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Another board member, Clareen Arnold, cited a C.D.C. statement about the importance of in-person school to children’s mental health and development, inserted at the behest of the White House, as an argument for keeping Corner Canyon open.

In a community that parents and teachers described as deeply divided over whether the virus represents a real threat, the board’s decision left parents on both sides angry. Some were upset that the board had ignored the health department’s guidance, while others thought that schools should not close until 10 percent of the students had tested positive.

Mr. Walker said he had heard from some Corner Canyon parents that there was an agreement among mothers at the school — he called it a “mom code” — not to get their children tested for the virus even if they became ill, to avoid adding to the school’s case count and contributing to it being shut down. (He said he told these parents he did not agree with this approach.)

She had become a high school teacher because she loved the social rituals of high school — “the dances and the football games and the assemblies and the extracurricular things” — and it made her sad, she said, that her students were missing out on some of those traditions.There are these things I want these kids to be able to experience in life,” she said. “But then, is it worth it — for life, you know?”

In September, as the Canyons board put off closing Corner Canyon High School, district officials and board members said that a vast majority of cases in the district’s schools were the result of exposures outside of school and that there was minimal spread within schools themselves.But a spokesman for the Salt Lake County Health Department, Nicholas Rupp, said it was very difficult to definitively determine in most cases where someone was infected.

In any event, once Corner Canyon shut its doors, cases among students and staff fell sharply. After a month of being closed, the school is set to reopen on Monday. As of last Wednesday, according to the district’s dashboard, it had between one and five cases.

As the pandemic roars on, voters across America remain deeply angry and worried about the future. But the vocal outrage from women, in particular, is clear on protest lines and in polling data. Women were more likely than men to report having participated in protests over the past two years, and mothers with children in the home were twice as likely as fathers to report participating in a protest, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll from June.

Now, the rage moms are railing in Facebook groups about school shutdowns and in teacher union meetings about reopening without proper protection from the virus. They’re also packing virtual town halls with frustrations about schools, child care and the lack of leadership.

“There’s nobody giving us solutions,

Ms. Lopez is exactly the kind of voter Democrats hope will push them to victory in November, and they are aiming to turn that frustration with government inaction into a vote against Mr. Trump.

While the anger is loudest on the left, Democrats hope to capitalize on indications that the rage reaches across party lines

The broader focus on caregiving issues marks a significant shift in the political climate of even a few months ago, when Senator Elizabeth Warren made child care a centerpiece of her campaign in the Democratic presidential primary

At campaign events six months ago, Ms. Warren’s proposals for universal, government-funded child care would elicit nods primarily from mothers in the crowd, she said, followed by quiet conversations in the selfie line with women about their personal struggle balancing work and child care.During a virtual town hall meeting she held last month, however, more than half of the questions from the audience of 70,000 people were about schools, child care and working parents.

The pandemic is the spark but the backlash against Mr. Trump has been burning since the day after his inauguration, when millions of women joined protests across the country. Their fire has endured through #MeToo, waves of teachers’ strikes led by predominantly female unions, the outcry against school shootings, and Black Lives Matter demonstrations, a movement started largely by female racial justice activists. For the second election cycle in a row, a record-breaking number of female candidates are running for federal office. Mr. Biden’s selection of Ms. Harris was widely seen as a nod to the energy women have given the Democratic Party during the Trump era.

“Women are mobilized on a bigger scale than we’ve seen in a generation at least,” said Annelise Orleck, a historian at Dartmouth College who studies women’s political activism. “Women are organizing all across the spectrum.”

The activism is diffuse and multiracial, reflecting political battles that working class women have long waged for better health care, schools and child care. In some ways, more affluent suburban women are simply waking up to the untenable choices poorer women and women of color have faced for generations.

Last month, the Biden campaign kicked off a “Moms for Biden” group

The rebellion by white college-educated women against Mr. Trump helped Democrats win key swing districts in 2018, giving the party control of the House.

In recent weeks, support for Mr. Trump has begun to drop among white non-college educated women and older women — two more ideologically moderate groups that bolstered his winning coalition four years ago

In a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll, Mr. Biden leads by 24 points among suburban women and just four points among suburban men, a statistical dead heat.

Last month, Mr. Biden announced a sweeping $775 billion caregiving proposal that would cover care for young children, older adults and family members with disabilities.

Mr. Biden has repeatedly described caregiving as an economic necessity that deserves sustained support, a marked shift in political rhetoric on a topic that was often seen by politicians as a special interest, not an issue to put at the center of a campaign

Parents with minor children make up about one-third of the country’s work force, according to the Brookings Institutions. In 2018, 23.5 million working parents relied upon school and child care programs while they went to work.

“For the last 10, 20 years, this has been sidelined and siloed as just a women’s issue,” said Brigid Schulte, who runs the Better Life Lab at New America, a research group. “It’s not and it never has been.”

Ms. Richards says Supermajority planned for 800 women to sign up for a recent organizing training it offered. It got 1,800 responses in the first week.

“The fact that we do not value child care, that we don’t value early education, this is not something that Covid created — it’s something that Covid exposed,” she said

While Democrats have proposed the most ambitious plans to tackle child care, there are some signs that Republicans, too, are facing pressure to address the issue. Last month, the House passed two bills that would provide more than $220 billion in funding for child care centers and tax credits. Each bill had support from more than a dozen Republicans, a notable number in a deeply polarized Congress.

“It wasn’t easy for most parents that I’ve talked to. To have no access to child care is crippling,” she said. She hopes the crisis point reached by many families during the pandemic will create political momentum for policies like paid leave, universal early childhood education and universal sick days.

“This pandemic has ripped wide an open wound that families have struggled with for a long time.”

The guidance on the overall school approach is less specific. It suggests schools probably do not need to close for a single case, but beyond that, it pushes the decision largely onto schools and local health departments. It suggests a host of factors to consider — community transmission levels, contact levels and so on — but does not draw any bright lines. Even the suggestion of not closing after a single case is not definitive.

There is an intermediate option: Close the classroom for a few days, clean it and reopen.

Let’s say you will keep the school open even if there are some cases: Is there a point where an outbreak is large enough that you would close the school? Again, guidelines are vague on this. The C.D.C. doesn’t make any concrete statements.

Many European countries have opened schools, largely successfully. They did so taking various approaches to closures. In Germany, classmates and teachers (but not the rest of the school) were isolated for two weeks after a reported case. Taiwan, apparently, planned to close schools for two or more cases but as of early this month had yet to face that. Israel, which has had probably the most fraught reopening, closed schools for every case. This has resulted in a very large number of school closures.

if the school will shut down for two weeks after each case, I may prefer to embrace the inevitable and plan for it rather than whiplash back and forth. This planning could involve identifying backup care, talking to other parents about how to maintain social time during a school closing or even deciding that we should opt for an entirely online experience from the start.

e. The more shutdown you plan for, the more robust the online learning plan needs to be.

I decided to call Frank Luntz. Perhaps no person alive has spent more time polling Republican voters and counseling Republican politicians than Luntz, the 58-year-old focus group guru. His research on policy and messaging has informed a generation of GOP lawmakers. His ability to translate between D.C. and the provinces—connecting the concerns of everyday people to their representatives in power—has been unsurpassed. If anyone had an answer, it would be Luntz.

“You know, I don’t have a history of dodging questions. But I don’t know how to answer that. There is no consistent philosophy,” Luntz responded. “You can’t say it’s about making America great again at a time of Covid and economic distress and social unrest. It’s just not credible.”

Luntz thought for a moment. “I think it’s about promoting—” he stopped suddenly. “But I can’t, I don’t—” he took a pause. “That’s the best I can do.”

“Look, I’m the one guy who’s going to give you a straight answer. I don’t give a shit—I had a stroke in January, so there’s nothing anyone can do to me to make my life suck,” he said. “I’ve tried to give you an answer and I can’t do it. You can ask it any different way. But I don’t know the answer. For the first time in my life, I don’t know the answer.”

Every fourth summer, a presidential nominating convention gives occasion to appraise a party for its ideas, its principles, its vision for governing

Ronald Reagan’s party wanted to end the scourge of communism and slay the bureaucratic dragons of Big Government.

George W. Bush’s party aimed to project compassion and fortitude, educating poor Americans and treating AIDS-stricken Africans, while simultaneously confronting the advance of Islamic terrorism.

However flawed the policies, however unsuccessful their execution, a tone was set in these parties from the top-down.

Parties were supposed to be about ideas,” said Mark Sanford, the former South Carolina governor and congressman

“John Adams was an ornery guy, but he believed in his ideas. On the other side, Thomas Jefferson, he certainly didn’t live up to the ideas he espoused, but shoot, at least he talked about them. Nowadays, it’s just regression to the lowest common denominator on everything.

It can now safely be said, as his first term in the White House draws toward closure, that Donald Trump’s party is the very definition of a cult of personality. It stands for no special ideal. It possesses no organizing principle. It represents no detailed vision for governing. Filling the vacuum is a lazy, identity-based populism that draws from that lowest common denominator Sanford alluded to

“Owning the libs and pissing off the media,” shrugs Brendan Buck, a longtime senior congressional aide and imperturbable party veteran if ever there was one. “That’s what we believe in now. There’s really not much more to it.”

Everyone understands that Trump is a big-picture sloganeer—“Build the wall!” “Make America Great Again!”—rather than a policy aficionado. Even so, it’s astonishing how conceptually lifeless the party has become on his watch. There is no blueprint to fix what is understood to be a broken immigration system. There is no grand design to modernize the nation’s infrastructure. There is no creative thinking about a conservative, market-based solution to climate change. There is no meaningful effort to address the cost of housing or childcare or college tuition

None of the erstwhile bold ideas proposed by the likes of Newt Gingrich and Paul Ryan—term limits, a balanced budget amendment, reforms to Social Security and Medicare, anti-poverty programs—have survived as serious proposals. Heck, even after a decade spent trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Republicans still have no plan to replace it. (Trust me: If they did, you’d hear about it.)

When I called one party elder, he joked that it’s a good thing Republicans decided not to write a new platform for the 2020 convention—because they have produced nothing novel since the last one was written

The party is now defined primarily by its appetite for conflict, even when that conflict serves no obvious policy goal.

Even some of the president’s staunchest supporters concede Buck’s point in this regard

The result is political anarchy. Traditionally, the run-up to a convention sees a party attempting to tame rival factions and unite around a dynamic vision for the future. Instead, Republicans have spent the summer in a self-immolating downward spiral.

This is not a party struggling to find its identity. This is a party in the middle of a meltdown.

The verdict I’m rendering here is both observable in plain sight and breathtakingly obvious to anyone who has experienced the carnage up close.

Most of the party’s governing class sees perfectly well what is going on. They know exactly how bad t

hings are and how much worse they could yet be

these Republicans rue their predicament but see no way out of it. Like riders on a derailing roller coaster, they brace for a crash but dare not get off.

Having written the book on the making of the modern Republican Party, having spent hundreds of hours with its most powerful officials in public and private settings, I cannot possibly exaggerate the number of party leaders who have told me they worry both about Trump’s instability and its long-term implication for the GOP

There’s a reason Lindsey Graham called Trump “crazy,” a “bigot” and a “kook” who’s “unfit for office.” There’s a reason Ted Cruz called Trump “a pathological liar” and “a narcissist at a level I don’t think this country’s ever seen.” There’s a reason Marco Rubio observed that, “Every movement in human history that has been built on a foundation of anger and fear has been cataclysmic,” and warned of Trump’s rise, “This isn’t going to end well.”

To be a Republican today requires you to exist in a constant state of moral relativism, turning every chance at self-analysis into an assault on the other side, pretending the petting zoo next door is comparable to the three-ring circus on your front lawn.

The rest of the right-wing universe—conservative media, think tanks, activist organizations, financial networks, civic groups, voters themselves—has largely gone along for the ride, and for the same reason: “What about the Democrats?”

What all of these incidents and so many more have in common is that not a single American’s life has been improved; not a single little guy has been helped. Just as with the forceful dispersing of peaceful protesters in Lafayette Park—done so he could hold up a prop Bible for flashing cameras—Trump and his allies continue to wage symbolic battles whose principal casualties are ordinary people.

The spectacle is unceasing

Unsavory fringe characters have always looked for ways to penetrate the mainstream of major parties—and mostly, they have failed. What would result from a fringe character leading a party always remained an open question. It has now been asked and answered:

Some in the party have embraced the extreme, others in the party have blushed at it, but all of them have subjugated themselves to it. The same way a hothead coach stirs indiscipline in his players, the same way a renegade commander invites misconduct from his troops, a kamikaze president inspires his party to pursue martyrdom.

That is precisely what will be on display at this week’s Republican convention—martyrdom, grievance, victimhood.

It’s not that America won’t hear from serious Republicans who have real substance to offer, people like Senator Tim Scott and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley. It’s that these two, along with the remnant of other sober-minded Republicans, are the new sideshow at a time when the old sideshow has moved to center stage.

Similarly, the problem for the party isn’t that the aforementioned complaints are entirely without merit. It’s that they form no part of a broader construct on which voters can be sold. This continues to be the bane of the GOP’s existence: The party is so obsessed with fighting that it has lost sight of what it’s fighting for.

“I think I have brought tremendous strength back to the party,” the president told me last year, arguing that previous GOP leaders lacked the stomach for gruesome political combat. There is no denying Trump has transformed the party from a country club debater into a barroom brawler. But to what end?

“Our central mission is to stand up for America. It’s to say loudly and proudly that we choose America. When I go around talking to Texans every single day, what I hear is that they’re proud of this country. And they want us to fight for this country. That’s what ties it all together for Republicans,” Roy said. “The people I talk to—even the ones who maybe get a little frustrated with the president—they look at him as someone who fights for this country.”

Roy is as close to a plainspoken conservative Republican as there is in Congress. I was curious to know how he would define today’s GOP.

The problem for Republicans is that most of the fights they’re picking nowadays are futile at best and foolhardy at worst. NASCAR? Confederate flags? Goya beans? Face masks? To the degree any of these issues move the needle politically, Republicans are on the wrong side of them. What’s worse, there is no connective tissue. There is no focus to the GOP’s incessant appetite for fighting. That’s how they wound up with Trump in the first place

“The GOP has been here before with John Birchers and it didn’t end well,” said Ben Sasse, the Nebraska senator who has been a vocal if terribly inconsistent Trump critic. “The party of Lincoln and Reagan ought to have something big and bold to offer the country, but it’s got way too many grifters selling grievance politics.”

To be clear, these grifters aren’t just shady party operatives and obscure congressional candidates. They are some of the president’s closest allies, people like Matt Gaetz,

If there is one principle driving Republican politicians today, it is that traditional American values—faith, patriotism, modesty, the nuclear family—are under siege

what’s fascinating to observe is the shift in priorities and proportionality. What was once a source of annoyance and frustration for one sect of the party, social conservatives, has turned into the dominant life force for the GOP

The good news for Republicans is that “grievance politics,” as Sasse describes it, continues to be highly effective in motivating their base. The bad news? It has diminishing returns when it comes to the many millions of persuadable voters in the middle. It’s also especially difficult for an incumbent party to sell grievance to the masses, as it amounts to a tacit acknowledgment of powerlessness.

Instead of downplaying the social upheaval, treating it as a fleeting phenomenon that will pass with time and promising better days ahead, they are highlighting it at every turn, claiming it’s a sneak preview of Biden’s America when it is, factually speaking, the feature presentation of Trump’s America.

The pressure is now entirely on Trump. And he won’t have much help

leading Republicans won’t be speaking on behalf of their party this week. Kasich already defected, endorsing Biden during a dramatic speech to the Democratic convention. And neither Romney nor Boehner nor either of the Bushes would speak even if asked. From what I’ve been told, none of them plan to vote for Trump this fall, and the chief reason they won’t say so publicly is they fear it would diminish their influence over the party moving forward.

A Republican collapse this fall—Biden wins the White House, Democrats flip the Senate and hold the House—would trigger a reckoning within the GOP every bit as sharp as the one associated with Obama’s takeover of Washington in 2008. If that occurs, much of the party’s pent-up irritation with Trump (which often masks long-simmering disgust with themselves) will spill over, and the efforts to expunge this ugly chapter of GOP history could commence with stunning ferocity.

There is no guarantee of this, however. Trump claims an intensity among his following that stacks up against any leader in American history. (“We’ve never seen anything like it,” Luntz said. “It’s like Elvis and the Beatles wrapped up in one.”

Overlooked is the real possibility that Trump could win. That Biden has not built a runaway lead despite enormous advantages—chief among them, the president’s poor playing of a terrible election-year hand—speaks to the effectiveness of Trump’s slash-and-burn mentality

“I actually find it kind of reassuring. With [George] McGovern in 1972, it was a colossal wipeout with a hugely mistaken candidate who was completely out of step with mainstream public opinion. Then in 1976, Jimmy Carter, an honest-to-goodness progressive, wins,” Brooks said. “I mean, Richard Nixon gets tossed out of office for blatant corruption. Everybody’s heading for the hills saying, ‘I never voted for him! I’m not a Republican!’ And six years later, Ronald Reagan wins and then gets reelected in one of the biggest landslides in history. These things can heal really, really fast.”

owever long Trump remains in office, whatever damage he does to the GOP, Brooks believes it will be temporary. It’s the “fundamental truth” of a two-party system, he said, that coalitions are constantly shifting, parties are continually renewing, politicians are eternally looking for ways to adapt and survive.

“Healthy parties need to build coalitions around a shared vision that speaks to all Americans,” Sasse told me. “Our current course is unsustainable. We’ve got a hell of a rebuilding ahead of us, whatever happens in November.”

“For change to endure,” George Packer writes, “for national shame to become pride, we need a radical agenda with a patriotic spirit. We have to revive the one thing that has ever held together this sprawling, multiplicitous country: democratic faith.”

That requires sweeping reform of our sclerotic institutions, and the popular will to do it. But a majority of Americans generally believe that we need significant changes in how our government functions.

Here are some essentials: Protecting voting rights. Achieving a multistate compact to conform the Electoral College to the popular will. Establishing term limits for Supreme Court justices. Abrogating the filibuster. Instituting bipartisan commissions to design legislative districts. Curbing money in politics. Passing strict ethics requirements for public officials.

That is daunting, perhaps impossible, agenda. But it’s the only way our failing democracy can hope to reclaim our collective faith. Writes Packer: “The experience of a competent, active government bringing opportunity and justice to Americans left behind by globalization would inject an antivenom into the country’s bloodstream.”

Biden has a family and caregiving initiative, recognizing this as key to a sustained public health and economic recovery. His plans include increased salaries for child care workers and construction of new facilities for children because the inability to afford quality care keeps workers out of the economy and places enormous strains on families.

Before Tuesday, it would have been hard to imagine how Trump could have offended women more than he already has. The president has, of course, been accused of sexual misconduct by more than two dozen women (allegations he denies) and been caught on tape bragging that he can get away with sexual assault. He has regularly disparaged and demeaned women -- including his own daughter -- by talking about their appearances rather than their accomplishments and by calling them offensive names.

misogynist but not necessarily a sexist. On Tuesday evening, Trump made clear that he is both.

A man who is a misogynist, according to Cornell philosopher Kate Manne, punishes women who won't do what he wants. Trump's behavior has long made it evident that he fits this bill. Meanwhile, a sexist, Manne says, believes men are better than women at things like business or sports.

Before Tuesday's comments, it wasn't entirely clear that Trump was a sexist; he did put some women in powerful positions in his administration and in the Trump Organization. But by appealing to suburban women to support him because he's helping their husbands, Trump suggested he believes the workplace is the proper domain of men. This is textbook sexism.

rump's assumption that all women have -- or should have -- husbands is also terribly retrograde and offensive and will almost certainly be off-putting to single women (among others

His sexism isn't even the most jaw-dropping of the implications made by these offensive remarks

Trump says he's looking out for the husbands, but it's women themselves who need help getting back to work: over 800,000 of the 1.1 million people who left the workforce between August and September were women, according to the National Women's Law Center

This is unsurprising, since job losses have been especially concentrated in sectors where there are more women

moms have also been disproportionately taking on the impossible burdens of trying to juggle work, childcare, and home schooling while their kids have been home during the pandemic.

But the exodus of this many women from the workplace will also be terrible for the country overall, because it will deprive many organizations of the well-established benefits of women's leadership and influence.

Companies with more women and cultural diversity have significantly better financial outcomes, according to the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. But it usually isn't enough to have just one or two women. Studies consistently find that women must make up at least 20-30% of an institution before they actually shape outcomes.

They suggest that he thinks that it is men who belong in the workplace and that women all are or should be married. I suspect that women will respond on Tuesday by putting Trump in his own rightful place -- and voting him out of office.

"I was the only black girl in those clubs," she recalls. "There weren't really a lot of activities around STEM that you could do in my neighbourhood. So, I found myself sort of leaving my south side community and going elsewhere - to get exposure to certain activities."

When she graduated and became a research chemist she noticed another trend.

Researchers say that the 'leaky pipeline' refers to women, and particularly women of colour, facing many barriers and obstacles to advancing further in their fields, from childcare obligations to fewer promotion opportunities.

Cynthia had an idea whilst doing her masters in 2015, that she would create a club to pull more women like her in to the world of science. By 2018, Black Girls Do STEM became an after-school community in St Louis, Missouri - where she now lives

The fortnightly classes used to be held in person but have moved online throughout the pandemic.

This, it strikes me, is not only a political choice, but a reneging on a historical deal, forged in the colossal upheavals of the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and revolution in England, the US and Europe.

You can hear the language and logic of this economic dictatorship everywhere. Tony Blair tells us that with an ageing population, a climate crisis, higher debt interest and an economic workforce increasingly constrained in its ability to seek services such as housing and healthcare outside the public sector, we should be ready to not wait for the NHS and use private health providers for minor health matters, and that we should ultimately be “taxing less and spending less”.

The result is a sort of ambient autocracy, where personal choices are increasingly dictated by forces that you had no say in creating and have no means of overthrowing.

The trade-off was that we would lose the traditional supports and solaces of rural values and extended families, but become free from their prejudices and patriarchies, and the associated economic and political exploitations of a hierarchical system that was skewed to landowners, rent seekers and those imbued with authority because of where they were born in that hierarchy.

to choose how to live our lives. “The only freedom which deserves the name,” wrote John Stuart Mill, “is that of pursuing our own good, in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.”

That good is now increasingly limited to those who can afford it – who can purchase the liberty to love, leave and leisure, and the right to indulge in creative work and expression.

The rest are caught in a halfway house between the old and new worlds.

Bereft of the support and proximity of family and community, people are deprived of the social safety net that was supposed to replace it, increasingly having to fork out funds for childcare, subsidising boomeranging single children and elderly parents while paying tax, or fretting about their fates in a cutthroat housing market and a scandalously underfunded care system.

Anything that disturbs this tenuous balance cannot be contemplated, so the shackles to partners, employers and imperfect domestic arrangements grow ever tighter.

I grew up in the old world and saw only its limitations, chafing against it and impatient for some individual autonomy. My mother had four children, working throughout her childbearing years as a school teacher, only able to go back to work because, with each child, a new family member would move in, or move back in, to help. They joined others who lived with us on and off over the years when they needed housing.

My parents were distant but seemed to be broadly content figures, either at work or obscured by a blur of relatives they were constantly entertaining, feeding or cleaning up after in a gaggle of chat, laughter and gossip. The price for that mutual communal facilitation was paid in other ways – a violating lack of privacy and personal space, and a sense that everyone’s lives, in their most private and intimate detail, were the subject of others’ opinions and policing. It was a “gilded cage”, as it is called in Orientalist literature

In hindsight now, and in adulthood and parenthood, having experienced both in the new world, I can see that gilded cages come in many forms