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It doesn’t help that the Trump administration is rapidly stripping away as many regulations as it can, promising to repeal two for every new one implemented — an ultra-wealthy administration’s attempt to formalize the plutocratic free-for-all that has followed decades of growing corporate power, defined by massive income inequality, regulatory capture, a revolving door between agencies and the industries they oversee, and steadily eroding consumer rights. The empowered consumer is a figment of our imagination.

Experiences that used to be standardized are being divided into tiers denoting various rights, access and costs. The result is to both pit consumers against one another — as they compete for a limited pool of guaranteed seats on an airplane, for example — and to extract more money out of better-heeled customers.

If we violate any of the strictures of the contract we’ve implicitly signed by buying a ticket, then the airline — backed with the imprimatur of state authority, perhaps even with the help of local police — has every right to remove us from the plane without apology.

Survey the economic landscape and you’re likely to find similarly scrambled power relationships. During the foreclosure crisis, banks acted like arms of the state, with local sheriffs becoming the banking industry’s eviction force. Health insurers dictate access to health care for millions while a small coterie of chief executives reaps huge payouts. The telecommunications industry has consolidated into a handful of industry behemoths that maintain regional monopolies

The result is a lack of competition and slow, pricey service

Increasingly we’re not just paying more for less; we are sacrificing our privacy rights in the process, as personal data has become a huge driver of the digital economy

Those are the economic costs of this arrangement. The social and cultural costs are harder to define but no less important. As Sandel explains, common experiences become increasingly fragmented and subjected to the vicissitudes of the market: “At a time of rising inequality, the marketization of everything means that people of affluence and people of modest means lead increasingly separate lives. We live and work and shop and play in different places. Our children go to different schools.”

traditionally guaranteed rights become more contingent and benefits accrue to the wealthy.

We get what we pay for, which increasingly means whatever a company like United decides.

about 8 of 10 Americans with less than a college degree believe that “political correctness is a serious problem in our country, making it hard for people to say what they really think” compared with 5 of 10 of the well-educated

7 of 10 of the less educated believe that “the most educated and successful people in America are more interested in serving themselves than in serving the common good” compared to just over 4 of 10 of college or postgraduate educated Americans

Another feature of our new culture wars is our crisis of legitimation

A growing majority of Americans believe that their government cannot be trusted, that its leaders (and the leadership class more broadly) are incompetent and self-interested, and that as citizens, they personally have little power to influence the powerful institutions or circumstances that shape their lives. Survey research shows that this distrust has grown and even hardened.

this crisis, too, follows a class pattern

The poorly educated are one and a half times more likely than the college educated to hold the highest levels of distrust of the government; nearly three times more likely to be highly cynical of politicians; and over twice as likely to express the highest levels of alienation from the political process.

As a result, the credibility of the political establishment, conservative and liberal — its governing philosophies and ideals, its institutional authority, and its leadership — has been depleted.

Most significantly, the idea that one can find truth in the words of politicians or that there are even agreed-upon truths to which politicians could be held to account has largely vanished.

The party establishments and their governing philosophies, moreover, are no longer tethered to the aspirations and interests of their constituencies; a reality reflected not only in the continuation of a long-term growth of self-identified independents, who now outnumber Republicans or Democrats at 39 percent of the electorate

t significant minorities of Republicans and Democrats don’t believe their party represents their views of how the government should operate.

Whatever else the culture war of the last several decades accomplished, it unquestionably contributed to the intensification of this legitimation crisis. On any issue, from abortion to same-sex marriage, what was considered reasonable and justifiable governance and policy for one side came to be viewed as irrational and indefensible by the other. The resulting political discourse has been less about persuasion and compromise than about demonizing the opposition through overstatement and hyperbole.

We want to believe that the tragic insults to liberal democracy today — whether in the White House or the streets of Charlottesville — are atypical, and that soon, reason and good sense will again prevail. Yet the candidacy and presidency of Donald Trump are not an aberration, but a reflection of the political estrangement of our times.

So is the authoritarian impulse we see bubbling up from the fringes. Genuine democratic freedom has become an opportunity for carefully staged political theater, the end of which is the denial of democratic freedom. The culture wars we fought before have given way to a new and worrying confrontation, the stakes of which feel darker and higher.

While not directly addressing Mr. Trump, neither left much doubt whom and what they had in mind.

Mr. Bush, the last Republican to hold the White House, spoke out at a conference he convened in New York to support democracy, noting that America first had to “recover our own identity” in the face of challenges to its most basic ideals.

While Mr. Trump seeks to raise barriers to trade and newcomers, lashing out at targets with relish, Mr. Bush defended immigration and free trade, denounced nationalism and bigotry and bemoaned what he called the “casual cruelty” of current public discourse.

“We’ve seen nationalism distorted into nativism, forgotten the dynamism that immigration has always brought to America,” Mr. Bush said.

“We see a fading confidence in the value of free markets and international trade, forgetting that conflict, instability and poverty follow in the wake of protectionism.

We’ve seen the return of isolationist sentiments, forgetting that American security is directly threatened by the chaos and despair of distant places.”

A decision in favor of Tsarnev would put President Biden in a difficult position. The initial decision to seek the death penalty in Tsarnaev's case was made by Barack Obama's administration — during Biden's tenure as vice president. But Biden pledged during his presidential campaign to push for the elimination of the death penalty in the federal system.

The appeals panel said the judge who presided over Tsarnaev's trial, U.S. District Judge George A. O'Toole, had rejected the defense team's request for a more distant trial venue, one where prospective jurors might be less likely to be biased against Tsarnaev than in eastern Massachusetts, and the panel maintained the judge committed other important trial errors that barred adequate screening of prospective jurors.

Appeals Judge Juan Torruella, who died late last year, said that the district judge stopped Tsarnaev's counsel from asking prospective jurors questions such as what they knew about the case before coming to court or what stood out to them from the media coverage they had seen about the bombing and its aftermath.

Torruella wrote that the district judge had relied on "self-declarations of impartiality" by prospective jurors, some of whom admitted before the trial that they were convinced Tsarnaev was guilty.For example, Torruella noted that the woman who became the jury's foreperson withheld from the court dozens of relevant social media comments that mourned the death of an 8-year-old victim, praised law enforcement officers and called Tsarnaev "a piece of garbage."

The ruling from last July ordered the District Court to impanel a new jury to hold a sentencing retrial for the death penalty convictions. But the appeals panel noted that Tsarnaev, who told the courtroom on the day of his sentencing that he was "guilty of this attack," would remain in prison for the rest of his life regardless of whether the death sentence is imposed.

The Trump administration prioritized carrying out federal executions in its final year — resuming a practice that had been paused for nearly two decades and prompting pushback from activists and lawmakers.In the final six months of the administration, 13 people on death row in the federal system were executed, including three in the week before Biden took office.

e know enough about brain development to understand that such people are often too young to recognize the true import of what they are seeing or doing. Until 2005, this country allowed even juvenile offenders to be executed, though our laws don’t treat juveniles as adults in other respects. Teenagers are neurological works in progress. They have not yet developed the full capacity for moral reasoning, for impulse control, for understanding the long-term implications of their behavior.

It’s much harder to know how to think about the young Friedrich Karl Bergers who stood silent while innocent people were worked to death on their watch, even if they have lived good lives in the years since. Neuroscience tells us that they deserve the same understanding as the young offenders sentenced to death row for drug violence, but I can’t seem to find any understanding in my heart for the young Nazis.Well, life isn’t fair, and we all know it, but justice is about doing our best to impose fairness in an unfair world. And the presence of the once-young Friedrich Karl Bergers among us — living a good life, causing no trouble, exacting no harm — impels us into an uncomfortable gray area. Somehow we must weigh the imperatives of justice against the imperatives of compassion for the heedlessness of youth.In that context, what happened to the Oak Ridge Nazi seems to me both far too little and also exactly right. No punishment can possibly restore to life the people who died in a concentration camp that Mr. Berger helped to guard, and exile in an assisted living facility is hardly fit recompense for such unspeakable crimes. But sending him to prison at the age of 95 for what he did as a teenager also seems wrong. Surely deportation from his home of more than 60 years is a fair penalty for a nonagenarian for whom prison could provide no possible rehabilitation.So which is it: real justice, or too little too late? I honestly don’t know.Margaret Renkl is a contributing opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South. She is the author of the books “Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss” and the forthcoming “Graceland, At Last: And Other Essays From The New York Times.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

Individuals earning less than $75,000 will receive the full $1,400. Married couples earning less than $150,000 a year will receive $2,800 -- and families with children are eligible for an additional $1,400 per dependent. Heads of households earning less than $112,500 a year will also receive the full $1,400 plus another $1,400 per dependent.

The jobless will receive a $300 weekly federal boost to unemployment benefits and get those payments through September 6.

The bill also calls for making the first $10,200 of unemployment payments tax-free for households with annual incomes under $150,000.

Food stamp recipients will see a 15% increase in benefits continue through September, instead of having it expire at the end of June.

Enrollees will pay no more than 8.5% of their income towards coverage, down from nearly 10% now. Also, those earning more than the current cap of 400% of the federal poverty level -- about $51,000 for an individual and $104,800 for a family of four in 2021 -- will become eligible for help.

It authorizes about $10 billion to help struggling homeowners pay their mortgages, utilities and property taxes.The bill also provides $5 billion to help states and localities assist those at risk of experiencing homelessness by providing safe, socially distant housing, for example. Another $5 billion goes to emergency housing vouchers for those who are homeless.

Qualifying families can receive a child tax credit of $3,600 for each child under 6 and $3,000 for each one under age 18, up from the current credit of up to $2,000 per child under age 17.The enhanced portion of the credit will be available for single parents with annual incomes up to $75,000 and joint filers making up to $150,000 a year.

The bill will send roughly $20 billion to state and local governments to help low-income households cover back rent, rent assistance and utility bills.

The bill provides $15 billion to the Emergency Injury Disaster Loan program, which provides long-term, low-interest loans from the Small Business Administration. Severely impacted small businesses with fewer than 10 workers will be given priority for some of the money.

It also provides $25 billion for a new grant program specifically for bars and restaurants. Eligible businesses may receive up to $10 million and can use the money for a variety of expenses, including payroll, mortgage and rent, utilities and food and beverages.

Workers being paid at or just above the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour will not see a boost in pay.

The $1.9 trillion coronavirus package contains a wide range of benefits to help Americans who are still struggling with the economic fallout of the pandemic.

“We need to remember the government isn’t some foreign force in a distant capital,” Mr. Biden said. “It’s us, all of us.”

Direct payments of up to $1,400 per individual are scheduled to hit the bank accounts of Americans as early as this weekend, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said. Expanded federal unemployment benefits will be extended.

But, just as the vote had been, the reaction to the relief bill in Washington was split along party lines, even though it is widely popular in national polling.

Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, hailed the package as “the most consequential legislation many of us will ever vote for,” and chastised Republicans who, she said, “vote no and take the dough.

"Companies that exploit their workers have no place doing business in the United States," said Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas in a statement. "Products made from forced labor not only exploit workers, but hurt American businesses and expose consumers to unethical purchases."

Earlier this week, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai also called attention to the issue of forced labor on fishing vessels, submitting a proposal to the World Trade Organization to curb subsidies to fishing activities that involve the use of forced labor and requiring that member countries recognize the problem.

The Trump administration, during its last week in office, implemented a ban on the import of cotton and tomato products from China's Xinjiang region. The sweeping prohibition followed allegations that products were being produced by Uighur Muslims working under involuntary conditions and forced labor.

In September, in a similar effort, the U.S. prohibited the import of certain Chinese-made hair products, apparel and computer parts over concerns of forced labor — again in the Xinjiang region.

"DHS will continue to aggressively investigate the use of forced labor by distant water fishing vessels, and by a wide range of other industries," said Secretary Mayorkas in a news briefing. "Producers and U.S. importers alike should understand that there will be consequences for entities that attempt to exploit workers to sell goods in the United States." Facebook Twitter Flipboard Email

For the second year in a row, anniversary commemorations are marked by virus travel restrictions that prevented veterans or families of fallen soldiers from the U.S., Britain, Canada and other Allied countries from making the trip to France. Only a few officials were allowed exceptions.

On June 6, 1944, "In the heart of the mist that enveloped the Normandy Coast ... was a lightning bolt of freedom," French Defense Minister Florence Parly told the ceremony. "France does not forget. France is forever grateful."

Most public events have been canceled, and the official ceremonies are limited to a small number of selected guests and dignitaries.Denis van den Brink, a WWII expert working for the town of Carentan, site of a strategic battle near Utah Beach, acknowledged the "big loss, the big absence is all the veterans who couldn't travel."

Over the anniversary weekend, many local residents have come out to visit the monuments marking the key moments of the fight and show their gratitude to the soldiers. French World War II history enthusiasts, and a few travelers from neighboring European countries, could also be seen in jeeps and military vehicles on the small roads of Normandy.

Some reenactors came to Omaha Beach in the early hours of the day to pay tribute to those who fell that day, bringing flowers and American flags.

On D-Day, 4,414 Allied troops lost their lives, 2,501 of them Americans. More than 5,000 were wounded. On the German side, several thousand were killed or wounded.

The cemetery contains 9,380 graves, most of them for servicemen who lost their lives in the D-Day landings and ensuing operations. Another 1,557 names are inscribed on the Walls of the Missing.

Normandy has more than 20 military cemeteries holding mostly Americans, Germans, French, British, Canadians and Polish troops who took part in the historic battle.

As Navalny's health rapidly declines behind bars, his supporters' freedom may also be in jeopardy. On Friday, the Moscow prosecutor's office petitioned a court to have three organizations affiliated with him declared "extremist" -- the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), the Foundation for Protection of Citizens Rights, and "Navalny's Headquarters." That could lead to all three groups being outlawed, putting their numerous staff members and backers across the country at great personal risk, including of criminal prosecution. This broader movement needs defending.

The logic goes: if you are a critic, you must be foreign, and if you're foreign, you're the enemy. The new legislation also codified equating a series of single-person pickets with "mass protests." Under a 2014 law, if you're found guilty more than twice in a 180-day period for "unlawful" protesting, you can go to prison.

Kelly then asked how, in a quarter century, one might determine whether Sale was right.Sale extemporaneously cited three factors: an economic disaster that would render the dollar worthless, causing a depression worse than the one in 1930; a rebellion of the poor against the monied; and a significant number of environmental catastrophes.

“I bet you $1,000 that in the year 2020, we’re not even close to the kind of disaster you describe,” he said.

Twenty-five years later, the once distant deadline is here. We are locked down. Income equality hasn’t been this bad since just before the Great Depression. California and Australia were on fire this year.

When Sale and Kelly made the bet, they had assumed that by 2020 the winner would be obvious. Maybe all it would take was a look around: Is civilization still here, or not? It clearly is still kicking around. But the pandemic, its economic consequences, and the worsening climate crisis have made things interesting. What would Patrick say?

That’s what Patrick had to determine. In early December he began writing up his decision. Despite his wariness toward tech, he had no intention of jumping on the current techlash bandwagon. Instead, the bet was constructed on three clear conditions, and Patrick would consider each one separately, as if judging a boxing match round by round.

Round by round, the outcome would seem to make it a draw. But when making the final call, Patrick stuck to the language of the original bet. In that fateful Greenwich Village encounter, Sale called for a convergence of three disasters. “Kirk must hit the trifecta to win, meaning that all three horses of his apocalypse must come through,” Patrick wrote. “Only one of his predictions was a winner; one came in neck and neck; and one was way back in the pack.”

So on December 31, Patrick declared Kelly the winner in an email to the bettors. “But it’s a squeaker and not much cause for celebration,” he concluded.

What winemakers came to call “smoke taint” now menaces Napa’s wine industry.“The problem with the fires is that it doesn’t have be anywhere near us,” Mr. Smith said. Smoke from distant fires can waft long distances, and there is no way a grower can prevent it.

The losses have been stunning. In 2019, growers in the county sold $829 million worth of red grapes. In 2020, that figure plummeted to $384 million.

Ms. Heminway and Mr. Hannigan have been unable to find coverage from any other carrier. The California legislature is considering a bill that would allow wineries to get insurance through a state-run high-risk pool.

After the Glass Fire, Mr. Chappellet is one of the lucky ones — he still has insurance. It just costs five times as much as it did last year.His winery now pays more than $1 million a year, up from $200,000 before the fire. At the same time, his insurers cut by half the amount of coverage they were willing to provide.

If Napa can go another year or two without major wildfires, Mr. Davies thinks insurers will return. Harder to solve are the smoke taint and water shortages.“It’s still kind of early on to talk about the demise of our industry,” Mr. Davies said, looking out across the valley. “But it’s certainly a concern.”

Patriotism is a form of nationalism. They are ideological brothers, not distant cousins.

members of the nation, understood as a group of equal citizens with a shared history and future political destiny, should rule the state, and second, that they should do so in the interests of the nation.

Nationalism is thus opposed to foreign rule by members of other nations, as in colonial empires and many dynastic kingdoms, as well as to rulers who disregard the perspectives and needs of the majority.

Already around 2500 BC, merchants were setting out from what is now Iraq, the seat of the ancient Sumerian civilization, carrying silver ingots to India

En route, they acquired copper from Oman and brought precious objects such as carnelian and lapis lazuli from India. Accumulating and re-investing profits, they were the first capitalists. The Indian Ocean became one of the great channels of trade between nations. Greek merchants from Egypt exploited the monsoon winds to ensure a swift passage to south India.

The Chinese emperors tended to discourage uncontrolled trade, though prohibitions often did more to provoke traders into finding ways around the rules. Early compasses were used for feng shui, not navigation. But in the 12th century AD, when the coasts of China were open to the world, Hangzhou was at the peak of its prosperity.

in the open Pacific, hundreds of scattered islands from Hawaii to Easter Island were settled over many centuries — the Polynesians only reached New Zealand around AD 1300. Even without written records, the Polynesians transmitted exact knowledge of how to sail these apparently boundless waters from generation to generation.

By 1500 AD, the Portuguese had begun to show interest in what the Atlantic might offer. That interest had resulted in the settlement of uninhabited islands including Madeira, which began to export phenomenal quantities of sugar.

When European sailors — from Portugal, Spain, Holland, England, Denmark and France — entered the Pacific and the Indian Ocean starting in the 16th century, they found a lively maritime world that they could never truly dominate. They still depended on the resources and supply lines of the inhabitants of the lands they visited, even as they created routes across the entire globe

Since then, the oceans have only continued to tie the world together — most dramatically when new routes were literally carved out, with the building of the Suez Canal in the 19th century and the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914. The first goods to pass through the Panama Canal consisted of a cargo of tinned pineapples from Hawaii. The Pacific and the Atlantic were more closely tied together than ever before.

In the 21st century, however, new factors have changed entirely the way goods are carried across the seas, even though over 90% of world trade is carried on ships

Business is conducted on a scale that utterly dwarfs that of even 20 years ago, transforming a familiar world. And yet, through trade and cultural exchange, the seas continue to connect even the most distant lands.

At a time when Trump is pushing the nation closer to more reckless wars, I think people will start to look much closely at the records of the Democrats running to replace him to see which candidate they would feel safer with,”

The initial response from the party’s presidential field was to condemn Trump for what candidates viewed as a reckless action that escalated tensions in the Middle East and could lead to an unintentional war with Iran. In the days that followed, however, the Democrats have amplified their disagreements, setting up what could be the first substantive debate among the candidates about the role of American power.

Biden has billed his long record on foreign affairs and stature on the global stage as assets in a world rattled by Trump’s erratic foreign policy.

But while Biden presents his experience as an asset, his closest rivals have assailed that record, particularly his 2002 vote to authorize the war in Iraq and his role in shaping its aftermath. Sanders, who opposed the war in Iraq, recently suggested that the Biden’s foreign policy record could be a political liability against Trump should he be the nominee.

While polls tend to show that foreign policy is a low priority for voters, it has played a significant role in presidential elections since the September 11 terrorist attacks.

While that message resonates with antiwar Democrats and independents, Sanders has yet to be seriously challenged on his views.

Elizabeth Warren shares Sanders’ anti-interventionist sentiments but finds herself on the defensive from critics on the left and the center as she attempts to reclaim her standing in the race.

Buttigieg has used the occasion to highlight his military service and allay concerns about his youth and relative inexperience on the world stage. He has also assailed Biden supporting the “the worst foreign policy decision made by the United States in my lifetime”.

“This is an example of why years in Washington is not always the same thing as judgment,” Buttigieg said during an appearance on Iowa Press last month.

In a CNN poll from November, 48% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters said Biden was best suited to handle matters of foreign policy. By comparison, Sanders ranked a distant second at 14%, while 11% said Warren and only 6% chose Buttigieg

Sanders meanwhile has seized on the rapidly unfolding conflict to emphasize his longstanding opposition to foreign wars as well as his efforts to end US military involvement in Yemen and prevent further action in Iran.

In 2004, growing opposition to the Iraq war helped to propel John Kerry to the presidential nomination. Four years later, Barack Obama wielded Hillary Clinton’s past support for the Iraq war as a cudgel, lifting him to the nomination. During the 2016 presidential election, Sanders and Trump tapped into a weariness over America’s “forever wars” and both attacked Clinton for her early support for the war.

“As voters contemplate how a confrontation with Iran could spiral out of control, they will contrast the erratic, unpredictable impulsive nature of the Trump presidency with the steady hand that Biden brings to the foreign policy arena,”

voters were tired after nearly two decades of war and hungry for a nominee who “offers a very different vision” of American foreign policy.

McCoy pointed to research that showed the communities most devastated by casualties of America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq voted for Trump. The study found that “if three states key to Trump’s victory – Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin – had suffered even a modestly lower casualty rate, all three could have flipped from red to blue and sent Hillary Clinton to the White House”.

“It’s common among pundits to say that voters don’t care about foreign policy. But that misses the truth,” he said. “Voters don’t care about the minutiae of treaty negotiations but they sure do care about whether the people they know and love are dying in forever wars.”

Then there's another detail that destroys the President's defense. He has claimed that the entire Ukraine/Biden operation aimed to combat corruption. The fact that Trump has never cared about corruption anywhere but in Ukraine may not be enough proof for some.But the release confirms what witnesses in the impeachment hearings said: Giuliani and his associates, working to pursue Trump's Ukraine policy, were demanding an announcement of an investigation. There's no evidence that what they wanted was an actual investigation.One of the most intriguing and damning pieces are paper scraps handwritten by Parnas, according to his attorney. "Get Zalensky (sic) to announce that Biden case will be investigated" it starts, moving on to other parts of the plan; also, "Victoria/Joe retained; 100,000 -month." "Begin media campaign."

As the Senate trial prepares to start, Americans of all parties should ponder, is this what they want from their president? Pressuring a foreign leader to investigate a political rival; having US diplomats tracked and intimidated? Allowing oligarchs with ties to the Kremlin to fund operations aimed at boosting his reelection chances?

as the federal government has left it to states to determine what to do with the vaccines it ships to them, and with some states pushing decision-making to local health departments and hospitals, the process has gone far from smoothly.

“There may have been an expectation from Operation Warp Speed or others that we’d give everyone the vaccine overnight.…It was a logistics equation for them. If you’ve been in vaccines for a long time, you know that’s the easy part. Getting it into actual arms is the hard part.”

Sen. Mitt Romney (R., Utah) criticized the vaccine rollout, saying in a statement that the lack of a comprehensive federal plan to be shared with states “is as incomprehensible as it is inexcusable.”

Public health officials and states say uptake is lagging for several reasons, beginning with holiday seasons that have kept staff of hospitals and nursing homes away from work. They also note they are facing high percentages of people, including some health-care workers, who are skeptical of taking the shots.

Hospitals and other sites are staggering appointments to avoid pulling too many workers from caring for patients amid a nationwide surge in Covid-19 cases, officials say. Administration of the vaccines also takes more time than a typical flu shot, particularly since they are being done in a socially distant way and may be preceded by a Covid-19 test.

Different state policies have led to confusion and shipment delays for hospitals, said Michael Wascovich, vice president of field pharmacy services for Premier Inc., a group purchasing organization whose members include 4,100 hospitals, 80% of which received doses.

“Every state is doing what they want to do,” he said. “You could be in Philadelphia and it’s completely different across the river if you’re in Trenton or Camden.”

Many states are following CDC guidelines to start with front-line medical workers and people in long-term care facilities, but not all. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Dec. 23 extended eligibility to people aged 65 and older. Because each county and hospital in the state implemented its own approach, many people didn’t know whether to call, log on or show up in person to secure a spot.

CVS has begun administering doses at nursing homes and facilities in 48 states and Washington, D.C., with most eligible residents agreeing to be vaccinated, said Chris Cox, a CVS executive who is overseeing the vaccination rollout for the pharmacy chain.

In some cases, residents haven’t been vaccinated because of active outbreaks at facilities, while other facilities have taken longer than others to schedule their vaccination clinics, a challenge exacerbated by the holiday season, Mr. Cox said.

But events — and economic research — over the past 30 years have shown not only that we cannot rely on self-interest, but also that no economy, not even a modern, market-based economy like America’s, can function well without a modicum of trust — and that unmitigated selfishness inevitably diminishes trust.

THE banking industry is only one example of what amounts to a broad agenda, promoted by some politicians and theoreticians on the right, to undermine the role of trust in our economy. This movement promotes policies based on the view that trust should never be relied on as motivation, for any kind of behavior, in any context. Incentives, in this scheme, are all that matter.

This cascade of trust destruction was unrelenting. One of the reasons that the bubble’s bursting in 2007 led to such an enormous crisis was that no bank could trust another. Each bank knew the shenanigans it had been engaged in — the movement of liabilities off its balance sheets, the predatory and reckless lending — and so knew that it could not trust any other bank

bankers used their political influence to eviscerate regulations and install regulators who didn’t believe in them. Officials and academics assured lawmakers and the public that banks could self-regulate. But it all turned out to be a scam. We had created a system of rewards that encouraged shortsighted behavior and excessive risk-taking. In fact, we had entered an era in which moral values were given short shrift and trust itself was discounted.

Things didn’t turn out well for our economy or our society. As millions lost their homes during and after the crisis, median wealth declined nearly 40 percent in three years. Banks would have done badly, too, were it not for the Bush-Obama mega-bailouts.

Similarly, teachers must be given incentive pay to induce them to exert themselves. But teachers already work hard for low wages because they are dedicated to improving the lives of their students. Do we really believe that giving them $50 more, or even $500 more, as incentive pay will induce them to work harder? What we should do is increase teacher salaries generally because we recognize the value of their contributions and trust in their professionalism. According to the advocates of an incentive-based culture, though, this would be akin to giving something for nothing.

So C.E.O.’s must be given stock options to induce them to work hard. I find this puzzling: If a firm pays someone $10 million to run a company, he should give his all to ensure its success. He shouldn’t do so only if he is promised a big chunk of any increase in the company’s stock market value

Of course, incentives are an important component of human behavior. But the incentive movement has made them into a sort of religion, blind to all the other factors — social ties, moral impulses, compassion — that influence our conduct.

This is not just a coldhearted vision of human nature. It is also implausible. It is simply impossible to pay for trust every time it is required. Without trust, life would be absurdly expensive; good information would be nearly unobtainable; fraud would be even more rampant than it is; and transaction and litigation costs would soar.

When 1 percent of the population takes home more than 22 percent of the country’s income — and 95 percent of the increase in income in the post-crisis recovery — some pretty basic things are at stake. Reasonable people, even those ignorant of the maze of unfair policies that created this reality, can look at this absurd distribution and be pretty certain that the game is rigged.

Trust between individuals is usually reciprocal. But if I think that you are cheating me, it is more likely that I will retaliate, and try to cheat you. (These notions have been well developed in a branch of economics called the “theory of repeated games.”) When Americans see a tax system that taxes the wealthiest at a fraction of what they pay, they feel that they are fools to play along.

a deeper rot takes hold: Attitudes and norms begin to change. When no one is trustworthy, it will be only fools who trust. The concept of fairness itself is eroded. A study published last year by the National Academy of Sciences suggests that the upper classes are more likely to engage in what has traditionally been considered unethical behavior. Perhaps this is the only way for some to reconcile their worldview with their outlandish financial success, often achieved through actions that reveal a kind of moral deprivation.

As always, it is the poor and the unconnected who suffer most from this, and who are the most repeatedly deceived. Nowhere was this more evident than in the foreclosure crisis.

The banks figured out how to get court affidavits signed by the thousands (in what came to be called robo-signing), certifying that they had examined their records and that these particular individuals owed money — and so should be booted out of their homes. The banks were lying on a grand scale, but they knew that if they didn’t get caught, they would walk off with huge profits, their officials’ pockets stuffed with bonuses. And if they did get caught, their shareholders would be left paying the tab

But perhaps even more than opportunity, Americans cherish equality before the law. Here, inequality has infected the heart of our ideals.

I suspect there is only one way to really get trust back. We need to pass strong regulations, embodying norms of good behavior, and appoint bold regulators to enforce them.

In Rochester, N.Y. the Safety Commissioner told police to keep the noise levels down, out of consideration for the high number of people sick with flu or pneumonia who need “rest and quiet” to get better.

In Maryland, concerned that warm weather would bring people out and too close together, the Baltimore Health Commissioner banned “frolics” such as street celebrations, arguing that “while the epidemic’s sweep was becoming milder, it was still dangerous to permit large assemblages of persons.”

“ticklers and brushes are particularly forbidden, and confetti throwing will not be allowed because in contact with the hands clothes and the persons of the people throwing enhances the danger of spreading influenza,” reported the Oct. 30 Pittsburgh Gazette Times.

Indoor Halloween parties were banned as well. “Halloween parties are taboo, as are all other indoor gatherings, as the danger of spreading the influenza is still great,” declared Denver Mayor W.F.R. Mills, according to the Denver Post.

In Indianapolis, the top health official lifted the ban on public gatherings just for Halloween, allowing residents to “go ahead and have all the Halloween parties they wanted to,”

On the other hand, even where cities tried to target large gatherings, local newspaper coverage of scattered incidents of individual mischief-making suggests that the tricks part of trick-or-treating was especially pronounced.

It’s unclear what kind of effect these rowdy Halloweens had on case counts more than a century ago, especially given that it wasn’t the only event drawing people into crowds around that time: Election Day was just a week later, and people flocked to the streets again to celebrate the end of World War I just days after that.

Regardless of Halloween’s role, a long winter was ahead, and the flu did continue to spread at pandemic levels well into 1919, spiking in the following winter and in early 1920 as well. In the end, about 675,000 Americans and 50 million people died, and about 500 million people were infected globally.

Often, Mr. Markman noted, we are deploying something called “defensive pessimism,” which is a strategy our brains use in stressful situations where we can control the outcome, like, say, a big exam. “It’s a great coping strategy when you have agency because being defensively pessimistic forces you to study more,” Mr. Markman said. But in circumstances out of our control, it is an example of the mind working against its best interests and creating more anxiety.

“Defensive pessimism is creating a fictitious state. You’re feeling pessimistic but you don’t really believe it. Deep down you think your candidate will win, but you’re telling yourself they won’t, so when the actual outcome happens it’ll hurt less. But that’s not how it works. So really you’ll be paying the price twice. Once for anticipatory period and again if the results don’t go how you want,” he said.

An election. A pandemic. An economic crisis. A climate crisis. Mass protests for racial justice. It is a painful and tense moment in America right now. We’re all living through it together.

“Bracing for the worst makes sense when you lack agency,” she said. “We see it in even the most optimistic people because it protects us and also elevates the experience of good news.”

If you’re scared, allow yourself to feel that way for a moment. “Denying the pain and fear and anger leads to bad things down the road — the feelings always come out somewhere,”

Focusing on something desirable is a great strategy.” He suggests that planning and cooking your favorite meal or making plans to see friends in a socially distant way can help. “It’s not fiddling while Rome burns,” he told me. “There’ll be time to refocus thoughts to the election as returns come in, but planning and executing something you enjoy will reduce uncertainty between now and then.”

“Lots of people tell me they’re canceling everything during election week and I’m like, ‘No please don’t cancel. Schedule. If you have nothing to do you’ll only revert to worrying and obsessively consuming news,”

All elections elicit this feeling t

iting so difficult and what, if anything we can do to make this uncertain moment a little more tolerable?