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Professional wrestling generates intense interest and drama through relentless confrontation. Everybody knows it’s fake at some level, but it is perceived as fake and real at the same time (sort of like politics). What matters is not so much who wins or loses, or whether you are good or evil, but the aggressiveness by which you wage each mano-a-mano confrontation.

Trump brought this style onstage at the first Republican debate, and a thousand taboos were smashed all at once. He insulted people’s looks. He stereotyped vast groups of people — Mexicans and Muslims. He called members of the establishment morons, idiots and losers.

Trump was unabashedly masculine, the lingua franca of pro wrestling. Every time he was challenged, he was compelled by his code to double down the confrontation and fire back.

we saw a big management failure in Trump’s organization. Bernie Sanders is a good enough executive that he was able to lead a campaign that brought outsiders to the polls. Trump is not as effective a leader as Sanders.

What happened in Iowa was that some version of normalcy returned to the G.O.P. race. The precedents of history have not been rendered irrelevant.

Most critically, the playbook, people who have read it tell POLITICO, contained nothing about Donald Trump, who would spend the next excruciating year turning Bush into his personal patrician piñata.

“When you’re the son and brother of former presidents, the grandson of a U.S. senator, how do you run in a year like this? It is just a year of personality, not message.

Days later, on Aug. 25, Trump was on stage at a rally in Dubuque, Iowa, when he offered an impression of Bush and characterized him as “low energy,” a critique he’d come up with after the first debate a few weeks earlier. Bush’s team was stunned, first by the insult and then that it stuck.

“You cannot run a political campaign and not have the ability to adapt, to pivot,” one longtime Bush donor who has supported all five of the family’s presidential campaigns

“He’s Jeb Bush. No one is going to empathize with him as someone who needs his senator to work on his behalf.”

Thus Obama is not only wrong but also anti-American, un-American, non-American, and his policies — though barely distinguishable from those of previous liberal Democrats such as Michael Dukakis or Mario Cuomo — are somehow representative of something subversive.

We are supposed to believe that Trump’s legion of “angry” people are angry about wage stagnation. No, they are angry about all the things Republicans have told them to be angry about these past 7½ years, and it has been Trump’s good fortune to be the guy to sweep them up and become their standard-bearer. He is the Napoleon who has harvested the fruit of the Revolution.

Why didn’t party leaders stand up and try to stop Trump earlier, while there was still time? But how could they have? Trump was feeding off forces in the party they had helped nurture and that they hoped to ride into power.

So what to do now? The Republicans’ creation will soon be let loose on the land, leaving to others the job the party failed to carry out. For this former Republican, and perhaps for others, the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton. The party cannot be saved, but the country still can be.

Today’s Republican Party is our Oedipus. A plague has descended on the party in the form of the most successful demagogue-charlatan in the history of U.S. politics. The party searches desperately for the cause and the remedy without realizing that, like Oedipus, it is the party itself that brought on this plague. The party’s own political crimes are being punished in a bit of cosmic justice fit for a Greek tragedy.

Trump is no fluke. Nor is he hijacking the Republican Party or the conservative movement, if there is such a thing. He is, rather, the party’s creation, its Frankenstein monster, brought to life by the party, fed by the party and now made strong enough to destroy its maker

Was it not the party’s wild obstructionism — the repeated threats to shut down the government over policy and legislative disagreements; the persistent call for nullification of Supreme Court decisions; the insistence that compromise was betrayal; the internal coups against party leaders who refused to join the general demolition — that taught Republican voters that government, institutions, political traditions, party leadership and even parties themselves were things to be overthrown, evaded, ignored, insulted, laughed at?

He reciprocated in kind. “How do you describe coming into a warm room from out of the cold?” he once said. “Never waking up bored? The only thing wrong is, she’s made a coward out of me. Whenever she’s out of sight, I’m a worrier about her.”

But this was a convention in a day when women were not encouraged to have careers outside the home. In his book “Reagan’s America: Innocents At Home,” Garry Wills disputed the prevalent view that Miss Davis had just been marking time in Hollywood while waiting for a man. She was “the steady woman,” he wrote, who in most of her 11 films had held her own with accomplished actors.

In the late 1940s, Hollywood was in the grip of a “Red Scare,” prompted by government investigations into accusations of Communist influence in the film industry. In October 1949, the name “Nancy Davis” appeared in a Hollywood newspaper on a list of signers of a supporting brief urging the Supreme Court to overturn the convictions of two screenwriters who had been blacklisted after being found guilty of contempt for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee.Such newspaper mentions could mean the end of a career, and Nancy Davis sought help from her friend Mervyn LeRoy, who had directed her in “East Side, West Side.” LeRoy found it was a case of mistaken identity: another Nancy Davis had worked in what he called “leftist theater.” He offered to call Ronald Reagan, president of the Screen Actors Guild, to make sure there would be no problems in the future. Instead, Miss Davis insisted that LeRoy set up a meeting with Mr. Reagan.

From the first, Mrs. Reagan was part of the campaign planning. “They were a team,” said Stuart Spencer, who with Bill Roberts managed the Reagan campaign. New to politics, she said little at first. But Mr. Spencer found her “a quick learner, always absorbing.” Before long she was peppering Mr. Roberts and Mr. Spencer about their strategy and tactics.

The mansion episode, and Mrs. Reagan’s unalloyed preference for Southern California, aroused parochial resentment in Sacramento. She in turn disliked the city’s locker-room political culture, which required her to socialize with the wives of legislators who had insulted her husband. She bristled at press scrutiny, which became more intense after Joan Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, wrote an unflattering article, “Pretty Nancy,” in The Saturday Evening Post in 1968. The article described Mrs. Reagan’s famous smile as a study in frozen insecurity.

Mr. Reagan decided to debate and did so well that he surged ahead in the polls and won convincingly a week later.

After the assassination attempt, Mrs. Reagan turned to Joan Quigley, a San Francisco astrologer, who claimed to have predicted that March 30 would be a “bad day” for the president. Her relationship with Ms. Quigley “began as a crutch,” Mrs. Reagan wrote, “one of several ways I tried to alleviate my anxiety about Ronnie.” Within a year, it was a habit. Mrs. Reagan conversed with Ms. Quigley by telephone and passed on the information she received about favorable and unfavorable days to Mr. Deaver, the presidential assistant, and later to the White House chief of staff, Donald Regan, for use in scheduling.

Mr. Regan disclosed Mrs. Reagan’s astrological bent in his 1988 book, “For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington,” asserting that the Quigley information created a chaotic situation for White House schedulers. Mrs. Reagan said that no political decisions had been made based on the astrologist’s advice, nor did Mr. Regan allege that any had been.But the disc

losure was nonetheless embarrassing to Mrs. Reagan; she and many commentators saw it as an act of revenge for the role she had played in forcing Mr. Regan out after the Iran-contra disclosures. Mrs. Reagan’s low opinion of Mr. Regan was well known; she had said tartly that he “liked the sound of chief but not of staff.”

Trump is a man repeatedly underestimated by the very elites who made Trumpism possible. He’s smarter than most of his belittlers, and quicker on his feet, which makes him only more dangerous.

He’s the anti-Obama, all theater where the president is all prudence, the mouth-that-spews to the presidential teleprompter, rage against reason, the backslapper against the maestro of aloofness, the rabble-rouser to the cerebral law professor, the deal maker to the diligent observer.

The French prime minister, Manuel Valls, has tweeted that Trump “fuels hatred.” In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron has attacked Trump’s proposed ban on non-American Muslims entering the United States, and more than half a million people have signed a petition urging that he be kept out of Britain. This weekend Britain's Sunday Times ran a page-size photo of Trump in Lord Kitchener pose with a blaring headline:

As Europe knows, democracies do die. Often, they are the midwives of their own demise. Once lost, the cost of recovery is high.

The prime minister favors a strong state role in the economy, has been critical of Western sanctions against Russia and is known for strong anti-Muslim rhetoric.

The party says NATO is a terrorist organization and keeps attacking the European Union and Europe's common currency, the euro, which Slovakia uses.

The ultra-nationalist Slovak National Party, Fico's potential partner, returned to Parliament after a four-year-absence with 8.6 percent while the traditional party in the predominantly Roman Catholic country of 5.4 million, the Christian Democrats, didn't get enough votes to be represented.

neo-Nazi People's Party — Our Slovakia — got 8 percent, or 14 seats.

The pro-business Freedom and Solidarity became the second strongest party with 12.1 percent, or 21 seats, ahead of another center-right party, the Ordinary People with 11.0 percent.

Fico said it is his duty as the winner to create a meaningful government. He said he will open a first round of informal consultations with other parties Sunday.

Mitt Romney jumps on #NeverTrump: Our view

Donald Trump's strong showing on Super Tuesday put prominent Republicans in a tight spot. They have three distinct choices: Jump on the Trump bandwagon. Stay silent, and try to save their own skins if they end up on the November ballot beneath Trump. Or denounce Trump as unfit for the GOP nomination or the presidency.

Only a few prominent Republicans have had the courage to take that third path, and on Thursday they were joined by Mitt Romney, the GOP's candidate in 2012

 Calling Trump "a phony" and "a fraud," Romney said the billionaire businessman is unsuited by temperament, character and judgment to occupy the Oval Office and represent America on the world stage.

Shortly before Romney spoke, dozens of Republican national security experts, including former Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff, added their voices to the emerging anti-Trump drive by the GOP establishmen

, bullying and bigotry is as familiar as it is appalling, and practically every day brings a new outrage. Early in the campaign, he denigrated Mexican immigrants and Arizona Sen. John McCain, one of the nation's iconic war heroes and the party's standard-bearer in 2008.

y, he talked about loosening libel laws to make it easier to sue news organizations, and on Sunday, two days before several primaries in the Deep South, he waffled over denouncing David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader who had endorsed Trump.

Taking on a bully is much more unpleasant business, as Trump's rivals have discovered. After Romney's speech, Trump fired back with his usual fusillade of schoolyard insults, calling Romney a stiff, a choke artist, a lightweight, and a disaster as a candidate who ran a horrible campaign and begged for his endorsement in 2012.

But Americans can hope Romney's speech has the same effect as the confrontation that Army counsel Joseph Welch had in 1954 with Sen. Joseph McCarthy, another demagogue who took America down a dangerous and ugly road before a demand for decency stopped him.

Rubio and Cruz dug deep on policy.

Bush shot back: "Donald, you're not going to be able to insult your way to the presidency."

There was no one on stage more eager to hit Trump than Jeb Bush. With his campaign floundering as his poll numbers have dropped to the low single-digits, Bush asserted himself more effectively than in previous debates. Right out of the gate, the two men exchanged tense words on Trump's plan Muslim ban proposal, as well as the real estate developer's recent vow to go after family members of ISIS terrorists.The latter, Bush said, was "another example of (Trump's) lack of seriousness."

The long-simmering feud between the two men has intensified as they've risen in the polls and the senators have sought to seize the second-place spot after Trump. Cruz has attempted to straddle the line between presenting himself as an outsider and making the case that he can be commander-in-chief. Rubio has tried to blunt Cruz's rise by attacking his national security policy as too isolationist -- a potent attack at a time when national security is dominating the campaign.

Rubio blasted Cruz for voting for the USA Freedom Act, which made it more difficult for the government to access certain kinds of information about people's telephone records.

Cruz called Rubio's accusation false, and said the law ultimately "strengthened the tools of national security and law enforcement to go after" terrorists.He also hit Rubio on one of his biggest political vulnerabilities: his work on the "Gang of Eight" comprehensive immigration reform bill. Calling the legislation a "massive amnesty plan," Cruz accused Rubio of working with Democrats to give President Barack Obama a "blanket authority" to accept refugees.

Rubio hit back, saying Cruz supports the legalization of people who are in the country illegally. He also slammed his colleague for supporting a controversial H-1B visa program, which supports immigration of highly skilled foreign workers.

Cruz and Rubio were also split on whether the turmoil in the Middle East would ease if Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was removed from power.

"If we topple Assad, the result will be ISIS will take over Syria and it will worsen U.S. national security interests," Cruz said.Rubio rejected this notion, saying while the United States must sometimes work with "less than ideal governments," Assad was simply an "anti-American dictator."

Heading into Tuesday's debate, the stakes were higher than ever for the White House hopefuls. The Iowa caucuses are just seven weeks away and ISIS-inspired terror attacks have shifted the dynamics of the 2016 campaign.

Trump remains the undisputed national GOP presidential front-runner. A Monmouth University poll on Monday placed him at 41%, the first time he's cracked the 40% threshold in a national survey.

Trump does, however, face a real threat from Cruz in Iowa. Recent polls showed the senator either neck-and-neck with or ahead of Trump in the state.

On Tuesday night, Cruz continued to show little appetite for publicly engaging Trump. Asked to respond to Trump's Muslim ban proposal, the Texas senator said he could certainly "understand why Donald made that proposal."

Four lower-polling White House hopefuls kicked off the evening by raising alarm about the threat of radical Islam -- and went after Trump for the Muslim proposal.

Santorum and Graham -- who dominated the discussion -- were joined by former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and former New York Gov. George Pataki. All four are at risk of being next on the chopping block if they're unable to gain real momentum soon.

Adopting physical or cultural characteristics of those with higher status/more power is fine. Adopting the same characteristics of those lower in status or power is risky. For example, virtually nobody would be offended if someone dressed up in full preppy regalia, complete with lacrosse stick, Dartmouth ring, and golden retriever. Many people would be upset if someone dressed up with a huge hooked nose, greasy cheek curls, and fur hat. Both costumes would be based on ridiculous stereotypes, but one would be funny and the other offensive

Students at various schools said in interviews that they viewed racial tension as the driving force behind many of the warnings, especially in the last few weeks, since stories about a fraternity party gone wrong at the University of California, Los Angeles, raised concerns at many schools. Some white students at the party dressed as Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, with smudged faces and exaggerated, padded body parts.

And at the University of Michigan, the dean of students has a webpage titled “Cultural Appropriation — what is the big deal?” It urges students to ask themselves why they are wearing a particular costume, and then to consider how accurate it is in depicting a culture or identity.

One right our constitution does NOT bestow is the right to NOT be offended. Quite the opposit, the First Amendment, the right of freedom of speech, bestows the right TO offend.The harsh realities of being alive in an insane world ARE offensive. Being offended is a GOOD thing. It builds resilience, and character. It provides for personal growth. It toughens you.

Mocking someone's culture is a cheap shot and often leads to worse. Also, if it's such a heinous imposition on you to respect other people's benign wishes regarding how you treat their culture, then maybe the problem isn't their sensitivity but your own.

There is a difference between dressing up as Kim and Kanye, both of whom have made a career of being campy exaggerations of themselves, and being culturally insensitive. Kim and Kanye, as willing celebrities, are legitimate subjects for parody.

I'm gay and there are lots of men dressing in drag at the local college. A woman dressed as a football player. So what? I laughed because some of them looked so ridiculous. I would look ridiculous dressed as a Samarai warrior. Isn't that the point? To be silly and ridiculous on Halloween. Maybe everyone should just wear black t shirts and grey trousers which is about the only thing left that seems to be safe to wear.

It is somewhat different if you want to go as a celebrity. Suppose you want to go as Lebron James. The #23 jersey, and the baggy shorts, and the ball all make a great costume. If you are short like me, the joke is even funnier. If like me you are white, however, don't go in blackface. People who go in blackface (or something similar) know it offends and intend to offend. You might as well wear a sign that says, "I'm supposed to be Labron James, but in real life I'm am just a jerk."

Halloween, Ms. Garcia said, is now often about ridicule. “Dressing up as Pocahontas (or Sexy Pocahontas, let’s get real), is offensive because it takes the whitewashed version of a whole group of people that have been victimized and abused in their own land,” and presents it as “a thing one can just try for a night,” she said.

I find it quite sad that so many commenters here have such an odd interpretation of what's going on. What these Universities are so boldly doing is teaching our children how to navigate the increasingly diverse world we live in, and that mutual respect and understanding are more important than being able to act stupidly without regard for how it affects others. Do we expect everyone to be perfect? Of course not. All that is being asked is that we THINK before we act (or dress up), and use good judgement -- anyone that thinks that isn't a worthy aim by dismissing this all as "hypersensitivity" is seriously missing the point.

Dressing up in ways that mock POC cultures isn't harmless -- it perpetuates stereotypes that result in actual harm. To you, it's only a Halloween costume that you get to take off at the end of the night -- for them, it's their LIVES. To me, protecting POC and dismantling dangerous stereotypes is more important than your desire to dress up for Halloween without thinking about the impact of your costume.

There are stereotypes and stereotypes. Surely we can all agree that a Halloween party isn't an appropriate place to don blackface and pretend to be a negro minstrel. And there are tasteless jokes that offend us no matter how friendly the person telling them or the lack of intent to offend. I understand the desire to promote a sense of decency at a time and place where good judgment often goes out the window. But at the same time, if we lose all perspective and the ability to laugh at our own stupidity, then what we embrace is a culture of outrage. Those of us with unique and interesting backgrounds ought not to be so precious.

Some schools advise that borrowing from any culture is demeaning and insulting unless the wearer is a part of that culture. In other words, do not put on a karate outfit with a black belt, the University of Washington advised in the video it sent to students, unless you actually earned that belt.

Are you serious? Halloween costumes aside, what many universities are doing is shielding students from divergent points of view.

I'm not sure if donning a sombrero, a false mustache, and clothes suitable to a mariachi band is offensive. But I don't think that dressing as a geisha or a judoka is offensive in the same way that dressing as "a suicide bomber" is. But is dressing as Osama Bin Laden offensive, because it means wearing typical Arabic clothing? Would the clothing itself be offensive without racial stereotypes? Are Viking costumes offensive to people of Scandinavian descent? Are leprechaun costumes offensive to the Irish? Are Tyrolean costumes offensive to Austrians, Germans, and Swiss?

Cruz forcefully responded to Trump's accusations that he isn't eligible to be president because he was born in Canada -- a controversy that Trump has only recently embraced. Read More

"There was nothing to this birther issue."

Rubio slammed his fellow senator for hiding behind the pretense of conservative values.

has repeatedly questioned whether Cruz, whose mother was a U.S. citizen, is a natural born citizen.

Cruz noted that some of the more extreme theories on the topic would conclude that someone can only become president if both parents were born in the United States. Under that standard, Cruz noted

neligible for the presidency because his mother was born in Scotland.

onald, I'm not going to use your mother's birth against you," Cruz said.

"Because it wouldn't work."

"That is not consistent conservatism," he says. "That is political calculation."

"I've said from the beginning, we should take no Syrian refugees of any kind," Christie said.

Trump was more dominant Thursday than in previous debates

Asked to explain what that meant, Cruz said New Yorkers tend to hold "socially liberal" views

"Not a lot of conservatives come out of Manhattan," he said.

"We rebuilt downtown Manhattan and everybody in the world watched and everybody in the world loved New York and loved New Yorkers. And I have to tell you, that was a very insulting statement that Ted made."

ut if that's the best hit the New York Times has got, they better go back to the well."

"Unfortunately, Gov. Christie has endorsed many of the ideas that Barack Obama supports," the Florida senator said.

It appears that "same someone has been whispering in old Marco's ear, too," Christie said.

Two years ago, he called me a conservative reformer that New Jersey needed. That was before he was running against me."

Trump said, insisting he would not change his mind on the issue.

"All Muslims? Seriously? What kind of signal does that send to the rest of the world?" Bush said.

While there has been plenty of animosity between Trump and most of his rivals, the billionaire businessman and Cruz have been on largely friendly territory for much of the campaign season.

Christie, meanwhile, blasted the actions as inconsistent with democracy.

Fiorina's candidacy has largely been defined by memorable debate performances. And even though she was dropped from the prime-time stage at the debate, she still delivered. Right out of the gate, she dealt a sharp personal attack on Clinton, the Democratic front-runner.

"Despite Donald Trump's bromance with Vladimir Putin ... Russia is our adversary," she said.

not only over issues like imposing tariffs on Chinese goods and fighting the Islamic State, but also over matters of character and integrity that drew some of the hardest punches of the race so far.

In many ways, it was the darkest debate of the campaign, as the Republicans tried to paint the grimmest possible portrait of an America in decline economically

Mr. Rubio and Mr. Christie, along with Jeb Bush and John Kasich, are vying to emerge as the leading candidate of mainstream Republicans, yet they struggled to be heard on Thursday night.

After months as Mr. Trump’s closest ally in the race, Mr. Cruz pointedly noted that Mr. Trump had dismissed questions in the fall about Mr. Cruz’s constitutional eligibility given his birth to an American mother living in Calgary, Alberta.

— Donald J. Trump and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas sharply attacked each other on Thursday night over the Canadian-born Mr. Cruz’s eligibility to be president and Mr. Trump’s “New York values,” shedding any semblance of cordiality as they dominated a Republican debate

“I hate to interrupt this episode of ‘Court TV,’ ” he said, drawing laughs and applause. He then sought to refocus the conversation on President Obama’s shortcomings and what he said was a need to revive the country, safe terrain for Republican primary voters.

Mr. Cruz seemed more comfortably in command with his needling of Mr. Trump, who was booed frequently. But then he was asked to elaborate on his suggestion earlier in the week that Mr. Trump embodied “New York values.”

“I think most people know exactly what New York values are: socially liberal, pro-gay marriage, pro-abortion, focused on money and the media,” he said.

But Mr. Trum

recalled the way that New Yorkers suffered, grieved and recovered from the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks — drawing applause even from Mr. Cruz.

“And we rebuilt downtown Manhattan, and everyone in the world watched and loved New York and New Yorkers. And I’ll tell you, that was a very insulting statement that Ted made.”

Mr. Bush — who had his best debate last month when he doggedly criticized Mr. Trump, but saw little bounce in his poll numbers in New Hampshire — took another pass at Mr. Trump when he urged him to “reconsider” his proposal for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the country.

Trump repeatedly dismissed the nuanced arguments of his peers in favor of the blunt and forceful assertions that have made the billionaire the party’s national front-runner.

"I will gladly accept the mantle of anger," he made clear that he understands what many of his establishment foes still seem not to — that much of what they see as weaknesses in his campaign are the wellsprings of its support

His opponents, by contrast, often acting with visible desperation to attract attention as voters start making up their minds, seemed mostly intent on fighting among themselves. That precluded any single candidate from rising above the others.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, tied with Trump in first-voting Iowa,

He was himself pummeled by other candidates who want to replace him as Trump’s main nemesis.

Rubio offered an upbeat new-generation pitch as the centerpiece of his campaign

In the course of the conflict, he and Cruz emptied their opposition research files onto each other

New York and loved New Yorkers. And I have to tell you, that was a very insulting statement that Ted made."

Republicans typically pick as their nominee the person who placed second the last time out, but this race has been nothing the party has seen before.

Instead, it is Trump who has controlled the race.

The survey also showed a dramatic shift in Trump’s direction on another important measure.

In March, 23% of GOP primary voters said they could see supporting him. Now it's 65%.

"I recognize that Donald is dismayed that his poll numbers are falling in Iowa," Cruz said, "but the facts and the law here are really quite clear."

Trump responded by citing a contrary view by Cruz’s former Harvard professor and jocularly suggested he was concerned lest there be complications if he picked Cruz as his vice presidential nominee.

Trump when he defended an assessment days ago that Trump represented "New York values.

"Edward Snowden is a traitor. And if I am president and we get our hands on him, he is standing trial for treason," Rubio said

“Radical Islamic terrorism was not invented 24 months ago,” he said, citing precursors to the Islamic State.

Trump represents the spread of something brutal. He takes economic anxiety and turns it into sexual hostility. He effectively tells men: You may be struggling, but at least you’re better than women, Mexicans and Muslims.

I’ve grappled with determining how much to blame Trump’s supporters for his rise. Many of them are victims of economic dislocation and it is hard to fault them for seeking a change, of course, even if it is simplistic and ignorant.

But in the realm of cultural politics, Trump voters do need to be held to account. They are participating in a descent into darkness. They are supporting a degrading wrong. This is the world your daughters are going to grow up in.

There are Republicans who’ll try to split the difference here, and say they’re still voting for Republicans only to maintain policies they like. But, this year, that is little more than a convenient dodge. Trump’s words and deeds — you can’t really call them “policies” — aren’t conservative. They’re statist, anti-law enforcement, anti-national security and run counter to American ideals.

Conservatives who insist on voting Republican this year are, in effect, arguing that Democrats are worse than a president who has prostrated himself to Putin, started trade wars with our allies, cruelly separated families at the border, failed to deliver adequate aid to Americans in Puerto Rico and who has, as retired admiral Bill McRaven recently wrote for The Post, “embarrassed us in the eyes of our children.

Yes, taking the road I’m proposing means that a lot of Republican projects, many of which I support, will come to a halt; that some laughable, maybe even destructive Democrats will come to Washington, possibly remaining there for a long time. So be it. When a political party loses its way, as the Republican Party has, and becomes the instrument of someone like Trump, divided government is the Constitution’s best remedy.

It is a coherent approach. It is the pragmatic one. But it is unsatisfying and unsettling

The first problem with itemizing and compartmentalizing is that actions can’t be treated as discrete. In politics, they are the direct result of a system’s arrangements and a leader’s philosophy

the making-the-trains-run-on-time argument. But time judges unkindly those who cheered the timely trains. Some of history’s most ghastly arrangements have been defended by relentlessly pointing to some number of their benefits and turning a blind eye to their costs

In other words, we have to be mindful of a position’s pedigree and its role in a broader program.

If President Trump has a modus operandi, it is the control, manipulation, and distortion of information: hiding his tax returns, meeting with Putin alone, firing the FBI director investigating him, lying habitually, undermining the media, pitting staff against each other. We are being purposely obtuse if we don’t assess his executive actions in this context

Almost every leader in history has had some redeeming characteristic or some defensible initiative.

They reflect the larger enterprise. We deceive ourselves by separating quiet streets from the oppressive police state that brought them about

Even a strictly utilitarian approach to Trump demands that we do more than note the existence of different entries; we also have to tally them up, to have an accounting. That means we need to evaluate the positives in light of the negatives.

questions about duty and justice may not be well served by creating a list of positive and negative effects.

On virtually any matter, we can populate the positive side. Stealing stimulates a rush of adrenaline, makes you look tough, and provides some immediate profit. The danger lies in falsely equating the value of the ticks in both columns. Obviously, items carry vastly different weights

Worse, the line separating the columns artificially quarantines the negatives. It treats as separable the indivisble effects of an activity. In actuality, a sound moral system would recognize that some negatives infect all associated positives

It is shrewd for a bad actor to ask that we detach his various choices from one another and focus on the positives of each. We needn’t, and shouldn’t, acquiesce.

This does more than debase debate, it does long-term harm: It serves as a conscience-protecting strategy exactly when our consciences shouldn’t be protected.

The nature of the four-year term allows us a delay in the reckoning. And the nature of our polarized, binary parties encourages us to avoid any accounting detrimental to our team. The itemize-and-compartmentalize approach focuses our attention on the entries, not the balance

The problem in the case of the Trump administration is that its moral debits are skyrocketing. Material and irreparable harm is being done to our nation, our institutions, and our norms, as well as to conservatism and the Republican party.

But even the ledger approach has two major flaws: one related to the past, the other to the future. Both are traditionally addressed by elements of the conservative disposition

The first problem is that in assessing the effects of immorality, it is impossible in real time to account for costs

Whether lying or embezzlement, infidelity or illicit drug use, hiding income or abusing welfare programs, social offenses can seem utterly inconsequential in the immediate term. It can even be difficult to imagine how they could prove corrosive to society at large.

It is precisely because we know the long-term dangers of certain categories of behavior but lack the capacity to quantify or explain them that we have social rules against things like mendacity, lassitude, and lasciviousness and in favor of selflessness, judiciousness, and initiative.

It is no coincidence that such rules are consonant with the instructions of our faith traditions

they tell us the exact same things in the exact same way: Follow these rules of behavior, even if they seem quaint or troublesome, because they reflect the wisdom of authorities that you cannot subject to cross-examination—countless previous generations or the Almighty.

norms are our community’s load-bearing walls. Undermine them too often, and the edifice will collapse.

The second flaw of the moral ledger is that it appears perfectly designed, at least during the Trump era, to facilitate our slowly succumbing to temptation

we’re consigned to making a series of episodic mini-assessments. We might celebrate a positive and then balance it against a recent negative.

Like the frog that steadily acclimates to—but ultimately dies from—water rising to a boil, we can be oblivious to the gradual escalation of costs.

So long as short-term rationalizations are possible, decline can proceed unabated and largely unnoticed. This is why But Gorsuch is so insidious. It is the pro that excused so many cons: the growing attacks on the media, the callous border policy, the belittling of the intelligence community.

given the enormity of the stakes, placing a gold star on the president’s occasional successful assignment is unwarranted and unwise. The road to Hell is paved with a piecemeal, situational approach to morality.

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

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

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

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

What has caused this transformation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

, such examples of ham-handed propaganda likely didn’t raise eyebrows at the time because the function of social media is to affirm its users

On Facebook, as opposed to a medium like television, “you’re able to hone in on someone who will likely vote Republican or will likely vote Democrat and hold on to them a bit more,” Borrell told TPM. “You don’t see a lot of crossover. They’ll hold onto you as a voter—at least that’s what [social media] campaigns appear to do.”

Facebook, Twitter and Google have flattened the media ecosystem to such a degree that traditional news outlets like the Washington Post and the New York Times effectively compete with whitewashed demagoguery masquerading as information on sites like InfoWars and Breitbart. The Google News ranking algorithm gives those sites equal footing, and until very recently treated digital troll hive 4Chan as a news source. 

“One of the reasons people are dismissing this stuff is they’ll look at one particular instance of this stuff and say, ‘That looks like it might be vaguely anti-Trump,'” Hendrix told TPM. “And you’ll dig under it and see that while it may initially appear anti-Trump it has a subtler purpose, to discourage people from being engaged or to suggest that all politics are so corrupt that there’s an equivalence between the candidates.”

The Trump campaign didn’t need conservatives who didn’t dig Trump as a candidate to like him—they just needed those holdouts to believe he was better than Clinton, and the image of a black person supporting him, or at least deriding her as a “racist bitch,” might do the trick.

“A lot of it does seem to really prey on identity politics,” Hendrix said.That identity politics was already surging in reaction to the presence of a black president: Conservative pundits have been quick to attribute any unrest that follows episodes of police brutality to Black Lives Matter, wielding #bluelivesmatter and #alllivesmatter hashtags on social media, and to tie all Black Lives Matter positions to Obama, whose justice department had taken first steps toward police reform. Russian-operated accounts gleefully exploited that festering sore spot

A Facebook account called “Blacktivist” posted ostensibly pro-black liberation rhetoric that was filled with dogwhistles designed to play on the worst right-wing fears: “Our race is under attack, but remember, we are strong in numbers,” one post uncovered by CNN proclaimed. “Black people should wake up as soon as possible,” said another.

People who fear disloyalty don’t just fear activists like BLM. Trump’s resoundingly anti-immigrant campaign, with its cornerstone of a border wall he may or may not ever build, and the nativist grievances that anchor his base dovetail with the Putin government’s desire to see less military and diplomatic cooperation across the West.

The @tpartynews account was quick to tie together everything the right fears about undocumented people: “Illegal Immigrants today.. Democrat on welfare tomorrow!” Russian-linked Facebook pages went a step further: “Due to the town of Twin falls, Idaho, becoming a center of refugee resettlement, which led to the huge upsurge of violence towards American citizens, it is crucial to draw society’s attention to this problem,” read a post on the SecuredBorders page,

Another Russian-linked group called Heart of Texas, with about 225,000 followers, successfully organized anti-immigrant rallies protesting “higher taxes to feed undocumented aliens” and warned of the scourge of “mosques,”

Undergirding both the anti-immigrant and anti-black sentiment the Russian propaganda campaign capitalized on is a fear of violence. It’s something the NRA exploited throughout the tenure of the United States’ first black president to great effect, and it was easy for Russian trolls to exploit too.

Looking at the ads—though scant few of them have been unearthed by reports as tech companies have declined to publicly release them—it’s clear that the issue of race is paramount. The ads that have surfaced play relentlessly on prejudices against black people, immigrants and Muslims, and Trump’s campaign was a symphony of insults maligning all three groups.

Advertising from the Trump campaign was notable for the brazenness of its racialized invective; the Russian propaganda campaign followed suit with a microtargeted series of ads explicitly playing up racism and bigotry, rather than trying to sanitize it with coded phrases and winks. The results were inexpert and scattershot—the improbably named “Williams and Kalvin” seem to be looking at cue cards occasionally in their videos—but Facebook, Twitter and their peers had honed the delivery mechanism so carefully that the r

“It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in computer science to use Facebook’s targeting tools,” Hendrix said. “These are tools that were built for anybody to be able to target messages and ads to any constituency. They’re designed for the lowest common denominator—to be as simple as possible and to work at scale.”

The word for love in Spanish is, of course, amor. And it seems significant, and maybe even deliberate, that amor is what you get if you spell Roma backwards: a love sadly lacking on our merciless planet today. Roma and the word amor, which it contains and hides, ask us how it can be possible that Cleo, the character, can cross effortlessly into the States, appearing on so many cinema screens across the country, while her real-life sisters are met with teargas and threats and insults.

here is no red carpet for any of the women who care for other people’s children with such devotion.