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Those are revolutionary aspirations in that they reject not a policy consensus, but social and governing compacts that date to the Founding. (Or at least the end of the Civil War.)

Most revolutions are borne of dissatisfaction.

The Trumpian revolution, on the other hand, seems to be the product of decadent boredom commingled with casual nihilism.

Circumstances for our revolutionaries have never been better. They are so flush that they parade on their boats. And fly upside-down flags outside of their million-dollar suburban homes. And put stickers depicting a hogtied president on their $75,000 pickup trucks. All while posting angry memes to Facebook on their $1,000 iPhones.

Unlike normal revolutionaries, the Trumpist revolutionaries risk nothing. If their gambit succeeds, then they overturn the Constitutional order. And if it fails? They go back to their boats, and trucks, and good-paying jobs, and iPhones.

What’s more, this revolution has discovered that it gets as many bites at the apple as it likes. All defeats and setback are temporary. The movement lives to fight again. They can lose a dozen times—they only have to win once more.

Trumpist revolutionaries get to tell themselves that they are part of a historic, final battle—but also that if they lose, they get to keep their normal, pampered lives. And four years from now they can try again.

In sum: While the revolutionaries get to have their glamorous Götterdämmerung, over and over, the forces of the status quo have to defend against wave after wave of challenges. And it doesn’t matter how many authoritarian attempts are beaten back. There’s always another one looming.That is why you’re exhausted.

let’s be honest about human nature: Breaking things is fun. Especially when you don’t experience any consequences. But running around putting out fires, and cleaning up broken glass, and asking people to stop breaking things? That is not fun. It is enervating.

So while the revolutionary feels like a hero, you feel like a scold.

To paraphrase Mr. Cobb, once an idea has taken hold in society, it’s almost impossible to eradicate.

the Trumpist revolution’s weakness is that it has no ideas. It has goals, but these are motivated by nothing more than will-to-power. There is no logic—not even a faulty logic—behind them.7

How do we fight the exhaustion?First, we try to have some fun while we are scolding the twits and defending the imperfect status quo.Second, we remain fearless about the fight and clear eyed about reality.

Third, we organize and build communities to rally normal people to the cause of democracy.

AlphaGo’s victory demonstrated the unbridled potential of A.I. to achieve superhuman mastery of skills once considered too complicated for machines.

Mr. Lee, now 41, retired three years later, convinced that humans could no longer compete with computers at Go. Artificial intelligence, he said, had changed the very nature of a game that originated in China more than 2,500 years ago.

As society wrestles with what A.I. holds for humanity’s future, Mr. Lee is now urging others to avoid being caught unprepared, as he was, and to become familiar with the technology now. He delivers lectures about A.I., trying to give others the advance notice he wishes he had received before his match.

“I faced the issues of A.I. early, but it will happen for others,” Mr. Lee said recently at a community education fair in Seoul to a crowd of students and parents. “It may not be a happy ending.”

Mr. Lee is not a doomsayer. In his view, A.I. may replace some jobs, but it may create some, too. When considering A.I.’s grasp of Go, he said it was important to remember that humans both created the game and designed the A.I. system that mastered it.

What he worries about is that A.I. may change what humans value.

His immense talent was apparent from the start. He quickly became the best player of his age not only locally but across all of South Korea, Japan and China. He turned pro at 12.

“People used to be in awe of creativity, originality and innovation,” he said. “But since A.I. came, a lot of that has disappeared.”

By the time he was 20, Mr. Lee had reached 9-dan, the highest level of mastery in Go. Soon, he was among the best players in the world, described by some as the Roger Federer of the game.

Go posed a tantalizing challenge for A.I. researchers. The game is exponentially more complicated than chess, with it often being said that there are more possible positions on a Go board (10 with more than 100 zeros after it, by many mathematical estimates) than there are atoms in the universe.

The breakthrough came from DeepMind, which built AlphaGo using so-called neural networks: mathematical systems that can learn skills by analyzing enormous amounts of data. It started by feeding the network 30 million moves from high-level players. Then the program played game after game against itself until it learned which moves were successful and developed new strategies.

Mr. Lee said not having a true human opponent was disconcerting. AlphaGo played a style he had never seen, and it felt odd to not try to decipher what his opponent was thinking and feeling. The world watched in awe as AlphaGo pushed Mr. Lee into corners and made moves unthinkable to a human player.“I couldn’t get used to it,” he said. “I thought that A.I. would beat humans someday. I just didn’t think it was here yet.”

AlphaGo’s victory “was a watershed moment in the history of A.I.” said Demis Hassabis, DeepMind’s chief executive, in a written statement. It showed what computers that learn on their own from data “were really capable of,” he said.

Mr. Lee had a hard time accepting the defeat. What he regarded as an art form, an extension of a player’s own personality and style, was now cast aside for an algorithm’s ruthless efficiency.

His 17-year-old daughter is in her final year of high school. When they discuss what she should study at university, they often consider a future shaped by A.I.“We often talk about choosing a job that won’t be easily replaceable by A.I. or less impacted by A.I.,” he said. “It’s only a matter of time before A.I. is present everywhere.”

this latest effort provoked a response that was swift and scathing and revealed something new: the existence of a tightknit group of scholars who are clamoring for more empathetic political analyses of rural Americans.

“We contribute to the further denigration of expertise when we say, ‘This is what the experts say about these rubes and bumpkins,’” said Mr. Jacobs, a co-author of “The Rural Voter.” “Who’s going to trust the experts when that’s what the experts have to say about you?”

There is an obvious reason for academics’ neglect of the political urban-rural divide until recently: It barely existed.

It’s only since the late 1990s that there has been a marked gap between rural and urban voting patterns in presidential elections, and it has widened ever since. In 2016, Mr. Trump won 59 percent of rural voters. Four years later, that climbed to 65 percent, according to Pew. And in the 2022 midterms, Republicans won 69 percent of the rural vote.

Even if that shift does hint that “rural” may now be its own kind of identity, it’s a cohort that’s hard to define.

The Census Bureau classifies any community as rural if it isn’t within an urban area, meaning it is not part of a densely settled area with 5,000 or more people or 2,000 or more housing units. (In the 2020 census, 20 percent of Americans were classified as rural.)

“I get frustrated especially when people talk about rural America as white America. In some states, it’s Latino America. In the Deep South, it’s Black America.”

Beyond these basic definitional problems, rural communities can be wildly different socially. “When you aggregate to the national level, you lose so much,”

Traditionally, political scientists argued that measuring the effects of place was just a proxy for looking at other parts of identity, like race or education. And because many did not come from rural areas, growing up rural didn’t tend to strike academics as a salient part of political identity.

Maybe because so few people fashioned themselves as “rural political experts” until recently, the few high-profile explanations for the rise of rural Republicanism were widely embraced by the chattering classes.

Thomas Frank in his best-selling 2004 book, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” Mr. Frank, a historian, argued that the Republican focus on social issues, like abortion and guns, persuaded rural voters to put aside their economic interests and vote on cultural values rather than for candidates who supported unions and corporate regulation.

a handful of academics were so frustrated with the book that it inspired them to pursue their own research.

What rankled the experts who had read “White Rural Rage” was what they considered slapdash analysis. The authors build some arguments on polls with sample sizes as small as 167 rural people. The book is filled with critiques of rural Americans — their resistance to pluralism, their willingness to embrace conspiracies — that apply to many groups and that some scholars reject because they are not based on the long-term observation they say is needed to truly understand the political motives of any community.

Their reaction was hostility toward the very idea of government, so they supported politicians who promised to keep it out of their lives; Ms. Cramer called this “the politics of resentment.”

Ms. Cramer’s 2016 book, “The Politics of Resentment,” quickly became an anchor in the growing field of rural political studies. At least half a dozen academics credit her with foundational thinking for their research.

“A lot of the focus has been on ‘What’s wrong with those people?’” she said. “But most people studying what’s going on with rural political behavior are people with empathy for people who live in rural places. They aren’t discounting them as ignorant or uninformed. There’s more of an attempt to understand the way they’re seeing the world.”

When Mr. Jacobs decided this year to convene a group of 15 scholars for a conference called Rethinking Rural, he was struck by the flurry of excitement that greeted the invitations. “It was like the first time they’d been asked to the dance,”

Ms. Cramer came to a different understanding from Mr. Frank’s of why people voted the way they did: Rural Americans resented city dwellers. They believed that national and state governments had enriched urban areas at the expense of rural ones, taking note of all the road-building in Madison, for example, when they drove to sports games.

Mr. Jacobs, with the political scientist Dan Shea, conducted surveys of 10,000 rural voters, from Gambell, Alaska, to Lubec, Maine. The pair were struck by a commonality: Rural residents tend to focus less on their own economic circumstances and more on their community’s prosperity.

Even individuals who are thriving are attuned to whether their community as a whole is being left behind by economic changes like automation or the decline of coal.

That sense of “shared fate,” as the scholars put it, arises in part because rich and poor tend to cross paths often,

“If you go down my street in Vassalboro, the nicest house on the street is right across from the least nice house on the street,” Mr. Jacobs said. “Their kids go to the same school because there’s only one school.”

Such interconnectedness means that pollsters sometimes miss how rural voters are really feeling, he added. “It’s not enough to simply ask: Are you doing better than you were last year?

As millions left rural areas seeking economic opportunity, an appreciation formed for the businesspeople who stayed and tried to create jobs. That led to an outsize influence by local business leaders in the political realm, driving support for anti-union laws and tax policies generous to businesses.

Broadly, rural Americans see free trade and the rise of new technologies as hurting their communities while helping cities prosper

So the resentment they felt toward urbanites didn’t come out of nowhere.

“Rage and resentment are not interchangeable terms,” he wrote in Politico. “Rage implies irrationality, anger that is unjustified and out of proportion. You can’t talk to someone who is enraged. Resentment is rational, a reaction based on some sort of negative experience.”

And while resentment, like rage, doesn’t easily dissolve, he suggests that trying to understand where it comes from could start to build a bridge over that ever-widening urban-rural divide.

MAGA has replaced Reaganism as the chief operating system of the Republican Party.

If Democrats hope to win in the near future they have to take the MAGA worldview seriously, and respectfully make the case, especially to working-class voters, for something better.

In a volatile world, MAGA offers people security. It promises secure borders and secure neighborhoods. It offers protection from globalization, from the creative destruction of modern capitalism. It offers protection from an educated class that looks down on you and indoctrinates your children in school. It offers you protection from corporate predators.

the problem with MAGA — and here is where the Democratic opportunity lies — is that it emerges from a mode of consciousness that is very different from the traditional American consciousness.

we saw ourselves, as the dynamic nation par excellence. We didn’t have a common past, but we dreamed of a common futur

“the Spirit of America is best known in Europe by one of its qualities — energy.”

Americans have a zeal for continual self-improvement, a “need tirelessly to tinker, improve everything and everybody, never leave anything alone.”

Americans can’t be secure if the world is in flames. That’s why America has to be active abroad in places like Ukraine, keeping wolves like Vladimir Putin at bay.

Through most of our history, we were not known for our profundity or culture but for living at full throttle.

MAGA, on the other hand, emerges from a scarcity consciousness, a zero-sum mentality: If we let in tons of immigrants they will take all our jobs; if America gets browner, “they” will replace “us.”

MAGA is based on a series of victim stories: The elites are out to screw us. Our allies are freeloading off us. Secular America is oppressing Christian America.

MAGA looks less like an American brand of conservatism and more like a European brand of conservatism. It resembles all those generations of Russian chauvinists who argued that the Russian masses embody all that is good but they are threatened by aliens from the outside

MAGA looks like a kind of right-wing Marxism, which assumes that class struggle is the permanent defining feature of politics.

The American consciousness has traditionally been an abundance consciousness.

If Democrats are to thrive, they need to tap into America’s dynamic cultural roots and show how they can be applied to the 21st century

My favorite definition of dynamism is adapted from the psychologist John Bowlby: All of life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base. If Democrats are to thrive, they need to offer people a vision both of the secure base and of the daring explorations.

MAGA is a fortress mentality, but America has traditionally been defined by a pioneering mentality. MAGA offers a strong shell, but not much in the way of wings needed to soar.

Americans can’t be secure if the border is in chaos. Popular support for continued immigration depends on a sense that the government has things under control.

Americans can’t be secure if a single setback will send people to the depths of crushing poverty. That’s why the social insurance programs that Democrats largely built are so important.

offer people a vision of the daring explorations that await them. That’s where the pessimistic post-Reagan Republicans can’t compete

champion the abundance agenda that people like Derek Thompson and my colleague Ezra Klein have been writing about. We need to build things. Lots of new homes. Supersonic airplanes and high-speed trains.

If Republicans are going to double down on class war rhetoric — elites versus masses — Democrats need to get out of that business

They need to stand up to protectionism, not join the stampede.

Democrats need to take on their teachers’ unions and commit to dynamism in the field of education.

Democrats need to throttle back the regulators who have been given such free rein that they’ve stifled innovation.

tap back into the more traditional American aspiration: We are not sentenced to a permanent class-riven future but can create a fluid, mobile society.

The economist Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute has offered a telling psychic critique of MAGA economic thinking: “The economics of grievance is ineffective, counterproductive and corrosive, eroding the foundations of prosperity. Messages matter. Tell people that the system is rigged, and they will aspire to less

Champion personal responsibility, and they will lift their aspirations. Promoting an optimistic vision of economic life can increase risk tolerance, ambition, effort and dynamism.”

t aspiration is not like a brick that just sits there. Aspiration is more like a flame that can be fed or dampened

“The problem is desire. We need to *want* these things. The problem is inertia. We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things.”

And why was the surge in illegal border crossings so troubling, even for voters who live far from the southern border? Not because they believe Mr. Trump’s florid demagogy about criminals, rapists and residents of mental hospitals pouring in but because they see a country unable to control its borders as a country unable to control its destiny

and as a country that treats strangers better than some of its citizens.

they are part of the same political project. Economic arrangements not only decide the distribution of income and wealth; they also determine the allocation of social recognition and esteem.

Democrats need to acknowledge that the neoliberal globalization project they and mainstream Republicans pursued in recent decades brought huge gains for those at the top but job loss and stagnant wages for most working people

The winners used their windfall to buy influence in high places. Government stopped trying to check concentrated economic power. The two parties joined forces to deregulate Wall Street. And when the financial crisis of 2008 pushed the system to the brink, they spent billions of dollars to bail out the banks but left ordinary homeowners mostly to fend for themselves.

Rather than contend directly with the damage they had done, both political parties told workers to improve themselves by getting college degrees.

The elites who offered this advice missed the implicit insult it contained: If you’re struggling in the new economy, it’s your fault.

as president, despite his centrist career, Mr. Biden turned away from the policies that had prompted populist backlash and empowered Mr. Trump.

Mr. Biden’s ambitious public investments in infrastructure, manufacturing, jobs and clean energy recalled the muscular role of government during the New Deal. So did his support for collective bargaining and the revival of antitrust law. It made him one of the most consequential presidents of modern times.

Still, he remained unpopular. Mr. Biden and his team thought the problem was one of timing: Public investments take time to produce jobs and tangible benefits.

But the real problem was more fundamental. Mr. Biden never really offered a broad governing vision, never explained how the policies he enacted added up to a new democratic project.

Mr. Biden offered no comparable story.When he broke with the era of neoliberal globalization, reasserting government’s role in regulating markets for the common good, he did so with little fanfare or explanation. He did not acknowledge that his own party had been complicit in the policies that had deepened the divide between winners and losers

in the end, it all made for impressive policy but themeless politics. His presidency was a legislative triumph but an evocative failure.

This made him a weak match for Mr. Trump, a candidate with little policy success but whose MAGA movement spoke to the anger of the age.

what does all of this mean for the Harris campaign?

Defeating Mr. Trump means taking seriously the divide between winners and losers that polarizes the country. It means acknowledging the resentment of working people who feel that the work they do is not respected, that elites look down on them, that they have little say in shaping the forces that govern their lives.

To do so, Ms. Harris should highlight a theme that has long been implicit but underdeveloped in Mr. Biden’s presidency: the dignity of work.

The Harris campaign should not only defend these achievements but also embark on something more ambitious: a project of democratic renewal that goes beyond merely saving democracy from Mr. Trump

democracy in its fullest sense is about citizens deliberating together about justice and the common good. The dignity of work is important to a healthy democracy because it enables everyone to contribute to the common good and to win honor and recognition for doing so.

For Ms. Harris, offering concrete proposals to honor work — and to reward it fairly — could force Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance to choose between the working-class party they hope to become and the corporate Republican Party they continue to be.

She should be asking questions that would invigorate progressive politics for the 21st century: If we really believe in the dignity of work, why do we tax income from labor at a higher rate than income from dividends and capital gains? Shouldn’t the federal minimum hourly wage be higher than $7.25?

Mr. Trump has proposed exempting tips from taxes. Well, here’s a bolder suggestion: Why not reduce or eliminate the payroll taxes employees pay and make up the revenue with a tax on financial transactions?

Beyond tax measures: What about public investment in universal child care not only to support those who work outside the home but also to improve the pay and working conditions of caregivers?

Democrats could promote sectoral bargaining so that fast food workers can negotiate wages and working conditions across their industry rather than company by company. Democrats could require companies to give employees seats on corporate boards and classify gig workers as employees

On climate change, rather than imposing top-down, technocratic solutions, what if we tried listening to those who fear their livelihoods will be upended — creating local forums that give workers in the fossil fuel industry and agriculture a chance to collaborate with community leaders, scientists and public officials in shaping the transition to a green economy?

The election season is too short, they might argue, and the stakes are too high; elevating the terms of public discourse is a project for another day.

But this would be a political mistake and a historic missed opportunity. Taunting Mr. Trump as a felon would rally the base but reinforce the divide. Offering Americans a more inspiring democratic project could change some minds, win over some voters and offer some hope for a less rancorous public life.