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Frank championed the narrative that working-class Americans vote against their economic interests, having been lured into the GOP tent largely with what he sees as insincere religious rhetoric. “The people at the top know what they have to do to stay there,” writes Frank, “and in a pinch they can easily overlook the sweaty piety of the new Republican masses, the social conservatives who raise their voices in praise of Jesus but cast their votes for Caesar.”

However compelling this dichotomy may be, it is a false one. As a researcher and social scientist, I have found that economic perspectives are indelibly tied to religious cosmologies. Voters need not choose between God and mammon. Instead, they tend to see their money, the market, and the economy as a reflection of their God.

we often assume that working-class evangelicals struggle to either prioritize their economic interests or remain committed to their religious ethics.

women’s rise to economic dominance within the middle class continues

What isn’t changing is that top leadership positions remain overwhelmingly filled by men. “As the 99 percent has become steadily pinker, the 1 percent has remained an all-boys club,”

We live in a hollow patriarchy: the edifice is patriarchal, while the majority of its occupants approach egalitarianism. This generates strange paradoxes. Even women with servants and powerful jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars feel that they have an institutional disadvantage. And they’re right. Women in the upper reaches of power are limited in ways that men simply are not.

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The right has all the advantages, just as the devil has all the best tunes. Conservatism appeals to our selfishness and fear, our desire and self-interest; they neatly nurture and then harvest the inherent and incubating individualism. I imagine that neurologically the pathway travelled by a fearful or selfish impulse is more expedient and well travelled than the route of the altruistic pang. In simple terms of circuitry I suspect it is easier to connect these selfish inclinations.

This natural, neurological tendency has been overstimulated and acculturated. Materialism and individualism do in moderation make sense.

we've allowed and encouraged economics to slip the bonds of politics. This has given successful entrepreneurs, corporate executives, bankers, and financiers an unprecedented degree of autonomy, with profit-seeking overriding political or cultural loyalties or restraints of any kind. Up until recently, most of us have hoped or assumed that everyone would benefit from this development — a rising tide raises all boats and so forth — but the reality has proven more problematic.

The world seen through an economic lens is a place where people are motivated entirely by instrumental concerns — above all by concerns for profit and loss, competitive advantage and disadvantage. When the government acts in a way to diminish profits, it is doing something (in economic terms) that is unambiguously bad.

something that is economically unjustifiable may be politically necessary and even salutary. Unlike economics, politics combines instrumental considerations with non-instrumental ideals such as community, loyalty, citizenship, and the common good. A world in which these ideals have been sacrificed on the altar of economic profit-seeking will be a world…well, it will be a world that looks a lot like our own.

Within 10 years, "virtually every country on Earth will be able to build or acquire drones capable of firing missiles," Defense One reports. "Armed aerial drones will be used for targeted killings, terrorism and the government suppression of civil unrest." 

The best chance for future success would require us to put constraints on American behavior before other countries match our technology. That would create a short-term disadvantage, but it could pay huge long-term dividends.

Instead, the United States seems intent on developing weaponized drones that also operate autonomously. By the time an article can be written about how every country will have that technology available to them, it will be too late to stop it. 

a team of researchers embedded themselves in a freshman dormitory at an unnamed high-profile Midwestern state school and then kept up with a group of female students through college and into graduate or professional life.

the authors discovered were the many ways in which collegiate social life, as embraced by students and blessed by the university, works to disadvantage young women (and no doubt young men, too) who need their education to be something other than a four-year-long spree.

the American way of college rewards those who come not just academically but socially prepared, while treating working-class students more cruelly, and often leaving them adrift.

“Former U.S. president Bill Clinton has called for an end to mass incarceration, admitting that changes in penal policy that happened largely under his watch put ‘too many people in prison and for too long’ and ‘overshot the mark.’”

“In 1994 Clinton championed a crime bill that laid down several of the foundations of the country’s current mass incarceration malaise. Vowing to be ‘tough on crime’ — a quality that had previously been more closely associated with the Republicans and which Clinton adopted under his ‘triangulation’ ploy — he created incentives to individual states to build more prisons, to put more people behind bars and to keep them there for longer. His also presided over the introduction of a federal three-strikes law that brought in long sentences for habitual offenders.”

The black community in America has been betrayed by Democrats and Republicans alike — it has been betrayed by America itself.

There are, it turns out, people in the corporate world who will do whatever it takes, including fraud that kills people, in order to make a buck. And we need effective regulation to police that kind of bad behavior, not least so that ethical businesspeople aren’t at a disadvantage when competing with less scrupulous types.

Well, we used to know it, thanks to the muckrakers and reformers of the Progressive Era. But Ronald Reagan insisted that government is always the problem, never the solution, and this has become dogma on the right.

an important part of America’s political class has declared war on even the most obviously necessary regulations. Too many important players now argue, in effect, that business can do no wrong and that government has no role to play in limiting misbehavior.

On economic issues, however, the Democratic Party has inched closer to the policy positions of conservatives, stepping back from championing the needs of working men and women, of the unemployed and of the so-called underclass.

The current popularity of Bernie Sanders and his presidential candidacy notwithstanding, the mainstream of the Democratic Party supports centrist positions ranging from expanded free trade to stricter control of the government budget to time limits on welfare for the poor.

The authors, from Stanford, Princeton, the University of Georgia and N.Y.U., respectively, go on to note thatthe Democratic agenda has shifted away from general social welfare to policies that target ascriptive identities of race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation.

According to a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll, Republicans prefer an outsider to a candidate with experience in the political system by a 24-point margin (60 to 36). People who would never board an airplane piloted by a person who has never flown before, or even used a flight simulator, apparently want to elect as president someone who has never served in public office.

More than at any point in recent times, then, the Republican Party — large parts of it, at least — is moving in the direction of insularity, defensiveness and discomfort with people of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Many on the right now see things as a pitched battle between “us” and “the other.”

All of this presents a serious threat to the Republican Party. A party that is already at a disadvantage in presidential elections is on course to alienate huge numbers of nonwhite voters, including some of the fastest-rising demographic groups in America. Four years ago, Republican presidential candidates were talking about self-deportation and electrified fences; today the front-runner is talking about forced deportation, ending birthright citizenship and calling for a “pause” on green cards issued to foreign workers.

A few years ago, Americans and Europeans were asked in a Pew Global Attitudes survey what was more important: “freedom to pursue life’s goals without state interference,” or “state guarantees that nobody is in need.”

In the United States, 58 percent chose freedom and only 35 percent a state pledge to eradicate neediness. In Britain, the response was the opposite: 55 percent opted for state guarantees and just 38 percent for freedom. On the European Continent — in Germany, France and Spain — those considering state protection as more important than freedom from state interference rose to 62 percent.

Americans, who dwell in a vast country, sparsely populated by European standards, are hardwired to the notion of individual self-reliance.

most kids have really enjoyed the ‘80’s songs--overall favorite being “99 Luftballons”/”Beowulf.” "They frequently purchase the original after hearing it in my class. They often tell me they hear the song outside of school (like at the dentist) and can only remember my lyrics. My 6-year-old says that, too, she listens all the time and has all the lyrics memorized, though frequently asks me questions about “coup d’etat” or “illegitimacy.”

As for the songs’ effectiveness in the classroom, for several years I took polls on this. The kids seemed to really think they helped them remember the basic info, but more than that they sparked an interest in history to learn more independently. I am constantly surprised to see how many college-level profs are using them, as they were originally intended for 15 year-olds. I’m glad, though, because we don’t try to “dumb down” any lyrics.

"Basically, they have to realize that these songs need to have discussions that bolster them, and maybe even call into question the advantages and disadvantages of learning history through pop culture.

East and west have always been geopolitical constructions whose shifting cultural meanings - from the conflict between Catholic and Orthodox Christianity in the early Middle Ages to the current obsession with China - reflect changing patterns of power. A classical archaeologist by training, Ian Morris begins this highly ambitious volume by returning to prehistoric times, when east and west were geographical expressions. For Morris, "the west" means the societies that expanded "from the original core in south-west Asia to encompass the Mediterranean Basin and Europe, and in the last few centuries America and Australasia, too", while "the east expanded from its original core between China's Yellow and Yangtze rivers, and today stretches from Japan in the north into the countries of Indochina in the south".

he offers a materialist explanation, with the aim of developing nothing less than a law-governed science of history.

In Morris's account, the ultimate origin of the west's primacy is to be found in the domestication of plants and animals that occurred in the western core around 9500BC, some 2,000 years before it did in the east. He is far from claiming that geography is destiny in any simple sense. As he points out, the meaning of geography changes along with technological and social development. Five thousand years ago, society was developing most rapidly in Egypt and Mesopotamia, and the geographical location of Portugal, Spain, France and Britain - "stuck out from Europe into the Atlantic" - was a great disadvantage. But when, 500 years ago, new kinds of ships appeared that could cross what had always been impassable oceans, sticking out into the Atlantic became highly advantageous

The events of the past several years have exposed democracy’s structural flaws. Democracies tend to have a tough time with long-range planning. Voters tend to want more government services than they are willing to pay for. The system of checks and balances can slide into paralysis, as more interest groups acquire veto power over legislation.

Across the Western world, people are disgusted with their governments. There is a widening gap between the pace of social and economic change, and the pace of government change. In Britain, for example, productivity in the private service sector increased by 14 percent between 1999 and 2013, while productivity in the government sector fell by 1 percent between 1999 and 2010.

In places like Singapore and China, the best students are ruthlessly culled for government service. The technocratic elites play a bigger role in designing economic life. The safety net is smaller and less forgiving. In Singapore, 90 percent of what you get out of the key pension is what you

Even white Americans of modest means are more likely to have inherited something, in the form of housing wealth or useful professional connections, than the descendants of slaves

When Affirmative Action Was White, Ira Katznelson recounts in fascinating detail the various ways in which the New Deal and Fair Deal social programs of the 1930s and 1940s expanded economic opportunities for whites while doing so unevenly at best for blacks, particularly in the segregated South.

Many rural whites who had known nothing but the direst poverty saw their lives transformed as everything from rural electrification to generous educational benefits for veterans allowed them to build human capital, earn higher incomes, and accumulate savings. This legacy, in ways large and small, continues to enrich the children and grandchildren of the whites of that era. This is the stuff of white privilege. …

A couple of years ago, the city of Chicago started a summer jobs program for teenagers attending high schools in some of the city's high-crime, low-income neighborhoods.

Students who were randomly assigned to participate in the program had 43 percent fewer violent-crime arrests over 16 months, compared to students in a control group.

Researcher Sara Heller conducted a randomized control trial with the program, in partnership with the city. The study included 1,634 teens at 13 high schools. They were, on average, C students, almost all of them eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. Twenty percent of the group had already been arrested, and 20 percent had already been victims of crime.

In just two months, we’d gone from making a combined $120,000 a year to making just $25,000 and leeching out funds to a mortgage we couldn’t afford. Our savings dwindled, then disappeared.

The most embarrassing part was how I felt about myself. How I had so internalized the message of what poor people should or should not have that I felt ashamed to be there, with that car, getting food. As if I were not allowed the food because of the car. As if I were a bad person.

what I learned there will never leave me. We didn’t deserve to be poor, any more than we deserved to be rich. Poverty is a circumstance, not a value judgment. I still have to remind myself sometimes that I was my harshest critic. That the judgment of the disadvantaged comes not just from conservative politicians and Internet trolls. It came from me, even as I was living it.

This week’s conversation is with Naomi Zack, a professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon and the author of “The Ethics and Mores of Race: Equality After the History of Philosophy.”

My first book, “Race and Mixed Race” (1991) was an analysis of the incoherence of U.S. black/white racial categories in their failure to allow for mixed race. In “Philosophy of Science and Race,” I examined the lack of a scientific foundation for biological notions of human races, and in “The Ethics and Mores of Race,” I turned to the absence of ideas of universal human equality in the Western philosophical tradition.

Critical philosophy of race, like critical race theory in legal studies, seeks to understand the disadvantages of nonwhite racial groups in society (blacks especially) by understanding social customs, laws, and legal practices.

“American exceptionalism,” as Americans began talking about it in the 1950s, rested on a series of claims about American history.

It was claimed that because America had never known a feudal aristocracy, the United States had evolved as a uniquely classless society, at least for its white citizens. Because America was classless, the United States was uniquely immune to socialism and communism. This achievement came at a price however: a society uniquely indifferent to high culture, uniquely characterized by mass production and mass marketing.

These claims don’t seem very robust today. The United States is more, not less, class-bound than other developed countries. Socialism and communism are dead ideas everywhere in the developed world. Nor does American culture look so different from that of other rich countries as it did when Henry James lamented of the United States: “no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class.”