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what if this is a non-crisis driven by abundance? The obvious place to look for an explanation of the declining marriage rate is the vast increase in the economic opportunities available to women. Newly empowered and less dependent on male economic support, women have become somewhat choosie

Two related facts seem to trouble both Brooks and Krugman. Marriage rates are down, and so is male workforce participation. Brooks sees this as a cultural crisis that’s leading to declining material welfare, while Krugman sees declining male wages as driving both trends.

As for labor force participation, Krugman must be right that poor labor market conditions explain the trend over the past few years. But the long-term decline has been going on since as far back as we have data. Male labor force participation rates were declining in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and in the ‘80s, and now in the aughts. Maybe the value of leisure is increasing?

it’s a natural outgrowth of progress. On the whole, the American population has grown less desperate over time and less interested in working—an entirely typical pattern, globally and historically.

The short-term jobs situation is a real crisis, but the longer-term decline of work is an opportunity. If men want to tempt women back into marriage, they’ll have to use more of their free time to pitch in with housework and child care, building a more egalitarian tomorrow. If employers want to tempt people back into working, they’ll have to offer higher pay or more pleasant jobs

they don’t understand why it weighs what it does — it is about 125 times as massive as the protons that were collided to make it, not gazillions of times as heavy, as standard quantum mechanical calculations would suggest.

For years the preferred solution to this conundrum has been a theory called supersymmetry, which, among other things, predicted the existence of a whole new spectrum of particles, superpartners of the ones we already know, that would cancel out the quantum calculations and keep the Higgs light. One of these particles might also be the dark matter that makes up a quarter of the universe by weight.

experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider have already eliminated the simplest versions of supersymmetry.

The most talked-about alternative to supersymmetry is the idea of the multiverse, an almost infinite ensemble of universes in which the value of the Higgs — as well as many other crucial parameters — is random. We just happen to live in the one in which the conditions and parameters are fit for us. This is a notion that flows naturally from string theory and modern theories of the Big Bang, but accepting multiple universes means giving up the Einsteinian dream of a single explanation for the cosmos, a painful concession.

“Physical science has historically progressed not only by finding precise explanations of natural phenomena, but also by discovering what sorts of things can be precisely explained. These may be fewer than we had thought.”

Similarly, Larry Summers, then president of Harvard, was ostracized in 2005 for wondering publicly whether the preponderance of male professors in some top math and science departments might be due partly to the larger variance in I.Q. scores among men (meaning there are more men at the very high and very low ends). “This was not a permissible hypothesis,” Dr. Haidt said. “It blamed the victims rather than the powerful. The outrage ultimately led to his resignation. We psychologists should have been outraged by the outrage. We should have defended his right to think freely.” Instead, the taboo against discussing sex differences was reinforced, so universities and the National Science Foundation went on spending tens of millions of dollars on research and programs based on the assumption that female scientists faced discrimination and various forms of unconscious bias. But that assumption has been repeatedly contradicted, most recently in a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by two Cornell psychologists, Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams. After reviewing two decades of research, they report that a woman in academic science typically fares as well as, if not better than, a comparable man when it comes to being interviewed, hired, promoted, financed and published.

Dr. Haidt was optimistic enough to title his speech “The Bright Future of Post-Partisan Social Psychology,” urging his colleagues to focus on shared science rather than shared moral values. To overcome taboos, he advised them to subscribe to National Review and to read Thomas Sowell’s “A Conflict of Visions.”

Daniel Hetlage, a spokesman for the Customs and Border Protection unit of the United States Department of Homeland Security, declined to discuss the specifics of any case, but he denied that religion was a factor in deciding who could enter.

An applicant to enter the United States “must overcome all grounds of inadmissibility,” Mr. Hetlage’s statement said, adding that there were more than 60 such grounds, “including health-related, prior criminal convictions, security reasons, public charge, labor certification, illegal entrants and immigration violations, documentation requirements, and miscellaneous grounds.” The statement did not indicate which grounds, if any, caused the British family to be denied entry.

The Guardian quoted Mohammad Tariq Mahmood, a member of the family stopped at Gatwick last week, saying, “It’s because of the attacks on America — they think every Muslim poses a threat.”

Now, you might say that the explanation for the right’s about-face on monetary policy is the same as the explanation of its about-face on deficits. That is, Republicans want pain and suffering when there’s a Democratic president, but a nonstop party when one of their own sits in the White House. And that is indeed how it looks now.

I’ve learned that the issue of whether it sometimes makes sense to print money stirs more visceral emotions on the right than anything else.

A lot of people on the right just go crazy at any suggestion that money is something to be managed, not treated as a sacred trust with which mortals must not meddle.

And the right’s emotional response to Fed policy — its hatred for using the printing press to boost the economy, no matter what the circumstances — always seemed real to me

Furthermore, the view that printing money is always a terrible thing seemed extremely durable, despite an uninterrupted track record of predictive failure. People who warned about looming inflation in 2009 continued to warn about it year after year, even as it kept not happening

Then Trump decided to pressure the Fed, and many of the erstwhile hard-money men became easy-money men overnight. I mean that more or less literally

There is, by the way, a reasonable case (which I accept) that the Fed should, indeed, pause its campaign of raising rates, and even that this week’s hike was a mistake. But this case should be made on the basis of fundamental economic principles, not in pursuit of short-term political advantage, and least of all because it’s what Donald Trump wants.

Yet that’s how it’s going. These days the G.O.P. is all about power; there are no principles it will adhere to if they involve any political cost. And it’s a party that belongs to Trump: What he says is the party line, on any and every issue.

In a famous journal he kept from 1935 to 1944, the Romanian writer Mihail Sebastian chronicled an even more extreme shift in his own country. Like me, Sebastian was Jewish; like me, most of his friends were on the political right. In his journal, he described how, one by one, they were drawn to fascist ideology, like a flock of moths to an inescapable flame. He recounted the arrogance and confidence they acquired as they moved away from identifying themselves as Europeans—admirers of Proust, travelers to Paris—and instead began to call themselves blood-and-soil Romanians. He listened as they veered into conspiratorial thinking or became casually cruel. People he had known for years insulted him to his face and then acted as if nothing had happened. “Is friendship possible,” he wondered in 1937, “with people who have in common a whole series of alien ideas and feelings—so alien that I have only to walk in the door and they suddenly fall silent in shame and embarrassment?”

This is not 1937. Nevertheless, a parallel transformation is taking place in my own time, in the Europe that I inhabit and in Poland, a country whose citizenship I have acquired

the Dreyfus affair is most interesting because it was sparked by a single cause célèbre. Just one court case—one disputed trial—plunged an entire country into an angry debate, creating unresolvable divisions between people who had previously not known that they disagreed with one another. But this shows that vastly different understandings of what is meant by “France” were already there, waiting to be discovered

More important, though the people I am writing about here, the nativist ideologues, are perhaps not all as successful as they would like to be (about which more in a minute), they are not poor and rural, they are not in any sense victims of the political transition, and they are not an impoverished underclass. On the contrary, they are educated, they speak foreign languages, and they travel abroad—just like Sebastian’s friends in the 1930s.

What has caused this transformation

My answer is a complicated one, because I think the explanation is universal. Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all societies eventually will.

And it is taking place without the excuse of an economic crisis of the kind Europe suffered in the 1930s. Poland’s economy has been the most consistently successful in Europe over the past quarter century. Even after the global financial collapse in 2008, the country saw no recession. What’s more, the refugee wave that has hit other European countries has not been felt here at all. There are no migrant camps, and there is no Islamist terrorism, or terrorism of any kind.

in modern Britain, America, Germany, France, and until recently Poland, we have assumed that competition is the most just and efficient way to distribute power. The best-run businesses should make the most money. The most appealing and competent politicians should rule. The contests between them should take place on an even playing field, to ensure a fair outcome.

All of these debates, whether in 1890s France or 1990s Poland, have at their core a series of important questions: Who gets to define a nation? And who, therefore, gets to rule a nation? For a long time, we have imagined that these questions were settled—but why should they ever be?

the illiberal one-party state, now found all over the world—think of China, Venezuela, Zimbabwe—was first developed by Lenin, in Russia, starting in 1917. In the political-science textbooks of the future, the Soviet Union’s founder will surely be remembered not for his Marxist beliefs, but as the inventor of this enduring form of political organization.

Unlike Marxism, the Leninist one-party state is not a philosophy. It is a mechanism for holding power. It works because it clearly defines who gets to be the elite—the political elite, the cultural elite, the financial elite.

In monarchies such as prerevolutionary France and Russia, the right to rule was granted to the aristocracy, which defined itself by rigid codes of breeding and etiquette. In modern Western democracies, the right to rule is granted, at least in theory, by different forms of competition: campaigning and voting, meritocratic tests that determine access to higher education and the civil service, free markets

Two decades ago, different understandings of “Poland” must already have been present too, just waiting to be exacerbated by chance, circumstance, and personal ambition

Lenin’s one-party state was based on different values. It overthrew the aristocratic order. But it did not put a competitive model in place. The Bolshevik one-party state was not merely undemocratic; it was also anticompetitive and antimeritocratic. Places in universities, civil-service jobs, and roles in government and industry did not go to the most industrious or the most capable. Instead, they went to the most loyal.

As Hannah Arendt wrote back in the 1940s, the worst kind of one-party state “invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”

Lenin’s one-party system also reflected his disdain for the idea of a neutral state, of apolitical civil servants and an objective media. He wrote that freedom of the press “is a deception.” He mocked freedom of assembly as a “hollow phrase.” As for parliamentary democracy itself, that was no more than “a machine for the suppression of the working class.”

These parties tolerate the existence of political opponents. But they use every means possible, legal and illegal, to reduce their opponents’ ability to function and to curtail competition in politics and economics. They dislike foreign investment and criticize privatization, unless it is designed to benefit their supporters. They undermine meritocracy. Like Donald Trump, they mock the notions of neutrality and professionalism, whether in journalists or civil servants. They discourage businesses from advertising in “opposition”—by which they mean illegitimate—media.

nepotism, state capture. But if you so choose, you can also describe it in positive terms: It represents the end of the hateful notions of meritocracy and competition, principles that, by definition, never benefited the less successful. A rigged and uncompetitive system sounds bad if you want to live in a society run by the talented. But if that isn’t your primary interest, then what’s wrong with it?

If you are someone who believes that you deserve to rule, then your motivation to attack the elite, pack the courts, and warp the press to achieve your ambitions is strong. Resentment, envy, and above all the belief that the “system” is unfair—these are important sentiments among the intellectuals of the Polish right.

Whatever mistakes the party might make, whatever laws it might break, at least the “truth” about Smolensk would finally be told.

the polarizing political movements of 21st-century Europe demand much less of their adherents. They don’t require belief in a full-blown ideology, and thus they don’t require violence or terror police. They don’t force people to believe that black is white, war is peace, and state farms have achieved 1,000 percent of their planned production. Most of them don’t deploy propaganda that conflicts with everyday reality.

yet all of them depend, if not on a Big Lie, then on what the historian Timothy Snyder once told me should be called the Medium-Size Lie, or perhaps a clutch of Medium-Size Lies. To put it differently, all of them encourage their followers to engage, at least part of the time, with an alternative reality. Sometimes that alternative reality has developed organically; more often, it’s been carefully formulated, with the help of modern marketing techniques, audience segmentation, and social-media campaigns.

In Hungary, the lie is unoriginal: It is the belief, shared by the Russian government and the American alt-right, in the superhuman powers of George Soros, the Hungarian Jewish billionaire who is supposedly plotting to bring down the nation through the deliberate importation of migrants, even though no such migrants exist in Hungary.

In Poland, at least the lie is sui generis. It is the Smolensk conspiracy theory: the belief that a nefarious plot brought down the president’s plane in April 2010.

The truth, as it began to emerge, was not comforting to the Law and Justice Party or to its leader, the dead president’s twin brother. The plane had taken off late; the president was likely in a hurry to land, because he wanted to use the trip to launch his reelection campaign. There was thick fog in Smolensk, which did not have a real airport, just a landing strip in the forest; the pilots considered diverting the plane, which would have meant a drive of several hours to the ceremony. After the president had a brief phone call with his brother, his advisers apparently pressed the pilots to land. Some of them, against protocol, walked in and out of the cockpit during the flight. Also against protocol, the chief of the air force came and sat beside the pilots. “Zmieścisz się śmiało”—“You’ll make it, be bold,” he said. Seconds later, the plane collided with the tops of some birch trees, rolled over, and hit the ground.

When, some weeks after the election, European institutions and human-rights groups began responding to the actions of the Law and Justice government, they focused on the undermining of the courts and public media. They didn’t focus on the institutionalization of the Smolensk conspiracy theory, which was, frankly, just too weird for outsiders to understand. And yet the decision to put a fantasy at the heart of government policy really was the source of the authoritarian actions that followed.

Although the Macierewicz commission has never produced a credible alternate explanation for the crash, the Smolensk lie laid the moral groundwork for other lies. Those who could accept this elaborate theory, with no evidence whatsoever, could accept anything.

picking apart personal and political motives is extremely difficult. That’s what I learned from the story of Jacek Kurski, the director of Polish state television and the chief ideologist of the Polish illiberal state. He started out in the same place, at the same time, as his brother, Jarosław Kurski, who edits the largest and most influential liberal Polish newspaper. They are two sides of the same coin.

The Smolensk conspiracy theory, like the Hungarian migration conspiracy theory, served another purpose: For a younger generation that no longer remembered Communism, and a society where former Communists had largely disappeared from politics, it offered a new reason to distrust the politicians, businesspeople, and intellectuals who had emerged from the struggles of the 1990s and now led the country.

More to the point, it offered a means of defining a new and better elite. There was no need for competition, or for exams, or for a résumé bristling with achievements. Anyone who professes belief in the Smolensk lie is by definition a true patriot—and, incidentally, might well qualify for a government job.

Hungary’s belated reckoning with its Communist past—putting up museums, holding memorial services, naming perpetrators—did not, as I thought it would, help cement respect for the rule of law, for restraints on the state, for pluralism

16 years after the Terror Háza’s opening, Hungary’s ruling party respects no restraints of any kind. It has gone much further than Law and Justice in politicizing the state media and destroying the private media, achieving the latter by issuing threats and blocking access to advertising. It has created a new business elite that is loyal to Orbán.

Schmidt embodies what the Bulgarian writer Ivan Krastev recently described as the desire of many eastern and central Europeans to “shake off the colonial dependency implicit in the very project of Westernization,” to rid themselves of the humiliation of having been imitators, followers of the West rather than founders.

Listening to her, I became convinced that there was never a moment when Schmidt’s views “changed.” She never turned against liberal democracy, because she never believed in it, or at least she never thought it was all that important. For her, the antidote to Communism is not democracy but an anti-Dreyfusard vision of national sovereignty

It’s clear that the Medium-Size Lie is working for Orbán—just as it has for Donald Trump—if only because it focuses the world’s attention on his rhetoric rather than his actions.

I described my 1999 New Year’s Eve party to a Greek political scientist. Quietly, he laughed at me. Or rather, he laughed with me; he didn’t mean to be rude. But this thing I was calling polarization was nothing new. “The post-1989 liberal moment—this was the exception,” Stathis Kalyvas told me. Polarization is normal. More to the point, I would add, skepticism about liberal democracy is also normal. And the appeal of authoritarianism is eternal.

Americans, with our powerful founding story, our unusual reverence for our Constitution, our relative geographic isolation, and our two centuries of economic success, have long been convinced that liberal democracy, once achieved, cannot be altered. American history is told as a tale of progress, always forward and upward, with the Civil War as a kind of blip in the middle, an obstacle that was overcome.

In Greece, history feels not linear but circular. There is liberal democracy and then there is oligarchy. Then there is liberal democracy again. Then there is foreign subversion, then there is an attempted Communist coup, then there is civil war, and then there is dictatorship. And so on, since the time of the Athenian republic.

In truth, the argument about who gets to rule is never over, particularly in an era when people have rejected aristocracy, and no longer believe that leadership is inherited at birth or that the ruling class is endorsed by God

Democracy and free markets can produce unsatisfying outcomes, after all, especially when badly regulated, or when nobody trusts the regulators, or when people are entering the contest from very different starting points. Sooner or later, the losers of the competition were always going to challenge the value of the competition itself.

More to the point, the principles of competition, even when they encourage talent and create upward mobility, don’t necessarily answer deeper questions about national identity, or satisfy the human desire to belong to a moral community.

The authoritarian state, or even the semi-authoritarian state—the one-party state, the illiberal state—offers that promise: that the nation will be ruled by the best people, the deserving people, the members of the party, the believers in the Medium-Size Lie.

“It’s not a threat to their own economic well-being; it’s a threat to their group’s dominance in our country over all.”

Last year, a Public Religion Research Institute survey of more than 3,000 people also found that Mr. Trump’s appeal could better be explained by a fear of cultural displacement.

she analyzed survey data from a nationally representative group of about 1,200 voters polled in 2012 and 2016.

Dr. Mutz’s statistical analysis focused on those who bucked the trend, switching their support to the Republican candidate, Mr. Trump, in 2016.

Dr. Mutz also analyzed a separate survey, conducted in 2016 by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. It showed that anxieties about retirement, education and medical bills also had little impact on whether a person supported Mr. Trump.

Losing a job or income between 2012 and 2016 did not make a person any more likely to support Mr. Trump

A person’s opinion on how trade affected personal finances had little bearing on political preferences

uation had worsened

Neither did unemployment or the density of manufacturing jobs in one’s area.

“It wasn’t people in those areas that were switching, those folks were already voting Republican,” Dr. Mutz said.

Even before conducting her analysis, Dr. Mutz noted two reasons for skepticism of the economic anxiety, or “left behind,” theory. First, the economy was improving before the 2016 presidential campaign. Second, while research has suggested that voters are swayed by the economy, there is little evidence that their own financial situation similarly influences their choices at the ballot box.

Last year’s Public Religion Research Institute report went even further, finding a link, albeit a weak one, between poor white, working-class Americans and support for Hillary Clinton.

While economic anxiety did not explain Mr. Trump’s appeal, Dr. Mutz found reason instead to credit those whose thinking changed in ways that reflected a growing sense of racial or global threat.

the findings revealed a fear that American global dominance was in danger, a belief that benefited Mr. Trump and the Republican Party.

“The shift toward an antitrade stance was a particularly effective strategy for capitalizing on a public experiencing status threat due to race as well as globalization,” Dr. Mutz wrote in the study.

“It used to be a pretty good deal to be a white, Christian male in America, but things have changed and I think they do feel threatened,

The other surveys supported the cultural anxiety explanation, too.

For example, Trump support was linked to a belief that high-status groups, such as whites, Christians or men, faced more discrimination than low-status groups, like minorities, Muslims or women

If wrong, the prevailing economic theory lends unfounded virtue to his victory, crediting it to the disaffected masses

More important, she said, it would teach the wrong lesson to elected officials, who often look to voting patterns in enacting new policy.

Working along an east-west transect through central England and Wales, the scientists discovered that the mix of Y-chromosomes characteristic of men in the English towns was very different from that of men in the Welsh towns: Wales was the primary Celtic holdout in Western Britannia during the ascendance of the Anglo-Saxons. Using computer analysis, the researchers explored how such a pattern could have arisen and concluded that a massive replacement of the native fourth-century male Britons had taken place. Between 50 percent and 100 percent of indigenous English men today, the researchers estimate, are descended from Anglo-Saxons who arrived on England’s eastern coast 16 centuries ago.

So what happened? Mass killing, or “population replacement,” is one possible explanation. Mass migration of Anglo-Saxons, so that they swamped the native gene pool, is another.

Yet no archaeological or historical evidence from the fifth and sixth centuries hints at the immense scale of violence or migration that would be necessary to explain this genetic legacy. The science hinted at an untold story.

across entire fields of inquiry, the traditional boundaries between history and prehistory have been melting away as the study of the human past based on the written record increasingly incorporates the material record of the natural and physical sciences.

The study of the human past, in other words, has entered a new phase in which science has begun to tell stories that were once the sole domain of humanists.

Thomas had found that genetically, not one of the English towns he sampled was significantly different from the others. Welsh towns, on the other hand, were significantly different from each other and from the English towns.

Most importantly, he found that inhabitants of  the Dutch province of Friesland were indistinguishable genetically from the English town-dwellers. Friesland is one of the known embarkation points of the Angl0-Saxons--and the language spoken there is the closest living relative to English.

The implications are profound: “Suddenly, we have all these genuine historical observations that need to be taken on board by historians and archaeologists and they raise a whole series of new questions, focusing particularly on…what is going on at the intimate level of this new civilization that is being born in the ruins of the Roman empire. The history of Europe will never be the same.”

But most archaeologists and historians who understand the economic capacity of the era, he noted, “find such massive contributions to the English gene pool to be completely unacceptable.

“But still, the genetic data are quite robust,” Thomas pointed out. “This is where the idea of an apartheid-like social structure comes in.” He has advanced a theory that a sexually biased, ethnically driven reproductive pattern, in which Anglo-Saxon males fathered children with Anglo-Saxon females and possibly Celtic females, while the reproductive activities of Romano-Celtic males were more restricted, is the most plausible explanation for the demographic, archaeological, and genetic patterns seen today. 

In an attempt to explain the remarkable similarity between Frisian and English towns, Thomas and colleagues constructed a population simulation model on a computer. He tested many theories: common ancestry dating back to the Neolithic age; background migration over centuries and even millennia; and a mass-migration event that, he calculated, would have had to involve at least 50 percent replacement--the movement, in other words, of a million people.

Simulating such an advantage, and choosing an arbitrary figure of 10 percent migration, Thomas found that the Y chromosomes of native Britons could have been replaced in the general population in as few as five generations. 

by the 1970s, he continues, scholars began to realize there never was a homogenous “nation” of Germans in northern Europe, just small tribes that coalesced along the Roman frontier in what were political and cultural, rather than biological, federations, as their very names suggest: Alemanni, meaning “all men”; Goths, meaning “good guys.”

The Romans, scholars believed, provided a common enemy, and that unified the disparate Germanic tribes. This line of reasoning led historians to a further thought: maybe the Anglo-Saxon identity was similarly socially constructed, and not biological after all

More recent historical scholarship, therefore, has increasingly emphasized discovering the extent to which the barbarian migrations were really a process of ethnogenesis--the creation of new ethnic identities, as the merchant’s story illustrates.

“There is lots of evidence for it,” McCormick says. “But now you have Mark Thomas telling us that you could actually study mating patterns. That is utterly unanticipated.” The work raises a host of new questions: What was women’s role in the barbarian settlements? Were Anglo-Saxon men mating with Celtic women? Or were there women in those invading boats, and if so, how many? What happened to the Romano-Celtic men? Were they killed? 

There is some support for this in ancient English laws, which indicate that Britons and Anglo-Saxons were legally and economically different even in the seventh century, long after the initial migration. Thomas cited wergild (blood money) payments as one example: “Killing an Anglo-Saxon was a costly business, but killing a native Briton was quite cheap.” This points to differences in economic status. And differences in wealth “almost always result in differences in reproductive output,” he said. “Sometimes two- and three-fold differences.” To the extent Anglo-Saxons were able to have and support more children, this could lead to a gradual replacement of the indigenous Y-chromosome over many generations

The Y-chromosome can be a particularly revealing signature of the past when compared to other kinds of genetic data. Among African Americans in the United States, for example, Y-chromosomes are about 33 percent European, he says, though the proportion varies from city to city. But those same African Americans’ mitochondrial DNA, which comes from the female line, is only about 6 percent European. And that, says Reich, “tells you about the history of this country, in which men contributed about three-fourths of the European ancestry that is present in the African-American population data. The data speak to a history in which white male slaveowners exploited women of African descent--a fact that is well documented in the historical record. That there is evidence of this in genetic data should be no surprise.”

Most Americans associate Medellín with the drug cartels of that isolated region. But the remoteness has also preserved a genetic legacy that can be traced to the conquistadores. As described in a paper by Andrés Ruiz-Linares of University College London, the Y-chromosomes of men in Medellín are 95 percent European, while the mitochondrial DNA of the women is 95 percent Native American. Spanish men and Native American women created a new population--confirming the recorded history of the region.

The pattern of sexual exploitation by a dominant group seen in the preceding examples is not at all unusual in the human genetic record, says Reich’s frequent collaborator, Nick Patterson, a senior research scientist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. The Icelandic sagas record that the exiles who settled that island raided Scotland and Ireland, kidnapping Celtic women. And the genes corroborate this account. The mitochondrial DNA of the women is Celtic, the Y-chromosomes are Nordic

Fortunately, the science of the human past has progressed in these other areas no less than in the field of genetics. Innovations in archaeological analysis have had a profound impact

After the fall of the Roman empire, “you get this layer called ‘dark earth’” in the archaeological stratigraphy, he says. “People thought the empire fell and the cities turned into garden [plots]. That is how dark earth was understood up until about five years ago,

“In the Roman excavations,” says McCormick, “there were pots and stone buildings and columns.” But then suddenly you get a layer of nothing but dark, humus-looking soil. What actually happened, Galinié and others have found, is that people shifted to organic building materials. “They had thatched roofs and wooden houses, they didn’t have Roman garbage removal, and they just dumped the ashes and charcoal from their hearths out in the road and all of that compacted. It is extremely rich, extremely dense,

The classic version of Americanization is called straight-line assimilation. It’s a three-generation tale as central to America’s mythology as the Boston Tea Party: The immigrants struggle amid poverty and bias; their children awkwardly juggle two cultures; the third generation completes the rise, with a white-collar job and a house in the suburbs. The story imparts two lessons: The descendants of immigrants advance and do so by blending in.

Straight-line assimilation was the reigning narrative of the mid-20th century. Half a century had passed since immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe had poured through Ellis Island. Learned men had warned that they would never adapt, but they did so decisively. A unified country had beaten the Nazis, with Mayflower descendants sharing foxholes with Kowalskis and Mancinis. Groups that warred abroad lived as neighbors in New York and Chicago. A Catholic became president.

Sometime in the 1960s, this assimilation story fell from favor. It overstated the acceptance that immigrants had won and understated the hardships they had faced. It idealized WASP culture and slighted the satisfactions of the ethnic community. It overlooked race — the lengths to which the country had gone to prevent the assimilation of blacks.

Leftist scholars condemned “the blight of assimilationist ideology” and celebrated ethnic struggle. Ozzie and Harriet gave way to Kojak and Columbo, heritage travel and klezmer bands. Assimilation seemed wrong as an explanation of what did happen and offensive as an explanation of what should happen.

But some scholars warn that Americanization carries risks, especially for the poor. The longer newcomers are in the United States, the more likely they are to smoke, grow obese or commit crimes. Two prominent scholars, Alejandro Portes and Ruben Rumbaut, have warned that the children of the most disadvantaged immigrants may assimilate downward, joining the native poor in a “rainbow underclass.”

Given the difficulties that immigrants and their descendants faced, Gans rightly called their assimilation “bumpy line” rather than straight. But bumps and all, assimilation prevailed

It’s possible that Kristine’s generation will find assimilation harder. Economic mobility has waned; a quarter of the foreign-born lack legal status; and most of today’s immigrants are racial minorities, which could attract more enduring bigotry. Mass media once encouraged common identity. In today’s narrowcast world, pluribus triumphs over unum.

Trumpism itself may impede assimilation: If you constantly tell immigrants they’re unwanted, they may come to believe it.

But other differences between the eras could ease assimilation. Immigrants have civil rights their predecessors lacked. (Sicilians did not have affirmative action.) Many arrive like Rosalie, already middle-class. And mainstream culture is much more diverse, making it easier to fit in.

Two academic camps have shaped debate about the children of immigrants. Both see the majority succeeding — advancing in school, securing jobs and integrating. Intermarriage is high, and English is near universal. “Today’s immigrants are actually learning English faster than their predecessors,” the National Academy of Sciences concluded in 2015.

The resurgence of ethnic identity was heartfelt but no sign that assimilation had failed. On the contrary, as scholars like Herbert Gans and Mary Waters argued, Americans could celebrate their heritage precisely because it meant so little. It did not affect where they could live, whom they could marry or what jobs they could get. “Symbolic ethnicity” flourished, but divisions faded: intermarriage rose, discrimination fell and residential enclaves dispersed

A rival group is more optimistic. They found that children of immigrants not only outperformed children of natives (of similar races) but did so despite having parents with less income and education. How could that be? Philip Kasinitz and three colleagues argue that children of immigrants often enjoy a “second-generation advantage” over native peers.

Two parts of the argument are familiar — immigrants, self-selected for ambition, pass along their drive, and the intensity of ethnic networks provides support that natives lack. But the researchers also argue that children of immigrants benefit intellectually from living at a cultural crossroads

Children of immigrants, they wrote, often “combine the best of both worlds” — their parents’ and their peers’ — or innovate in ways that “can be highly conducive to success.’

Curious about how she had grown curious, Lara formed her own assimilation theory: America had scared her into asking questions. Confused when she arrived and afraid of repeating second grade, “I told myself I should be interested right now.” Being interested became a habit. Put differently, blending cultures produced new thinking — Lara was simply repeating what the Kasinitz camp argues about the cultural crossroads.

This suggests America is fundamentally the same country of concerned, good-hearted citizens it ever was. Even when its national politics is seized by demagogues, responsibility and accountability matter in everyday governance.

The unhappier flip-side is that this divergence helps explain why Americans can bear to put up with, and thereby sustain, such dreadful national politics. It plays a much smaller role in their lives than the apparent momentousness of its life-and-death issues might suggest. In the current catastrophe

their explanation begins by dismantling several others.

Was the source of the problem America’s all-too-ready supply of prescription opioids?

About a million Americans now use heroin daily or near-daily. Many others use illicitly obtained synthetic opioids like fentanyl.

As Case and Deaton note, most people who abuse or become addicted to opioids continue to lead functional lives and many eventually escape their dependence

The oversupply of opioids did not create the conditions for despair. Instead, it appears, the oversupply fed upon a white working class already adrift.

although opioid deaths plateaued, at least temporarily, in 2018, suicides and alcohol-related deaths continue upward.

Could deaths of despair be related to the rising incidence of obesity?

Case and Deaton report that we’re seeing the same troubling health trends “among the underweight, normal weight, overweight, and obese.”

Is the problem poverty?

Overdose deaths are most common in high-poverty Appalachia and along the low-poverty Eastern Seaboard, in places such as Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Delaware, and Connecticut. Meanwhile, some high-poverty states, such as Arkansas and Mississippi, have been less affected. Black and Hispanic populations are poorer but less affected, too.

How about income inequality? Case and Deaton have found that patterns of inequality, like patterns of poverty, simply don’t match the patterns of mortality by race or region.

A consistently strong economic correlate, by contrast, is the percentage of a local population that is employed

In the late nineteen-sixties, Case and Deaton note, all but five per cent of men of prime working age, from twenty-five to fifty-four, had jobs; by 2010, twenty per cent did not.

What Case and Deaton have found is that the places with a smaller fraction of the working-age population in jobs are places with higher rates of deaths of despair—and that this holds true even when you look at rates of suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related liver disease separately. They all go up where joblessness does.

Conservatives tend to offer cultural explanations

People are taking the lazy way out of responsibilities, the argument goes, and so they choose alcohol, drugs, and welfare and disability checks over a commitment to hard work, family, and community. And now they are paying the price for their hedonism and decadence—with addiction, emptiness, and suicide.

Yet, if the main problem were that a large group of people were withdrawing from the workforce by choice, wages should have risen in parallel.

Case and Deaton argue that the problem arises from the cumulative effect of a long economic stagnation and the way we as a nation have dealt with it

For the first few decades after the Second World War, per-capita U.S. economic growth averaged between two and three per cent a year. In the nineties, however, it dipped below two per cent. In the early two-thousands, it was less than one per cent. This past decade, it remained below 1.5 per cent.

Different populations have experienced this slowdown very differently

Anti-discrimination measures improved earnings and job prospects for black and Hispanic Americans. Though their earnings still lag behind those of the white working class, life for this generation of people of color is better than it was for the last.

Not so for whites without a college education. Among the men, median wages have not only flattened; they have declined since 1979. The work that the less educated can find isn’t as stable: hours are more uncertain, and job duration is shorter

Among advanced economies, this deterioration in pay and job stability is unique to the United States.

In the past four decades, Americans without bachelor’s degrees—the majority of the working-age population—have seen themselves become ever less valued in our economy. Their effort and experience provide smaller rewards than before, and they encounter longer periods between employment.

The problem isn’t that people are not the way they used to be. It’s that the economy and the structure of work are not the way they used to be

Today, about seventy-five per cent of college graduates are married by age forty-five, but only sixty per cent of non-college graduates are

Nonmarital childbearing has reached forty per cent among less educated white women.

Religious institutions previously played a vital role in connecting people to a community. But the number of Americans who attend religious services has declined markedly over the past half century, falling to just one-third of the general population today.

Case and Deaton see a picture of steady economic and social breakdown, amid over-all prosperity.

climate—the amount of social and economic instability not only in your life but also in your family and community—matters, too. Émile Durkheim pointed out more than a century ago that despair and then suicide result when people’s material and social circumstances fall below their expectations.

why has the steep rise in deaths of despair been so uniquely American

The United States has provided unusually casual access to means of death.

The availability of opioids has indeed played a role, and the same goes for firearms

The U.S. has also embraced automation and globalization with greater alacrity and fewer restrictions than other countries have. Displaced workers here get relatively little in the way of protection and support.

And we’ve enabled capital to take a larger share of the economic gains. “Economists long thought that the ratio of wages to profits was an immutable constant, about two to one,” Case and Deaton point out. But since 1970, they find, it has declined significantly.

A more unexpected culprit identified by Case and Deaton is our complicated and costly health-care system.

The focus of Case and Deaton’s indictment is on the fact that America’s health-care system is peculiarly reliant on employer-provided insurance.

As they show, the premiums that employers pay amount to a perverse tax on hiring lower-skilled workers.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, in 2019 the average family policy cost twenty-one thousand dollars, of which employers typically paid seventy per cent.

“For a well-paid employee earning a salary of $150,000, the average family policy adds less than 10 percent to the cost of employing the worker,” Case and Deaton write. “For a low-wage worker on half the median wage, it is 60 percent.”

between 1970 and 2016, the earnings that laborers received fell twenty-one per cent. But their total compensation, taken to include the cost of their benefits (in particular, health care), rose sixty-eight per cent. Increases in health-care costs have devoured take-home pay for those below the median income.

this makes American health care itself a prime cause of our rising death rates.

we must change the way we pay for health care. Instead of preserving a system that discourages employers from hiring, retaining, and developing workers without bachelor’s degrees, we need to make health-care payments proportional to wages—as with tax-based systems like Medicare.

So far, the American approach to the rise in white working-class mortality has been to pour resources into addiction-treatment centers and suicide-prevention programs. Yet the rates of suicide and addiction remain sky-high. It’s as if we’re using pressure dressings on a bullet wound to the chest instead of getting at the source of the bleeding.

Case and Deaton want us to recognize that the more widespread response is a sense of hopelessness and helplessness. And here culture does play a role.

When it comes to people whose lives aren’t going well, American culture is a harsh judge: if you can’t find enough work, if your wages are too low, if you can’t be counted on to support a family, if you don’t have a promising future, then there must be something wrong with you

We Americans are reluctant to acknowledge that our economy serves the educated classes and penalizes the rest. But that’s exactly the situation, and “Deaths of Despair” shows how the immiseration of the less educated has resulted in the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives, even as the economy has thrived and the stock market has soared.

capitalism, having failed America’s less educated workers for decades, must change, as it has in the past. “There have been previous periods when capitalism failed most people, as the Industrial Revolution got under way at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and again after the Great Depression,” they write. “But the beast was tamed, not slain.”

Today, the battles are over an employer-based system for financing health care, corporate governance that puts shareholders’ interests ahead of workers’, tax plans that benefit capital holders over wage earners.

We are better at addressing fast-moving crises than slow-building ones. It wouldn’t be surprising, then, if we simply absorbed current conditions as the new normal.

the psychological tendency to favor information that confirms our beliefs

If this explanation is right, then there is a relatively straightforward solution to political polarization: We need to consciously expose ourselves to evidence that challenges our beliefs to compensate for our inclination to discount it.

But what if confirmation bias isn’t the only culprit? It recently struck us that confirmation bias is often conflated with “telling people what they want to hear,” which is actually a distinct phenomenon known as desirability bias, or the tendency to credit information you want to believe.

we decided to conduct an experiment that would isolate these biases

. In contrast, those people who received undesirable evidence barely changed their belief about which candidate was most likely to win.

The results, which we report in a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, were clear and robust. Those people who received desirable evidence — polls suggesting that their preferred candidate was going to win — took note and incorporated the information into their subsequent belief

we observed a general bias toward the desirable evidence.

What about confirmation bias? To our surprise, those people who received confirming evidence — polls supporting their prior belief about which candidate was most likely to win — showed no bias in favor of this information.

They tended to incorporate this evidence into their subsequent belief to the same extent as those people who had their prior belief disconfirmed. In other words, we observed little to no bias toward the confirming evidence.

Our study suggests that political belief polarization may emerge because of peoples’ conflicting desires, not their conflicting beliefs per se

This is rather troubling, as it implies that even if we were to escape from our political echo chambers, it wouldn’t help much. Short of changing what people want to believe, we must find other ways to unify our perceptions of reality.

In his grim analysis Serwer insists that he’s just following the data, which point away from any economic explanation for the events of 2016. The allegedly populist Trump did not actually win large majorities among the lower middle class and poor, Serwer notes; rather, Trump won white voters of all income levels, and did best among what in the European context we would call the white petite-bourgeoisie, the group most likely to be threatened by a kind of psychological status competition from minorities.

Thus Trump’s was not really a populist or “working-class coalition,” Serwer concludes, but a “nationalist one,” rooted in white panic over demographic change, with little to do with any genuine paycheck-to-paycheck anxiety or grim opioids-and-family-breakdown socioeconomic trends.

No doubt that swing was racially mediated in some of the ways that Serwer suggests. But the swing also happened during a campaign in which Trump explicitly and consistently tried to move the Republican Party’s economic agenda toward the center or even toward the left — abjuring entitlement cuts, channeling Bernie Sanders on trade, promising a splurge of infrastructure spending, pledging to replace Obamacare with an even better coverage guarantee and more

But we will never escape from purgatory until these points are treated as complements to the role that other forces played in Trump’s success, not as substitutes that somehow make the “economic anxiety” or “anti-establishment” analyses of Trumpism into racism-denying crocks.

Serwer is correct that Trumpian populism did not magically turn the Republican Party into a pan-ethnic party of the poor and working class. But to the extent that Trump did change the Republican coalition, he changed its class composition, not its racial composition. He actually won a smaller share of the white vote than Mitt Romney overall, the same rough percentage of black and Hispanic voters — and far more voters without a college degree

This, along with Hillary Clinton’s bleeding support to third-party candidates, was the important electoral change between 2012 and 2016. Trump’s general-election coalition as a whole wasn’t a working-class coalition, but his most visible effect on American politics, in both the primary and the general election, was an effect on working-class voters

He’s right that Trump’s “birtherism,” with its xenophobic cocktail, was crucial to building his initial support — which perhaps explains why it lurks in the president’s paranoid imagination to this day. He’s right that Trump’s campaign trafficked in casual bigotry, played footsie with legit white supremacists, and stoked white suspicion of minorities. He’s right that Trump’s supporters tolerated this noxiousness even if they did not endorse or embrace it. He’s right that the obvious mind-meld Trump has achieved with a part of the Republican coalition should tell conservatives something depressing about the role that white identity politics has played in their movement all along.

when a candidate makes many more populist promises than is usual for a Republican, and then wins more working-class votes than is usual, the straightforward explanation — that the promises actually resonated with voters — probably contains a lot of truth.

Since entering the White House, Trump has mostly dropped his campaign populism and pursued conventional Republican policy goals (ineffectively in legislation, effectively in judicial appointments), while relying on tribal and racial and culture-war appeals to hold his base.

This combination has enabled him to maintain a core of partisan support, which proves, again and alas, that large parts of the conservative coalition either tolerate white-identitarian forays for the sake of other ends (pro-life or pro-corporate tax cuts, depending) or else simply prefer identitarian nationalism to higher-minded forms of conservatism.

his awful approval ratings in the midst of the best growth since the Clinton era strongly suggest that many of Trump’s supporters were hoping for something else from him besides just white identity politics and a repudiation of the first black president.

The point of belaboring all of this is not to discourage racial analysis of Trump and his supporters, but to discourage racial reductionism — the idea that in analyzing American politics we have to choose between claiming that all Trump voters are entirely innocent of racism and damning them all as white nationalists

“Nowhere did Clinton vow to use the power of the state to punish the constituencies voting for Trump,” Serwer writes at one point, while discussing the Democratic nominee’s famous references to the “irredeemable” and “deplorable.” But of course the entire drift of cultural liberalism in the West of late has been to use taxes and mandates and regulations and speech restrictions against groups that they deem bigoted and backward. It’s increasingly common for liberals to assume that the irredeemable don’t qualify for certain religious liberties and the deplorable don’t deserve the fullness of free speech

Acknowledging this complexity is not the abdication of moral judgment that many liberals seem to think. Rather it’s the beginning of political wisdom, because it makes it possible to discern what are, I think, fairly obvious paths out of our present predicament.

The path for conservatism is to do roughly the opposite of what the party in Washington is presently doing — to adapt to the experience of Trumpism by moving to the center on economics, as he did in the campaign, while rejecting his white-identitarian appeals.

The path for liberalism is to treat Trump’s white working-class supporters as persuadable rather than deplorable, and to marry the economic critique that the present G.O.P. non-agenda deserves to a diminished absolutism on social issues where the Democrats have marched left faster than the country.

Twitter said, um what?

The lab leak theory has been judged by at least one US intelligence agency as the more likely explanation for Covid-19's origins, while two agencies think the virus was more likely spread to humans from an infected animal

An investigation into the true origins of the virus is essential not only for scientific reasons, but also because policymakers around the world need this knowledge to better prepare themselves for future pandemics.

It should be no surprise, then, that the WHO's own investigation into the origins of Covid-19 concluded that a lab leak was probably not the cause of the pandemic and that infection from natural sources was more likely. But investigators were only permitted to examine research conducted by Chinese state scientists and did not have full access to the data or facilities that would have allowed them to assess whether the virus that causes Covid-19 may have been present before cases of the disease were first confirmed in China in December 2019.

Beijing, for its part, considers the case closed and has argued that the attention should be turned to other countries for the role they may have played in the early days of the pandemic.

More specifically, the Biden administration is calling on the WHO to complete a second phase of its investigation in a way that allows "international experts the independence to fully assess the source of the virus and the early days of the outbreak."

Biden has been eager to redouble our engagement and work together with America's friends and allies around the world. Getting to the root cause of a pandemic that has already killed nearly 3.5 million people globally presents a golden opportunity to do just that.

The “antiracism” of which Kendi is the most trusted exponent is not just a new name for an old precept. It is the political doctrine behind the street demonstrations, “cancelings,” Twitter attacks, boycotts, statue topplings, and self-denunciations that have come together in a national movement

His parents moved to Manassas, Va., where he attended Stonewall Jackson High School. He won an oratory contest for a Bill Cosby–style exhortation calling on blacks to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, a performance that (on one hand) he remembers with shame but that (on the other) he begins the book with.

the anti-racism movement has grown to the point where Ibram X. Kendi can be said, for better or for worse, to be changing the country.

Kendi’s devout parents were drawn through their churches into political activism in the 1970s

Anti-racists assume that the American system of politics, economics, and policing has been corrupted by racial prejudice, that such prejudice explains the entire difference in socioeconomic status between blacks and others, that the status quo must be fought and beaten, and that anyone not actively engaged in this system-changing work is a collaborator with racism, and therefore himself a legitimate target for attack.

Asante’s goals were polemical as much as scholarly. “The rejection of European particularism as universal is the first stage of our coming intellectual struggle,” he taught Kendi

“What other people call racial microaggressions I call racist abuse,” he writes. “And I call the zero-tolerance policies preventing and punishing these abusers what they are: antiracist.”

the autobiographical parts of this book show him to be tentative, even anguished, about identity

His mentor in Philadelphia was Molefi Kete Asante, notorious at the dawn of political correctness a generation ago as the author of Afrocentricity (1980), which stressed that, long before the high point of Greek culture, Egyptians, who lived in Africa, were building the Pyramids.

The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity. If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist. . .

As a prose stylist, Kendi is clear, direct, and even witty.

we must understand what Kendi means by “racism” in the first place.

“Racism is a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities.”

it uses the concept of racism to define the concept of racism. It will seem less strange, and more powerful, when examined through the lens of academic race theory.

As the Minnesota legal theorist Alan David Freeman noted in his landmark 1978 essay “Legitimizing Racial Discrimination through Antidiscrimination Law,” the beneficiaries of a racist system (Freeman calls them “perpetrators”) are likely to view its dismantling as an ethical challenge. Getting over such a system means adopting an attitude of fairness and treating everyone the same.

The historic victims of that system, however, have a different perspective. They look at the system as having taken from them concrete things that were theirs by right — above all, jobs, money, and housing. They will not consider the problem fixed until those deprivations have been remedied

Kendi has done a bit of everything. He is an ideological everyman of race consciousness, his life a Bunyanesque pilgrimage from the Valley of Assimilation to the Mountains of Intersectionality.

ideas about race and racism are central to Kendi’s system of thought, and you will understand why when you focus on its one truly original element: His “antiracism” is not a doctrine of nondiscrimination. In fact, it is not even anti-racist, as that term is commonly understood.

He does not even pay lip service to neutral treatment

If practical equality for blacks is the imperative, discriminating on their behalf is going to be necessary

He wants not pious talk but the actual policies that will redistribute the advantages, the stuff, that whites have undeservingly acquired. “What if instead of a feelings advocacy,” he asks at one point, “we had an outcome advocacy that put equitable outcomes before our guilt and anguish?”

The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination. 

It is why this book really is as “bold” as reviewers say it is, and why the judges who in 2016 gave Kendi the National Book Award were right to say he “turns our ideas of the term ‘racism’ upside-down.”

Kendi has decided that the two approaches to civil rights described by Freeman are not simply different perspectives on the same issue; they are mutually incompatible — one must destroy the other. “There is no neutrality in the racism struggle,” he insists. The old view of the perpetrators — that everything will be well as long as we treat people with equality, neutrality, and respect — is no longer just a different approach to the problem. It is illegitimate. It is a “racist” obstruction.

But also Oscar Lewis, once considered the hippest of radical anthropologists, for describing a “culture of poverty” in La Vida (1966) and other books.

To allude to color blindness or talk of a “post-racial society,” to back religious freedom or voter-ID laws . . . these are racist things, too. Even the overarching vision that rallied white liberals to civil rights — the belief that blacks could, and should, assimilate into American society — becomes morally suspect

Assimilation, Kendi announces at the start of his second chapter, expresses “the racist idea that a racial group is culturally or behaviorally inferior.” The idea is racist, Kendi reasons, because it is assumed the out-group would be improved by joining the in-group.

Also racist are those intellectuals and politicians whose explanations lessen in any way the weight of white racism among the causes of inequality:

Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer, naturally, for their ideas on black family structure in Beyond the Melting Pot (1963)

Ihad to forsake the suasionist bred into me, of researching and educating for the sake of changing minds,” Kendi writes. “I had to start researching and educating to change policy.” Something similar is inscribed on Karl Marx’s gravestone in Highgate Cemetery in London. It is the credo of an activist, not a scholar

Kendi grants that blacks, too, can be racist, but we must understand the grudging sense in which he concedes this

He believes blacks can collaborate with the structures of white racism, as turncoats, agents, and enforcers

When Kendi opposes “racism,” he means only the treatment of blacks by European-descended peoples since the Age of Discovery, especially under the American system of slavery and Jim Crow.

But the racism itself is always white, no matter what the color of the person practicing it

He explicitly does not mean that he considers it wrong to discriminate by race in any abstract ethical sense.

On the contrary: He is carrying out the de-universalization of Western values that his mentor Asante urged.

To oppose reparations for slavery (or to have no opinion on the matter) is racist.

In African-American studies departments you can address racial problems in an atmosphere of esprit de corps and ideological unanimity.

their very isolation has turned them into mighty bases for consciousness-raising, dogma construction, and political organizing

It is from these hives of like-minded activists that the country’s human-resources departments have been staffed.

Those who are confident that Kendi’s argument is something they can take or leave probably do not understand what civil-rights law has become

The word “racist” is a powerful disciplinary tool; whoever controls its deployment can bend others to his will

it has become clear that corporations fear the word “racism” so much that they will betray their employees and permit their lives to be destroyed rather than risk being accused of it.

All this requires is a few redefinitions, and here the law appears to be on Kendi’s side. With its Bostock decision this spring, the Supreme Court went into the business of policing transphobia,

In Kendi’s book — which, it bears repeating, has been for much of this summer the best-selling nonfiction book in the United States — the line between white supremacists and climate-change deniers, between white supremacists and opponents of Obamacare, is hard to draw or discern

It is difficult to imagine a reform more likely to drive American ethnic (and other) groups apart than the much-discussed project of defunding, or even abolishing, urban police forces

The same can be said for the wave of iconoclasm. Satisfying though it may be to throw ropes around a monument of Andrew or Stonewall Jackson and pull it down on one wild night, the effect is to add a grievance to American history, not remove one

In light of these unintended consequences, one assertion of Kendi, mentioned earlier, is particularly troubling, because even a skeptical reader will need to pause over the author’s point. This is Kendi’s dismissal of assimilation — the belief that blacks can “join” American society on equal terms — as racist. “While segregationist ideas suggest a racial group is permanently inferior,” Kendi writes, “assimilationist ideas suggest a racial group is temporarily inferior.”

. For a couple of decades after the passage of civil-rights legislation, such black socioeconomic inequality as remained could be wished away by well-meaning people of all persuasions, whether quota Democrats or enterprise-zone Republicans

the persistence of this inequality through two whole generations puts those promises in a different light. The difference between “temporary” and “permanent” disadvantage looks like a rhetorical one. The dream, as Langston Hughes put it, has been deferred. A radical temptation arises.

Kendi, terrible simplificateur that he is, has picked up the gauntlet. As he sees it, there are only two explanations for this delay: Either you believe the problem is with blacks, unable to make it in a system that has been designed fairly for everyone, or you believe the problem is with whites, who have designed an unfair system that keeps blacks down.

Mixed signals, she said, make any effort to shape an adversary’s behavior “incredibly ineffective.”

This imposes a layer of confusion on the conflict, just as it enters a dangerous and volatile new chapter, inviting mixed messages and misread intentions.

It’s not that experts or foreign officials suspect a secret agenda, but that the administration’s action fit no clear pattern or long-term strategy, she said. “It just doesn’t add up.”

He took the United States out of the nuclear agreement and imposed sanctions against Iran — which some see as setting off a crisis that continues today

He has cycled between ambitions of withdrawing from the Middle East, positioning himself as a once-in-a-generation peacemaker and, more recently, promising to oppose Iran more forcefully than any recent president has.

Without a clear understanding of what actions will lead the United States to ramp up or ramp down hostilities, she said, Iranian leaders are operating in the dark — and waiting to stumble past some unseen red line.“That’s what makes this a dangerous situation,” she said.

Without a clear explanation for Mr. Trump’s behavior, anyone whose job requires forecasting the next American action — from foreign head of state to think tank analyst — was left guessing.

United States diplomacy has emphasized calls for peace but has conspicuously declined to offer what diplomats call “offramps” — easy, low-stakes opportunities for both sides to begin de-escalating, which are considered essential first steps.

has Trump considered next 15 moves on chessboard? How to protect our people? Line up allies to support us? Contain Iran but avoid wider war? My guess is he hasn’t.”

Ms. Geranmayeh stressed that the conflict between the United States and Iran also threatens to draw in a host of Middle Eastern and European countries.To navigate tensions and avoid worsening them, allies and adversaries alike must astutely judge American intentions and anticipate American actions.

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates had already been ramping down tensions with Iran, Ms. Geranmayeh said, “because they have no idea how Trump will behave from one week to the next” and fear getting caught in the middle.

“If Trump is not managing a consistent and clear message to the Iranians about what he wants,” she said, “then this opens up a lot of space for a lot of miscalculation.”

Ms. Kaye said Iran might conclude that it should tread with extreme caution. Or it might reason that the United States poses a threat that is both existential and unyielding, compelling Tehran to gamble on taking extreme measures.

He writes with disarming composure about the factors that have led to the disintegration of empires and the abandonment of cities and about the mechanism that, in his view, makes it nearly certain that all states that rise will one day fall

societal collapse and its associated terms — “fragility” and “resilience,” “risk” and “sustainability” — have become the objects of extensive scholarly inquiry and infrastructure.

Princeton has a research program in Global Systemic Risk, Cambridge a Center for the Study of Existential Risk

even Tainter, for all his caution and reserve, was willing to allow that contemporary society has built-in vulnerabilities that could allow things to go very badly indeed — probably not right now, maybe not for a few decades still, but possibly sooner. In fact, he worried, it could begin before the year was over.

Plato, in “The Republic,” compared cities to animals and plants, subject to growth and senescence like any living thing. The metaphor would hold: In the early 20th century, the German historian Oswald Spengler proposed that all cultures have souls, vital essences that begin falling into decay the moment they adopt the trappings of civilization.

that theory, which became the heart of “The Collapse of Complex Societies.” Tainter’s argument rests on two proposals. The first is that human societies develop complexity, i.e. specialized roles and the institutional structures that coordinate them, in order to solve problems

All history since then has been “characterized by a seemingly inexorable trend toward higher levels of complexity, specialization and sociopolitical control.”

Something more than the threat of violence would be necessary to hold them together, a delicate balance of symbolic and material benefits that Tainter calls “legitimacy,” the maintenance of which would itself require ever more complex structures, which would become ever less flexible, and more vulnerable, the more they piled up.

Eventually, societies we would recognize as similar to our own would emerge, “large, heterogeneous, internally differentiated, class structured, controlled societies in which the resources that sustain life are not equally available to all.”

Social complexity, he argues, is inevitably subject to diminishing marginal returns. It costs more and more, in other words, while producing smaller and smaller profits.

Take Rome, which, in Tainter's telling, was able to win significant wealth by sacking its neighbors but was thereafter required to maintain an ever larger and more expensive military just to keep the imperial machine from stalling — until it couldn’t anymore.

This is how it goes. As the benefits of ever-increasing complexity — the loot shipped home by the Roman armies or the gentler agricultural symbiosis of the San Juan Basin — begin to dwindle, Tainter writes, societies “become vulnerable to collapse.”

haven’t countless societies weathered military defeats, invasions, even occupations and lengthy civil wars, or rebuilt themselves after earthquakes, floods and famines?

Only complexity, Tainter argues, provides an explanation that applies in every instance of collapse.

Complexity builds and builds, usually incrementally, without anyone noticing how brittle it has all become. Then some little push arrives, and the society begins to fracture.

A disaster — even a severe one like a deadly pandemic, mass social unrest or a rapidly changing climate — can, in Tainter’s view, never be enough by itself to cause collapse

Societies evolve complexity, he argues, precisely to meet such challenges.

Whether any existing society is close to collapsing depends on where it falls on the curve of diminishing returns.

The United States hardly feels like a confident empire on the rise these days. But how far along are we?

Scholars of collapse tend to fall into two loose camps. The first, dominated by Tainter, looks for grand narratives and one-size-fits-all explanations

The second is more interested in the particulars of the societies they study

Patricia McAnany, who teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has questioned the usefulness of the very concept of collapse — she was an editor of a 2010 volume titled “Questioning Collapse” — but admits to being “very, very worried” about the lack, in the United States, of the “nimbleness” that crises require of governments.

We’re too vested and tied to places.” Without the possibility of dispersal, or of real structural change to more equitably distribute resources, “at some point the whole thing blows. It has to.”

In Turchin’s case the key is the loss of “social resilience,” a society’s ability to cooperate and act collectively for common goals. By that measure, Turchin judges that the United States was collapsing well before Covid-19 hit. For the last 40 years, he argues, the population has been growing poorer and more unhealthy as elites accumulate more and more wealth and institutional legitimacy founders. “The United States is basically eating itself from the inside out,

Inequality and “popular immiseration” have left the country extremely vulnerable to external shocks like the pandemic, and to internal triggers like the killings of George Floyd

Turchin is keenly aware of the essential instability of even the sturdiest-seeming systems. “Very severe events, while not terribly likely, are quite possible,” he says. When he emigrated from the U.S.S.R. in 1977, he adds, no one imagined the country would splinter into its constituent parts. “But it did.”

Eric H. Cline, who teaches at the George Washington University, argued in “1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed” that Late Bronze Age societies across Europe and western Asia crumbled under a concatenation of stresses, including natural disasters — earthquakes and drought — famine, political strife, mass migration and the closure of trade routes. On their own, none of those factors would have been capable of causing such widespread disintegration, but together they formed a “perfect storm” capable of toppling multiple societies all at once.

Collapse “really is a matter of when,” he told me, “and I’m concerned that this may be the time.”

In “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Tainter makes a point that echoes the concern that Patricia McAnany raised. “The world today is full,” Tainter writes. Complex societies occupy every inhabitable region of the planet. There is no escaping. This also means, he writes, that collapse, “if and when it comes again, will this time be global.” Our fates are interlinked. “No longer can any individual nation collapse. World civilization will disintegrate as a whole.”

If it happens, he says, it would be “the worst catastrophe in history.”

The quest for efficiency, he wrote recently, has brought on unprecedented levels of complexity: “an elaborate global system of production, shipping, manufacturing and retailing” in which goods are manufactured in one part of the world to meet immediate demands in another, and delivered only when they’re needed. The system’s speed is dizzying, but so are its vulnerabilities.

A more comprehensive failure of fragile supply chains could mean that fuel, food and other essentials would no longer flow to cities. “There would be billions of deaths within a very short period,” Tainter says.

If we sink “into a severe recession or a depression,” Tainter says, “then it will probably cascade. It will simply reinforce itself.”

Tainter tells me, he has seen “a definite uptick” in calls from journalists: The study of societal collapse suddenly no longer seems like a purely academic pursuit

The only precedent Tainter could think of, in which pandemic coincided with mass social unrest, was the Black Death of the 14th century. That crisis reduced the population of Europe by as much as 60 percent.

He writes of visions of “bloated bureaucracies” becoming the basis of “entire political careers.” Arms races, he observes, presented a “classic example” of spiraling complexity that provides “no tangible benefit for much of the population” and “usually no competitive advantage” either.

It is hard not to read the book through the lens of the last 40 years of American history, as a prediction of how the country might deteriorate if resources continued to be slashed from nearly every sector but the military, prisons and police.

The more a population is squeezed, Tainter warns, the larger the share that “must be allocated to legitimization or coercion.

And so it was: As U.S. military spending skyrocketed — to, by some estimates, a total of more than $1 trillion today from $138 billion in 1980 — the government would try both tactics, ingratiating itself with the wealthy by cutting taxes while dismantling public-assistance programs and incarcerating the poor in ever-greater numbers.

“As resources committed to benefits decline,” Tainter wrote in 1988, “resources committed to control must increase.”

The overall picture drawn by Tainter’s work is a tragic one. It is our very creativity, our extraordinary ability as a species to organize ourselves to solve problems collectively, that leads us into a trap from which there is no escaping

Complexity is “insidious,” in Tainter’s words. “It grows by small steps, each of which seems reasonable at the time.” And then the world starts to fall apart, and you wonder how you got there.

Perhaps collapse is not, actually, a thing. Perhaps, as an idea, it was a product of its time, a Cold War hangover that has outlived its usefulness, or an academic ripple effect of climate-change anxiety, or a feedback loop produced by some combination of the two

if you pay attention to people’s lived experience, and not just to the abstractions imposed by a highly fragmented archaeological record, a different kind of picture emerges.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, the total net worth of America’s billionaires, all 686 of them, has jumped by close to a trillion dollars.

Tainter’s understanding of societies as problem-solving entities can obscure as much as it reveals

Plantation slavery arose in order to solve a problem faced by the white landowning class: The production of agricultural commodities like sugar and cotton requires a great deal of backbreaking labor. That problem, however, has nothing to do with the problems of the people they enslaved. Which of them counts as “society”?

If societies are not in fact unitary, problem-solving entities but heaving contradictions and sites of constant struggle, then their existence is not an all-or-nothing game.

Collapse appears not as an ending, but a reality that some have already suffered — in the hold of a slave ship, say, or on a long, forced march from their ancestral lands to reservations faraway — and survived.

The current pandemic has already given many of us a taste of what happens when a society fails to meet the challenges that face it, when the factions that rule over it tend solely to their own problems

the real danger comes from imagining that we can keep living the way we always have, and that the past is any more stable than the present.

If you close your eyes and open them again, the periodic disintegrations that punctuate our history — all those crumbling ruins — begin to fade, and something else comes into focus: wiliness, stubbornness and, perhaps the strongest and most essential human trait, adaptability.

When one system fails, we build another. We struggle to do things differently, and we push on. As always, we have no other choice.

During this time, eight American presidents assumed, or hoped, that China would eventually bend to what were considered the established rules of modernization: Prosperity would fuel popular demands for political freedom and bring China into the fold of democratic nations. Or the Chinese economy would falter under the weight of authoritarian rule and bureaucratic rot.

China’s Communist leaders have defied expectations again and again. They embraced capitalism even as they continued to call themselves Marxists. They used repression to maintain power but without stifling entrepreneurship or innovation. Surrounded by foes and rivals, they avoided war, with one brief exception, even as they fanned nationalist sentiment at home. And they presided over 40 years of uninterrupted growth, often with unorthodox policies the textbooks said would fail.

There is no simple explanation for how China’s leaders pulled this off. There was foresight and luck, skill and violent resolve, but perhaps most important was the fear — a sense of crisis among Mao’s successors that they never shook, and that intensified after the Tiananmen Square massacre and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

China’s Communists studied and obsessed over the fate of their old ideological allies in Moscow, determined to learn from their mistakes. They drew two lessons: The party needed to embrace “reform” to survive — but “reform” must never include democratization.

China has veered between these competing impulses ever since, between opening up and clamping down, between experimenting with change and resisting it, always pulling back before going too far in either direction for fear of running aground.

The careers of these men from Moganshan highlight an important aspect of China’s success: It turned its apparatchiks into capitalists.

Party leaders called this go-slow, experimental approach “crossing the river by feeling the stones” — allowing farmers to grow and sell their own crops, for example, while retaining state ownership of the land; lifting investment restrictions in “special economic zones,” while leaving them in place in the rest of the country; or introducing privatization by selling only minority stakes in state firms at first.

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, tried to break the hold of these bureaucrats on the economy by opening up the political system. Decades later, Chinese officials still take classes on why that was a mistake. The party even produced a documentary series on the subject in 2006, distributing it on classified DVDs for officials at all levels to watch.

Afraid to open up politically but unwilling to stand still, the party found another way. It moved gradually and followed the pattern of the compromise at Moganshan, which left the planned economy intact while allowing a market economy to flourish and outgrow it.

American economists were skeptical. Market forces needed to be introduced quickly, they argued; otherwise, the bureaucracy would mobilize to block necessary changes. After a visit to China in 1988, the Nobel laureate Milton Friedman called the party’s strategy “an open invitation to corruption and inefficiency.”

The United States and Japan, both routinely vilified by party propagandists, became major trading partners and were important sources of aid, investment and expertise