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“Misinformation is the new playbook,” Bob Kelly, the mayor of Great Falls, said. “You don’t like something? Create alternative facts and figures as a way to undermine reality.”

“We’ve run into the uneducable,” Ellen Sievert, a retired historic preservation officer for Great Falls and surrounding Cascade County, said. “I don’t know how we get through that.”

Steve Taylor, a former mayor of Neihart (pop. 43) whose family owns a car dealership in Great Falls, is a conservative who voted for Donald J. Trump twice, though he said he has regretted those votes since the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Fellow Republicans, he said, have painted the heritage area as a liberal plot

“They make it a political thing because if you have a Democrat involved, then they are all against it,” he said. “It’s so hard to build something and so easy to tear it down. It’s maddening. It’s so easy to destroy something with untruths.”

And she came across a vein of conspiratorial accusations that national heritage areas were a kind of Trojan horse that could open the door to future federal land grabs.

Beginning in 2013, Ms. Weber teamed up with local preservationists, formed a nonprofit, enlisted local businesses and raised $50,000 for a required feasibility study. In 2014, the Great Falls City Commission included the heritage area as part of its official growth policy.

The proposal would take in four National Historic Landmarks: Lewis and Clark’s portage route around Great Falls; Fort Benton, a pioneer town along the Missouri River that was the last stop for steamships heading west from St. Louis in the 1800s; the First Peoples Buffalo Jump, a steep cliff over which Blackfoot hunters herded buffalo to their deaths; and the home and studio of C.M. Russell, the turn-of-the-century “cowboy artist” whose paintings of the American West shaped the popular image of frontier life.

The park service requires demonstrations of public support, which Ms. Weber and her allies solicited. For six years, the process went on largely undisturbed. Ms. Weber hosted dozens of public meetings and was a regular on local radio stations. Opponents made scarcely a peep.

Then the 2020 political season arrived.

Ms. Grulkowski’s interest was piqued.At the time, she was becoming engrossed in the online world of far-right media. From her home on 34 acres in Stockett, a farming community of 157 people south of Great Falls, she watched videos from outlets like His Glory TV, where hosts refer to President Biden as “the so-called president.” She subscribed to the Telegram messaging channel of Seth Keshel, a prolific disinformation spreader.

The proposal for the Big Sky Country National Heritage Area, encompassing most of two central Montana counties that are together roughly the size of Connecticut, was the brainchild of Jane Weber, a U.S. Forest Service retiree who spent a decade on the Cascade County Commission.

By May, their campaign had reached the state capital, where Mr. Gianforte signed the bill barring any national heritage area in Montana after it passed on a near-party-line vote. A heritage area, the bill’s text asserted, would “interfere with state and private property rights.”

In two hours of talking at his farm, Mr. Bandel could offer no evidence to back up that claim. He said he distrusted assurances that there were no such designs. “They say, ‘Don’t worry, we’re going to do it right. Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you. I think Adolf Hitler said that, too, didn’t he?” Mr. Bandel said. “The fear of the unknown is a huge fear.”

Mr. Bandel said he trusted Ms. Grulkowski with the details.

But when pressed, Ms. Grulkowski, too, was unable to identify a single instance of a property owner’s being adversely affected by a heritage area. “It’s not that there are a lot of specific instances,” she said. “There’s a lot of very wide open things that could happen.”

That somewhat amorphous fear was more the point.

“We didn’t believe in any of that stuff until last July,” Ms. Grulkowski said. “Then we stumbled on something on the internet, and we watched it, and it took us two days to get over that. And it had to do with the child trafficking that leads to everything. It just didn’t seem right, and that was just over the top. And then we started seeing things that are lining up with that everywhere.”

One thing Ms. Grulkowski does not do — because she refuses to pay — is read The Great Falls Tribune, the local daily. It’s not what it once was, with just eight journalists, down from 45 in 2000, said Richard Ecke, who spent 38 years at the paper before the owner, Gannett, laid him off as opinion editor in 2016. He is vice chairman of the proposed heritage area’s board.

In the paper’s place, information and misinformation about the heritage area spread on Facebook and in local outlets that parroted Ms. Grulkowski. Last winter, a glossy magazine distributed to Montana farmers put the subject on its cover, headlined “Intrusive Raid on Private Property Rights.”

Ms. Grulkowski now has ambitions beyond Montana. She wants to push Congress not to renew heritage areas that already exist.Buoyed by the trust her neighbors have placed in her, she has begun campaigning for Ms. Weber’s old seat on the county commission, in part to avenge the way she feels: mistreated by those in power.She doesn’t feel she’s been told the whole truth.

Blend these factors — a desire for escape from our virtual lives; bidding as fast as pushing a button; and the promotion of new collecting fields like outdated technology devices — and you have Heritage Auctions in Dallas.

Heritage is a whirlwind of activity, of passion, of hype, constantly trying new ways of enticing people to own something beautiful and useless. Ninety-one million Americans, according to U.S. Census Bureau surveys, are having trouble paying household bills. Everyone else is a potential bidder.

Twenty years ago, Heritage had four categories: coins, comics, movie posters and sports. Now it has more than 50, which generated revenue of $1.4 billion last year. Everything, at least in theory, is collectible.

“We don’t question the value or legitimacy of a particular subject matter relative to outmoded norms,” Mr. Benesh said. “We’re not here to tell you what’s worthwhile. The marketplace will tell you. The bidders” — Heritage has 1.6 million — “will tell you.”

In mid-2020, the privately held company moved to a 160,000-square-foot building by Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, doubling the size of its former headquarters. Hundreds of specialists, most of them collectors themselves, prepare hundreds of thousands of items for bids here — researching, photographing, writing catalog copy.

The problem is, older historical items that were previously unknown are becoming rare. Every barn, basement and attic has been ransacked for treasures. New items related to Washington or Lincoln, for instance, are nearly impossible to find.

At The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, nearly every editor and writer of the “Never Trump” persuasion left the paper in the past year, this writer included. George Will did not have his contract renewed at Fox News after his anti-Trump views fell afoul of a network in thrall to the president.

At the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a hawkish, nonpartisan research group, at least two people left over the way the think tank responded to Mr. Trump’s election. “The ability to criticize became very limited. We had to be more and more populist and right wing in our views and our analysis,” one former employee told me. He said that the reason was explained clearly by the leadership: “We were told time and time again that for eight years we’ve been out in the wilderness. Now we have an opportunity for access. We can’t pass it up.”

For a sense of what it looks like for the bomb throwers to run the joint, one needn’t look far. The Heritage Foundation, by far the most influential think tank of the Trump era, is widely seen as a redoubt of Trumpism in large part because of the tremendous influence of the Mercers, who are major donors

“Heritage has gotten away from its core function, which was to provide top-notch policy research to advise conservative lawmakers. It’s become the de facto arm of Bannonism,” one person close to Heritage told me. In recent weeks, the think tank has hosted the president. The home page of its website boasts: “Donald Trump and many newly elected Republican congressmen promised they’d drain the swamp. And Heritage is here to help them do just that!”

“Bannon and Trumpism is a definitive threat to the country. The ideology is a dramatic departure from a long American tradition of America being a global leader,” added Mr. Radosh. “Bannon has spoken of wanting an international alliance with all these emerging right-wing populists in Europe. It is a fundamental rejection of liberalism.”

This is what my brothers and I were told by my mom and my dad, my mammaw and my pappaw.” Many people’s mammaws and pappaws have told them the same thing. There is a distinction, of course, between actual, provable citizenship of the Cherokee Nation, and purported heritage

Cherokee people did intermarry with white settlers at an uncommonly high rate compared to other Native American tribes. Still

the number of people claiming Cherokee heritage far outstrips the number of possible descendants from these intermarriages.

legitimating the antiquity of their native-born status as sons or daughters of the South

pointing out that your family had been here long enough to intermarry with Cherokees was a method of staking a claim to Southern identity. Southern white identity.

Their descendants believed them, and then they had children of their own who also believed these stories, and so on

Which brings us to the other reason white Southerners liked to claim Cherokee heritage, and continued to do so throughout the hyper-racist Jim Crow-era, when having a drop of non-white blood was otherwise a genuine liability: in the decades after the Civil War, the Cherokee story had become a metaphor for the Confederacy.

white Southerners (many of whom, remember, already thought they had Cherokee ancestry) had reimagined the Cherokee as brave anti-federal fighters who courageously resisted government tyranny. The Cherokee had been defeated, but retained their pride and dreamed of a return to former glory — a Lost Cause.

Not to mention that the Cherokee had literally fought for the Confederacy.

increasingly conflated the Cherokee struggle with the struggle of the South, especially as the Civil Rights movement threatened to finally loosen Southern whites’ firm grip on the region.

The deep Southeast is the Cherokee heritage claim’s point of origin, but not its exclusive province. Such claims are common, too, on the outskirts of the region — like Oklahoma, to which the Cherokee were relocated, and the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee, to which many of those who escaped the Trail of Tears fled. So, the lineage claims in Elizabeth Warren’s family are not surprising.

If your ancestor’s name can’t be located in those documents, the chance that you’re actually Cherokee is slim to none. Think of it this way, says Cornsilk, “If there were enough Cherokees to produce all the wannabes now claiming to be us, we would have never lost the war!” And he doesn’t mean the Civil War.

Yet in the immediate aftermath of war, precisely because a peace effort is underway, foreign governments and international peacekeepers are unusually well-placed to intervene. Unlike during armed conflict, there is also a chance for international mediators and local communities to work together to prevent attacks before the damage is done.

In Nagorno-Karabakh, too, cultural reconciliation is still possible. Despite the dismal record of the past three decades, both sides have demonstrated awareness of — and admiration for — heritage that is not their own. In 2019, Armenians restored a prominent 19th-century mosque in Shusha (though they pointedly failed to note its previous use by Azerbaijani Muslims). And in his recent address, Mr. Aliyev acknowledged the importance of the region’s churches — even as he denied their Armenian origin.

Salt in the soil can aid archaeologists in some circumstances, but the same mineral can also be destructive, and is destroying heritage sites, according to the geoarchaeologist Jaafar Jotheri, who described salt as “aggressive … it will destroy the site – destroy the bricks, destroy the cuneiform tablets, destroy everything”.

The destructive power of salt is increasing as concentrations rise amid water shortages caused by dams built upstream by Turkey and Iran, and years of mismanagement of water resources and agriculture within Iraq.

“The salinity in Shatt al-Arab river started to increase from the 90s,” said Ahmad N A Hamdan, a civil engineer who studies the quality of the water in Iraq’s rivers. In his observations, the Shatt al-Arab – formed by the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates - annually tests poor or very poor quality, especially in 2018, which he called a “crisis” year when brackish water sent at least 118,000 people to hospital in southern Basra province during a drought.

The climate crisis is adding to the problem. Iraq is getting hotter and dryer. The United Nations estimates that mean annual temperatures will rise by 2C by 2050 with more days of extreme temperatures of over 50C, while rainfall will drop by as much as 17% during the rainy season and the number of sand and dust storms will more than double from 120 per year to 300. Meanwhile, rising seawater is pushing a wedge of salt up into Iraq and in less than 30 years, parts of southern Iraq could be under water.

“Imagine the next 10 years, most of our sites will be under saline water,” said Jotheri, a professor of archaeology at Al-Qadisiyah University and co-director of the Iraqi-British Nahrein Network researching Iraqi heritage. He started to notice damage from salt at historic sites about a decade ago.

One spot suffering significant damage is Unesco-recognised Babylon, the capital of the Babylonian Empire, where a salty sheen coats 2,600-year-old mud bricks. In the Temple of Ishtar, the Sumerian goddess of love and war, the base of the walls are crumbling. In the depths of the thick wall, salt accumulates until it crystallises, cracking the bricks and causing them to break apart.

Other sites that have been affected are Samarra, the Islamic-era capital with its spiral minaret that is being eroded by sandstorms, and Umm al-Aqarib with its White Temple, palace and cemetery that are being swallowed up by the desert.

This year, Iraq lost a piece of its cultural heritage. On the edge of the desert, 150km south of Babylon, is a bed of salt that was once Sawa Lake. The spring-fed water was home to at least 31 species of bird, including the grey heron and the near-threatened ferruginous duck. Now, it is completely dry because of overuse of water by surrounding farms and climate change. Lack of enforcement of regulations over groundwater use means farmers can freely drill wells and plant wheat fields that are an eruption of lush green in the dusty desert landscape.

“When I was a child I remembered that Sawa Lake was a big lake, a large lake. It looked like the sea. But now it’s gone. Totally gone. We don’t have any lake any more,” said Jotheri.

That means history is best kept on a tight leash.

The unstated reason for Xi’s unwillingness to disavow the Mao era is that Mao is not just China’s Stalin. The Soviet Union was able to discard Stalin because it still had Lenin to fall back on as its founding father. For the Communist party of China, Mao is Stalin and Lenin combined; attack Mao and his era and you attack the foundations of the Communist state.

on a broader level, history is especially sensitive because change in a communist country often starts with history being challenged.

Building on the work of his predecessors, especially Hu Jintao and his call for a Taoist-sounding “harmonious society” (hexie shehui), Xi’s ideological programme includes an explicit embrace of traditional ethical and religious imagery.

efforts to commemorate the past are often misleading or so fragmentary as to be meaningless. Almost all plaques at historical sites, for example, tell either partial histories or outright lies

The Communist party does not just suppress history, it recreates it to serve the present. In China, this has followed the party’s near self-destruction in the Cultural Revolution, which led to a desperate search for ideological legitimacy. At first, this was mainly economic, but following the massacre of pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square in June 1989, the party began to promote itself more aggressively as the defender of Chinese culture and tradition.

One way it has begun to do this has been to position itself as a protector of “intangible cultural heritage”, a term adopted from Unesco, which keeps a country-by-country list of traditions important to specific nations. As opposed to world heritage sites, which are physical structures such as the Great Wall or Forbidden City, intangible heritage includes music, cuisine, theatre, and ceremonies.

the country’s urban centres are built on an obliterated past, which only sometimes seeps into the present through strange-sounding names for streets, parks, and subway stops.

As late as 1990s China, some of these traditions were still labelled “feudal superstition”, a derogatory term in the communist lexicon synonymous with backward cultural practices. For example, traditional funerals were widely discouraged, but now are on the government list of intangible culture. So, too, religious music that is performed exclusively in Taoist temples during ceremonies.

In 2013, according to a news report on 5 December of that year, Xi visited Confucius’s hometown of Qufu, picked up a copy of The Analects – a book of sayings and ideas of the great sage – as well as a biography of him, and declared: “I want to read these carefully.” He also coined his own Confucianesque aphorism – “A state without virtue cannot endure.” The next year, he became the first Communist party leader to participate in a commemoration of Confucius’s birthday.

The China Dream was to be Xi Jinping’s contribution to national sloganeering – every top leader has to have at least one

Xi’s idea was simple to grasp – who doesn’t have a dream? The slogan would become associated with many goals, including nationalism and China’s surge to global prominence, but domestically, its imagery was almost always linked to traditional culture and virtues

Liu spoke freely, without notes, for 90 minutes about something that might seem obscure but that was slowly shaking China’s intellectual world: the discovery of long-lost texts from 2,500 years ago

The texts we were here to learn about had been written a millennium later on flat strips of bamboo, which were the size of chopsticks. These writings did not describe the miscellanea of court life – instead, they were the ur-texts of Chinese culture. Over the past 20 years, three batches of bamboo slips from this era have been unearthed. Liu was there to introduce the third – and biggest – of these discoveries, a trove of 2,500 that had been donated to Tsinghua University in 2008.

The texts stem from the Warring States period, an era of turmoil in China that ran from the 5th to the 3rd centuries BC. All major Chinese schools of thought that exist today stem from this era, especially Taoism and Confucianism, which has been the country’s dominant political ideology, guiding kings and emperors – at least in theory – until the 20th century.

“It’s as though suddenly you had texts that discussed Socrates and Plato that you didn’t know existed,” Sarah Allan, a Dartmouth university professor who has worked with Liu and Li in the project, told me a few months before I heard Liu speak. “People also say it’s like the Dead Sea scrolls, but they’re more important than that. This isn’t apocrypha. These texts are from the period when the core body of Chinese philosophy was being discussed. They are transforming our understanding of Chinese history.”

One of the surprising ideas that comes through in the new texts is that ideas that were only alluded to in the Confucian classics are now revealed as full-blown schools of thought that challenge key traditional ideas. One text, for example, argues in favour of meritocracy much more forcefully than is found in currently known Confucian texts

Until now, the Confucian texts only allowed for abdication or replacement of a ruler as a rare exception; otherwise kingships were hereditary – a much more pro-establishment and anti-revolutionary standpoint. The new texts argue against this. For an authoritarian state wrapping itself in “tradition” to justify its never-ending rule, the implications of this new school are subtle but interesting. “This isn’t calling for democracy,” Allan told me, “but it more forcefully argues for rule by virtue instead of hereditary rule.

“The sophisticated consumer became a bit disappointed in luxury as it strove for ubiquity,”

“You can’t keep opening stores,” Mr. Hutchings said, “so you have to think about exactly how you are engaging with the consumer.” He added: “The new model is representing something a whole lot deeper and more meaningful to consumers.”

As a result, a new front has opened in the luxury wars, with the names stitched inside handbags now also chiseled on cultural institutions. In Italy alone, Tod’s, the Italian luxury group, is underwriting the restoration of the Colosseum for 25 million euros, or $31.7 million; LVMH’s Fendi is spending €2 million for restoration of the Trevi Fountain; Versace is helping to restore Milan’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II; and Salvatore Ferragamo pitched in at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

“Consumers buy luxury goods products as a way to ennoble themselves; luxury goods companies and brands can earn more ‘nobility’ by associating their names to art and masterpieces,”

All of this halo-associating behavior is occurring as luxury has become more enticing as a sector. In the depths of the recession, the luxury market grew by 5 percent worldwide

Today, the company vies for brands and creative talent not just with peers like Kering and Richemont, but also with private equity firms like Yucaipa (which has stakes in Barneys and Zac Posen) and players from the Middle East and Asia. The Qatar Investment Authority owns Harrods as well as minority stakes in Tiffany and Porsche. And the Hong Kong-based Fung Group, through its private equity vehicle First Heritage Brands, owns Sonia Rykiel, Robert Clergerie and Delvaux.

the question for a business being courted by several buyers is not so much “Can you afford us?” as “Who do we like best?” In that context, “linking to culture is a very powerful tool,” said Ms. D’Arpizio at Bain. “You are dealing largely with entrepreneurs who want their brand to survive them and last into the future, and culture is all about preserving that for the future.”

“Steve Jobs once asked me for some advice about retail, but I said, ‘I am not sure at all we are in the same business.’ I don’t know if we will still use Apple products in 25 years, but I am sure we will still be drinking Dom Pérignon.”Technology is predicated on change; luxury, however, is predicated on heritage and connection to tradition.

“France has a complicated relationship to success,” said Mr. Burke, who has worked with Mr. Arnault since that time. “Just think about the fact the expression ‘to make money’ does not exist in France. You ‘gagner l’argent’; you win money — the implication being either you are taking it away from someone by beating them, or you didn’t deserve it. And in France, Bernard Arnault epitomizes making money.”

Mr. Arnault sees his role as ensuring the future of brands, but not necessarily the designers behind them — a crucial distinction. As a result, whenever he makes a controversial play for a company, the predator image becomes part of the fight.

The increased prominence of Antoine and Delphine Arnault has also helped promote an image of LVMH — despite being a huge public company with €29.1 billion in revenue — as a family affair.

“It will show everyone who he really is,” Mr. Claverie said, suggesting that the FLV would reveal Mr. Arnault as someone who makes creativity happen, as opposed to a man who merely exploits and commoditizes it.

“I told Mr. Arnault to be prepared for the fact that the French reaction, at least, will not be all positive,” Mr. Burke of Vuitton said. “I think we may get something along the lines of, ‘Who does he think he is to do this? It is not for business people to make these kinds of cultural statements!’ and so on.”

“At some point, though, France will adapt to it,” he continued. “Then they will accept it. And then they will love it.”

Away from the national level, the commitment of conservative donors to support a power shift in state government illustrates the determination of the right to eliminate regulatory and legal constraints on markets where their money has proven most productive.

Attempts to control the White House have become far more risky with the rise of a strong Democratic presidential coalition. In 2012, conservative groups put $700 million in a bid to win the presidency, two and a half times as much as liberal groups, but Obama still won decisively.

The willingness of conservatives to weather difficulty and to endure prolonged delay has been demonstrated repeatedly over the past decades.

the result for conservatives is thatyour volunteers and paid activists come out of a values-based institution, which is essentially not a political institution. People are there because of their values. If you come to politics from a club or church or veterans hall, it reinforces the stickiness of your work, your willingness to keep at it even if you are tired.

When the State Policy Network was founded in 1986, it had 12 affiliated state-based groups and a goal of creating an “interstate freedom network” to spread “the growth of freedom across America until a permanent freedom majority is built.” Today, there are one or more affiliated organizations in every state.

An examination of IRS reports from all of these conservative groups shows total spending in just one year, 2013, of $142.2 million, with the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s $8.9 million the largest expenditure.

The complex transactions between the foundations in the Koch Brothers network obscure the dollar amount of their investments in state and local organizations. But the Koch Companies’ June Quarterly Newsletter notes that the Koch brothers “hope to raise $889 million by the end of 2016, about two-thirds of which will help support research and education programs, scholarships and other efforts designed to change policies and promote a culture of freedom in the United States.”

the right can tap into an embeddedstructure of community-based cultural, religious, social organizations — churches, Elks, veterans halls, gun groups, local business organizations, etc. — that are gathering places with offices, meeting halls, phones and computers that can be used by activist troops for logistical and operational support.

In 1973, as the Watergate scandal was closing in on the Nixon administration, conservatives financed the creation of two institutions: the Heritage Foundation to counter the left on national policy, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to foster state-based conservative lobbies, interest groups and foundations.

“progressives don’t have these community based, indigenous resources to educate, organize and mobilize troops anymore.” With the exception of unions, “we have fewer local places to gather and belong.”

In 2004, major liberal donors financed two new national groups created specifically for the 2004 presidential election — Americans Coming Together ($79,795,487) and the Joint Victory Committee ($71,811,666).

Despite the investment, the Democratic nominee, John Kerry, lost. At that point, the liberal donor community came to general agreement that the left needed a secure a permanent infrastructure at the national level to compete with such conservative institutions as the Chamber of Commerce, the American Enterprise Institute, Americans for Tax Reform and Heritage.

A year later, Democracy Alliance established its goal of building a “progressive infrastructure that could help counter the well-funded and sophisticated conservative apparatus in the areas of civic engagement, leadership, media, and ideas.”At a national level, the alliance has played a significant role in the development of such groups as the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank; Catalist, which builds and maintains voter lists; and Media Matters, which seeks to document and discredit “conservative misinformation throughout the media.”

It has begun to appear that the twenty-first century progressive brain is not as interested in clubs, communities and cultural sharing as the conservative brain is.

How, Stein asked, “could we have lost that? How does a communitarian world view lose its communitarian sense of self?”

the nature of political liberalism has changed.

The liberalism of the 1930s and 1940s was shaped by the Great Depression, and the response was, in many respects, communitarian: the strengthening of unions, the provision of jobs and government benefits to the poor and unemployed and the creation of a safety net to provide a modicum of security.

The left has, in part, shifted focus, with more stress on the values of self-expression and self-fulfillment, on individual liberation from the constraints of traditional morality, especially sexual morality — what my colleague Ross Douthat calls “The Liberalism of Adult Autonomy” or “the morality of rights.” Economic liberalism – despite progress on the minimum wage - has lost salience.

Instead of communitarian principles, the contemporary progressive movement — despite its advocacy of local issues like community policing — has produced a counterpart to conservative advocacy of free markets: the advocacy of personal freedom.

Insofar as liberals continue to leave the state-level organization to conservatives, they are conceding the most productive policy arenas in the country.

As left interests are being cut out of this process, the groundbreaking work is being done on the right. The losses for the Democratic Party and its allies include broken unions, defunded Planned Parenthood, lost wetlands and forests, restrictive abortion regulations and the proliferation of open-carry gun laws.

conservatives have overseen the drawing of legislative and congressional districts that will keep Republicans in power over the next decade. In this way, through the most effective gerrymandering of legislative and congressional districts in the nation’s history, the right has institutionalized a dangerous power vacuum on the left.

When organizations like the Chamber of Commerce or the Heritage Foundation declare that Trump’s tariffs are a bad idea, they are on solid intellectual ground: All, and I mean all, economic experts agree. But they don’t have any credibility, because these same conservative institutions have spent decades making war on expertise.

it’s hard to pivot from “pay no attention to those so-called experts who say the planet is warming” to “protectionism is bad — all the experts agree.”

Similarly, organizations like Heritage have long promoted supply-side economics, a.k.a., voodoo economics — the claim that tax cuts will produce huge growth and pay for themselves — even though no economic experts agree. So they’ve already accepted the principle that it’s O.K. to talk economic nonsense if it’s politically convenient. Now comes Trump with different nonsense, saying “trade wars are good, and easy to win.” How can they convince anyone that his nonsense is bad, while theirs was good?

Much worse and scarier things may lie ahead, because Trump isn’t just a protectionist, he’s an authoritarian. Trade wars are nasty; unchecked power is much worse, and not just for those who are poor and powerless.

The point is that it’s not just world trade that’s at risk, but the rule of law. And it’s at risk in part because big businesses abandoned all principle in the pursuit of tax cuts.

The towering likenesses of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson weren’t put up to celebrate history or heritage; they were put up as a message: The 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution aren’t going to help you black folks because the South has risen from that humiliation. Jim Crow — a name rooted in blackface mockery — is king.

No, the statues were put up by white people, beginning in the 1890s, to remind black people that, despite all that nonsense of Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, as well as the so-called Reconstruction, we are back, and you are back down.

The Confederate statues of Richmond’s Monument Avenue weren’t erected to honor the service of brave warriors. Those soldiers had been dead for decades before the statues went up

If you doubt that well-documented history — if you are tempted to buy the “heritage, not hate” rhetoric — ask yourself this question: “Where are the statues of James Longstreet?

Longstreet committed two unforgivable sins in the eyes of white supremacists: He criticized Lee’s war leadership, and he led an African American militia to put down an 1874 white rebellion in Louisiana. That’s why this central figure in Civil War history is not depicted among the other Confederate statues in Richmond.

The statues were about only a certain kind of heritage, just as blackface was about a certain kind of storytelling. It was about hate, not history or art.

If Virginia’s leaders want to atone for a troubling legacy, changing state law so Richmond’s statues no longer taunt the progress of our country would be a good place to start

instead of allowing it to cement racialized ways of thinking, we can use these tests to highlight how meaningless genetic ancestry is compared with the many other factors that shape our experience of ourselves and our communities.

For most of human history, the concept of peoplehood — of belonging to a group larger than one’s extended family — has been largely determined by shared cultural practices (such as religion, customs and language) or political institutions.

This more capacious notion of belonging is how heritage is lived day to day for most people. I didn’t need a DNA test to identify as a Jew of European ancestry.

race science got a new lease on life when, in the 1950s, scientists discovered the molecular structure of DNA. By the 1980s DNA testing could reliably prove paternity

More than 26 million people are estimated to have taken genealogical DNA tests.

The answer goes back to the 18th and 19th centuries, when European colonialism and the slave trade birthed the modern concept of race.

As societies were built and genocides committed on the basis of racial hierarchy, it became imperative for racists to prove the biological existence of race. And so race “science” emerged, seeking to dislodge cultural heritage as the prime difference between groups of people.

“Aryan” became synonymous with “German,” excluding the many Jewish and Slavic speakers of the language.

et, no matter how strong it was, this sense of cultural heritage didn’t feel like enough for me. In a society that determines so much based on blood — money, connections, assumptions about character — culture by itself felt like an unreliable narrator of my identity.

Ironically, as academics were reaching the consensus that race is a social construct with no basis in biology — about 94 percent of human genetic variation occurs within so-called racial groups, with racial difference accounting for only 6 percent — the popularity of DNA testing was helping undermine that very idea.

almost 53 percent of Americans think biology at least somewhat determines their racial identity

Two-thirds of white Americans believe that their racial identity is determined by their DNA, compared with about half of black, Latino and Asian Americans

Only 35 percent of those surveyed believe that shared history or culture determines their racial identity.

DNA tests merely compare patterns in your genome with those of groups of people who have been identified as belonging to different ethnicities based on traditional genealogical research (vital records, family trees, etc.)

“If your 23andMe test says you’re 29 percent British, it’s because 29 percent of the pieces of your DNA were most likely to have come from a group that 23andMe’s reference library has labeled ‘British.’ ”

This means ethnicity estimates from companies like 23andMe and AncestryDNA tell a much narrower story than consumers — led along by marketing campaigns — read into them

such estimates are only as good as the companies’ pattern-matching algorithms and DNA reference libraries, which can be incomplete and haphazardly assembled

In fact, these companies’ ethnicity estimates for the same person can vary substantially.

In a society that continues to structure lives along the hierarchy of race, it is difficult to leave behind the reassuring neatness of blood ancestry — of, in an age of turbulence and uncertainty, knowing exactly and objectively who we are — for the reality of mixing, moving and contradiction that makes up our history on this planet.

As Chuck Hoskin Jr., then the Cherokee Nation’s secretary of state, wrote in response to Warren’s DNA testing controversy, “We are [tribal] citizens through historical documentation, adopted laws and a shared language and culture that make us unique.” DNA tests, he said, are “useless to determine tribal citizenship.”

how can people be unaware of this development, or at least unaware of its scale? The main answer, I’d suggest, is that the truly rich are so removed from ordinary people’s lives that we never see what they have.

defenses of extreme inequality almost always invoke the examples of movie and sports stars. But celebrities make up only a tiny fraction of the wealthy, and even the biggest stars earn far less than the financial barons who really dominate the upper strata

For example, according to Forbes, Robert Downey Jr. is the highest-paid actor in America, making $75 million last year. According to the same publication, in 2013 the top 25 hedge fund managers took home, on average, almost a billion dollars each.

Does the invisibility of the very rich matter? Politically, it matters a lot. Pundits sometimes wonder why American voters don’t care more about inequality; part of the answer is that they don’t realize how extreme it is.

defenders of the superrich take advantage of that ignorance. When the Heritage Foundation tells us that the top 10 percent of filers are cruelly burdened, because they pay 68 percent of income taxes, it’s hoping that you won’t notice that word “income” — other taxes, such as the payroll tax, are far less progressive. But it’s also hoping you don’t know that the top 10 percent receive almost half of all income and own 75 percent of the nation’s wealth, which makes their burden seem a lot less disproportionate.

Today’s political balance rests on a foundation of ignorance, in which the public has no idea what our society is really like.

Defenders of the battle flag often further assert that Southern secession and the resultant Civil War had little or nothing to do with slavery, arguing that only a tiny fraction of people in the seceding states—usually cited as 3% to 6%—actually owned slaves. Thus, they say, the flag’s opponents are wrong to condemn it is a symbol of slavery and oppression.

But somebody owned the 3.5 million slaves in the Confederate states in 1861. In fact, census records reveal that 31% of all Confederate households held one or more slaves. The same records show that on farms large enough to avail themselves of slave labor, as many as 70% of planters owned their workers. Such ownership defined wealth and social status, regional culture and economic survival. The prospect of abolishing slavery threatened to upend the slave states’ societies and economies

My fellow white Southerners today need feel no shame in confronting the motivations of our ancestors. The Confederates were men and women of their era; we can only judge them legitimately in that context. Otherwise, we could reject virtually all of human history on one currently unacceptable ground or another. As with symbols, standards, norms and mores change over the ages. We could be shocked indeed were we to live long enough to see how Americans 150 years from now might judge us by the measures of their time.

Moreover, defending the battle flag with appeals to pride in ancestry and heritage evades the issue, deliberately and unsubtly. Black and white Americans today do not reject this emblem primarily because of what happened in the 1860s. They object because of what the flag has come to symbolize in the U.S. and around the world in our own lifetimes.

When we remember that common tax revenues support every expense connected with flying that flag or with displaying Confederate emblems on federal, state or municipal property, we confront the cruel irony of African-American taxpayers being forced to subsidize constant reminders of past and present injustices. Whatever private individuals and groups choose to do on their persons and their private property—and as Americans, they must be allowed their freedom of expression—the battle flag should disappear from display on public property

Lee understood symbols. After the war, he opposed efforts to place monuments on the Confederacy’s battlefields. In 1869, he counseled that Southerners ought to “obliterate the marks of civil strife and to commit to oblivion the feelings it engendered.”

All of which demands that we ask: Can we ever separate the memory of the Confederate experience from the memory of slavery? Is there any positive legacy to be drawn from the Confederacy? Can we admire Confederate leaders, even the all-but-deified Lee, without tacitly endorsing their cause? Ultimately, can we make the Confederacy worth remembering for the descendants of the slaves and those following generations of freedmen whom the whole nation betrayed by ignoring their new rights and liberties for a century?

Such an exercise can come only by directly and honestly addressing the Confederacy and the war it fought, and owning up to the ways they are remembered—both of which are vital to understanding America’s course since 1860. To that end, the Confederacy’s monuments and symbols can be vital learning tools if placed in context. They must be preserved, not expunged. They must be understood, not whitewashed.

The shibboleth that “state rights” caused secession is a suit of clothes desperately lacking an emperor. Only slavery (and its surrounding economic and political issues) had the power to propel white Southerners to disunion and, ultimately, war. Ironically, by taking a course that led to a war that they lost, the Confederates themselves launched the juggernaut that led to emancipation. To understand how freedom and justice came, why it was delayed for a century after the Civil War and why today so much mistrust and misunderstanding persists between black and white Americans, the vital starting point remains the Confederacy.

In the end, Americans cannot afford to forget the Confederacy. It is a good thing that the Confederacy failed—not least because a permanently divided America would have had neither the strength nor the worldliness to confront the next century’s totalitarian menaces. But the Confederate experience also teaches lessons about Americans themselves—about how they have reacted in crisis, about matters beyond just bravery and sacrifice that constitute the bedrock of our national being.

The Confederates were seen at the time as traitors by the North, and they are seen as racists down to the present day, but in the main, they sincerely believed that they were holding true to the guiding principles of democracy.

To paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, America has ever been a laboratory for that democracy. The Confederacy is its most notable failed experiment. The debate over the relation of the states to the federal government had been present since independence. The idea that secession was an alternative if conflicts over sovereignty couldn’t be resolved arose often enough that it was likely to be tried eventually, and so the Confederates tried. They failed. But good scientists don’t erase their laboratory failures; they learn from them.

To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The law did not protect us. And now, in your time, the law has become an excuse for stopping and frisking you, which is to say, for furthering the assault on your body

There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy. This legacy aspires to the shackling of black bodies

It is hard to face this. But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth

ou must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.

And should one live in such a body? What should be our aim beyond meager survival of constant, generational, ongoing battery and assault? I have asked this question all my life.

The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and myths.

I was afraid long before you, and in this I was unoriginal. When I was your age the only people I knew were black, and all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid. It was always right in front of me. The fear was there in the extravagant boys of my West Baltimore neighborhood

The fear lived on in their practiced bop, their slouching denim, their big T- shirts, the calculated angle of their baseball caps, a catalog of behaviors and garments enlisted to inspire the belief that these boys were in firm possession of everything they desired.

But a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker.

still and all I knew that we were something, that we were a tribe—on one hand, invented, and on the other, no less real. The reality was out there on the Yard, on the first warm day of spring when it seemed that every sector, borough, affiliation, county, and corner of the broad diaspora had sent a delegate to the great world party

I remember being amazed that death could so easily rise up from the nothing of a boyish afternoon, billow up like fog. I knew that West Baltimore, where I lived; that the north side of Philadelphia, where my cousins lived; that the South Side of Chicago, where friends of my father lived, comprised a world apart. Somewhere out there beyond the firmament, past the asteroid belt, there were other worlds where children did not regularly fear for their bodies

I came to understand that my country was a galaxy, and this galaxy stretched from the pandemonium of West Baltimore to the happy hunting grounds of Mr. Belvedere. I obsessed over the distance between that other sector of space and my own. I knew that my portion of the American galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a tenacious gravity, was black and that the other, liberated portion was not. I knew that some inscrutable energy preserved the breach. I felt, but did not yet understand, the relation between that other world and me. And I felt in this a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, irrepressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the velocity of escape.

Before I could escape, I had to survive, and this could only mean a clash with the streets, by which I mean not just physical blocks, nor simply the people packed into them, but the array of lethal puzzles and strange perils which seem to rise up from the asphalt itself. The streets transform every ordinary day into a series of trick questions, and every incorrect answer risks a beat-down, a shooting, or a pregnancy. No one survives unscathed

When I was your age, fully one-third of my brain was concerned with who I was walking to school with, our precise number, the manner of our walk, the number of times I smiled, who or what I smiled at, who offered a pound and who did not—all of which is to say that I practiced the culture of the streets, a culture concerned chiefly with securing the body.

Why were only our heroes nonviolent? Back then all I could do was measure these freedom-lovers by what I knew. Which is to say, I measured them against children pulling out in the 7-Eleven parking lot, against parents wielding extension cords, and the threatening intonations of armed black gangs saying, “Yeah, nigger, what’s up now?” I judged them against the country I knew, which had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under slavery, against the country whose armies fanned out across the world to extend their dominion. The world, the real one, was civilization secured and ruled by savage means. How could the schools valorize men and women whose values society actively scorned? How could they send us out into the streets of Baltimore, knowing all that they were, and then speak of nonviolence?

the beauty of the black body was never celebrated in movies, in television, or in the textbooks I’d seen as a child. Everyone of any import, from Jesus to George Washington, was white. This was why your grandparents banned Tarzan and the Lone Ranger and toys with white faces from the house. They were rebelling against the history books that spoke of black people only as sentimental “firsts”—first black four-star general, first black congressman, first black mayor—always presented in the bemused manner of a category of Trivial Pursuit.

erious history was the West, and the West was white. This was all distilled for me in a quote I once read, from the novelist Saul Bellow. I can’t remember where I read it, or when—only that I was already at Howard. “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?,” Bellow quipped

this view of things was connected to the fear that passed through the generations, to the sense of dispossession. We were black, beyond the visible spectrum, beyond civilization. Our history was inferior because we were inferior, which is to say our bodies were inferior. And our inferior bodies could not possibly be accorded the same respect as those that built the West. Would it not be better, then, if our bodies were civilized, improved, and put to some legitimate Christian use?

now I looked back on my need for a trophy case, on the desire to live by the standards of Saul Bellow, and I felt that this need was not an escape but fear again—fear that “they,” the alleged authors and heirs of the universe, were right. And this fear ran so deep that we accepted their standards of civilization and humanity.

“Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus,” wrote Wiley. “Unless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.” And there it was. I had accepted Bellow’s premise. In fact, Bellow was no closer to Tolstoy than I was to Nzinga. And if I were closer it would be because I chose to be, not because of destiny written in DNA. My great error was not that I had accepted someone else’s dream but that I had accepted the fact of dreams, the need for escape, and the invention of racecraft.

The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions.

I could see now that that world was more than a photonegative of that of the people who believe they are white. “White America” is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, “white people” would cease to exist for want of reasons

here will surely always be people with straight hair and blue eyes, as there have been for all history. But some of these straight-haired people with blue eyes have been “black,” and this points to the great difference between their world and ours. We did not choose our fences. They were imposed on us by Virginia planters obsessed with enslaving as many Americans as possible. Now I saw that we had made something down here, in slavery, in Jim Crow, in ghettoes. At The Mecca I saw how we had taken their one-drop rule and flipped it. They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people.

Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into each of them, was sent flowing back to the earth. It is terrible to truly see our particular beauty, Samori, because then you see the scope of the loss. But you must push even further. You must see that this loss is mandated by the history of your country, by the Dream of living white.

I don’t know if you remember how the film we saw at the Petersburg Battlefield ended as though the fall of the Confederacy were the onset of a tragedy, not jubilee. I doubt you remember the man on our tour dressed in the gray wool of the Confederacy, or how every visitor seemed most interested in flanking maneuvers, hardtack, smoothbore rifles, grapeshot, and ironclads, but virtually no one was interested in what all of this engineering, invention, and design had been marshaled to achieve. You were only 10 years old. But even then I knew that I must trouble you, and this meant taking you into rooms where people would insult your intelligence, where thieves would try to enlist you in your own robbery and disguise their burning and looting as Christian charity. But robbery is what this is, what it always was.

American reunion was built on a comfortable narrative that made enslavement into benevolence, white knights of body snatchers, and the mass slaughter of the war into a kind of sport in which one could conclude that both sides conducted their affairs with courage, honor, and élan. This lie of the Civil War is the lie of innocence, is the Dream.

I, like every kid I knew, loved The Dukes of Hazzard. But I would have done well to think more about why two outlaws, driving a car named the General Lee, must necessarily be portrayed as “just some good ole boys, never meanin’ no harm”—a mantra for the Dreamers if there ever was one. But what one “means” is neither important nor relevant. It is not necessary that you believe that the officer who choked Eric Garner set out that day to destroy a body. All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy, and they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.

Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage. Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor—it is not so easy to get a human being to commit their body against its own elemental interest. And so enslavement must be casual wrath and random manglings, the gashing of heads and brains blown out over the river as the body seeks to escape. It must be rape so regular as to be industrial. There is no uplifting way to say this.

It had to be blood. It had to be the thrashing of kitchen hands for the crime of churning butter at a leisurely clip. It had to be some woman “chear’d ... with thirty lashes a Saturday last and as many more a Tuesday again.” It could only be the employment of carriage whips, tongs, iron pokers, handsaws, stones, paperweights, or whatever might be handy to break the black body, the black family, the black community, the black nation. The bodies were pulverized into stock and marked with insurance. And the bodies were an aspiration, lucrative as Indian land, a veranda, a beautiful wife, or a summer home in the mountains. For the men who needed to believe themselves white, the bodies were the key to a social club, and the right to break the bodies was the mark of civilization.

“The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black,” said the great South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun. “And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.” And there it is—the right to break the black body as the meaning of their sacred equality. And that right has always given them meaning, has always meant that there was someone down in the valley because a mountain is not a mountain if there is nothing below.

There is no them without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream. And then they would have to determine how to build their suburbs on something other than human bones, how to angle their jails toward something other than a human stockyard, how to erect a democracy independent of cannibalism. I would like to tell you that such a day approaches when the people who believe themselves to be white renounce this demon religion and begin to think of themselves as human. But I can see no real promise of such a day. We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America. And this has happened here, in our only home, and the terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own.

I think now of the old rule that held that should a boy be set upon in someone else’s chancy hood, his friends must stand with him, and they must all take their beating together. I now know that within this edict lay the key to all living. None of us were promised to end the fight on our feet, fists raised to the sky. We could not control our enemies’ number, strength, or weaponry. Sometimes you just caught a bad one. But whether you fought or ran, you did it together, because that is the part that was in our control. What we must never do is willingly hand over our own bodies or the bodies of our friends. That was the wisdom: We knew we did not lay down the direction of the street, but despite that, we could—and must—fashion the way of our walk. And that is the deeper meaning of your name—that the struggle, in and of itself, has meaning.

I have raised you to respect every human being as singular, and you must extend that same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is as active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. “Slavery” is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren. But when she dies, the world—which is really the only world she can ever know—ends. For this woman, enslavement is not a parable. It is damnation. It is the never-ending night. And the length of that night is most of our history. Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains—whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.

You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never redeem this. Perhaps our triumphs are not even the point. Perhaps struggle is all we have

I am not a cynic. I love you, and I love the world, and I love it more with every new inch I discover. But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know. Indeed, you must be responsible for the worst actions of other black bodies, which, somehow, will always be assigned to you. And you must be responsible for the bodies of the powerful—the policeman who cracks you with a nightstick will quickly find his excuse in your furtive movements. You have to make your peace with the chaos, but you cannot lie.

“I could have you arrested,” he said. Which is to say: “One of your son’s earliest memories will be watching the men who sodomized Abner Louima and choked Anthony Baez cuff, club, tase, and break you.” I had forgotten the rules, an error as dangerous on the Upper West Side of Manhattan as on the West Side of Baltimore. One must be without error out here. Walk in single file. Work quietly. Pack an extra No. 2 pencil. Make no mistakes.

the price of error is higher for you than it is for your countrymen, and so that America might justify itself, the story of a black body’s destruction must always begin with his or her error, real or imagined—with Eric Garner’s anger, with Trayvon Martin’s mythical words (“You are gonna die tonight”), with Sean Bell’s mistake of running with the wrong crowd, with me standing too close to the small-eyed boy pulling out.

You are called to struggle, not because it assures you victory but because it assures you an honorable and sane life

I am sorry that I cannot save you—but not that sorry. Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe oneself white divides them from it. The fact is that despite their dreams, their lives are also not inviolable. When their own vulnerability becomes real—when the police decide that tactics intended for the ghetto should enjoy wider usage, when their armed society shoots down their children, when nature sends hurricanes against their cities—they are shocked by the rages of logic and the natural world in a way that those of us who were born and bred to understand cause and effect can never be.

I would not have you live like them. You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.

I never wanted you to be twice as good as them, so much as I have always wanted you to attack every day of your brief bright life determined to struggle. The people who must believe they are white can never be your measuring stick. I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.

At the risk of oversimplifying, take the example of a family with a diabetic member who must pay for insulin on a regular basis

The family also happens to own stock in the three powerful pharmaceutical companies that manufacture insulin in the United States

price increases have resulted in higher profits for company executives and their shareholders.

Whether those price hikes ultimately harm or benefit the family depends on two factors: how much they spend on insulin and how much of a stake in the insulin companies they own through the stock market.

researchers use data from the federal Survey of Consumer Finances and the Consumer Expenditure Survey to calculate the distribution of corporate equity (e.g., stocks and business equity) and of total consumer expenditures. They find that corporate equity is much more unequally distributed than expenditures.

The top 20 percent of U.S. households own nearly 90 percent of the country’s total equity, according to their calculations. But those households account for a hair under 40 percent of total consumer spending

the bottom 80 percent of the country owns just 10 percent of the equity but spends 60 percent of the money.

On net, that means it’s nearly impossible for the typical U.S. family to make up for higher prices via the performance of their stock portfolio. When prices rise, low- and middle-class families pay. Wealthy families profit

They find that monopolistic pricing takes a bite out of every income group’s share of national income, with the notable exception of the top 20 percent, whose incomes rise. In effect, companies are using their market power to extract wealth from poor and middle-class households and deposit it in the pockets of the wealthy, to the tune of about 3 percent of national household income in 2016.

The implication of these findings is that antitrust enforcement has potential to be a tool in the fight against rising inequality by reducing the ability of large companies to set high prices that primarily benefit the wealthy. Conversely, the findings suggest that a recent lapse in that enforcement is contributing to the growing gap between the rich and poor.

In response to these hardships, farmers in the South and Midwest formed a wide variety of self-help organizations, like the Grange, to pool capital and farm output and exert pressure on railroads. They created third-party organizations, like the short-lived Greenback Party, to advocate an expansion of paper currency and silver specie. Ultimately, they coalesced in 1892 under the banner of the People’s Party—aka, the Populist Party—and adopted a wide-ranging platform advocating progressive tax reform; free coinage of silver; government-backed credit facilities for small farmers; limitations on public subsidies to corporations; and the nationalization of railroads, to ensure equal freight rates for all producers. They forged wobbly but, for a time, effective coalitions with urban labor organizations.

or these scholars, Populism was of a piece with America’s sunnier grass-roots tradition—a heritage that included first- and second-wave feminism, the post-war Civil Rights movement, organized labor and the environmental and consumer rights movements. It was about ordinary people banding together to make a difference. They weren’t all perfect; not every activist was a paragon of tolerance. But in the main, they represented some of the best instincts in American political culture.

Populists also showed antipathy toward immigrants, Jewish and otherwise. “We have become the world’s melting pot,” wrote Tom Watson, a leading Georgia populist. “The scum of creation has been dumped on us. Some of our principal cities are more foreign than American. The most dangerous and corrupting horde of the Old World have invaded us. The vice and crime they planted in our midst are sickening and terrifying. What brought these Goths and Vandals to our shores? The manufacturers are mainly to blame. They wanted cheap labor; and they didn’t care a curse how much harm to our future might be the consequence of their heartless policy.”

Studying the Populists from the vantage point of the mid-1950s, Hofstadter saw something different. The Civil War, he noted, had catalyzed a global information revolution: By the 1870s, railroads spanned the American continent and submerged oceanic telegraph lines bound Europe, North America and South America in real time, allowing them to integrate their markets for agricultural, mineral and finished goods. The era saw a massive movement of internal migrants from farms to cities, and immigrants from one continent to another. To invoke a more modern term, globalization was drawing people in closer proximity. It also bound markets together, compelled a global drop in commodity prices and created a boom-and-bust cycle that was normally outside the ability of local or even national governments to control.

ut if a historian 100 years hence were to read in its entirety Trump’s Twitter feed—or watch five years’ worth of Fox News and comb through a full run of Infowars and Breitbart—it seems likely he or she would want to take a second look at Hofstadter.

Should that move us to reconsider other populist movements? Looking back on Huey Long and Father Coughlin, George Wallace and Pat Buchanan through the lens of Trumpian politics, the ugly, unhinged strain to American populism that meets at the intersection of the far right and far left appears in sharp relief. Hofstadter observed this underbelly of mass politics and warned against it. But Hofstadter is most useful when we scratch below that surface. His goal wasn’t to establish that populists, who over time have pursued a wide variety of ideological and policy ends, are bad people. His larger point was that populist eyes are often cast in the wrong direction—backward. At critical junctures in history, they prove unreconciled to economic and cultural change and to globalization, both in the form of open markets and open borders. They endeavor to reestablish lost worlds—a Jeffersonian republic of small farms and independent shops, or a latter-day utopia of tidy suburbs and unionized factories and mines, that have no hope of survival in a changing world. They bitterly but understandably resist acknowledgment that the country in which they grew up has irrevocably changed.

The United States currently has the lowest minimum wage, as a proportion of its average wage, of any advanced economy,

The argument against increasing the minimum wage often relies on what I call “economism”—the misleading application of basic lessons from Economics 101 to real-world problems, creating the illusion of consensus and reducing a complex topic to a simple, open-and-shut case.

The minimum wage has been a hobgoblin of economism since its origins

Think tanks including Cato, Heritage, and the Manhattan Institute have reliably attacked the minimum wage for decades, all the while emphasizing the key lesson from Economics 101: Higher wages cause employers to cut jobs.

In today’s environment of increasing economic inequality, the minimum wage is a centerpiece of political debate

The real impact of the minimum wage, however, is much less clear than these talking points might indicate.

In 1994, David Card and Alan Krueger evaluated an increase in New Jersey’s minimum wage by comparing fast-food restaurants on both sides of the New Jersey-Pennsylvania border. They concluded, “Contrary to the central prediction of the textbook model ... we find no evidence that the rise in New Jersey’s minimum wage reduced employment at fast-food restaurants in the state.”

Card and Krueger’s findings have been vigorously contested across dozens of empirical studies. Today, people on both sides of the debate can cite papers supporting their position, and reviews of the academic research disagree on what conclusions to draw.

economists who have long argued against the minimum wage, reviewed more than one hundred empirical papers in 2006. Although the studies had a wide range of results, they concluded that the “preponderance of the evidence” indicated that a higher minimum wage does increase unemployment.

On the other hand, two recent meta-studies (which pool together the results of multiple analyses) have found that increasing the minimum wage does not have a significant impact on employment.

The profession as a whole is divided on the topic: When the University of Chicago Booth School of Business asked a panel of prominent economists in 2013 whether increasing the minimum wage to $9 would “make it noticeably harder for low-skilled workers to find employment,” the responses were split down the middle.

The idea that a higher minimum wage might not increase unemployment runs directly counter to the lessons of Economics 101

there are several reasons why the real world does not behave so predictably.

Although the standard model predicts that employers will replace workers with machines if wages increase, additional labor-saving technologies are not available to every company at a reasonable cost

At the other extreme, very large employers may have enough market power that the usual supply-and-demand model doesn’t apply to them. They can reduce the wage level by hiring fewer workers

In the above examples, a higher minimum wage will raise labor costs. But many companies can recoup cost increases in the form of higher prices; because most of their customers are not poor, the net effect is to transfer money from higher-income to lower-income families.

In addition, companies that pay more often benefit from higher employee productivity, offsetting the growth in labor costs.

why higher wages boost productivity: They motivate people to work harder, they attract higher-skilled workers, and they reduce employee turnover, lowering hiring and training costs, among other things

If fewer people quit their jobs, that also reduces the number of people who are out of work at any one time because they’re looking for something better. A higher minimum wage motivates more people to enter the labor force, raising both employment and output

Finally, higher pay increases workers’ buying power. Because poor people spend a relatively large proportion of their income, a higher minimum wage can boost overall economic activity and stimulate economic growth

Even if a higher minimum wage does cause some people to lose their jobs, that cost has to be balanced against the benefit of greater earnings for other low-income workers.

In short, whether the minimum wage should be increased (or eliminated) is a complicated question. The economic research is difficult to parse, and arguments often turn on sophisticated econometric details. Any change in the minimum wage would have different effects on different groups of peop

Nevertheless, when the topic reaches the national stage, it is economism’s facile punch line that gets delivered, along with its all-purpose dismissal: people who want a higher minimum wage just don’t understand economics (although, by that standard, several Nobel Prize winners don’t understand economics

This conviction that the minimum wage hurts the poor is an example of economism in action

one particular result of one particular model is presented as an unassailable economic theorem.

A recent study by researchers at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration, however, found that higher minimum wages have not affected either the number of restaurants or the number of people that they employ, contrary to the industry’s dire predictions, while they have modestly increased workers’ pay.

The fact that this is the debate already demonstrates the historical influence of economism

Low- and middle-income workers’ reduced bargaining power is a major reason why their wages have not kept pace with the overall growth of the economy. According to an analysis by the sociologists Bruce Western and Jake Rosenfeld, one-fifth to one-third of the increase in inequality between 1973 and 2007 results from the decline of unions.

With unions only a distant memory for many people, federal minimum-wage legislation has become the best hope for propping up wages for low-income workers. And again, the worldview of economism comes to the aid of employers by abstracting away from the reality of low-wage work to a pristine world ruled by the “law” of supply and demand.

The resulting intellectual battle over ‘what happened’ at this moment in time reflects developments in historical and memorial practice over the centuries

During the 1650s and especially on the occasion of Charles’ Restoration in 1660, the story was celebrated and narrated

The tree itself became a central part of a particular memorial culture. Pepys says that the king took a cutting from the tree and planted it in St James’s Park

The memory of the event became more and more suffused into English culture. Though abolished in 1859, there are still celebrations around the country relating to ‘Oak Apple Day’

The event has become a complex part of English memorial culture: as a historiographic debate, heritage, a site of tourism and memory, something to be owned, a place to drink, something to spend. Memory, heritage and history work in strange, fascinating, non-linear ways, through England into France, and tracing these various trajectories reveals to us the complexity of consumption of the past.