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would see four exploration wells drilled 1–2.5 kilometers [0.6–1.6 miles] into the Great Australian Bight, a large body of water to the country's southwest.

Last year, BP agreed to pay $24.5 billion [$17.7 billion USD] to settle claims against the company around the disaster.

It's attention that would be attractive to South Australia, which faces the prospect of becoming Australia's worst-performing state economy.

As the Wilderness Society points out, 85 percent of the species found in the bight cannot be found anywhere else in the world.

with the spill having an "optimistic" flow rate and being capped within 35 days, the modeling predicts that 175,000 barrels of oil would be released into the bight. Worst-case scenario looks more like 50,000 barrels a day for 87 days (the same as Deepwater Horizon)—close to 4.35 million barrels.

But they are not all that new, and to find these policies and values, we need new histories. Here are four things people believed a century ago, before our impoverished era:

1) People in a democracy have a right to control the parameters of economic activity that shapes their lives. Debate about this could be framed as a debate about where to draw lines in the economy between things that are tightly governed and things that are not

2) People in a democracy have a right to gather information about businesses and use that information in the regulation of business.

he aspects of business that touch upon the public lives of the people they come into contact with must not be hidden if we are to govern business fairly. Even such simple things as who owns a company, how much money it earns, how much (and how) it pays its employees and investors, how much (or whether) it pays in taxes are routinely hidden, guarded by lawyers and phrases such as “commercial sensitivity.”

3) There is no such thing as an abstract “market” separate from government. Ever since kings issued royal charters, markets have operated in public spaces under the control of government.

4) Not all business is bad. In almost any sector, in almost any time, there are examples of good practice, of business operating fairly, openly, legally, to the benefit of its employees, its investors, and the public at large. All too often, such companies are at a disadvantage compared to those less scrupulous. Without good governance, it is a race to the bottom.

These are not new ideas. They were articulated, argued over, and implemented long ago, in the Progressive Era. They were the basis of decades of prosperity and the greatest advances in democracy and equality the United States has seen. We need to reread our own history.

The Every Student Succeeds Act (S.1177) allows states to set their own guidelines for rating schools and improving them, with federal oversight and restrictions.

The bill would “put education back in the hands of those who understand their needs best: parents, teachers, states and school boards,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Wednesday. “It’s conservative reform designed to help students succeed instead of helping Washington grow.”

Senate Republicans supported the bill, with the exception of a handful of conservatives including 2016 presidential candidates Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, who don’t think it walks back the federal role in education far enough.

August 2016. States would have more than a year to shift to the new system, which would take hold starting in the 2017-18 school year.

For example, the department could place broad parameters on when a group of students would be considered “consistently” low-performing, signaling a need for intervention.

Since the bill returns power to states, advocates plan on waging state-by-state battles over education policy that were previously fought in Washington.

“With all of this wonderful flexibility comes great responsibility” for states, said Cheryl Oldham, vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber is highlighting the need to continue to focus on minorities this week with a conference it is co-hosting with the NAACP on African-American student achievement.

Unions pushed all year to ditch No Child Left Behind’s embrace of testing, which they’ve dubbed a “test-and-punish” approach.

“This is a vast improvement over what we have right now.”

The Obama administration, too, has begun positioning itself for an intense new phase — designing regulations to implement the law.

Senators celebrated the bill’s passage, but the next steps already loom on the horizon. Senate HELP Committee ranking member Patty Murray (D-Wash.) pledged Tuesday to keep close watch on implementation now that the work in Congress is done.

And job creators, people who own businesses, are yearning for common-sense reforms too. We know we need to find a solution when Larry Wooten, president of the North Carolina Farm Bureau, says, "The longer national political leaders ignore the issue or use it as a political wedge, the more our farmers suffer because they cannot find a sufficient labor pool to harvest their crops."

When it comes to crafting a 21st century immigration process, Bibles, badges and business are ready to work with both Democrats and Republicans to reach a consensus.Americans are ready for a just immigration system that treats all people with dignity and respect. Our leaders in Washington -- of both parties -- can and must deliver.

What they find is that most states respond sensibly to relative decline, undertaking prompt, proportionate retrenchment, because they seek strategic solvency—they don’t want to go bankrupt (and thus lose their independence). That is, the sensible policy choices that helped make them powerful also help them cope with straitened circumstances and decide to reduce their military and avoid armed conflicts.

Parent and McDonald survey power transitions since 1870 (when data on gross domestic product first started being reliably collected) to explore the behavior of both the top states in the order and the lesser but still powerful states. They examine 16 cases of relative decline, some by hegemonic powers and some by mid-level states.

A hegemon is the rule setter and enforcer in the international order. It is typically (but not necessarily) the strongest power, because states fight for the right to establish terms favorable to their interests—so Britain after the Napoleonic Wars, which “ruled the waves,” could waive the rules; and the United States in the 20th century and especially after World War II became the architect of what is called the liberal international order, or the rules-based international order.

The authors also find that states experiencing decline are not generally seen as inviting targets for aggression by others. So rising states are not generally tempted to attack a weakening rival. Parent and McDonald’s research suggests this is because the states experiencing decline steer clear of conflicts—war being the unsentimental arbiter of state power, declining states would rather not risk demonstrating their diminution.

Their research also suggests that these states tend to prevail in the conflicts they do choose to initiate. Parent and McDonald conclude, “This suggests that declining powers are flexible and formidable.”

For all the talk of China’s leaders as brilliant strategists with a hundred-year time horizon in their planning, their choices in the past decade would seem to conform to Parent and McDonald’s description of a premature bid for hegemony.

This is all good news for the United States in a time of waning relative power in the international order. If the future conforms to the data, we can expect a United States that gets its house in order while avoiding wars, as the Chinese activate antibodies against their continued rise, and thereby allow the U.S. to regain its former standing

two things not apparent in the numbers may prove much more important than the findings from Parent and McDonald’s study.

countries do care whether they hold the top spot, the hegemon, because that gives them the ability to set the rules of the game. If China becomes the hegemon, it will change the rules from what they have been in the time of American hegemony: Preference will replace law, small states will be dictated terms by strong states—patterns we have already begun to see in China’s intimidation of regional neighbors and predatory trade and business practices. The United States and its liberal allies may well fight to prevent those changes.

What we may be seeing in their study is less a generalizable theory of the behavior of declining powers than a demonstration of British and German strategic cultures. They may both be anomalous, which makes them poor examples on which to build a theory.

Regime type may also matter much more because it speaks to a state’s resilience

Authoritarian states tend to be more brittle than their democratic counterparts. Lacking free media to publicize failures and challenge polices, lacking distributed power and civil society to experiment with alternatives and check excess, and lacking elections as competitions among different possible directions for policy, authoritarian governments tend to remain committed to failing policies longer.

Twilight of the Titans is a meaningful contribution to the debate about whether the decline of a great power is to be feared as a cause of war in the international system

they make a very strong case that fighting preventive wars is self-defeating for declining powers. Rather than fight to prevent a rising challenger, states losing their relative power should retrench and compromise to avoid conflict.

Adopting Parent and McDonald’s policy recommendations, though, would be learning to live with “democracy with Chinese characteristics.” Which, interestingly enough, is also the policy recommendation Graham Allison makes in Destined for War.

When Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones) asks the president how he can reconcile so noble an aim with such malodorous methods, Lincoln recalls what his youthful years as a surveyor taught him: [A] compass . . . [will] point you true north from where you’re standing, but it’s got no advice about the swamps and deserts and chasms

Whether we approach reality from the top down or the bottom up, Tolstoy seems to be saying, an infinite number of possibilities exist at an indeterminate number of levels, all simultaneously. Some are predictable, most aren’t, and only dramatization—free from the scholar’s enslavement to theory and archives—can begin to represent them.

what is “training,” as Clausewitz understands it? It’s being able to draw upon principles extending across time and space, so that you’ll have a sense of what’s worked before and what hasn’t. You then apply these to the situation at hand: that’s the role of scale. The result is a plan, informed by the past, linked to the present, for achieving some future goal.

It’s worth remembering also that Lincoln—and Shakespeare—had a lifetime to become who they were. Young people today don’t, because society so sharply segregates general education, professional training, ascent within an organization, responsibility for it, and then retirement.

This worsens a problem Henry Kissinger identified long ago: that the “intellectual capital” leaders accumulate prior to reaching the top is all they’ll be able to draw on while at the top.37 There’s less time now than Lincoln had to learn anything new.

A gap has opened between the study of history and the construction of theory, both of which are needed if ends are to be aligned with means. Historians, knowing that their field rewards specialized research, tend to avoid the generalizations

Theorists, keen to be seen as social “scientists,” seek “reproducibility” in results: that replaces complexity with simplicity in the pursuit of predictability. Both communities neglect relationships between the general and the particular—between universal and local knowledge—that nurture strategic thinking.

Collaboration, in theory, could have secured the sea and the land from all future dangers. That would have required, though, the extension of trust, a quality with strikingly shallow roots in the character of all Greeks.

The only solution then is to improvise, but this is not just making it up as you go along. Maybe you’ll stick to the plan, maybe you’ll modify it, maybe you’ll scrap it altogether. Like Lincoln, though, you’ll know your compass heading, whatever the unknowns that lie between you and your destination. You’ll have in your mind a range of options for dealing with these, based—as if from Machiavelli—upon hard-won lessons from those who’ve gone before.

The past and future are no more equivalent, in Thucydides, than are capabilities and aspirations in strategy—they are, however, connected.

The past we can know only from imperfect sources, including our own memories. The future we can’t know, other than that it will originate in the past but then depart from it. Thucydides’ distinction between resemblance and reflection—between patterns surviving across time and repetitions degraded by time—aligns the asymmetry, for it suggests that the past prepares us for the future only when, however imperfectly, it transfers. Just as capabilities restrict aspirations to what circumstances will allow.

Insufficiency demands indirection, and that, Sun Tzu insists, requires maneuver: [W]hen capable, feign incapacity; when active, inactivity. When near, make it appear that you are far; when far away, that you are near. Offer an enemy a bait to lure him; feign disorder and strike him. . . . When he concentrates, prepare against him; where he is strong, avoid him. . . . Pretend inferiority and encourage his arrogance. . . . Keep him under a strain and wear him down. Opposites held in mind simultaneously, thus, are “the strategist’s keys to victory.”

it was Pericles who, more than anyone else, unleashed the Peloponnesian War—the unintended result of constructing a culture to support a strategy.

By the mid-450s Pericles, who agreed, had finished the walls around Athens and Piraeus, allowing total reliance on the sea in any future war. The new strategy made sense, but it made the Athenians, as Thucydides saw, a different people. Farmers, traditionally, had sustained Athens: their fields and vineyards supplied the city in peacetime, and their bodies filled the ranks of its infantry and cavalry when wars came. Now, though, their properties were expendable and their influence diminished.

If Athens were to rely upon the ardor of individuals, then it would have to inspire classes within the city and peoples throughout the empire—even as it retained the cohesiveness of its rival Sparta, still in many ways a small town.

Pericles used his “funeral oration,” delivered in Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War’s first year, to explain what he hoped for. The dead had given their lives, he told the mourners, for the universality of Athenian distinctiveness: Athens imitated no one, but was a pattern for everyone. How, though, to reconcile these apparent opposites? Pericles’ solution was to connect scale, space, and time: Athenian culture would appeal to the city, the empire, and the ages.

The city had acquired its “friends,” Pericles acknowledged, by granting favors, “in order by continued kindness to keep the recipient in [its] debt; while the debtor [knows] that the return he makes will be a payment, not a free gift.” Nevertheless, the Athenians had provided these benefits “not from calculations of expediency, but in the confidence of liberality.” What he meant was that Athens would make its empire at once more powerful and more reassuring than that of any rival.

It could in this way project democracy across cultures because insecure states, fearing worse, would freely align with Athens.22 Self-interest would become comfort and then affinity.

The Athenians’ strategy of walling their cities, however, had reshaped their character, obliging them restlessly to roam the world. Because they had changed, they would have to change others—that’s what having an empire means—but how many, to what extent, and by what means? No one, not even Pericles, could easily say.

Equality, then, was the loop in Pericles’ logic. He saw both it and empire as admirable, but was slow to sense that encouraging one would diminish the other.

Like Lincoln, Pericles looked ahead to the ages. He even left them monuments and sent them messages. But he didn’t leave behind a functional state: it would take well over two millennia for democracy again to become a model with mass appeal.

as Thucydides grimly observes, war “brings most men’s character to a level with their fortunes.”

“Island” strategies require steady nerves. You have to be able to watch smoke rise on horizons you once controlled without losing your own self-confidence, or shaking that of allies, or strengthening that of adversaries.

For the abstractions of strategy and the emotions of strategists can never be separated: they can only be balanced. The weight attached to each, however, will vary with circumstances. And the heat of emotions requires only an instant to melt abstractions drawn from years of cool reflection.

if credibility is always in doubt, then capabilities must become infinite or bluffs must become routine. Neither approach is sustainable: that’s why walls exist in the first place.

he encouraged his readers to seek “knowledge of the past as an aid to the understanding of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it.” For without some sense of the past the future can be only loneliness: amnesia is a solitary affliction.

But to know the past only in static terms—as moments frozen in time and space—would be almost as disabling, because we’re the progeny of progressions across time and space that shift from small scales to big ones and back again. We know these through narratives, whether historical or fictional or a combination of both.

No one can anticipate everything that might happen. Sensing possibilities, though, is better than having no sense at all of what to expect. Sun Tzu seeks sense—even common sense—by tethering principles, which are few, to practices, which are many.

Clausewitz’s concept of training, however, retains its relevance. It’s the best protection we have against strategies getting stupider as they become grander, a recurring problem in peace as well as war. It’s the only way to combine the apparent opposites of planning and improvisation: to teach the common sense that comes from knowing when to be a hedgehog and when a fox.

Victories must connect: otherwise they won’t lead anywhere. They can’t be foreseen, though, because they arise from unforeseen opportunities. Maneuvering, thus, requires planning, but also improvisation. Small triumphs in a single arena set up larger ones elsewhere, allowing weaker contenders to become stronger.

The actions of man, Kennan concluded, “are governed not so much by what he intellectually believes as by what he vividly realizes.”

Nor is it clear, even now, whether Christianity caused Rome’s “fall”—as Gibbon believed—or—as the legacies of Augustus suggest—secured Rome’s institutional immortalities. These opposites have shaped “western” civilization ever since. Not least by giving rise to two truly grand strategies, parallel in their purposes but devised a thousand years apart

Augustine shows that reality always falls short of the ideal: one can strive toward it, but never expect to achieve it. Seeking, therefore, is the best man can manage in a fallen world, and what he seeks is his choice. Nevertheless, not all ends are legitimate; not all means are appropriate. Augustine seeks, therefore, to guide choice by respecting choice. He does this through an appeal to reason: one might even say to common sense.

A peaceful faith—the only source of justice for Christians—can’t flourish without protection, whether through toleration, as in pre-Constantine Rome, or by formal edict, as afterward.20 The City of God is a fragile structure within the sinful City of Man. It’s this that leads Christians to entrust authority to selected sinners—we call it “politics”—and Augustine, for all his piety, is a political philosopher.

Augustine concluded that war, if necessary to save the state, could be a lesser evil than peace—and that the procedural prerequisites for necessity could be stated. Had provocation occurred? Had competent authority exhausted peaceful alternatives? Would the resort to violence be a means chosen, not an end in itself? Was the expenditure of force proportionate to its purposes, so that it wouldn’t destroy what it was meant to defend?

No one before Augustine, however, had set standards to be met by states in choosing war. This could be done only within an inclusionary monotheism, for only a God claiming universal authority could judge the souls of earthly rulers. And only Augustine, in his era, spoke so self-confidently for Him. The

Augustine’s great uncertainty was the status of souls in the City of Man, for only the fittest could hope to enter the City of God. Pre-Christian deities had rarely made such distinctions: the pagan afterlife was equally grim for heroes, scoundrels, and all in between.25 Not so, though, with the Christian God: behavior in life would make a huge difference in death. It was vital, then, to fight wars within rules. The stakes could hardly be higher.

Alignment, in turn, implies interdependence. Justice is unattainable in the absence of order, peace may require the fighting of wars, Caesar must be propitiated—perhaps even, like Constantine, converted—if man is to reach God. Each capability brings an aspiration within reach, much as Sun Tzu’s practices tether his principles, but what’s the nature of the tether? I think it’s proportionality: the means employed must be appropriate to—or at least not corrupt—the end envisaged. This, then, is Augustine’s tilt: toward a logic of strategy transcending time, place, culture, circumstance, and the differences between saints and sinners.

a more revealing distinction may lie in temperament: to borrow from Milan Kundera,37 Machiavelli found “lightness of being” bearable. For Augustine—perhaps because traumatized as a youth by a pear tree—it was unendurable.

“I judge that it might be true that fortune is arbiter of half our actions, but also that she leaves the other half, or close to it, for us to govern.” Fifty percent fortune, fifty percent man—but zero percent God. Man is, however precariously, on his own.

States, Machiavelli suggests, operate similarly. If governed badly, men’s rapacity will soon overwhelm them, whether through internal rebellion or external war. But if run with virtù—his untranslatable term for planning without praying40—states can constrain, if not in all ways control, the workings of fortune, or chance. The skills needed are those of imitation, adaptation, and approximation.

Machiavelli commends the study of history, “for since men almost always walk on paths beaten by others and proceed in their actions by imitation . . . , a prudent man should always enter upon the paths beaten by great men, and imitate those who have been most excellent, so that if his own virtue does not reach that far, it is at least in the odor of it.”

What, then, to do? It helped that Machiavelli and Berlin had lightness of being, for their answer is the same: don’t sweat it. Learn to live with the contradictions. Machiavelli shows “no trace of agony,” Berlin points out, and he doesn’t either:

Eternal truths have little to do with any of this, beyond the assurance that circumstances will change. Machiavelli knows, as did Augustine, that what makes sense in one situation may not in the next. They differ, though, in that Machiavelli, expecting to go to Hell, doesn’t attempt to resolve such disparities. Augustine, hoping for Heaven, feels personally responsible for them. Despite his afflictions, Machiavelli often sees comedy.42 Despite his privileges, Augustine carries a tragic burden of guilt. Machiavelli sweats, but not all the time. Augustine never stops.

“Lightness of being,” then, is the ability, if not to find the good in bad things, then at least to remain afloat among them, perhaps to swim or to sail through them, possibly even to take precautions that can keep you dry. It’s not to locate logic in misfortunes, or to show that they’re for the best because they reflect God’s will.

Augustine and Machiavelli agree that wars should be fought—indeed that states should be run—by pre-specifiable procedures. Both know that aspirations aren’t capabilities. Both prefer to connect them through checklists, not commandments.43

Augustine admits, which is why good men may have to seek peace by shedding blood. The greater privilege, however, is to avert “that calamity which others are under the necessity of producing.” Machiavelli agrees, but notes that a prince so infrequently has this privilege that if he wishes to remain in power he must “learn to be able not to be good,” and to use this proficiency or not use it “according to necessity.”51 As fits man’s fallen state, Augustine sighs. As befits man, Machiavelli simplifies.

As Machiavelli’s finest translator has put it: “[J]ustice is no more reasonable than what a person’s prudence tells him he must acquire for himself, or must submit to, because men cannot afford justice in any sense that transcends their own preservation.”53

princes need advisers. The adviser can’t tell the prince what to do, but he can suggest what the prince should know. For Machiavelli this means seeking patterns—across time, space, and status—by shifting perspectives. “[J]ust as those who sketch landscapes place themselves down in the plain to consider the nature of mountains . . . and to consider the nature of low places place themselves high atop mountains,

Machiavelli embraces, then, a utilitarian morality: you proportion your actions to your objective, not to progress from one nebulous city to another, but because some things have been shown to work and others haven’t.60

Who, then, will oversee them? They’ll do it themselves, Machiavelli replies, by balancing power. First, there’ll be a balance among states, unlike older Roman and Catholic traditions of universality. Machiavelli anticipates the statecraft of Richelieu, Metternich, Bismarck,

But Machiavelli understands balancing in a second and subtler sense, conveyed more explicitly in The Discourses than in The Prince: [I]t is only in republics that the common good is looked to properly in that all that promotes it is carried out; and, however much this or that private person may be the loser on this account, there are so many who benefit thereby that the common good can be realized in spite of those few who suffer in consequence.64 This idea of an internal equilibrium within which competition strengthens community wouldn’t appear again until Adam Smith unveiled an “invisible hand” in The Wealth of Nations (1776), until the American Founding Fathers drafted and in The Federalist justified constitutional checks and balances (1787–88), and until Immanuel Kant linked republics, however distantly, with Perpetual Peace (1795).

Machiavelli’s great transgression, Berlin concluded, was to confirm what everyone knows but no one will admit: that ideals “cannot be attained.” Statecraft, therefore, can never balance realism against idealism: there are only competing realisms. There is no contest, in governing, between politics and morality: there is only politics. And no state respects Christian teaching on saving souls. The incompatibilities are irreconcilable. To deny this is, in Berlin’s words but in Machiavelli’s mind, to “vacillate, fall between two stools, and end in weakness and failure.”

And approximation? “[P]rudent archers,” Machiavelli points out, knowing the strength of their bow, “set their aim much higher than the place intended, not to reach such height with their arrow, but to be able with the aid of so high an aim to achieve their plan.”41 For there will be deflection—certainly from gravity, perhaps from wind, who knows from what else? And the target itself will probably be moving.

Augustine’s City of God no longer exists on earth. The City of Man, which survives, has no single path to salvation. “[T]he belief that the correct, objectively valid solution to the question of how men should live can in principle be discovered,” Berlin finds, “is itself in principle not true.” Machiavelli thus split open the rock “upon which Western beliefs and lives had been founded.” It was he “who lit the fatal fuse.”

Machiavelli’s blood ran colder than was ordinary: he praised Cesare Borgia, for example, and he refused to condemn torture despite having suffered it (Augustine, never tortured, took a similar position).75 Machiavelli was careful, however, to apportion enormities: they should only forestall greater horrors—violent revolution, defeat in war, descent into anarchy, mass killing, or what we would today call “genocide.”

Berlin sees in this an “economy of violence,” by which he means holding a “reserve of force always in the background to keep things going in such a way that the virtues admired by [Machiavelli] and by the classical thinkers to whom he appeals can be protected and allowed to flower.”76 It’s no accident that Berlin uses the plural. For it comes closer than the singular, in English, to Machiavelli’s virtù, implying no single standard by which men must live.

“[T]here are many different ends that men may seek and still be fully rational,” Berlin insists, “capable of understanding . . . and deriving light from each other.” Otherwise, civilizations would exist in “impenetrable bubble[s],” incomprehensible to anyone on the outside. “Intercommunication between cultures in time and space is possible only because what makes men human is common to them, and acts as a bridge between them. But our values are ours, and theirs are theirs.”

Perhaps there are other worlds in which all principles are harmonized, but “it is on earth that we live, and it is here that we must believe and act.”77 By shattering certainty, Machiavelli showed how. “[T]he dilemma has never given men peace since it came to light,” Berlin lightly concludes, “but we have learnt to live with it.”

Posterity has long regarded Augustine and Machiavelli as pivots in the history of “western” thought because each, with enduring effects, shifted long-standing relationships between souls and states.

Philip promises obedience to God, not his subjects. Elizabeth serves her subjects, fitting God to their interests. The king, looking to Heaven, venerates. The queen, feet on earth, calculates. The differences test the ideas of Augustine and Machiavelli against the demands of statecraft at the dawn of the modern age.

Relishing opposites, the queen was constant only in her patriotism, her insistence on keeping ends within means, and her determination—a requirement for pivoting—never to be pinned down.

Pivoting requires gyroscopes, and Elizabeth’s were the best of her era. She balanced purposefulness with imagination, guile, humor, timing, and an economy in movement that, however extravagant her display, kept her steady on the tightrope she walked.

Machiavelli, thinking gyroscopically, advised his prince to be a lion and a fox, the former to frighten wolves, the latter to detect snares. Elizabeth went him one better by being lion, fox, and female, a combination the crafty Italian might have learned to appreciate. Philip was a grand lion, but he was only a lion.

princes can through conscientiousness, Machiavelli warned, become trapped. For a wise ruler “cannot observe faith, nor should he, when such observance turns against him, and the causes that made him promise have been eliminated. . . . Nor does a prince ever lack legitimate causes to color his failure to observe faith.”46

What we like to recall as the Elizabethan “golden age” survived only through surveillance and terror: that was another of its contradictions, maintained regretfully with resignation.

The queen’s instincts were more humane than those of her predecessors, but too many contemporaries were trying to kill her. “Unlike her sister, Elizabeth never burned men for their faith,” her recent biographer Lisa Hilton has written. “She tortured and hanged them for treason.”60 Toleration, Machiavelli might have said, had turned against Elizabeth. She wanted to be loved—who wouldn’t? It was definitely safer for princes, though, to be feared.

“The failure of the Spanish Armada,” Geoffrey Parker has argued, “laid the American continent open to invasion and colonization by northern Europeans, and thus made possible the creation of the United States.” If that’s right, then the future pivoted on a single evening—August 7, 1588—owing to a favorable wind, a clever lord admiral, and a few fiery ships. Had he succeeded, Philip would have required Elizabeth to end all English voyages to America.4

In contrast to Spain’s “new world” colonies—and to the territories that France, more recently, had claimed (but barely settled) along the banks of the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes, and the Ohio and Mississippi rivers—British America “was a society whose political and administrative institutions were more likely to evolve from below than to be imposed from above.”10 That made it a hodgepodge, but also a complex adaptive system.

The principles seem at odds—how can supremacies share?—but within that puzzle, the modern historian Robert Tombs has suggested, lay the foundations of England’s post-Stuart political culture: [S]uspicion of Utopias and zealots; trust in common sense and experience; respect for tradition; preference for gradual change; and the view that “compromise” is victory, not betrayal. These things stem from the failure of both royal absolutism and of godly republicanism: costly failures, and fruitful ones.

Madison’s worst fears of mob rule have been realized—and the cooling mechanisms he designed to slow down the formation of impetuous majorities have broken.

We are living, in short, in a Madisonian nightmare. How did we get here, and how can we escape?

During the election of 1912, the progressive populists Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson insisted that the president derived his authority directly from the people. Since then, the office has moved in precisely the direction the Founders had hoped to avoid: Presidents now make emotional appeals, communicate directly with voters, and pander to the mob.

Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms have accelerated public discourse to warp speed, creating virtual versions of the mob. Inflammatory posts based on passion travel farther and faster than arguments based on reason. Rather than encouraging deliberation, mass media undermine it by creating bubbles and echo chambers in which citizens see only those opinions they already embrace.

The polarization of Congress, reflecting an electorate that has not been this divided since about the time of the Civil War, has led to ideological warfare between parties that directly channels the passions of their most extreme constituents and donors—precisely the type of factionalism the Founders abhorred.

Whatever benefits the parties offered in the 19th and early 20th centuries, however, have long since disappeared. The moderating effects of parties were undermined by a series of populist reforms, including the direct election of senators, the popular-ballot initiative, and direct primaries in presidential elections, which became widespread in the 1970s.

As the historian Sean Wilentz has noted, the great movements for constitutional and social change in the 19th century—from the abolition of slavery to the Progressive movement—were the product of strong and diverse political parties.

The Founders’ greatest failure of imagination was in not anticipating the rise of mass political parties. The first parties played an unexpected cooling function, uniting diverse economic and regional interests through shared constitutional visions

More recently, geographical and political self-sorting has produced voters and representatives who are willing to support the party line at all costs. After the Republicans took both chambers of Congress in 1994, the House of Representatives, under Speaker Newt Gingrich, adjusted its rules to enforce party discipline, taking power away from committee chairs and making it easier for leadership to push bills into law with little debate or support from across the aisle.

The rise of what the presidential historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. called the “imperial presidency” has unbalanced the equilibrium among the three branches. Modern presidents rule by executive order rather than consulting with Congress. They direct a massive administrative state, with jurisdiction over everything from environmental policy to the regulation of the airwaves.

The passions, hyper-partisanship, and split-second decision making that Madison feared from large, concentrated groups meeting face-to-face have proved to be even more dangerous from exponentially larger, dispersed groups that meet online.

some promising, if modest, fixes are on the horizon. Nathaniel Persily, a professor at Stanford Law School who leads an independent commission that will examine the impact of Facebook on democracy, notes one step the company has taken to address the problem of “clickbait,” which lures users with sensational headlines. Articles that persuade many users to click previously appeared high on Facebook’s News Feed. The company now prioritizes those articles users have actually taken the time to read.

“The democratic character of the internet is itself posing a threat to democracy, and there’s no clear solution to the problem,” Persily told me. “Censorship, delay, demotion of information online, deterrence, and dilution of bad content—all pose classic free-speech problems, and everyone should be concerned at every step of the government regulatory parade.”

At the moment, the combination of low voter turnout and ideological extremism has tended to favor very liberal or very conservative candidates in primaries. Thanks to safe districts created by geographic self-sorting and partisan gerrymandering, many of these extremists go on to win the general election. Today, all congressional Republicans fall to the right of the most conservative Democrat, and all congressional Democrats fall to the left of the most liberal Republican. In the 1960s, at times, 50 percent of the lawmakers overlapped ideologically.

The best way of promoting a return to Madisonian principles, however, may be one Madison himself identified: constitutional education. In recent years, calls for more civic education have become something of a national refrain. But the Framers themselves believed that the fate of the republic depended on an educated citizenry. Drawing again on his studies of ancient republics, which taught that broad education of citizens was the best security against “crafty and dangerous encroachments on the public liberty,” Madison insisted that the rich should subsidize the education of the poor.

The civics half of the educational equation is crucial. Recent studies have suggested that higher education can polarize citizens rather than ensuring the rule of reason: Highly educated liberals become more liberal, and highly educated conservatives more conservative

Today, passion has gotten the better of us. The preservation of the republic urgently requires imparting constitutional principles to a new generation and reviving Madisonian reason in an impetuous world.

The 24 at the Transportation Department lag behind only the 31 at HHS and 47 in the executive office of the president.

The swamp has overflowed, with lobbyists employed by Trump quintupling over two years. Boeing, American Airlines and 31 other corporate entities landed at least five former lobbyists apiece. Public Citizen reported that, five months into the administration, nearly 70 percent of top nominees had corporate ties.

In addition, the billions of dollars that corporate executives invest in lobbying and campaign contributions have generated healthy returns: a corporate tax cut, an assault on regulations and unrelenting efforts to shrink enforcement. The president, who previously attempted to privatize 30,000 FAA jobs, again proposed slashing the FAA in his budget this week.

Corporate victories keep coming. The Los Angeles Times just obtained emails showing that EPA officials moved to block NASA from monitoring pollution levels. Politico recently obtained data that showed that the Interior Department gave oil drillers nearly 1,700 waivers of safety rules implemented after BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

The Union of Concerned Scientists has documented more than 70 “attacks on science,” many benefiting corporations: censoring scientific language, suppressing studies, weakening advisory panels and such. The group suspects “inappropriate corporate influence” in rolling back fuel efficiency, chemical and methane standards, repealing the Clean Power Plan, suppressing known health risks, expanding oil and gas leasing and bailing out the coal industry, among others.

In one of the most subtle early analyses of what he tellingly called “Liberation Technology,” Larry Diamond argued that new digital tools would empower “citizens to report news, expose wrongdoing, express opinions, mobilize protest, monitor elections, scrutinize government, deepen participation, and expand the horizons of freedom.” Diamond’s article was published in the summer of 2010.

Twitter, Andrew Sullivan wrote in The Atlantic, had proven to be a “critical tool for organizing.” In twenty-first-century conflict, Nicholas Kristof echoed in The New York Times, “government thugs firing bullets” would increasingly come up against the resistance of “young protesters firing ‘tweets.’”

As Clay Shirky argued in Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, even in longstanding democracies like the United States the power of digital technology made it much easier for activists to coordinate

thanks to Twitter, Donald Trump did not need the infrastructure of traditional media outlets. Instead, he could tweet messages directly to his millions of followers. Once he had done so, established broadcasters faced a stark choice: ignore the main subject of conversation and make themselves irrelevant—or discuss each tweet at length, thereby amplifying Trump’s message even as they ostensibly scrutinized it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they chose the latter course of action.

Breathless claims about digital technology’s liberating potential turned into equally breathless prognostications of doom. Social media was declared the most dangerous foe of liberal democracy.

The truth about social media is not that it is necessarily good or bad for liberal democracy. Nor is it that social media inherently strengthens or undermines tolerance.

On the contrary, it is that social media closes the technological gap between insiders and outsiders.

At times, this meant marginalizing passionate critics of the status quo—and thus making it harder for the weak and powerless to make their voices heard. At other times, it meant declining to publish conspiracy theories, outright lies, or racist rants—and thus stabilizing liberal democracy

The credibility of those claims depends on what they are compared to. So long as the memory of absolute monarchy was recent, and a more directly democratic system seemed unfeasible, liberal democracies could claim to empower the people.

One response has been to put pressure on Twitter and Facebook to change their algorithms and enforce stricter community guidelines; this is the tack that most tech critics have taken in the United State

Another response has been to limit what can be said on social media platforms by coercive legislation; this is the stance that European governments have adopted, with remarkable speed.

it seems at least as plausible to think that Americans won’t be willing to compromise on their First Amendment rights; that they will decamp to more freewheeling alternatives if existing social media platforms are tamed; and, indeed, that more subtle, yet no less powerful, forms of hate will continue to spread on existing platforms even if its most outrageous manifestations are suppressed.

There is, then, a very real possibility that the rise of digital technology, and the concomitant spread of essentially costless communication, have set up a direct clash between two of our most cherished values: freedom of speech and the stability of our political system.

the challenge is even more fundamental.

Rather, the daily experience of liking and sharing posts on social media may habituate users to a simulated form of direct democracy that makes the existing institutions of representative democracy appear intolerably outmoded.

Could digital natives—reared on the direct efficacy of social media—simply be less willing to tolerate the slow, indirect workings of analogue institutions designed in the eighteenth century?

And might they therefore be more resistant to accepting the democratic myth that has long underwritten the stability of the American Republic?

The political systems of countries like Great Britain and the United States were founded not to promote, but to oppose, democracy; they only acquired a democratic halo in retrospect, thanks to more recent claims that they allowed the people to rule.

the rise of the Internet and social media is making the ideological foundation of liberal democracy—which has had a tight hold over our imagination for the better part of two centuries—look increasingly brittle.

This held true for the century or so during which democracy enjoyed an unprecedented ideological hegemony. In the age of the Internet, it no longer does. As a result, the democratic myth that helped to make our institutions look uniquely legitimate is losing its hold.

The undemocratic roots of our supposedly democratic institutions are clearly on display in Great Britain. Parliament was not designed to put power in the hands of the people; it was a blood-soaked compromise between a beleaguered monarch and the upper echelons of the country’s elite

Because the US was founded in a more ideologically self-conscious manner, the same history is even more evident here. For the Founding Fathers, the election of representatives, which we have come to regard as the most democratic way to translate popular views into public policy, was a mechanism for keeping the people at bay

In short, the Founding Fathers did not believe a representative republic to be second best; they found it far preferable to the factious horrors of a true democracy.

It was only in the nineteenth century, as egalitarian sentiment rose on both sides of the Atlantic, that a set of entrepreneurial thinkers began to dress an ideologically self-conscious republic up in the unaccustomed robes of a born-again democracy.

Only gradually did the US make real improvements to its democratic process.

And crucial to that transformation was a story about the limits of democratic governance under modern conditions.

In ancient Athens, so the story went, the people—or at least those who were regarded as the people, which is to say adult male citizens—could rule directly because there were relatively few of them, because the territory of the state was so small, and because they had leisure to govern since so many of them owned slaves who took care of their daily needs

As John Adams noted, the people “can never act, consult, or reason together, because they cannot march five hundred miles, nor spare the time, nor find a space to meet.” In industrial nations that expanded over a huge territory direct democracy was thought to be impossible.

While representative institutions had been founded in ideological opposition to democracy, they were now re-described as the closest instantiation of that ideal possible under modern conditions. Thus, the founding myth of liberal-democratic ideology—the improbable fiction that representative government would facilitate the rule of the people—was born.

we have not even started to address the issue of how to make the democratic promise of our political system ring true for a new generation.

or a long century, the founding myth of liberal democracy retained sufficient footing in reality to keep a deep hold over the popular imagination, and help one political system conquer half the globe. But that basis is now crumbling

With the advent of the Internet, John Adams’s worry about the people’s inability to deliberate together has come to seem quaint

The physical agora of ancient Athens could be replaced by a virtual agora that would allow millions to debate and vote on policy proposals with even greater ease. As a result, citizens now have a much more instinctive sense that our democratic institutions are highly mediated.

They know that if we wanted to design a system of government that truly allowed the people to rule, it would not look much like the representative democracy of today.

The rise of the Internet and social media has thus created a giant mismatch between the direct efficiency of our digital lives and the cumbersome inefficiency of our formal institutions—and that has accentuated the contrast between our system’s promise to let the people rule and the reality that the people rarely feel as though they can have a real impact on the most important decisions facing their country

The Internet threatens to end the hegemony of liberal democracy not only by amplifying the voice of a small band of haters and extremists, but also by alienating a much larger number of digital natives from the decidedly analogue institutions by which they are governed.

We have only just begun to face up to the first big corrosive influence of digital technology on our politics: the way in which social media has helped to mainstream extremists

We’re only beginning to understand how we can stop vast platforms like Facebook and Twitter from spreading hate and fake news—and whether that will even prove possible without sacrificing constitutive elements of our political system

The rising tide of egalitarian sentiment during the nineteenth century should, by rights, have come into conflict with a set of avowedly aristocratic institutions. Instead, its fresh packaging gave the representative institutions of the United States and the United Kingdom a new lease on life. It pleased the elites who continued to get their way on the most important issues as much as it pleased the egalitarians who came to see it as a realization of their aspirations.

the widespread frustration with the state has less to do with excessive bureaucracy or overly cumbersome processes than it does with the underlying reality of the economy and the welfare state: what political scientists call the “performance legitimacy” of our political system has suffered from a combination of rising living costs, stagnating real wages, growing inequality, and dwindling social services.

More important, the real barrier to public participation in politics has always been interest, time, and expertise as much as it has been technology

Even if it were easy to weigh in, even vote, on every decision made at the local, county, state, and federal level, most citizens would hardly marshal the enthusiasm to be so intimately engaged with such a wide variety of questions of public policy.

Nor would most citizens miraculously develop the expertise to assess, for example, what kinds of regulations are needed to keep a power plant safe

A dozen years after the invention of Facebook, by contrast, the new technology has spread to every corner of the globe. Some two billion people actively use the platform.

there can be little doubt that, in the short run—which is to say, for the rest of our lives—it will make for a more chaotic world.

Unfettered by the constraints of the old media system, and buoyed by a growing popular cynicism about democracy’s promise, the demagogues have been willing to say whatever it takes to get elected—to flatter and deceive, to obfuscate, and even to incite hatred of their fellow citizens. Perhaps their rhetoric will prove to be unstoppable. As one state legislator recently pointed out to me, it is difficult for a rational politician to win a debate with a three-sentence answer when his rival is offering a one-sentence answer—especially when the other candidate can blast his simplistic take all over Twitter and Facebook.

All is not lost. But to revitalize liberal democracy in the digital age, it will not be enough to think carefully about how to enforce privacy rights or stifle the most hateful voices on the Internet. We must also think anew about how to fill the democratic promise with meaning for a new generation that has lost the belief in the democratic myth that long provided legitimacy for our political system.

Gaddis keeps pounding — to the point of monotony — the seemingly self-evident: The grand strategist must prune away emotion, ego and conventional wisdom to accept that “if you seek ends beyond your means, then sooner or later you’ll have to scale back your ends to fit your means.

Their implicit idea is to remind America’s future best and brightest how the mostly successful grand strategy of the past saw America become the pre-eminent world power of the 20th century by winning two world conflicts along with the Cold War.

The case studies are variously drawn from some 16 years of co-teaching a well-regarded seminar on “Studies in Grand Strategy” at Yale

Paul Kennedy’s edited “Grand Strategies in War and Peace,” Charles Hill’s “Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order” and more recently Linda Kulman’s “Teaching Common Sense: The Grand Strategy Program at Yale University.”

His repetitious observation about proportionality might have been banal — if so many leaders, many of them geniuses, had not forgotten it

A recurrent theme is the danger of omnipresent hubris. Even a great power cannot master the unexpected and uncontrollable — from the great plague at Athens, to the harsh Russian winter, to I.E.D.s and tribal factionalism in Iraq

The book is as much personal remembrance as strategic reflection, and is chock-full of aphorisms and enigmatic adages.

Gaddis believes the best way to hone strategic thinking is not just by mastering the advice of Machiavelli or Clausewitz (who both figure prominently in the class), much less contemporary high-tech wizardry, but also by understanding the interplay of history, literature and philosophy over 2,500 years of Western civilization — with occasional insights from Sun Tzu and other non-Western thinkers

In some sense “On Grand Strategy” is a traditional argument for the value of classical education in the broadest sense.

The student of strategy learns to balance a grasp of detail with proper humility: It is, of course, wise to have a plan and contingencies. But how will these prompt rival counter-responses? Do such agendas have the means adequate for their ends? Or are they more dreams, warped by ego and emotion

In contrast, the often arrogant neglect of grand strategic thinking has led to postwar quagmires, stalemates and the assorted misadventures that often drained American resources for either impossible or irrelevant aims, while tearing the country apart over the last 70 years.

Understanding the underappreciated role of irony is essential for a leader, and might have prevented the disasters of both 415 B.C. and 1588.

Tolstoy and Clausewitz appreciated that bad things can come from good intentions and vice versa. The best generals live with and react to paradoxes, Gaddis argues. The worst ignore or seek to undo them.

Gaddis sees these more successful global strategists as rope-a-dope pragmatists who remain elastic and patient enough to capitalize on events and opportunities as they unfold, rather than forcing them to fit preconceived schemes.

Morality matters, if defined less as self-righteous ardor and more as self-awareness of a leader’s effect on those around him and an appreciation of paradox.

A pragmatic St. Augustine has no problem with war — if it is a last resort to save civilization, without which there can be neither calm nor organized religion.

Still, courting calculated risk is essential

The gambler Winston Churchill took chances in 1940, albeit rational ones backed by educated guesses that, for all Hitler’s bluster, the Third Reich had neither the air nor sea power to destroy the Anglosphere

Gaddis’s American heroes are Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, who he thinks “rescued democracy and capitalism.”

Roosevelt somehow was cognizant early on of how the singular military and economic potential of America might save Europe and Asia, but only if he first prepared reluctant Americans materially and psychologically for the inevitable war to come

Gaddis concludes with an invaluable warning that true morality embraces neither messianic interventionism nor the quest for utopianism

Instead, ethical leadership pursues the art of the possible for the greater (not the greatest) good

With regard to the American 21st century, Gaddis’s favorite novelists and philosophers perhaps argue against both optional intercessions abroad and moralistic lead-from-behind recessionals. The better course is to marshal American power to prepare for the often unavoidable existential crises on the horizon, with the full expectation that we do not have to be perfect to be good.

“On Grand Strategy” is many things — a thoughtful validation of the liberal arts, an argument for literature over social science, an engaging reflection on university education and some timely advice to Americans that lasting victory comes from winning what you can rather than all that you want.

Every summer we watch dozens of villains plotting to blow up the entire universe, but the motivations are always hazy. Why, exactly, does the baddie want to destroy everything again? Now we know.

It’s not just Elon Musk, who stated that ‘there’s a one in a billion chance we’re living in base reality,’ who believes this—in an extraordinary piece of hedge-betting, the Bank of America has judiciously announced that the probability that waking life is just an illusion is, oh, about fifty-fifty

Tech products no longer feel like something offered to the public, but something imposed: The great visionary looks at the way everyone is doing something, and decides, single-handedly, to change it.

once social reality is the exclusive property of a few geegaw-tinkerers, why shouldn’t physical reality be next? With Google’s Calico seeking hedge-fund investment for human immortality and the Transformative Technology Lab hoping to externalize human consciousness, the tech industry is moving into territory once cordoned off for the occult. Why shouldn’t the fate of the entire cosmos be in the hands of programmers hiding from the California sun, to keep or destroy as they wish?

Unsurprisingly, nobody bothered to ask us whether we want the end of the world or not; they’re just setting about trying to do it. Silicon Valley works by solving problems that hadn’t heretofore existed; its culture is pathologically fixated on the notion of ‘disruption.’

Its real antecedents are the Gnostics, an early Christian sect who believed that the physical universe was the creation of the demiurge, Samael or Ialdaboath, sometimes figured as a snake with the head of a lion, a blind and stupid god who creates his false world in imperfect imitation of the real Creator. This world is a distorted mirror, an image; in other words, a kind of software.

Kabbalist mysticists, Descartes with his deceiving demon, and Zhuangzi in his butterfly dream have all questioned the reality of their sense-experiences, but this isn’t a private, solipsistic hallucination; in the simulation hypothesis, reality is a prison for all of us

there’s always been the lingering suspicion that our reality is somehow unreal—it’s just that what we once thought about in terms of dreams and magic, cosmic minds or whispering devils, is now expressed through boring old computers, that piece of clunky hardware that waits predatory on your desk every morning to code the finest details of your life.

The Gnostics were often accused by other early Christians of Satanism, and they might have had a point: Many identified the jealous, petty, prurient God of the Old Testament with the Demiurge, while sects such as the Ophites revered the serpent in the Garden of Eden as the first to offer knowledge to humanity, freeing them from their first cage

In his book, Baudrillard also talks about virtual realities and deceptive images, but his point isn’t that they have clouded our perception of the reality beyond. The present system of social images is so vast and all-encompassing that it’s produced a total reality for itself; it only lies when it has us thinking that there’s something else behind the façade. Baudrillard, always something of an overgrown child, loved to refer to Disneyland: As he pointed out, it’s in no way a fake—when you leave its gates, you return to an America that’s just one giant Disneyland, a copy without an original, from coast to coast

‘The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none.

Digital and cinematic media actively construct our experience of reality. The world of film stars and theme parks, social media and supermarket shelves designed to look like something out of an old-time grocery—this is the one we live in. Our Silicon Valley Satanists have made a very questionable assumption: What if there’s nowhere to break out into?

the virtual is also real. Why is a universe composed of software necessarily any less real than one composed of matter? Computer simulation is of course only a metaphor, a new-ish way of describing what was once expressed in oneiric or theological terms. They can’t really mean that our universe was built in something similar to the machine you’re using to read these words right now;

simulation is a process independent of whatever divine or technological apparatus is used to achieve it. The real argument is that, by some unknown mechanism, what we see is only a function of what really exists. But we’ve known since Kant that our sense-perception can never give us a full account of the material world; all this can be said of any conceivable reality

Outside the simulation hypothesis there are scientists who propose that our universe is a single black hole, with what we perceive as matter being a hologram emerging from a two-dimensional ring of information along its event horizon; there are mathematical Platonists who, following Max Tegmark, consider the world to be a set of abstract mathematical objects, of which physical objects are a crude epiphenomenon. If matter doesn’t ‘really’ exist, there’s no need for anything to be rooted anywhere; we might live suspended in a looping chain of simulations and appearances that coils back on itself and never has to touch the ground

Elon Musk and his co-religionists aren’t actually blinded by artifice; they’re fixated on a strange and outdated notion that somewhere, there has to be a concrete reality—they’ve just decided that it’s not this one

What’s far more worrying is the fact that the people who want to destroy the only world we really have are also the people increasingly in charge of it.

“This is particularly nefarious because social media companies influence how people think and behave without them even being aware of it. This has far-reaching adverse consequences on the functioning of democracy, particularly on the integrity of elections.”

There is a possibility that once lost, people who grow up in the digital age will have difficulty in regaining it. This may have far-reaching political consequences.”

Soros warned of an “even more alarming prospect” on the horizon if data-rich internet companies such as Facebook and Google paired their corporate surveillance systems with state-sponsored surveillance – a trend that’s already emerging in places such as the Philippines.

“This may well result in a web of totalitarian control the likes of which not even Aldous Huxley or George Orwell could have imagined,”

“The internet monopolies have neither the will nor the inclination to protect society against the consequences of their actions. That turns them into a menace and it falls to the regulatory authorities to protect society against them,

He also echoed the words of world wide web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee when he said the tech giants had become “obstacles to innovation” that need to be regulated as public utilities “aimed at preserving competition, innovation and fair and open universal access”.

Earlier this week, Salesforce’s chief executive, Marc Benioff, said that Facebook should be regulated like a cigarette company because it’s addictive and harmful.

In November, Roger McNamee, who was an early investor in Facebook, described Facebook and Google as threats to public health.

at least 650 of them are armed and about 1,000 have been identified by the state as right-wing “extremists”

Last year the interior ministry detected their hand in 157 “politically motivated” acts of violence, up from 115 in the year before. In 2016 a Reichsbürger named only as Wolfgang P shot four Bavarian police commandos who had come to confiscate his armoury of weapons, killing one of them.

None of these far-right groups is anything like as numerous, as well organised or as semi-officially tolerated as the Nazi Sturmabteilung of the 1920s. Yet there are far more of them than the authorities could realistically watch at any given time.

nother reason for the mounting concern is the likelihood that far-right extremists have contrived to infiltrate the police, the armed forces and even the spy agencies

The Basic Law, the Federal Republic’s de facto constitution, is girded with an iron perimeter of safeguards that were not afforded to its Weimar predecessor: anti-democratic parties are proscribed, the possession of weapons is heavily regulated, and the army is at least theoretically the servant of the Bundestag. It is no accident that the German equivalent of MI5 is known as the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. These matters are taken with the utmost seriousness.

“So the notion that no deal somehow means that we can turn our backs on the EU and break all our ties is just nonsensical.”

He gave a speech on Monday warning that politicians should be thinking carefully about how to protect the union with Scotland and Northern Ireland after Brexit – deal or no deal.

“In those circumstances it’s very different to be lifting their eyes to a more distant horizon. How do we manage as a country, if and when we come out of the EU?

Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University, London, and a former government adviser, said ministers have worked on the assumption that feeding Britain can be left to the market and big retailers. While ministers have been in discussion with supermarket chief executives during the pandemic, Lang argues they are failing to grasp the structural weaknesses in the food system and the scale of food poverty.

Lang added: “Borders are closing, lorries are being slowed down and checked. We only produce 53% of our own food in the UK. It’s a failure of government to plan.”

“Some £1bn extra food and groceries were bought by households in the last two to three weeks. That’s like Christmas but worse because it’s gone on for three times as long,” said Andrew Opie, director of food at the British Retail Consortium, the supermarket trade association.

Supermarkets have built supply chains of immense complexity and sophistication over the last four decades, affording customers a choice of more than 40,000 lines from around the world – from dozens of different kinds of pasta to a permanent global summertime of fresh fruits and vegetables.

The consequences of a disrupted supply chain will be most acute for the millions in households whose incomes are so low that they have depended on food banks or free meals at school or in daycare centres, which have now closed.

She added: “We may need the army to oversee biosecurity as caterers, for example in school kitchens, supply hubs and to enforce social distancing as people collect food from them.”

The government has also been working on a scheme for parents of the 1.6 million children who had been on free school meals, with vouchers which can be redeemed in supermarkets. Campaigners, however, argue the vouchers should be usable for nutritionally-balanced meals from school kitchens, which could be kept open.

The industry can see other threats on the near horizon. The British food system is largely built on a cheap and highly flexible labour force, which can be turned on and off like a tap. Now that is drying up as Brexit, travel restrictions and fear of illness are keeping away the migrants who have typically done that work.

It is creating around eight new hubs from which children in low-income families and isolated adults can have food delivered to their doors. “We have the data to identify people who are likely to be struggling and have mobilised staff,” said its director of public health, Jason Strelitz, but the council was still waiting for government to commit money.

“In a rational world, we would be ramping up production of basic essential supplies – test kits, masks, respirators – not only for our own use, but for poorer countries, too. Because it’s all one battle. But it’s not necessarily a rational world. So there could be a lot of demonisation and calls for isolation. Which will mean more deaths and more suffering worldwide.”

prior to 9/11, the US government had been in the process of developing serious regulations designed to give web users real choice about how their personal information was and wasn’t used. “In the course of a few days,” Zuboff says, “the concern shifted from ‘How do we regulate these companies that are violating privacy norms and rights’ to ‘How do we nurture and protect these companies so they can collect data for us?’”

“People have a hard time remembering privacy rights when they’re trying to deal with something like a pandemic,” says Vasuki Shastry, a Chatham House fellow who studies the interplay of technology and democracy. “Once a system gets scaled up, it can be very difficult to scale it back down. And then maybe it takes on other uses.”

The US Department of Justice has, since the outbreak began, filed a request with Congress for a new rule that would allow judges to suspend courtroom proceedings in emergencies, creating the possibility of people being jailed without ever being able to formally object.

In a 2008 report on the legal aspects of pandemic response, prompted by the increase in pandemic flu outbreaks, a team of historians and medical ethicists assembled by the American Civil Liberties Union bemoaned a common tendency – resurgent, in their view, since 9/11 – for government to address public health problems using mindsets more appropriate to tracking down criminals.

here’s another school of thought that looks at crisis and sees glimmers of possibility

“Ideas that used to be seen as leftwing seem more reasonable to more people. There’s room for change that there wasn’t beforehand. It’s an opening.”

Covid-19 has revealed the political status quo to be broken. Long before anyone had heard of the new coronavirus, people died of diseases we knew how to prevent and treat. People lived precarious lives in societies awash with wealth. Experts told us about catastrophic threats on the horizon, including pandemics, and we did next to nothing to prepare for them

At the same time, the drastic measures governments have taken in recent weeks testify to just how much power the state does have – the extent of what government can accomplish (and quickly!) when it realises it must act boldly or risk being seen as fundamentally illegitimate. As Pankaj Mishra recently wrote: “It has taken a disaster for the state to assume its original responsibility to protect citizens.”

For years, in mainstream politics the conventional line – on everything from healthcare to basic living expenses such as housing – has been that even if the world has its problems, expansive government intervention is not a feasible solution

Instead, we have been told that what works best are “marketplace” solutions, which give large roles to corporations motivated not by outdated notions like “the public good” but by a desire to make a profit

From this perspective, the task today is not to fight the virus in order to return to business as usual, because business as usual was already a disaster. The goal, instead, is to fight the virus – and in doing so transform business as usual into something more humane and secure.

disasters opened up human reserves of improvisation, solidarity and resolve, pockets of purpose and joy, even in the midst of loss and pain

In her 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine, the Canadian writer Naomi Klein laid out a dark account of crisis politics. In Klein’s view, there is always Disaster 1 – the earthquake, the storm, the military conflict, the economic slump – and Disaster 2 – the bad things that people with power subsequently get up to, such as ramming through extreme economic reforms or gobbling up post-crisis opportunities for self-enrichment, while the rest of us are too dazed to notice

Both address crisis not in terms of what inevitably – or “naturally” – happens as they unfold, but in terms of choices that people make along the way. And both were well-timed to contribute to the political conversations taking shape in the rubble of the financial crash

We may not quite all be “in it together” – as always, the poor are hit worse – but there is more truth to the idea than there ever was in the wake of 2008.

In this, the optimists believe, there is hope that we might begin to see the world differently.

Maybe we can view our problems as shared, and society as more than just a mass of individuals competing against each other for wealth and standing. Maybe, in short, we can understand that the logic of the market should not dominate as many spheres of human existence as we currently allow it to.

in the years since publishing The Shock Doctrine, Klein has made climate change her central focus, framing it as the paradigmatic emergency that must be wrenched from the clutches of fossil-fuel profiteers and their enablers in government.

the two problems have suggestive similarities. Both will require unusual levels of global cooperation. Both demand changes in behaviour today in the name of reducing suffering tomorrow. Both problems were long predicted with great certainty by scientists, and have been neglected by governments unable to see beyond the next fiscal quarter’s growth statistics

both will require governments to take drastic action and banish the logic of the marketplace from certain realms of human activity, while simultaneously embracing public investment.

“What is possible politically is fundamentally different when lots of people get into emergency mode – when they fundamentally accept that there’s danger, and that if we want to be safe we need to do everything we can. And it’s been interesting to see that theory validated by the response to the coronavirus

Now the challenge is to keep emergency mode activated about climate, where the dangers are orders of magnitude greater. We can’t think we’re going to go ‘back to normal’, because things weren’t normal.”

Most people do not feel they or their loved ones could die from the climate crisis this month, and so emergency mode is harder to activate and sustain

Alongside these hopeful signs, a far less heartening story is unfolding, which fits Klein’s “shock doctrine” framework. Disaster 1: Covid-19. Disaster 2: the dismantling of even the meagre existing rules designed to protect the environment

advocacy groups funded by the plastics industry have launched a public relations blitz on behalf of single-use plastic bags, spreading the unproven claim that the virus is less likely to stick to plastic than to the cloth fabric of reusable bags.

On 26 March, following lobbying from the energy industry, the US Environmental Protection Agency announced that, in recognition of the pandemic’s effects on the workforce, it will not punish violations of pollution regulations so long as companies can link those violations to the pandemic. China’s environmental ministry has started waiving inspections that assess the environmental impact of industrial facilitie

“It’s good that we’re entering emergency mode about the pandemic,” she said. “But unless we also do it for climate … ” She didn’t finish the sentence.

We need to learn to be scared together, to agree on what we’re terrified about.” Only then, she said, would governments be forced to act.

The historian Philip Mirowski, author of Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown, warns against complacency. “The left thought it was so obvious to everyone that the crisis revealed the utter bankruptcy of a certain way of looking at the economy,” he told me. “And it wasn’t obvious to everyone, and the left lost.”

How do we prevent the world from going back to a version of the way it was before Covid-19, with the virus vanquished but all of the old ongoing disasters still unfolding?

“The political outcome of the epidemic,” said Mike Davis, “will, like all political outcomes, be decided by struggle, by battles over interpretation, by pointing out what causes problems and what solves them. And we need to get that analysis out in the world any way we can.”

the past few weeks have exposed the fact that the biggest things can always change, at any minute. This simple truth, both destabilising and liberating, is easy to forget. We’re not watching a movie: we’re writing one, together, until the end

“I’ve been telling everybody that my event horizon is about 36 months, and that’s my best-case scenario,” she said.

“I’m quite certain that this is going to go in waves,” she added. “It won’t be a tsunami that comes across America all at once and then retreats all at once. It will be micro-waves that shoot up in Des Moines and then in New Orleans and then in Houston and so on, and it’s going to affect how people think about all kinds of things.”

But she called Trump “the most incompetent, foolhardy buffoon imaginable.”

If America enters the next wave of coronavirus infections “with the wealthy having gotten somehow wealthier off this pandemic by hedging, by shorting, by doing all the nasty things that they do, and we come out of our rabbit holes and realize, ‘Oh, my God, it’s not just that everyone I love is unemployed or underemployed and can’t make their maintenance or their mortgage payments or their rent payments, but now all of a sudden those jerks that were flying around in private helicopters are now flying on private personal jets and they own an island that they go to and they don’t care whether or not our streets are safe,’ then I think we could have massive political disruption.

They’ll re-evaluate the importance of travel. They’ll reassess their use of mass transit. They’ll revisit the need for face-to-face business meetings. They’ll reappraise having their kids go to college out of state.

Having long followed Garrett’s work, I can attest that it’s not driven by partisanship. She praised George W. Bush for fighting H.I.V. in Africa.

there is one part of the story she couldn’t have predicted: that the paragon of sloppiness and sluggishness would be the United States.

“I’ve heard from every C.D.C. in the world — the European C.D.C., the African C.D.C., China C.D.C. — and they say, ‘Normally our first call is to Atlanta, but we ain’t hearing back.’ There’s nothing going on down there. They’ve gutted that place. They’ve gagged that place. I can’t get calls returned anymore. Nobody down there is feeling like it’s safe to talk. Have you even seen anything important and vital coming out of the C.D.C.?

America has never been sufficiently invested in public health. The riches and renown go mostly to physicians who find new and better ways to treat heart disease, cancer and the like. The big political conversation is about individuals’ access to health care.

But what about the work to keep our air and water safe for everyone, to design policies and systems for quickly detecting outbreaks, containing them and protecting entire populations? Where are the rewards for the architects of that?

Garrett recounted her time at Harvard. “The medical school is all marble, with these grand columns,” she said. “The school of public health is this funky building, the ugliest possible architecture, with the ceilings falling in.”“That’s America?” I asked.“That’s America,” she said.

America needs good information, from many rigorously designed studies, about the prevalence and deadliness of coronavirus infections in given subsets of people, so that governors and mayors can develop rules for social distancing and reopening that are sensible, sustainable and tailored to the situation at hand.

THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT rests on three political ideas—“these truths,” Thomas Jefferson called them—political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people.

After Benjamin Franklin read Jefferson’s draft, he picked up his quill, scratched out the words “sacred & undeniable,” and suggested that “these truths” were, instead, “self-evident.” This was more than a quibble. Truths that are sacred and undeniable are God-given and divine, the stuff of religion. Truths that are self-evident are laws of nature, empirical and observable, the stuff of science. This divide has nearly rent the Republic apart.

The real dispute is between “these truths” and the course of events: Does American history prove these truths, or does it belie them?

The United States rests on a dedication to equality, which is chiefly a moral idea, rooted in Christianity, but it rests, too, on a dedication to inquiry, fearless and unflinching. Its founders agreed with the Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume, who wrote, in 1748, that “Records of Wars, Intrigues, Factions, and Revolutions are so many Collections of Experiments.”9 They believed that truth is to be found in ideas about morality but also in the study of history.

understanding history as a form of inquiry—not as something easy or comforting but as something demanding and exhausting—was central to the nation’s founding. This, too, was new.

A new kind of historical writing, less memorial and more unsettling, only first emerged in the fourteenth century. “History is a philosophical science,” the North African Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun wrote in 1377, in the prologue to his history of the world, in which he defined history as the study “of the causes and origins of existing things.”11

Only by fits and starts did history become not merely a form of memory but also a form of investigation, to be disputed, like philosophy, its premises questioned, its evidence examined, its arguments countered.

Declaring independence was itself an argument about the relationship between the present and the past, an argument that required evidence of a very particular kind: historical evidence. That’s why most of the Declaration of Independence is a list of historical claims. “To prove this,” Jefferson wrote, “let facts be submitted to a candid world.”

In an attempt to solve this problem, the earliest historians of the United States decided to begin their accounts with Columbus’s voyage, stitching 1776 to 1492. George Bancroft published his History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent to the Present in 1834, when the nation was barely more than a half-century old, a fledgling, just hatched. By beginning with Columbus, Bancroft made the United States nearly three centuries older than it was, a many-feathered old bird.

In 1787, then, when Alexander Hamilton asked “whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force,” that was the kind of question a scientist asks before beginning an experiment. Time alone would tell. But time has passed. The beginning has come to an end. What, then, is the verdict of history?

In deciding what to leave in and what to leave out, I’ve confined myself to what, in my view, a people constituted as a nation in the early twenty-first century need to know about their own past, mainly because this book is meant to double as an old-fashioned civics book, an explanation of the origins and ends of democratic institutions, from the town meeting to the party system, from the nominating convention to the secret ballot, from talk radio to Internet polls. This book is chiefly a political

Aside from being a brief history of the United States and a civics primer, this book aims to be something else, too: it’s an explanation of the nature of the past. History isn’t only a subject; it’s also a method.

The truths on which the nation was founded are not mysteries, articles of faith, never to be questioned, as if the founding were an act of God, but neither are they lies, all facts fictions, as if nothing can be known, in a world without truth.

Between reverence and worship, on the one side, and irreverence and contempt, on the other, lies an uneasy path, away from false pieties and petty triumphs over people who lived and died and committed both their acts of courage and their sins and errors long before we committed ours. “We cannot hallow this ground,” Lincoln said at Gettysburg. We are obliged, instead, to walk this ground, dedicating ourselves to both the living and the dead.

studying history is like that, looking into one face and seeing, behind it, another, face after face after face. “Know whence you came,” Baldwin told his nephew.17 The past is an inheritance, a gift and a burden. It can’t be shirked. You carry it everywhere. There’s nothing for it but to get to know it.

Nature takes one toll, malice another. History is the study of what remains, what’s left behind, which can be almost anything, so long as it survives the ravages of time and war: letters, diaries, DNA, gravestones, coins, television broadcasts, paintings, DVDs, viruses, abandoned Facebook pages, the transcripts of congressional hearings, the ruins of buildings. Some of these things are saved by chance or accident, like the one house that, as if by miracle, still stands after a hurricane razes a town. But most of what historians study survives because it was purposely kept—placed

As nation-states emerged, they needed to explain themselves, which they did by telling stories about their origins, tying together ribbons of myths, as if everyone in the “English nation,” for instance, had the same ancestors, when, of course, they did not. Very often, histories of nation-states are little more than myths that hide the seams that stitch the nation to the state.15

When the United States declared its independence in 1776, plainly, it was a state, but what made it a nation? The fiction that its people shared a common ancestry was absurd on its face; they came from all over, and, having waged a war against England, the very last thing they wanted to celebrate was their Englishness.

Facts, knowledge, experience, proof. These words come from the law. Around the seventeenth century, they moved into what was then called “natural history”: astronomy, physics, chemistry, geology. By the eighteenth century they were applied to history and to politics, too. These truths: this was the language of reason, of enlightenment, of inquiry, and of history.

Against conquest, slaughter, and slavery came the urgent and abiding question, “By what right?”

Yet the origins of the United States date to 1492 for another, more troubling reason: the nation’s founding truths were forged in a crucible of violence, the products of staggering cruelty, conquest and slaughter, the assassination of worlds.

Locke, spurred both by a growing commitment to religious toleration and by a desire to distinguish English settlement from Spanish conquest, stressed the lack of cultivation as a better justification for taking the natives’ land than religious difference, an emphasis with lasting consequences.

Unlike Polo and Mandeville, Columbus did not make a catalogue of the ways and beliefs of the people he met (only later did he hire Pané to do that). Instead, he decided that the people he met had no ways and beliefs. Every difference he saw as an absence.22 Insisting that they had no faith and no civil government and were therefore infidels and savages who could not rightfully own anything, he claimed possession of their land, by the act of writing. They were a people without truth; he would make his truth theirs. He would tell them where the dead go.

It became commonplace, inevitable, even, first among the Spanish, and then, in turn, among the French, the Dutch, and the English, to see their own prosperity and good health and the terrible sicknesses suffered by the natives as signs from God. “Touching these savages, there is a thing that I cannot omit to remark to you,” one French settler wrote: “it appears visibly that God wishes that they yield their place to new peoples.” Death convinced them at once of their right and of the truth of their faith. “The natives, they are all dead of small Poxe,” John Winthrop wrote when he arrived in New England in 1630: “the Lord hathe cleared our title to what we possess.”

In much of New Spain, the mixed-race children of Spanish men and Indian women, known as mestizos, outnumbered Indians; an intricate caste system marked gradations of skin color, mixtures of Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans, as if skin color were like dyes made of plants, the yellow of sassafras, the red of beets, the black of carob. Later, the English would recognize only black and white, a fantasy of stark and impossible difference, of nights without twilight and days without dawns. And yet both regimes of race, a culture of mixing or a culture of pretending not to mix, pressed upon the brows of every person of the least curiosity the question of common humanity: Are all peoples one?

Elizabeth’s best defender argued that if God decided “the female should rule and govern,” it didn’t matter that women were “weake in nature, feable in bodie, softe in courage,” because God would make every right ruler strong. In any case, England’s constitution abided by a “rule mixte,” in which the authority of the monarch was checked by the power of Parliament; also, “it is not she that ruleth but the lawes.” Elizabeth herself called on yet another authority: the favor of the people.48 A mixed constitution, the rule of law, the will of the people: these were English ideas that Americans would one day make their own, crying, “Liberty!”

In the brutal, bloody century between Columbus’s voyage and John White’s, an idea was born, out of fantasy, out of violence, the idea that there exists in the world a people who live in an actual Garden of Eden, a state of nature, before the giving of laws, before the forming of government. This imagined history of America became an English book of genesis, their new truth. “In the beginning,” the Englishman John Locke would write, “all the world was America.” In America, everything became a beginning.

England’s empire would have a different character than that of either Spain or France. Catholics could make converts by the act of baptism, but Protestants were supposed to teach converts to read the Bible; that meant permanent settlements, families, communities, schools, and churches. Also, England’s empire would be maritime—its navy was its greatest strength. It would be commercial. And, of greatest significance for the course of the nation that would grow out of those settlements, its colonists would be free men, not vassals, guaranteed their “English liberties.”

Beginning with the Virginia charter, the idea of English liberties for English subjects was planted on American soil and, with it, the king’s claim to dominion, a claim that rested on the idea that people like Powhatan and his people lived in darkness and without government, no matter that the English called their leaders kings.

Twenty Englishmen were elected to the House of Burgesses. Twenty Africans were condemned to the house of bondage. Another chapter opened in the American book of genesis: liberty and slavery became the American Abel and Cain.

To build his case against the king, Coke dusted off a copy of an ancient and almost entirely forgotten legal document, known as Magna Carta (literally, the “great charter”), in which, in the year 1215, King John had pledged to his barons that he would obey the “law of the land.” Magna Carta wasn’t nearly as important as Coke made it out to be, but by arguing for its importance, he made it important, not only for English history, but for American history, too, tying the political fate of everyone in England’s colonies to the strange doings of a very bad king from the Middle Ages.

Magna Carta explains a great deal about how it is that some English colonists would one day come to believe that their king had no right to rule them and why their descendants would come to believe that the United States needed a written constitution. But Magna Carta played one further pivotal role, the role it played in the history of truth—a history that had taken a different course in England than in any other part of Europe.

The most crucial right established under Magna Carta was the right to a trial by jury.

in 1215, the pope banned trial by ordeal. In Europe, it was replaced by a new system of divine judgment: judicial torture. But in England, where there existed a tradition of convening juries to judge civil disputes—like disagreements over boundaries between neighboring freeholds—trial by ordeal was replaced not by judicial torture but by trial by jury.

This turn marked the beginning of a new era in the history of knowledge: it required a new doctrine of evidence and new method of inquiry and eventually led to the idea that an observed or witnessed act or thing—the substance, the matter, of fact—is the basis of truth. A judge decided the law; a jury decided the facts. Mysteries were matters of faith, a different kind of truth, known only to God.

The age of mystery began to wane, and, soon, the culture of fact spread from law to government.

There would never be very many Africans in New England, but New Englanders would have slave plantations, on the distant shores. Nearly half of colonial New Englanders’ wealth would come from sugar grown by West Indian slaves.

One million Europeans migrated to British America between 1600 and 1800 and two and a half million Africans were carried there by force over that same stretch of centuries, on ships that sailed past one another by day and by night.42 Africans died faster, but as a population of migrants, they outnumbered Europeans two and a half to one.

In the last twenty-five years of the seventeenth century, English ships, piloted by English sea captains, crewed by English sailors, carried more than a quarter of a million men, women, and children across the ocean, shackled in ships’ holds.44 Theirs was not a ship of state crossing a sea of troubles, another Mayflower, their bond a covenant. Theirs was a ship of slavery, their bonds forged in fire. They whispered and wept; they screamed and sat in silence. They grew ill; they grieved; they died; they endured.

By what right did the English hold these people as their slaves?

Under Roman law, all men are born free and can only be made slaves by the law of nations, under certain narrow conditions—for instance, when they’re taken as prisoners of war, or when they sell themselves as payment of debt. Aristotle had disagreed with Roman law, insisting that some men are born slaves. Neither of these traditions from antiquity proved to be of much use to English colonists attempting to codify their right to own slaves, because laws governing slavery, like slavery itself, had disappeared from English common law by the fourteenth century. Said one Englishman in Barbados in 1661, there was “no track to guide us where to walk nor any rule sett us how to govern such Slaves.”46

With no track or rule to guide them, colonial assemblies adopted new practices and devised new laws with which they attempted to establish a divide between “blacks” and “whites.”

Adopting these practices and passing these laws required turning English law upside down, because much in existing English law undermined the claims of owners of people. In 1655, a Virginia woman with an African mother and an English father sued for her freedom by citing English common law, under which children’s status follows that of their father, not their mother. In 1662, Virginia’s House of Burgesses answered doubts about “whether children got by any Englishman upon a Negro woman should be slave or ffree” by reaching back to an archaic Roman rule, partus sequitur ventrem (you are what your mother was). Thereafter, any child born of a woman who was a slave inherited her condition.

By giving Americans a more ancient past, he hoped to make America’s founding appear inevitable and its growth inexorable, God-ordained. He also wanted to celebrate the United States, not as an offshoot of England, but instead as a pluralist and cosmopolitan nation, with ancestors all over the world.

No book should be censored before publication, Milton argued (though it might be condemned after printing), because truth could only be established if allowed to do battle with lies. “Let her and falsehood grapple,” he urged, since, “whoever knew Truth to be put to the worst in a free and open encounter?” This view depended on an understanding of the capacity of the people to reason. The people, Milton insisted, are not “slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that human capacity can soar to.”52

All men, Locke argued, are born equal, with a natural right to life, liberty, and property; to protect those rights, they erect governments by consent. Slavery, for Locke, was no part either of a state of nature or of civil society. Slavery was a matter of the law of nations, “nothing else, but the state of war continued, between a lawful conqueror and a captive.” To introduce slavery in the Carolinas, then, was to establish, as fundamental to the political order, an institution at variance with everything about how Locke understood civil society.