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Since 2016, there have been two competing visions for the Democratic Party. One is the promise that began with Barack Obama of a multiracial coalition that would grow stronger as America’s demographics shifted; the other is the political revolution championed by Bernie Sanders as a way to unite nonvoters with the working class

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez bridges the gap between the two

what’s clear is that at a time when Democrats are struggling, she is quietly laying the groundwork to build a coalition broader than the one she came to power with, unafraid to take risks along the way.

After five years in Congress, she has emerged as a tested navigator of its byzantine systems, wielding her celebrity to further her political aims in a way few others have.

Three terms in, one gets the sense that we’re witnessing a skilled tactician exiting her political adolescence and coming into her own as a veteran operator out to reform America’s most dysfunctional political body.

To grasp what sets Ms. Ocasio-Cortez apart from many of her colleagues, you have to understand where she finds allies

In 2019, she and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas considered joining forces to write a bill that would bar former members of Congress from becoming lobbyists. Asked why she would consider an alliance with someone so loathed by liberals, she said, “I will swallow all of my distaste in this situation because we have found a common interest.”

It was a window into the politician she would become: pragmatic and results-driven, willing to work with people she considers her political adversaries, at least on legislation that appeals to her base

She has attributed the success of these efforts at least in part to her role as the second most powerful Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, which she said has “opened many windows” for collaboration.

while these bills may seem like small victories, they are more than that because, in a sense, she is redefining what bipartisanship looks like in Washington.

For decades, bipartisanship has meant bringing together moderates, lobbyists and establishment insiders to produce watered-down legislation unpalatable to many voters in both political partie

What Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is doing is different; she’s uniting politicians on the fringes of American politics around a broadly popular set of policies.

Americans in both parties overwhelmingly say that they don’t trust the government to do the right thing and that donors and lobbyists have too much sway over the legislative process.

more than 8 in 10 Americans believe politicians “are more focused on fighting each other than on solving problems.” One-fifth of respondents said lack of bipartisan cooperation was the biggest problem with the political system.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s efforts to reach out to Republicans are offering what a sizable portion of Americans want from Congress: a return to getting things done.

The few policy matters on which progressives and conservatives align often boil down to a distrust of politicians and of big corporations, particularly technology companies and pharmaceutical giants.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has shrewdly made those causes her passion, building alliances with conservative colleagues interested in holding these industries accountable.

Last spring, she cosponsored a bill with, among others, Brian Fitzpatrick, a moderate Republican from Pennsylvania, and Matt Gaetz, the Florida rabble-rouser who has become one of Mr. Trump’s most steadfast allies. The legislation would bar members of Congress from trading individual stocks, a measure that as of the fall of 2022 was supported by nearly 70 percent of voters across party lines.

On Gaza, too, she has been willing to buck other members of her party to pursue an agenda that a majority of voters support. She was one of the first Democrats to call for a cease-fire; within weeks, nearly 70 percent of Americans said Israel should call one and try to negotiate with Hamas.

In March, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was accosted by a handful of protesters who demanded that she call Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide.

Less than three weeks later, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez did accuse Israel of genocide and chastised the White House for providing military aid to the country while it blockaded Gaza. “If you want to know what an unfolding genocide looks like,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said in a speech on the House floor, “open your eyes. It looks like the forced famine of 1.1 million innocents. It looks like thousands of children eating grass as their bodies consume themselves, while trucks of food are slowed and halted just miles away.”

Last month, she voted against providing additional funding for Israel. Those were unpopular positions in Congress, where unconditional support for the country remains the norm, but they put her in line with a majority of Democratic voters.

These stances haven’t been enough to quell the doubts from a faction of the left that helped get her elected. Over the past few weeks, some have accused her of caving in to pressure from moderate Democrats

. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has taken much of the heat from leftist activists who see her as a symbol of the contradictions and compromises inherent in the political system. It may not be realistic to expect absolute purity from her; she is, after all, a politician. But these critiques overlook the promise of what she’s doing behind the scenes.

Democratic pollsters and strategists are searching for ways for Mr. Biden to win back Muslims and Arab Americans in swing states such as Michigan and Georgia, recent college graduates who hoped to have their student debt forgiven, immigrant-rights activists and Latinos.

Some of the betrayal these voters feel was hardly the president’s fault; he was hampered on student loan debt by a federal judiciary stacked with judges sympathetic to conservative legal arguments, and Congress refused to pass the comprehensive immigration bill he supported in 2021, which would have provided legal status to as many as 11 million undocumented immigrants.

A more gifted orator might have been able to make the structural impediments in his way clear to voters, while also putting forth a proactive vision for dismantling the core problems baked into our politics.

In that, someone like Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, who endorsed Mr. Biden for re-election in 2023, may be able to help. She’s the Democratic Party’s most charismatic politician since Barack Obama and its most ardent populist since Bernie Sanders.

she can offer voters something more substantial than a hollow rebuke of Trumpism

Last month, when the journalist Mehdi Hasan asked her how she’d respond to “a young progressive or Arab American who says to you, ‘I just can’t vote for Biden again after what he’s enabled in Gaza,’” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said a vote for Mr. Biden didn’t necessarily mean an endorsement of all his policies. “Even in places of stark disagreement, I would rather be organizing under the conditions of Biden as an opponent on an issue than Trump,” she said. It was a shrewd political maneuver, designed to distance herself from Democrats who support Israel unconditionally, while meeting voters — some of whom have lost family members in Gaza — where they are

There are, of course, limits to this strategy. Some on the left see Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsement of Mr. Biden as a betrayal of progressive values, particularly in the wake of the climbing death toll in Gaza.

The moderate Republicans who turned out for Mr. Biden in 2020 might shrink from a Democratic Party led by someone they consider an outspoken progressive.

But for every moderate or leftist voter lost with a strategy like Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s, the Democratic Party may be able to win someone new — from the pool of disillusioned Americans who feel shut out of the political process.

guided by a fascination with the wayward paths to fame, he half-unwittingly sows doubt about the justice of the American rise to artistic leadership in the postwar era. In his erudite account, artistic success owes little to vision and purpose, more to self-promotion, but most to unanticipated adoption by bigger systems with other aims, principally oriented toward money, political advantage, or commercial churn

For the greatness and inevitability of artistic consecration, Menand substitutes the arbitrary confluences of forces at any given moment.

The curriculum runs chapter by chapter through George Kennan, George Orwell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hannah Arendt, Jackson Pollock, Lionel Trilling, Allen Ginsberg, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage, Elvis and the Beatles, Isaiah Berlin, James Baldwin, Jack Kerouac, Andy Warhol, Susan Sontag, and Pauline Kael. Each biography opens a door to a school or trend of work

Menand’s is not a “great man” view of history, because no one seems particularly great. One gets a feeling for Sartre as a person, a limited knowledge of how Sartre made Being and Nothingness, and a vivid sense of how the book made Sartre a celebrity. Then one learns how a troupe of others came along and rode his success like a sled.

Menand zooms in and out between individual egomaniacs and the milieus that facilitated their ascent and profited from their publicity.

group biographies, in miniature, of the existentialists, the Beats, the action painters, the Black Mountain School, the British Invasion, the pop artists, and many coteries more—are enchanting singly but demoralizing as they pile up

All of these enterprises look like hives of social insects, not selfless quests for truth or beauty. Menand is a world-class entomologist: He can name every indistinguishable drone, knows who had an oversize mandible, who lost a leg, who carried the best crumbs.

From this vantage, the monuments really are just anthills.

Menand is truly one of the great explainers. He quotes approvingly a lesson taken by Lionel Trilling from his editor Elliot Cohen: “No idea was so difficult and complex but that it could be expressed in a way that would make it understood by anyone to whom it might conceivably be of interest.”

Menand’s account of each is an abbreviated tour de force. His explanations work at all levels: interpretation for scholars, review for general readers, introductions for neophytes. Where another writer would take 20 pages to tell us why someone or something mattered historically, Menand does it in two.

He is accurate, he is insightful, and he is not a dumber-downer

The underlying theory of the book rests on a picture of what makes for “cultural winners,” works and ideas that Menand defines as

Menand’s recountings are less concerned with the changing meanings of individual works than with their successive adoptions and co-optations, in defiance of depth and meaning. It is a process of “winning” often based on cults of personality, indifference to complex origins, and the fortune or misfortune of timing

goods or styles that maintain market share through “generational” taste shifts—that is, through all the “the king is dead; long live the king” moments that mark the phases of cultural history for people living through it.

Menand is notably excellent on how commercial, regulatory, and technological changes determined which kinds of artwork made it to the public. His analysis helps demystify trends in commercial forms like film and pop music, especially when they otherwise seemed to run against the grain of pure profit

Often Menand’s point seems to be that the culture’s reigning talkers and salespeople and debaters need to conjure figures to venerate and attack (in ceaseless alternation) for short-range purposes of attention and competition. Any given work—1984, say, or Bonnie and Clyde—isn’t much of anything until it becomes a counter in other people’s games.

The central question of this period in culture might be whether U.S. artists lived up to expectations

In 1945, Europe was in ruins. America was rich and productive and dictated the terms of the postwar economic and political order. Certainly the U.S. had the power to pretend to cultural glory, too. But was it a pretense, or did Americans really continue and exceed the prewar triumphs of European modernism?

Most histories of the arts after 1945 assume that the greatest American successes deserved their fame.

The thrust of many of Menand’s retellings is that “in the business of cultural exchange, misprision is often the key to transmission.” Fame comes through misreadings, fantasies, unintended resonances, charisma, and publicity.

Menand’s book bequeaths the sense that the last laugh may truly have been on the self-seriousness of a whole historical period, one that treated its most publicized and successful arts figures far too generously, giving them too much credit for depth and vision, while missing the cynical forces by which they’d been buoyed up and marketed

Where did rock ’n’ roll come from?” Menand wonders. He answers that it was “the by-product of a number of unrelated developments in the American music business” that redirected sales to teenagers, and also the result of new radio-station competition, the partial racial desegregation of the music charts, and the arrival of 200-disc jukeboxes

The idea of a “culture industry”

is used unironically by Menand to name the vastly scaled-up production and consumption of all artistic experience. “The culture industries, as they expanded, absorbed and commercialized independent and offbeat culture-makers, and the university, as it expanded, swallowed up the worlds of creative writing and dissident political opinion.”

With his eye on this process, we miss out on artists and thinkers who dug deep and stayed home, who produced as hermits or eccentrics or introverted students of their art

“Foreign film” in America in the ’50s and ’60s—when independent art cinemas emerged, showing imports such as work by Ingmar Bergman and the French New Wave—proves to have been energized by a successful federal-government antitrust action against the monopolistic Hollywood studios

I can imagine The Free World leaving my hypothetical college senior, denizen of the bleak attention economy of the 21st century, feeling liberated to discover that culture was no better—no more committed to a quest for what is true, noble, lasting, and beautiful—in the world of the Baby Boomers and beaming grandparents.

The book is so masterful, and exhibits such brilliant writing and exhaustive research, that I wonder whether Menand could truly have intended where his history of the postwar era landed me. I learned so much, and ended up caring so much les

The ordinary fixes—the kind that draw on people’s will, and require eating less and moving more—rarely have a large or lasting effect. Indeed, America itself has suffered through a long, maddening history of failed attempts to change its habits on a national scale: a yo-yo diet of well-intentioned treatments, policies, and other social interventions that only ever lead us back to where we started

Through it all, obesity rates keep going up; the diabetes epidemic keeps worsening.

The most recent miracle, for Barb as well as for the nation, has come in the form of injectable drugs. In early 2021, the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk published a clinical trial showing remarkable results for semaglutide, now sold under the trade names Wegovy and Ozempic.

Patients in the study who’d had injections of the drug lost, on average, close to 15 percent of their body weight—more than had ever been achieved with any other drug in a study of that size. Wadden knew immediately that this would be “an incredible revolution in the treatment of obesity.”

Many more drugs are now racing through development: survodutide, pemvidutide, retatrutide. (Among specialists, that last one has produced the most excitement: An early trial found an average weight loss of 24 percent in one group of participants.

In the United States, an estimated 189 million adults are classified as having obesity or being overweight

The drugs don’t work for everyone. Their major side effects—nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea—can be too intense for many patients. Others don’t end up losing any weight

For the time being, just 25 percent of private insurers offer the relevant coverage, and the cost of treatment—about $1,000 a month—has been prohibitive for many Americans.

The drugs have already been approved not just for people with diabetes or obesity, but for anyone who has a BMI of more than 27 and an associated health condition, such as high blood pressure or cholesterol. By those criteria, more than 140 million American adults already qualify

if this story goes the way it’s gone for other “risk factor” drugs such as statins and antihypertensives, then the threshold for prescriptions will be lowered over time, inching further toward the weight range we now describe as “normal.”

How you view that prospect will depend on your attitudes about obesity, and your tolerance for risk

The first GLP-1 drug to receive FDA approval, exenatide, has been used as a diabetes treatment for more than 20 years. No long-term harms have been identified—but then again, that drug’s long-term effects have been studied carefully only across a span of seven years

the data so far look very good. “These are now being used, literally, in hundreds of thousands of people across the world,” she told me, and although some studies have suggested that GLP-1 drugs may cause inflammation of the pancreas, or even tumor growth, these concerns have not borne out.

adolescents are injecting newer versions of these drugs, and may continue to do so every week for 50 years or more. What might happen over all that time?

“All of us, in the back of our minds, always wonder, Will something show up?  ” Although no serious problems have yet emerged, she said, “you wonder, and you worry.”

in light of what we’ve been through, it’s hard to see what other choices still remain. For 40 years, we’ve tried to curb the spread of obesity and its related ailments, and for 40 years, we’ve failed. We don’t know how to fix the problem. We don’t even understand what’s really causing it. Now, again, we have a new approach. This time around, the fix had better work.

The fen-phen revolution arrived at a crucial turning point for Wadden’s field, and indeed for his career. By then he’d spent almost 15 years at the leading edge of research into dietary interventions, seeing how much weight a person might lose through careful cutting of their calories.

But that sort of diet science—and the diet culture that it helped support—had lately come into a state of ruin. Americans were fatter than they’d ever been, and they were giving up on losing weight. According to one industry group, the total number of dieters in the country declined by more than 25 percent from 1986 to 1991.

Rejecting diet culture became something of a feminist cause. “A growing number of women are joining in an anti-diet movement,” The New York Times reported in 1992. “They are forming support groups and ceasing to diet with a resolve similar to that of secretaries who 20 years ago stopped getting coffee for their bosses.

Now Wadden and other obesity researchers were reaching a consensus that behavioral interventions might produce in the very best scenario an average lasting weight loss of just 5 to 10 percent

National surveys completed in 1994 showed that the adult obesity rate had surged by more than half since 1980, while the proportion of children classified as overweight had doubled. The need for weight control in America had never seemed so great, even as the chances of achieving it were never perceived to be so small.

Wadden wasn’t terribly concerned, because no one in his study had reported any heart symptoms. But ultrasounds revealed that nearly one-third of them had some degree of leakage in their heart valves. His “cure for obesity” was in fact a source of harm.

In December 1994, the Times ran an editorial on what was understood to be a pivotal discovery: A genetic basis for obesity had finally been found. Researchers at Rockefeller University were investigating a molecule, later named leptin, that gets secreted from fat cells and travels to the brain, and that causes feelings of satiety. Lab mice with mutations in the leptin gene—importantly, a gene also found in humans—overeat until they’re three times the size of other mice. “The finding holds out the dazzling hope,”

In April 1996, the doctors recommended yes: Dexfenfluramine was approved—and became an instant blockbuster. Patients received prescriptions by the hundreds of thousands every month. Sketchy wellness clinics—call toll-free, 1-888-4FEN-FEN—helped meet demand. Then, as now, experts voiced concerns about access. Then, as now, they worried that people who didn’t really need the drugs were lining up to take them. By the end of the year, sales of “fen” alone had surpassed $300 million.

It was nothing less than an awakening, for doctors and their patients alike. Now a patient could be treated for excess weight in the same way they might be treated for diabetes or hypertension—with a drug they’d have to take for the rest of their life.

the article heralded a “new understanding of obesity as a chronic disease rather than a failure of willpower.”

News had just come out that, at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, two dozen women taking fen-phen—including six who were, like Barb, in their 30s—had developed cardiac conditions. A few had needed surgery, and on the operating table, doctors discovered that their heart valves were covered with a waxy plaque.

Americans had been prescribed regular fenfluramine since 1973, and the newer drug, dexfenfluramine, had been available in France since 1985. Experts took comfort in this history. Using language that is familiar from today’s assurances regarding semaglutide and other GLP-1 drugs, they pointed out that millions were already on the medication. “It is highly unlikely that there is anything significant in toxicity to the drug that hasn’t been picked up with this kind of experience,” an FDA official named James Bilstad would later say in a Time cover story headlined “The Hot New Diet Pill.

“I know I can’t get any more,” she told Williams. “I have to use up what I have. And then I don’t know what I’m going to do after that. That’s the problem—and that is what scares me to death.” Telling people to lose weight the “natural way,” she told another guest, who was suggesting that people with obesity need only go on low-carb diets, is like “asking a person with a thyroid condition to just stop their medication.”

She’d gone off the fen-phen and had rapidly regained weight. “The voices returned and came back in a furor I’d never heard before,” Barb later wrote on her blog. “It was as if they were so angry at being silenced for so long, they were going to tell me 19 months’ worth of what they wanted me to hear. I was forced to listen. And I ate. And I ate. And ate.”

For Barb, rapid weight loss has brought on a different metaphysical confusion. When she looks in the mirror, she sometimes sees her shape as it was two years ago. In certain corners of the internet, this is known as “phantom fat syndrome,” but Barb dislikes that term. She thinks it should be called “body integration syndrome,” stemming from a disconnect between your “larger-body memory” and “smaller-body reality.

In 2003, the U.S. surgeon general declared obesity “the terror within, a threat that is every bit as real to America as the weapons of mass destruction”; a few months later, Eric Finkelstein, an economist who studies the social costs of obesity, put out an influential paper finding that excess weight was associated with up to $79 billion in health-care spending in 1998, of which roughly half was paid by Medicare and Medicaid. (Later he’d conclude that the number had nearly doubled in a decade.

In 2004, Finkelstein attended an Action on Obesity summit hosted by the Mayo Clinic, at which numerous social interventions were proposed, including calorie labeling in workplace cafeterias and mandatory gym class for children of all grades.

he message at their core, that soda was a form of poison like tobacco, spread. In San Francisco and New York, public-service campaigns showed images of soda bottles pouring out a stream of glistening, blood-streaked fat. Michelle Obama led an effort to depict water—plain old water—as something “cool” to drink.

Soon, the federal government took up many of the ideas that Brownell had helped popularize. Barack Obama had promised while campaigning for president that if America’s obesity trends could be reversed, the Medicare system alone would save “a trillion dollars.” By fighting fat, he implied, his ambitious plan for health-care reform would pay for itself. Once he was in office, his administration pulled every policy lever it could.

Michelle Obama helped guide these efforts, working with marketing experts to develop ways of nudging kids toward better diets and pledging to eliminate “food deserts,” or neighborhoods that lacked convenient access to healthy, affordable food. She was relentless in her public messaging; she planted an organic garden at the White House and promoted her signature “Let’s Move!” campaign around the country.

An all-out war on soda would come to stand in for these broad efforts. Nutrition studies found that half of all Americans were drinking sugar-sweetened beverages every day, and that consumption of these accounted for one-third of the added sugar in adults’ diets. Studies turned up links between people’s soft-drink consumption and their risks for type 2 diabetes and obesity. A new strand of research hinted that “liquid calories” in particular were dangerous to health.

when their field lost faith in low-calorie diets as a source of lasting weight loss, the two friends went in opposite directions. Wadden looked for ways to fix a person’s chemistry, so he turned to pharmaceuticals. Brownell had come to see obesity as a product of our toxic food environment: He meant to fix the world to which a person’s chemistry responded, so he started getting into policy.

The social engineering worked. Slowly but surely, Americans’ lamented lifestyle began to shift. From 2001 to 2018, added-sugar intake dropped by about one-fifth among children, teens, and young adults. From the late 1970s through the early 2000s, the obesity rate among American children had roughly tripled; then, suddenly, it flattened out.

although the obesity rate among adults was still increasing, its climb seemed slower than before. Americans’ long-standing tendency to eat ever-bigger portions also seemed to be abating.

sugary drinks—liquid candy, pretty much—were always going to be a soft target for the nanny state. Fixing the food environment in deeper ways proved much harder. “The tobacco playbook pretty much only works for soda, because that’s the closest analogy we have as a food item,

that tobacco playbook doesn’t work to increase consumption of fruits and vegetables, he said. It doesn’t work to increase consumption of beans. It doesn’t work to make people eat more nuts or seeds or extra-virgin olive oil.

Careful research in the past decade has shown that many of the Obama-era social fixes did little to alter behavior or improve our health. Putting calorie labels on menus seemed to prompt at most a small decline in the amount of food people ate. Employer-based wellness programs (which are still offered by 80 percent of large companies) were shown to have zero tangible effects. Health-care spending, in general, kept going up.

From the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, the proportion of adults who said they’d experienced discrimination on account of their height or weight increased by two-thirds, going up to 12 percent. Puhl and others started citing evidence that this form of discrimination wasn’t merely a source of psychic harm, but also of obesity itself. Studies found that the experience of weight discrimination is associated with overeating, and with the risk of weight gain over time.

obesity rates resumed their ascent. Today, 20 percent of American children have obesity. For all the policy nudges and the sensible revisions to nutrition standards, food companies remain as unfettered as they were in the 1990s, Kelly Brownell told me. “Is there anything the industry can’t do now that it was doing then?” he asked. “The answer really is no. And so we have a very predictable set of outcomes.”

she started to rebound. The openings into her gastric pouch—the section of her stomach that wasn’t bypassed—stretched back to something like their former size. And Barb found ways to “eat around” the surgery, as doctors say, by taking food throughout the day in smaller portions

Bariatric surgeries can be highly effective for some people and nearly useless for others. Long-term studies have found that 30 percent of those who receive the same procedure Barb did regain at least one-quarter of what they lost within two years of reaching their weight nadir; more than half regain that much within five years.

if the effects of Barb’s surgery were quickly wearing off, its side effects were not: She now had iron, calcium, and B12 deficiencies resulting from the changes to her gut. She looked into getting a revision of the surgery—a redo, more or less—but insurance wouldn’t cover it

She found that every health concern she brought to doctors might be taken as a referendum, in some way, on her body size. “If I stubbed my toe or whatever, they’d just say ‘Lose weight.’ ” She began to notice all the times she’d be in a waiting room and find that every chair had arms. She realized that if she was having a surgical procedure, she’d need to buy herself a plus-size gown—or else submit to being covered with a bedsheet when the nurses realized that nothing else would fit.

Barb grew angrier and more direct about her needs—You’ll have to find me a different chair, she started saying to receptionists. Many others shared her rage. Activists had long decried the cruel treatment of people with obesity: The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance had existed, for example, in one form or another, since 1969; the Council on Size & Weight Discrimination had been incorporated in 1991. But in the early 2000s, the ideas behind this movement began to wend their way deeper into academia, and they soon gained some purchase with the public.

“Our public-health efforts to address obesity have failed,” Eric Finkelstein, the economist, told me.

Others attacked the very premise of a “healthy weight”: People do not have any fundamental need, they argued, morally or medically, to strive for smaller bodies as an end in itself. They called for resistance to the ideology of anti-fatness, with its profit-making arms in health care and consumer goods. The Association for Size Diversity and Health formed in 2003; a year later, dozens of scholars working on weight-related topics joined together to create the academic field of fat studies.

As the size-diversity movement grew, its values were taken up—or co-opted—by Big Business. Dove had recently launched its “Campaign for Real Beauty,” which included plus-size women. (Ad Age later named it the best ad campaign of the 21st century.) People started talking about “fat shaming” as something to avoid

By 2001, Bacon, who uses they/them pronouns, had received their Ph.D. and finished a rough draft of a book, Health at Every Size, which drew inspiration from a broader movement by that name among health-care practitioners

But something shifted in the ensuing years. In 2007, Bacon got a different response, and the book was published. Health at Every Size became a point of entry for a generation of young activists and, for a time, helped shape Americans’ understanding of obesity.

Some experts were rethinking their advice on food and diet. At UC Davis, a physiologist named Lindo Bacon who had struggled to overcome an eating disorder had been studying the effects of “intuitive eating,” which aims to promote healthy, sustainable behavior without fixating on what you weigh or how you look

The heightened sensitivity started showing up in survey data, too. In 2010, fewer than half of U.S. adults expressed support for giving people with obesity the same legal protections from discrimination offered to people with disabilities. In 2015, that rate had risen to three-quarters.

In Bacon’s view, the 2000s and 2010s were glory years. “People came together and they realized that they’re not alone, and they can start to be critical of the ideas that they’ve been taught,” Bacon told me. “We were on this marvelous path of gaining more credibility for the whole Health at Every Size movement, and more awareness.”

that sense of unity proved short-lived; the movement soon began to splinter. Black women have the highest rates of obesity, and disproportionately high rates of associated health conditions. Yet according to Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity-medicine physician at Harvard Medical School, Black patients with obesity get lower-quality care than white patients with obesity.

That system was exactly what Bacon and the Health at Every Size movement had set out to reform. The problem, as they saw it, was not so much that Black people lacked access to obesity medicine, but that, as Bacon and the Black sociologist Sabrina Strings argued in a 2020 article, Black women have been “specifically targeted” for weight loss, which Bacon and Strings saw as a form of racism

But members of the fat-acceptance movement pointed out that their own most visible leaders, including Bacon, were overwhelmingly white. “White female dietitians have helped steal and monetize the body positive movement,” Marquisele Mercedes, a Black activist and public-health Ph.D. student, wrote in September 2020. “And I’m sick of it.”

Tensions over who had the standing to speak, and on which topics, boiled over. In 2022, following allegations that Bacon had been exploitative and condescending toward Black colleagues, the Association for Size Diversity and Health expelled them from its ranks and barred them from attending its events.

As the movement succumbed to in-fighting, its momentum with the public stalled. If attitudes about fatness among the general public had changed during the 2000s and 2010s, it was only to a point. The idea that some people can indeed be “fit but fat,” though backed up by research, has always been a tough sell.

Although Americans had become less inclined to say they valued thinness, measures of their implicit attitudes seemed fairly stable. Outside of a few cities such as San Francisco and Madison, Wisconsin, new body-size-discrimination laws were never passed.

In the meantime, thinness was coming back into fashion

In the spring of 2022, Kim Kardashian—whose “curvy” physique has been a media and popular obsession—boasted about crash-dieting in advance of the Met Gala. A year later, the model and influencer Felicity Hayward warned Vogue Business that “plus-size representation has gone backwards.” In March of this year, the singer Lizzo, whose body pride has long been central to her public persona, told The New York Times that she’s been trying to lose weight. “I’m not going to lie and say I love my body every day,” she said.

Among the many other dramatic effects of the GLP-1 drugs, they may well have released a store of pent-up social pressure to lose weight.

If ever there was a time to debate that impulse, and to question its origins and effects, it would be now. But Puhl told me that no one can even agree on which words are inoffensive. The medical field still uses obesity, as a description of a diagnosable disease. But many activists despise that phrase—some spell it with an asterisk in place of the e—and propose instead to reclaim fat.

Everyone seems to agree on the most important, central fact: that we should be doing everything we can to limit weight stigma. But that hasn’t been enough to stop the arguing.

Things feel surreal these days to just about anyone who has spent years thinking about obesity. At 71, after more than four decades in the field, Thomas Wadden now works part-time, seeing patients just a few days a week. But the arrival of the GLP-1 drugs has kept him hanging on for a few more years, he said. “It’s too much of an exciting period to leave obesity research right now.”

When everyone is on semaglutide or tirzepatide, will the soft-drink companies—Brownell’s nemeses for so many years—feel as if a burden has been lifted? “My guess is the food industry is probably really happy to see these drugs come along,” he said. They’ll find a way to reach the people who are taking GLP‑1s, with foods and beverages in smaller portions, maybe. At the same time, the pressures to cut back on where and how they sell their products will abate.

the triumph in obesity treatment only highlights the abiding mystery of why Americans are still getting fatter, even now

Perhaps one can lay the blame on “ultraprocessed” foods, he said. Maybe it’s a related problem with our microbiomes. Or it could be that obesity, once it takes hold within a population, tends to reproduce itself through interactions between a mother and a fetus. Others have pointed to increasing screen time, how much sleep we get, which chemicals are in the products that we use, and which pills we happen to take for our many other maladies.

“The GLP-1s are just a perfect example of how poorly we understand obesity,” Mozaffarian told me. “Any explanation of why they cause weight loss is all post-hoc hand-waving now, because we have no idea. We have no idea why they really work and people are losing weight.”

The new drugs—and the “new understanding of obesity” that they have supposedly occasioned—could end up changing people’s attitudes toward body size. But in what ways

When the American Medical Association declared obesity a disease in 2013, Rebecca Puhl told me, some thought “it might reduce stigma, because it was putting more emphasis on the uncontrollable factors that contribute to obesity.” Others guessed that it would do the opposite, because no one likes to be “diseased.”

why wasn’t there another kind of nagging voice that wouldn’t stop—a sense of worry over what the future holds? And if she wasn’t worried for herself, then what about for Meghann or for Tristan, who are barely in their 40s? Wouldn’t they be on these drugs for another 40 years, or even longer? But Barb said she wasn’t worried—not at all. “The technology is so much better now.” If any problems come up, the scientists will find solutions.

“The Lebanese war taught me early about the ugliness of tribalism and religious dogma,” Saad wrote. “It likely informed my subsequent disdain for identity politics, as I grew up in an ecosystem where the group to which you belonged mattered more than your individuality.” 

Musk has said his concerns about Woke Mind Virus, his way of labeling progressive liberal beliefs that he says are overly politically correct and stifling to public debate and free speech, helped fuel his desire to acquire the social-media company Twitter turned X in late 2022. It is on that platform where Musk, 52 years old, has aired many of his concerns.

For his part, Musk says his politics are “fairly moderate”—what he describes as his supporting safe cities, secure borders, a neutral judiciary and sensible spending. And, he adds, what he calls being “pro environment.”

Still, Musk is prone to painting risks at their most extreme and gravitating to others with similar world views. 

“For many years now, I have warned that the path that the West is taking will result in civil war. It might take 5 years, 50 years, or 100 years but it is inevitable,” Saad tweeted on the day of Tesla’s quarterly earnings call last month. 

Before joining that call, Musk was on X, agreeing with Saad in a thread of responses. “War will come whether we want it or not,” Musk posted. 

The best argument of the other side! Jesus Christ—the other side? The whole point of the argument was to destroy the other side! I was there to illuminate and then devastate the other side by engaging deeply with the worst it had to offer.

I had learned the style and the rhetorical turns of making a great case, but I didn’t know the first thing about fortifying it with facts, reason, logic—or the best argument of the side I was treating in such a cavalier way.

Most of the time, the subjects we talk about are—for all of their flattening by cable news and internet wormholes and all the rest of it—extremely complicated.

Is there anything more satisfying than watching a debate in which the sophist gets defenestrated by someone smarter, better prepared, and obviously right?

Many college professors don’t want to do that today. They don’t want to “platform” a writer they think is wrong; they don’t want to participate in “both sides-ism.”

A teacher should never do your thinking for you. She should give you texts to read and guide you along the path of making sense of them for yourself. She should introduce you to the books and essays of writers who disagree with one another and ask you to determine whose case is better.

In the broadest possible sense, “what’s wrong” with the modern American university is that although it still understands itself to operate under the model established by the 19th-century German university—which emphasized academic freedom, seminars, and laboratories as means of allowing students to discover the truth for themselves—it’s becoming a parody of that model

The professors are going to tell you what to think, and you’re going to backfill that “truth” with research of your own.

“What’s different about College X,” she’ll say confidently, “is that our professors don’t teach you what to think. They teach you how to think.”

Republican politicians, sensing momentum, called on other firms to follow suit.

“This was always cosmetic,” said Shivaram Rajgopal, a professor at Columbia Business School. “If signing a piece of paper was getting these companies into trouble, it’s no surprise they’re getting the hell out.

American asset managers have a fiduciary duty to act in the best interest of their clients, and the financial firms were worried that a new strategy by Climate Action 100+ could expose them to legal risks.

Since its founding in 2017, the group focused on getting publicly traded companies to increase how much information they shared about their emissions and identify climate-related risks to their businesses.

In addition to the risk that some clients might disapprove, and potentially sue, there were other concerns. Among them: that acting in concert to shape the behaviors of other companies could fall afoul of antitrust regulations.

The new plan called on asset-management firms to begin pressuring companies like Exxon Mobil and Walmart to adopt policies that could entail, for example, using fewer fossil fuels

last year, Climate Action 100+ said it would shift its focus toward getting companies to reduce emissions with what it called phase two of its strategy

BlackRock also said that one of its subsidiaries, BlackRock International, would continue to participate in the group — a tacit acknowledgment of the different regulatory environment in Europe. BlackRock also said it was initiating new features that would let clients choose if they wanted to pressure companies to reduce their emissions.

Pimco, another big asset manager, followed suit. “We have concluded that our Climate Action 100+ participation is no longer aligned with PIMCO’s approach to sustainability,” a firm spokesman said in a statement.

JPMorgan said it was pulling out of the group in recognition of the fact that, over the past few years, the firm had developed its own framework for engaging on climate risk

The fracturing of Climate Action 100+ was a victory for Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, who has led a campaign against companies pursuing E.S.G. goals, shorthand for environmental, social and governance factors.

Embracing E.S.G. principles and speaking up on climate issues has become commonplace across corporate America in recent years. Chief executives warned about the dangers of climate change. Banks and asset managers formed alliances to phase out fossil fuels. Trillions of dollars were allocated for sustainable investing.

“Phase two is not that different,” she said. “It’s basically investors working with companies and saying: ‘OK, you’ve disclosed the risk. We just want to know how you’re going to address it.’ Because that’s what the investors want. How are you dealing with risk?”

Mindy Lubber, the chief executive of Ceres and a member of the steering committee of Climate Action 100+, disputed the notion that the new strategy represented a change from the focus on enhanced disclosure.

“The political cost has heightened, the legal risk has heightened,” he said. “That said, these corporations are not doing U-turns,” he added. “They continue to consider climate. That’s not going away. It’s adapting to the current environment.”

Aron Cramer, chief executive for BSR, a sustainable-business consultancy, said the Wall Street firms were responding to political pressure, but not abandoning their climate commitments altogether.

Several of the firms that backed out of Climate Action 100+ said they remained committed to the issue. JPMorgan said that it had a team of 40 people working on sustainable investing and that it believed “climate change continues to present material economic risks and opportunities to our clients.”

The dourness of the mood contrasted sharply with just a year ago, when many of the same participants — intelligence chiefs and diplomats, oligarchs and analysts — thought Russia might be on the verge of strategic defeat in Ukraine. There was talk of how many months it might take to drive the Russians back to the borders that existed before their invasion on Feb. 24, 2022. Now that optimism appeared premature at best, faintly delusional at worst.

Nikolai Denkov, the prime minister of Bulgaria, argued that Europeans should draw three lessons from the cascade of troubles. The war in Ukraine was not just about gray zones between Europe and Russia, he argued, but “whether the democratic world we value can be beaten, and this is now well understood in Europe.”

“European defense was a possibility before, but now it’s a necessity,” said Claudio Graziano, a retired general from Italy and former chairman of the European Union Military Committee. But saying the right words is not the same as doing what they demand.

third, they needed to separate Ukraine’s urgent needs for ammunition and air defense from longer-term strategic goals.

Some attendees found the commitments made by the leaders who showed up uninspiring, said Nathalie Tocci, director of Italy’s Institute of International Affairs. “Kamala Harris empty, Scholz mushy, Zelensky tired,

“I feel underwhelmed and somewhat disappointed” by the debate here, said Steven E. Sokol, president of the American Council on Germany. “There was a lack of urgency and a lack of clarity about the path forward, and I did not see a strong show of European solidarity.

Second, European nations have realized that they must combine their forces in military, not just economic endeavors, to build up their own deterrence

now two-thirds of the alliance members have met the goal of spending 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense — up from just a handful of nations 10 years ago. But a few acknowledged that goal is now badly outdated, and they talked immediately about the political barriers to spending more.

the prospect of less American commitment to NATO, as the United States turned to other challenges from China or in the Middle East, was concentrating minds.

the fundamental disconnect was still on display: When Europeans thought Russia would integrate into European institutions, they stopped planning and spending for the possibility they might be wrong. And when Russia’s attitude changed, they underreacted.

“This is 30 years of underinvestment coming home,” said François Heisbourg, a French defense analyst, who called them “les trente paresseuses” — the 30 lazy years of post Cold-War peace dividends, in contrast to the 30 glorious years that followed World War II.

What was important for Europeans to remember was that this hot war in Ukraine was close and could spread quickly, Ms. Kallas said. “So if you think that you are far away, you’re not far away. It can go very, very fast.”

Dmytro Kuleba, the foreign minister of embattled Ukraine, was blunter. “I think our friends and partners were too late in waking up their own defense industries,” he said. “And we will pay with our lives throughout 2024 to give your defense industries time to ramp up production.”

Russian military doctrine states that Russia would use nuclear weapons in the event of attacks against key Russian assets or threats to the existence of the state, and experts believe Russia could use nuclear weapons first in a crisis to signal resolve.

Russia has seen how important space-based assets can be on the battlefield in Ukraine. Starlink, with its thousands of satellites orbiting Earth, provides Ukrainian forces with uninterrupted communication. The U.S. Department of Defense openly discusses its investments in large satellite constellations. Hundreds of satellites used for missile warning, intelligence and communications are seen as a way to be more resilient against a variety of growing space threats. Moscow would look for ways to target these large satellite constellations and to erode the advantage they provide.

Nor is it new for Russia to violate nuclear arms control agreements. In recent years, Russia has violated the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, suspended its participation in the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, and de-ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Backing out of arms control commitments is part of Russia’s modus operandi.

But a nuclear detonation in space is indiscriminate. It would degrade or destroy any satellites in its path and within the same orbital region. It wouldn’t just affect U.S. satellites but also the aggressor’s own satellites, as well as an unknown number of satellites owned by the over 90 countries operating in space, and astronauts living on the International Space Station and Chinese space station

Russia, however, has less to lose: Its once vaunted space program is in decline, dinged by sanctions, and said it intends to withdraw from the International Space Station program after 2024. Moscow is now well behind China in its total number of operating on-orbit satellites.

Third, we need to be realistic about prospects for future arms control with Russia. Moscow has shown a disregard for its treaty commitments. Just last month, Moscow rejected attempts by the Biden administration to restart bilateral arms control talks. Rather than trying again, the administration should instead focus on strengthening deterrence by improving our own capabilities and building multilateral coalitions for responsible nuclear behavior

Finally, policymakers need to protect our intelligence sources and intelligence gathering methods

With Russian officials already demanding proof of what the United States knows, declassifying those sources and methods plays directly into Moscow’s hands and jeopardizes those channels for future intelligence collection.

Fresh estimates from the Congressional Budget Office this month said the U.S. labor force in 2023 had grown by 5.2 million people, thanks especially to net immigration

economy grow. But today’s snapshot still represents a stark turnaround from just a short time ago.

he flow of migrants to the United States started slowing during the Trump administration, when officials took hundreds of executive actions designed to restrict migration.

Right before the pandemic, there were about 1.5 million fewer working-age immigrants in the United States than pre-2017 trends would have predicted, according to the San Francisco Fed. By the end of 2021, that shortfall had widened to about 2 million

But the economy overall wound up rebounding aggressively from the sudden, widespread closures of 2020, bolstered by historic government stimulus and vaccines that debuted faster than expected.

The sudden snapback in demand sent inflation soaring. Supply chain issues were a main reason prices rose quickly. But labor shortages posed a problem, too, and economists feared that rising wages — as employers scrambled to find workers — would keep price increases dangerously high.

That’s because the labor force that emerged as the pandemic ebbed was smaller than it had been: Millions of people retired early, stayed home to take over child care or avoid getting sick, or decided to look for new jobs entirely

In the span of a year or so, employers went from having businesses crater to sprinting to hire enough staff to keep restaurants, hotels, retail stores and construction sites going. Wages for the lowest earners rose at the fastest pace.

About the same time, the path was widening for migrants to cross the southern border, particularly as the new Biden administration rolled back Trump-era restrictions.

In normal economic times, some analysts note, new immigrants can drag down wages, especially if employers decide to hire them over native-born workers. Undocumented workers, who don’t have as much leverage to push for higher pay, could lower average wages even more.

But the past few years were extremely abnormal because companies were desperate to hire.

lus, it would be exceedingly difficult for immigration to affect the wages of enormous swaths of the labor force,

“What it can do is lower the wages of a specific occupation in a specific area, but American workers aren’t stupid. They change jobs. They change what they specialize in,” Nowrasteh said. “So that’s part of the reason why wages don’t go down.”

Experts argue that the strength of the U.S. economy has benefited American workers and foreign-born workers alike. Each group accounts for roughly half of the labor market’s impressive year-over-year growth since January 2023

Particularly for immigrants fleeing poorer countries, the booming U.S. job market and the promise of higher wages continue to be an enormous draw.

“More than any immigration policy per se, the biggest pull for migrants is the strength of the labor market,” said Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes, an economics professor at the University of California at Merced. “More than any enforcement policy, any immigration policy, at the end of the day.”

Upon arriving in Denver in October, Santander hadn’t acquired a work permit but needed to feed his small children. Even without authorization, he found a job as a roofer for a contractor that ultimately pocketed his earnings, then one cleaning industrial refrigerators on the overnight shift for $12 an hour. Since receiving his work permit in January, Santander has started “a much better job” at a wood accessories manufacturer making $20 an hour.

But for the vast majority of migrants who arrive in the United States without prior approval, including asylum seekers and those who come for economic reasons, getting a work permit isn’t easy.

Federal law requires migrants to wait nearly six months to receive a work permit after filing for asylum. Wait times can stretch for additional months because of a backlog in cases.

While they wait, many migrants find off-the-books work as day laborers or street vendors, advocates say. Others get jobs using falsified documents, including many teenagers who came into the country as unaccompanied minors.

Still, many migrants miss the year-long window to apply for asylum — a process that can cost thousands of dollars — leaving them with few pathways to work authorization, advocates say. Those who can’t apply for asylum often end up working without official permission in low-wage industries where they are susceptible to exploitation.

there is a world of content out there that has not been watermarked, which is done by adding imperceptible information to a digital file so that its provenance can be traced. Once watermarking at creation becomes widespread, and people adapt to distrust content that is not watermarked, then everything produced before that point in time can be much more easily called into question.

countering them is much harder when the cost of creating near-perfect fakes has been radically reduced.

There are many examples of how economic and political powers manipulated the historical record to their own ends. Stalin purged disloyal comrades from history by executing them — and then altering photographic records to make it appear as if they never existed

Slovenia, upon becoming an independent country in 1992, “erased” over 18,000 people from the registry of residents — mainly members of the Roma minority and other ethnic non-Slovenes. In many cases, the government destroyed their physical records, leading to their loss of homes, pensions, and access to other services, according to a 2003 report by the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights.

The infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, first published in a Russian newspaper in 1903, purported to be meeting minutes from a Jewish conspiracy to control the world. First discredited in August 1921, as a forgery plagiarized from multiple unrelated sources, the Protocols featured prominently in Nazi propaganda, and have long been used to justify antisemitic violence, including a citation in Article 32 of Hamas’s 1988 founding Covenant.

In 1924, the Zinoviev Letter, said to be a secret communiqué from the head of the Communist International in Moscow to the Communist Party of Great Britain to mobilize support for normalizing relations with the Soviet Union, was published by The Daily Mail four days before a general election. The resulting scandal may have cost Labour the election.

Decades later Operation Infektion — a Soviet disinformation campaign — used forged documents to spread the idea that the United States had invented H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, as a biological weapon.

As it becomes easier to generate historical disinformation, and as the sheer volume of digital fakes explodes, the opportunity will become available to reshape history, or at least to call our current understanding of it into question.

Fortunately, a path forward has been laid by the same companies that created the risk.

In indexing a large share of the world’s digital media to train their models, the A.I. companies have effectively created systems and databases that will soon contain all of humankind’s digitally recorded content, or at least a meaningful approximation of it.

They could start work today to record watermarked versions of these primary documents, which include newspaper archives and a wide range of other sources, so that subsequent forgeries are instantly detectable.

many of the intellectual property concerns around providing a searchable online archive do not apply to creating watermarked and time-stamped versions of documents, because those versions need not be made publicly available to serve their purpose. One can compare a claimed document to the recorded archive by using a mathematical transformation of the document known as a “hash,” the same technique the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, uses to help companies screen for known terrorist content.

creating verified records of historical documents can be valuable for the large A.I. companies. New research suggests that when A.I. models are trained on A.I.-generated data, their performance quickly degrades. Thus separating what is actually part of the historical record from newly created “facts” may be critical.

Preserving the past will also mean preserving the training data, the associated tools that operate on it and even the environment that the tools were run in.

Such a vellum will be a powerful tool. It can help companies to build better models, by enabling them to analyze what data to include to get the best content, and help regulators to audit bias and harmful content in the models

What turned the neurotic Presbyterian teenager into the great founder of the European Enlightenment?

your life might actually get better. Give up the prospect of life after death, and you will finally really appreciate life before it. Give up metaphysics, and you can concentrate on physics. Give up the idea of your precious, unique, irreplaceable self, and you might actually be more sympathetic to other people.

Go back to your backgammon game after your skeptical crisis, Hume wrote, and it will be exactly the same game.

Desideri retreated to an even more remote monastery. He worked on his Christian tracts and mastered the basic texts of Buddhism. He also translated the work of the great Buddhist philosopher Tsongkhapa into Italian.

That sure sounded like Buddhist philosophy to me—except, of course, that Hume couldn’t have known anything about Buddhist philosophy.

He spent the next five years in the Buddhist monasteries tucked away in the mountains around Lhasa. The monasteries were among the largest academic institutions in the world at the time. Desideri embarked on their 12-year-long curriculum in theology and philosophy. He composed a series of Christian tracts in Tibetan verse, which he presented to the king. They were beautifully written on the scrolls used by the great Tibetan libraries, with elegant lettering and carved wooden cases.

Desideri describes Tibetan Buddhism in great and accurate detail, especially in one volume titled “Of the False and Peculiar Religion Observed in Tibet.” He explains emptiness, karma, reincarnation, and meditation, and he talks about the Buddhist denial of the self.

The drive to convert and conquer the “false and peculiar” in the name of some metaphysical absolute was certainly there, in the West and in the East. It still is

For a long time, the conventional wisdom was that the Jesuits were retrograde enforcers of orthodoxy. But Feingold taught me that in the 17th century, the Jesuits were actually on the cutting edge of intellectual and scientific life. They were devoted to Catholic theology, of course, and the Catholic authorities strictly controlled which ideas were permitted and which were forbidden. But the Jesuit fathers at the Royal College knew a great deal about mathematics and science and contemporary philosophy—even heretical philosophy.

La Flèche was also startlingly global. In the 1700s, alumni and teachers from the Royal College could be found in Paraguay, Martinique, the Dominican Republic, and Canada, and they were ubiquitous in India and China. In fact, the sleepy little town in France was one of the very few places in Europe where there were scholars who knew about both contemporary philosophy and Asian religion.

Twelve Jesuit fathers had been at La Flèche when Desideri visited and were still there when Hume arrived. So Hume had lots of opportunities to learn about Desideri.One name stood out: P. Charles François Dolu, a missionary in the Indies. This had to be the Père Tolu I had been looking for; the “Tolu” in Petech’s book was a transcription error. Dolu not only had been particularly interested in Desideri; he was also there for all of Hume’s stay. And he had spent time in the East. Could he be the missing link?

in the 1730s not one but two Europeans had experienced Buddhism firsthand, and both of them had been at the Royal College. Desideri was the first, and the second was Dolu. He had been part of another fascinating voyage to the East: the French embassy to Buddhist Siam.

Dolu was an evangelical Catholic, and Hume was a skeptical Protestant, but they had a lot in common—endless curiosity, a love of science and conversation, and, most of all, a sense of humor. Dolu was intelligent, knowledgeable, gregarious, and witty, and certainly “of some parts and learning.” He was just the sort of man Hume would have liked.

Of course, it’s impossible to know for sure what Hume learned at the Royal College, or whether any of it influenced the Treatise. Philosophers like Descartes, Malebranche, and Bayle had already put Hume on the skeptical path. But simply hearing about the Buddhist argument against the self could have nudged him further in that direction. Buddhist ideas might have percolated in his mind and influenced his thoughts, even if he didn’t track their source

my quirky personal project reflected a much broader trend. Historians have begun to think about the Enlightenment in a newly global way. Those creaky wooden ships carried ideas across the boundaries of continents, languages, and religions just as the Internet does now (although they were a lot slower and perhaps even more perilous). As part of this new global intellectual history, new bibliographies and biographies and translations of Desideri have started to appear, and new links between Eastern and Western philosophy keep emerging.

It’s easy to think of the Enlightenment as the exclusive invention of a few iconoclastic European philosophers. But in a broader sense, the spirit of the Enlightenment, the spirit that both Hume and the Buddha articulated, pervades the story I’ve been telling.

as I read Buddhist philosophy, I began to notice something that others had noticed before me. Some of the ideas in Buddhist philosophy sounded a lot like what I had read in Hume’s Treatise. But this was crazy. Surely in the 1730s, few people in Europe knew about Buddhist philosophy

But the characters in this story were even more strongly driven by the simple desire to know, and the simple thirst for experience. They wanted to know what had happened before and what would happen next, what was on the other shore of the ocean, the other side of the mountain, the other face of the religious or philosophical—or even sexual—divide.

Like Dolu and Desideri, the gender-bending abbé and the Siamese astronomer-king, and, most of all, like Hume himself, I had found my salvation in the sheer endless curiosity of the human mind—and the sheer endless variety of human experience.

A glimmer of hope for Biden emerged toward the end of the survey: “If Donald Trump is found guilty and convicted this year of a felony — with Donald Trump as the Republican candidate and Joe Biden as the Democratic candidate — for whom would you vote?”In this hypothetical circumstance, Biden pulls ahead of Trump, 45-43.

when asked, “How willing would you be to vote for Donald Trump if he is convicted of a crime?” 53 percent of registered voters surveyed said they would be “unwilling” to do so; 46 percent said “very unwilling”; and 7 percent said “somewhat unwilling.”

Bloomberg-Morning Consult asked respondents whether they would be unwilling to vote for Trump if he were “sentenced to prison”: 55 percent said unwilling, 48 percent very unwilling and 7 percent said somewhat unwilling.

YouGov found that 45 percent of respondents were either unaware of or uncertain that Trump had “been charged with falsifying business records to conceal hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, a porn star” and that Trump “had been found liable for sexually assaulting and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll.”

The most recent NBC News poll, conducted at the end of January, has Trump favored over Biden by a substantial 47 percent to 42 percent.

In the RealClearPolitics compilation of polls that add Robert Kennedy Jr., Cornel West and Jill Stein to the mix, Trump’s lead over Biden more than doubles, to 4.8 points, 41.6 to 36.8 percent. Kennedy gets 13 percent, and West and Stein each get 2.1 percent.

Along with the threat posed by third-party candidates, two major crises — immigration and the Israeli assault on Hamas in Gaza — have become significant liabilities for the Biden campaign.

The Dec. 10-14 New York Times/Siena poll found that young voters, aged 18 to 29, favored Trump over Biden 49-43. These voters said they trusted Trump over Biden “to do a better job on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” 49-30. In the 2020 election, Biden beat Trump among 18-to-29-year-old voters by 24 points, 60-36, according to exit polls, by far his biggest margin in all age groups.

“To win in 2024, Biden will need to convince voters that he is still the proud moderate they voted for in 2020,” Cowan wrote by email. “He has a lot of evidence on his side, but he still has a lot of convincing to do.”

Biden’s showing “middle- and working-class voters that he understands their values and takes seriously their concerns around crime, immigration and the economy — which, as polling makes clear, are often dramatically different and far more mainstream and centrist than those of college-educated elites who staff much of Washington — is the only way to win.”

While bitterly criticized by many liberals, the Supreme Court decision last year to ban affirmative action in public and private colleges will in fact reduce the salience of an issue that has historically worked to build support for Republicans.

The picture is much the same in many other formerly communist countrie

Slovakia’s politics are particularly poisonous, swamped by wild conspiracy theories and bile.

The foundations of this were laid in the 1990s when Mr. Meciar formed what is still one of the country’s two main political blocs: an alliance of right-wing nationalists, business cronies and anti-establishment leftists. All thrived on denouncing their centrist and liberal opponents as enemies willing to sell out the country’s interests to the West

“Meciar was a pioneer,” he said. “He was a typical representative of national populism with an authoritarian approach, and so is Fico.”

On the day Mr. Fico was shot, Parliament was meeting to endorse an overhaul of public television to purge what his governing party views as unfair bias in favor of political opponents, a reprise of efforts in the 1990s by Mr. Meciar to mute media critics.

The legislation was part of a raft of measures that the European Commission in February said risked doing “irreparable damage” to the rule of law. These include measures to limit corruption investigations and impose what critics denounced as Russian-style restrictions on nongovernmental organizations. The government opposes military aid to Ukraine and L.G.B.T.Q. rights, is often at odds with the European Union and, like Mr. Orban, favors friendly relations with Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia.

In the run-up to the election last September that returned Mr. Fico, a fixture of Slovak politics for more than two decades, to power, he and his allies took an increasingly hostile stance toward the United States and Ukraine, combined with sympathetic words for Russia.

Their statements often recalled a remark by Mr. Meciar, who, resisting demands in the 1990s that he must change his ways if Slovakia wanted to join the European Union, held up Russia as an alternative haven: “if they don’t want us in the West, we’ll go East.”

But, he added, “the frames that the society and its elites use to interpret the conflict remain the same: a choice between a Western path and being something of a bridge between the East and the West, as well as a choice between liberal democracy and illiberal, authoritarian government.”

Andrej Danko, the leader of the party, which is now part of the new coalition government formed by Mr. Fico after the September election, said that the attempt to assassinate Mr. Fico represented the “start of a political war” between the country’s two opposing camps.

Iveta Radicova, a sociologist opposed to Mr. Fico who is a former prime minister, said Slovakia’s woes were part of a wider crisis with roots that extend far beyond its early stumbles under Mr. Meciar.

“Many democracies are headed toward the black hole,” as countries from Hungary in the East to the Netherlands in the West succumb to the appeal of national populism, she said. “This shift is happening everywhere.”

After the Civil War, a series of amnesties were passed, eventually encompassing almost all Confederate soldiers.

The complicit were so great in number that identifying and trying every one of them would come at significant cost, but more important, no law could sufficiently condemn what they had done, and no criminal procedure could adequately consecrate the memory of their wrongs.

the “act of oblivion,” an ancient, imperfect legal and moral mechanism for bringing an end to episodes of political violence. These acts were invoked when forgiveness was impossible, yet when pragmatism demanded a certain strain of forgetting — a forgetting that instead of erasing unforgivable transgressions, paradoxically memorialized them in the minds of all who had survived their assault

Rather than relying upon the courts to deliver impossible and unattainable forms of reckoning, oblivion provided opportunities for the extralegal recognition of political and moral wrongs, and reminded its subjects of the desire for, and necessity of, coexistence.

For centuries, legislative “acts of oblivion” were declared in times when betrayal, war and tyranny had usurped and undermined the very foundations of law; when a household or nation had been torn apart, its citizens pitted against one another; when identifying, investigating, trying and sentencing every single guilty party threatened to redouble the harm

Under the oblivions of old, the ringleaders of riots, insurrections and tyrannical reigns were prosecuted for their crimes and in many cases were forced out of the cities and states they had once claimed to rule. Treasonous leaders were prohibited from holding public office

I wondered what it would mean to revive the old idea of oblivion in our age of seemingly unending memory.

Oblivion demanded accountability for those who bore primary responsibility for political rupture and often required material compensation and restitution for the harms don

consecrating the facts of what had occurred while refusing to allow the misfortunes of the past to dictate the future.

over the course of the 20th century, as the cultural tide gradually turned toward an embrace of remembrance and recrimination, oblivion fell out of favor, and out of collective memory.

The oldest act of oblivion is usually dated to 403 B.C., when the Athenians, having survived the bloody reign of the Thirty Tyrants, swore to never remember the wrongs of a war within the family, a civil war that had divided Athens.

The 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, the supposed origin point of our world of sovereign states, promised that all the violence, hostility, damage and expenses that had been incurred “on the one side, and the other … shall be bury’d in eternal Oblivion.”

In 1660, the Indemnity and Oblivion Act restored the British monarchy after the English Civil War

To remember the power of oblivion is not to naïvely wish away the wrongs of the recent past, but rather quite the opposite: By marking certain transgressions as unforgivable and unforgettable, it recognizes the depth of the loss while also opening a path toward political pragmatism

the Continental Congress passed a resolution recommending that states treat loyalists with leniency, “to receive such returning penitents with compassion and mercy, and to forgive and bury in oblivion their past failings and transgressions.” Punishments for loyalists were, according to the scholar Mugambi Jouet, “particularly mild” for the era.

Over the past several decades, our society has become oversaturated with memory. In our legal system, a single, low-level crime can ruin an individual’s life forever, people are forced to serve sentences for acts that are no longer illegal, and even a sealed conviction or an arrest with no charge can jeopardize job, housing and volunteer opportunities.

This virtual culture of incessant, uncompromising remembrance and recrimination has seeped from our screens, affecting the kinds of conversations we are willing to have in public, and with whom.

Every day, we depend on our devices to store every photograph, every video, every file. We store all these things because we have learned a bit too well that it is important to remember, to archive, to keep receipts and screenshots. To create a faithful, digitized log not only of our own lives but also of those around us

we have been very good students of memory. So good that we have, I think, forgotten what all our memory is for — that it can guide us to choose justice over vengeance

Revisiting the forgotten idea of oblivion would give us permission to reconsider our unthinking overdependence on memory and perhaps to begin to let go of all the data, digital and otherwise, that we do not need

our personal and political memories, which, left to fester for too long, can corrode and transform, causing us to lose sight of their original force and feeling.

Gripped too tightly, memory can become a vengeful and violent force.

The unique power of oblivion is that it does not forgive the crimes committed on one side or the other, but rather consecrates and memorializes the profound gravity of the wrongs. It demands accountability and refuses absolution, yet it rejects the project of perpetual punishment.

Historically, appeals to oblivion offered political communities the prospect of rethinking the present, presenting a rare opportunity to re-evaluate and confront societal divisions.

a lot of people who came out of third-world countries felt, “We are never going to catch up with the West if we just wait for the market to work its way over hundreds of years.” They looked at, in the ’30s, the Soviet Union and thought, “This is a way to accelerate modernization, industrialization.” They all were much more comfortable with the idea of something that sped up the historical process of modernization.

Milton Friedman used to say that there are two groups of people who don’t like the free market. Academics, intellectuals because they think they can do it better than the market, and businessmen because they don’t like competition. What they really want — this is a variation of the Peter Thiel argument — what they all really want is to be monopolists. That former part is, I think, what explains the Bengali intellectuals.

I think that the reality is, the market is much more powerful than they are in these areas. To give you one simple example, they decided, “Okay, we need to be making high-end chips.” Who do they bet on? They bet on Intel, a company that has failed miserably to compete with TSMC, the great Taiwanese chip manufacturer. Intel is now getting multi-billion-dollar grants from the United States government, from the European Union, because it fills all the categories that you’re looking for: big company, stable and well-run, in some sense, can guarantee a lot of jobs.

But of course, the reality is that chip making is so complicated

Who knew that, actually, it’s Nvidia, whose chips turned out to be designed for gaming, turned out to be ideal for artificial intelligence? That’s a perfect example of how the Hayekian market signals that come bottom-up are much more powerful than a political elite who tries to tell you what it is.

COWEN: What did you learn from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer?

One was a reverence for tradition, and in particular, I loved the hymnal. I think Britain’s great contribution to music is religious music. It doesn’t have anything to compete with the Germans and the Italians in opera and things like that. Religious music, I think the Brits and the English have done particularly well.

The second thing I would say is an admiration for Christianity for its extraordinary emphasis on being nice to people who have not been lucky in life. I would say that’s, to me, the central message of Christianity that I take, certainly from the Sermon on the Mount, and it’s imbued through the Book of Common Prayer: to be nice to the people who have been less fortunate than you. Be nice to poor people. Recognize that in God’s kingdom, the first shall be last and the last shall be first.

There is an enormous emphasis on the idea that those things that make you powerful in this world are not the things that really matter, that your dignity as a human being doesn’t come from that. I think that’s a very powerful idea. It’s a very revolutionary idea

Tom Holland has a very good book about this. He’s a wonderful historian in Britain. I think it’s called Dominion.

He points out what a revolutionary idea this was. It completely upended the Roman values, which were very much, the first shall be first. The powerful and the rich are the ones to be valued. He points out, here is this Jewish preacher coming out of the Middle East saying, “No, the first shall be last, the last shall be first in the kingdom of heaven.”

COWEN: I went to Amritsar the year before, and it was one of the most magical feelings I’ve ever had in any place. I’m still not sure what exactly I can trace it to — I am not a Sikh, of course. But what, for you, accounts for the strong, powerful, wondrous feeling one gets from that place?

I think there’s something about it architecturally, which is that there is a serenity about it. Sometimes you can find Hindu temples that are very elaborate. Sikhism is a kind of offshoot of Hinduism. The Hindu temples can be very elaborate, but very elaborate and ornate. This somehow has a simplicity to it. When you add to that the water — I’ve always thought that water adds an enormously calming effect

Hindi and Urdu are two Indian languages, very related. They both have roughly the same grammatical structure, but then Hindi derives its vocabulary entirely from Sanskrit, or almost entirely from Sanskrit, and Urdu derives its vocabulary almost entirely from Persian. Urdu is a language of Indian Muslims and is the official language for Pakistan. It’s a beautiful language, very lyrical, very much influenced by that Persian literary sensibility.

If you’re speaking one of the languages, there’s a way to alternate between both, which a lot of Indian politicians used to do as a way of signaling a broad embrace of both the Hindu and the Muslim communities. Nehru, India’s first prime minister, used to often do that. He would say, “I am delighted to be coming here to your home.” He’d repeat the word home, first in Urdu, then in Hindi, so that in effect, both constituencies were covered.

Modi, by contrast, India’s current prime minister, is a great Hindu nationalist. He takes pains almost never to use an Urdu word when he speaks. He speaks in a kind of highly Sanskritized Hindi that most Indians actually find hard to understand because the everyday language, Bollywood Hindi, is a mixture of Hindi words and Urdu words

I think the partition of India was a complete travesty. It was premised on this notion of religious nationalism. It was horrendously executed. The person who drew the lines, a man named Radcliffe, had never been to India. He’d never been east of the Suez and was given this task, and he did it in a month or two, probably caused a million-and-a-half to two million lives lost, maybe 10 million people displaced. It broke that wonderfully diverse, syncretic aspect of India.

If you look at cities like Delhi and Lahore, what was beautiful about them is that they mix together all the influences of India: Hindu, Muslim, Punjabi, Sindhi. Now what you have is much more bifurcated. If you go to Lahore, Lahore is a Muslim city in Pakistan, and it has a Punjabi influence. Delhi has become, essentially, much more Indian and Hindu and has lost that Muslim influence. To me, as somebody who really loves cosmopolitanism and diversity, it’s sad to see that. It’s almost like you’ve lost something that really made these places wonderfully rich.

I feel the same way when you read about the history of Europe. You think of a place like Vienna, which, in its most dazzling moment, was dazzling precisely because it was this polyglot population of people coming from all over the Habsburg Empire. A large segment of it was Jewish, and it had, as a result — think about Freud and Klimt and the music that came out of there, and the architecture that came out at the turn of the 19th century. And it’s all gone. It’s like, at this point, a somewhat beautiful but slightly dull Austrian city.

I remember once being asked when I was a graduate student at Harvard — Tony Lake was then national security adviser, and his office called and said — I’d written something in the New York Times, I think — “Mr. Lake would like you to come to the White House to brief him.”

I think, in a sense, Islam fit in within that tapestry very easily, and it’s been around for a while. When people talk about cleansing India, Hindu nationals talk about cleansing India of foreign influences. Islam has been in India since the 11th century, so it’s been around for a long time

I was amazed that America — it wasn’t America; it was where I was at Yale and Harvard and all that — that nobody cared where I came from. Nobody cared.

the syncretic nature of India, that India has always been diverse. Hinduism is very tolerant. It’s a kind of unusual religion in that you can believe in one god and be Hindu. You can believe in 300. You can be vegetarian and believe that’s a religious dictate. You can be nonvegetarian and believe that that’s completely compatible with your religion. It’s always embraced almost every variant and variation.

I walked in and there were five people around the table: Tony Lake; Deputy National Security Advisor Sandy Berger; George Stephanopoulos, who was then director of communications at the White House; Joe Nye, who was a senior professor at Harvard; one other person; and myself. And I kept thinking to myself, “Are they going to realize at some point that I’m not an American citizen? They’re asking me for my advice on what America should do, and I am on a student visa.” And of course, nobody ever did, which is one of the great glories of America.

My thesis topic was, I tried to answer the question, when countries rise in great power, when they rise economically, they become great powers because they quickly translate that economic power into diplomatic and military power. What explains the principal exception in modern history, which is the United States?

My simple answer was that the United States was a very unusual creature in the modern world. It was a very strong nation with a very weak state. The federal government in the United States did not have the capacity to extract the resources from the society at large because you didn’t have income taxes in those days.

COWEN: What put you off academia? And this was for the better, in my view.

ZAKARIA: I think two things. One, I could see that political science was moving away from the political science that I loved, which was a broad discipline rooted in the social sciences but also rooted in the humanities, which was rigorous, structural, historical comparisons. Looking at different countries, trying to understand why there were differences.

It was moving much more toward a huge emphasis on things like rational choice, on game theory There was an economist envy. Just as economists have math envy, political scientists have economist envy. It was moving in that direction

COWEN: After 9/11 in 2001, you wrote a famous essay for Newsweek, “Why Do They Hate Us?” You talked about the rulers, failed ideas, religion. If you were to revise or rethink that piece today, how would you change it? Because we have 23 more years of data, right?

He had a routine, which is, he’d get up about 6:00 a.m. He’d go down to the basement of his townhouse, and at 6:30, he would start writing or working on whatever his next big research project was. He’d do that, uninterrupted, for three hours at least, sometimes four. Then, at about 9:30, 10:00, he would take the subway to Harvard.

His point was, you got to start the day by doing the important work of academia, which is producing knowledge. All the rest of it — teaching, committee meetings, all that — you can do later. He was so disciplined about that, that every five years or so, he put out another major piece of work, another major book

I looked at that, and I said to myself, I do not have the self-discipline to perform at that level. I need to go into something that has deadlines,

It’s all within you, and you have to be able to generate ideas from that lonely space. I’ve always found that hard. For me, writing books is the hardest thing I do. I feel like I have to do it because I feel as though everything else is trivia — the television, column, everything else.

The second piece of it was actually very much related to Huntington. Sam Huntington was quite an extraordinary character, probably the most important social scientist in the second half of the 20th century. Huge contributions to several fields of political science. He lived next to me

ZAKARIA: Yes. Not very much, honestly. The central point I was making in that essay was that if you look at the Arab world, it is the principal outlier in the modern era, where it has undergone almost no political modernization.

The Arab world had remained absolutely static. My argument was that it was largely because of the curse of oil and oil wealth, which had impeded modernization. But along with that, because of that failed modernization, they had developed this reactionary ideology of Islam, which said the answer is to go further back, not to go forward. “Islam is the solution,” was the cry of the Islamic fundamentalists in the 1970s.

COWEN: I’m struck that this year, both you and Ruchir Sharma have books coming out — again, Fareed’s book is Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present — that I would describe broadly as classically liberal. Do you think classical liberalism is making a comeback

the reason these books are coming out — and certainly, mine, as you know, is centrally occupied with the problem that there’s a great danger that we are going to lose this enormous, probably the most important thing that’s happened in the last 500, 600 years in human history, this movement that has allowed for the creation of modern liberal democratic societies with somewhat market economies.

If you look at the graph of income, of GDP, per capita GDP, it’s like a straight line. There’s no improvement until you get to about, roughly speaking, the 17th, 18th century in Europe, and then you see a sharp uptick. You see this extraordinary rise, and that coincides with the rise of science and intellectual curiosity and the scientific method, and the industrial revolution after that. All that was a product of this great burst of liberal Enlightenment thinking in the West.

If you think about what we’ve gone through in the last 30 years — and this is really the central argument in my book — massive expansion of globalization, massive expansion of information technology so that it has completely upended the old economy. All of this happening, and people are overwhelmed, and they search in that age of anxiety. They search for a solution, and the easy solutions are the ones offered by the populists.

They’re deeply anti-liberal, illiberal. So, I worry that, actually, if we don’t cherish what we have, we’ll lose what has been one of the great, great periods of progress in human history.

COWEN: Why does your book cover the 17th-century Dutch Golden Age? ZAKARIA: The Dutch are the first modern country. If you think about politics before that — certainly with the exception of ancient Greece and Rome — in modern history, the Dutch invent modern politics and economics. They invent modern politics in the sense that it’s the first time politics is not about courts and kings. It is about a merchant republic with powerful factions and interest groups and political parties, or the precursor to political parties.

It’s the beginning of modern economics because it’s economics based not simply on land and agriculture, but on the famous thing that John Locke talked about, which is mixing human beings’ labor with the land. The Dutch literally do this when they reclaim land from the sea and find ways to manage it, and then invent tall ships, which is, in some ways, one of the first great technological revolutions that has a direct economic impact.

You put all that together, and the Dutch — they become the richest country in the world, and they become the leading technological power in the world. It was very important to me to start the story — because they are really the beginnings of modern liberalism

COWEN: Circa 1800, how large were the Chinese and Indian economies?

Circa 1800, the Chinese and Indian economies are the two largest economies in the world, and people have taken this to mean, oh, the West had a temporary spurt because of colonies and cheap energy, and that the Chinese and Indians are just coming back to where they were.

First of all, the statistic is misleading because in those days, GDP was simply measured by using population. All society was agricultural. The more people you had, the larger your GDP. It was meaningless because the state could not extract that GDP in any meaningful way, and it’s meaningless because it doesn’t measure progress. It doesn’t measure per capita GDP growth, which is the most important thing to look at.

If you look at per capita GDP growth from 1350 to 1950, for 600 years, India and China have basically no movement. It’s about $600 in 1350 and $600 in 1950. The West, by comparison, moves up 600 percent in that period. It’s roughly $500 per capita GDP to roughly $5,000 per capita GDP.

You can also look at all kinds of other measures. You can look at diet. There are economic historians who’ve done this very well, and people in England were eating four to five times as much grain and protein as people in China and India. You can look at the extraordinary flourishing of science and engineering. You can look at the rise of the great universities. It’s all happening in the West.

The reason this is important is, people need to understand the rise of the West has been a very profound, deep-rooted historical phenomenon that began sometime in the 15th century. The fact that we’re moving out of that phase is a big, big deal. This is not a momentary blip. This is a huge train. The West define modernity. Even when countries try to be modern, they are in some way becoming Western because there is no path we know of to modernity without that.

One other way of just thinking about how silly that statistic is: in pure GDP terms, China had a larger GDP than Britain in 1900. Now, look at Britain in 1900: the most advanced industrial society in the world, ruling one-quarter of the world, largest navy in the world, was able to humiliate China by using a small fraction of its military power during the opium era. That’s what tells you that number is really meaningless. The West has been significantly more advanced than the rest of the world since the 16th century at least.

As a young State Department policy planner in the 2000s, she was a lonely voice in Washington raising the alarm about the rise of China. She pushed for tariffs and against trade agreements before it was cool, and was an author of a book called “War by Other Means” about how blind faith in free markets put the United States at a geopolitical disadvantage. For years, she felt like an oddball in Washington, where both parties were still in thrall to neoliberalism.

The Hewlett Foundation hired her as the head of an initiative that has given away $140 million so far to people who are devising a new economic philosophy. Then she served a stint in the White House. Today, she’s an intellectual leader of a growing, bipartisan consensus

She fell in love with economics and studied it at Wake Forest. After she joined a student delegation to a NATO summit in Prague in 2002, a faculty adviser on that trip offered her a job in Washington working at the National Intelligence Council. In those early years, she believed what everyone else in Washington believed about the economy — that governments ought not meddle with it.

if Mr. Trump correctly identified a problem — “China is eating our lunch” — he did not solve it, beyond putting tariffs on Chinese products. His tax cut for the rich hurt rather than helped matters.

It’s the Biden administration that came in with a plan to build an economy that was good for workers, not just shareholders, using some strategies Ms. Harris had been talking about for years.

The thinking behind it goes like this: Unquestioning belief in the free market created a globalism that funneled money to the 1 percent, which has used its wealth to amass political power at the expense of everyone else. It produced free trade agreements that sent too many U.S. factories to China and rescue plans after the 2008 financial crisis that bailed out Wall Street instead of Main Street.

It was her job to track China’s use of subsidies, industrial espionage and currency manipulation to fuel its rise as a manufacturing powerhouse. Ms. Harris argued that tariffs on China were a necessary defense. Nobody agreed. “I was kind of just banging my head against this wall,” she told me. “The wall was a foreign policy establishment that saw markets as sacrosanct.”