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The Atlantic Home todaysDate();Monday, March 7, 2011Monday, March 7, 2011 Go Follow the Atlantic » Politics Presented by The Rise and Fall of John Ensign Chris Good Sarah Palin Feud Watch Tina Dupuy In Wisconsin, the Mood Turns Against Compromise Natasha Vargas-Cooper Business Presented by Credit Card Balances Resume Their Decline Daniel Indiviglio 5 Ways the Value of College Is Growing Derek Thompson America's 401(k)'s Are a Mess, Are Its Pensions? Megan McArdle Culture Presented By 'Spy' Magazine's Digital Afterlife Bill Wyman http://as

To many on the right, this inequality is a non-issue, and in an abstract sense, I agree. Penalizing people for their success does not help the less successful. But at a time of real sacrifice, it does seem to me important for conservatives not to ignore the dangers of growing and vast inequality - for political, not economic, reasons. And by political, I don't mean partisan. I mean a genuine concern for the effects of an increasingly unequal society.

it increasingly seems wrong to me to exempt the very wealthy from sacrifice, in the context of their gains in the last three decades, if we are to ask it of everyone else. It's not about fairness. It isn't even really about redistribution, as we once understood that from the hard left. It's about political stability and cohesion and coherence. Without a large and strong middle class, we can easily become more divided, more bitter and more unstable. Concern about that is a legitimate conservative issue. And if someone on the right does not find a way to address it, someone on the left may well be empowered to over-reach.

The mood in Havana

“Whatever you feel about Fidel, he was always there,”

The government has banned all public music performances during the nine-day official mourning period, a directive that has enveloped Havana in gloom.

In a widely distributed piece written for the magazine The Spectator, which favors leaving the European Union, Alex Massie drew a connection between the “Leave” campaign, which has featured outlandish assertions, xenophobia and Islamophobia, to the death of Ms. Cox.

“Sometimes rhetoric has consequences,” Mr. Massie wrote. “If you spend days, weeks, months, years telling people they are under threat, that their country has been stolen from them, that they have been betrayed and sold down the river, that their birthright has been pilfered, that their problem is they’re too slow to realize any of this is happening, that their problem is they’re not sufficiently mad as hell, then at some point, in some place, something or someone is going to snap. And then something terrible is going to happen.”

“When you shout BREAKING POINT over and over again, you don’t get to be surprised when someone breaks,” Mr. Massie wrote. “When you present politics as a matter of life and death, as a question of national survival, don’t be surprised if someone takes you at your word. You didn’t make them do it, no, but you didn’t do much to stop it either.”

Though Mr. Zemmour’s is a work of reactionary nostalgia and Mr. Houellebecq’s a futuristic fantasy, both books have hit the dominant note in the national mood today: “inquiétude,” or profound anxiety about the future.

broadly, concern has grown that the political center is eroding and that extremes are rising in a way reminiscent of the 1930s, along with a sense that France, which prides itself on its republican tradition and strong, centralized state, has ceded too much power to the European Union.

“Houellebecq uses his talent, if I may say so, to exalt or to highlight this aspect of a collective fear that is descending upon us,” the philosopher Malek Chebel, who is Muslim, said on France 2 television this week. “I reproach him for it, all the more so that he is a great writer, and when you are a great writer, you have more responsibilities.”

Islam is one of the world's great religions. Let me be explicit about what I, as a historian of Islam who is not a Muslim, mean by that

Islam has brought comfort and peace of mind to countless millions of men and women. It has given dignity and meaning to drab and impoverished lives. It has taught people of different races to live in brotherhood and people of different creeds to live side by side in reasonable tolerance

It inspired a great civilization in which others besides Muslims lived creative and useful lives and which, by its achievement, enriched the whole world

From its very origins in resistance to revolutionary movements in the late 18th century, conservatism has had two broad contrasting moods. The first is an attachment to the world as it is, and a resistance to too drastic a change in anything

The second is an attachment to what once was — and a radical desire to overturn the present in order to restore the past.

they are both part of conservatism in its different moods.

Based strictly on the standard of advancing causes that conservative evangelicals most care about, a fair-minded assessment of the Trump record is that some important things were achieved, especially in appointing federal judges. That clearly would not have happened in a Hillary Clinton presidency. But in virtually every other area, including the outcome of several key Supreme Court decisions, Trump has fallen short of the promises and expectations.

My hunch is that at the beginning of this Faustian bargain, most evangelicals didn’t imagine it would come to this, with them defending the indefensible, tarnishing their reputations, and doing incalculable damage to their causes.

This is the worst year for America in more than a half century; a stunning 87 percent of Americans are dissatisfied with the way things are going and only 17 percent feel proud when thinking about the state of the nation, while 71 percent feel angry and 66 percent are fearful

Various books I’ve been reading lately have me thinking about 1966. I have often said that the history of Black America could be divided between what happened before and after that year.

It was a year when the fight for Black equality shifted sharply in mood, ushering in an era in which rhetoric overtook actual game plans for action

The difference between Black America in 1960 and in 1970 appears vaster to me than it was between the start and end of any other decade since the 1860s, after Emancipation

Apocalypse Now: What’s Behind the Volatile Mood of Today’s American — and European — Voters

Across the world, a spirit of anarchy is in bloom — an aimless desire to smash the liberal order, with only the distant, inchoate hope that a better world will emerge from the wreckage. That spirit apparently motivated many Trump voters, who didn’t mind that their tribune spoke in clownish generalities, possessed no relevant experience and exhibited an itchy trigger finger. Many of these voters admitted, with little compunction, that they wanted to implant his brash persona in the seat of power to shock the system, because the system deserved a shock

This is an important, erudite and flawed book about the deepest roots of this inflamed moment, which was shipped to the printer before the outcome of the American election.

these midterms mean nothing? That can’t be right either. They seem to me to be reflecting at the very least a sour and dyspeptic mood in the country at large, a well of deepening discontent and concern, and a national funk that remains very potent as a narrative, even if it has become, in my view, close to circular and more than a little hysterical.

what is the reason for this mood – and why has Obama taken the biggest dive because of it?

Even though the economic signals in the US are stronger than anywhere else in the developed world, even as unemployment has fallen, and as energy independence has come closer than anyone recently expected, the underlying structure of the economy remains punishing for the middle class. This, in some ways, can be just as dispiriting as lower levels of growth – because it appears that even when we have a recovery, it will not make things any better for most people.

The story of the Democratic Party’s journey leftward has two chapters. The first is about the presidency of George W. Bush. Before Bush, unapologetic liberalism was not the Democratic Party’s dominant creed. The party had a strong centrist wing

Centrist Democrats believed that Reagan, for all his faults, had gotten some big things right. The Soviet Union had been evil. Taxes had been too high. Excessive regulation had squelched economic growth. The courts had been too permissive of crime. Until Democrats acknowledged these things, the centrists believed, they would neither win the presidency nor deserve to.

In the late 1980s and the 1990s, an influential community of Democratic-aligned politicians, strategists, journalists, and wonks believed that critiquing liberalism from the right was morally and politically necessary.

“I’m almost in the job world, and it really weighs down on me,” said the government major, who keeps up with his fellow students by looking at their résumés on LinkedIn. “Everyone tries to put themselves in competition with everyone else. . . . There’s more of a focus on the professional aspect rather than on having fun or doing things that are focused on the college experience.”

Over the past decade or so, rates of depression, psychological distress and suicidal thoughts and actions have risen significantly among people 26 and younger, with some of the highest increases among women and those at higher income levels, according to a stud

in the past 10 to 12 years, the number of people reporting symptoms indicative of major depression increased 52 percent among 12- to 17-year-olds and 63 percent among 18- to 25-year-olds; the rate for both groups is now 13.2 percent.

discontent is palpable: the Pew Research Center found Indians’ confidence in the economy had fallen by 27 percentage points in the past year, the largest drop of any country it measured.

Separate but linked is deep despair among India’s farmers, who are struggling with steep falls in the prices of staples such as chickpeas, onions and oilseeds, and whose mood can sink a government in a country where 70% of people still directly or indirectly earn their living from agriculture. Farmers have marched on Delhi five times in the past 12 months.

rural India is still reeling from Modi’s surprise decision in 2016 to invalidate a majority of the currency in the economy, which led to months of cash shortages and knocked an estimated 2% off the country’s GDP.

Rob Goldman, defended Facebook’s response and argued the Russians bought ads to exploit social divisions, not primarily to sway the 2016 U.S. presidential election, say people who heard his remarks.

ddress Russian manipulation and suggested there were “easy” solutions to the problem that included a better-educated population. He said influencing the election wasn’t the “main goal” of the Russian ads, which some in Washington interpreted as contradicting the indictment.

Facebook’s executive team was alerted to the potential Russian manipulation efforts in a Dec. 9, 2016, memo from the company’s security team, say people familiar with the memo. But the company waited nine months before publicly saying that Russian manipulation had occurred.

The overthrow of the constitutional monarchy in February 1848 still seems, in retrospect, a puzzling event. The revolution has been called a result without a cause; more properly, it might be called a result out of proportion to its cause.

Since 1840 the regime had settled into a kind of torpid stability; but it had provided the nation with peace abroad and relative prosperity at home. Louis-Philippe and his ministers had prided themselves on their moderation, their respect for the ideal of cautious balance embodied in the concept of juste-milieu. France seemed to be arriving at last at a working compromise that blended traditional ways with the reforms of the Revolutionary era

There were, nevertheless, persistent signs of discontent. The republicans had never forgiven Louis-Philippe for “confiscating” their revolution in 1830. The urban workers, moved by their misery and by the powerful social myths engendered by the Revolution of 1789,

You might think this type of reaction is juvenile or dismissive, but it’s really just human. Memes frequently operate as exemplars of larger trends, as well as stand-ins for cultural anxieties and ways to express and alleviate fears or other emotions through humor.

the overall tone of the memes boiled down to a kind of cheerful ambivalence about the prospect of war.

The American government eliminated the draft in 1973, but that didn’t matter to the meme makers — which makes sense, because fears about the draft being reinstated have always circulated among teens and young adults. In 2016, a false claim that Trump wanted to bring back the draft circulated around the internet as a part of the larger cultural anxiety over his campaign.

What Mr. Trump’s stunning win and Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s extraordinary comeback in the 2020 primaries both demonstrate, they say, is the crucial importance of momentum-changing events, the mood of the electorate and the ingrained perceptions of the candidates. Tactics like well-produced campaign ads, high-profile endorsements and clever one-liners at debates often matter far less, as Mrs. Clinton found.

To call Mr. Trump’s political organization four years ago bare-bones would be an insult to other bare-bones campaigns. Mr. Trump cycled through campaign managers, ran his campaign from a spare floor in Trump Tower and approached social media like a guy watching TV at the end of a bar. But it all proved less important than the structural factors that shaped the 2016 election and ultimately favored him.

First, Mr. Trump ran in a crowded and fragmented Republican field and found a strong plurality of voters for his racial grievances and attacks on the political establishment.

As Malcolm Forbes Baldwin, the acting chairman of the president’s Council for Environmental Quality, told industry executives in 1981, “There can be no more important or conservative concern than the protection of the globe itself.”

Among those who called for urgent, immediate and far-reaching climate policy were Senators John Chafee, Robert Stafford and David Durenberger; the E.P.A. administrator, William K. Reilly; and, during his campaign for president, George H.W. Bush.

It was understood that action would have to come immediately. At the start of the 1980s, scientists within the federal government predicted that conclusive evidence of warming would appear on the global temperature record by the end of the decade, at which point it would be too late to avoid disaster.