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Of course the Civil War was about slavery, and everyone knew it at the time. No, Nikki Haley, it wasn’t about states’ rights, except to the extent that Southern states were trying to force Northern states to help maintain slavery

it may be worth delving a bit deeper into the background here. Why did slavery exist in the first place? Why was it confined to only part of the United States? And why were slaveholders willing to start a war to defend the institution, even though abolitionism was still a fairly small movement and they faced no imminent risk of losing their chattels?

The American system of chattel slavery wasn’t motivated primarily by racism, but by greed. Slaveholders were racists, and they used racism both to justify their behavior and to make the enslavement of millions more sustainable, but it was the money and the inhumane greed that drove the racist system.

Instead of self-confident and self-centered answers, the author humbly asks fundamental questions: What is economics? What is its meaning? Where does this new religion, as it is sometimes called, come from? What are its possibilities and its limitations and borders, if there are any? Why are we so dependent on permanent growing of growth and growth of growing of growth? Where did the idea of progress come from, and where is it leading us? Why are so many economic debates accompanied by obsession and fanaticism?

The majority of our political parties act with a narrow materialistic focus when, in their programs, they present the economy and finance first; only then, somewhere at the end, do we find culture as something pasted on or as a libation for a couple of madmen.

most of them—consciously or unconsciously—accept and spread the Marxist thesis of the economic base and the spiritual superstructure.

Speaking at Columbia University around this time, Gupta reflected on his new ambition. “When I look at myself, yeah, I am driven by money,” he said. “And when I live in this society, you know, you do get fairly materialistic, so I look at that. I am disappointed. I am probably more materialistic today than I was before, and I think money is very seductive.” He continued: “You have to watch out for it, because the more you have it, you get used to comforts, and you get used to, you know, big houses and vacation homes and going and doing whatever you want, and so it is very seductive. However much you say that you will not fall into the trap of it, you do fall into the trap of it.”

he Republican Party’s technological deficiencies barely begin to explain why the G.O.P. has lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. The party brand — which is to say, its message and its messengers — has become practically abhorrent to emerging demographic groups like Latinos and African-Americans, not to mention an entire generation of young voters.

I flew with Anderson to Columbus, Ohio, to watch her conduct two focus groups. The first consisted of 10 single, middle-class women in their 20s; the second, of 10 20-something men who were either jobless or employed but seeking better work. All of them voted for Obama but did not identify themselves as committed Democrats and were sufficiently ambivalent about the president’s performance that Anderson deemed them within reach of the Republicans.

“I’m going to write down a word, and you guys free-associate with whatever comes to mind,” she said. The first word she wrote was “Democrat.” “Young people,” one woman called out. “Liberal,” another said. Followed by: “Diverse.” “Bill Clinton.”“Change.”“Open-minded.”“Spending.”“Handouts.”“Green.”“More science-based.” When Anderson then wrote “Republican,” the outburst was immediate and vehement: “Corporate greed.”“Old.”“Middle-aged white men.” “Rich.” “Religious.” “Conservative.” “Hypocritical.” “Military retirees.” “Narrow-minded.” “Rigid.” “Not progressive.” “Polarizing.” “Stuck in their ways.” “Farmers.”

It was such a marvelous idea: the United States of America. Obviously, we’ve never really pulled it all together under one hat, but it has always seemed that at least we were striving for a more perfect union. No more. Something changed — and quickly, as history goes. Actually, everything did.

Our hyperpartisanship, augmented by incessant media coverage tied to ratings and greed, has reduced politics to a parking-lot brawl.

Demographic slicing and dicing is essential to elections, of course. Analysts and operatives are especially attached to the segmented sets of individuals, the better to objectify them into manageable parts and, thus, to predict or win elections.

In requesting the resignation of his national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, however, Mr. Trump made his first public concession to political expectations. Hypocrisy has scored a minor victory in America. This is a good thing.

Mr. Trump wasn’t just breaking the rules of political conduct: He was destroying them. He was openly claiming that he abused the system to benefit himself. If he didn’t pay his taxes and got away with it, this made him a good businessman. If he could force himself on women, that made him more of a man. He acted as though this primitive logic were obvious and shared by all.

Fascists the world over have gained popularity by calling forth the idea that the world is rotten to the core. In “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Hannah Arendt described how fascism invites people to “throw off the mask of hypocrisy” and adopt the worldview that there is no right and wrong, only winners and losers.

Everything imagined above—and everything described below—is possible only if many people other than Donald Trump agree to permit it. It can all be stopped, if individual citizens and public officials make the right choices. The story told here, like that told by Charles Dickens’s Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, is a story not of things that will be, but of things that may be. Other paths remain open. It is up to Americans to decide which one the country will follow.

What is spreading today is repressive kleptocracy, led by rulers motivated by greed rather than by the deranged idealism of Hitler or Stalin or Mao. Such rulers rely less on terror and more on rule-twisting, the manipulation of information, and the co-optation of elites.

the American system is also perforated by vulnerabilities no less dangerous for being so familiar. Supreme among those vulnerabilities is reliance on the personal qualities of the man or woman who wields the awesome powers of the presidency.

I think the 1960s were definitely a net positive for America and Americans. Civil rights and women's rights were unequivocal triumphs, as was the newly heightened awareness of what we then called "ecology." The greater tolerance for different kinds of people and for weirdness were excellent changes. Pop music had its awesome big-bang moment, as you say, and movies and visual art were transformed in interesting ways, and we middle-aged people now get to wear blue jeans and sneakers and go to rock concerts and generally behave as if we're young until we die. But we threw some baby out with the bath water. The mistrust of government that blossomed in the late '60s has become a chronic and in some ways pathological condition. We got carried away with the idea of victimhood, so that now white people and Christians and Wall Street guys cast themselves categorically as victims of bigotry. The latent American tendency toward self-righteousness and apocalyptic thinking got ratcheted up. The idea of one's "own truth" started propagating, and that solipsism is now pandemic. And as I recently argued in a Times op-ed which bugged a lot of of '60s-romanticizers on the left and libertarians on the right, I think the "if it feels good do it"/"do your own thing" paradigm of the 1960s also helped enable the greed-is-good hypercapitalism and general selfishness that grew and grew afterward.

drugs, when used consistently, constantly, destructively, are all anesthesia from pain. The Mexican drug cartels crave money, but they make that money from the way Yankees across the border crave numbness. They sell unfeeling. We buy it. We spend tens of billions of dollars a year doing so, and by some estimates about a third to a half of that money goes back to Mexico.

We want not to feel what’s happening to us, and then we do stuff that makes worse things happen–to us and others. We pay for it, too, in a million ways, from outright drug-overdose deaths (which now exceed traffic fatalities, and of which the United States has the highest rate of any nation except tiny Iceland, amounting to more than thirty-seven thousand deaths here in 2009 alone) to the violence of drug-dealing on the street, the violence of people on some of those drugs, and the violence inflicted on children who are neglected, abandoned, and abused because of them–and that’s just for starters.  The stuff people do for money when they’re desperate for drugs generates more violence and more crazy greed

Then there’s our futile “war on drugs” that has created so much pain of its own.