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Thomas Sowell, at Stanford University, points to the British as responsible for no less than the invention of freedom. In Mr Sowell’s view, the British were a shining light of economic development, which other countries gradually learnt to imitate. (Fascinating new research explores a similar theory: that learning best practices from others is essential to growth and becomes harder the greater the cultural distance from economic leaders.)

According to James Blaut, an American historian, the year 1492—when Christopher Columbus landed in America and set off centuries of European colonialism—“represents the breakpoint between two fundamentally different evolutionary epochs”. From 1492 onwards, Europe pulled in raw materials, currency and labour, and deliberately held back the rest of the world.

Jared Diamond, at the University of California, Los Angeles, suggests that environmental factors played a crucial role in the European take-off. Mr Diamond argues that Europe was uniquely endowed with domesticable plants and animals. Its population was also more immune to diseases. These factors led to higher productivity and, crucially, higher population density. The upshot? The development of institutions such as cities, bureaucracies and literate classes, which contributed to economic growth.

The development of "open science" in the 16th century helped with the spread of economically useful ideas

Another theory suggests that the Glorious Revolution in Britain of the 1680s, which reduced the power of the monarch, was a crucial stepping-stone in the country’s economic development. After the revolution, people became less worried that their profits would be summarily seized by the Crown, as they had been in the past. And so they became keener to work hard. This theory is at the heart of the book "Why Nations Fail", by economist Daron Acemoglu and professor of government James Robinson.

the causes of the Great Divergence are “overdetermined”. Many different factors intertwined to create European dominance—and no single factor would have been enough on its own. This conclusion might seem like a typical academic fudge. But the point is that the Great Divergence was not simply caused by European culture. Rather, it emerged because a business-friendly, open and innovative economy was created—mostly by accident.

titled “Tightness-Looseness Across the 50 United States,” the study calculated a catalog of measures for each state, including the incidence of natural disasters, disease prevalence, residents’ levels of openness and conscientiousness, drug and alcohol use, homelessness and incarceration rates.

Gelfand said:Some groups have much stronger norms than others; they’re tight. Others have much weaker norms; they’re loose. Of course, all cultures have areas in which they are tight and loose — but cultures vary in the degree to which they emphasize norms and compliance with them.

states in New England and on the West Coast were the loosest: California, Oregon, Washington, Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Vermont.

In both 2016 and 2020, Donald Trump carried all 10 of the top “tight” states; Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden carried all 10 of the top “loose” states.

“Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire the World” in 2018, in which she described the results of a 2016 pre-election survey she and two colleagues had commissioned

The results were telling: People who felt the country was facing greater threats desired greater tightness. This desire, in turn, correctly predicted their support for Trump. In fact, desired tightness predicted support for Trump far better than other measures. For example, a desire for tightness predicted a vote for Trump with 44 times more accuracy than other popular measures of authoritarianism.

The 2016 election, Gelfand continued, “turned largely on primal cultural reflexes — ones that had been conditioned not only by cultural forces, but by a candidate who was able to exploit them.”

Along the same lines, if liberals and conservatives hold differing moral visions, not just about what makes a good government but about what makes a good life, what turned the relationship between left and right from competitive to mutually destructive?

Cultural differences, Gelfand continued, “have a certain logic — a rationale that makes good sense,” noting that “cultures that have threats need rules to coordinate to survive (think about how incredibly coordinated Japan is in response to natural disasters).

cultures that don’t have a lot of threat can afford to be more permissive and loose.”

The tight-loose concept, Gelfand argued,is an important framework to understand the rise of President Donald Trump and other leaders in Poland, Hungary, Italy, and France,

The gist is this: when people perceive threat — whether real or imagined, they want strong rules and autocratic leaders to help them survive

My research has found that within minutes of exposing study participants to false information about terrorist incidents, overpopulation, pathogen outbreaks and natural disasters, their minds tightened. They wanted stronger rules and punishments.

The South dominated the tight states: Mississippi, Alabama Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Louisiana, Kentucky, South Carolina and North Carolina

Looseness, Gelfand posits, fosters tolerance, creativity and adaptability, along with such liabilities as social disorder, a lack of coordination and impulsive behavior.

If liberalism and conservatism have historically played a complementary role, each checking the other to constrain extremism, why are the left and right so destructively hostile to each other now, and why is the contemporary political system so polarized?

Gelfand writes that tightness encourages conscientiousness, social order and self-control on the plus side, along with close-mindedness, conventional thinking and cultural inertia on the minus side.

Niemi contended that sensitivity to various types of threat is a key factor in driving differences between the far left and far right.

She cited research thatfound 47 percent of the most extreme conservatives strongly endorsed the view that “The world is becoming a more and more dangerous place,” compared to 19 percent of the most extreme liberals

Conservatives and liberals, Niemi continued,see different things as threats — the nature of the threat and how it happens to stir one’s moral values (and their associated emotions) is a better clue to why liberals and conservatives react differently.

Unlike liberals, conservatives strongly endorse the binding moral values aimed at protecting groups and relationships. They judge transgressions involving personal and national betrayal, disobedience to authority, and disgusting or impure acts such as sexually or spiritually unchaste behavior as morally relevant and wrong.

Underlying these differences are competing sets of liberal and conservative moral priorities, with liberals placing more stress than conservatives on caring, kindness, fairness and rights — known among scholars as “individualizing values

conservatives focus more on loyalty, hierarchy, deference to authority, sanctity and a higher standard of disgust, known as “binding values.”

As a set, Niemi wrote, conservative binding values encompassthe values oriented around group preservation, are associated with judgments, decisions, and interpersonal orientations that sacrifice the welfare of individuals

Just as ecological factors differing from region to region over the globe produced different cultural values, ecological factors differed throughout the U.S. historically and today, producing our regional and state-level dimensions of culture and political patterns.

Niemi cited a paper she and Liane Young, a professor of psychology at Boston College, published in 2016, “When and Why We See Victims as Responsible: The Impact of Ideology on Attitudes Toward Victims,” which tested responses of men and women to descriptions of crimes including sexual assaults and robberies.

We measured moral values associated with unconditionally prohibiting harm (“individualizing values”) versus moral values associated with prohibiting behavior that destabilizes groups and relationships (“binding values”: loyalty, obedience to authority, and purity)

Increased endorsement of binding values predicted increased ratings of victims as contaminated, increased blame and responsibility attributed to victims, increased perceptions of victims’ (versus perpetrators’) behaviors as contributing to the outcome, and decreased focus on perpetrators.

For example, binding values are associated with Machiavellianism (e.g., status-seeking and lying, getting ahead by any means, 2013); victim derogation, blame, and beliefs that victims were causal contributors for a variety of harmful acts (2016, 2020); and a tendency to excuse transgressions of ingroup members with attributions to the situation rather than the person (2023).

What happened to people ecologically affected social-political developments, including the content of the rules people made and how they enforced them

Numerous factors potentially influence the evolution of liberalism and conservatism and other social-cultural differences, including geography, topography, catastrophic events, and subsistence styles

Joshua Hartshorne, who is also a professor of psychology at Boston College, took issue with the binding versus individualizing values theory as an explanation for the tendency of conservatives to blame victims:

I would guess that the reason conservatives are more likely to blame the victim has less to do with binding values and more to do with the just-world bias (the belief that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people, therefore if a bad thing happened to you, you must be a bad person).

Belief in a just world, Hartshorne argued, is crucial for those seeking to protect the status quo:It seems psychologically necessary for anyone who wants to advocate for keeping things the way they are that the haves should keep on having, and the have-nots have got as much as they deserve. I don’t see how you could advocate for such a position while simultaneously viewing yourself as moral (and almost everyone believes that they themselves are moral) without also believing in the just world

Conversely, if you generally believe the world is not just, and you view yourself as a moral person, then you are likely to feel like you have an obligation to change things.

I asked Lene Aaroe, a political scientist at Aarhus University in Denmark, why the contemporary American political system is as polarized as it is now, given that the liberal-conservative schism is longstanding. What has happened to produce such intense hostility between left and right?

There is variation across countries in hostility between left and right. The United States is a particularly polarized case which calls for a contextual explanatio

A central explanation typically offered for the current situation in American politics is that partisanship and political ideology have developed into strong social identities where the mass public is increasingly sorted — along social, partisan, and ideological lines.

I then asked Aaroe why surveys find that conservatives are happier than liberals. “Some research,” she replied, “suggests that experiences of inequality constitute a larger psychological burden to liberals because it is more difficult for liberals to rationalize inequality as a phenomenon with positive consequences.”

Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, elaborated in an email on the link between conservatism and happiness:

t’s a combination of factors. Conservatives are likelier to be married, patriotic, and religious, all of which make people happier

They may be less aggrieved by the status quo, whereas liberals take on society’s problems as part of their own personal burdens. Liberals also place politics closer to their identity and striving for meaning and purpose, which is a recipe for frustration.

Some features of the woke faction of liberalism may make people unhappier: as Jon Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have suggested, wokeism is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in reverse, urging upon people maladaptive mental habits such as catastrophizing, feeling like a victim of forces beyond one’s control, prioritizing emotions of hurt and anger over rational analysis, and dividing the world into allies and villains.

Why, I asked Pinker, would liberals and conservatives react differently — often very differently — to messages that highlight threat?

It may be liberals (or at least the social-justice wing) who are more sensitive to threats, such as white supremacy, climate change, and patriarchy; who may be likelier to moralize, seeing racism and transphobia in messages that others perceive as neutral; and being likelier to surrender to emotions like “harm” and “hurt.”

The authors used neural imaging to follow changes in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (known as DMPFC) as conservatives and liberals watched videos presenting strong positions, left and right, on immigration.

there are ways to persuade conservatives to support liberal initiatives and to persuade liberals to back conservative proposals:

While liberals tend to be more concerned with protecting vulnerable groups from harm and more concerned with equality and social justice than conservatives, conservatives tend to be more concerned with moral issues like group loyalty, respect for authority, purity and religious sanctity than liberals are. Because of these different moral commitments, we find that liberals and conservatives can be persuaded by quite different moral arguments

For example, we find that conservatives are more persuaded by a same-sex marriage appeal articulated in terms of group loyalty and patriotism, rather than equality and social justice.

“political arguments reframed to appeal to the moral values of those holding the opposing political position are typically more effective

We find support for these claims across six studies involving diverse political issues, including same-sex marriage, universal health care, military spending, and adopting English as the nation’s official language.”

In one test of persuadability on the right, Feinberg and Willer assigned some conservatives to read an editorial supporting universal health care as a matter of “fairness (health coverage is a basic human right)” or to read an editorial supporting health care as a matter of “purity (uninsured people means more unclean, infected, and diseased Americans).”

Conservatives who read the purity argument were much more supportive of health care than those who read the fairness case.

Liberals who read the fairness argument were substantially more supportive of military spending than those who read the loyalty and authority argument.

In “Conservative and Liberal Attitudes Drive Polarized Neural Responses to Political Content,” Willer, Yuan Chang Leong of the University of Chicago, Janice Chen of Johns Hopkins and Jamil Zaki of Stanford address the question of how partisan biases are encoded in the brain:

society. How do such biases arise in the brain? We measured the neural activity of participants watching videos related to immigration policy. Despite watching the same videos, conservative and liberal participants exhibited divergent neural responses. This “neural polarization” between groups occurred in a brain area associated with the interpretation of narrative content and intensified in response to language associated with risk, emotion, and morality. Furthermore, polarized neural responses predicted attitude change in response to the videos.

The four authors argue that their “findings suggest that biased processing in the brain drives divergent interpretations of political information and subsequent attitude polarization.” These results, they continue, “shed light on the psychological and neural underpinnings of how identical information is interpreted differently by conservatives and liberals.”

While liberals and conservatives, guided by different sets of moral values, may make agreement on specific policies difficult, that does not necessarily preclude consensus.

or each video,” they write,participants with DMPFC activity time courses more similar to that of conservative-leaning participants became more likely to support the conservative positio

Conversely, those with DMPFC activity time courses more similar to that of liberal-leaning participants became more likely to support the liberal position. These results suggest that divergent interpretations of the same information are associated with increased attitude polarizatio

Together, our findings describe a neural basis for partisan biases in processing political information and their effects on attitude change.

Describing their neuroimaging method, the authors point out that theysearched for evidence of “neural polarization” activity in the brain that diverges between people who hold liberal versus conservative political attitudes. Neural polarization was observed in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC), a brain region associated with the interpretation of narrative content.

The question is whether the political polarization that we are witnessing now proves to be a core, encoded aspect of the human mind, difficult to overcome — as Leong, Chen, Zaki and Willer sugges

— or whether, with our increased knowledge of the neural basis of partisan and other biases, we will find more effective ways to manage these most dangerous of human predispositions.

As a result, the two Americas created by the collision of the knowledge economy and NIMBYism correspond fairly closely to the blue-red division: Democratic-voting districts have seen a big rise in incomes, while G.O.P. districts have been left behind:

True, the growing concentration of knowledge industries in a few metropolitan areas reflects deep economic forces that are hard to fight

But not building enough housing to accommodate this concentration and share its benefits is a policy choice, one that is deepening our national divisions.

Restrictive housing policy doesn’t get nearly as much attention in national debates as it deserves. It is, in fact, a major force pulling our nation apart.

On the whole, European nations still have very different understandings of the rule of law and political order, different work ethics and conceptions of citizenship

The failure of convergence is most striking in Europe. True, a tiny sliver of European society is becoming more transnational. But only 2 percent of Europeans live in a different European nation than their country of citizenship.

The United States is a single nation with a common history, a common currency and a strong identity. Yet the country has become more polarized, not less. The country has become more difficult to govern, not less.

Less than 40 percent of Danes believe that work is a “very important” part of their lives, compared with roughly 65 percent of the French. More than 80 percent of the Croats believe that a parent’s duty is to do what’s best for their children, even at the expense of their own well-being. Only about 55 percent of Germans agree.

73 percent of Germans think that economic conditions are good right now. In France, 19 percent think that, and in Spain it’s 6 percent.

people in most Western nations are becoming more distrustful of their neighbors, not less. There are huge variations across nations, but levels of social and political trust have been declining almost everywhere except the Nordic countries. If there’s convergence, in other words, it’s in our increasing agreement that we don’t trust each other.

The euro crisis is not a crisis of debt. Total European debt levels are not that high. It’s a crisis of legitimacy. Debt burdens are divergent across nations, and Europeans with one set of habits and values do not want to bail out Europeans with other habits and values.

we face the likelihood that the euro will crack up. This is not an outcome to be desired. The ensuing recession and chaos could be horrible on both sides of the Atlantic. But we should prepare for a crackup because the underlying sense of shared identity required for the euro’s survival is not there.

The most popular major European politician is Angela Merkel, who is holding tough on more bailouts. She has 80 percent approval in Germany, 66 percent approval in Britain and 76 percent approval in France.

The larger issue is, how will the world cope with its own segmentation? How do you govern amid divergence? If multilateral organizations can’t bind nations, do we simply resort to an era of regional hegemons — or chaos?

The first step, surely, is abandoning the illusions of convergence and the schemes based upon them. In 1949, Niebuhr questioned the naïve belief that history drives toward unity. He cited the book of Psalms: “He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision.”

The findings lend support to an emerging hypothesis that the Clovis technology, named for the town in New Mexico where the first specimens were discovered, actually arose in what is now the Southeastern United States and moved west to the Plains and the Southwest. The Western Stemmed technology began, perhaps earlier, in the West. Most artifacts of that kind have been found on the West Coast and in Idaho, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming. “We seem to have two different traditions coexisting in the United States that did not blend for a period of hundreds of years,” Dr. Jenkins said.

in the Senate, those high-tax areas are often represented by Democrats, which puts less pressure on Republican leaders to keep the state and local deduction, in any form, in their version of the bill.

Each of the bills reflects delicate political and fiscal calculations as Republican leaders seek to deliver on President Trump’s campaign promises to cut taxes on the middle class and on businesses — but also find the money to pay for them.

Eliminating the state and local tax deduction would increase tax receipts and therefore lessen the overall cost of the legislation, which by congressional budget rules cannot exceed $1.5 trillion over the next decade if it is to pass without Democratic support.

After the elections, Republicans understand they have to pass a tax bill in order to show a significant accomplishment. Big losses in Virginia and New Jersey on Tuesday exposed their vulnerabilities going into next year’s midterm elections.

in the Senate, the emerging bill suggests party leaders are less concerned with the potential fallout of eliminating breaks that benefit upper-middle-class taxpayers in high-tax states such as New York and California.

Republican officials say many more changes will be included in the Senate plan, which is planned for release on Thursday, the same day that the House Ways and Means Committee is expected to pass its version of the bill ahead of a full House vote next week.

Hardline Tory Brexiteers then helped repeatedly to vote down Mrs May’s withdrawal agreement, clearing the way for Mr Johnson to take over the party leadership and to become prime minister in July 2019.

Mrs May had at least been prepared to accept the concept of the level playing field in principle, Mr Johnson saw regulatory divergence as one of the main purposes of Brexit, and a key test of whether the EU had accepted that Britain was now a fully sovereign state

EU’s determination that Britain should accept “non-regression”, meaning it would not resile from current regulatory levels

Britain should promise to abide by all future changes in the rules. It has now partly backed away from this, in exchange for a promise of a robust British domestic regime to police state aids.

effort by the EU to keep the European Court of Justice as umpire, a position it has also backed away from in favour of a more neutral arbitrator of disputes.

the EU wants a right of instant retaliation through the imposition of tariffs if Britain diverges from its rules in a way that it deems anti-competitive.

having a gun on the table that can be picked up at any time.

The second is that any settlement of level-playing-field concerns requires mutual trust.

Mr Johnson proposed to legislate unilaterally (and illegally) to change the treaty’s provisions on Northern Ireland. He has now withdrawn this threat, but that may not be enough to regain the EU’s trust.

On the religious front, just as in those other arenas, the groups that favor Democrats are clearly growing. Not only have the religiously unaffiliated expanded since 2009 from about 1 in 6 to 1 in 4 adults, but the share of Americans who ascribe to non-Christian faiths, a group that also leans strongly Democratic, has edged up from 5% to 7% of the population over that time, Pew found. Simultaneously, white Christians have fallen as a share of all American adults -- from just over half in 2009, according to Pew and other data, to around two-fifths today.

The challenge for Democrats is that their potential gains from the growing groups are being muted by an increasing tilt toward the GOP among the groups that are shrinking, in this case whites who identify as Christian. (The same dynamic is evident among other contracting groups such as whites without college degrees.) The combined result has left the parties on something of a treadmill, as Republicans offset at least some of the demographic change that benefits Democrats with improved performance among the key groups of shrinking white voters.

But even as white Christians have declined as a share of the population, more of that shrinking group is aligning with Republicans. In 2009, Pew found 51% of white Christians identified as Republicans, while 37% considered themselves Democrats (the rest were independents). Today that 14-point partisan gap has more than doubled: In the latest Pew results, 63% of white Christians identify as Republicans, compared with 30% who identify as Democrats.

The movement has been even sharper among white evangelical Protestants. Their share of the overall population is also shrinking: It fell to 16% in the latest Pew results, down from 19% in 2009. In 2009, they were about twice as likely to identify as Republicans (61%) as Democrats (30%), according to figures provided by Gregory Smith, Pew's associate director of research. Today 75% of white evangelicals call themselves Republicans, while just 19% identify as Democrats, a ratio of nearly 4 to 1.

As a result, even as white Christians have fallen below majority status in the country, they remain a clear majority of Republicans. In all, 64% of Republicans identify as white Christians in the latest Pew data. (The PRRI findings put the figure even slightly higher, at nearly 70%). That means white Christians now represent about the same share of Republicans as they did in the country overall in 1998. White evangelical Protestants alone represent 30% of Republicans, about double their share in the general population, Pew found.

The Democrats' religious profile could not be more distinct. White Christians now make up only 25% of Democrats, Pew found, down sharply from 40% in 2009. (White evangelicals compose only 7% of all Democrats.) Today, a larger share of Democrats in the Pew results are either not affiliated with any religion (34%) or are nonwhite Christians (30%), Pew found. Another 9% of Democrats adhere to non-Christian faiths. In each of those three latter cases, that's about double the share of Republicans in those categories.

While two-thirds of white evangelicals, for instance, say discrimination against whites is as big a problem as discrimination against minorities, more than 7 in 10 among the religiously unaffiliated disagree. Two-thirds of white evangelicals say immigrants are "invading" America; three-fourths of the religiously unaffiliated disagree. Three-fourths of white evangelicals say socialists have taken over the Democratic Party; two-thirds of the unaffiliated say racists now control the Republican Party.

The groups diverge in their assessment of every element of Trump's performance. Three-fourths of the unaffiliated say Trump has encouraged white supremacy; 70% of white evangelicals say he has not. Four-fifths of the unaffiliated disapprove of Trump's job performance; more than three-fourths of the evangelicals approve. More than three-fifths of the unaffiliated support Trump's impeachment and removal; nearly 9 in 10 evangelicals oppose it.

That means that if Republicans can't make more inroads with the diverse groups that are growing, they will constantly need bigger margins from their diminishing white groups just to stay in place. As Jones, of the Public Religion Research Institute, noted in an email, "Republicans look about like 65-year-old America or about like America did back in the mid-1990s, while Democrats look about like 30-year-old America or about like [what the] country is going to look a decade from now, if current trends continue."

U.S. life expectancy has been below that of other advanced countries for a long time.

The death gap has, however, widened considerably in recent years as a result of increased mortality among working-age Americans. This rise in mortality has, in turn, been largely a result of rising “deaths of despair”: drug overdoses, suicides and alcohol. And the rise in these deaths has led to declining overall life expectancy for the past few years.

In 1990, today’s red and blue states had almost the same life expectancy. Since then, however, life expectancy in Clinton states has risen more or less in line with other advanced countries, compared with almost no gain in Trump country.

blue-state residents can expect to live more than four years longer than their red-state counterparts.

Consider our four most populous states. In 1990, Texas and Florida had higher life expectancy than New York and almost matched California; today, they’re far behind.

there has been a striking divergence in behavior and lifestyle that must be affecting mortality. For example, the prevalence of obesity has soared all across America since 1990, but obesity rates are significantly higher in red states.

the facts are utterly inconsistent with the conservative diagnosis of what ails America.

The secularist assault on traditional values, Barr claims, lies behind “soaring suicide rates,” rising violence and “a deadly drug epidemic.”

But European nations, which are far more secularist than we are, haven’t seen a comparable rise in deaths of despair and an American-style decline in life expectancy

within America these evils are concentrated in states that voted for Trump, and have largely bypassed the more secular blue states.

The party removed support for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) from its platform that year, after 40 years of relatively consistent support. Further, for the first time since Roe v. Wade was decided, there was a clear divide between the candidates on support for abortion rights, as Reagan was on the record supporting a constitutional amendment banning them.

What then was driving the gap?

Political analysts attributed this loss to the GOP’s continuing failure to win over women voters.

In the end, the explanation Hinckley offered was predictable and mundane: women were voting their economic interests.

Reagan spent quite a bit of time and energy in 1982 and 1983 trying to appeal to women. He nominated women to his cabinet and put energy into promoting accomplishments like expanded tax credits for childcare. He was not, however, willing to address the issue that his pollsters had identified as driving the gender gap; he continued to cut government benefits.

Reagan never really tried to win over Black women, for example; instead, he focused on white homemakers and professionals and tried to persuade those women that his economic policies were in their best interests.

At the same time, Democrats have recognized women more broadly as a key element of their coalition. The Democratic platform has continuously paid proportionally more attention to women’s issues such as abortion rights and family leave than the GOP platform.

That these were both bills specifically addressing women’s economic interests is unlikely to be an accident. Women drive Democratic victories, and women’s economic experiences drive their votes.

If Joe Biden manages to win in November, it is likely to be with the largest gender gap ever recorded. The question that should be on voters’ minds is what legislation women want him to act on first.

the growing divisions between red and blue states represent a reversion to the lines of separation through much of the nation’s history.

“very similar, both geographically and culturally, to the divides between the Union and the Confederacy. And those dividing lines were largely set at the nation’s founding, when slave states and free states forged an uneasy alliance to become ‘one nation.’”

he’s warning that the pressure on the country’s fundamental cohesion is likely to continue ratcheting up in the 2020s

the “MAGA movement”—as the U.S. equivalent to the authoritarian parties in places such as Hungary and Venezuela. It is a multipronged, fundamentally antidemocratic movement that has built a solidifying base of institutional support through conservative media networks, evangelical churches, wealthy Republican donors, GOP elected officials, paramilitary white-nationalist groups, and a mass public following

Virginia has voted like a blue state at the presidential level, and Arizona and Georgia have moved from red to purple. With these three states shifted into those categories, the two “nations” are almost equal in eligible voting-age population, and the blue advantage in GDP roughly doubles, with the blue section contributing 48 percent and the red just 35 percent.)

This divergence itself creates enormous strain on the country’s cohesion, but more and more even that looks like only a way station

the underlying political question of the 2020s remains whether majority rule—and democracy as we’ve known it—can survive this offensive.

Podhorzer defines modern red and blue America as the states in which each party has usually held unified control of the governorship and state legislature in recent years.

By that yardstick, there are 25 red states, 17 blue states, and eight purple states

the red nation houses slightly more of the country’s eligible voting population (45 percent versus 39 percent), but the blue nation contributes more of the total U.S. gross national product: 46 percent versus 40 percent

it is determined to impose its policy and social vision on the entire country—with or without majority support

The hardening difference between red and blue, Podhorzer maintains, “empowers” the 10 purple states (if you include Arizona and Georgia) to “decide which of the two superpower nations’ values, Blue or Red, will prevail” in presidential and congressional elections

that leaves the country perpetually teetering on a knife’s edge: The combined vote margin for either party across those purple states has been no greater than two percentage points in any of the past three presidential elections

That’s a reversal from the middle decades of the 20th century, when the basic trend was toward greater convergence.

One element of that convergence came through what legal scholars call the “rights revolution.” That was the succession of actions from Congress and the Supreme Court, mostly beginning in the 1960s, that strengthened the floor of nationwide rights and reduced the ability of states to curtail those rights.

Key moments in that revolution included the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and the Supreme Court decisions striking down state bans on contraception, interracial marriage, abortion, and, much later, prohibitions against same-sex intimate relations and marriage.)

Simultaneously, the regional differences were moderated by waves of national investment, including the New Deal spending on rural electrification, the Tennessee Valley Authority, agricultural price supports, and Social Security during the 1930s, and the Great Society programs that provided federal aid for K–12 schools and higher education, as well as Medicare and Medicaid.

The impact of these investments (as well as massive defense spending across both periods) on states that had historically spent little on public services and economic development helped steadily narrow the gap in per capita income between the states of the old Confederacy and the rest of the country from the 1930s until about 1980.

Since about 2008, Podhorzer calculates, the southern states at the heart of the red nation have again fallen further behind the blue nation in per capita income.

red states, as a group, are falling behind blue states on a broad range of economic and social outcomes—including economic productivity, family income, life expectancy, and “deaths of despair” from the opioid crisis and alcoholism.

other measures that show those places in a more favorable light

Housing is often more affordable in red states; partly for that reason, homelessness has become endemic in many big blue cities. Red-state taxes are generally lower than their blue counterparts. Many red states have experienced robust job growth

And red states across the Sun Belt rank among the nation’s fastest growing in population.

blue states are benefiting more as the nation transitions into a high-productivity, 21st-century information economy

red states (apart from their major metropolitan centers participating in that economy) are suffering as the powerhouse industries of the 20th century—agriculture, manufacturing, and fossil-fuel extraction—decline.

The gross domestic product per person and the median household income are now both more than 25 percent greater in the blue section than in the red,

The share of kids in poverty is more than 20 percent lower in the blue section than red, and the share of working households with incomes below the poverty line is nearly 40 percent lower.

Gun deaths are almost twice as high per capita in the red places as in the blue, as is the maternal mortality rate.

Per capita spending on elementary and secondary education is almost 50 percent higher in the blue states compared with red

All of the blue states have expanded access to Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, while about 60 percent of the total red-nation population lives in states that have refused to do so.

All of the blue states have set a minimum wage higher than the federal level of $7.25, while only about one-third of the red-state residents live in places that have done so.

Right-to-work laws are common in the red states and nonexistent in the blue, with the result that the latter have a much higher share of unionized workers than the former

No state in the blue section has a law on the books banning abortion before fetal viability, while almost all of the red states are poised to restrict abortion rights

Almost all of the red states have also passed “stand your ground” laws backed by the National Rifle Association, which provide a legal defense for those who use weapons against a perceived threat, while none of the blue states have done so.

During the seven decades of legal Jim Crow segregation from the 1890s through the 1960s, the principal goal of the southern states at the core of red America was defensive: They worked tirelessly to prevent federal interference with state-sponsored segregation but did not seek to impose it on states outside the region.

Jim Crow segregation offers an important reference point for understanding how far red states might take this movement to roll back civil rights and liberties—not that they literally would seek to restore segregation, but that they are comfortable with “a time when states” had laws so “entirely different” that they created a form of domestic apartheid.

The flurry of socially conservative laws that red states have passed since 2021, on issues such as abortion; classroom discussions of race, gender, and sexual orientation; and LGBTQ rights, is widening this split. No Democratic-controlled state has passed any of those measures.

he documents a return to historical patterns from the Jim Crow era in which the dominant party (segregationist Democrats then, conservative Republicans now) has skewed the playing field to achieve a level of political dominance in the red nation far beyond its level of popular support

Undergirding that advantage, he argues, are laws that make registering or voting in many of the red states more difficult, and severe gerrymanders that have allowed Republicans to virtually lock in indefinite control of many state legislatures

how the United States will function with two sections that are moving so far apart.

History, in my view, offers two models

bedrock differences dating back to the country’s founding are resurfacing. And one crucial element of that, he argues, is the return of what he calls “one-party rule in the red nation.”

in the last years before the Civil War, the South’s political orientation was offensive: Through the courts (the 1857 Dred Scott decision) and in Congress (the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854), its principal aim was to authorize the expansion of slavery into more territories and states

Podhorzer, like Mason and Grumbach, believes that the MAGA movement’s long-term goal is to tilt the electoral rules in enough states to make winning Congress or the White House almost impossible for Democrats

Then, with support from the GOP-appointed majority on the Supreme Court, Republicans could impose red-state values and programs nationwide, even if most Americans oppose them. The “MAGA movement is not stopping at the borders of the states it already controls,” Podhorzer writes. “It seeks to conquer as much territory as possible by any means possible.”

The Trump model, in other words, is more the South in 1850 than the South in 1950, more John Calhoun than Richard Russell

it does mean that the 2020s may bring the greatest threats to the country’s basic stability since those dark and tumultuous years.

Roll, Jordan, Roll, the most insightful book ever written about American slaves and the most lasting work of American historical scholarship since the Second World War.

the authors illuminate in their characteristically energetic prose the myriad ways in which the master-slave relationship "permeated the lives and thought" not merely of elite slaveholders but of their whole society. In doing so they elucidate the master class's deeply learned relationship to Christianity and to history (especially classical culture), which in turn highlights th

it provides significant and powerful support to the now academically unfashionable argument that the antebellum North and South were separate cultures with divergent political, economic, moral, and religious values; a work of searching historical anthropology, it reveals a profoundly alien society and culture.

to indict the authors for what is now called insensitivity (and they will be so indicted) is to ignore the psychological acuity and tragic sensibility that they bring to their subject. In defining the slaveholders' peculiar characteristics and world view, the Genoveses dissect the graciousness and generosity, the noblesse oblige and courage, the frankness and sense of ease, that were entirely common. Nevertheless, they are at pains to show that slaveholding wasn't a flaw in an otherwise admirable makeup but was intrinsic to that makeup--that is, they make plain that the admirable grew out of the loathsome

they open their book with Santayana's remark "The necessity of rejecting and destroying some things that are beautiful is the deepest curse of existence." True, they convincingly argue that a paternalist ethos often mitigated slavery; they reveal that the master class internalized Christian and chivalric values, which, they chillingly write, made its members "less dangerous human beings"; they demonstrate that in defending the peculiar institution southern theologians consistently bested their northern opponents in biblical exegeses (the Old Testament patriarchs owned slaves, Jesus didn't condemn slavery, and Paul and other New Testament writers sanctioned it); they show that slaveholders subscribed to "a code that made the ultimate test of a gentleman the humane treatment of his slaves"

They repeatedly dismiss as "psychologically naïve" the notion that slaveholders (able, though not licensed, to give free rein to their tempers and impulses) would invariably treat their slaves well because it was in their pecuniary interest to do so.

as Christians the slaveholders acknowledged that men are weak and sinful creatures who if given absolute power will abuse it. Because slavery perforce granted masters such power, the Bible, although it didn't condemn slavery, did condemn the sins that grew inevitably from it

The standard explanation of this unhinging, repeated in graduate-school classrooms and in advice to politicians, is technological change.

This explanation, known as skill-biased technical change, is so common that economists just call it S.B.T.C. They use it to explain why everyone from the extremely rich to the just-kind-of rich are doing so much better than everyone else.

For all their disagreements, Autor and Mishel are allies of sorts. Both are Democrats who have advised President Barack Obama, and both agree that rampant inequality can undermine democracy and economic growth by fostering despair among workers and corruption among the wealthy

The change came around 1978, Mishel said, when politicians from both parties began to think of America as a nation of consumers, not of workers.

each administration and Congress have made choices — expanding trade, deregulating finance and weakening welfare — that helped the rich and hurt everyone else. Inequality didn’t just happen, Mishel argued. The government created it.

Computers and the Internet, Mishel argued, are just new examples on the continuum and cannot explain a development like extreme inequality, which is so recent. So what happened?

David Autor, one of the country’s most celebrated labor economists, took the stage, fumbled for his own PowerPoint presentation and then explained that there was plenty of evidence showing that technological change explained a great deal about the rise of income inequality. Computers, Autor says, are fundamentally different. Conveyor belts and massive steel furnaces made blue-collar workers comparatively wealthier and hurt more highly skilled crafts­people, like blacksmiths and master carpenters, whose talents were disrupted by mass production. The computer revolution, however, displaced millions of workers from clerical and production occupations, forcing them to compete in lower-paying jobs in the retail, fast-food and home health sectors. Meanwhile, computers and the Internet disproportionately helped people like doctors, engineers and bankers in information-intensive jobs. Inequality was merely a side effect of the digital revolution, Autor said; it didn’t begin and end in Washington.

Levy suggested seeing how inequality has played out in other countries

In Germany, the average worker might make less than an American, but the government has established an impressive apprenticeship system to keep blue-collar workers’ skills competitive.

For decades, the Finnish government has offered free education all the way through college. It may have led to high taxes, but many believe it also turned a fairly poor fishing economy into a high-income, technological nation.

On the other hand, Greece, Spain and Portugal have so thoroughly protected their workers that they are increasingly unable to compete

Inequality has risen almost everywhere, which, Levy says, means that Autor is right that inequality is not just a result of American-government decisions. But the fact that inequality has risen unusually quickly in the United States suggests that government does have an impact

Still, economists certainly cannot tell us which policy is the right one. What do we value more: growth or fairness? That’s a value judgment. And for better or worse, it’s up to us.

Japan's Meiji Restoration of 1868 and Turkey's Kemalist Reforms that followed the establishment of the republic in 1923 are both models of modernization adopted by lagging countries in the periphery of the West. Both ushered in new eras for their respective countries and both involved great risks, often implementing drastic measures and facing hostile opposition

"Humanity is in need of a great restoration; our region is in need of a great restoration, and right in the center of all this great restoration, our very nation is striving for its own great restoration within itself." One does not repeat with such fervor the "need to restore greatly" unless they are making a point about the distinction between restoration and reform

The Ottoman Empire had already tried, and failed at, something similar in 1839 with the Tanzimat Reorganization, so by the time Ataturk's Kemalist Reforms rolled around 50 years after the Meiji Restoration, modernity and tradition seemed irreconcilable: modernization could not occur without Westernization. Almost everything was brought in line with the West; clothing was Europeanized, the alphabet was Latinized, numerals were - rather ironically - Arabized, and women could now not only display their hair but also vote and pursue professional careers, just to name a few

Erdoğan doesn't seek a return to pre-revolutionary Turkey. His actions aren't those of an overzealous Ottoman romantic but rather of a Meiji restorer, re-appropriating the republican revolution by redefining its spirit and essence to one that blends Western innovation with local culture, tradition and historic bonds -- "Western technique, Ottoman spirit"

the fundamental divergence between the two paradigms was in their disagreement over the role of culture. Adopting the slogan "Western technique, Japanese spirit," the Meiji Restoration involved taking the technological, scientific, industrial and military advancements of the West but retaining Japanese values. Japanese culture needed not be sacrificed in adopting modern economic and military techniques and would in fact be the glue that kept a revolutionary society together.

synthesizing the best of the West and the best of the East in order to strengthen his hand.

If your country has spent the past nine decades claiming to be a copy of the West, then the West has no reason to see you as anything more than an inferior copy of itself.

“Policymakers need to think as hard about managing the current wave of disruptive innovation as technologists are thinking about turbocharging it.”

hey expect an industry evolution; they fail to recognize that they are facing a revolution—and if they don't utterly transform themselves, right now, it will destroy them. But of course, they never do.

I asked him: How bad is it? "It's pretty bad," he said. "And this economy is only making it worse. There are parents now who tell their kids they will only pay tuition for a business, engineering or science degree."

Santosh said, "Are you kidding? English majors are exactly the people I'm looking for."

Almost anything you can imagine you can now build, said Santosh, so the battleground in business has shifted from engineering, which everybody can do, to storytelling, for which many fewer people have real talent. "That's why I want to meet your English majors," he said.

"It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough—it's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing."

But if the competition in tech moves to this new battlefield, the edge will go to those institutions that can effectively employ imagination, metaphor, and most of all, storytelling.

Twenty-first-century storytelling: multimedia, mass customizable, portable and scalable, drawing upon the myths and archetypes of the ancient world, on ethics, and upon a deep understanding of human nature and even religious faith.

for many consumers there is simply no other way to get many books than through Amazon. And for some books, Amazon is, in effect, beginning to raise prices.

even books by Nobel Prize winners are now being sold at prices that minimally diverge from the bookstores that were driven out of business in the last decade.

Stockholders have pushed Amazon shares up to a record level, even though the company makes only pocket change. Profits were always promised tomorrow. Small publishers wonder if tomorrow is finally here, and they are the ones who will pay for it.

There’s also a pleasing simplicity to the causes of the growing gap between the 1 and the 99. There are only two, and both are familiar liberal targets: the rise of a deregulated financial sector and the erosion of accountability in compensating top executives outside finance

On those rare occasions when conservatives do bring it up, it’s the skills-based gap that usually draws their attention, because it offers an opportunity to criticize our government-run system of public education and especially teachers’ unions.

Liberals resist talking about the skills-based gap because they don’t want to tell the working classes that they’re losing ground because they didn’t study hard enough. Liberals prefer to focus on the 1 percent-based gap.

Conceiving of inequality as something caused by the very richest people has obvious political appeal, especially since (by definition) nearly all of us belong to the 99 percent.

One reason the left plays down the growing skills-based gap is that it accepts at face value the conservative claim that educational failure is its root cause.

both represent a dramatic reversal of economic trends that prevailed in the United States for most of the 20th century. From the 1930s through the 1970s the 1 percent saw its share of national income decline, while the “college premium” either fell or followed no clear up-or-down pattern over time.

Since 1979 the income gap between people with college or graduate degrees and people whose education ended in high school has grown. Broadly speaking, this is a gap between working-class families in the middle 20 percent (with incomes roughly between $39,000 and $62,000) and affluent-to-rich families (say, the top 10 percent, with incomes exceeding $111,000)

Another reform both conservatives and liberals have supported — though at different times — is withholding federal aid from colleges and universities that can’t control tuition increases

THERE is also more bipartisan support than you might suppose for restricting some of the Wall Street excesses that enrich the 1 percent.

a growing chorus of conservative voices, including the columnist George F. Will, the former Utah governor Jon M. Huntsman Jr. and Richard W. Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, favor breaking up the big banks.

At least some of the tools to restore these more egalitarian trends shouldn’t be divisive ideologically. Liberals and conservatives both recognize the benefits of preschool education,

But the decline of labor unions is just as important. At one time union membership was highly effective at reducing or eliminating the wage gap between college and high school graduates. That’s much less true today

Only about 7 percent of the private-sector labor force is covered by union contracts, about the same proportion as before the New Deal. Six decades ago it was nearly 40 percent.

Although conservatives often insist that the 1 percent’s richesse doesn’t come out of the pockets of the 99 percent, that assertion ignores the fact that labor’s share of gross domestic product is shrinking while capital’s share is growing

the G.D.P. shift from labor to capital explains fully one-third of the 1 percent’s run-up in its share of national income.

Many of Trump’s most famous catchphrases are actually versions of time-tested speech mechanisms that salespeople use.

Trump’s frequent use of "Many people are saying…" or "Believe me" — often right after saying something that is baseless or untrue. This tends to sound more trustworthy to listeners than just outright stating the baseless claim, since Trump implies that he has direct experience with what he’s talking about. At a base level, Lakoff argues, people are more inclined to believe something that seems to have been shared.

And when Trump kept calling Clinton "crooked," or referring to terrorists as "radical Muslims," he strengthened the association through repetition