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shaming in particular, and the moralisation of politics in general, has characterised the huge shift toward identity politics and progressive neoliberalism in recent years, and has played a major role in provoking the Trumpian backlash.

Democratic Party moralism and Trumpian macho risk-taking are internally related to one another. Gambling, with all its macho undertones, has a special if covert appeal to the evangelical or Puritan mind. It allows individuals to throw off the slow, painful and laborious burden of subordinating their wishes to the superego with one manic play of the dice. Running around without a mask in the face of a pandemic could serve as a huge relief from the endless self-examination of the hypertrophied Protestant conscience.

This unspoken connection between a guilt-ridden, identity-driven mass culture and a risk-taking, macho opposition to it can tell us a lot about American politics. During the New Deal era, a fractious citizenry was held together by the understanding that capitalist greed was a common enemy.

public health experts are largely in agreement about this. If we don’t “flatten the curve” — which is to say, make sure our coronavirus patients come to our hospitals in manageable waves, rather than all at once — then we will soon become Italy, where doctors are now facing the possibility of wartime triage, which would require making choices about who lives and who dies based on a patient’s age, because there aren’t enough beds and ventilators to go around

But rather than flattening the curve, Fox is behind the curve. Each and every time.

this swagger about carrying on business as usual goes beyond reflexive pro-Trump and pro-market reflexes.

The first sentence of his book: “Rarely in the history of the United States has the nation been so ill-served as during the presidency of George W. Bush.”

The last: “Whether George W. Bush was the worst president in American history will be long debated, but his decision to invade Iraq is easily the worst foreign policy decision ever made by an American president.”

“Believing he was the agent of God’s will, and acting with divine guidance, George W. Bush would lead the nation into two disastrous wars of aggression,” Mr. Smith writes. “Bush’s personalization of the war on terror combined with his macho assertiveness as the nation’s commander in chief,” he adds later, “were a recipe for disaster.”

Europe, the soil on which Fascism took root, is watching the rise of Donald Trump with dismay. Contempt for the excesses of America is a European reflex, but when the United States seems tempted by a latter-day Mussolini, smugness in London, Paris and Berlin gives way to alarm.

It’s not just that Trump retweets to his six million followers a quote attributed to Mussolini: “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.” It’s not just that Trump refuses to condemn David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, who has expressed support for him. It’s not just that violence is woven into Trump’s language as indelibly as the snarl woven into his features — the talk of shooting somebody or punching a protester in the face, the insulting of the disabled, the macho mockery of women, the anti-Muslim and anti-Mexican tirades. It’s not just that he could become Silvio Berlusconi with nukes.

Trump is telling people something is rotten in the state of America. The message resonates because the rot is there.

the performance of presidents, especially on foreign policy, is shaped by how leaders attach to problems. Some leaders are like dogs: They want to bound right in and make things happen. Some are more like cats: They want to detach and maybe look for a pressure point here or there.

we should be asking them a different set of questions:

How much do you think a president can change the flow of world events? President Obama, for example, has a limited or, if you want to put it that way, realistic view of the extent of American influence. He subscribes to a series of propositions that frequently push him toward nonintervention: The world “is a tough, complicated, messy, mean place and full of hardship and tragedy,” he told Goldberg. You can’t fix everything. Sometimes you can only shine a spotlight.

This week’s dose of societal deterioration arrived early, in the form of freshly scrubbed teenage boys. The boys, students at Wisconsin’s Baraboo High School, were apparently at prom last spring when they decided — more than 60 of them — to pose for a photo. Many of the grinning boys further decided, dressed in their dinner jackets and boutonnieres, that their communal pose would be to extend their arms in a Nazi salute.

On Monday, this photo surfaced online (under the hashtag #BarabooProud) and immediately went viral. The photographer later maintained he’d merely asked the boys to wave, though the gesture didn’t resemble a wave made by any hand-possessing human. In response to an outpouring of outrage, the superintendent issued a statement: “We want to be very clear. The Baraboo School District is a hate-free environment.”

In response to various acts of racism, sexism, bigotry and violence, President Barack Obama used the phrase “That’s not who we are” so often — at least 46 times, as compiled in one video montage — that it had the unintended result of upending his assertion. Maybe that’s exactly who we are: a country that is frequently racist, sexist, bigoted and violent.

Gender roles are defined by culture more than physical differences between men and women.

independence is not considered a desirable trait for a man in China

Men were expected to be loyal to their lords; women were to be loyal to their family and husband.

Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, replied to my inquiry with a detailed critique of the A.P.A. guidelines.“The report is blinkered by two dogmas. One is the doctrine of the blank slate” that rejects biological and genetic factors, Pinker wrote, adding thatThe word “testosterone” appears nowhere in the report, and the possibility that men and women’s personalities differ for biological reasons is unsayable and unthinkable.The other dogma, Pinker argued,is that repressing emotions is bad and expressing them is good — a folk theory with roots in romanticism, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Hollywood, but which is contradicted by a large literature showing that people with greater self-control, particularly those who repress anger rather than “venting,” lead healthier lives: they get better grades, have fewer eating disorders, drink less, have fewer psychosomatic aches and pains, are less depressed, anxious, phobic, and paranoid, have higher self-esteem, are more conscientious, have better relationships with their families, have more stable friendships, are less likely to have sex they regretted, are less likely to imagine themselves cheating in a monogamous relationship.

In Pinker’s view, the A.P.A. guidelines fail to recognize thata huge and centuries-long change in Western history, starting from the Middle Ages, was a “Civilizing Process” in which the ideal of manhood changed from a macho willingness to retaliate violently to an insult to the ability to exert self-control, dignity, reserve, and duty. It’s the culture of the gentleman, the man of dignity and quiet strength, the mensch. The romantic 1960s ethic of self-expression and escape from inhibitions weakened that ethic, and the A.P.A. report seems to be trying to administer the coup de grâce.

Pinker suggested rather thatOne could argue that what today’s men need is more encouragement to enhance one side of the masculine virtues — the dignity, responsibility, self-control, and self-reliance — while inhibiting others, such as machismo, violence, and drive for dominance.

On Tuesday, the actress and 99 other notable French women from the arts, medicine and business published an open letter in Le Monde calling out what they dubbed a “puritanical” wave of resignations and a group-think—largely in the United States and Britain, since no heads have rolled in France—that they said infantilized women and denied them their sexual power.

“As women, we do not recognize ourselves in this feminism, which goes beyond denouncing abuse of power and has turned into a hatred of men and of sexuality,” they wrote. “Rape is a crime, but trying to seduce someone, even awkwardly, is not. Nor is being gallant a macho aggression.” They continued: “It is the nature of puritanism to borrow, in the name of the supposed collective good, the arguments of the protection of women and of their emancipation to better chain them to their status as eternal victims; poor little things under the control of demonic phallocrats, like in the good old days of witchcraft.”

the letter is a telling addition to today’s chorus. We’re living through a disorienting moment in which public shaming has eclipsed due process

even the type of idealized athlete who drew many fans to football—the hard-nosed, rugged guy who repeatedly and eagerly sacrificed his body, enduring unimaginable pain for the sake of the game—has been pushed to the outer limits of what any human body can tolerate. The fame, wealth, and adulation that pro athletes receive are no longer enough to make them suffer in silence. For more and more athletes, the price of pain is getting way too high.

Not all fans are actually capable of seeing the humanity of the players they follow so closely. When the allure of the game is rooted in violence, and in conformity to whatever the team demands, players are treated as physical objects and nothing more

In many books and films, the prewar years appear as an age of prosperity and contentment in Europe, with the summer of 1913 featuring as the last golden summer.

But today, as racism and xenophobia return to the centre of western politics, it is time to remember that the background to the first world war was decades of racist imperialism whose consequences still endure. It is something that is not remembered much, if at all, on Remembrance Day.

In the early 20th century, the popularity of social Darwinism had created a consensus that nations should be seen similarly to biological organisms, which risked extinction or decay if they failed to expel alien bodies and achieve “living space” for their own citizens. Pseudo-scientific theories of biological difference between races posited a world in which all races were engaged in an international struggle for wealth and power

Kindness. Humility. Responsibility. These traits were once “the definition of manliness,” Barack Obama told a crowd on Saturday, campaigning in Flint, Mich., for his former running mate, Joseph R. Biden Jr.

“It used to be being a man meant taking care of other people, not going around bragging,” Mr. Obama said.

n two days, Americans will take their shot, making a choice between two presidential candidates who resemble vastly different case studies in what a man, even in 2020, should do or be.

MIAMI — Despite a late push to court Latino voters over the last several weeks, Joseph R. Biden Jr. is ending his presidential bid on shaky and perhaps perilous ground with this diverse, essential segment of the electorate, according to interviews with Democratic officials, community activists and voters.

Did Mr. Biden do too little, too late to court Latino voters, committing a strategic error that could be the 2020 version of Hillary Clinton taking Wisconsin for granted in 2016?

Polling in battleground states this fall has generally shown Mr. Biden leading President Trump among Hispanic voters, but not in every case — and rarely by the same margin that Mrs. Clinton commanded in 2016, especially among Hispanic men.

Why do working-class white men—the most reliable component of Donald Trump’s base—support someone who is, by their own standards, the least masculine man ever to hold the modern presidency?

the question is why so many of Trump’s working-class white male voters refuse to hold Trump to their own standards of masculinity—why they support a man who behaves more like a little boy.

They are, as an American Psychological Association feature describes them, men who adhere to norms such as “toughness, dominance, self-reliance, heterosexual behaviors, restriction of emotional expression and the avoidance of traditionally feminine attitudes and behaviors.”

Unlike the Trump tariffs, these controls have a clear goal: to prevent or at least delay Beijing’s attempts to produce advanced semiconductors, which are of crucial military as well as economic importance. If this sounds like a very aggressive move on the part of the United States, that’s because it is.

But it needs to be put in context. Recent events have undermined the sunny view of globalization that long dominated Western policy. It’s now apparent that despite global integration, there are still dangerous bad actors out there — and interdependence sometimes empowers these bad actors. But it also gives good actors ways to limit bad actors’ ability to do harm. And the Biden administration is evidently taking these lessons to heart.

Obviously it didn’t work. Russia is led by a brutal autocrat who invaded Ukraine. China appears to have retrogressed politically, moving back to erratic one-man rule.

Most of the thousands who packed the Movistar Arena for Milei’s campaign-closing rally on Wednesday were men, many of them young and all of them seemingly angry.

Angry with a leftist establishment that has failed to control spiraling inflation and economic stagnation. Angry with a government that has allowed their currency to plummet and their earnings to vanish.

Young people are a political force in Argentina. Young women here were on the front lines of massive protests for the “green wave” abortion rights movement that spread across Latin America. They’ve led a campaign for gender-inclusive Spanish and helped bring the populist movement of former Argentine leaders Juan and Eva “Evita” Perón back to power.