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The session with the young men was equally jarring. None of them expressed great enthusiasm for Obama. But their depiction of Republicans was even more lacerating than the women’s had been. “Racist,” “out of touch” and “hateful” made the list — “and put ‘1950s’ on there too!” one called out.

What could they say or do to make you feel more positive about the Republican Party?” “Be more pro-science,” said a 22-year-old moderate named Jack. “Embrace technology and change.” “Stick to your strong suit,” advised Nick, a 23-year-old African-American. “Clearly social issues aren’t your strong suit. Stop trying to fight the battle that’s already been fought and trying to bring back a movement. Get over it — you lost.”

that’s where the left has beaten us, by giving smart people the space and trusting them to have success. It’s a fundamentally anti-entrepreneurial model we’ve embraced.”

the dilemma faced by Republicans in Congress. “What forces them to vote that way, 9 times out of 10, is a fear of a primary challenge,” he said. “What we hope to accomplish is to bring more voters into Republican primaries, so that it isn’t just the far right that shows up at the polls.” The dilemma, Goodwin acknowledged, is that the far-right rhetoric may well repel such voters from participating in G.O.P. primaries to begin with. “We recognize that this isn’t something that’s going to happen anytime soon,” he said.

Young Republicans now lament that no one from their side has stepped up to organize a conservative version of RootsCamp. Michael Turk, a 42-year-old Republican digital guru, suggested that the failure of G.O.P. technologists to do this springs from a uniquely Republican trait. “They all wanted to make money,” he said. “And so as a result, Katie Harbath, who was one of my deputies at the R.N.C., is now at Facebook, and Mindy Finn” — a longtime G.O.P. digital operative — “is at Twitter, and Patrick and I each started our own companies. We all found ways to parlay that into a living for our families, as opposed to just doing it for the cause.”

Several G.O.P. digital specialists told me that, in addition, they found it difficult to recruit talent because of the values espoused by the party. “I know a lot of people who do technology for a living,” Turk said. “And almost universally, there’s a libertarian streak that runs through them — information should be free, do your own thing and leave me alone, that sort of mind-set. That’s very much what the Internet is. And almost to a person that I’ve talked to, they say, ‘Yeah, I would probably vote for Republicans, but I can’t get past the gay-marriage ban, the abortion stance, all of these social causes.’

In the previous few days, the pollster interviewed Latino voters in San Diego and young entrepreneurs in Orlando. The findings were virtually unanimous. No one could understand the G.O.P.’s hot-blooded opposition to gay marriage or its perceived affinity for invading foreign countries. Every group believed that the first place to cut spending was the defense budget. During the whiteboard drill, every focus group described Democrats as “open-minded” and Republicans as “rigid.” “There is a brand,” the 28-year-old pollster concluded of her party with clinical finality. “And it’s that we’re not in the 21st century.”

To win, a reincarnated Reagan — or a Rubio or a Chris Christie or a Bobby Jindal — would still have to satisfy his base of hard-line conservatives and captivate a new generation of voters at the same time. I ran this quandary by Kristen Soltis Anderson. “It’s a big challenge,” she acknowledged. “But I think that if you can earn the trust of the people, there are ways you can say, ‘Here’s why I take this position.’ I don’t know that someone like Rubio, who may be young and attractive and well spoken, could attract young voters despite his views on gay marriage. I do think that in the absence of a very compelling reason to vote for a candidate, those social issues can be deal-breakers for young voters. The challenge is: Can you make a case that’s so compelling that you can overcome those deal-breaker issues? And I don’t know the answer to that question.”

Really, though, it's white men who are the ones rebelling against an economy that they feel like devalues their work, against a culture that they fear is devaluing their once-preeminent place in it, and against a mundane existence that devalues any kind of meaning.

Productivity growth stalled in the 1970s, and, at least in the United States, what economic growth there was overwhelmingly accrued to the top 1 percent in the 1980s and beyond. Part of this was due to Western workers having to compete with billions of Chinese, Indian, and Indonesian ones after the Berlin Wall came down. An even bigger part was good-paying jobs being automated into obsolescence. And the rest was policy—tax cuts for the rich, deunionization for the rest, and deregulation for Wall Street—which is why inflation-adjusted median incomes stagnated even more in the U.S. than in Europe

Trump supporters aren't any more likely to have come from places that have lost a lot of manufacturing jobs or have a lot of immigrants. The opposite, actually. Nor are they just people who are barely getting by. They tend to be a rung or two above that—decently middle class or more—who nonetheless might feel economically insecure because they haven't gotten a raise in a long time, and see everyone else around them doing even worse.

It's no surprise that these kind of economic grievances can ratchet up racial ones.

as Harvard economist Ben Friedman found in The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, "a rising standard of living for the clear majority of citizens more often than not fosters greater opportunity, tolerance of diversity, social mobility, commitment to fairness, and dedication to democracy." So a stagnant one can make people meaner, less generous, and more suspicious of people who don't sound, look, or worship like they do.

it's important to point out that a weak economy isn't necessary for this kind of backlash. Any time white people—and really white men—feel like their position in society is being challenged in any way, this has happened. Like it did, for example, even when the economy was booming during the civil rights movement.

The fact is that a lot of white people don't like being around minorities who haven't assimilated, and they don't want to assimilate to a culture where they'll soon be a minority themselves

even white liberals who aren't used to hearing Spanish in public became much more opposed to increased immigration and much less in favor of letting kids who were born here stay here if their parents were undocumented once they were exposed to Spanish-speakers during their morning commutes. Which seems to explain why, as the Wall Street Journal found, the counties that experienced the fastest minority growth between 2000 and today voted so heavily for Trump.

As researchers Maureen Craig and Jennifer Richeson found, all you have to do is remind them that the country is on track to being majority-minority to make them endorse these kind of racially conservative policies.

But it's not just minorities who white men are worried about. It's women too—or one woman in particular.

There's still a socially-accepted hostility to women being in charge, a fear that this would make a man not a man, and a feeling that women shouldn't even try to act like men. Researchers Tyler Okimoto and Victoria Brescall found that people experienced "moral outrage" when they were told that a hypothetical female politician was ambitious, but nothing when they were told a male was.

For a lot of people, there is no great cause, no great conflict, no great meaning to it all. The big battles have already been won, and now there are just bills to pay and weekends to look forward to.  The problem with this, Fukuyama wrote, is that "if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because the just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause."

it's something that his supporters don't seem to mind. Earlier this the year, 84 percent of them said that "what we need is a leader who will say or do anything to solve America's problems." Constitutional conservatism this is not.

It's not clear what is to be done. It's true that for almost 35 years now the liberal international order has failed to give rich world workers the rising standard of living they expect. Insofar as that was what was motivating Trump's supporters, we could redistribute more to try to make the economy work for everyone. But Europe already does that, and it hasn't stopped the rise of right-wing nationalists there.

But insofar as Trump's voters were really driven by a fear of a future where white men are no longer politically, economically, and culturally dominant, there's nothing we should do. Some things should not be accommodated

It's possible that 2016 will be our own 1914. Not that we'll descend into a paroxysm of suicidal violence, but that a world that was defined by openness might give way to one that's not.

For the last 70 years, liberal democracy has guaranteed people's individual rights, and the U.S. has guaranteed liberal democracy's right to exist. All of that is doubt now.

Whatever its flaws, the liberal international order gave us peace and prosperity on a scale heretofore unknown in human history. And perhaps in our future too.

Nicholas Carr, author of “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” said the speech was part of “a resurgence of millenarian thinking in Silicon Valley.” The dream of an extra-societal utopia grows in part out of a “naïve libertarianism” ascendant in the Valley, and in part out of older American cultist traditions dating as far back as the Pilgrims, he said.

Mr. Srinivasan cast entrepreneurs as a persecuted people who must flee to survive. The Valley, he argued, is taking over the rest of America’s traditional raisons d’être. Netflix and iTunes challenge Hollywood. Twitter and blogs challenge New York media. The Khan Academy and Coursera challenge Boston’s universities. Uber and Airbnb challenge the regulatory state personified by Washington.

His proposed solution is seceding from the society before the “backlash” against the Valley grows.

Some of the biggest names in the Valley have variously proposed building a Mars colony, an unregulated zone of experimentation on Earth or floating libertarian islands at sea.

“The best part is this,” he said. “The people who think this is weird, the people who sneer at the frontier, who hate technology — they won’t follow you out there.”

When you click to show the list of people who “liked” a post, you probably think you’re getting a list of people who expressed positive sentiment toward a particular combination of sentences. But computationally, what you’re getting is slightly different. “Show me a list of the people who liked a Facebook post” is actually a command more like “Display a list of FirstName and LastName for usernames where the flag LikedThisPost = True.” There are a lot of assumptions built in there.

There’s the assumption that the username corresponds to a single real person, which is not always true—people have multiple Facebook accounts, and some accounts have multiple people posting to them, and some accounts are fake

There’s the assumption that the agent that clicked the like button is the same person referred to by the username—not necessarily true. People often forget to log out of their Facebook accounts on desktops and laptops, or use other people’s phones to browse social media

The problem is structural and epistemological. Like all computer programs, databases are ultimately based on binary logic. If you want shades of meaning, you have to explicitly build that capability into your system. And building nuance is far harder than it seems.

For the kid listed in a gang database, it can be unclear how to get out of it. In the world of human interaction, we accept change through behavior: the addict can redeem himself by getting clean, or the habitual interrupter can redeem himself by not interrupting. We accept behavior change. But in the database world, unless someone has permission to delete or amend a database record, no such change is possible

The National Gang Center, in its list of gang-related legislation, shows only 12 states with policies that specifically address gang databases. Most deny the public access to the information in these databases. Only a few of these twelve mention regular purging of information, and some specifically say that a person cannot even find out if they have a record in the database

. “The last time that the gang unit purged its files, however, was in 1993—approximately 4 years before this study was conducted,” he wrote. “One clerk who is responsible for data entry and dissemination estimated, ‘At a minimum, 400 to 500 gang members would be deleted off the gang list today if we went through the files.

n predict what book I want to buy next, hasn’t this problem already been solved?” The answer is inevitably no. When computer scientists were building the Internet in the late 1990s, there weren’t any widely adopted or established ethical guidelines because we were building these systems for the first time in human history.

We also need to acknowledge that computer systems are not a panacea. “Your program really does stink, and the sooner you get used to the idea, the better,” writes Nathan S. Borenstein in Programming as if People Mattered. “The inadequacies of your software are simply a reflection of your frail, shortsighted, and limited human nature. Every program ever built is doomed to eventual obsolescence.” We need to put people before programs, and if programs don’t reflect our human values, we need to change the code. And if programmers can’t write code that is fair and just, we should consider relying on people instead of programs.

If American law enforcement is going to go deeper into the brave new world of data-driven policing, we need to create systems that have human values embedded in them. If our technological systems are entrapping innocent citizens or tampering with the presumption of innocence, should they be used?

First and foremost, the climate was changing. Sound familiar? Medieval Europe benefitted from several centuries of warmer weather, which boosted crop yields, but by the 14th century, the world was entering the so-called Little Ice Age

As the population grew, increasingly marginal land was turned over to agriculture, with diminishing returns, resulting in lower yields per capita and pushing the population dangerously close to subsistence levels. This left little slack in the economy to absorb a significant shock, and the 14th century would soon bring one shock after another.

From AD 1000, Europe's population doubled or even tripled, and the economy became increasingly commercialized, underwritten by an increasingly sophisticated financial system, as new cities and towns emerged, universities were founded across the continent, and the magnificent Gothic cathedrals surpassed the Great Pyramid at Giza as the tallest man-made structures in the world.

At the same time, Europe entered a prolonged period of heightened geopolitical conflict, during which a dizzying array of kingdoms, principalities, sultanates and city-states waged innumerable wars, both large and small.

beginning in 1311, Europe began to experience a series of crop failures across the continent in what became known as the Great Famine. Reaching a peak in northern Europe in 1315-1317, the Great Famine may have killed 5 to 10% of Europe's population

Cooler and wetter weather depressed agricultural yields, at a time when there was already very little slack in the food supply. This contributed to a broader economic slowdown, as yields declined and prices rose, but it also brought Europe to the edge of famine.

These conflicts inhibited trade between northern and southern Europe and between western Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, further slowing the European economy and incurring a massive fiscal burden that would soon ruin the European financial system and provoke uprisings in both France and England

Northern Italy was the heart of the financial system at this time, and a small number of very large Italian banks, often referred to as "super-companies," were lending huge sums of money across Europe

All available money was loaned out or tied up in investments, leaving the banks severely under-capitalized and vulnerable to insolvency in the event of a sudden large withdraw or a major default on their loans.

war broke out between England and France in 1294, prompting King Edward I to withdraw huge sums of money from the Riccardi of Lucca, approximately equivalent to several billion dollars today. The Riccardi simply did not have the money, and Edward seized whatever assets he could. Then, over the following decades, three more super banks, the Frescobaldi, the Bardi and the Peruzzi, all of Florence, were each ruined by successive English kings who refused to pay their debts.

Meanwhile, the Catholic Church, the cultural and epistemological bedrock of Medieval Europe, was facing the most significant legitimacy crisis in centuries

It was in the midst of this spiritual, economic and geopolitical crisis that the Black Death arrived, sweeping through Europe in 1347-1353 and upending the balance of power, almost overnight

We might compare this crisis of faith with the current legitimacy crisis of science in the United States. Like the scientific method, the Church was a shared way of knowing — a pathway to common understanding, which was essential to the social order of Medieval Europe.

he King's men attempted to arrest the elderly Pope, inadvertently killing him. Shortly thereafter, in 1305, a Frenchman, Clement V, was chosen to be the next pope, and the papacy was relocated to Avignon, France. This understandably cast a long shadow over the Holy See, and the Avignon Popes were widely disliked and distrusted. The crisis only deepened in 1378 when a second pope was elected in Rome and a third pope was briefly elected in 1409 before all three were deposed in 1417.

This, combined with the soaring fiscal burden of near-constant war, set off a series of uprisings, most notably the French Jacquerie of 1358 and the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381. The aristocracy responded with force wherever they could, but they could not turn back the clock.

Both of these developments substantially benefitted commoners, at the expense of the elite, particularly in England.

The archetypal serf was not paid for their work in the lord's fields — that was their obligation to the lord in exchange for the use of the lord's land. The modern equivalent would be if your landlord was also your boss, and in order to live in your apartment, you had to sign away your freedom and that of your children, in perpetuity.

Not only that, the medieval lord was also the primary unit of legal, civic and military power, often serving as the first stop for legal matters and the first defense against brigands and rival kingdoms.

With perhaps half the population gone, there were simply not enough peasants to work the land, and the average income of the English lord declined significantly. In response, the lord's wheat fields were increasingly turned over to livestock, or rented out to tenant farmers, who would pay the lord a fixed rent, keeping the agricultural produce for themselves.

The ambitious commoner could now acquire sizable tracts of land, and with the agricultural product of that land entirely at their disposal, commoners were incentivized to maximize the productivity of their land and sell the surplus at market for a profit. This transition is often referred to as the birth of Agrarian Capitalism.

In the wake of the Black Death, plague doctors were among the first to believe they had surpassed the knowledge of the Greek and Roman world; ironically, they were wrong, but the lower mortality of later outbreaks led many doctors to proclaim they had cured the disease, which instilled a new faith in scientific progress

Sumptuary laws, which restricted what commoners could wear and eat, also became common during the 14th and 15th Centuries. However, these laws do not appear to have been effective, and tensions continued to mount between the aristocracy and the wider populace, who were increasingly impatient for change.

Urban laborers and craftsmen also benefitted from rising wages. The average lifespan increased, and standards of living improved across the board. The shortage of skilled tradesmen even created new opportunities for urban women

starting in the 14th century, infantry units comprised of commoners, like the Swiss pikemen and English longbowmen, began to win a series of decisive victories against mounted knights, revolutionizing military tactics and hastening the obsolescence of the feudal aristocracy.

a new intellectual spirit was taking root across western Europe. Influential thinkers like John Wycliffe and Marsilius of Padua began to question the worldly authority of both the Church and the state, arguing that power rested ultimately with the populace rather than the ruler, and the unworthy ruler could lose their right to govern

the economic effects of the plague were nothing short of earthshattering. By killing perhaps 50% of the labor force, the Black Death drastically altered the supply of labor, land and coin. Wages skyrocketed, as labor was in short supply, and rents declined, as the plummeting population density created a surplus of land

seven-hundred years later, what, if anything, can we learn from this — what can the crises and consequences of the 14th century tell us about our own pandemic and the impending aftermath?

There will be no labor shortage in the wake of the coronavirus; quite the opposite, there will likely be a labor surplus, due to the ensuing economic contraction. As for rents, the housing market is essentially frozen as people shelter in place, and housing prices are likely to decline in a recession, but the real cost of housing relative to income is unlikely to see the kind of seismic shift experienced after the Black Death.

most presciently for our own time, Europe was headed for a climate catastrophe, and regardless of the Black Death, the continent would have almost certainly faced a series of demographic shocks, like the Great Plague, until considerable changes were made to the existing socio-economic system.

The lesson we should take from this today is not the differences between the coronavirus and the Black Death, but rather the broader similarities between the 14th century and the 21st century

war between China and the US still looms ever larger, socio-economic inequality is reaching record levels, trust in institutions and our established epistemology is waning, and as we enter the worst depression since the 1930s, climate change once again threatens to throw us back into the Middle Ages

if we continue business as usual, what happens next is likely to be much worse. The calamitous 21st century is just getting started, and a more apt parallel for the Black Death is probably yet to come

“The G.O.P. needs to prioritize reaching out to younger voters,” she told me. “Millennials bring a sense of bipartisanship and really rolling up our sleeves and getting things done.” Now she has tied her political career to the man who has perhaps done more than any other Republican to drive young voters away from her party, resulting in surging youth turnout for Democrats in the 2018 and 2020 elections.

The G.O.P. has embraced a political form of youth sacrifice, immolating their hopes for young supporters in order to appease an ancient, vengeful power.

Of course, the road to political obsolescence is littered with the bones of political analysts like me who predicted that demographics would be destiny. But Mr. Trump didn’t just devastate the G.O.P.’s fledgling class of up-and-coming talent. He also rattled the already precarious loyalty of young Republican voters; from December 2015 to March 2017, nearly half of Republicans under 30 left the party, according to Pew. Many returned, but by 2017, nearly a quarter of young conservatives had defected.

Millennials and Gen Zers were already skeptical of the G.O.P., but Mr. Trump alienated them even further. His campaign of white grievance held little appeal for the two most racially diverse generations in U.S. history. Youth voter turnout was higher in 2020 than it was in 2016, with 60 percent of young voters picking Joe Biden.

And anti-Trumpism may now be one of the most durable political values of Americans under 50. By the end of Mr. Trump’s presidency, after the Jan. 6 insurrection, almost three-quarters of Americans under 50 said they strongly disapproved of him. Even young Republicans were cooling off: According to a new CBS poll, Republicans under 30 were more than twice as likely as those older than 44 to believe that Mr. Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election and roughly twice as likely to believe the party shouldn’t follow Mr. Trump’s lead on race issues.

“Younger conservatives aren’t focused on the election being stolen or the cultural sound bites,”

It’s clear that this version of the Republican Party is firmly the party of old people: Mr. Gaetz and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene kicked off their America First tour with a Trumpian rally at the Villages, Florida’s famous retirement community.

Once, the young leaders of the G.O.P. were trying to present next-generation solutions to next-generation problems. Now they’ve traded their claim on the future for an obsession with the past.

he’s among the world’s most influential financial commentators, with loyal readerships in Washington, London, Paris, and Brussels, as well as on Wall Street

Tooze’s readers turn to him for his uncanny ability to know which numbers on a spreadsheet matter, or when a trend has hit the point at which it has started to shape history.

“Economic events have had such a huge influence on politics this century,” Robert Skidelsky, the John Maynard Keynes biographer, told me. Tooze “illustrates the interpenetration of economic policy and political events. It’s as simple as that.”

a long list of challenges: War, raising the specter of nuclear conflict. Climate change, threatening famine, flood, and fire. Inflation, forcing central banks to crush consumer demand. The pandemic,

The combination of COVID-19, buckling supply chains, and central banks’ scramble to respond constituted “the first crisis where I found my professional existence, my personal existence, and my understanding of my relationship to history were all just completely seamless, continuous,” he says. He found his niche—and thousands of new readers.

As he tells it, he’s not just circulating data or building arguments; he’s also bathing in an anarchic, unstoppable flow of information. “What does it mean to be in the present, in this constant experience of obsolescence, this constant experience of having your ideas and preconceptions consumed by the flow toward the future, which, at any given moment, is fundamentally unpredictable and then once you have consumed it, becomes obsolete?” he says effusively. “That’s my now—this literal floating on the surface tension of the current moment.”

Hitler was compelled not just by murderous anti-Semitism but by shortages of land, steel, and fuel, Tooze argued in 2006’s Wages of Destruction,

“We always wonder what drives this propulsive quality of the Nazi state, why it is so intent on blitzkrieg and fast conquest,” says Susan Pedersen, a renowned historian of Europe. “Adam lays out how they are operating in a world of economic constraint: For them, victory is possible, if it happens fast.”

As Tooze sees it, the forces of central-bank tightening, war, inflation, and climate change are reinforcing one another. He is offering no reassurance about where that might head—only the hope that perhaps this polycrisis might be knowable to us.

Meanwhile, STEM’s conquest of the university has wrecked old humanistic homes. As Nathan Heller’s recent article in The New Yorker documented, the English department is now an unpopulated, undesired version of its former self.

That her book doesn’t feel terribly urgent perhaps speaks to a fundamental weakness within humanism.

Bakewell self-identifies as a stalwart of humanism, but even she concedes that this is an elusive label. “Humanism is personal, and it is a semantic cloud of meanings and implications, none attachable to any particular theorist or practitioner.” Without a pithy definition or clear doctrine, she can manage only to narrow humanism down to three characteristics: freethinking, hope, and inquiry

By setting aside all thoughts of the afterlife, the humanist can focus on making the most of earthly existence, pursuing happiness and mitigating suffering.

the belief that people can feel genuine solidarity for one another, despite their differences—but this is a paper-thin morality that hardly survives the skepticism that Bakewell celebrates.

she would clearly like humanism to be more substantial than it actually is. The ism suffix in Bakewell’s subject is, in fact, a bit of misdirection, because it implies a political idea or perhaps a coherent worldview

Humanism is not a synonym for liberalism or philosophical pragmatism. It more accurately describes a temperament

he humanistic canon she constructs sprawls to include the likes of David Hume, Voltaire, Thomas Paine, Frederick Douglass, John Stuart Mill, Zora Neale Hurston, and Thomas Mann.

It can sometimes be a struggle to see the commonalities, other than some degree of skepticism about religion, an underlying decency, and a general cheeriness in the midst of dreary struggles against the prevailing politics of their times.

While it’s true that freethinking is the enemy of authoritarianism, humanism suffers from a tendency to oversell itself. It doesn’t have a good track record of effectively standing up to facism,

in the current American context, right-wing ethno-nationalists have cynically draped themselves in the trappings of humanism. The likes of Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson present themselves as the true defenders of freethinking and open inquiry.

Self-doubt, a cheerful disposition, and a joyous pursuit of knowledge are qualities that might make for wise leaders, but can also produce hapless political combatants. Or, as Mann once declared: “In all humanism there is an element of weakness, which … may be its ruin.”

humanism is more like religion than Bakewell is prepared to admit. At its best, it is a secular faith. Its universalist spirit and open-mindedness are ethical stances. Its wishful optimism about human possibility can provide spiritual nourishment in a fallen world.

This makes it a style of dissidence well suited for the age of AI. The humanist becomes the contrarian who insists on maintaining that which automation seeks to render obsolete: the faculties of the independent mind, the very core of intellectual personhood.