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We have more intensive care beds per capita, more equipment and more pricey specialists than almost anywhere else. We have a fantastically innovative biotech sector.

Two major American assets I didn’t list, and should have, were weather and time.

America’s weather was more favorable to fighting covid-19 because more of our landmass falls in southern latitudes where it’s comfortable, for most of the year, to spend time outside.

we had time to figure all that out, because Europe got hit hard first, giving us a valuable preview of horrors to come. That bought us priceless extra days

only we squandered them and every other advantage we started with.

Sure, America doesn’t have the absolute worst death rate in the industrialized world — not yet, anyway

Either way, we’ll still be doing much worse than we could have — and much worse than we should have. And I mean all of us, not just President Trump.

everyone, left or right, who turned this into a political battle with their fellow Americans, rather than a desperate fight our country needed to unite to win.

Yes, Trump was by far the worst bungler in this whole affair. But there is plenty of blame to go around:

I include myself in that number. I think of all the times I lost my temper with covid skeptics, even though I knew it was counterproductive, and I regret every one of them.

I look back at my columns and wonder if I should have advocated for less intrusive policies that might have garnered broader support, or if I would have convinced more people if I’d evinced a little more humility in my conviction that America needed to take radical action immediately.

I’ll always wonder: How many people could we have saved if everyone, from the president on down, had acted as if saving American lives from a deadly virus was the most important thing we had to do this year?

He has generally relished the aspects of the job that allow him to preside over something, fowl-based or otherwise — forums well suited to a leader for whom attention can seem less a wish than a psychic need.

Jeff Flake, a Republican former senator from Arizona who spoke forcefully against Mr. Trump before leaving office, recalled Mr. Trump’s manifest glee at posing for pictures in his work space.

Yet the president’s desperate gambit until this point has been so all-consuming, his aversion to losing so well known, that little attention has been paid to a knotty question underpinning it all: What, exactly, was he holding onto? Why fight so hard, and put the country through so much, to keep a position he has often not appeared to want?

Besides his regular golf outings on the weekends, the man who has historically seemed to need human interaction for sustenance — the audience for his perpetual show — is demonstrating little interest in being around others when he cannot point to something he can credibly call a win.

It is also something of a culmination after three years of turkey pardons that have at times doubled as surprisingly telling snapshots of Mr. Trump’s frame of mind at various points in his presidency, with cutting asides and easy smiles in equal measure.

“From what I’ve seen,” said Beth Breeding, a spokeswoman for the National Turkey Federation, “the president seems to have really enjoyed them.”

By the end, though, the president was fulfilling the part of the job that always made the most sense to him: master of ceremonies. He placed his hand over a turkey named Butter, used the word “hereby” to infuse the proceedings with requisite gravitas (“I hereby grant you a full and complete pardon”) and started clapping on his way back inside.

“Speaking for buncombe” meant that a congressman was holding forth in a way designed not to appeal to the other members of the chamber, but to convince his constituents that he was working for their needs and beliefs.

To enliven their speeches, southern members often insulted and threatened Republican members of Congress. Fellow congressmen understood the game; after a particularly fiery speech, a member might walk over to his colleague’s desk and apologize for his choice of words, clearing the air. And, in spite of these harangues, congressional relationships remained mostly friendly

that was not what their constituents saw. Southerners back home rarely knew of these congressional friendships (sometimes because members purposely kept them secret); they could read only the desperate speeches accusing Republicans of undermining the system of slavery and preaching that the South was fundamentally oppressed by the nonslaveholding states.

When Lincoln won the 1860 election, most southern congressmen were unhappy, but not openly rebellious. After years of buncombe speeches aimed at riling them up, however, many white southerners found the prospect of a Republican capturing the presidency terrifying, even though their political representatives in Washington did not.

While some of these federal politicians had long been in favor of southern separation, a majority were surprised by the mass anger that took hold in the South after Lincoln’s election. In the weeks that followed, such prominent federal politicians as Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens dismissed or opposed talk of secession. Stephens, who knew Lincoln from when the two served in the House of Representatives together in the late 1840s, told Georgia residents, “In my judgment, the election of no man, constitutionally chosen to that high office, is sufficient cause to justify any State to separate from the Union.”

Ordinary white southerners were furious—and trained their ire on their own representatives. They repeatedly blamed Washington politicians for failing to protect them.

Southern senators and representatives soon adopted the fury of the men and women they represented. They withdrew from their positions in Congress and joined their colleagues in supporting secession. By the end of March 1861, Davis and Stephens had become the president and the vice president of the new Confederate government, and many of their colleagues in Congress accepted other key posts.

by spreading misinformation about the electoral process, promoting conspiracy theories, and tacitly endorsing threats against members of the other party, the GOP has created a base that cannot bring itself to believe that Joe Biden won.

The consequences of congressional Republicans’ 21st-century buncombe speeches have yet to be fully felt. What comes next may depend on Republicans’ willingness to do what too many members of Congress were unwilling to do in 1860—tell their constituents the truth, even at the risk of their own electoral defeat.

consider for a moment that even China has Coronavirus under control by now. The only nations which don’t — again — are either desperately poor, or failed societies, or both. But that’s just what Coronavirus tells us is true of America, now, too

Floyd’s death underscores that police work should be subject to oversight, and officers who violate policy and misuse their power should be subject to discipline. But the unions’ power is most notable in contracts that limit the accountability that, as the community can now see, is so desperately needed.

I used to say that the majority of officers are good but silently let a minority set the dominant culture. But now I believe that no one can be called a “good officer” if they are not working actively and openly to change the culture and unseat their toxic union leaders.

Waiting to stoke that resentment are police-union leaders such as Kroll, who defend even the more aggressive acts of officers and, even in a case as extreme as Floyd’s death, prevent any self-examination by blaming the victim.

Last year, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey banned so-called warrior-style training, which emphasizes physical threats to police officers rather than the benefits of de-escalating confrontations. Critics have implicated a variant of this training—a course titled “The Bulletproof Warrior”—in the shooting of Philando Castile during a traffic stop in a Minneapolis–St. Paul suburb in 2016. Kroll and the police federation defied Frey’s move by offering warrior-style training of their own.

If progressive local officials want wholesale reform of police tactics and culture, they will have to do something that runs counter to their own culture: take on union leaders.

Some local officials have also hesitated to demand tougher reforms in contracts because police unions often spend heavily in local elections to oppose any politician who challenges them.

Electing mayors and city-council members who support such reforms is not enough. Police-union leaders use back channels to go around local officials and get more conservative state legislators to block meaningful changes

at this moment, as massive marches across the country demand dramatic change, police unions have less leverage than they’ve ever had. I am not suggesting that cities should try to bust police unions. Far from it.

Without policies like Medicare For All and a Green New Deal, working class people will continue to die. Compromise will not save them.

Biden’s platform instead includes a want to not “demonize” the wealthy and have “no one’s standard of living change,” as he told rich donors at a fundraiser last June.

And as much as Democrats want me to, I do not believe in voting for the “lesser” of two rapists.

He also authored the 1994 crime bill, which led to mass incarceration of disproportionately black and brown Americans. Just a few months ago, Biden gave a speech in Iowa claiming “poor kids are just as bright as white kids.”

Any Democrat who dismisses these allegations as uncredible or illegitimate is a hypocrite.

he notably neglects those who suffered the most as a result of the administration’s mass deportations, record civilian drone strikes and infamous Wall Street bailout.

We must not forget that Biden voted for the Iraq war, voted for NAFTA, has consistently supported corporate bailouts and opposes Medicare for All amid a pandemic (one that he has been largely absent from)

Biden was nowhere to be found. The only coronavirus response policy he has been vocal about, other than criticizing President Donald Trump, is advocating to hold in-person elections and putting thousands at risk.

After all, Biden voted to confirm both conservative judges Sandra Day O’Connor and Antonin Scalia. More importantly, Biden was the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman during the Anita Hill hearings where Clarence Thomas, now the most conservative justice on the Court, was accused of sexual misconduct.

But those key Bernie-Trump voters were never Democrats in the first place – they were self-identifying independents and traditional non-voters who distrust establishment politicians.

But neither have I, and neither have the sexual assault survivors or former incarcerated people whose lives were affected by Biden’s decisions.

Trump is a dangerous figure, but he exists only by virtue of the prevailing establishment and status quo. He is a symptom of the late capitalist neoliberalism that the Democratic establishment embodies

By continuously voting for the lesser of two evils, I have effectively taken away the power of my own vote and allowed our country to move further to the right.

There are so many families like the Iloanyas who are caught between pain and hope, because their sons and brothers were arrested by SARS and they fear the worst, knowing the reputation of SARS, but still they dare to hope in the desperate way we humans do for those we love.

the protesters insisted on not having a central leadership, it was social rather than traditional media that documented the protests, and, in a country with firm class divisions, the protests cut across class

The protests were peaceful, insistently peaceful, consistently peaceful.

But the Nigerian government tried to disrupt their fund-raising.

From the capital city of Abuja to the small town of Ogbomosho, state agents attacked and beat up protesters

The Lagos State government accused protesters of violence, but it defied common sense that a protest so consistently committed to peaceful means would suddenly turn around and become violent.

At about noon on Oct. 20, 2020, about two weeks into the protests, the Lagos State governor suddenly announced a curfew that would begin at 4 p.m., which gave people in a famously traffic-clogged state only a few hours to get home and hunker down.

Government officials reportedly cut the security cameras, then cut off the bright floodlights, leaving only a darkness heavy with foreboding. The protesters were holding Nigerian flags, sitting on the ground, some kneeling, some singing the national anthem, peaceful and determined.

A blurry video of what happened next has gone viral — soldiers walk toward the protesters with a terrifyingly casual calm, the kind of calm you cannot have if you are under attack, and they shoot, not up in the air, which anyway would still be an atrocity when dealing with peaceful protesters, but with their guns at arm level, shooting into a crowd of people, shooting to kill.

The Nigerian state has turned on its people. The only reason to shoot into a crowd of peaceful citizens is to terrorize: to kill some and make the others back down.

Twelve hours after soldiers shot peaceful protesters, Mr. Buhari still had not addressed the nation.

In the first week of the protests, the president sent out a tweet and then gave a flaccid speech about ending SARS

“I did a focus group tonight with women who voted for Trump in 2016,” Ms. Longwell wrote. “Not a single one was planning to vote for him again.”

In other words, Mr. Trump’s effort smacked of a too-late, too-lame apology to an ex who has long since moved on. It also underscored Mr. Trump’s special knack for making statements (or sending tweets) that are perfectly suited to being clipped, saved and hurled back in his face when facts contradict him later on, or in real time. Mr. Trump has proved himself, again and again, a grand master of delivering famous last words.

Mr. Trump seems to be tempting fate on a daily basis since he himself became infected.

He has said he is a “perfect physical specimen,” feels better than he did 20 years ago and is now “immune” from the disease — never mind that the course of the coronavirus has shown itself to be treacherous and unpredictable.

It kicked off on Day 2 when the first of four Trump White House press secretaries, Sean Spicer, claimed that the crowd gathered for Mr. Trump’s 2017 inauguration was “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period.” Overhead photos of Mr. Trump’s inaugural crowd next to Mr. Obama’s proved this remark to be ridiculous, period.

He already boasted a long rap sheet of “unfortunate remarks,” all readily captured and spread via video, Twitter, TikTok and wherever else famous last words get immortalized these days.

“We have it totally under control,” Mr. Trump said in January on CNBC, an opening salvo of denial that would soon be hung around his neck.

He continues to insist that the virus is “disappearing,” an assertion flatly contradicted by rising rates of infection across much of the country in recent days.

Every president typically gets one or two shudder-worthy sound bites on their permanent record. President Barack Obama promised that “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor” under his health care plan, a proposition that proved false during the troubled rollout of the Affordable Care Act in 2013.

“Politicians are always going to say things they regret,” said Victoria Clarke, a longtime Republican communications strategist who has advised several elected officials and administrations

Traditionally, presidents have tried to avoid making statements that might prove embarrassing later on

But the response to the coronavirus has placed the White House’s pre-existing condition on, well, steroids.

The current outbreak in the White House has been accompanied by a video parade of “unfortunate remarks” — or, depending on your point of view, a rampage of karma.

Kayleigh McEnany, testing positive last week was accompanied by a now-infamous clip from a Fox News interview Ms. McEnany gave in February. “We will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here,” vowed the then-future press secretary.

Likewise, when Kellyanne Conway, a former senior White House adviser, revealed her own coronavirus diagnosis, numerous news media outlets and Twitter feeds resurrected an oft-mocked statement she made about the still-emerging outbreak in March. “It is being contained,” vowed Ms. Conway

“No president can go four years without making a comment that can be considered a ‘gotcha moment,’” said Erik Smith, a veteran Democratic spokesman and operative. “But this president seems to pile them up like cordwood and take joy in it.”

It has lent the president a level of credibility as a “straight shooter,” even as he has been caught in thousands of false statements, dubious boasts and comical reassurances.

“It affects virtually nobody!” Mr. Trump declared of the coronavirus at a packed rally in Ohio last month — another remark that would go literally viral. It did not age well.

Even after his presidency ended, Washington is under siege from extremism, Trump's trashing of truth with false claims of election fraud and unhinged conspiracies that show the fight to save US democracy did not end on Inauguration Day.

A majority of Senate Republicans have indicated that they will not wrestle with Trump's behavior but will take refuge in a questionable argument that a President who was impeached while in office for seditious behavior cannot be tried after returning to private life.

That means there is a little chance of a two-thirds majority to convict Trump among 100 senators who will serve as jurors in the chamber that became a crime scene to which many of them were witnesses.

While the managers will likely fail to secure a prohibition on Trump serving in federal office in future, they hope to so damn him in public perception that a political comeback in 2024 will be impossible.

Video of Trump declaring to an angry crowd he had called to Washington on January 6 "if you don't fight like hell, we are not going to have a country anymore," followed by clips of rioters shouting "fight for Trump" as they smashed their way into the Capitol will have a powerful effect.

The price to be paid for deserting an ex-president who still dominates his party is being demonstrated by the backlash directed at 10 Republicans who voted to impeach in the House.

It's possible a handful of Senate Republicans will emulate Utah's Sen. Mitt Romney, the only member of his party to vote to convict Trump in his first trial. And Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, who voted to impeach Trump, wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post Monday encouraging Senate Republicans to vote to convict Trump, saying it "is necessary to save America from going further down a sad, dangerous road."

The claim that a former president cannot be tried after being impeached relies on a hyper-literal reading of the Constitution. Trump's supporters argue the trial is moot since impeachment is about removing a President from office and Trump has already left power.

The trial will consume hours a day over the next few weeks, but it will be only one half of a compelling political story that is unfolding in Washington.Biden, three weeks into his term, is intensifying his efforts to stand up his administration and to rescue the country with vaccines before new variants of Covid-19 trigger another deadly wave of infections.

The new commander-in-chief has steered clear of impeachment drama, leaving it to the new Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill to plow ahead.

Trump's hurriedly overhauled impeachment defense team on Monday laid out their strategy in pre-trial briefs.

"This was only ever a selfish attempt by Democratic leadership in the House to prey upon the feelings of horror and confusion that fell upon all Americans across the entire political spectrum upon seeing the destruction at the Capitol on January 6 by a few hundred people," the lawyers wrote.

The Trump defense will also revive one of the long-held tropes of the ex-President's apologists -- that his aggressive rhetoric should be taken figuratively not literally, with a claim that his call for the mob to "fight like hell" was metaphorical.

His team has also posited, despite multiple lawsuits and certifications of votes by states and Congress, that there is no evidence to disprove his false claims of voter fraud -- so prolonging the Big Lie that the election was stolen from the former President.

In a counter filling on the eve of the trial on Monday, Democratic House impeachment managers accused Trump's defense of indulging in "contortions" to support his discredited claims of a "rigged" and "stolen" election.

"President Trump violated his Oath of Office and betrayed the American people," the brief said. "His incitement of insurrection against the United States government -- which disrupted the peaceful transfer of power -- is the most grievous constitutional crime ever committed by a president."

The trial will begin just a month after a now infamous day, when Trump greeted a huge crowd in Washington already primed for revolt by his weeks of false claims of election fraud. The subsequent invasion of the US Capitol during a joint session of Congress to certify Biden's election victory led to five deaths and saw Trump fans parading unimpeded through the halls of the iconic building as lawmakers fled to safety.

"He wanted something to disrupt the electoral vote count that would mean he would no longer be President of the United States," Conway said."None of that is protected by the First Amendment. It's a flat out violation of his oath of office and it's impeachable and he should be punished by being barred from ever holding future federal office."

But they made an even more devastating case by chronicling his inaction as commander-in-chief during the most frightening moments of the siege with clips from Twitter, Parler and YouTube; cell phone footage from reporters and members of Congress; desperate police radio dispatches calling for backup; officer body camera footage that was marked as being obtained by the US attorney's office; and an array of surveillance camera footage from across the Capitol that captured a bird's-eye view of key moments.

Wielding the element of surprise by unearthing many previously unreleased videos, they showed the harrowing moments where then-Vice President Mike Pence, his wife and daughter, were rushed to safety down a narrow stairway on the Senate side of the Capitol. They juxtaposed that surveillance video from an overhead Capitol camera with a video shot from within the angry mob outside chanting "Hang Mike Pence!" -- then crystallized the danger with a chilling photograph of a noose and a gallows that was erected that day outside the Capitol.

The managers tried to give it all context by showing Trump's tweet attacking Pence two minutes before the vice president was evacuated down those steps

To rebut Trump's defenders' claims that he did not incite violence and had no bearing on the events that unfolded that afternoon, the managers then showed video of a Trump loyalist outside the Capitol reading the former President's tweet accusing Pence of disloyalty in real time over a bullhorn as anger mounted.

Never before in history have Americans seen one attack on their nation from so many different perspectives. For hours, the managers outlined in painstaking detail what unfolded in each critical minute of the siege with timestamps — later played back against the President's actions or inaction. Sometimes, they showed the same few minutes or seconds from the vantage point of two or three different videos to punctuate their arguments. The montages were brutal, searing and unforgettable.JUST WATCHED'Storm the Capitol!': Rioters react to Trump speechReplayMore Videos ...MUST WATCH PlayM19.15 55.34l30.07-20a4 4 0 0 0 0-6.66l-30.07-20A4 4 0 0 0

At another point, impeachment managers tried to portray the danger that staff members felt as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was being hunted down by rioters who pounded on doors demanding to know where she was.

"They're pounding the doors trying to find her," the aide whispers into the phone. The bookend to the call was a video from minutes later, showing a rioter jamming his shoulder into an outer door and then breaking through near where they were hiding, before turning away.

In another near miss, new surveillance video showed Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman sprinting down a Senate hallway to respond to the breach, encountering Sen. Mitt Romney and gesturing for the Utah Republican, who had been critical of Trump's baseless election rhetoric, to turn and run in another direction to avoid encountering the mob.

The Democratic managers also used shaky, disjointed video to try to capture the confusion and fear that ensued when a Capitol Police officer shot pro-Trump rioter Ashli Babbitt

The gunshot is heard, then a gasp of profanity capturing the fear in that moment: "Take your pins off," members are heard telling one another. Swalwell noted that the buzzing sound in the background of the video emanated from the gas masks members were holding.

At 4:17 p.m. Trump finally tweeted an on-camera message telling rioters to disperse. A video displayed during the trial Wednesday showed the "QAnon Shaman" Jacob Chansley, who was seen inside the Capitol dressed in horns, a fur headdress and red, white and blue face paint, back outside on Capitol grounds telling others a short while later that Trump had released a video message conveying that they should all now go home.

in the long arc of the Limbaugh era, you can see pretty clearly how success and self-marginalization can be effectively combined.

Reaganite conservatism in ’80s America was a 55 percent proposition, popular with younger voters, with only a mild version of today’s yawning gender gap.

But you don’t need 55 percent of the country to build a huge talk-radio audience or an incredibly successful cable news network or a vast online ecosystem. You need a passionate audience, a committed audience, a church of Dittoheads.That was what Limbaugh built for himself

then everyone else on the right went in the same direction: First, Limbaugh’s talk radio imitators, then Roger Ailes with Fox News, and then — disastrously — a great many Republican politicians, who realized that an intense ideological fan base was enough to win them elections in safe districts and might make them media celebrities in the bargain.

This pattern created problems that compounded one another. As Conservatism Inc. became more of a world unto itself, it sealed out bad news for conservative governance, contributing to debacles that doomed Republican presidents — Iraq for George W. Bush, Covid for Donald Trump

These debacles helped make conservatism less popular, closer to a 45 percent than a 55 percent proposition in presidential races, a blocking coalition but not a governing one.

And this in turn made the right’s passionate core feel more culturally besieged, more desperate for “safe spaces” where liberal perfidy was taken for granted and the most important reasons for conservative defeats were never entertained.

Such a system, predictably, was terrible at generating the kind of outward-facing, evangelistic conservatives who had made the Reagan revolution possible

to go back and watch Reagan and Buckley is to see an entirely different approach to politics — missionary and confident, with a gentlemanly comportment that has altogether vanished.

In its place today is a fantasy politics, a dreampolitik, that’s fed by a deep feeling of grievance and dispossession.

the right’s infotainment complex is itself a major reason for that consolidation. Conservatives have lost real-world territory by building dream palaces, and ceded votes by talking primarily to themselves.

Dan McLaughlin, in an instructive piece for National Review, counts Limbaugh as one of the right’s five most important 1990s-era figures, along with Ailes, Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich and Antonin Scalia

as they grew old within the right’s infrastructure, Limbaugh and Ailes and Newt and Rudy all seemed to cede their individuality and converge into a single character, a single noisy voice.

Which were the media impresarios and which were the political leaders? Which one was married four times, which ones only three, which was the office predator? Which one was most likely to say something indefensible in defense of Donald Trump?

Only Scalia, secure from certain temptations in his lifetime judicial appointment, retained both his individuality and his outward-facing influence to the end.

For the rest, for Limbaugh especially, we can say that their gifts were ample, their ascent remarkable, their influence enduring — and yet their most important legacy has been ashes and defeat.

From 2008 to 2012, she served as ambassador to Liberia, before moving on to become the director general of the Foreign Service for about a year.

“If you look at what I have done prior to that,” she said, “there is no question that I am not at all naïve about what the Chinese are doing and I have called them out on a regular basis,” which included her sharp criticism of China at other points in the hearing.

an optimistic speech she had given in October 2019 on Africa’s relationship with both China and the United States.

The speech conspicuously lacked criticism of China’s human-rights record or pattern of predatory-lending practices in developing countries desperate for investment.

Despite the warm response Ms. Thomas-Greenfield’s nomination received from diplomats and former State Department officials, Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill showed some concern.

Aside from China, Ms. Thomas-Greenfield will have to more broadly strengthen America’s presence at the United Nations, which was scaled back as the Trump administration pursued an “America First” style of diplomacy that devalued multilateral institutions.

So who’s right: Alston or Kim?

They are in a more important sense interpretive, about whether progress has been fast or slow, and whether today’s global poverty counts are laudable or tragic.

This is a realm of yes-ands and no-buts, not direct refutations.

“By being able to rely so heavily on the World Bank's flagship figure, they can say, ‘Look, progress has been consistent. We’ve been doing great,’” Alston told me. “The implication of that is that the triumph of neoliberalism has brought with it very significant benefits for poor people. In reality, that’s just not the case.”

Extreme poverty has declined rapidly, but the extreme-poverty line is very low: A person living below it spends no more than $1.90 a day, enough in many poor countries to cover some starch, a few fruits and vegetables, some cooking oil, a bit of protein, and that’s about it—with nothing left over for utilities, education, health care, transportation, or investment in wealth-generating assets, such as a cow or a motorbike

Alston takes issue with the fact that the World Bank’s extreme-poverty line is an absolute measure, not a relative one: It sets a line and sees how many people cross it, country by country, rather than pegging the poverty threshold to median income, country by country

But “relative poverty is what really counts these days,” Alston told me, as it captures social exclusion, and the way that living on a few dollars a day is more challenging in middle-income countries like India and Kenya than in low-income countries like Afghanistan and Chad.

Alston’s most controversial, and most important, argument is that the focus on progress measured against the $1.90-a-day line—the prevalence of “everything’s getting better” arguments, made by Davos types like Bill Gates and Steven Pinker—has hampered progress toward true poverty eradication, and toward civil rights, social inclusion, and a basic standard of living for all.

That poverty threshold represents “a staggeringly low standard of living, well below any reasonable conception of a life with dignity,” Alston argues—it is a catastrophic-destitution measure, not a poverty measure. He emphasizes the lack of progress made at the $3.20-a-day and $5.50-a-day poverty lines, too. Half the world lives on less than the latter figure.

What if the headline story were that half the world still qualifies as desperately poor, and poverty head counts remain stubbornly high in dozens of countries? What if the story were not that we are succeeding, but that we are failing?

it would hold the world accountable for the fact that poverty is, always and everywhere, a choice.

Alston’s view, and a necessary one, is that the world cannot wait for economic expansion to lift people above the poverty line. It cannot count on trade compacts and infrastructure projects and the ticking of GDP growth rates from 2.3 to 3.2 percent to do it. It needs direct interventions by governments, as fast as possible, to eliminate inequality and build safety nets, even in the poorest places.

There is a collective blame to be shared by those of us who have created the modern Republican Party that has so egregiously betrayed the principles it claimed to represent.

How did this happen? How do you abandon deeply held beliefs about character, personal responsibility, foreign policy and the national debt in a matter of months?

You don’t. The obvious answer is those beliefs weren’t deeply held. What others and I thought were bedrock values turned out to be mere marketing slogans easily replaced.

A party rooted in decency and values does not embrace the anger that Mr. Trump peddles as patriotism.

This collapse of a major political party as a moral governing force is unlike anything we have seen in modern American politics. The closest parallel is the demise of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, when the dissonance between what the party said it stood for and what citizens actually experienced was so great that it was unsustainable.

I’ve given up hope that there are any lines of decency or normalcy that once crossed would move Republican leaders to act as if they took their oath of office more seriously than their allegiance to party. Only fear will motivate the party to change — the cold fear only defeat can bring.

That defeat is looming. Will it bring desperately needed change to the Republican Party? I’d like to say I’m hopeful. But that would be a lie and there have been too many lies for too long.

So too has been the classic officer-class trait of inattention to detail.

there are also bigger, deeper factors at work

In England in particular, there is a strand of the national culture expressed by the mixture of hectoring optimism and insularity of the rightwing press, and reducible to the idea that the supposed British way of doing anything is necessarily the best

Even now, 21st-century politics is still less about hardened matters of success and failure than these expressions of culture and history, and the sides they force people to take.

These things play into deep elements of the English psyche, shot through with the lingering traces of deference and always ready to be manipulated by Tory politicians.

we will sooner or later have to confront the fact that we have not just the highest death toll in Europe but a broken social settlement.

We cannot go on like this, with deep inequalities of race and class constantly exploding before our eyes, the need for food banks extending into the distance, and voices at the top willing us back towards the very social and political dead end that ensured the virus has had such a disastrous impact.

In the great surge of spontaneous collective action that has greeted Covid-19, there are the seeds of something better, but we should not underestimate the obstacles in the way: nostalgia, mythology and the banalities of politicians desperate to manipulate such things in their own interests as their failures become inescapable.

“That may not be what public opinion is crying out for, but they are not very far removed from the principles that … Biden believes in. Otherwise the chances of the western world retaining any sort of moral leadership and giving itself the right to call out other people when they behave badly will be gone forever.”

Many senior former UK ambassadors are desperately hoping Washington will lead again. One said: “I think that if you have a different, more internationally minded leadership in the US then a lot of what has happened over the past few years can be reversed. If we get another four years of this leadership, then some of the bonds and some of the cement that holds the west together, and holds Europe and America together will be broken forever. If things change in November then we can recapture things if we get the right sort of leadership in Europe.”

Frank M. Snowden, a Yale historian who studies pandemics, wrote in his book “Epidemics and Society” that definitive accounts of this plague have largely vanished.

History Today, a monthly magazine of historical writing published in London, calls this pandemic “the greatest catastrophe ever.” The number of deaths — 200 million — is just astounding. Put it this way: That would be like wiping out roughly 65 percent of the current U.S. population. (Covid-19 disease modeling predicts U.S. deaths to potentially reach 240,000.)

Like the Plague of Justinian, the Black Death was caused by the bubonic plague.

Explorers arrived to the New World bearing more than just turnips and grapes. They also brought smallpox, measles and other viruses for which New World inhabitants had no immunity.

it is estimated that upwards of 80–95 percent of the Native American population was decimated within the first 100–150 years following 1492

Again, blame the rats with those pesky fleas on their backs: “They were attracted by city streets filled with rubbish and waste, especially in the poorest areas,” according to the National Archives in England. While doctors, lawyers and royalty fled town, the poor were ravaged by the disease

There were no treatments. If you caught it, you had roughly two weeks to live. This caused people to become desperate.

The epidemic that swept London in 1854 spawned the sort of epidemiological investigations that take place in disease outbreaks today. That’s thanks to John Snow, an English physician who almost single-handedly took on the bacteria. While some scientists suspected cholera was transmitted through the air, Snow thought otherwise. “Through carefully mapping the outbreak, he finds that everyone affected has a single connection in common: they have all retrieved water from the local Broad Street pump,”

according to a CDC history. He ordered the pump-handle turned off, and people stopped getting sick.

In 1793, yellow fever swept through Philadelphia, then the nation’s capital, killing roughly 10 percent of the population. President George Washington and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson high-tailed it out of town, ultimately settling on Washington as the nation’s capital.

It wasn’t until 1900 that U.S. Army researchers “pinpointed mosquitoes as the transmission vector for the disease,” according to a vaccine history project at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.

The covid-19 pandemic has inspired lots of comparisons to the 1918 flu, sometimes called the Spanish flu, which got its name not because it originated in Spain but because it was World War I, and Spain was the only country being honest about the toll the pandemic took on the country.

The flu came in two waves, starting in 1918 and ending in 1920. The number of infected is staggering —as many as 500 million, with estimates of 50 million deaths worldwide, according to the CDC.

One man saw it coming: Maurice Hilleman. The doctor later regarded as the godfather of vaccines was working at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in 1957 when he read a New York Times article about a nasty flu outbreak in Hong Kong that mentioned glassy-eyed children at a clinic.

Hilleman requested samples of the virus be shipped to U.S. drugmakers right away so they could get a vaccine ready. Though 70,000 people in the United States ultimately died, “some predicted that the U.S. death toll would have reached 1 million without the vaccine that Hilleman called for,” according to the Philadelphia vaccine history project. “Health officials widely credited that vaccine with saving many lives.”

Before covid-19, this was the world’s most recent pandemic, infecting as much as 21 percent of the world’s population. Swine flu was a hodgepodge of several different flu strains that had never been collectively seen together

Unfortunately for Hoover, the stock market crashed a mere seven months into his presidency and while it was certainly not his fault, he didn’t take aggressive action to rescue the economy as the Great Depression got underway.

Eerily reminiscent of President Trump’s declarations that the pandemic was over just as it was beginning, Hoover repeatedly declared that prosperity was around the corner, showing himself to be out of touch with his desperate constituents.

Roosevelt espoused contradictory themes, on one hand calling for bigger government and on another attacking Hoover for failing to balance the budget.

Even his own advisers were left perplexed as to his governing policy. But it didn’t matter in the end, with 25 percent of the country out of work and little hope on the horizon, Roosevelt won easily in a landslide.

Jimmy Carter encountered similar problems and like his fellow engineer Hoover, did not handle them well.

Carter addressed the country via national television in July 1979 to talk not about these bread-and-butter concerns, but rather what he saw as the nation’s dangerous loss of faith in its major institutions.

To some it seemed that he was blaming the American people for the nation’s difficulties and what became known as the “malaise” speech backfired on the former Georgia governor.

George H.W. Bush’s defeat in 1992 seemed far less likely than Hoover’s or Carter’s as his presidency got off to a roaring start. The end of the Cold War in 1989 along with the triumph in the 1991 Persian Gulf War produced record approval ratings for Bush.

Things only got worse for Carter when Iranian radicals seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran a few months later in November, taking 52 Americans hostage.

The crisis, along with a failed attempt to rescue the hostages, made Carter seem like a weak and ineffectual leader.While Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980 is often remembered as an inevitable step in the country’s turn to the right, polls remained close as the candidates’ first and only debate approached a week before the election.

None of this means that covid-19 spells Trump’s defeat for sure in the fall. It just means that Biden’s chances to win will likely be determined by forces beyond his control rather than by how much he’s able to get out on the trail. And It is a reminder that in electoral politics, chance and circumstance often matter more than strategy or political skill.

Americans find themselves where they have not been since the Second World War, or the Great Depression, no longer able to separate emotions into private feeling and public sentiment or opinion.

We realize that emotion has both depth and breadth, that powerful feelings are inspired not just by deep personal loss, but by large, collective losses, too.

It’s strange, and disorienting as an American, to be an object of pity. Pity has always been our defense against the pain and suffering experienced in places that we condescended to think of as poor, or undeveloped or badly governed. But perhaps a good, deep, excoriating and brief acceptance of self-pity is the only hope we have, the only way forward, because it’s now clear that we are desperately sick.

Roughly 40,000 got “abortive” polio, with fever, sore throat, headache, vomiting and muscle pain. Fifty-one were paralyzed, and five died,

It was “one of the worst biological disasters in American history: a man-made polio epidemic,” Offit wrote.

“People weren’t sure how you got it,” he said in an interview last week. “Therefore, they were scared of everything. They didn’t want to buy a piece of fruit at the grocery store. It’s the same now. … Everybody’s walking around with gloves on, with masks on, scared to shake anybody’s hand.”

The worst polio outbreak in U.S. history struck in 1952, the year after Offit was born. It infected 57,000 people, paralyzed 21,000 and killed 3,145. The next year there were 35,000 infections, and 38,000 the year after that.

Many survivors had to wear painful metal braces on their paralyzed legs or had to be placed in so-called iron lungs, which helped them breathe

In 1951, Jonas Salk of the University of Pittsburgh’s medical school received a grant from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis to find a vaccine. During intense months of research, he took live polio virus and killed it with formaldehyde until it was not infectious but still provided virus-fighting antibodies.

On April 26, 1954, Randy Kerr, a 6-year-old second-grader from Falls Church, Va., stood in the cafeteria of the Franklin Sherman Elementary School in McLean and became the first to be vaccinated in a massive field study.Salk’s vaccine was given to 420,000 children. A placebo was given to 200,000. And 1.2 million were given nothing.

She had started at NIH in 1937, had headed testing of vaccines for influenza, and in 1954 was asked to help test the Salk polio vaccine. The pressure was intense. “For weeks she and her staff worked around-the-clock, seven days a week,” O’Hern wrote.“This was a product that had never been made before, and they were going to use it right away,” Eddy had said.She began testing Cutter’s samples in August 1954 and continued through November, according to a later report in the Congressional Record. She found that three of the six samples paralyzed test monkeys.“What do you think is wrong with these monkeys?” she asked a colleague, Offit recounted.“They were given polio,” the colleague replied.“No,” Eddy said. “They were given the … vaccine.”