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Within a decade or so, in 1994, Berlusconi was prime minister, at the head of a right-of-center political party he’d concocted the previous year, thrust to power on the basis that he would break with Italy’s dysfunctional politics and that, as a self-made billionaire, he knew how to fix problems. He used television unsparingly to buttress his meteoric rise through the wreckage of Italy’s post-1945 political order, which had recently collapsed with the end of the Cold War.

Nobody who knows Berlusconi and has watched the rise and rise of Donald Trump can fail to be struck by the parallels. It’s not just the real-estate-to-television path. It’s not just their shared admiration for Vladimir Putin. It’s not just the playboy thing, and obsession with their virility, and smattering of bigotry, and contempt for policy wonks, and reliance on a tell-it-like-it-is tone. It’s not their wealth, nor the media savvy that taught them that nobody ever lost by betting on human stupidity.

No, it’s something in the zeitgeist. America is ripe for Trump just as Italy was ripe for Berlusconi. Trump, too, is cutting through a rotten political system in a society where economic frustration at jobs exported to China is high. He is emerging after two lost wars, as American power declines and others strut the global stage, against a backdrop of partisan political paralysis, in a system corrupted by money. To Obama’s Doctrine of Restraint, Trump opposes a Doctrine of Resurgence. To reason, he counters with rage

American politics have careened out of control, lurching from a role model of sensible policy making and civil discourse to gridlock over even modest proposals with bipartisan buy-in, and to a presidential campaign with the kind of angry populist bluster, coarse language and sectarian division formerly associated with Peron-style banana republics.

On the policy front, the Republican Congress has made the unprecedented decision to portray a president with almost a year left in his term as not simply a “lame duck” but utterly bereft of any legitimacy to carry out the responsibilities of his office

On the campaign front, the emergence of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz as the leaders of the Republican presidential pack—one a demagogic populist outsider who has never served in public office and had no role in the party, the other an extreme right-wing ideologue whose twin calling cards are engineering a government shutdown and going on the Senate floor and calling his own leader a liar—turned conventional presidential politics on its head, leaving a Republican political establishment reeling and a broader group of concerned Americans frightened about the future.

85 percent of all online advertising revenue is funneled to either Facebook or Google—leaving a paltry 15 percent for news organizations to fight over.

Now, Zuckerberg is making it clear that he wants Facebook to take over many of the actual functions—not just ad dollars—that traditional news organizations once had.

Zuckerberg uses abstract language in his memo—he wants Facebook to develop “the social infrastructure for community,” he writes—but what he’s really describing is building a media company with classic journalistic goals: The Facebook of the future, he writes, will be “for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all.”

all politicians lie. Bill Clinton could barely go a day without some shading or parsing of the truth. Richard Nixon was famously tricky. But all the traditional political fibbers nonetheless paid some deference to the truth — even as they were dodging it. They acknowledged a shared reality and bowed to it. They acknowledged the need for a common set of facts in order for a liberal democracy to function at all.

Trump’s lies are different. They are direct refutations of reality — and their propagation and repetition is about enforcing his power rather than wriggling out of a political conundrum. They are attacks on the very possibility of a reasoned discourse, the kind of bald-faced lies that authoritarians issue as a way to test loyalty and force their subjects into submission.

No error is ever admitted. Any lie is usually doubled down by another lie — along with an ad hominem attack.

Why Nobody Cares the President Is Lying

On his first full day in office Mr. Trump insisted that his inaugural crowd was the largest ever, a baseless boast that will likely set a pattern for his relationship both to the media and to the truth.

For years, as a conservative radio talk show host, I played a role in that conditioning by hammering the mainstream media for its bias and double standards. But the price turned out to be far higher than I imagined. The cumulative effect of the attacks was to delegitimize those outlets and essentially destroy much of the right’s immunity to false information. We thought we were creating a savvier, more skeptical audience. Instead, we opened the door for President Trump, who found an audience that could be easily misled.

I wrote a Fourth of July piece trying to explain my patriotic feelings for this country. My focus was an apparent contradiction in the idea of patriotism as a moral virtue. Patriotism seemed to require a commitment to the good of this particular country, even when its good was at odds with the greater good of everyone (“America First,” you might say). Love of a particular country appeared to conflict with the universal demands of ethics

I found a solution in the idea, expressed in our Declaration of Independence, that the American commitment to freedom was a commitment to the freedom of all people, not just of our citizens. My patriotism, I concluded, was a love of my country’s shared project of promoting freedom for all.

Viewed this way, the primary patriotic duty today would be to find some way to restore civil political discourse and a spirit of mutually respectful compromise.

The Limits of American Realism

Realists had a field day with that carnage, beginning with former Secretary of State James Baker’s early assessment that, “We don’t have a dog in that fight.” This view was echoed by various self-serving assessments from the Clinton White House that justified inaction through the portrayal of the Balkans as the locus of millennial feuds neither comprehensible nor resolvable.

The moral case was, however, overwhelming, beginning with the Serbian use in 1992 of concentration camps to kill Bosnian Muslim men deemed threatening, and expel Muslim women and children.

Gender is a useful wedge, though, when it comes to highlighting what has become one of their main planks: a critique of immigration, particularly from the Muslim world. The European far right has long seized on the hijab as a symbol of patriarchy; more recently it has said that attacks on gays and women in Muslim enclaves are evidence of the Islamic threat to European values.

“They defend ‘our’ women against harassment by foreigners — strangers, migrants, Muslim men,” says Ms. Wodak, the author of “The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean.” “However, they never spoke out against sexual harassment before.”

Female leaders in Europe span the ideological spectrum. Two of the Continent’s most powerful leaders, Ms. Merkel of Germany and Theresa May of Britain, are on opposite sides of Britain’s plan to leave the European Union.

From his leftist or "statist" perch, Bo has been challenging the "opening and reform" side of the political consensus that Deng Xiaoping secured three decades ago. Wen Jiabao, meanwhile, who plays the role of a learned, emphatic, and upright Confucian prime minister, has been challenging the other half of Deng consensus -- absolute political control -- from the liberal right. He has continuously articulated the need to limit government power through rule of law, justice, and democratization. To do this, he has drawn on the symbolic legacies of the purged reformist leaders he served in the 1980s, particularly Hu Yaobang, whose name he recently helped to "rehabilitate" in official discourse. As every Communist Party leader knows, those who want a stake in the country's future must first fight for control of its past.

Steven M. Teles, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University and author of the commendable “The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement,” suggested in The Washington Monthly that Chief Justice Roberts was not comfortable with “sweeping uses of judicial power to limit government.” Professor Teles said that while the chief justice was “sympathetic” with his fellow conservatives, he “simply lacks the taste for the jugular that they have, either as a result of his role as chief justice or his prudential sense of how far it is reasona

Joel Alicea, in a smart post on the conservative Web site The Public Discourse, wrote that the health care decision revealed “a clash between two visions of judicial restraint and two eras of the conservative legal movement.” If Chief Justice Roberts, nearly a generation younger than Justices Scalia and Kennedy, in fact represents the old form of legal conservatism, in which the judicial role is to salvage statutes if possible rather than eviscerate them in the service of a bigger agenda, that’s a fascinating and highly consequential development.

Is John Roberts the new swing justice? I have strong doubts. The man is conservative to his bones. So the real question is what the word “conservative” means in 2012 and the decades ahead.

we are now seeing the approach of a global political tipping point.

The appearance of more extreme and more frequent weather events has had a very profound impact on public opinion in countries throughout the world

A second factor is the sharp and unexpectedly steep decrease in prices for electricity produced from wind and solar and the demand destruction for fossil fuel energy from new efficiency improvements.

conservatism in its best sense is about the constant situating of the individual within a cultural and historical context.

Individualism can never therefore be an ideology. “I built that” is an excrescent simplification, a form of contempt for tradition and society.

the key to a more productively conservative defense of tradition is, it seems to me, a civility in making the case and an alertness to the occasional, contingent need for genuine reform, as social problems emerge in a changing society.

At 52, Stewart has the bouncy energy of a man half his age and, unlike most in the public eye, has an aversion to compliments. If I tell him I liked something about the film, he will immediately deflect the compliment and insist it was all down to Bahari, or the film’s star Gael García Bernal, or the crew

Over time, Stewart has evolved from a satirist to a broadcaster celebrated as the voice of US liberalism, the one who will give the definitive progressive take on a story.

“[If I left the show,] I would do what I’m doing. Whether it’s standup, the show, books or films, I consider all this just different vehicles to continue a conversation about what it means to be a democratic nation, and to have it written into the constitution that all men are created equal – but to live with that for 100 years with slaves. How do those contradictions play themselves out? And how do we honestly assess our failings and move forward with integrity?”

even if you like the broad thrust of modern Republican policies, it should worry you that the men and woman on that stage are clearly living in a world of fantasies and fictions.

modern G.O.P. economic discourse is completely dominated by an economic doctrine — the sovereign importance of low taxes on the rich — that has failed completely and utterly in practice over the past generation.

the discussion of foreign policy was practically demented. Almost all the candidates seem to believe that American military strength can shock-and-awe other countries into doing what we want without any need for negotiations, and that we shouldn’t even talk with foreign leaders we don’t like. No dinners for Xi Jinping! And, of course, no deal with Iran, because resorting to force in Iraq went so well.

There is a movie I’m looking forward to seeing when it comes to Washington. It seems quite relevant to America today

It’s about what can happen in a democratic society when politicians go too far, when they not only stand mute when hateful words that cross civilized redlines suddenly become part of the public discourse, but, worse, start to wink at and dabble in this hate speech for their advantage.

Later, they all say that they never heard the words, never saw the signs, or claim that their own words were misunderstood. But they heard and they saw and they meant.

The Civil War isn’t just an adjunct to current events. It’s a national reserve of words, images and landscapes, a storehouse we can tap in lean times like these, when many Americans feel diminished, divided and starved for discourse more nourishing than cable rants and Twitter feeds.

America has everything it needs for success in the twenty-first century with one exception: a critical mass of thinkers, analysts and policy entrepreneurs who can help unleash the creative potential of the American people and build the new government and policy structures that will facilitate a new wave of private-sector led growth.

the biggest roadblock today is that so many of America’s best-educated, best-placed people are too invested in old social models and old visions of history to do their real job and help society transition to the next level.  Instead of opportunities they see threats; instead of hope they see danger; instead of the possibility of progress they see the unraveling of everything beautiful and true.

there seem to be three big reasons why so many intellectuals today are so backward looking and reactionary.

What’s different about this moment is the emergence of a political culture — on blogs and Twitter and cable television — that so loudly and readily reinforces the dark visions of political extremists, often for profit or political gain.

the problem would seem to rest with the political leaders who pander to the margins of the margins, employing whatever words seem likely to win them contributions or TV time, with little regard for the consequences.

Popular spokespeople like Ms. Palin routinely drop words like “tyranny” and “socialism” when describing the president and his allies, as if blind to the idea that Americans legitimately faced with either enemy would almost certainly take up arms.

He posed the cultivation of virtue as a superior alternative to the manipulation or coercion of behavior through policy.

I'll highlight three virtues from Confucius's thought that I believe are the basic building blocks for all other virtues: One is rén (仁), benevolence or compassion. Another is self-control, which Confucius believed was enforced and nurtured by adhering to proper forms of behavior, or lǐ (礼). And, the third is wise judgment about how to turn benevolent intention into action of a kind that avoids the proverbial road to hell.

public discourse about virtue is muted. To abuse a recent parlour game, below is a graph of the rate of occurrence of the words "virtue" and "technology" in Google's Ngram Viewer, which plots frequency of words occurring in books over time. We see a rapid rise of technology in the last forty years against a two-century slide in virtue. (Is it a coincidence that the crossover happens around 1970, the same year I called out in yesterday's graph? Somewhat similar results are had with "virtue" against "institutions," "policies," and "systems.")

European economies, France in particular, get very bad press in America. Our political discourse is dominated by reverse Robin-Hoodism — the belief that economic success depends on being nice to the rich, who won’t create jobs if they are heavily taxed, and nasty to ordinary workers, who won’t accept jobs unless they have no alternative. And according to this ideology, Europe — with its high taxes and generous welfare states — does everything wrong. So Europe’s economic system must be collapsing, and a lot of reporting simply states the postula

Northern European nations, France included, have done far better than most Americans realize. In particular, here’s a startling, little-known fact: French adults in their prime working years (25 to 54) are substantially more likely to have jobs than their U.S. counterparts.

France’s prime-age employment rate overtook America’s early in the Bush administration; at this point the gap in employment rates is bigger than it was in the late 1990s, this time in France’s favor. Other European nations with big welfare states, like Sweden and the Netherlands, do even better.