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Prompted by the chief executive, supporters laid siege to, invaded, and occupied the Capitol building, deploying weapons and subjecting members of both chambers of Congress to intimidation and violence in an effort to produce a particular decision by force.

We have all been taught about “checks and balances” in school. The Constitutional strategy for limiting power requires that officeholders defend the institutions they occupy against what the framers called “encroachments” by the other branches. Usually encroachments are understood metaphorically, and there is time to allow the branches to work out their differences in the back and forth of political negotiation and occasional court battles. The president’s attempted encroachment on the constitutional rights of Congress this past Wednesday was anything but metaphorical

The president aimed to reverse the decision that Congress was making on a question that the Constitution expressly reserved for the legislature.

At Wednesday’s rally, Mr. Trump gave some prepared remarks on the so-called evidence of election fraud, but he worried aloud that the crowd would be bored by those details. The more powerful thread running through his speech was an argument that constitutional constraints were forms of weakness, that Vice President Mike Pence and Congress should not be allowed to certify the election, and that it was time to take the gloves off and fight.

If the cabinet and vice president decided to remove the president temporarily from his duties through the 25th Amendment, they would protect us against some immediate dangers, but their action would do nothing to stand up for the integrity of Congress as a coequal branch of government. In fact, it would reinforce the notion that true power is concentrated only in the executive branch. Impeachment and conviction offer the only constitutionally appropriate response to the president’s encroachment on the legislative branch.

When James Madison described the checks and balances in Federalist No. 51, he wrote that “ambition must be made to counteract ambition” and that “the interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.” This means that members of Congress should feel that their personal interests and ambitions are intertwined with the power of the institution they occupy.

Members who said they wanted to satisfy popular sentiment questioning the election results by channeling it through a congressional commission should see that the president’s actions have made a mockery of their procedural efforts. Their place in history depends on whether they counteract the president’s ambition and resist the humiliation of Congress in the way the constitutional framers assumed any self-respecting legislator would.

Not so long ago, the Republican Party described itself as “the party of Lincoln” and flaunted its commitment to constitutionalism. Now, the question is whether enough Republican senators will do what is necessary to help the country step away from what Lincoln called the “mobocratic spirit,” which he identified as the greatest threat to our political institutions.

If Congress does not utilize the constitutional means of defending itself and deterring future attacks, this moment will come to be regarded by historians as a decisive capitulation, not just to President Trump, but to a dangerous new mode of presidential action. The precedent that a president can stir up mobs to intimidate the other branches will be set, and even if it recedes into the background for a while, eventually that precedent will be followed.

Mr. Trump has inflicted more damage to the rule of law. He has impugned the integrity of judges who have ruled against him. He has demanded loyalty to himself — not the law or the Constitution — from F.B.I. directors, intelligence officials, military commanders and his attorneys general. He has replaced five inspectors general investigating wrongdoing in his administration, withheld his tax returns, pardoned his political allies convicted of felonies, and normalized lying and inflammatory tweets as modes of presidential communication. And recently he issued an executive order undermining the political neutrality and career protections of thousands of senior civil servants.

But the third pillar of our democracy — the one we have most taken for granted — is most at risk: free and fair elections. The danger emanates from a singular combination of events, the worst pandemic in a century and the most undemocratic president in our history.

ith Democrats accounting for a much larger share of mail-in ballots than Republicans, Mr. Trump has repeatedly challenged the legitimacy of these votes. If he is leading even narrowly on Tuesday night, he could claim victory based only on the votes so far counted —

The integrity of the election is further challenged by the rising pace of voter suppression. In 2013, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, throwing out the formula requiring nine states (and other localities) with a history of racist voter suppression to obtain federal permission before changing their voting requirements. Since then, these and other Republican-controlled states have imposed legal and administrative changes that have made voting more difficult for Black Americans, Hispanics, young people and city dwellers — all heavily Democratic constituencies.

The very age of American democracy is part of the problem. The United States was the first country to become a democracy, emerging over a vast, dispersed and diverse set of colonies that feared the prospect of the “tyranny of the majority.”

The American system is a mishmash of state and local authorities. Most are staffed by dedicated professionals, but state legislatures and elected secretaries of state can introduce partisanship, casting doubt on its impartiality. No other advanced democracy falls so short of contemporary democratic standards of fairness, neutrality and rationality in its system of administering national elections.

Newer democracies also take measures to depoliticize the constitutional court. No other democracy gives life tenure to such a powerful position as constitutional court justice. They either face term limits (12 years in Germany and South Africa; eight in Taiwan) or age limits (70 years in Australia, Israel and South Korea; 75 in Canada), or both.

Many of these ideas simply didn’t occur to America’s founders, who were framing a modern democracy for the first time, for a largely rural society with more limited levels of education, communication and life expectancy. The result is that American democracy lacks national checks on executive corruption and national guarantees of electoral integrity that have become routine in other democracies around the world. And nominations to our Supreme Court have become far more politicized than in many peer democracies.

Today, we are far closer to a breakdown than most democracy experts, myself included, would have dared anticipate just a few years ago. Even if we are spared the worst, it is long past time to renew the mechanisms of our democracy, learn from other democracies around the world and again make our republic a shining city on a hill.

In 2016, its first time publicly releasing polls, Trafalgar was the firm whose state surveys most effectively presaged Mr. Trump’s upset win. A veteran Republican strategist, Mr. Cahaly even called the exact number of Electoral College votes that Mr. Trump and Hillary Clinton would receive — 306 to 227 — although his prediction of which states would get them there was just slightly off.

“social desirability bias”: the tendency for respondents to say what they think an interviewer wants to hear, not what they actually believe.

ut he’s not saying what they are. Mr. Cahaly releases almost no real explanation of his polling methodology; the methods page on Trafalgar’s website contains what reads like a vague advertisement of its services and explains that its polls actively confront social desirability bias, without giving specifics as to how. He says that he uses a mixture of text messages, emails and phone calls — some automated, and some by live callers — to reach an accurate representation of the electorate.

“People do not seem embarrassed to support Mr. Trump,” Mr. Cox said. In the past four years, studies seeking to quantify a so-called “shy Trump” effect in surveys have generally found little evidence to support it.

“It is wildly inappropriate not to tell me, not only what modes you use to draw your sample, but how specifically you did it,” he said. His general rule: “If somebody’s not transparent you can generally assume they’re crap.”

In 2010, Mr. Cahaly was arrested and taken to court for violating a law against using automatic calling machines — known as robocalling — to conduct polls. The charges against him were eventually dropped, and he later successfully sued a state law enforcement agency, causing South Carolina’s prohibition on robocalls to be declared unconstitutional.

Mr. Cahaly said he was doing legitimate polling, aimed at truly understanding voters’ opinions — and getting what he called “dead-on” results. During the 2016 Republican primaries, he was early to spot a surge of enthusiasm from many working-class voters who had long felt alienated from politics and helped power Mr. Trump’s ascent.

“I kept getting these stories about people who showed up to vote and didn’t know how to use the voting machines, they hadn’t voted in so long,” Mr. Cahaly said. So he began to look into who those people might be, and used data available online to create a list of roughly 50 lifestyle characteristics — including, for instance, whether they owned a fishing license — to identify the sorts of low-engagement voters who were turning out in droves. He used that data to make sure he was reaching the right kinds of respondents as he polled off the voter file in advance of the general election.

Mr. Cahaly feels no need to reveal his techniques, despite the near-universal doubt about his work from his peers. “I’ve given away enough; I’m not giving away any more,” he said, arguing that it had been a mistake to even tell the public about his “neighbor question,” which some other firms have since adopted in their own surveys.

The group’s reopening recommendations include widespread testing, contact tracing and isolation of people who are infected or exposed.

One important factor in transmission is that seemingly benign activities like speaking and breathing produce respiratory bits of varying sizes that can disperse along air currents and potentially infect people nearby.

Health agencies have so far identified respiratory-droplet contact as the major mode of Covid-19 transmission. These large fluid droplets can transfer virus from one person to another if they land on the eyes, nose or mouth. But they tend to fall to the ground or on other surfaces pretty quickly.

Proper ventilation—such as forcing air toward the ceiling and pumping it outside, or bringing fresh air into a room—dilutes the amount of virus in a space, lowering the risk of infection.

The so-called attack rate—the percentage of people who were infected in a specific place or time

that is only a rule of thumb, he cautioned. It could take much less time with a sneeze in the face or other intimate contact where a lot of respiratory droplets are emitted, he said.

When singing, people can emit many large and small respiratory particles. Singers also breathe deeply, increasing the chance they will inhale infectious particles.

Similar transmission dynamics could be at play in other settings where heavy breathing and loud talking are common over extended periods, like gyms, musical or theater performances, conferences, weddings and birthday parties.

An estimated 10% of people with Covid-19 are responsible for about 80% of transmissions, according to a study published recently in Wellcome Open Research. Some people with the virus may have a higher viral load, or produce more droplets when they breathe or speak, or be in a confined space with many people and bad ventilation when they’re at their most infectious point in their illness

additional protocols to interrupt spread, like social distancing in workspaces and providing N95 respirators or other personal protective equipment, might be necessary as well, she said.

overall, “the risk of a given infected person transmitting to people is pretty low,” said Scott Dowell, a deputy director overseeing the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Covid-19 response. “For every superspreading event you have a lot of times when nobody gets infected.”

The attack rate for Covid-19 in households ranges between 4.6% and 19.3%, according to several studies. It was higher for spouses, at 27.8%, than for other household members, at 17.3%, in one study in China.

The 37-year-old stay-at-home mother was hospitalized with a stroke on April 18 that her doctors attributed to Covid-19, and was still coughing when she went home two days later.

She pushed to get home quickly, she said, because her 4-year-old son has autism and needed her. She kept her distance from family members, covered her mouth when coughing and washed her hands frequently. No one else in the apartment has fallen ill, she said. “Nobody went near me when I was sick,” she said.

Being outside is generally safer, experts say, because viral particles dilute more quickly. But small and large droplets pose a risk even outdoors, when people are in close, prolonged contac

No one knows for sure how much virus it takes for someone to become infected, but recent studies offer some clues

In one small study published recently in the journal Nature, researchers were unable to culture live coronavirus if a patient’s throat swab or milliliter of sputum contained less than one million copies of viral RNA.

“Based on our experiment, I would assume that something above that number would be required for infectivity,” said Clemens Wendtner, one of the study’s lead authors

He and his colleagues found samples from contagious patients with virus levels up to 1,000 times that, which could help explain why the virus is so infectious in the right conditions: It may take much lower levels of virus than what’s found in a sick patient to infect someone else.

Current CDC workplace guidelines don’t talk about distribution of aerosols, or small particles, in a room, said Lisa Brosseau, a respiratory-protection consultan

Another factor is prolonged exposure. That’s generally defined as 15 minutes or more of unprotected contact with someone less than 6 feet away

Some scientists say while aerosol transmission does occur, it doesn’t explain most infections. In addition, the virus doesn’t appear to spread widely through the air.

“If this were transmitted mainly like measles or tuberculosis, where infectious virus lingered in the airspace for a long time, or spread across large airspaces or through air-handling systems, I think you would be seeing a lot more people infected,” said the CDC’s Dr. Brooks.

High-touch surfaces like doorknobs are a risk, but the virus degrades quickly so other surfaces like cardboard boxes are less worrisome,

authors on the new paper, ran a pilot study in another group of volunteers under similar conditions in 2009: After just two days of bunking up, about 8 percent of the recipients were infected.

In this new experiment, the researchers doubled the number of days the study participants were allowed to mingle. But they found only one new case of flu among the 75 volunteers who hadn’t been intentionally dosed with the virus — an infection rate of just 1.3 percent.

The biggest difference between the two experiments, Dr. Milton said, was their backdrop. In its first iteration, the study took place in poorly ventilated hotel rooms; in its second, the researchers housed their participants in a research facility with much improved air flow. In the new study, “we had at least seven times more ventilation per person,”

“We’ve been studying the flu for 102 years and still don’t know for sure how it’s transmitted,”

While good ventilation can dilute aerosols, it is far less effective against droplets, which are much wider and heavier

Part of the problem is the continuum on which aerosols and droplets exist. Though they go by different names, the two categories really belong to the same group: globs of fluid that come in varying sizes. Blobs less than five micrometers in diameter are termed aerosols, which can exit the airway at the slightest breath and waft away; anything larger is a droplet, hefty enough to fall to the ground within a few feet of its source. The boundary between them is somewhat arbitrary, though generally speaking, the smaller the particle, the farther it travels.

When people expel fluid from their airway, it tends to manifest in a mixture, some bigger, some smaller and everything in between,

Even after they exit an individual, these fluidic blobs remain dynamic. Large droplets, for instance, can disperse or evaporate into little aerosols in midair. Others might scatter onto a surface or a hand, lingering for minutes or hours before encountering someone new. And the rates at which all these events occur can shift, depending on the force with which someone, maybe a loud talker, expels these droplets or the amount of air flow in an area,

“The reality is that there is a continuum of aerosols.”

Conservative senators are pushing for a swift vote before Nov. 3. The Senate Judiciary chairman who will shepherd the nomination through the chamber said Republicans have the support they need for confirmation.

Democrats point to hypocrisy in Republicans trying to rush through a pick so close to the election after McConnell led the GOP in refusing to vote on a nominee of President Barack Obama in February 2016, long before that year’s election.

The nominee is going to be supported by every Republican in the Judiciary Committee

We’ve got the votes to confirm the justice on the floor of the Senate before the election and that’s what’s coming.

But he acknowledged the court will shift to become more conservative.

Trump told confidants he was “saving” Barrett for Ginsburg’s seat.

Barrett has long expressed sympathy with a mode of interpreting the Constitution called originalism, in which justices try to decipher original meanings of texts in deciding cases

Biden was appealing to GOP senators to “uphold your constitutional duty, your conscience” and wait until after the election.

No nominee has won confirmation so quickly since Sandra Day O’Connor — with no opposition from either party — became the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court in 1981.

Trump criticized Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska for opposing a vote before elections. The president warned they would be “very badly hurt” by voters.

They were able to finance the product, which went through 30 prototypes and iterations, with grants and personal money as well as funding from start-up accelerators and awards

However, it has features that distinguish it from others on the market, including different light modes — blue, red and white.

Red light, which has a long wavelength, can help promote alertness, while blue light, which has a shorter wavelength, tends to do the same while also suppressing melatonin, a hormone that helps regulate sleep, she said.

“It’s the tool that you didn’t know that you needed until it’s right on your scrub top, and you’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, where has this been this whole time?’” Ms. Mancillas said. “It makes life so much easier.”

More than 400 nurses have tested the uNight Light, and more than 90 percent said it was helpful, the inventors said. They have received 1,500 orders and will start shipments next month.

A month later, I believe that the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 via aerosols matters much more than has been officially acknowledged to date.

This confirms the results of a study from late May (not peer-reviewed) in which Covid-19 patients were found to release SARS-CoV-2 simply by exhaling — without coughing or even talking. The authors of that study said the finding implied that airborne transmission “plays a major role” in spreading the virus.

Accepting these conclusions wouldn’t much change what is currently being recommended as best behavior. The strongest protection against SARS-CoV-2, whether the virus is mostly contained in droplets or in aerosols, essentially remains the same: Keep your distance and wear masks.

Rather, the recent findings are an important reminder to also be vigilant about opening windows and improving airflow indoors. And they are further evidence that the quality of masks and their fit matter, too.

here is no neat and no meaningful cutoff point — at 5 microns or any other size — between droplets and aerosols: All are tiny specks of liquid, their size ranging along a spectrum that goes from very small to really microscopic.

Yes, droplets tend to fly through the air like mini cannonballs and they fall to the ground rather quickly, while aerosols can float around for many hours.

The practical implications are plain:Social distancing really is important. It keeps us out of the most concentrated parts of other people’s respiratory plumes. So stay away from one another by one or two meters at least — though farther is safer.

“The smaller the exhaled droplets, the more important the short-range airborne route.”

Can you walk into an empty room and contract the virus if an infected person, now gone, was there before you? Perhaps, but probably only if the room is small and stuffy.

Can the virus waft up and down buildings via air ducts or pipes? Maybe, though that hasn’t been established.

another, recent, preprint (not peer reviewed) about the Diamond Princess concluded that “aerosol inhalation was likely the dominant contributor to Covid-19 transmission” among the ship’s passengers.

It might seem logical, or make intuitive sense, that larger droplets would contain more virus than do smaller aerosols — but they don’t.

The Lancet Respiratory Medicine that analyzed the aerosols produced by the coughs and exhaled breaths of patients with various respiratory infections found “a predominance of pathogens in small particles” (under 5 microns). “There is no evidence,” the study also concluded, “that some pathogens are carried only in large droplets.”

I believe that, taken together, much of the evidence gathered to date suggests that close-range transmission by aerosols is significant — possibly very significant, and certainly more significant than direct droplet spray.

But basic physics also says that a 5-micron droplet takes about a half-hour to drop to the floor from the mouth of an adult of average height — and during that time, the droplet can travel many meters on an air current. Droplets expelled in coughs or sneezes also travel much farther than one meter.

Wear a mask. Masks help block aerosols released by the wearer. Scientific evidence is also building that masks protect the wearer from breathing in aerosols around them.

When it comes to masks, size does matter.

My lab has been testing cloth masks on a mannequin, sucking in air through its mouth at a realistic rate. We found that even a bandanna loosely tied over its mouth and nose blocked half or more of aerosols larger than 2 microns from entering the mannequin.

Ventilation counts. Open windows and doors. Adjust dampers in air-conditioning and heating systems. Upgrade the filters in those systems. Add portable air cleaners, or install germicidal ultraviolet technologies to remove or kill virus particles in the air.

Avoid crowds. The more people around you, the more likely someone among them will be infected. Especially avoid crowds indoors, where aerosols can accumulate.

We also found that especially with very small aerosols — smaller than 1 micron — it is more effective to use a softer fabric (which is easier to fit tightly over the face) than a stiffer fabric (which, even if it is a better filter, tends to sit more awkwardly, creating gaps).

One study from 2013 found that surgical masks reduced exposure to flu viruses by between 10 percent and 98 percent (depending on the mask’s design).A recent paper found that surgical masks can completely block seasonal coronaviruses from getting into the air.To my knowledge, no similar study has been conducted for SARS-CoV-2 yet, but these findings might apply to this virus as well since it is similar to seasonal coronaviruses in size and structure.

What about the outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise ship off Japan early this year? Some 712 of the 3,711 people on board became infected.

Consider the case of a restaurant in Guangzhou, southern China, at the beginning of the year, in which one diner infected with SARS-CoV-2 at one table spread the virus to a total of nine people seated at their table and two other tables.Yuguo Li, a professor of engineering at the University of Hong Kong, and colleagues analyzed video footage from the restaurant and in a preprint (not peer reviewed) published in April found no evidence of close contact between the diners.Droplets can’t account for transmission in this case, at least not among the people at the tables other than the infected person’s: The droplets would have fallen to the floor before reaching those tables.But the three tables were in a poorly ventilated section of the restaurant, and an air conditioning unit pushed air across them. Notably, too, no staff member and none of the other diners in the restaurant — including at two tables just beyond the air conditioner’s airstream — became infected.

In May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its guidelines to clarify that while COVID-19 spreads easily among speakers and sneezers in close encounters, touching a surface “isn’t thought to be the main way the virus spreads.” Other scientists have reached a more forceful conclusion. “Surface transmission of COVID-19 is not justified at all by the science,”

Surface transmission—from touching doorknobs, mail, food-delivery packages, and subways poles—seems quite rare.

n the past few months, scientists have converged on a theory of how this disease travels: via air. The disease typically spreads among people through large droplets expelled in sneezes and coughs, or through smaller aerosolized droplets, as from conversations, during which saliva spray can linger in the air.

All those studies that made COVID-19 seem likely to live for days on metal and paper bags were based on unrealistically strong concentrations of the virus. As he explained to me, as many as 100 people would need to sneeze on the same area of a table to mimic some of their experimental conditions. The studies “stacked the deck to get a result that bears no resemblance to the real world," Goldman said.

an obsession with contaminated surfaces distracts from more effective ways to combat COVID-19. “People have prevention fatigue,” Goldman told me. “They’re exhausted by all the information we’re throwing at them. We have to communicate priorities clearly; otherwise, they’ll be overloaded.”

Hygiene theater can take limited resources away from more important goals. Goldman shared with me an email he had received from a New Jersey teacher after his Lancet article came out. She said her local schools had considered shutting one day each week for “deep cleaning.” At a time when returning to school will require herculean efforts from teachers and extraordinary ingenuity from administrators to keep kids safely distanced, setting aside entire days to clean surfaces would be a pitiful waste of time and scarce local tax revenue.

As long as people wear masks and don’t lick one another, New York’s subway-germ panic seems irrational. In Japan, ridership has returned to normal, and outbreaks traced to its famously crowded public transit system have been so scarce that the Japanese virologist Hitoshi Oshitani concluded, in an email to The Atlantic, that “transmission on the train is not common.”

By funneling our anxieties into empty cleaning rituals, we lose focus on the more common modes of COVID-19 transmission and the most crucial policies to stop this plague. “My point is not to relax, but rather to focus on what matters and what works,” Goldman said. “Masks, social distancing, and moving activities outdoors. That’s it. That’s how we protect ourselves. That’s how we beat this thing.”

A Washington Post-University of Maryland poll released last week showed a more steady rate of concern. In that poll, 63 percent of Americans said that they were very or somewhat worried that they would get seriously ill, while 36 percent said they were not too worried or not at all worried.

The percentage of Americans who say they have avoided small gatherings dropped some during the past month — but significantly more among Republicans than Democrat

The new survey found 86 percent of Democrats say they have avoided small gatherings, a modest drop since a high of 90 percent in late March.

By comparison, 60 percent of Republicans in the new survey say they have avoided small gatherings, a drop from a high of 76 percent in late March

The city of Shulan in Jilin province, near the borders with Russia and China, has declared it is in “wartime mode” after linking 15 new cases to a super-spreader. All public places have been closed and all public transport suspended, with residents told to stay home while the outbreak is contained.

He rose from a political party bent on thwarting demographic change by subverting the democratic process; a party whose base was addicted to white identity politics, steeped in religious fundamentalism, and suffused with authoritarian cravings—a party which, infected by Trumpism, now spreads the multiple malignancies metastasized by Trump’s personal and political pathologies.

Since the civil rights revolution triggered an influx of resentful Southern whites, the GOP has catered to white grievance and anxiety.

Trump’s transformative contribution has been to make racial antagonism overt—a badge of pride that bonds him to his followers in opposition to a pluralist democracy that threatens their imperiled social and political hegemony.

Take the poll released last week by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) measuring the attitudes of “Fox News Republicans”—the 40 percent of party adherents who trust Fox as their primary source of TV news. The survey found that 91 percent oppose the Black Lives Matter movement; 90 percent believe that police killings of blacks are “isolated incidents”; and 58 think that whites are victimized by racial discrimination, compared to 36 percent who think blacks are.

He comprehends his audience all too well

Their animus toward immigration is equally strong. Substantial majorities believe that immigrants consume a disproportionate amount of governmental services, increase crime in local communities, and threaten our cultural and ethnic character.

That sense of racial and cultural besiegement pervades the 73 percent of Fox News Republicans who, the survey found, believe that white Christians suffer from “a lot” of societal discrimination—more than double the number who say that blacks do

Another key subgroup of the GOP base, white evangelicals, harbors similar attitudes. The poll found that the majority adamantly disbelieve that the legacy of racial discrimination makes it difficult for African Americans to succeed

The head of the PRRI, Robert P. Jones, concludes that Trump arouses white Christians “not despite, but through appeals to white supremacy” based on evoking “powerful fears about the loss of White Christian dominance.”

In 2016, Vox reports, Trump carried whites by 54 to 39 percent; in 2020, by 57 to 42 percent (per the raw exit polls)

Tucker Carlson serves as a cautionary tale. When Carlson dismissed, as gently as possible, the crackpot allegations of Trump lawyer Sidney Powell about a sweeping conspiracy using rogue voting machines, he was savaged across the right-wing echo chamber as a spineless quisling. Lesson learned.

fear of displacement helps explain the profound emotional connection between Trump and Republican voters. Their loyalty is not to the political philosophy traditionally embraced by the GOP, but a visceral sense of racial, religious, and cultural identity—and the need to preserve it—which is instinctively authoritarian and anti-democratic.

Bartels surveyed respondents regarding four statements which, taken together, read like a blueprint for Trump: The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it. A time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands. Strong leaders sometimes have to bend the rules in order to get things done. It is hard to trust the results of elections when so many people will vote for anyone who offers a handout.

Reports Bump: “Most Republicans and Republican-leaning independents agreed with the first statement. . . . Nearly three-quarters agreed that election results should be treated with skepticism.” Republicans and Republican-leaning independents were also “significantly more likely to say they agreed with the other two statements than that they disagreed.”

This lies at the heart of Trump’s appeal: his shared sense of victimization by an insidious elite; his unvarnished denunciation of white America’s supposed enemies; and his promise to keep them at bay—if necessary, by force. For many in the Republican base, he fulfills a psychic longing for an American strongman.

In the New York Times, Katherine Stewart describes the growth of “a radical political ideology that is profoundly hostile to democracy and pluralism, and a certain political style that seeks to provoke moral panic, rewards the paranoid and views every partisan conflict as a conflagration, the end of the world.”

“Christian nationalism is a creation of a uniquely isolated messaging sphere. Many members of the rank and file get their main political information not just from messaging platforms that keep their audiences in a world that is divorced from reality, but also from dedicated religious networks and reactionary faith leaders.”

As Republican strategists well appreciate, a party whose appeal is confined to conservative whites is, over the demographic long term, doomed to defeat. The GOP’s design is to postpone as long as possible their electoral day of reckoning.

In launching his naked attempt to disenfranchise the majority of voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin through assertions of fraud unprecedented in their speciousness and scope, Trump took the GOP’s distaste for free and fair elections to its logical conclusion: the abrogation of American democracy at the highest level.

Trump justified his anti-democratic sociopathy by proliferating a plethora of groundless and preposterous falsehoods calculated to delegitimize our electoral processes. He claimed that millions of phony mail-in ballots had been cast for Biden; that voting machines had been re-engineered to exclude millions more cast for him; and that Republican election observers had been excluded from many polling places by a host of local officials bent on serving a labyrinthine conspiracy to purloin the White House.

Never once did he or his lawyers cite a shred of evidence supporting any material impropriety. Rather his purpose was to convince the Republican base that they were being cheated of their leader by the insidious “other.” Numerous polls confirm that it’s working; typical is a Politico/Morning Consult survey showing that 70 percent of Republicans don’t believe the election was fairly conducted.

As Trevor Potter, a Republican who formerly headed the Federal Election Commission, told the New York Times, Trump “is creating a road map to destabilization and chaos in future years. . . . What he’s saying, explicitly, is if a party doesn’t like the election result they have the right to change it by gaming the system.”

Support for Trump’s wall is nearly unanimous (96 percent); two-thirds (66 percent) favor barring refugees from entering the United States; and a majority (53 percent) support separating children from their parents when a family enters the country without permission.

Ultimately, this otherworldly obduracy stems from Trump’s manifest psychological illness: his imperishable narcissism; his ineradicable drive to be noticed; his relentless need to dominate; his comprehensive carelessness of all considerations save what pleases him in the moment. Television turned this moral pygmy into a mythic figure—and he cannot let go.

Republican elites want very much to turn the page on Donald Trump following his loss. But . . . they do not have any say in the matter, because their party now belongs to him. And the party belongs to Donald Trump because he has delivered to Republican voters exactly what they want.

a notable phenomenon of Trump’s presidency is the degree to which financially embattled working-class whites imagined, contrary to observable reality, that their economic situation had improved—or soon would. There are few better examples of how politics mirrors psychology more than lived experience.

This fidelity is why some Republican gurus remain committed to Trump’s strategy of maximizing support among middle-class and blue-collar whites. After all, they argue, despite Trump’s defeat the GOP did better than expected in senatorial and congressional races. Why risk tinkering with his formula?

Finally, economic populism is antithetical to the donor classes who, in truth, did better under Trump than did anyone else. They got their tax cuts and their judges—the GOP’s pipeline for judicial nominees, the Federalist Society, is dedicated to advancing pro-corporate jurisprudence. This is not the prescription for worker-friendly policies.

For the foreseeable future, Trumpism will define the GOP. The path to regeneration runs not through reform but, one fears, must proceed from self-destruction. The wait time will be painful for the party, and fateful for the country.

“There’s a high-risk strategy here and I hope that the president doesn’t rush back into the campaign mode — which he wants to do before he gets well — until they tell him he’s no longer a danger to everybody else,” said Ed Rollins, an adviser to a super PAC supporting Mr. Trump.

Doctors allowed him to leave for the White House, while acknowledging he hadn’t yet reached the critical seven- to 10-day window that doctors watch for with the coronavirus to see whether patients take a turn for the worse.

Mr. Trump did little to adhere to the narrative aides were hoping would emerge, one that would benefit him politically.

the president did not mention the hardship the virus had caused to others or that anyone had suffered greatly from it. Nor did he mention the White House staff members who had fallen sick.

“It appears the campaign hasn’t discussed their concept with their candidate,” said Brendan Buck, a former adviser to the former House speaker Paul D. Ryan. “You would hope someone who has been in serious health crisis would have a bit of an awakening, find a little religion on this, but he seems incapable of doing that.”

“After being released from the hospital, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson showed in personal terms how the virus impacted him — thanking those who helped him get back on his feet, committing to tackling the virus and balancing the challenges facing his country,”

it would not be clear until Oct. 12 whether Mr. Trump is over the hump of his virus.

Advisers continue to hold out the belief that former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Trump’s challenger, could stumble, or that unforeseen events could intervene in the race.

Campaign officials said the expectation was still to resume presidential rallies before November, contending that Mr. Trump’s only real exposure to people at those events was on the plane, and the entourage traveling with him would be smaller because so many of his own aides are out sick as well.

“With four weeks remaining and nearly four million Americans already casting their votes, it’s awfully late to change perceptions about President Trump or his performance,” said Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist.

"This is not direction from the current political appointees from the Trump administration, it's from basically the staff below the political level," the staffer said.

"We had a call yesterday and talked quite a bit about this, and the direction we received was to expect a transition, start planning for it, think about the things that the Biden team would likely want to see and start brushing up on those documents and start thinking about how do we frame our programs, and our work in a way that is attractive to the Biden administration," the staffer told CNN.

One Department of Energy division is starting to quietly prepare for the incoming Biden administration even though no official connection has been made, according to one staffer in the department.

until there is a declaration certifying the election, personnel should refrain from speaking directly with members of the Biden team and continue to go through the department's transition office, a department official told CNN.

"They have done everything they can do. Now they just wait," said a source familiar with the process.

department officials realize they have no other option but to remain patient, recognizing that they will eventually get to work with the incoming team, they also believe the department needs a tremendous amount of attention and would like the Biden team to get in as soon as possible.

A Treasury staffer said the Treasury Department has been "running through a standard transition process," which began a month out from the election. That process is ongoing, the source said, though there has been no communication regarding landing teams from the Biden transition yet.

"The silence is still deafening," a DHS official said when asked about outreach from leadership on the transition. The department seems to be in a "wait and see" mode, the official added, saying that any transactions with the Biden team prior to official certification appear "unlikely at this point."

"Much of the story of this last administration and the next couple of months is a disdain for the workings of government," Chertoff said. "It's almost as if it's a determination that they want to wreck government and make it as hard as possible for government to do its job. The problem is that leaves a lot of people dead, as we've seen with the virus."

Trump has refused to accept the outcome, spreading false claims of widespread voter fraud while his campaign has filed a flurry of lawsuits that aren't going to overturn the results of the election.

some of Trump's Cabinet officials have stayed loyal to his false claims, suggesting there will be a second Trump term.

At a news conference on Tuesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed, "There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration."

"Obviously, if there's a transition here, we're going to ensure it's a professional, cooperative one," Azar said.

Biden's team is moving forward with its transition, naming a lengthy team for all of the agencies that is beginning the work of selecting Cabinet leaders and staffing up, even though it is currently shut out from funding -- and the agencies themselves. Biden's team is downplaying the significance the delayed transition will have on the incoming administration.

there are tangible effects to the delay.

Normally, a President-elect would immediately begin receiving the same classified briefings as the President. But so far those briefings have not happened for Biden, as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has not engaged with the Biden team.

While Biden's coronavirus team has been reaching out to states and the medical community to hit the ground running once Biden is inaugurated, the transition team does not have access to the administration's Covid-19 data and virus distribution plans.

"Not only are they not getting access to classified information or already appropriated funds, they aren't getting their review teams into the agencies, and getting ahold of the real budget picture in the agencies and the real personnel picture," said Denis McDonough, who was President Barack Obama's chief of staff.

The office spaces for the transition teams --- both the State Department career officials assigned to the job by the department and the Biden State Department team -- are sitting vacant.

The Biden team is also aware that even when they are able to speak with current defense officials after the General Services Administration signs off on Biden's victory, those officials may not be eager to engage or be as forthcoming as the ones who have already departed.

“We do not seek conflict,” General McKenzie said, “but we must remain postured and committed to respond to any contingency.”

on Thursday, a senior military official said American intelligence analysts had detected “planning going on” — including preparations for possible rocket strikes or worse — by Iran and Shia militias in Iraq that it supports.

“In short, Iran is using Iraq as its proxy battleground against the United States, with Iran’s ultimate objective being to eject the United States and our forces from Iraq and the broader Middle East,” General McKenzie said

The senior military official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe operations and intelligence assessments, did not cite any specific evidence of a larger, imminent attack against American personnel. But the official said military analysts assessed that the likelihood of Iran or its proxies miscalculating the risks of such a strike were higher than usual.

More recently, a top Iranian scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was killed east of Tehran, in a daytime strike widely believed to have been carried out by Israeli operatives

Iran responded this month by enacting a law ordering an immediate ramping up of its enrichment of uranium to levels closer to weapons-grade fuel.

“The Iranians don’t want to go to war with us,” Admiral McRaven continued. “We don’t want to go to war with Iran. So everybody needs to do the best they can to kind of lower the temperature and try not to get this into an escalation mode.”

In 1981, Huntington predicted that the next moral convulsion would hit America around the second or third decade of the 21st century—that is, right about now.

Trump is the final instrument of this crisis, but the conditions that brought him to power and make him so dangerous at this moment were decades in the making, and those conditions will not disappear if he is defeated.

Social trust is a measure of the moral quality of a society—of whether the people and institutions in it are trustworthy, whether they keep their promises and work for the common g

When people in a society lose faith or trust in their institutions and in each other, the nation collapses.

This is an account of how, over the past few decades, America became a more untrustworthy society

under the stresses of 2020, American institutions and the American social order crumbled and were revealed as more untrustworthy still

We had a chance, in crisis, to pull together as a nation and build trust. We did not. That has left us a broken, alienated society caught in a distrust doom loop.

The Baby Boomers grew up in the 1950s and ’60s, an era of family stability, widespread prosperity, and cultural cohesion. The mindset they embraced in the late ’60s and have embodied ever since was all about rebelling against authority, unshackling from institutions, and celebrating freedom, individualism, and liberation.

The emerging generations today enjoy none of that sense of security. They grew up in a world in which institutions failed, financial systems collapsed, and families were fragile. Children can now expect to have a lower quality of life than their parents, the pandemic rages, climate change looms, and social media is vicious. Their worldview is predicated on threat, not safety.

Thus the values of the Millennial and Gen Z generations that will dominate in the years ahead are the opposite of Boomer values: not liberation, but security; not freedom, but equality; not individualism, but the safety of the collective; not sink-or-swim meritocracy, but promotion on the basis of social justice

A new culture is dawning. The Age of Precarity is here.

I’ve spent my career rebutting the idea that America is in decline, but the events of these past six years, and especially of 2020, have made clear that we live in a broken nation. The cancer of distrust has spread to every vital organ.

Those were the days of triumphant globalization. Communism was falling. Apartheid was ending. The Arab-Israeli dispute was calming down. Europe was unifying. China was prospering. In the United States, a moderate Republican president, George H. W. Bush, gave way to the first Baby Boomer president, a moderate Democrat, Bill Clinton.

The stench of national decline is in the air. A political, social, and moral order is dissolving. America will only remain whole if we can build a new order in its place.

The American economy grew nicely. The racial wealth gap narrowed. All the great systems of society seemed to be working: capitalism, democracy, pluralism, diversity, globalization. It seemed, as Francis Fukuyama wrote in his famous “The End of History?” essay for The National Interest, “an unabashed victory for economic and political liberalism.”

Nations with low social trust—like Brazil, Morocco, and Zimbabwe—have struggling economies.

We think of the 1960s as the classic Boomer decade, but the false summer of the 1990s was the high-water mark of that ethos

The first great theme of that era was convergence. Walls were coming down. Everybody was coming together.

The second theme was the triumph of classical liberalism. Liberalism was not just a philosophy—it was a spirit and a zeitgeist, a faith that individual freedom would blossom in a loosely networked democratic capitalist world. Enterprise and creativity would be unleashed. America was the great embodiment and champion of this liberation.

The third theme was individualism. Society flourished when individuals were liberated from the shackles of society and the state, when they had the freedom to be true to themselves.

For his 2001 book, Moral Freedom, the political scientist Alan Wolfe interviewed a wide array of Americans. The moral culture he described was no longer based on mainline Protestantism, as it had been for generations

Instead, Americans, from urban bobos to suburban evangelicals, were living in a state of what he called moral freedom: the belief that life is best when each individual finds his or her own morality—inevitable in a society that insists on individual freedom.

moral freedom, like the other dominant values of the time, contained within it a core assumption: If everybody does their own thing, then everything will work out for everybody.

This was an ideology of maximum freedom and minimum sacrifice.

It all looks naive now. We were naive about what the globalized economy would do to the working class, naive to think the internet would bring us together, naive to think the global mixing of people would breed harmony, naive to think the privileged wouldn’t pull up the ladders of opportunity behind them

Over the 20 years after I sat with Kosieva, it all began to unravel. The global financial crisis had hit, the Middle East was being ripped apart by fanatics. On May 15, 2011, street revolts broke out in Spain, led by the self-declared Indignados—“the outraged.” “They don’t represent us!” they railed as an insult to the Spanish establishment. It would turn out to be the cry of a decade.

Millennials and members of Gen Z have grown up in the age of that disappointment, knowing nothing else. In the U.S. and elsewhere, this has produced a crisis of faith, across society but especially among the young. It has produced a crisis of trust.

Social trust is a generalized faith in the people of your community. It consists of smaller faiths. It begins with the assumption that we are interdependent, our destinies linked. It continues with the assumption that we share the same moral values. We share a sense of what is the right thing to do in different situations

gh-trust societies have what Fukuyama calls spontaneous sociability. People are able to organize more quickly, initiate action, and sacrifice for the common good.

When you look at research on social trust, you find all sorts of virtuous feedback loops. Trust produces good outcomes, which then produce more trust. In high-trust societies, corruption is lower and entrepreneurship is catalyzed.

Higher-trust nations have lower economic inequality, because people feel connected to each other and are willing to support a more generous welfare state.

People in high-trust societies are more civically engaged. Nations that score high in social trust—like the Netherlands, Sweden, China, and Australia—have rapidly growing or developed economies.

Renewal is hard to imagine. Destruction is everywhere, and construction difficult to see.

As the ethicist Sissela Bok once put it, “Whatever matters to human beings, trust is the atmosphere in which it thrives.”

During most of the 20th century, through depression and wars, Americans expressed high faith in their institutions

In 1964, for example, 77 percent of Americans said they trusted the federal government to do the right thing most or all of the time.

By 1994, only one in five Americans said they trusted government to do the right thing.

Then came the Iraq War and the financial crisis and the election of Donald Trump. Institutional trust levels remained pathetically low. What changed was the rise of a large group of people who were actively and poi

sonously alienated—who were not only distrustful but explosively distrustful. Explosive distrust is not just an absence of trust or a sense of detached alienation—it is an aggressive animosity and an urge to destroy. Explosive distrust is the belief that those who disagree with you are not just wrong but illegitimate

In 1997, 64 percent of Americans had a great or good deal of trust in the political competence of their fellow citizens; today only a third of Americans feel that way.

In most societies, interpersonal trust is stable over the decades. But for some—like Denmark, where about 75 percent say the people around them are trustworthy, and the Netherlands, where two-thirds say so—the numbers have actually risen.

In America, interpersonal trust is in catastrophic decline. In 2014, according to the General Social Survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago, only 30.3 percent of Americans agreed that “most people can be trusted,”

Today, a majority of Americans say they don’t trust other people when they first meet them.

There’s evidence to suggest that marital infidelity, academic cheating, and animal cruelty are all on the rise in America, but it’s hard to directly measure the overall moral condition of society—how honest people are, and how faithful.

Trust is the ratio between the number of people who betray you and the number of people who remain faithful to you. It’s not clear that there is more betrayal in America than there used to be—but there are certainly fewer faithful supports around people than there used to be.

Hundreds of books and studies on declining social capital and collapsing family structure demonstrate this. In the age of disappointment, people are less likely to be surrounded by faithful networks of people they can trust.

Black Americans have high trust in other Black Americans; it’s the wider society they don’t trust, for good and obvious reasons

As Vallier puts it, trust levels are a reflection of the moral condition of a nation at any given time.

high national trust is a collective moral achievement.

High national distrust is a sign that people have earned the right to be suspicious. Trust isn’t a virtue—it’s a measure of other people’s virtue.

Unsurprisingly, the groups with the lowest social trust in America are among the most marginalized.

Black Americans have been one of the most ill-treated groups in American history; their distrust is earned distrust

In 2018, 37.3 percent of white Americans felt that most people can be trusted, according to the General Social Survey, but only 15.3 percent of Black Americans felt the same.

People become trusting when the world around them is trustworthy. When they are surrounded by people who live up to their commitments. When they experience their country as a fair place.

In 2002, 43 percent of Black Americans were very or somewhat satisfied with the way Black people are treated in the U.S. By 2018, only 18 percent felt that way, according to Gallup.

The second disenfranchised low-trust group includes the lower-middle class and the working poor.

this group makes up about 40 percent of the country.

“They are driven by the insecurity of their place in society and in the economy,” he says. They are distrustful of technology and are much more likely to buy into conspiracy theories. “They’re often convinced by stories that someone is trying to trick them, that the world is against them,”

the third marginalized group that scores extremely high on social distrust: young adults. These are people who grew up in the age of disappointment. It’s the only world they know.

In 2012, 40 percent of Baby Boomers believed that most people can be trusted, as did 31 percent of members of Generation X. In contrast, only 19 percent of Millennials said most people can be trusted

Seventy-three percent of adults under 30 believe that “most of the time, people just look out for themselves,” according to a Pew survey from 2018. Seventy-one percent of those young adults say that most people “would try to take advantage of you if they got a chance.

A mere 10 percent of Gen Zers trust politicians to do the right thing.

Only 35 percent of young people, versus 67 percent of old people, believe that Americans respect the rights of people who are not like them.

Fewer than a third of Millennials say America is the greatest country in the world, compared to 64 percent of members of the Silent Generation.

“values and behavior are shaped by the degree to which survival is secure.” In the age of disappointment, our sense of safety went away

Some of this is physical insecurity: school shootings, terrorist attacks, police brutality, and overprotective parenting at home

the true insecurity is financial, social, and emotional.

By the time the Baby Boomers hit a median age of 35, their generation owned 21 percent of the nation’s wealth

First, financial insecurity

As of last year, Millennials—who will hit an average age of 35 in three years—owned just 3.2 percent of the nation’s wealth.

Next, emotional insecurity:

fewer children growing up in married two-parent households, more single-parent households, more depression, and higher suicide rates.

Then, identity insecurity.

All the traits that were once assigned to you by your community, you must now determine on your own: your identity, your morality, your gender, your vocation, your purpose, and the place of your belonging. Self-creation becomes a major anxiety-inducing act of young adulthood.

liquid modernity

Finally, social insecurity.

n the age of social media our “sociometers”—the antennae we use to measure how other people are seeing us—are up and on high alert all the time. Am I liked? Am I affirmed?

Danger is ever present. “For many people, it is impossible to think without simultaneously thinking about what other people would think about what you’re thinking,” the educator Fredrik deBoer has written. “This is exhausting and deeply unsatisfying. As long as your self-conception is tied up in your perception of other people’s conception of you, you will never be free to occupy a personality with confidence; you’re always at the mercy of the next person’s dim opinion of you and your whole deal.”

In this world, nothing seems safe; everything feels like chaos.

Distrust sows distrust. It produces the spiritual state that Emile Durkheim called anomie, a feeling of being disconnected from society, a feeling that the whole game is illegitimate, that you are invisible and not valued, a feeling that the only person you can really trust is yourself.

People plagued by distrust can start to see threats that aren’t there; they become risk averse

Americans take fewer risks and are much less entrepreneurial than they used to be. In 2014, the rate of business start-ups hit a nearly 40-year low. Since the early 1970s, the rate at which people move across state lines each year has dropped by 56 percent

People lose faith in experts. They lose faith in truth, in the flow of information that is the basis of modern society. “A world of truth is a world of trust, and vice versa,”

In periods of distrust, you get surges of populism; populism is the ideology of those who feel betrayed

People are drawn to leaders who use the language of menace and threat, who tell group-versus-group power narratives. You also get a lot more political extremism. People seek closed, rigid ideological systems that give them a sense of security.

fanaticism is a response to existential anxiety. When people feel naked and alone, they revert to tribe. Their radius of trust shrinks, and they only trust their own kind.

When many Americans see Trump’s distrust, they see a man who looks at the world as they do.

By February 2020, America was a land mired in distrust. Then the plague arrived.

From the start, the pandemic has hit the American mind with sledgehammer force. Anxiety and depression have spiked. In April, Gallup recorded a record drop in self-reported well-being, as the share of Americans who said they were thriving fell to the same low point as during the Great Recession

These kinds of drops tend to produce social upheavals. A similar drop was seen in Tunisian well-being just before the street protests that led to the Arab Spring.

The emotional crisis seems to have hit low-trust groups the hardest

“low trusters” were more nervous during the early months of the pandemic, more likely to have trouble sleeping, more likely to feel depressed, less likely to say the public authorities were responding well to the pandemic

Eighty-one percent of Americans under 30 reported feeling anxious, depressed, lonely, or hopeless at least one day in the previous week, compared to 48 percent of adults 60 and over.

Americans looked to their governing institutions to keep them safe. And nearly every one of their institutions betrayed them

The president downplayed the crisis, and his administration was a daily disaster area

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention produced faulty tests, failed to provide up-to-date data on infections and deaths, and didn’t provide a trustworthy voice for a scared public.

The Food and Drug Administration wouldn’t allow private labs to produce their own tests without a lengthy approval process.

In nations that ranked high on the World Values Survey measure of interpersonal trust—like China, Australia, and most of the Nordic states—leaders were able to mobilize quickly, come up with a plan, and count on citizens to comply with the new rules.

In low-trust nations—like Mexico, Spain, and Brazil—there was less planning, less compliance, less collective action, and more death.

Countries that fell somewhere in the middle—including the U.S., Germany, and Japan—had a mixed record depending on the quality of their leadership.

South Korea, where more than 65 percent of people say they trust government when it comes to health care, was able to build a successful test-and-trace regime. In America, where only 31 percent of Republicans and 44 percent of Democrats say the government should be able to use cellphone data to track compliance with experts’ coronavirus social-contact guidelines, such a system was never really implemented.

For decades, researchers have been warning about institutional decay. Institutions get caught up in one of those negative feedback loops that are so common in a world of mistrust. They become ineffective and lose legitimacy. People who lose faith in them tend not to fund them. Talented people don’t go to work for them. They become more ineffective still.

On the right, this anti-institutional bias has manifested itself as hatred of government; an unwillingness to defer to expertise, authority, and basic science; and a reluctance to fund the civic infrastructure of society, such as a decent public health system

On the left, distrust of institutional authority has manifested as a series of checks on power that have given many small actors the power to stop common plans, producing what Fukuyama calls a vetocracy

In 2020, American institutions groaned and sputtered. Academics wrote up plan after plan and lobbed them onto the internet. Few of them went anywhere. America had lost the ability to build new civic structures to respond to ongoing crises like climate change, opioid addiction, and pandemics, or to reform existing ones.

In a lower-trust era like today, Levin told me, “there is a greater instinct to say, ‘They’re failing us.’ We see ourselves as outsiders to the systems—an outsider mentality that’s hard to get out of.”

Americans haven’t just lost faith in institutions; they’ve come to loathe them, even to think that they are evil

55 percent of Americans believe that the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 was created in a lab and 59 percent believe that the U.S. government is concealing the true number of deaths

Half of all Fox News viewers believe that Bill Gates is plotting a mass-vaccination campaign so he can track people.

This spring, nearly a third of Americans were convinced that it was probably or definitely true that a vaccine existed but was being withheld by the government.

institutions like the law, the government, the police, and even the family don’t merely serve social functions, Levin said; they form the individuals who work and live within them. The institutions provide rules to live by, standards of excellence to live up to, social roles to fulfill.

By 2020, people had stopped seeing institutions as places they entered to be morally formed,

Instead, they see institutions as stages on which they can perform, can display their splendid selves.

People run for Congress not so they can legislate, but so they can get on TV. People work in companies so they can build their personal brand.

The result is a world in which institutions not only fail to serve their social function and keep us safe, they also fail to form trustworthy people. The rot in our structures spreads to a rot in ourselves.

The Failure of Society

The coronavirus has confronted America with a social dilemma. A social dilemma, the University of Pennsylvania scholar Cristina Bicchieri notes, is “a situation in which each group member gets a higher outcome if she pursues her individual self-interest, but everyone in the group is better off if all group members further the common interest.”

Social distancing is a social dilemma. Many low-risk individuals have been asked to endure some large pain (unemployment, bankruptcy) and some small inconvenience (mask wearing) for the sake of the common good. If they could make and keep this moral commitment to each other in the short term, the curve would be crushed, and in the long run we’d all be better off. It is the ultimate test of American trustworthiness.

While pretending to be rigorous, people relaxed and started going out. It was like watching somebody gradually give up on a diet. There wasn’t a big moment of capitulation, just an extra chocolate bar here, a bagel there, a scoop of ice cream before bed

in reality this was a mass moral failure of Republicans and Democrats and independents alike. This was a failure of social solidarity, a failure to look out for each other.

Alexis de Tocqueville discussed a concept called the social body. Americans were clearly individualistic, he observed, but they shared common ideas and common values, and could, when needed, produce common action. They could form a social body.

Over time, those common values eroded, and were replaced by a value system that put personal freedom above every other value

When Americans were confronted with the extremely hard task of locking down for months without any of the collective resources that would have made it easier—habits of deference to group needs; a dense network of community bonds to help hold each other accountable; a history of trust that if you do the right thing, others will too; preexisting patterns of cooperation; a sense of shame if you deviate from the group—they couldn’t do it. America failed.

The Crack-up

This wasn’t just a political and social crisis, it was also an emotional trauma.

The week before George Floyd was killed, the National Center for Health Statistics released data showing that a third of all Americans were showing signs of clinical anxiety or depression. By early June, after Floyd’s death, the percentage of Black Americans showing clinical signs of depression and anxiety disorders had jumped from 36 to 41 percent

By late June, American national pride was lower than at any time since Gallup started measuring, in 2001

In another poll, 71 percent of Americans said they were angry about the state of the country, and just 17 percent said they were proud.

By late June, it was clear that America was enduring a full-bore crisis of legitimacy, an epidemic of alienation, and a loss of faith in the existing order.

The most alienated, anarchic actors in society—antifa, the Proud Boys, QAnon—seemed to be driving events. The distrust doom loop was now at hand.

The Age of Precarity

Cultures are collective responses to common problems. But when reality changes, culture takes a few years, and a moral convulsion, to completely shake off the old norms and values.

The culture that is emerging, and which will dominate American life over the next decades, is a response to a prevailing sense of threat.

This new culture values security over liberation, equality over freedom, the collective over the individual.

From risk to security.

we’ve entered an age of precarity in which every political or social movement has an opportunity pole and a risk pole. In the opportunity mentality, risk is embraced because of the upside possibilities. In the risk mindset, security is embraced because people need protection from downside dangers

In this period of convulsion, almost every party and movement has moved from its opportunity pole to its risk pole.

From achievement to equality

In the new culture we are entering, that meritocratic system looks more and more like a ruthless sorting system that excludes the vast majority of people, rendering their life precarious and second class, while pushing the “winners” into a relentless go-go lifestyle that leaves them exhausted and unhappy

Equality becomes the great social and political goal. Any disparity—racial, economic, meritocratic—comes to seem hateful.

From self to society

If we’ve lived through an age of the isolated self, people in the emerging culture see embedded selves. Socialists see individuals embedded in their class group. Right-wing populists see individuals as embedded pieces of a national identity group. Left-wing critical theorists see individuals embedded in their racial, ethnic, gender, or sexual-orientation identity group.

The cultural mantra shifts from “Don’t label me!” to “My label is who I am.”

From global to local

When there is massive distrust of central institutions, people shift power to local institutions, where trust is higher. Power flows away from Washington to cities and states.

From liberalism to activism

enlightenment liberalism, which was a long effort to reduce the role of passions in politics and increase the role of reason. Politics was seen as a competition between partial truths.

Liberalism is ill-suited for an age of precarity. It demands that we live with a lot of ambiguity, which is hard when the atmosphere already feels unsafe. Furthermore, it is thin. It offers an open-ended process of discovery when what people hunger for is justice and moral certainty.

liberalism’s niceties come to seem like a cover that oppressors use to mask and maintain their systems of oppression. Public life isn’t an exchange of ideas; it’s a conflict of groups engaged in a vicious death struggle

The cultural shifts we are witnessing offer more safety to the individual at the cost of clannishness within society. People are embedded more in communities and groups, but in an age of distrust, groups look at each other warily, angrily, viciously.

The shift toward a more communal viewpoint is potentially a wonderful thing, but it leads to cold civil war unless there is a renaissance of trust. There’s no avoiding the core problem. Unless we can find a way to rebuild trust, the nation does not function.

How to Rebuild Trust

Historians have more to offer, because they can cite examples of nations that have gone from pervasive social decay to relative social health. The two most germane to our situation are Great Britain between 1830 and 1848 and the United States between 1895 and 1914.

In both periods, a highly individualistic and amoral culture was replaced by a more communal and moralistic one.

But there was a crucial difference between those eras and our own, at least so far. In both cases, moral convulsion led to frenetic action.

As Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett note in their forthcoming book, The Upswing, the American civic revival that began in the 1870s produced a stunning array of new organizations: the United Way, the NAACP, the Boy Scouts, the Forest Service, the Federal Reserve System, 4-H clubs, the Sierra Club, the settlement-house movement, the compulsory-education movement, the American Bar Association, the American Legion, the ACLU, and on and on

After the civic revivals, both nations witnessed frenetic political reform. During the 1830s, Britain passed the Reform Act, which widened the franchise; the Factory Act, which regulated workplaces; and the Municipal Corporations Act, which reformed local government.

The Progressive Era in America saw an avalanche of reform: civil-service reform; food and drug regulation; the Sherman Act, which battled the trusts; the secret ballot; and so on. Civic life became profoundly moralistic, but political life became profoundly pragmatic and anti-ideological. Pragmatism and social-science expertise were valued.

Can America in the 2020s turn itself around the way the America of the 1890s, or the Britain of the 1830s, did? Can we create a civic renaissance and a legislative revolution?

I see no scenario in which we return to being the nation we were in 1965, with a cohesive national ethos, a clear national establishment, trusted central institutions, and a pop-culture landscape in which people overwhelmingly watch the same shows and talked about the same things.

The age of distrust has smashed the converging America and the converging globe—that great dream of the 1990s—and has left us with the reality that our only plausible future is decentralized pluralism.

The key to making decentralized pluralism work still comes down to one question: Do we have the energy to build new organizations that address our problems, the way the Brits did in the 1830s and Americans did in the 1890s?

social trust is built within organizations in which people are bound together to do joint work, in which they struggle together long enough for trust to gradually develop, in which they develop shared understandings of what is expected of each other, in which they are enmeshed in rules and standards of behavior that keep them trustworthy when their commitments might otherwise falter.

Over the past 60 years, we have given up on the Rotary Club and the American Legion and other civic organizations and replaced them with Twitter and Instagram. Ultimately, our ability to rebuild trust depends on our ability to join and stick to organizations.

Whether we emerge from this transition stronger depends on our ability, from the bottom up and the top down, to build organizations targeted at our many problems. If history is any guide, this will be the work not of months, but of one or two decades.

For centuries, America was the greatest success story on earth, a nation of steady progress, dazzling achievement, and growing international power. That story threatens to end on our watch, crushed by the collapse of our institutions and the implosion of social trust

But trust can be rebuilt through the accumulation of small heroic acts—by the outrageous gesture of extending vulnerability in a world that is mean, by proffering faith in other people when that faith may not be returned. Sometimes trust blooms when somebody holds you against all logic, when you expected to be dropped.

By David Brooks

As an experiment staged by researchers at the London School of Economics showed, support for the war goes down by 15 percentage points when people are encouraged to speak their mind.

In a joint project with the Ukrainian pollster KIIS, the Levada Center for years has asked Russians what kind of relations they envisioned between their country and Ukraine. In a poll conducted in December, only 18 percent of Russians said they wanted the two countries to become one, while 51 percent said they wanted Russia and Ukraine to be independent countries with an open border, and 24 percent said they wanted independent countries with a hard border.

In a Levada Center poll published on the day Putin launched the invasion, only 25 percent of Russians supported Russia’s expanding its borders to include the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk republics — Donbas, where much of the heaviest fighting is concentrated now — while 33 percent wanted the region to become independent and 26 percent wanted it to remain part of Ukraine.

It’s hard to deny that the war is fratricidal, however, and that would seem to make selling it to the public more difficult. How can you flatten Ukrainian cities where millions of Russians have relatives and friends?

The pattern of deeply intertwined relationships extends into broader Russian society. Having some kind of connection across the border is the norm, not the exception.

So how do Russians justify support of what so far has been a series of crimes against humanity committed against a people who are the transnational-relationship equivalent of next of kin?

The Kremlin employs two related narratives here. The first paints the enemy as the West, not Ukraine. This framing turns Russia into the smaller, weaker side in the conflict — a victim, not a perpetrator.

Medinsky the negotiator, who is better known in Russia as an architect of the historical narratives promoted by Putin’s regime, expresses the second framing best: “Russia’s very existence is at stake now,” he said last month. Russia, in this telling, is going through a period like the one that led to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, or the one when the Soviet system was falling apart in the early 1990s.