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“I could not have done it sooner,” he says. “I don’t think anybody could have done it sooner. Because I was the first one.” 

By the late 1960s, he was managing TI’s integrated-circuit division. Before long, he was running the entire semiconductor group. 

He transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied mechanical engineering, earned his master’s degree and would have stayed for his Ph.D. if he hadn’t failed the qualifying exam. Instead, he got his first job in semiconductors and moved to Texas Instruments in 1958

he came along as the integrated circuit was being invented, and his timing couldn’t have been any better, as Chang belonged to the first generation of semiconductor geeks. He developed a reputation as a tenacious manager who could wring every possible improvement out of production lines, which put his career on the fast track.

Chang grew up dreaming of being a writer—a novelist, maybe a journalist—and he planned to major in English literature at Harvard University. But after his freshman year, he decided that what he actually wanted was a good job

“They talk about life-work balance,” he says. “That’s a term I didn’t even know when I was their age. Work-life balance. When I was their age, if there was no work, there was no life.” 

These days, TSMC is investing $40 billion to build plants in Arizona, but the project has been stymied by delays, setbacks and labor shortages, and Chang told me that some of TSMC’s young employees in the U.S. have attitudes toward work that he struggles to understand. 

Chang says he wouldn’t have taken the risk of moving to Taiwan if he weren’t financially secure. In fact, he didn’t take that same risk the first time he could have.

“The closer the industry match,” they wrote, “the greater the success rate.” 

By then, Chang knew that he wasn’t long for Texas Instruments. But his stock options hadn’t vested, so he turned down the invitation to Taiwan. “I was not financially secure yet,” he says. “I was never after great wealth. I was only after financial security.” For this corporate executive in the middle of the 1980s, financial security equated to $200,000 a year. “After tax, of course,” he says. 

Chang’s situation had changed by the time Li called again three years later. He’d exercised a few million dollars of stock options and bought tax-exempt municipal bonds that paid enough for him to be financially secure by his living standards. Once he’d achieved that goal, he was ready to pursue another one. 

“There was no certainty at all that Taiwan would give me the chance to build a great semiconductor company, but the possibility existed, and it was the only possibility for me,” Chang says. “That’s why I went to Taiwan.” 

Not long ago, a team of economists investigated whether older entrepreneurs are more successful than younger ones. By scrutinizing Census Bureau records and freshly available Internal Revenue Service data, they were able to identify 2.7 million founders in the U.S. who started companies between 2007 and 2014. Then they looked at their ages.

The average age of those entrepreneurs at the founding of their companies was 41.9. For the fastest-growing companies, that number was 45. The economists also determined that 50-year-old founders were almost twice as likely to achieve major success as 30-year-old founders, while the founders with the lowest chance of success were the ones in their early 20s

“Successful entrepreneurs are middle-aged, not young,” they wrote in their 2020 paper.  

Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists throw money at talented young entrepreneurs in the hopes they will start the next trillion-dollar company. They have plentiful energy, insatiable ambition and the vision to peek around corners and see the future. What they don’t typically have are mortgages, family obligations and other adult responsibilities to distract them or diminish their appetite for risk. Chang himself says that younger people are more innovative when it comes to science and technical subjects. 

But in business, older is better. Entrepreneurs in their 40s and 50s may not have the exuberance to believe they will change the world, but they have the experience to know how they actually can. Some need years of specialized training before they can start a company. In biotechnology, for example, founders are more likely to be college professors than college dropouts. Others require the lessons and connections they accumulate over the course of their careers. 

one more finding from their study of U.S. companies that helps explain the success of a chip maker in Taiwan. It was that prior employment in the area of their startups—both the general sector and specific industry—predicted “a vastly higher probability” of success.

Chang was such a workaholic that he made sales calls on his honeymoon and had no patience for those who didn’t share his drive

Morris Chang had 30 years of experience in his industry when he decided to uproot his life and move to another continent. He knew more about semiconductors than just about anyone on earth—and certainly more than anyone in Taiwan. As soon as he started his job at the Industrial Technology Research Institute, Chang was summoned to K.T. Li’s office and given a second job. “He felt I should start a semiconductor company in Taiwan,”

“I decided right away that this could not be the kind of great company that I wanted to build at either Texas Instruments or General Instrument,”

TI handled every part of chip production, but what worked in Texas would not translate to Taiwan. The only way that he could build a great company in his new home was to make a new sort of company altogether, one with a business model that would exploit the country’s strengths and mitigate its many weaknesses.

Chang determined that Taiwan had precisely one strength in the chip supply chain. The research firm that he was now running had been experimenting with semiconductors for the previous 10 years. When he studied that decade of data, Chang was pleasantly surprised by Taiwan’s yields, the percentage of working chips on silicon wafers. They were almost twice as high in Taiwan as they were in the U.S., he said. 

“People were ingrained in thinking the secret sauce of a successful semiconductor company was in the wafer fab,” Campbell told me. “The transition to the fabless semiconductor model was actually pretty obvious when you thought about it. But it was so against the prevailing wisdom that many people didn’t think about it.” 

Taiwan’s government took a 48% stake, with the rest of the funding coming from the Dutch electronics giant Philips and Taiwan’s private sector, but Chang was the driving force behind the company. The insight to build TSMC around such an unconventional business model was born from his experience, contacts and expertise. He understood his industry deeply enough to disrupt it. 

“TSMC was a business-model innovation,” Chang says. “For innovations of that kind, I think people of a more advanced age are perhaps even more capable than people of a younger age.”

the personal philosophy that he’d developed over the course of his long career. “To be a partner to our customers,” he says. That founding principle from 1987 is the bedrock of the foundry business to this day, as TSMC says the key to its success has always been enabling the success of its customers.  

TSMC manufactures chips in iPhones, iPads and Mac computers for Apple, which manufactures a quarter of TSMC’s net revenue. Nvidia is often called a chip maker, which is curious, because it doesn’t make chips. TSMC does. 

Churning out identical copies of a single chip for an iPhone requires one TSMC fab to produce more than a quintillion transistors—that is, one million trillions—every few months. In a year, the entire semiconductor industry produces “more transistors than the combined quantity of all goods produced by all other companies, in all other industries, in all human history,” Miller writes. 

I asked how he thought about success when he moved to Taiwan. “The highest degree of success in 1985, according to me, was to build a great company. A lower degree of success was at least to do something that I liked to do and I wanted to do,” he says. “I happened to achieve the highest degree of success that I had in mind.” 

The dourness of the mood contrasted sharply with just a year ago, when many of the same participants — intelligence chiefs and diplomats, oligarchs and analysts — thought Russia might be on the verge of strategic defeat in Ukraine. There was talk of how many months it might take to drive the Russians back to the borders that existed before their invasion on Feb. 24, 2022. Now that optimism appeared premature at best, faintly delusional at worst.

Nikolai Denkov, the prime minister of Bulgaria, argued that Europeans should draw three lessons from the cascade of troubles. The war in Ukraine was not just about gray zones between Europe and Russia, he argued, but “whether the democratic world we value can be beaten, and this is now well understood in Europe.”

“European defense was a possibility before, but now it’s a necessity,” said Claudio Graziano, a retired general from Italy and former chairman of the European Union Military Committee. But saying the right words is not the same as doing what they demand.

third, they needed to separate Ukraine’s urgent needs for ammunition and air defense from longer-term strategic goals.

Some attendees found the commitments made by the leaders who showed up uninspiring, said Nathalie Tocci, director of Italy’s Institute of International Affairs. “Kamala Harris empty, Scholz mushy, Zelensky tired,

Second, European nations have realized that they must combine their forces in military, not just economic endeavors, to build up their own deterrence

“I feel underwhelmed and somewhat disappointed” by the debate here, said Steven E. Sokol, president of the American Council on Germany. “There was a lack of urgency and a lack of clarity about the path forward, and I did not see a strong show of European solidarity.

now two-thirds of the alliance members have met the goal of spending 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense — up from just a handful of nations 10 years ago. But a few acknowledged that goal is now badly outdated, and they talked immediately about the political barriers to spending more.

the prospect of less American commitment to NATO, as the United States turned to other challenges from China or in the Middle East, was concentrating minds.

the fundamental disconnect was still on display: When Europeans thought Russia would integrate into European institutions, they stopped planning and spending for the possibility they might be wrong. And when Russia’s attitude changed, they underreacted.

“This is 30 years of underinvestment coming home,” said François Heisbourg, a French defense analyst, who called them “les trente paresseuses” — the 30 lazy years of post Cold-War peace dividends, in contrast to the 30 glorious years that followed World War II.

What was important for Europeans to remember was that this hot war in Ukraine was close and could spread quickly, Ms. Kallas said. “So if you think that you are far away, you’re not far away. It can go very, very fast.”

Dmytro Kuleba, the foreign minister of embattled Ukraine, was blunter. “I think our friends and partners were too late in waking up their own defense industries,” he said. “And we will pay with our lives throughout 2024 to give your defense industries time to ramp up production.”

a major extinction panic happened 100 years ago, and the similarities are unnerving.

The 1920s were also a period when the public — traumatized by a recent pandemic, a devastating world war and startling technological developments — was gripped by the conviction that humanity might soon shuffle off this mortal coil.

It also helps us see how apocalyptic fears feed off the idea that people are inherently violent, self-interested and hierarchical and that survival is a zero-sum war over resources.

Either way, it’s a cynical view that encourages us to take our demise as a foregone conclusion.

What makes an extinction panic a panic is the conviction that humanity is flawed and beyond redemption, destined to die at its own hand, the tragic hero of a terrestrial pageant for whom only one final act is possible

What the history of prior extinction panics has to teach us is that this pessimism is both politically questionable and questionably productive. Our survival will depend on our ability to recognize and reject the nihilistic appraisals of humanity that inflect our fears for the future, both left and right.

As a scholar who researches the history of Western fears about human extinction, I’m often asked how I avoid sinking into despair. My answer is always that learning about the history of extinction panics is actually liberating, even a cause for optimism

Nearly every generation has thought its generation was to be the last, and yet the human species has persisted

As a character in Jeanette Winterson’s novel “The Stone Gods” says, “History is not a suicide note — it is a record of our survival.”

Contrary to the folk wisdom that insists the years immediately after World War I were a period of good times and exuberance, dark clouds often hung over the 1920s. The dread of impending disaster — from another world war, the supposed corruption of racial purity and the prospect of automated labor — saturated the period

The previous year saw the publication of the first of several installments of what many would come to consider his finest literary achievement, “The World Crisis,” a grim retrospective of World War I that laid out, as Churchill put it, the “milestones to Armageddon.

Bluntly titled “Shall We All Commit Suicide?,” the essay offered a dismal appraisal of humanity’s prospects. “Certain somber facts emerge solid, inexorable, like the shapes of mountains from drifting mist,” Churchill wrote. “Mankind has never been in this position before. Without having improved appreciably in virtue or enjoying wiser guidance, it has got into its hands for the first time the tools by which it can unfailingly accomplish its own extermination.”

The essay — with its declaration that “the story of the human race is war” and its dismay at “the march of science unfolding ever more appalling possibilities” — is filled with right-wing pathos and holds out little hope that mankind might possess the wisdom to outrun the reaper. This fatalistic assessment was shared by many, including those well to Churchill’s left.

“Are not we and they and all the race still just as much adrift in the current of circumstances as we were before 1914?” he wondered. Wells predicted that our inability to learn from the mistakes of the Great War would “carry our race on surely and inexorably to fresh wars, to shortages, hunger, miseries and social debacles, at last either to complete extinction or to a degradation beyond our present understanding.” Humanity, the don of sci-fi correctly surmised, was rushing headlong into a “scientific war” that would “make the biggest bombs of 1918 seem like little crackers.”

The pathbreaking biologist J.B.S. Haldane, another socialist, concurred with Wells’s view of warfare’s ultimate destination. In 1925, two decades before the Trinity test birthed an atomic sun over the New Mexico desert, Haldane, who experienced bombing firsthand during World War I, mused, “If we could utilize the forces which we now know to exist inside the atom, we should have such capacities for destruction that I do not know of any agency other than divine intervention which would save humanity from complete and peremptory annihilation.”

F.C.S. Schiller, a British philosopher and eugenicist, summarized the general intellectual atmosphere of the 1920s aptly: “Our best prophets are growing very anxious about our future. They are afraid we are getting to know too much and are likely to use our knowledge to commit suicide.”

Many of the same fears that keep A.I. engineers up at night — calibrating thinking machines to human values, concern that our growing reliance on technology might sap human ingenuity and even trepidation about a robot takeover — made their debut in the early 20th century.

The popular detective novelist R. Austin Freeman’s 1921 political treatise, “Social Decay and Regeneration,” warned that our reliance on new technologies was driving our species toward degradation and even annihilation

Extinction panics are, in both the literal and the vernacular senses, reactionary, animated by the elite’s anxiety about maintaining its privilege in the midst of societal change

There is a perverse comfort to dystopian thinking. The conviction that catastrophe is baked in relieves us of the moral obligation to act. But as the extinction panic of the 1920s shows us, action is possible, and these panics can recede

To whatever extent, then, that the diagnosis proved prophetic, it’s worth asking if it might have been at least partly self-fulfilling.

today’s problems are fundamentally new. So, too, must be our solutions

It is a tired observation that those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it. We live in a peculiar moment in which this wisdom is precisely inverted. Making it to the next century may well depend on learning from and repeating the tightrope walk — between technological progress and self-annihilation — that we have been doing for the past 100 years

We have gotten into the dangerous habit of outsourcing big issues — space exploration, clean energy, A.I. and the like — to private businesses and billionaires

That ideologically varied constellation of prominent figures shared a basic diagnosis of humanity and its prospects: that our species is fundamentally vicious and selfish and our destiny therefore bends inexorably toward self-destruction.

Less than a year after Churchill’s warning about the future of modern combat — “As for poison gas and chemical warfare,” he wrote, “only the first chapter has been written of a terrible book” — the 1925 Geneva Protocol was signed, an international agreement banning the use of chemical or biological weapons in combat. Despite the many horrors of World War II, chemical weapons were not deployed on European battlefields.

As for machine-age angst, there’s a lesson to learn there, too: Our panics are often puffed up, our predictions simply wrong

In 1928, H.G. Wells published a book titled “The Way the World Is Going,” with the modest subtitle “Guesses and Forecasts of the Years Ahead.” In the opening pages, he offered a summary of his age that could just as easily have been written about our turbulent 2020s. “Human life,” he wrote, “is different from what it has ever been before, and it is rapidly becoming more different.” He continued, “Perhaps never in the whole history of life before the present time, has there been a living species subjected to so fiercely urgent, many-sided and comprehensive a process of change as ours today. None at least that has survived. Transformation or extinction have been nature’s invariable alternatives. Ours is a species in an intense phase of transition.”

Reading their books, he tells us, can be as exciting as reading a great novel or poem. In particular, Krishnan emphasizes the virtues they embodied in themselves and their work. “Some of these virtues were, by any reckoning, moral ones: humility, self-awareness, collegiality, restraint. Others are better thought aesthetic: elegance, concision, directness.”

Consider Gilbert Ryle. As the Waynflete professor of metaphysics, he was asked if he ever read novels, to which he replied, “All six of them, once a year.” Jane Austen’s, of course.

Another time, an American visitor wondered if it was true that Ryle, as editor of the journal Mind, would “accept or reject an article on the basis of reading just the first paragraph.” “That used to be true at one time,” Ryle supposedly answered. “I had a lot more time in those days.”

J.L. Austin gradually emerges as the central figure. “He listened, he understood, and when he started to speak, with the piercing clarity he brought to all things, philosophical or not, it ‘made one’s thoughts race.’”

Oxford discussion groups and tutorials tried to avoid those “cheap rhetorical ploys” that aim “at victory and humiliation rather than truth.” Instead their unofficial motto stressed intellectual fraternity: “Let no one join this conversation who is unwilling to be vulnerable.”

their meetings continually resounded with “short, punchy interrogations” that aimed “to clarify positions, pose objections and expose inconsistencies.”

Austin “wanted to be, all he wanted other people to be, was rational.” His highest praise was to call someone “sensible.”

When Oxford announced plans to award Truman an honorary degree, Anscombe objected. She wasn’t protesting against nuclear weapons per se (as was Bertrand Russell) but simply standing up for what she regarded as an inviolable principle: “Choosing to kill the innocent as a means to your ends is always murder.” End of argument. Anscombe’s was a lonely voice, however, except for the support of her philosopher friend, Philippa Foot, whose imposing manner Krishnan brilliantly captures: “She looked like the sort of young woman who knew how to get a boisterous dog to sit.”

Despite the sheer entertainment available in “A Terribly Serious Adventure,” readers will want to slow down for its denser pages outlining erudite theories or explaining category mistakes and other specialized terms

All these philosophers, as well as a half-dozen others I haven’t been able to mention, come across as both daunting and charismatic

Pressler and Patterson were heroes within the movement. Patterson led Baptist seminaries and became president of the convention. Pressler was a Texas state judge and a former president of the Council for National Policy, a powerful conservative Christian activist organization.

Both men are now disgraced. In 2018, the board of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary fired Patterson after it found that he’d grossly mishandled rape allegations — including writing in an email that he wanted to meet alone with a woman who had reported being raped to “break her down” — at both Southwestern and another Baptist seminary.

Pressler’s story is in some ways eerily similar to that of Harvey Weinstein. Both were powerful men so brazen about their misconduct that it was an “open secret” in their respective worlds. Yet they were also so powerful that an army of enablers coalesced around them, protecting them from the consequences of their actions.

The suit set off a sprawling investigation into S.B.C. sexual misconduct by The Houston Chronicle and The San Antonio Express-News. Their report, called “Abuse of Faith,” documented hundreds of sex abuse cases in the S.B.C. and led to the denomination commissioning an independent investigation of its handling of abuse.

The American right exists in a news environment that reports misconduct on the left or in left-wing institutions loudly and with granular detail. When Weinstein fell and that fall prompted the cascade of revelations that created the #MeToo moment, the right was overrun with commentary on the larger lessons of the episode, including scathing indictments of a Hollywood culture

the coverage, or lack thereof, of Pressler’s fall also helps explain why we’re so very polarized as a nation.

the bottom line is clear: For decades, survivors of sex abuse “were ignored, disbelieved or met with the constant refrain that the S.B.C. could take no action due to its polity regarding church autonomy — even if it meant that convicted molesters continued in ministry with no notice or warning to their current church or congregation.”

the coverage on the right also fit a cherished conservative narrative: that liberal sexual values such as those in Hollywood invariably lead to abuse.

stories such as Pressler’s complicate this narrative immensely. If both the advocates and enemies of the sexual revolution have their Harvey Weinsteins — that is, if both progressive and conservative institutions can enable abuse — then all that partisan moral clarity starts to disappear

We’re all left with the disturbing and humbling reality that whatever our ideology or theology, it doesn’t make us good people. The allegedly virtuous “us” commits the same sins as the presumptively villainous “them.”

How does a typical conservative activist deal with this reality? By pretending it doesn’t exist.

Shortly after the Pressler settlement was announced, I looked for statements or commentary or articles by the conservative stalwarts who cover left-wing misconduct with such zeal. The silence was deafening.

I’m reminded of the minimal right-wing coverage of Fox News’s historic defamation settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, the largest known media defamation settlement of all time. I consistently meet conservatives who might know chapter and verse of any second-tier scandal in the “liberal media” but to this day have no clue that the right’s favorite news outlet broadcast some of the most expensive lies in history.

t’s more like a cultivated ignorance, in which news outlets and influencers and their audiences tacitly agree not to share facts that might complicate their partisan narratives.

the dynamic is even worse when stories of conservative abuse and misconduct break in the mainstream media. Conservative partisans can simply cry “media bias!” and rely on their followers to tune it all out. To those followers, a scandal isn’t real until people they trust say it’s real.

Have such technological leaps been good? Harari has doubts. Humans have “produced little that we can be proud of,” he complained in Sapiens. His next books, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2015) and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018), gazed into the future with apprehension

Harari has written another since-the-dawn-of-time overview, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI. It’s his grimmest work yet

Harari rejects the notion that more information leads automatically to truth or wisdom. But it has led to artificial intelligence, whose advent Harari describes apocalyptically. “If we mishandle it,” he warns, “AI might extinguish not only the human dominion on Earth but the light of consciousness itself, turning the universe into a realm of utter darkness.”

Those seeking a precedent for AI often bring up the movable-type printing press, which inundated Europe with books and led, they say, to the scientific revolution. Harari rolls his eyes at this story. Nothing guaranteed that printing would be used for science, he notes

Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres failed to sell its puny initial print run of about 500 copies in 1543. It was, the writer Arthur Koestler joked, an “all-time worst seller.”

The book that did sell was Heinrich Kramer’s The Hammer of the Witches (1486), which ranted about a supposed satanic conspiracy of sexually voracious women who copulated with demons and cursed men’s penises. The historian Tamar Herzig describes Kramer’s treatise as “arguably the most misogynistic text to appear in print in premodern times.” Yet it was “a bestseller by early modern standards,”

Kramer’s book encouraged the witch hunts that killed tens of thousands. These murderous sprees, Harari observes, were “made worse” by the printing press.

Ampler information flows made surveillance and tyranny worse too, Harari argues. The Soviet Union was, among other things, “one of the most formidable information networks in history,”

Information has always carried this destructive potential, Harari believes. Yet up until now, he argues, even such hellish episodes have been only that: episodes

Demagogic manias like the ones Kramer fueled tend to burn bright and flame out.

States ruled by top-down terror have a durability problem too, Harari explains. Even if they could somehow intercept every letter and plant informants in every household, they’d still need to intelligently analyze all of the incoming reports. No regime has come close to managing this

for the 20th-century states that got nearest to total control, persistent problems managing information made basic governance difficult.

So it was, at any rate, in the age of paper. Collecting data is now much, much easier.

Some people worry that the government will implant a chip in their brain, but they should “instead worry about the smartphones on which they read these conspiracy theories,” Harari writes. Phones can already track our eye movements, record our speech, and deliver our private communications to nameless strangers. They are listening devices that, astonishingly, people are willing to leave by the bedside while having sex.

Harari’s biggest worry is what happens when AI enters the chat. Currently, massive data collection is offset, as it has always been, by the difficulties of data analysis

What defense could there be against an entity that recognized every face, knew every mood, and weaponized that information?

Today’s political deliriums are stoked by click-maximizing algorithms that steer people toward “engaging” content, which is often whatever feeds their righteous rage.

Imagine what will happen, Harari writes, when bots generate that content themselves, personalizing and continually adjusting it to flood the dopamine receptors of each user.

Kramer’s Hammer of the Witches will seem like a mild sugar high compared with the heroin rush of content the algorithms will concoct. If AI seizes command, it could make serfs or psychopaths of us all.

Harari regards AI as ultimately unfathomable—and that is his concern.

Although we know how to make AI models, we don’t understand them. We’ve blithely summoned an “alien intelligence,” Harari writes, with no idea what it will do.

Last year, Harari signed an open letter warning of the “profound risks to society and humanity” posed by unleashing “powerful digital minds that no one—not even their creators—can understand, predict, or reliably control.” It called for a pause of at least six months on training advanced AI systems,

cynics saw the letter as self-serving. It fed the hype by insisting that artificial intelligence, rather than being a buggy product with limited use, was an epochal development. It showcased tech leaders’ Oppenheimer-style moral seriousness

it cost them nothing, as there was no chance their research would actually stop. Four months after signing, Musk publicly launched an AI company.

The economics of the Information Age have been treacherous. They’ve made content cheaper to consume but less profitable to produce. Consider the effect of the free-content and targeted-advertising models on journalism

Since 2005, the United States has lost nearly a third of its newspapers and more than two-thirds of its newspaper jobs, to the point where nearly 7 percent of newspaper employees now work for a single organization, The New York Times

we speak of “news deserts,” places where reporting has essentially vanished.

AI threatens to exacerbate this. With better chatbots, platforms won’t need to link to external content, because they’ll reproduce it synthetically. Instead of a Google search that sends users to outside sites, a chatbot query will summarize those sites, keeping users within Google’s walled garden.

a Truman Show–style bubble: personally generated content, read by voices that sound real but aren’t, plus product placement

this would cut off writers and publishers—the ones actually generating ideas—from readers. Our intellectual institutions would wither, and the internet would devolve into a closed loop of “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four,” as the software engineer Tom Eastman puts it.

Harari is Silicon Valley’s ideal of what a chatbot should be. He raids libraries, detects the patterns, and boils all of history down to bullet points. (Modernity, he writes, “can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.”)

Individual AI models cost billions of dollars. In 2023, about a fifth of venture capital in North America and Europe went to AI. Such sums make sense only if tech firms can earn enormous revenues off their product, by monopolizing it or marketing it. And at that scale, the most obvious buyers are other large companies or governments. How confident are we that giving more power to corporations and states will turn out well?

He discusses it as something that simply happened. Its arrival is nobody’s fault in particular.

In Harari’s view, “power always stems from cooperation between large numbers of humans”; it is the product of society.

like a chatbot, he has a quasi-antagonistic relationship with his sources, an I’ll read them so you don’t have to attitude. He mines other writers for material—a neat quip, a telling anecdote—but rarely seems taken with anyone else’s view

Hand-wringing about the possibility that AI developers will lose control of their creation, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, distracts from the more plausible scenario that they won’t lose control, and that they’ll use or sell it as planned. A better German fable might be Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung : A power-hungry incel forges a ring that will let its owner rule the world—and the gods wage war over it.

Harari’s eyes are more on the horizon than on Silicon Valley’s economics or politics.

In Nexus, he proposes four principles. The first is “benevolence,” explained thus: “When a computer network collects information on me, that information should be used to help me rather than manipulate me.”

Harari’s other three values are decentralization of informational channels, accountability from those who collect our data, and some respite from algorithmic surveillance

these are fine, but they are quick, unsurprising, and—especially when expressed in the abstract, as things that “we” should all strive for—not very helpful.

though his persistent first-person pluralizing (“decisions we all make”) softly suggests that AI is humanity’s collective creation rather than the product of certain corporations and the individuals who run them. This obscures the most important actors in the drama—ironically, just as those actors are sapping our intellectual life, hampering the robust, informed debates we’d need in order to make the decisions Harari envisions.

Taking AI seriously might mean directly confronting the companies developing it

Harari slots easily into the dominant worldview of Silicon Valley. Despite his oft-noted digital abstemiousness, he exemplifies its style of gathering and presenting information. And, like many in that world, he combines technological dystopianism with political passivity.

Although he thinks tech giants, in further developing AI, might end humankind, he does not treat thwarting them as an urgent priority. His epic narratives, told as stories of humanity as a whole, do not make much room for such us-versus-them clashes.

A number of polls suggest the AfD is now strongest in the Generation Z age bracket. In Thuringia it won 38 per cent of the vote among under-25s.

Nor is it a purely east German curiosity: one recent study of young adults across Germany found that the AfD was the most popular party, with about 22 per cent of the vote.

Plenty of voters remain dissatisfied. In Finsterwalde’s marketplace, where some of the mainstream parties have set up election stands, one 75-year-old woman who declined to give her name said she was outraged that eastern Germans who had paid into the system their whole lives were left with meagre pensions while immigrants received generous benefits from the state.

in the months before the Berlin Wall fell and saw the local unemployment rate rise as high as 25 per cent in the turbulent years that followed.

Today it is down to 8 per cent. The gap in per capita incomes with western Germany has shrunk from about 40 per cent to 10 per cent. On average each Brandenburg resident receives nearly €2,000 a year in fiscal transfers from the western side of the country.

Genilke leafs through a book that shows photographs of Finsterwalde as it was 40 years ago and as it is today: the town has been transmogrified. The roads, the schools and the nurseries have been almost entirely rebuilt. An open-cast coalmine has been converted into the third-largest solar farm in Germany.

This shift is hard to explain, especially as in macroeconomic terms there has never been a better time to be a Brandenburger.

In this town of 15,800 people there are precisely 867 asylum seekers and refugees. While there have been no incidents of violence, there have been isolated cases of theft and it is common to hear low-level grumbling about noisy or disruptive behaviour. “Sometimes you feel like a guest in your own country,” said one voter, who preferred to remain anonymous.

Overall, though, the progress since reunification has been impressive. “Thirty years ago we could never have dreamt we would have come this far,” said Genilke. “There has never been a better time in eastern Germany. Of course we still have problems. There’s no such thing as an ideal society. But we really have achieved a great deal.”

Knut Abraham, 58, a long-serving diplomat who is now the CDU MP for the local constituency, suggests one reason for the disillusionment of the young may be that they did not live through the toughest part of the economic transformation and can see only its shortcomings.

“I also think it has to do with identity,” he said. “The AfD disseminates an easily adaptable and comprehensible sense of national identity. And, of course, it is at the same time a protest and a rebellion against us.”

The culture of memory may be another factor. Socialist East Germany was an “anti-fascist” state by definition and did not encourage its citizens to do much soul-searching about how complicit they and their families had been in the crimes of the Nazi regime.

After the two Germanys were reunified in 1990, the west’s more self-flagellating traditions — the mandatory trips to concentration camps, the solemn schooling in the principles of liberal democracy — were transplanted into the east’s education system.

Gärtner said some of his fellow pupils had semi-openly sniggered during lessons about the Nazi period and one boy in the class below had deliberately shaved his head before a visit to a concentration camp in order to make his allegiance to the hard right visible.

He also described how the AfD had achieved near-total dominance over political discourse on TikTok, a social media platform used by more than 50 per cent of German teenagers. “Slowly you can begin to see the parallels with how Hitler gave the radio to his population back then as the Volksempfänger [people’s receiver],” Gärtner said.

Mr. Vance “extracted what he needed from Appalachia.” Before anything else, the senator’s first betrayal was of his own region, the first portion of his soul to be sold.

Shortly after “Hillbilly Elegy” was released, writers throughout Appalachia denounced the classism and elitism of the book, as well as the self-serving ambitions of its author.

Without too much hyperbole, it could be said that J.D. Vance — a possible heir to the MAGA movement who has embraced some of the most noxious elements of the alt-right and the national conservative movement — is an infernal creation of the powerful liberals who championed his writing and elevated his platform. It’s hard to imagine that without “Hillbilly Elegy,” which was adapted into a film by the Democratic Party donor Ron Howard in 2020, Mr. Vance would have become the junior senator of Ohio, much less a nominee for vice president

Since being elected to the Senate, in large part due to the financial support of the tech billionaire and right-wing activist Peter Thiel, Mr. Vance has become a zealous convert to the MAGA cause. That’s a stunning reversal for a figure who eight years ago was celebrated as an astute voice of Never Trumper Republicanism, a man of learning who could formulate a centrist conservatism to supplant the dark turn that had taken hold of the G.O.P.

As Mr. Vance noted in a Time magazine interview in 2016, Mr. Trump’s greatest failure as a political leader is that “he sees the worst in people, and he encourages the worst in people.” That’s turning out to be true of Mr. Vance, too.

Eight years ago, during the heated days of the 2016 Republican primary, Mr. Vance wrote that Mr. Trump’s policy proposals “range from immoral to absurd.” A few months later, he referred to Mr. Trump as “cultural heroin,” and called him “unfit for our nation’s highest office.” And memorably, in a text conversation with a former roommate, the future senator worried that Mr. Trump might be “America’s Hitler.”

Mr. Trump’s White House tenure, he said, had changed his mind, but it’s hard to take the senator entirely at his word.

At the outset of Christopher Marlowe’s late 16th-century play “The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus,” the scholar at the center of the tale abandons all the learning he has mastered. Law, philosophy, medicine — none of these have fulfilled his boundless ambition. Instead, he turns to magic, making the fateful decision to sell his soul to the demon Mephistopheles, for what he “most desires” — “a world of profit and delight, /Of power, of honor.”

First, they examined research going back decades from 60 countries, asking people whether they thought others were less friendly, honest, kind or good than they used to be. The studies included approximately 575,000 participants.

Then they looked at research probing how people behave toward one another. The studies asked people whether, for instance, They had recently been treated with respect, done something nice for someone else or donated to charity. 

A remarkably consistent portion of people over the years—around 60%—have believed that people are less good now than they were in the past. They also have believed that the moral decline began in their lifetime.

Psychologists call this the Fading Affect Bias and say it makes life more tolerable by helping us defang our bad experiences over time and cherish the good ones.

They also consistently said that their own friends and family members behave better than ever. (Don’t be so surprised. “We ignore their flaws to sustain the relationships,” says Waterloo’s Eibach.)

Why do we believe that society is worse than it is? It’s partly the way our brains pay attention. We have a negativity bias. We pay much more attention to bad events or emotions than good ones. This is a survival instinct; we need to detect threats. 

“The strategy that keeps me vigilant on whether the lion is going to get me keeps me seeing threats everywhere,” says Julia DiGangi, a neuropsychologist in Chicago.

Memory might play a part, too. We often remember the past more fondly than is perhaps warranted. That is because the emotional power of a positive experience stays with us longer than the emotional power of a negative one.

“People think the world has gone to hell in a handbasket,” says Adam Mastroianni, an experimental psychologist and lead author on the study. “But as far as we can tell it’s just the same as it always was.” The title of the study: “The Illusion of Moral Decline.”

Getting older might change our perceptions, too. People often see the world as more dangerous and risky during life transitions such as becoming an adult or a parent,

“Being in a role of responsibility makes people hyper-responsive to misconduct,” says Waterloo’s Eibach, who conducted the research. “And we don’t realize that the world didn’t change—we did.”

There’s a danger to believing that people are getting worse when that’s not really true. That belief distracts us from real problems that need to be solved. It makes us susceptible to people in power who want us to believe the worst so they can claim to be the only one who can fix it. And it keeps us from connecting with each other.

“If we believe the worst in people, we treat them in terrible ways,” says Jamil Zaki, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, who has a book coming out on cynicism. “And then we bring out the worst in them.”

His advice: Fact-check your assumptions about others

Talk more about the positive things people do, a practice he calls “positive gossip.”

And take a leap of faith on someone: Ask a neighbor for help, give an employee more responsibility, talk to a stranger.

But these past few weeks suggest that it wasn’t merely collateral damage at all. The assault on these groups really was the point. The alleged failures of liberal elites (to, say, close the border or protect manufacturing jobs) are the excuse for the assaults on immigrants and minorities that we’ve seen throughout the Trump years. That’s where the real political payoff is

By “hate” Vance means . . . hate. Not disagreement or even dislike. Hate.

Vance’s politics are the politics of hate

perhaps he just watched Trump’s success and internalized its lessons. But in any case, for Vance it’s all about hate.

And the assault on the Haitians of Springfield, Ohio, is a kind of culmination of Vance’s—and of course Trump’s—politics of hate.

It also represents a culmination of Vance’s and Trump’s politics of lying

Vance acknowledged yesterday on CNN that he had been trying to manufacture coverage of Springfield based on nothing more than a few unsubstantiated constituent phone calls. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

The creation of stories. One could call that fiction. Or lies

It’s familiar from the last century in Europe. It’s also familiar from periods of American history, especially with respect to race and immigrants.

in Trump’s case, the hatred is so mixed with his distinctive showmanship and conmanship that it’s sometimes hard to see the heart of the enterprise.

With Vance, who’s not as much of a showman or con man, it’s all much clearer.

he border’s been a mess, and there are people who’ve come across the border illegally and committed crimes. So there’s plenty of grist for the mill here for a more conventional (if still mean-spirited and demagogic) anti-immigration candidate.

instead, Vance and Trump have gotten “distracted” into a debate about legal Haitian migrants who’ve come to Springfield to work legally. Or is it a distraction? Might Vance and Trump know what they’re doing? Perhaps a pure play on racism and nativism is more effective politically than a somewhat complicated debate about the border

In any case, it’s striking that Trump and Vance are willing to make this campaign so clearly a referendum on nativism and racism.

Such efforts have worked at other times in American history. And such efforts have been aided by sophisticated allies who don’t quite join in the campaign, but certainly don’t go out of their way to denounce it or repudiate it

Think of the Southern Bourbons who tolerated and benefited from the uninhibited racism of Southern populists and demagogues.

The sounds you hear from that establishment and those elites, from corporate boardrooms and editorial offices, in the face of disgusting bigotry and dangerous incitement from the presidential ticket they support? Those are the sounds of silence.

More than half the book covers his life before the presidency

Boot is particularly good at depicting 1920s small-town America, and he gives full consideration to how religion shaped Reagan’s outlook. Balancing out his ne’er-do-well father was his pious and optimistic mother, from whom Reagan inherited his characteristic sunniness. These early pages establish Reagan’s worldview as one defined by faith and belief, even at the expense of reality.

one gets the feeling that Boot, who describes himself as an “ardent admirer” of Reagan in his youth, hoped at some point to find all the ways the Gipper was not like the Orange Man. A former foreign policy adviser to Republicans like Mitt Romney, Boot eventually became a Never Trumper and then the author of “The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right.

The echoes fade as Reagan takes on the presidency and embraces uplifting, patriotic mythmaking straight out of World War II-era Hollywood films. The differences in presidential policy are also stark: Reagan, Boot writes, “rejected the siren song of nativism.” He was for Puerto Rican statehood, boosted free trade and saw America as an unalloyed force for good in the world.

“Did Reaganism contain the seeds of Trumpism?” Boot asks in the introduction. In many ways, his biography scratches another mark in the yes column

Reagan is a fabulist, passing often into an imaginary world pieced together from old movie scripts and the conspiratorial pamphlets of the anti-communist John Birch Society. He is impervious to correction, even by trusted advisers, Boot writes, “no matter how often his false assertions, statistics and quotations were rebutted.”

Reagan also voiced dark visions of the future and befriended bigots. In his mind, Boot explains, it was always “10 minutes to midnight,” with apocalyptic dangers threatening the nation. He perfected the racial dog whistle and depended on the support of the segregationist North Carolina senator Jesse Helms to rescue his 1976 presidential campaign

Some of his early affection for Reagan lingers, but over a decade of research, one imagines, it became impossible to avoid the similarities to Trump.

The strongest parallels to Trump come early, in the dawn of Reagan’s national career. Amid the social upheavals of the ’60s and ’70s, Reagan’s law-and-order rhetoric tended to divide and demonize.

The primary distinction, though, is Boot’s central argument: that Reagan was fundamentally a pragmatist.

Reagan clung to his most rigid and dogmatic beliefs about the Soviet Union, yet struck up an immensely consequential relationship with the Russian politician Mikhail Gorbachev.

Boot does not argue that Reagan sped along the end of the Cold War. In fact, he writes, Reagan’s military buildup may even have prolonged it by strengthening hard-liners within the U.S.S.R. Nonetheless, he says, “working so closely with a Communist leader was the ultimate tribute to his pragmatism.”

Boot asserts there is no evidence to suggest Reagan’s Alzheimer’s began while in office. Rather, from the start he was a lackadaisical manager who depended upon his staff to make granular decisions about policy.

Sometimes this led to disaster when the staff went rogue, as in the Iran-contra affair. At other times, Reagan’s remove allowed the full complexity of a situation to unfold, as it eventually did in the endgame of the Soviet Union.

Perhaps the main lesson is that once a leader grabs onto some mythic truth, everything else falls away. Pragmatism, to be sure, was Reagan’s great strength, as Boot argues.

But even when Reagan refused to bend, he paid no political consequences. That’s because his followers were not looking for policy, but for national restoration. They were yearning to see the American characteristics of optimism, grit, humor and cheer writ large in one man.

Many of Trump’s fans feel the same way, yet the emotional register could not be more different. Where Reagan saw morning in America, Trump sees American carnage. To the extent Trump’s followers share that vision, they aren’t the children of Reagan’s revolution after all.

Until then, most scholars arguing in favor of the fascism label were not specialists. Paxton was

fascism does have a specific meaning, and in the last few years the debate has turned on two questions: Is it an accurate description of Trump? And is it useful?

he confirmed the diagnosis. “It’s bubbling up from below in very worrisome ways, and that’s very much like the original fascisms,” Paxton said. “It’s the real thing. It really is.”

Calling someone or something “fascist” is the supreme expression of moral revulsion, an emotional impulse that is difficult to resist.

This summer I asked Paxton if, nearly four years later, he stood by his pronouncement.

Most commentators fall into one of two categories: a yes to the first and second, or a no to both

Paxton is somewhat unique in staking out a position as yes and no. “I still think it’s a word that generates more heat than light,” Paxton said as we sat looking out over the Hudson River. “It’s kind of like setting off a paint bomb.”

He told me that what he saw on Jan. 6 has continued to affect him; it has been hard “to accept the other side as fellow citizens with legitimate grievances.

That is not to say, he clarified, that there aren’t legitimate grievances to be had, but that the politics of addressing them has changed. He believes that Trumpism has become something that is “not Trump’s doing, in a curious way,” Paxton said. “I mean it is, because of his rallies. But he hasn’t sent organizers out to create these things; they just germinated, as far as I can tell.”

Whatever Trumpism is, it’s coming “from below as a mass phenomenon, and the leaders are running to keep ahead of it,”

That was how, he noted, Italian Fascism and Nazism began, when Mussolini and Hitler capitalized on mass discontentment after World War I to gain power.

Focusing on leaders, Paxton has long held, is a distraction when trying to understand fascism. “What you ought to be studying is the milieu out of which they grew,” Paxton said. For fascism to take root, there needs to be “an opening in the political system, which is the loss of traction by the traditional parties” he said. “There needs to be a real breakdown.”

his groundbreaking book about the Vichy regime. In demonstrating that France’s leaders actively sought collaboration with the Nazis and that much of the public initially supported them

he showed that the country’s wartime experience was not simply imposed but arose from its own internal political and cultural crises: a dysfunctional government and perceived social decadence.

a fundamental misconception on the part of some of his peers, who defined fascism as an ideology. “It seems doubtful,” Paxton wrote in The New York Review of Books in 1994, “that some common intellectual position can be the defining character of movements that valued action above thought, the instincts of the blood above reason, duty to the community above intellectual freedom, and national particularism above any kind of universal value

Is fascism an ‘ism’ at all?” Fascism, he argued, was propelled more by feelings than ideas.

Fascist movements succeeded, Paxton wrote, in environments in which liberal democracy stood accused of producing divisions and decline

“Marine Le Pen has gone to considerable lengths to insist that there is no common ground between her movement and the Vichy regime,” Paxton told me. “For me, to the contrary, she seems to occupy much the same space within the political system. She carries forward similar issues about authority, internal order, fear of decline and of ‘the other.’”

Fifty years after “Vichy France” was published, it remains a remarkable book

it also illuminates, with clarity and a degree of even-handedness that feels astonishing today, the competing historical and political traditions — progressive versus Catholic traditionalist, republican versus ancien-régime — that created the turbulent conditions in which Vichy could prevail and that continue to drive French politics today.

“Vichy France,” published in France in 1973, profoundly shook the nation’s self-image, and Paxton is still something of a household name — his picture appears in some French high school history textbooks

Éric Zemmour, a far-right pundit and one-time presidential candidate, who has sought to sanitize far-right politics in France by rehabilitating Vichy, has attacked Paxton and the historical consensus he represents.

In “Vichy France,” Paxton asserted that “the deeds of occupied and occupier alike suggest that there come cruel times when to save a nation’s deepest values one must disobey the state. France after 1940 was one of those times.”

The book was a “national scandal,” Paxton said. “People were quite horrified.” Paxton’s adversaries called him a naïf: He was American and had no history of his own. “I said, ‘Oh, boy, you don’t know anything,’” Paxton told me.

Paris at the time was brimming with rumors of an impending coup by French generals who were fighting to keep Algeria, then a colony, French, and who were angry that the government in Paris was not supporting them. The notion of an Army officer class that was loyal to the nation but not to its current government was, to Paxton, a resonant one

sary to protect the nation while waiting for liberation — the so-called double game.

this did not correspond to the records. “What I was finding was a total mismatch,” Paxton told me. “The French popular narrative of the war had been that they’d all been resisters, even if only in their thoughts. And the archives were just packed with people clamoring, defense companies wanting to construct things for the German Army, people who wanted to have jobs, people who wanted to have social contacts.”

In his book, Paxton argued that the shock and devastation of France’s 1940 military defeat, for which many French blamed the four years of socialist government and the cultural liberalization that preceded it, had primed France to accept — even support — its collaborationist government

After World War I, France was a power in decline, squeezed between the mass production of the United States and the strength of the newly formed Soviet Union. Many French citizens saw the loss of France’s prestige as a symptom of social decay. These sentiments created the conditions for the Vichy government to bring about what they called “the national revolution”: an ideological transformation of France that included anti-Jewish laws and, eventually, deportation.

only an outsider could have accomplished what he did

it was Paxton who “legitimized changes that were in the process of happening in French society,” Henry Rousso, a French historian and expert on Vichy, told me. “He had the allure of a Hollywood star. He was the perfect American for the French.”

Paxton’s scholarship became the foundation for an entirely new field of research that would transform France’s official memory of World War II from one of resistance to one of complicity. It came to be known as the Paxtonian revolutio

Paxton was judicious about the uses and misuses of “fascism.” In “Vichy France,” he acknowledged that “well past the halfway point of this book, the term fascism has hardly appeared

because “the word fascism has been debased into epithet, making it a less and less useful tool for analyzing political movements of our times.”

to dismiss “the whole occupation experience as something alien to French life, an aberration unthinkable without foreign troops imposing their will.” This, he warned, was a “mental shortcut” that “conceals the deep taproots linking Vichy policies to the major conflicts of the Third Republic.” That is, to everything that came before.

In 1998, Paxton published a highly influential journal article titled “The Five Stages of Fascism,” which became the basis for his canonical 2004 book, “The Anatomy of Fascism.”

But for those who use the label to describe Trump, it is useful precisely because it has offered a predictive framework. “It’s kind of a hypothesis,

“the truth was whatever permitted the new fascist man (and woman) to dominate others, and whatever made the chosen people triumph.”

Whatever promises fascists made early on, Paxton argued, were only distantly related to what they did once they gained and exercised power

As they made the necessary compromises with existing elites to establish dominance, they demonstrated what he called a “contempt for doctrine,” in which they simply ignored their original beliefs and acted “in ways quite contrary to them.”

ascism, Paxton argued, was best thought of as a political behavior, one marked by “obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood.”

When Paxton announced his change of mind about Trump in his 2021 Newsweek column, he continued to emphasize that the historical circumstances were “profoundly different.

the column’s importance lay not only in the messenger, but also in marking Jan. 6 as a “radicalizing event.” In his 1998 article, Paxton outlined how fascism evolved, either toward entropy or radicalization. “When somebody allies with extremists to get to power and to sustain them, you have a logic of radicalization,” Ben-Ghiat says. “And we saw this happening.”

In 2020, Moyn argued in The New York Review of Books that the problem with comparisons is that they can prevent us from seeing novelty. In particular, Moyn was concerned about the same “mental shortcuts” that Paxton warned against more than 50 years earlier. “I wanted to say, Well, wait, it’s the Republican Party, along with the Democratic Party, that led to Trump, through neoliberalism and wars abroad,” Moyn told me. “It just seems that there’s a distinctiveness to this phenomenon that maybe makes it not very helpful to use the analogy.”

it was a mistake, he said, to treat fascism as if it were comparable with 19th-century doctrines like liberalism, conservatism or socialism. “Fascism does not rest explicitly upon an elaborated philosophical system, but rather upon popular feelings about master races, their unjust lot, and their rightful predominance over inferior peoples,” he wrote in “The Anatomy of Fascism.

even when it comes to Putin, a good candidate for the “fascist” label, the use of the word often generates a noxious incuriousness. “It becomes the enemy of nuance,” Kimmage says. “The only thing that provides predictive value in foreign policy, in my experience, is regime type

He argues that Putin has not behaved as a full-blown fascist, because his regime depends on maintaining order and stability, and that affects how he wages war. It should affect how the United States responds too.

“What does it tell us about the next steps that Trump may take? I would say that as a theory of Trumpism, it’s one of the better ones.” No one expects Trumpism to look like Nazism, or to follow a specific timeline, but some anticipated that “using street paramilitary forces he might do some kind of extralegal attempt to seize power,” Ganz said. “Well, that’s what he did.”

Some of the most ardent proponents of the fascism label have taken it quite a bit further. The Yale historian Timothy Snyder offers lessons on fighting Trumpism lifted from totalitarian Germany in the 1930s in the way that many other historians find unhelpf

“Sometimes waving that banner, ‘You fascists on the other side, and we the valiant anti-fascists,’ is a way of just not thinking about how one as an individual or as part of a class might be contributing to the problem,” he says.

I read back to him one of his earlier definitions of fascism, which he described as a “mass, anti-liberal, anti-communist movement, radical in its willingness to employ force . . . distinct not only from enemies on the left but also from rivals on the right.” I asked him if he thought it described Trumpism. “It does,” he said

“I’m not pushing the term because I don’t think it does the job very well now,” Paxton told me. “I think there are ways of being more explicit about the specific danger Trump represents.”

He scoured his brain for an apt historical analogy but struggled to find one. Hitler was not elected, he noted, but legally appointed by the conservative president, Paul von Hindenburg. “One theory,” he said, “is that if Hindenburg hadn’t been talked into choosing Hitler, the bubble had already burst, and you would have come up with an ordinary conservative and not a fascist as the new chancellor of Germany. And I think that that’s a plausible counterfactual, Hitler was on the downward slope.” In Italy, Mussolini was also legitimately appointed. “The king chose him,” Paxton said, “Mussolini didn’t really have to march on Rome.”

Trump’s power, Paxton suggested, appears to be different. “The Trump phenomenon looks like it has a much more solid social base,” Paxton said. “Which neither Hitler nor Mussolini would have had.”

the campus D.E.I. bureaucracy was attempting to address an almost impossibly difficult and important task from within an ideological monoculture. It was doomed to fail, and it was doomed to fail in toxic ways.

It’s not because the D.E.I. bureaucracy is leftist. It’s because it’s full of human beings. It’s a fact of human nature that when like-minded people gather, they tend to become more extreme. This concept — called the law of group polarization — applies across ideological and institutional lines.

“Bowling Alone” highlighted the collapse in communal activity in America and how that loss of connection is driving an immense amount of our national polarization and pain.

the more ideologically or theologically “pure” an institution becomes, the more wrong it is likely to be, especially if it takes on a difficult or complex task.

It’s terrible for the confident majority — and for the confident majority’s cause.

I went back and forth between thinking Robert Putnam’s book “Bowling Alone” was the most prescient book of the 2000s and thinking that distinction belonged to Bill Bishop’s 2008 book, “The Big Sort.”

“The Big Sort” highlighted the fact that Americans were increasingly living in like-minded communities, and like-minded communities radicalize us. “Mixed company moderates,” Bishop wrote, “like-minded company polarizes. Heterogeneous communities restrain group excesses; homogeneous communities march toward the extremes.”

For those of us who see diversity, equity and inclusion as good values, the answer is less for the right to beat the left or for the left to beat the right, but rather for the right to be open to the left, and the left to be open to the right.

a moderate temperament is more inclusive, more open to different ideas, and the more difficult the task (easing and hopefully erasing the lingering effects of hundreds of years of formal, legal racial oppression in the United States), the greater the need for different perspectives.

Required D.E.I. statements — in which prospective faculty members are forced to state their own views about diversity, equity and inclusion — are often used as ideological screening mechanisms. As Confessore reported, articulating even mainstream arguments in favor of de-emphasizing identity-based differences or creating a “level playing field” in admissions could be “career suicide” at Michigan.

Instead, monocultures narrow the frame

The university’s vast D.E.I. bureaucracy seemed uninterested in one of the most critical aspects of diversity — the diversity of ideas. Michigan’s D.E.I. bureaucracy could even take issue with the idea that “students should be expected to encounter uncomfortable ideas.”

This is not a university-specific phenomenon. One of the most culturally significant institutions in the United States is the evangelical church, and many of its denominations are on their way to becoming as ideologically one-sided as the most progressive college campuses.

Ryan Burge, a scholar who studies religious trends in American life, recently observed that Southern Baptists were evenly split between Republicans and Democrats as recently as 2008. By 2022 the denomination was 75 percent Republican and only 21 percent Democratic

Hidden behind numbers like that are countless stories of alienation and exclusion. There are family rifts and behind-the-scenes power struggles. All for the sake of purity and righteousness that religious fundamentalism perversely makes more elusive.

No American faction — or party — has a monopoly on virtue or insight.

The term was most clearly defined and popularized in a 1999 paper by Cass Sunstein. The law of group polarization, according to Sunstein, “helps to explain extremism, ‘radicalization,’ cultural shifts and the behavior of political parties and religious organizations.”

Opening your mind to a wider range of perspectives is transformative. It doesn’t just protect the minority from the majority, it also helps protect the majority from itself, and the institutions that learn that lesson will be far more tolerant and successful

in recent years, the rate of college enrollment has plateaued and begun to fall:

tuition soared even as the earnings boost from a college degree shrank substantially, making college a less attractive value proposition. A lot of this had to do with colleges themselves boosting spending on administrators and facilities, and having to charge students more to pay for it.

Unless Dems can figure out how to win back those non-college voters, they’re likely to be at a huge electoral disadvantage for the foreseeable future.

winning back those voters would require the educated professional types who make up the backbone of the Democratic base and the progressive movement to figure out how to connect rhetorically with the less-educated masses, addressing their concerns, speaking to their values, and just speaking their language in genera

The most important disconnect between educated professionals and the rest of America is about the problems they face on a day-to-day basis. Practically every problem that Trump voters cited is something that hits the working class harder than the professional class.

Democrats like Teixeira believe that the party has become culturally detached from Hispanic voters, moving too far left on issues such as immigration, policing, and transgender rights

Democrats like Odio say the real problem is a “class disconnect” in which Democrats are catering to the cultural concerns of economically secure whites at the expense of the pocketbook priorities of working-class Hispanics.

I asked him where Democrats are in the most trouble with Hispanic voters, and Odio didn’t hesitate. It’s the place where he lives: Miami, Florida.

“The idea that what we’re seeing from the Hispanic vote recently is a deviation, and that they will snap back to their historic preference for the Democrats two to one, I think it’s a total illusion,” he said. “The real question is how far this trend goes.”

The timing couldn’t be worse for Democrats. According to Pew Research, the U.S. Hispanic population has grown to 62 million from fewer than 10 million in 1970. (Hispanics accounted for more than half of America’s population growth from 2010 to 2020.) In the last election, Hispanics eclipsed African Americans in terms of raw eligible voters.

in several key battleground states, such as Florida, Texas, and Arizona, they have become the most essential, and most coveted, demographic.

Neither man is wrong. Hispanics are leaving the Democratic Party for many different reasons. This represents “a sea change” in our politics, Teixeira said,

As the 2014 midterm campaign got under way, Democrats spoke with a certainty—bordering on arrogance—about the Hispanic vote being locked up. Those who had turned out for Obama, Cuba told me, were now considered part of the party base. Charlie Crist, the Democratic nominee for governor, campaigned as if Hispanics were a sure thing. They would vote, and they would vote for Democrats.

To some extent, López said, the same principle applies to other issues she feels Democrats are enamored of—green energy and racial justice, individual pronouns and group identities. “What the hell is a ‘Latinx’?

The messages used by Clinton and her Democratic allies to mobilize Hispanic voters were nothing like what they’d used in the Obama campaigns. There was little about hope and change. It was mostly about fear and victimhood.

I’m an immigrant myself, and when I think back to what worked on those Obama campaigns, it was really that he spoke to the aspirations of Hispanics. He talked about the American dream. H

“But by 2016, we’d become less the party of the American dream, and more the party of anti-Trump.”

Obama won the state’s most populous county by 16 points in 2008 and 24 points in 2012. In a place where Republicans had spent a generation building relationships with Hispanic voters—much of it thanks to Jeb Bush, the popular bilingual governor, whose brother ran two ultracompetitive presidential campaigns in Miami-Dade—Obama’s triumphs felt like a watershed.

“I’ll never forget, we did a focus group with Hispanic voters in 2019,” Cuba said. “It was clear that a lot of these Hispanics voted against Trump in 2016 because they were scared of him. And by 2019, they weren’t scared anymore.”

While Trump successfully portrayed himself as a populist achieving hard-won economic growth—signing tax cuts into law, touting a record-shattering stock market, boasting the lowest Hispanic unemployment rate in history—Democrats came across as a bunch of out-of-touch idealogues. Promises of shared social progress, she told me, offend the sensibilities of many first- and second-generation immigrants who hate the idea of government handouts.

“We’re not a political party; we’re a charity. And you know what? These people don’t want charity,” López said. “These immigrants come here to make money and keep their families safe. They are not here because the sea levels are rising, or because of social justice, or anything else. We’re out there talking about racism and the Green New Deal and defunding the police, and we’re freaking them out.”

She counts herself as a progressive on nearly every issue. But, López said, many of her fellow progressives don’t appreciate how fundamentally conservative the Hispanic community is—more religious, more entrepreneurial, more working class—relative to the other cogs in the Democratic coalition.

. I’m telling every single one of my candidates here, do not talk about abortion in this campaign,” López said. “You have a lot of Latinos who are fine with abortion being the law of the land—but they are against it morally. They may not be, quote-unquote, pro-life, but don’t shove the issue in their face. Don’t force them to choose sides. They might not choose the side you would think.”

Cuba, who rose to the position of county party chair in 2017, recalls how quickly the anti-Trump message began losing potency. The economy was roaring to life after eight sluggish years of post-recession recovery at the same time that the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, emboldened by Bernie Sanders’s insurgency in 2016, was espousing an open distrust of capitalism and questioning the existence of opportunity and upward mobility in America.

López said it’s all about opportunity cost: Every minute Democrats spend on topics that appeal to small portions of their existing base is time that could have been spent speaking to a single theme that preoccupies voters across the ideological spectrum: jobs, opportunity, upward mobility. “You can still be the party of all those other things,” she said. “Just don’t talk about them so much.”

the challenge for Democrats isn’t just modulating the message; it’s also combatting the right-wing misinformation machine.

A political party is only as good as its rhetoric, Garcia told me, and in South Florida, “Democrats are losing the rhetoric war to Republicans—badly.”

Republicans have always been craftier in delivering their messages on Spanish-language TV and radio. What’s new, he said, is the way conservatives have swarmed the most popular social-media pages and WhatsApp chat groups in his community, relentlessly circulating half-sourced posts that portray the Democratic Party as weak on crime and soft on socialism.

“Look at Biden’s new Cuba policies, for instance,” Garcia said. What the administration announced in the spring—the relaunching of a family-reunification program, increased flights to the island, an easing of restrictions on the money Americans can send and invest there—“should actually be more popular with Cubans than Trump’s hard-line policies,” Garcia said.

It was a Republican dream come true. By the time Trump ran for reelection in 2020, the GOP had scaled up the socialism attacks nationwide. The reward was clearest in South Florida: Republicans knocked off two Democratic congressional incumbents, and Trump closed the gap in Miami-Dade to seven points, a 23-point swing from the 2016 election.

But the White House—according to numerous Democrats on the ground—did nothing to coordinate a messaging strategy around these policy changes. Nobody here could get booked on a local news program, or write a social-media post defending the new policies, because they found out about them at the same time everyone in the general public did. As a result, Garcia told me, puffing a massive Cuban cigar, “Democrats are getting killed, every single day, on Spanish-language media here, even though it’s an argument we should be winning.”

Garcia pointed to 2018, when Democrats nominated Andrew Gillum for governor—a candidate endorsed by Bernie Sanders. Garcia and his fellow Democrats in Miami could already recite the attacks on Gillum as a sleeper socialist. When those attacks came, Gillum didn’t do much to dispel them. (When NBC’s Chuck Todd asked if he was a socialist, Gillum replied simply, “No, I’m a Democrat.”) He wound up winning Miami-Dade by 21 points—down from Clinton’s 30-point margin two years before—and lost the election by 32,463 votes statewide. “Let’s face it,” Garcia said. “We lost the governorship to Ron DeSantis because our nominee wouldn’t come out and say, ‘I’m not a goddamn socialist.’”

Democrats here say the national party should have learned a hard lesson from that campaign. Instead, after 2018, the party’s ranks began to swell with influential young progressives, such as New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who championed far-left policies while openly embracing the socialist label

The conviction that history and demography are on the Democrats’ side dulls the political instinct of persuasion. “Look, I’m a big fan of Barack Obama. But he turned our party into a religious order,” he said. “When you think you’re right—no, when you know you’re right—everybody should just get it. You stop making the argument.”

By turning the young representative into a boogeyman, Garcia told me, Republicans forced Democrats to play defense over labels and abstractions while rendering the left’s version of 21st-century populism unacceptable to a huge swath of the electorate that might otherwise be receptive to it.

“She is not Vladimir Lenin, Karl Marx, Joseph Stalin, Mao, or anything like that. She’s a classic northeastern liberal who’s pushing a social agenda that, in many respects, has real viability at a time like this,” Garcia said of Ocasio-Cortez. “So, how do you shut down the debate? You engage in name-calling. You use propaganda to scare us from acting on the issues most important to our base.”

This is what Carlos Odio meant when he told me national Democrats have “let go of the rope” in Miami-Dade County. It wasn’t that his party would no longer compete for votes down there; rather, it was that his party was acknowledging a new reality, in which affluent white voters are a higher political priority than are working-class Hispanics. This would have been unthinkable just five years ago. I asked Garcia if he was comfortable with such a trade-off.

The city could not handle the influx; its border-processing facilities were at capacity, its humanitarian workers past their breaking point. The community was panicked. Lozano, then the mayor, was desperate. Some of these migrants, he thought, were going to die.“I’m right here, at the bridge, watching this thing spiral out of control. And Democrats in Washington are like, ‘Nothing to see here,’” Lozano said.

Lozano said he began sounding the alarm almost as soon as Biden took office. He told his fellow Democrats that, for all the damage done by Trump’s cruel border-security policies, a relaxed approach to border enforcement could prove even more disastrous. He warned them of a potential humanitarian or national-security crisis

He told me they refused to listen. And today, Lozano said, pulling into the parking lot of a Ramada Inn a few miles from the border, the problem is worse than ever.

“Where is our respect for laws? Where is our respect for the people already here?” Perales said. “I’m an immigrant; I’m also an American. We are allowing our country to be overrun.”

Technically, the border is not open. But you wouldn’t know it from spending a few days in Del Rio. People I spoke with down there said they’d never seen anything like the mass of humanity moving across the border since Biden became president. In fairness, apprehensions at the southern border began to rise in the spring of 2020 and continued to climb throughout Trump’s final year as president. But the numbers spiked much higher after Biden took office.

the conclusion that Democrats have made it easier for migrants to attempt and complete an unlawful crossing into the U.S., making a historically bad problem much worse.

She hated some of the hard-line policies of the Trump administration, including the forced separation of families at the U.S.-Mexico border. But the more she listened to activists and elected officials on the left, the more worried she became that Democrats would embrace the other extreme—refusing to secure the border at all.

Perales ended up voting for Trump. Despite disagreeing with him and the Republican Party on a host of issues, she told me, she plans to vote a straight-GOP ticket in 2022, because of the chaos Democrats have brought to her community.

“This is the biggest wave of illegal immigration in American history, and we’re at the epicenter of it here in Del Rio,” Jason Owens, the Border Patrol’s chief patrol agent of the Del Rio sector, announced at the luncheon. “In the last 24 hours, we’ve apprehended 2,240 people in this sector alone.”

Studies and polling suggest that Hispanics who entered the U.S. legally tend to be more conservative on questions of immigration. S

Martinez said most of the Democrats he’s known over the years have become skeptical of the party. For longer than he can remember, he’s had a weekly breakfast with the same group of seven or eight guys at the Ramada. They were always Democrats—all of them. Now, he said, there’s only one holdout. The rest have switched sides.

In the sheriff’s view—and he said it’s part perception, part reality—his party has become too progressive for Hispanics in a community like his. “This talk of defunding the police, it’s had a real impact,”

“Democrats refuse to even call it a crisis. They’re gaslighting me,” Lozano said. He ran through a list of requests: more funding for Border Patrol; better technology to monitor movement; more support for humanitarian groups on the ground; stricter processing policies to deter would-be migrants; and, yes, in certain places, reinforced physical barriers. Above all, he wants Democrats to stop signaling that America has an open border.

Throughout the 2020 Democratic presidential primary campaign, he noted, the party’s aspiring leaders took a host of positions—on decriminalizing border crossings, or providing health insurance to undocumented immigrants—that broke with decades of orthodoxy, to appease the progressive base.

Even if their social-justice efforts are regarded as genuine, Democrats are pushing an agenda that doesn’t resonate with a wide array of voters during this time of economic uncertainty.

“A lot of Latinos, they’re just not moved by these issues,” he said. “They may think Republicans are racist, but some of them are going to vote for the Republicans anyway, because they’re better on the economy, better on small business, better on regulation.”

“It’s very hard for an individual to vote for somebody who leans more on social justice than on the economy,” Chávez told me in a coffee shop not far from the state capitol. “When a person has to choose between paying for a gallon of milk or a gallon of gas, every other issue goes out the window.”

One woman, a longtime progressive activist named Petra Falcon, tells me that Hispanics “have no idea what Democrats really stand for anymore.” Anita Ritter, who serves as the secretary of the American Legion post next door, says she doesn’t know of many of her members who still vote for Democrats.

Luis Acosta. A respected Democratic campaign consultant, Acosta is also a so-called Dreamer. His mother brought him to the U.S. when he was 2; his earliest memory is crawling under the chain-link border fence. Inspired by Obama’s candidacy, Acosta threw himself into Democratic politics. He helped elect numerous candidates to office. But now, he tells me, he’s “absolutely done” helping the Democratic Party win elections.

We’ve supported the Democrats my whole life. Now, we want to know: Are we more than a talking point to you?”

“Maybe the best we can hope for is that these voters”—Mary Rose nods toward one of her adult grandsons nearby—“become independents, and we fight for them on a race-by-race basis,” she says. “And honestly, that’s a win for Republicans.”

A parallel process will take place on the other side of the political spectrum, as right-wing militias, white supremacists, and QAnon cultists are reenergized by the election of the man whose behavior they have, over eight years, learned to imitate.

My generation was raised on the belief that America could always be counted upon to do the right thing, even if belatedly: reject the isolationism of America First and join the fight against Nazism; fund the Marshall Plan to stop communism; extend the promise of democracy to all people, without regard to race or sex

But maybe that belief was true only for a specific period, a unique moment. There were many chapters of history in which America did the wrong thing for years or decades. Maybe we are living through such a period now.

Or maybe the truth is that democracy is always a close-run thing, always in contention. If so, then we too must—as people in other failing democracies have learned to do—find new ways to champion wobbling institutions and threatened ideas

For supporters of the American experiment in liberal democracy, our only hope is education, organization, and the creation of a coalition of people dedicated to defending the spirit of the Constitution, the ideals of the Founders, the dream of freedom

More concretely: public civic-education campaigns to replace the lessons no longer taught in schools; teams of lawyers who can fight for the rule of law in courts; grassroots organizing, especially in rural and small-town America; citizens and journalists working to expose and fight the enormous wave of kleptocracy and corruption that will now engulf our political system.