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even after the 7 October massacre had stirred memories of the bleakest chapters of the Jewish past – and prompted a surge in antisemitism across the world – Jews were being told exactly how they can and cannot speak about their pain. We’re not to mention the Holocaust, one scholar advised, because that would be “weaponising” it. Historical context about the Nakba, the 1948 dispossession of the Palestinians, is – rightly – deemed essential. But mention the Nazi murder of 6 million Jews – the event that finally secured near-universal agreement among the Jewish people, and the United Nations in 1947, that Jews needed a state of their own – and you’ve broken the rules. Because it’s impossible that both sides might have suffered historic pain.

Instead, a shift is under way that has been starkly revealed during these past three weeks. It squeezes the Israel-Palestine conflict into a “decolonisation” frame it doesn’t quite fit, with all Israelis – not just those in the occupied West Bank – defined as the footsoldiers of “settler colonialism”, no different from, say, the French in Algeria

They have been framed as the modern world’s ultimate evildoer: the coloniser.

That matters because, in this conception, justice can only be done once the colonisers are gone

What’s more, such a framing brands all Israelis – not just West Bank settlers – as guilty of the sin of colonialism. Perhaps that explains why those letter writers could not full-throatedly condemn the 7 October killing of innocent Israeli civilians. Because they do not see any Israeli, even a child, as wholly innocent.

the late Israeli novelist and peace activist Amos Oz was never wiser than when he described the Israel/Palestine conflict as something infinitely more tragic: a clash of right v right. Two peoples with deep wounds, howling with grief, fated to share the same small piece of land.

The way that people tend to argue today, particularly online, makes things worse.

hilosophers and social scientists have long pondered the question of why people hold different beliefs and values

odds are that neither camp is having any effect on the other; on the contrary, the attacks make opponents dig in deeper.

If you want a chance at changing minds, you need a new strategy: Stop using your values as a weapon, and start offering them as a gift.

You wouldn’t blame anyone involved for feeling as if they’re under fire, and no one is likely to change their mind when they’re being attacked.

even when two groups agree on a moral foundation, they can radically disagree on how it should be expressed

Extensive survey-based research has revealed that almost everyone shares at least two common values: Harming others without cause is bad, and fairness is good. Other moral values are less widely shared

political conservatives tend to value loyalty to a group, respect for authority, and purity—typically in a bodily sense, in terms of sexuality—more than liberals do.

Sometimes conflict arises because one group holds a moral foundation that the other simply doesn’t feel strongly about

One of the most compelling explanations comes from Moral Foundations Theory, which has been popularized by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at NYU. This theory proposes that humans share a common set of “intuitive ethics,” on top of which we build different narratives and institutions—and therefore beliefs—that vary by culture, community, and even person.

When people fail to live up to your moral values (or your expression of them), it is easy to conclude that they are immoral people.

Further, if you are deeply attached to your values, this difference can feel like a threat to your identity, leading you to lash out, which won’t convince anyone who disagrees with you.

research shows that if you insult someone in a disagreement, the odds are that they will harden their position against yours, a phenomenon called the boomerang effect.

3. Listen more.

effective missionaries present their beliefs as a gift. And sharing a gift is a joyful act, even if not everyone wants it.

so it is with our values. If we want any chance at persuasion, we must offer them happily. A weapon is an ugly thing, designed to frighten and coerce

A gift is something we believe to be good for the recipient, who, we hope, may accept it voluntarily, and do so with gratitude. That requires that we present it with love, not insults and hatred.

1. Don’t “other” others.

Go out of your way to welcome those who disagree with you as valued voices, worthy of respect and attention. There is no “them,” only “us.”

2. Don’t take rejection personally.

just as you are not your car or your house, you are not your beliefs. Unless someone says, “I hate you because of your views,” a repudiation is personal only if you make it so

he solution to this problem requires a change in the way we see and present our own values

when it comes to changing someone’s mind, listening is more powerful than talking. They conducted experiments that compared polarizing arguments with a nonjudgmental exchange of views accompanied by deep listening. The former had no effect on viewpoints, whereas the latter reliably lowered exclusionary opinions.

when possible, listening and asking sensitive questions almost always has a more beneficial effect than talking.

howing others that you can be generous with them regardless of their values can help weaken their belief attachment, and thus make them more likely to consider your point of view

for your values to truly be a gift, you must weaken your own belief attachment first

we should all promise to ourselves, “I will cultivate openness, non-discrimination, and non-attachment to views in order to transform violence, fanaticism, and dogmatism in myself and in the world.”

if I truly have the good of the world at heart, then I must not fall prey to the conceit of perfect knowledge, and must be willing to entertain new and better ways to serve my ultimate goal: creating a happier world

generosity and openness have a bigger chance of making the world better in the long run.

And it undercut the first-day assessment by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who praised law enforcement for their "quick response" to the attack, which he said saved lives.

Reports since then reveal a grisly, wrenching scene, where terrified students waited for help as the shooter, armed with an assault rifle, continued his rampage. One student told of laying on top of a classmate, smearing her blood on her so both would appear dead, to save them both. The girl who was injured died at the hospital from her injuries, raising questions about whether she would have survived if the reaction had been quicker.Abbott, a vociferous gun rights proponent who last year signed a law allowing people to own guns without a license or training, was originally scheduled to speak at the NRA convention. Thursday night, his office said the governor would instead head to Uvalde, supplying a video speech to show at the NRA meeting.

Well-known sports figures decried the gun violence and what they called inaction by elected officials to address it. During Thursday evening's baseball game between the New York Yankees and the Tampa Bay Rays, both teams abandoned their usual game-update tweets for a series of tweets on gun violence."The devastating events that took place in Uvalde, Buffalo and countless other communities across our nation are tragedies that are intolerable," the Yankees said on the team's official Twitter account, referring to the racist-motivated murder of 10 Black shoppers in Buffalo on May 16.

In private conversations, Chinese officials have expressed concern about the emphasis on regional alliances under Mr. Biden and their potential to hem in China.

Mr. Blinken’s speech revolved around the slogan for the Biden strategy: “Invest, Align and Compete.” The partnerships fall under the “align” part. “Invest” refers to pouring resources into the United States — administration officials point to the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law passed last year as an example. And “compete” refers to the rivalry with China, a framing the Trump administration also promoted.

“Beijing wants to put itself at the center of global innovation and manufacturing, increase other countries’ technological dependence, and then use that dependence to impose its foreign policy preferences,” Mr. Blinken said. “And Beijing is going to great lengths to win this contest — for example, taking advantage of the openness of our economies to spy, to hack, to steal technology and know-how to advance its military innovation and entrench its surveillance state.”

Mr. Blinken also noted the human rights abuses, repression of ethnic minorities and quashing of free speech and assembly by the Communist Party in Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong. In recent years, those issues have galvanized greater animus toward China among Democratic and Republican politicians and policymakers. “We’ll continue to raise these issues and call for change,” he said.

Mr. Blinken said it was China’s recent actions toward Taiwan — trying to sever the island’s diplomatic and international ties and sending fighter jets over the area — that are “deeply destabilizing.”

“Arguably no country on earth has benefited more from that than China,” he said. “But rather than using its power to reinforce and revitalize the laws, agreements, principles and institutions that enabled its success, so other countries can benefit from them too, Beijing is undermining it.”

“For too long, Chinese companies have enjoyed far greater access to our markets than our companies have in China,” Mr. Blinken said.” This lack of reciprocity is unacceptable and it’s unsustainable.”

But skeptics have said Washington’s ability to shape trade in the Asia-Pacific region may be limited because the framework is not a traditional trade agreement that offers countries reductions in tariffs and more access to the lucrative American market — a move that would be politically unpopular in the United States.

“We can stay vigilant about our national security without closing our doors,” he said. “Racism and hate have no place in a nation built by generations of immigrants to fulfill the promise of opportunity for all.”

Taiwan has long pushed for deeper trade ties with the United States. In 2020, it eased restrictions on imports of U.S. beef and pork in an effort to entice the United States into formal negotiations. The next year, the United States and Taiwan resumed some trade talks despite Beijing’s opposition.

Given Taiwan’s contested status, the two sides will also meet unofficially and under the auspices of the American Institute in Taiwan, which is the de facto U.S. embassy in Taipei, and the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office, which represents Taiwan in the United States in the absence of diplomatic recognition.

It is action in service of change, not information in service of outrage.

“The people thinking strategically about how to win the 2022 election are the ones doing the most for democracy,” said Daniel Ziblatt, a political scientist at Harvard and one of the authors of “How Democracies Die.”

“I’ve heard people saying bridges don’t save democracy — voting rights do. But for Democrats to be in a position to protect democracy, they need bigger majorities.”

There are people working on a Plan B

He spends his days obsessing over mayoral races in 20,000-person towns, because those mayors appoint the city clerks who decide whether to pull the drop boxes for mail-in ballots and small changes to electoral administration could be the difference between winning Senator Ron Johnson’s seat in 2022 (and having a chance at democracy reform) and losing the race and the Senate. Wikler is organizing volunteers to staff phone banks to recruit people who believe in democracy to serve as municipal poll workers, because Steve Bannon has made it his mission to recruit people who don’t believe in democracy t

The difference between those organizing at the local level to shape democracy and those raging ineffectually about democratic backsliding — myself included — reminds me of the old line about war: Amateurs talk strategy; professionals talk logistics. Right now, Trumpists are talking logistics.

“We do not have one federal election,” said Amanda Litman, a co-founder of Run for Something, which helps first-time candidates learn about the offices they can contest and helps them mount their campaigns. “We have 50 state elections and then thousands of county elections. And each of those ladder up to give us results.

While Congress can write, in some ways, rules or boundaries for how elections are administered, state legislatures are making decisions about who can and can’t vote. Counties and towns are making decisions about how much money they’re spending, what technology they’re using, the rules around which candidates can participate.”

Protecting democracy by supporting county supervisors or small-town mayors — particularly ones who fit the politics of more conservative communities — can feel like being diagnosed with heart failure and being told the best thing to do is to double-check your tax returns and those of all your neighbors.

These races get zero national attention. They hardly get local attention. Turnout is often lower than 20 percent. That means people who actually engage have a superpower. You, as a single dedicated volunteer, might be able to call and knock on the doors of enough voters to win a local election.”

“One thing I was really struck by when I first started getting involved in politics is how much power there is in just showing up to things,” she said. “If you love libraries, libraries have board meetings. Go to the public meeting. See where they’re spending their money. We’re supposed to be participating. If you want to get involved, there’s always a way.”

Within the Olympic community, the limits of political speech have become increasingly contested, a debate that has intensified with the Games in China, which routinely ranks among the world’s most repressive in surveys on political, religious and other freedoms.

Political activism has surfaced at many international events, including the Tokyo Olympics last summer, but no other host nation has been as strict as China in policing political dissent.

In fact, protests among Olympic athletes are rare, even among those who may sympathize with human-rights causes. Most athletes are zealously focused on their sport, having devoted years of training to have the chance to compete at the highest level.

Beijing 2022’s organizers have pledged to honor the Olympic Charter’s spirit to allow freedom of speech. Within the “closed loop” bubbles erected around Olympic venues, the authorities have created an open internet not restricted by China’s censorship.

The multinational response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shown that the demise of the global postwar rules-based order may not be inevitable.

But the reappearance of war in Europe is also an omen. With toddlers sheltering in subway tunnels, and nuclear power plants under threat, it is a global air raid siren — a warning that the American-led system of internationalism needs to get itself back into gear, for the war at hand and for the struggle against authoritarianism to come.

“The global system was built in the 1950s, and if you think of it as a car from those years, it is battered, out of date in some ways, and could use a good tuneup,”

“But it is still on the road, rolling along, and, ironically enough, Vladimir Putin has done more in a week to energize it than anything I can remember.”

Almost universally, from leaders in Europe and Asia to current and former American officials, Ukraine is being viewed as a test for the survival of a 75-year-old idea: that liberal democracy, American military might and free trade can create the conditions for peace and global prosperity.

Because the founder of that concept, the United States, continues to struggle — with partisanship, Covid and failure in distant war zones — many foreign policy leaders already see Ukraine in dire terms, as marking an official end of the American era and the start of a more contested, multipolar moment.

For at least a decade, liberal democracies have been disappearing. Their numbers peaked in 2012 with 42 countries, and now there are just 34, home to only 13 percent of the world population, according to V-Dem, a nonprofit that studies governments

In many of those, including the United States, “toxic polarization” is on the rise.

Mr. Biden, in his State of the Union address on Tuesday, spoke bluntly of the future risk, saying, “When dictators do not pay a price for their aggression, they cause more chaos.” He insisted that the free world was holding Mr. Putin accountable.

One lesson seems to be that alliances matter. But for many, the most important lesson echoes what Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman concluded about World War II: America cannot retreat into isolationism; its own prosperity depends on actively trying to keep the world’s major powers at peace.

The western world kept a buzz going for twelve years, and that’s an accomplishment. It must also be said that the 1990s weren’t squandered, because even in the dark years they were fun. They weren’t complicated.

the 1990s make great nostalgia bait: simpler politics, plus great music, plus cool fashion cues. And maybe we can create another halcyon bubble again one day!

The generation that came of age in the 1990s, now well into middle age, have a lot of happy memories of a sort that may never be possible to have again. At the moment any possibility of collective joy seems about as realistic as a Miss America contestant trying to wish world peace into existence

n the 1990s we still had the future, a place that you could travel to, that would be cool when you got there, like Australia or the South Pole. Right now we merely have a future, and a murky one at that, and it’s probably more like Kenosha, Wisconsin than Sydney.

I remember doing a book tour and ending up on a local AM radio station’s podium at the grand opening of Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota on 11 August 1992. It was full of Americans in alpha consumption mode, eating ice cream, faces beaming, walking around in unselfconscious bliss. The local radio jock said to me, “You must think all of this is pretty silly”. He motioned towards the crowd and then to a rollercoaster directly beside us that came screeching at our heads every 95 seconds.

But I said, “No. In a century people are going to look back on right now as a sort of magic era, a charmed time of peace and prosperity and freedom from fear, as something that can never happen again, no matter how much they wish it would”.

North America fared only slightly better. Despite riots in the Capitol and attempts by the departing president Donald Trump to overturn the election results, the inauguration of Joe Biden proceeded smoothly and America’s democracy score only fell by 0.07 points.

Pedro Castillo’s narrow victory in Peru in June was contested for weeks by his opponent, Keiko Fujimori, and the Nicaraguan poll in November was a sham. Chile was downgraded to a “flawed democracy” partly because of low voter turnout in its deeply polarised elections, and Haiti is still in political crisis after the assassination of the president, Jovenel Moïse.

Through lockdowns and travel restrictions, civil liberties were again suspended in both developed democracies and authoritarian regimes.

Canada suffered a far bigger setback, of 0.37 points. Again, pandemic restrictions were the main cause of frustration and disaffection. According to the World Value Survey, which is used in some of the quantitative sections of the EIU’s survey, just 10.4% of Canadians felt that they had “a great deal” of freedom of choice and control. More alarming, 13.5% expressed a preference for military rule.

The fall in Canada’s index score reflected popular disaffection with the status quo and a turn to non-democratic alternatives.

The trucker blockade in Ottawa may presage more political upheaval. But the biggest challenge to the Western model of democracy over the coming years will come from China

After four decades of rapid growth it is the world’s second-biggest economy; within a decade the EIU forecasts that it will overtake America. If China’s absence from Mr Biden’s recent Summit for Democracy is anything to go by, the West is not looking to engage it. China’s response to being snubbed was to declare the state of American democracy “disastrous”.

Putin’s behavior shocked many people because they bought into his image as a grand master of intricate policy maneuvers, which assumes intentionality, adroitness, and cunning. A more accurate judgment followed from saying to oneself: This is an aging dictator, who after 20 years of absolute power gets no pushback; who is paranoid, dismissive, and brutal

, he is someone who has deteriorated both physically and—as seen in his delivery of rambling, querulous speeches—mentally.

The personality of the Ukrainian president has made all the difference. Volodymyr Zelensky is an Everyman hero: reluctant, initially unsure, but patriotic and courageous.

A second explanation is narrower. It has to do with military analysts’ focus on technology at the expense of the human element in war.

War is a contest of wills; it is unpredictable; it is the domain of accident and contingency; nothing goes as planned; and events are smothered in a fog created by misinformation and fear.

less international-relations theory and more Carl von Clausewitz would have helped

Finally, the democratic pessimism of the past two decades has obscured from many the extraordinary power of freedom, and the innate resilience of liberal-democratic countries and institutions.

A culture of lies is corrosive, breeding cynicism and eventually self-doubt. Truth is not only more powerful but open to all of us, hence Václav Havel’s dictum that the way to resist tyranny is to live in truth.

to try to maintain the fantasy of a continuous England that could absorb within it wildly different cultures. What she relied upon was the West. The Englishmen who caused so much devastation around the world did not bring any miracles with them; they brought only bloodshed and cruelty and plunder, the same forces that had ruled the world since the beginning.

But by the time of Elizabeth’s reign, England understood itself as a Western nation, identifiable by its commitment to individual rights, equality, and self-determination. These values created the free world, and to the very limited extent that a Queen can stand for them—the Queen of a country with such a terrible imperial history—she was determined to do so.

she often acknowledged how Britain was changing, never once disparaged it, and found within it a plausible case for continuity. What she did was locate—or possibly create—a unifying culture of Englishness as defined by the values of the Blitz: courage, calm, resolve.

Elizabeth spoke of Englishness and its enduring character, not of racial composition or traditional custom. She—of all people—said England’s greatness wasn’t in its past. It lies in its present and its future.

now this whole delicate operation of creating a Britain in which the old and the new don’t merely coexist, or inform each other, but are together part of a cohesive narrative of greatness, in which the monarch is both the defender of the Church of England and the symbolic leader of a country with 3 million Muslims—all of this has fallen to … Charles?

Weak, selfish, petulant Charles?

This is not an era of reconciliation and bygones being bygones. This is an era of reparations. A lot of people around the world don’t want to “celebrate diversity,” a concept wholly born of the dying West. They want their treasures back, and they know where to find them.

Most of them were stolen, and in the most sadistic way possible. Will Charles—Boomer Zero—be able to keep hold not merely of the things but of the idea of England that his mother helped create?Doubtful.

how many are aware that President Biden is among the more popular — well, less unpopular — leaders in the Western world?

First, let’s talk about some other international comparisons that seem relevant to the current situation.

But public perception of our economic performance is strongly colored by rising prices. Inflation — the rate at which prices are rising — has subsided a lot, but prices haven’t and won’t come down

No matter what we did, many people were going to die — but the death toll was affected by politics, perhaps especially by the way vaccines became a front in the culture war. And America had a really bad pandemic, even compared with its peers. U.S. life expectancy was already lagging behind comparable countries’ by 2019, but the gap widened after Covid-19 struck.

On the other hand, the U.S. economy experienced an exceptionally strong bounce back from the pandemic recession. Even after adjusting for inflation, U.S. gross domestic product per capita is up 7 percent since the eve of the pandemic, greatly exceeding growth in other major wealthy economies

This would seem on the face of it to say something good about Biden’s economic policies.

Although we hear politicians on the campaign trail trying to make hay with the old Reagan-era question — Are you better off than you were four years ago? — there’s a lot of amnesia about what was actually happening in 2020, namely a deadly, terrifying pandemic

there have been huge recriminations against policymakers, both the Biden administration and the Federal Reserve, either for supposedly causing the bout of inflation or at any rate failing to prevent it.

the similarities between the wealthiest nations are more revealing than their differences.

Inflation surged almost everywhere after the pandemic. And if you take care to compare “apples to Äpfel” — to use the same consumer price measures — inflation has been remarkably similar in different countries.

Since the eve of the pandemic, the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices has risen 19.6 percent in the United States and 19.8 percent in the euro area.

This strongly suggests that pandemic-related disruptions, rather than national policies, were inflation’s main driver.

Still, inflation rankles voters. Even when income growth exceeds inflation, as it has in the United States, people tend to feel that they earned their higher wages only to have them snatched away by higher prices

this is probably the most important reason that, according to tracking polls conducted by Morning Consult, every single leader of a Group of 7 nation is underwater, with more voters disapproving than approving of their leadership.

So who’s the winner of this unpopularity contest? Who has the least bad net approval? The answer is Joe Biden, with Giorgia Meloni of Italy a close second. The other Group of 7 leaders are even more unpopular

this has political consequences

every political analysis that says the fault for Biden’s low approval lies with the president and his campaign — that he’s too old (although that narrative, after suddenly peaking, mostly faded away after his State of the Union address) or is out of touch with the concerns of “real” Americans — needs to explain why he’s doing less badly than his foreign peers.

I’ve seen arguments that it goes back to the 1978 Bakke decision, when the Supreme Court effectively greenlit affirmative action in the name of diversity.

the problem with Bakke isn’t that it allowed diversity to be a consideration in admissions decisions. It’s that university administrators turned an allowance into a requirement, so a kind of racial gerrymander now permeates nearly every aspect of academic life, from admissions decisions to faculty appointments to the racial makeup of contributors to essay collections

If affirmative action had been administered with a lighter hand — more nudge than mandate — it might have survived the court’s scrutiny last year. Instead, it became a pervasive regime that frequently got in the way of the universities’ higher goals, particularly the open exchange of ideas.

skin color was the first thing The Harvard Crimson noted in its story about her taking office, and her missteps and questions about her academic work gave ammunition to detractors who claimed she owed her position solely to her race.

This is the poisoned pool in which Harvard now swims. Whenever it elevates someone like Gay, there’s an assumption by admirers and detractors alike that she’s a political symbol whose performance represents more than who she is as a person

dehumanization is the price any institution pays when considerations of social engineering supplant those of individual achievement.

It may take a generation after the end of affirmative action before someone like Gay can have the opportunity to be judged on her own merits, irrespective of her color.

the damage that the social-justice model has done to higher education will take longer to repair. In 2015, 57 percent of Americans expressed high confidence in higher education, according to a Gallup survey. Last year, the number had fallen to 36 percent, and that was before the wave of antisemitic campus outbursts. At Harvard, early admission applications fell by 17 percent last fall.

Harvard also sets the tone for the rest of American higher ed — and for public attitudes toward it. One of the secrets of America’s postwar success wasn’t simply the caliber of U.S. universities. It was the respect they engendered among ordinary people who aspired to send their children to them.

That respect is now being eroded to the point of being erased. For good reason

People admire, and will strive for, excellence — both for its own sake and for the status it confers. But status without excellence is a rapidly wasting asset, especially when it comes with an exorbitant price. That’s the position of much of American academia today. Two hundred thousand dollars or more is a lot to pay for lessons in how to be an anti-racist.

the intellectual rot is pervasive and won’t stop spreading until universities return to the idea that their central purpose is to identify and nurture and liberate the best minds, not to engineer social utopias.

A glimmer of hope for Biden emerged toward the end of the survey: “If Donald Trump is found guilty and convicted this year of a felony — with Donald Trump as the Republican candidate and Joe Biden as the Democratic candidate — for whom would you vote?”In this hypothetical circumstance, Biden pulls ahead of Trump, 45-43.

when asked, “How willing would you be to vote for Donald Trump if he is convicted of a crime?” 53 percent of registered voters surveyed said they would be “unwilling” to do so; 46 percent said “very unwilling”; and 7 percent said “somewhat unwilling.”

Bloomberg-Morning Consult asked respondents whether they would be unwilling to vote for Trump if he were “sentenced to prison”: 55 percent said unwilling, 48 percent very unwilling and 7 percent said somewhat unwilling.

YouGov found that 45 percent of respondents were either unaware of or uncertain that Trump had “been charged with falsifying business records to conceal hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, a porn star” and that Trump “had been found liable for sexually assaulting and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll.”

The most recent NBC News poll, conducted at the end of January, has Trump favored over Biden by a substantial 47 percent to 42 percent.

In the RealClearPolitics compilation of polls that add Robert Kennedy Jr., Cornel West and Jill Stein to the mix, Trump’s lead over Biden more than doubles, to 4.8 points, 41.6 to 36.8 percent. Kennedy gets 13 percent, and West and Stein each get 2.1 percent.

Along with the threat posed by third-party candidates, two major crises — immigration and the Israeli assault on Hamas in Gaza — have become significant liabilities for the Biden campaign.

The Dec. 10-14 New York Times/Siena poll found that young voters, aged 18 to 29, favored Trump over Biden 49-43. These voters said they trusted Trump over Biden “to do a better job on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” 49-30. In the 2020 election, Biden beat Trump among 18-to-29-year-old voters by 24 points, 60-36, according to exit polls, by far his biggest margin in all age groups.

“To win in 2024, Biden will need to convince voters that he is still the proud moderate they voted for in 2020,” Cowan wrote by email. “He has a lot of evidence on his side, but he still has a lot of convincing to do.”

Biden’s showing “middle- and working-class voters that he understands their values and takes seriously their concerns around crime, immigration and the economy — which, as polling makes clear, are often dramatically different and far more mainstream and centrist than those of college-educated elites who staff much of Washington — is the only way to win.”

While bitterly criticized by many liberals, the Supreme Court decision last year to ban affirmative action in public and private colleges will in fact reduce the salience of an issue that has historically worked to build support for Republicans.

the red-blue divide is perhaps less illuminating than the gap between engaged and disengaged Americans, in which an exhausted majority encounters the highly polarized activist wings of both parties and shrinks back from the fray

The wings aren’t changing each other’s minds — hard-core Democrats aren’t going to persuade hard-core Republicans — but they’re also not reaching sufficient numbers of persuadable voters to break America’s partisan deadlock.

In 2020, when I was doing research for my book about the growing danger of partisan division, I began to learn more about what extreme partisanship does not only to our hearts but also to our minds.

It can deeply and profoundly distort the way we view the world. We become so emotionally and spiritually invested in the outcome of a political contest that we can inadvertently become disconnected from reality.

Our heart connects with our mind in such a way that the heart demands that the mind conform to its deepest desires

When a partisan encounters negative information, it can often trigger the emotional equivalent of a fight-or-flight response. This applies not just to negative arguments but also to negative facts. To deal with the emotional response, we seek different arguments and alternative facts.

If you are a true partisan, you essentially become an unpaid lawyer for your side. Every “good” fact that bolsters your argument is magnified. Every “bad” fact is minimized or rationalized.

When partisanship reaches its worst point, every positive claim about your side is automatically believed, and every negative allegation is automatically disbelieved.

allegations of wrongdoing directed at your side are treated as acts of aggression — proof that “they” are trying to destroy “us.”

You see this reality most plainly in the daily Republican theatrics surrounding Trump’s criminal indictments. Rather than wrestle seriously with the profoundly troubling claims against him, they treat the criminal cases as proof of Democratic perfidy. They believe every claim against Hunter and Joe Biden and not a single claim against Trump.

ask why people are checking out, and one reason is that partisans make it so very difficult to engage.

The problem is most pronounced (and often overtly threatening) on the MAGA right, but it’s endemic to our partisan wings

as partisanship deepens, partisan subcultures can get increasingly weird. They become so convinced of the us-versus-them dynamic that they’ll eventually believe virtually anything, as long as it’s a claim against the other side.

If decades of partisanship have persuaded you that your opponents are evil, have no morals and want to destroy the country, then why wouldn’t they hack voting machines or recruit a pop star as a government asset?

I have some rules to help temper my worst partisan impulses.

Expose yourself to the best of the other side’s point of view — including the best essays, podcasts and books.

when you encounter a new idea, learn about it from its proponents before you read its opponents.

when you encounter bad news about a cause that you hold dear — whether it’s a presidential campaign, an international conflict or even a claim against a person you admire, take a close and careful look at the evidence

Dr. Shi’s group was fascinated by how coronaviruses jump from species to species. To find viruses, they took samples from bats and other animals, as well as from sick people living near animals carrying these viruses or associated with the wildlife trade. Much of this work was conducted in partnership with the EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based scientific organization that, since 2002, has been awarded over $80 million in federal funding to research the risks of emerging infectious diseases.

Their research showed that the viruses most similar to SARS‑CoV‑2, the virus that caused the pandemic, circulate in bats that live roughly 1,000 miles away from Wuhan. Scientists from Dr. Shi’s team traveled repeatedly to Yunnan province to collect these viruses and had expanded their search to Southeast Asia. Bats in other parts of China have not been found to carry viruses that are as closely related to SARS-CoV-2.

When the Covid-19 outbreak was detected, Dr. Shi initially wondered if the novel coronavirus had come from her laboratory, saying she had never expected such an outbreak to occur in Wuhan.

The SARS‑CoV‑2 virus is exceptionally contagious and can jump from species to species like wildfire. Yet it left no known trace of infection at its source or anywhere along what would have been a thousand-mile journey before emerging in Wuhan.

The year before the outbreak, the Wuhan institute, working with U.S. partners, had proposed creating viruses with SARS‑CoV‑2’s defining feature

The laboratory pursued risky research that resulted in viruses becoming more infectious: Coronaviruses were grown from samples from infected animals and genetically reconstructed and recombined to create new viruses unknown in nature. These new viruses were passed through cells from bats, pigs, primates and humans and were used to infect civets and humanized mice (mice modified with human genes). In essence, this process forced these viruses to adapt to new host species, and the viruses with mutations that allowed them to thrive emerged as victors.

Worse still, as the pandemic raged, their American collaborators failed to publicly reveal the existence of the Defuse proposal. The president of EcoHealth, Peter Daszak, recently admitted to Congress that he doesn’t know about virus samples collected by the Wuhan institute after 2015 and never asked the lab’s scientists if they had started the work described in Defuse.

By 2019, Dr. Shi’s group had published a database describing more than 22,000 collected wildlife samples. But external access was shut off in the fall of 2019, and the database was not shared with American collaborators even after the pandemic started, when such a rich virus collection would have been most useful in tracking the origin of SARS‑CoV‑2. It remains unclear whether the Wuhan institute possessed a precursor of the pandemic virus.

In 2021, The Intercept published a leaked 2018 grant proposal for a research project named Defuse, which had been written as a collaboration between EcoHealth, the Wuhan institute and Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina, who had been on the cutting edge of coronavirus research for years. The proposal described plans to create viruses strikingly similar to SARS‑CoV‑2.

Coronaviruses bear their name because their surface is studded with protein spikes, like a spiky crown, which they use to enter animal cells. The Defuse project proposed to search for and create SARS-like viruses carrying spikes with a unique feature: a furin cleavage site — the same feature that enhances SARS‑CoV‑2’s infectiousness in humans, making it capable of causing a pandemic. Defuse was never funded by the United States.

owever, in his testimony on Monday, Dr. Fauci explained that the Wuhan institute would not need to rely on U.S. funding to pursue research independently.

While it’s possible that the furin cleavage site could have evolved naturally (as seen in some distantly related coronaviruses), out of the hundreds of SARS-like viruses cataloged by scientists, SARS‑CoV‑2 is the only one known to possess a furin cleavage site in its spike. And the genetic data suggest that the virus had only recently gained the furin cleavage site before it started the pandemic.

Ultimately, a never-before-seen SARS-like virus with a newly introduced furin cleavage site, matching the description in the Wuhan institute’s Defuse proposal, caused an outbreak in Wuhan less than two years after the proposal was drafted.

When the Wuhan scientists published their seminal paper about Covid-19 as the pandemic roared to life in 2020, they did not mention the virus’s furin cleavage site — a feature they should have been on the lookout for, according to their own grant proposal, and a feature quickly recognized by other scientists.

At the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a team of scientists had been hunting for SARS-like viruses for over a decade, led by Shi Zhengl

In May, citing failures in EcoHealth’s monitoring of risky experiments conducted at the Wuhan lab, the Biden administration suspended all federal funding for the organization and Dr. Daszak, and initiated proceedings to bar them from receiving future grants. In his testimony on Monday, Dr. Fauci said that he supported the decision to suspend and bar EcoHealth.

Separately, Dr. Baric described the competitive dynamic between his research group and the institute when he told Congress that the Wuhan scientists would probably not have shared their most interesting newly discovered viruses with him. Documents and email correspondence between the institute and Dr. Baric are still being withheld from the public while their release is fiercely contested in litigation.

In the end, American partners very likely knew of only a fraction of the research done in Wuhan. According to U.S. intelligence sources, some of the institute’s virus research was classified or conducted with or on behalf of the Chinese military.

In the congressional hearing on Monday, Dr. Fauci repeatedly acknowledged the lack of visibility into experiments conducted at the Wuhan institute, saying, “None of us can know everything that’s going on in China, or in Wuhan, or what have you. And that’s the reason why — I say today, and I’ve said at the T.I.,” referring to his transcribed interview with the subcommittee, “I keep an open mind as to what the origin is.”

The Wuhan lab pursued this type of work under low biosafety conditions that could not have contained an airborne virus as infectious as SARS‑CoV‑2.

Labs working with live viruses generally operate at one of four biosafety levels (known in ascending order of stringency as BSL-1, 2, 3 and 4) that describe the work practices that are considered sufficiently safe depending on the characteristics of each pathogen. The Wuhan institute’s scientists worked with SARS-like viruses under inappropriately low biosafety conditions.

​​Biosafety levels are not internationally standardized, and some countries use more permissive protocols than others.

In one experiment, Dr. Shi’s group genetically engineered an unexpectedly deadly SARS-like virus (not closely related to SARS‑CoV‑2) that exhibited a 10,000-fold increase in the quantity of virus in the lungs and brains of humanized mice. Wuhan institute scientists handled these live viruses at low biosafety levels, including BSL-2.

Even the much more stringent containment at BSL-3 cannot fully prevent SARS‑CoV‑2 from escaping. Two years into the pandemic, the virus infected a scientist in a BSL-3 laboratory in Taiwan, which was, at the time, a zero-Covid country. The scientist had been vaccinated and was tested only after losing the sense of smell. By then, more than 100 close contacts had been exposed. Human error is a source of exposure even at the highest biosafety levels, and the risks are much greater for scientists working with infectious pathogens at low biosafety.

An early draft of the Defuse proposal stated that the Wuhan lab would do their virus work at BSL-2 to make it “highly cost-effective.” Dr. Baric added a note to the draft highlighting the importance of using BSL-3 to contain SARS-like viruses that could infect human cells, writing that “U.S. researchers will likely freak out.”

Years later, after SARS‑CoV‑2 had killed millions, Dr. Baric wrote to Dr. Daszak: “I have no doubt that they followed state determined rules and did the work under BSL-2. Yes China has the right to set their own policy. You believe this was appropriate containment if you want but don’t expect me to believe it. Moreover, don’t insult my intelligence by trying to feed me this load of BS.”

SARS‑CoV‑2 is a stealthy virus that transmits effectively through the air, causes a range of symptoms similar to those of other common respiratory diseases and can be spread by infected people before symptoms even appear. If the virus had escaped from a BSL-2 laboratory in 2019, the leak most likely would have gone undetected until too late.

One alarming detail — leaked to The Wall Street Journal and confirmed by current and former U.S. government officials — is that scientists on Dr. Shi’s team fell ill with Covid-like symptoms in the fall of 2019. One of the scientists had been named in the Defuse proposal as the person in charge of virus discovery work. The scientists denied having been sick.

The hypothesis that Covid-19 came from an animal at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan is not supported by strong evidence.

In December 2019, Chinese investigators assumed the outbreak had started at a centrally located market frequented by thousands of visitors daily. This bias in their search for early cases meant that cases unlinked to or located far away from the market would very likely have been missed

To make things worse, the Chinese authorities blocked the reporting of early cases not linked to the market and, claiming biosafety precautions, ordered the destruction of patient samples on January 3, 2020, making it nearly impossible to see the complete picture of the earliest Covid-19 cases. Information about dozens of early cases from November and December 2019 remains inaccessible.

A pair of papers published in Science in 2022 made the best case for SARS‑CoV‑2 having emerged naturally from human-animal contact at the Wuhan market by focusing on a map of the early cases and asserting that the virus had jumped from animals into humans twice at the market in 2019

More recently, the two papers have been countered by other virologists and scientists who convincingly demonstrate that the available market evidence does not distinguish between a human superspreader event and a natural spillover at the market.

Furthermore, the existing genetic and early case data show that all known Covid-19 cases probably stem from a single introduction of SARS‑CoV‑2 into people, and the outbreak at the Wuhan market probably happened after the virus had already been circulating in humans.

Not a single infected animal has ever been confirmed at the market or in its supply chain. Without good evidence that the pandemic started at the Huanan Seafood Market, the fact that the virus emerged in Wuhan points squarely at its unique SARS-like virus laboratory.

With today’s technology, scientists can detect how respiratory viruses — including SARS, MERS and the flu — circulate in animals while making repeated attempts to jump across species. Thankfully, these variants usually fail to transmit well after crossing over to a new species and tend to die off after a small number of infections

investigators have not reported finding any animals infected with SARS‑CoV‑2 that had not been infected by humans. Yet, infected animal sources and other connective pieces of evidence were found for the earlier SARS and MERS outbreaks as quickly as within a few days, despite the less advanced viral forensic technologies of two decades ago.

Even though Wuhan is the home base of virus hunters with world-leading expertise in tracking novel SARS-like viruses, investigators have either failed to collect or report key evidence that would be expected if Covid-19 emerged from the wildlife trade. For example, investigators have not determined that the earliest known cases had exposure to intermediate host animals before falling ill.

No antibody evidence shows that animal traders in Wuhan are regularly exposed to SARS-like viruses, as would be expected in such situations.

In previous outbreaks of coronaviruses, scientists were able to demonstrate natural origin by collecting multiple pieces of evidence linking infected humans to infected animals

In contrast, virologists and other scientists agree that SARS‑CoV‑2 required little to no adaptation to spread rapidly in humans and other animals. The virus appears to have succeeded in causing a pandemic upon its only detected jump into humans.

it was a SARS-like coronavirus with a unique furin cleavage site that emerged in Wuhan, less than two years after scientists, sometimes working under inadequate biosafety conditions, proposed collecting and creating viruses of that same design.

a laboratory accident is the most parsimonious explanation of how the pandemic began.

Given what we now know, investigators should follow their strongest leads and subpoena all exchanges between the Wuhan scientists and their international partners, including unpublished research proposals, manuscripts, data and commercial orders. In particular, exchanges from 2018 and 2019 — the critical two years before the emergence of Covid-19 — are very likely to be illuminating (and require no cooperation from the Chinese government to acquire), yet they remain beyond the public’s view more than four years after the pandemic began.

it is undeniable that U.S. federal funding helped to build an unprecedented collection of SARS-like viruses at the Wuhan institute, as well as contributing to research that enhanced them.

Advocates and funders of the institute’s research, including Dr. Fauci, should cooperate with the investigation to help identify and close the loopholes that allowed such dangerous work to occur. The world must not continue to bear the intolerable risks of research with the potential to cause pandemics.

A successful investigation of the pandemic’s root cause would have the power to break a decades-long scientific impasse on pathogen research safety, determining how governments will spend billions of dollars to prevent future pandemics. A credible investigation would also deter future acts of negligence and deceit by demonstrating that it is indeed possible to be held accountable for causing a viral pandemic

Last but not least, people of all nations need to see their leaders — and especially, their scientists — heading the charge to find out what caused this world-shaking event. Restoring public trust in science and government leadership requires it.