The threat from the illiberal left | The Economist - 0 views
www.economist.com/...threat-from-the-illiberal-left
politics liberalism illiberal progressive populism Culture crisis threat
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SOMETHING HAS gone very wrong with Western liberalism. At its heart classical liberalism believes human progress is brought about by debate and reform. The best way to navigate disruptive change in a divided world is through a universal commitment to individual dignity, open markets and limited government.
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But it is undergoing a severe test, just as it did a century ago when the cancers of Bolshevism and fascism began to eat away at liberal Europe from within. It is time for liberals to understand what they are up against and to fight back.
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The most dangerous threat in liberalism’s spiritual home comes from the Trumpian right. Populists denigrate liberal edifices such as science and the rule of law as façades for a plot by the deep state against the people. They subordinate facts and reason to tribal emotion. The enduring falsehood that the presidential election in 2020 was stolen points to where such impulses lead. If people cannot settle their differences using debate and trusted institutions, they resort to force.
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The attack from the left is harder to grasp, partly because in America “liberal” has come to include an illiberal left
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a new style of politics has recently spread from elite university departments. As young graduates have taken jobs in the upmarket media and in politics, business and education, they have brought with them a horror of feeling “unsafe” and an agenda obsessed with a narrow vision of obtaining justice for oppressed identity groups. They have also brought along tactics to enforce ideological purity, by no-platforming their enemies and cancelling allies who have transgressed—with echoes of the confessional state that dominated Europe before classical liberalism took root at the end of the 18th century.
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Superficially, the illiberal left and classical liberals like The Economist want many of the same things. Both believe that people should be able to flourish whatever their sexuality or race. They share a suspicion of authority and entrenched interests. They believe in the desirability of change.
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However, classical liberals and illiberal progressives could hardly disagree more over how to bring these things about
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For classical liberals, the precise direction of progress is unknowable. It must be spontaneous and from the bottom up—and it depends on the separation of powers, so that nobody nor any group is able to exert lasting control.
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By contrast the illiberal left put their own power at the centre of things, because they are sure real progress is possible only after they have first seen to it that racial, sexual and other hierarchies are dismantled.
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Classical liberals believe in setting fair initial conditions and letting events unfold through competition—by, say, eliminating corporate monopolies, opening up guilds, radically reforming taxation and making education accessible with vouchers.
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Progressives see laissez-faire as a pretence which powerful vested interests use to preserve the status quo. Instead, they believe in imposing “equity”—the outcomes that they deem just. For example, Ibram X. Kendi, a scholar-activist, asserts that any colour-blind policy, including the standardised testing of children, is racist if it ends up increasing average racial differentials, however enlightened the intentions behind it.
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Mr Kendi is right to want an anti-racist policy that works. But his blunderbuss approach risks denying some disadvantaged children the help they need and others the chance to realise their talents.
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Besides, society has many goals. People worry about economic growth, welfare, crime, the environment and national security, and policies cannot be judged simply on whether they advance a particular group.
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Classical liberals use debate to hash out priorities and trade-offs in a pluralist society and then use elections to settle on a course.
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The illiberal left believe that the marketplace of ideas is rigged just like all the others. What masquerades as evidence and argument, they say, is really yet another assertion of raw power by the elite.
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Progressives of the old school remain champions of free speech. But illiberal progressives think that equity requires the field to be tilted against those who are privileged and reactionary
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That means restricting their freedom of speech, using a caste system of victimhood in which those on top must defer to those with a greater claim to restorative justice
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It also involves making an example of supposed reactionaries, by punishing them when they say something that is taken to make someone who is less privileged feel unsafe. The results are calling-out, cancellation and no-platforming.
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Milton Friedman once said that the “society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither”.
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Illiberal progressives think they have a blueprint for freeing oppressed groups. In reality theirs is a formula for the oppression of individuals
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it is not so very different from the plans of the populist right. In their different ways both extremes put power before process, ends before means and the interests of the group before the freedom of the individual.
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Countries run by the strongmen whom populists admire, such as Hungary under Viktor Orban and Russia under Vladimir Putin, show that unchecked power is a bad foundation for good government. Utopias like Cuba and Venezuela show that ends do not justify means
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And nowhere at all do individuals willingly conform to state-imposed racial and economic stereotypes.
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When populists put partisanship before truth, they sabotage good government. When progressives divide people into competing castes, they turn the nation against itself. Both diminish institutions that resolve social conflict. Hence they often resort to coercion, however much they like to talk about justice.
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populists and progressives feed off each other pathologically. The hatred each camp feels for the other inflames its own supporters—to the benefit of both. Criticising your own tribe’s excesses seems like treachery. Under these conditions, liberal debate is starved of oxygen
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Aspects of liberalism go against the grain of human nature. It requires you to defend your opponents’ right to speak, even when you know they are wrong. You must be willing to question your deepest beliefs. Businesses must not be sheltered from the gales of creative destruction. Your loved ones must advance on merit alone, even if all your instincts are to bend the rules for them. You must accept the victory of your enemies at the ballot box, even if you think they will bring the country to ruin.
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Too many left-leaning liberals focus on how they, too, want social justice. They comfort themselves with the thought that the most intolerant illiberalism belongs to a fringe. Don’t worry, they say, intolerance is part of the mechanism of change: by focusing on injustice, they shift the centre ground.
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Yet it is precisely by countering the forces propelling people to the extremes that classical liberals prevent the extremes from strengthening. By applying liberal principles, they help solve society’s many problems without anyone resorting to coercion
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Only liberals appreciate diversity in all its forms and understand how to make it a strength. Only they can deal fairly with everything from education to planning and foreign policy so as to release people’s creative energies.
Collapsing Levels of Trust Are Devastating America - The Atlantic - 0 views
www.theatlantic.com/...616581
politics history crisis culture US trust anomie polarization progressive progress
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Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington noticed that these convulsions seem to hit the United States every 60 years or so: the Revolutionary period of the 1760s and ’70s; the Jacksonian uprising of the 1820s and ’30s; the Progressive Era, which began in the 1890s; and the social-protest movements of the 1960s and early ’70s
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A highly moralistic generation appears on the scene. It uses new modes of communication to seize control of the national conversation. Groups formerly outside of power rise up and take over the system. These are moments of agitation and excitement, frenzy and accusation, mobilization and passion.
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In 1981, Huntington predicted that the next moral convulsion would hit America around the second or third decade of the 21st century—that is, right about now.
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Trump is the final instrument of this crisis, but the conditions that brought him to power and make him so dangerous at this moment were decades in the making, and those conditions will not disappear if he is defeated.
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Social trust is a measure of the moral quality of a society—of whether the people and institutions in it are trustworthy, whether they keep their promises and work for the common g
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When people in a society lose faith or trust in their institutions and in each other, the nation collapses.
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under the stresses of 2020, American institutions and the American social order crumbled and were revealed as more untrustworthy still
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We had a chance, in crisis, to pull together as a nation and build trust. We did not. That has left us a broken, alienated society caught in a distrust doom loop.
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The Baby Boomers grew up in the 1950s and ’60s, an era of family stability, widespread prosperity, and cultural cohesion. The mindset they embraced in the late ’60s and have embodied ever since was all about rebelling against authority, unshackling from institutions, and celebrating freedom, individualism, and liberation.
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The emerging generations today enjoy none of that sense of security. They grew up in a world in which institutions failed, financial systems collapsed, and families were fragile. Children can now expect to have a lower quality of life than their parents, the pandemic rages, climate change looms, and social media is vicious. Their worldview is predicated on threat, not safety.
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Thus the values of the Millennial and Gen Z generations that will dominate in the years ahead are the opposite of Boomer values: not liberation, but security; not freedom, but equality; not individualism, but the safety of the collective; not sink-or-swim meritocracy, but promotion on the basis of social justice
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I’ve spent my career rebutting the idea that America is in decline, but the events of these past six years, and especially of 2020, have made clear that we live in a broken nation. The cancer of distrust has spread to every vital organ.
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Those were the days of triumphant globalization. Communism was falling. Apartheid was ending. The Arab-Israeli dispute was calming down. Europe was unifying. China was prospering. In the United States, a moderate Republican president, George H. W. Bush, gave way to the first Baby Boomer president, a moderate Democrat, Bill Clinton.
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The stench of national decline is in the air. A political, social, and moral order is dissolving. America will only remain whole if we can build a new order in its place.
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The American economy grew nicely. The racial wealth gap narrowed. All the great systems of society seemed to be working: capitalism, democracy, pluralism, diversity, globalization. It seemed, as Francis Fukuyama wrote in his famous “The End of History?” essay for The National Interest, “an unabashed victory for economic and political liberalism.”
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We think of the 1960s as the classic Boomer decade, but the false summer of the 1990s was the high-water mark of that ethos
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The first great theme of that era was convergence. Walls were coming down. Everybody was coming together.
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The second theme was the triumph of classical liberalism. Liberalism was not just a philosophy—it was a spirit and a zeitgeist, a faith that individual freedom would blossom in a loosely networked democratic capitalist world. Enterprise and creativity would be unleashed. America was the great embodiment and champion of this liberation.
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The third theme was individualism. Society flourished when individuals were liberated from the shackles of society and the state, when they had the freedom to be true to themselves.
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For his 2001 book, Moral Freedom, the political scientist Alan Wolfe interviewed a wide array of Americans. The moral culture he described was no longer based on mainline Protestantism, as it had been for generations
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Instead, Americans, from urban bobos to suburban evangelicals, were living in a state of what he called moral freedom: the belief that life is best when each individual finds his or her own morality—inevitable in a society that insists on individual freedom.
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moral freedom, like the other dominant values of the time, contained within it a core assumption: If everybody does their own thing, then everything will work out for everybody.
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It all looks naive now. We were naive about what the globalized economy would do to the working class, naive to think the internet would bring us together, naive to think the global mixing of people would breed harmony, naive to think the privileged wouldn’t pull up the ladders of opportunity behind them
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Over the 20 years after I sat with Kosieva, it all began to unravel. The global financial crisis had hit, the Middle East was being ripped apart by fanatics. On May 15, 2011, street revolts broke out in Spain, led by the self-declared Indignados—“the outraged.” “They don’t represent us!” they railed as an insult to the Spanish establishment. It would turn out to be the cry of a decade.
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Millennials and members of Gen Z have grown up in the age of that disappointment, knowing nothing else. In the U.S. and elsewhere, this has produced a crisis of faith, across society but especially among the young. It has produced a crisis of trust.
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Social trust is a generalized faith in the people of your community. It consists of smaller faiths. It begins with the assumption that we are interdependent, our destinies linked. It continues with the assumption that we share the same moral values. We share a sense of what is the right thing to do in different situations
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gh-trust societies have what Fukuyama calls spontaneous sociability. People are able to organize more quickly, initiate action, and sacrifice for the common good.
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When you look at research on social trust, you find all sorts of virtuous feedback loops. Trust produces good outcomes, which then produce more trust. In high-trust societies, corruption is lower and entrepreneurship is catalyzed.
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Higher-trust nations have lower economic inequality, because people feel connected to each other and are willing to support a more generous welfare state.
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People in high-trust societies are more civically engaged. Nations that score high in social trust—like the Netherlands, Sweden, China, and Australia—have rapidly growing or developed economies.
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As the ethicist Sissela Bok once put it, “Whatever matters to human beings, trust is the atmosphere in which it thrives.”
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During most of the 20th century, through depression and wars, Americans expressed high faith in their institutions
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In 1964, for example, 77 percent of Americans said they trusted the federal government to do the right thing most or all of the time.
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Then came the Iraq War and the financial crisis and the election of Donald Trump. Institutional trust levels remained pathetically low. What changed was the rise of a large group of people who were actively and poi
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sonously alienated—who were not only distrustful but explosively distrustful. Explosive distrust is not just an absence of trust or a sense of detached alienation—it is an aggressive animosity and an urge to destroy. Explosive distrust is the belief that those who disagree with you are not just wrong but illegitimate
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In 1997, 64 percent of Americans had a great or good deal of trust in the political competence of their fellow citizens; today only a third of Americans feel that way.
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In most societies, interpersonal trust is stable over the decades. But for some—like Denmark, where about 75 percent say the people around them are trustworthy, and the Netherlands, where two-thirds say so—the numbers have actually risen.
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In America, interpersonal trust is in catastrophic decline. In 2014, according to the General Social Survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago, only 30.3 percent of Americans agreed that “most people can be trusted,”
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There’s evidence to suggest that marital infidelity, academic cheating, and animal cruelty are all on the rise in America, but it’s hard to directly measure the overall moral condition of society—how honest people are, and how faithful.
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Trust is the ratio between the number of people who betray you and the number of people who remain faithful to you. It’s not clear that there is more betrayal in America than there used to be—but there are certainly fewer faithful supports around people than there used to be.
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Hundreds of books and studies on declining social capital and collapsing family structure demonstrate this. In the age of disappointment, people are less likely to be surrounded by faithful networks of people they can trust.
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Black Americans have high trust in other Black Americans; it’s the wider society they don’t trust, for good and obvious reasons
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As Vallier puts it, trust levels are a reflection of the moral condition of a nation at any given time.
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High national distrust is a sign that people have earned the right to be suspicious. Trust isn’t a virtue—it’s a measure of other people’s virtue.
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Black Americans have been one of the most ill-treated groups in American history; their distrust is earned distrust
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In 2018, 37.3 percent of white Americans felt that most people can be trusted, according to the General Social Survey, but only 15.3 percent of Black Americans felt the same.
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People become trusting when the world around them is trustworthy. When they are surrounded by people who live up to their commitments. When they experience their country as a fair place.
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In 2002, 43 percent of Black Americans were very or somewhat satisfied with the way Black people are treated in the U.S. By 2018, only 18 percent felt that way, according to Gallup.
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“They are driven by the insecurity of their place in society and in the economy,” he says. They are distrustful of technology and are much more likely to buy into conspiracy theories. “They’re often convinced by stories that someone is trying to trick them, that the world is against them,”
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the third marginalized group that scores extremely high on social distrust: young adults. These are people who grew up in the age of disappointment. It’s the only world they know.
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In 2012, 40 percent of Baby Boomers believed that most people can be trusted, as did 31 percent of members of Generation X. In contrast, only 19 percent of Millennials said most people can be trusted
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Seventy-three percent of adults under 30 believe that “most of the time, people just look out for themselves,” according to a Pew survey from 2018. Seventy-one percent of those young adults say that most people “would try to take advantage of you if they got a chance.
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Only 35 percent of young people, versus 67 percent of old people, believe that Americans respect the rights of people who are not like them.
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Fewer than a third of Millennials say America is the greatest country in the world, compared to 64 percent of members of the Silent Generation.
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“values and behavior are shaped by the degree to which survival is secure.” In the age of disappointment, our sense of safety went away
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Some of this is physical insecurity: school shootings, terrorist attacks, police brutality, and overprotective parenting at home
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By the time the Baby Boomers hit a median age of 35, their generation owned 21 percent of the nation’s wealth
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As of last year, Millennials—who will hit an average age of 35 in three years—owned just 3.2 percent of the nation’s wealth.
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fewer children growing up in married two-parent households, more single-parent households, more depression, and higher suicide rates.
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All the traits that were once assigned to you by your community, you must now determine on your own: your identity, your morality, your gender, your vocation, your purpose, and the place of your belonging. Self-creation becomes a major anxiety-inducing act of young adulthood.
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n the age of social media our “sociometers”—the antennae we use to measure how other people are seeing us—are up and on high alert all the time. Am I liked? Am I affirmed?
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Danger is ever present. “For many people, it is impossible to think without simultaneously thinking about what other people would think about what you’re thinking,” the educator Fredrik deBoer has written. “This is exhausting and deeply unsatisfying. As long as your self-conception is tied up in your perception of other people’s conception of you, you will never be free to occupy a personality with confidence; you’re always at the mercy of the next person’s dim opinion of you and your whole deal.”
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Distrust sows distrust. It produces the spiritual state that Emile Durkheim called anomie, a feeling of being disconnected from society, a feeling that the whole game is illegitimate, that you are invisible and not valued, a feeling that the only person you can really trust is yourself.
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Americans take fewer risks and are much less entrepreneurial than they used to be. In 2014, the rate of business start-ups hit a nearly 40-year low. Since the early 1970s, the rate at which people move across state lines each year has dropped by 56 percent
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People lose faith in experts. They lose faith in truth, in the flow of information that is the basis of modern society. “A world of truth is a world of trust, and vice versa,”
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In periods of distrust, you get surges of populism; populism is the ideology of those who feel betrayed
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People are drawn to leaders who use the language of menace and threat, who tell group-versus-group power narratives. You also get a lot more political extremism. People seek closed, rigid ideological systems that give them a sense of security.
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fanaticism is a response to existential anxiety. When people feel naked and alone, they revert to tribe. Their radius of trust shrinks, and they only trust their own kind.
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From the start, the pandemic has hit the American mind with sledgehammer force. Anxiety and depression have spiked. In April, Gallup recorded a record drop in self-reported well-being, as the share of Americans who said they were thriving fell to the same low point as during the Great Recession
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These kinds of drops tend to produce social upheavals. A similar drop was seen in Tunisian well-being just before the street protests that led to the Arab Spring.
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“low trusters” were more nervous during the early months of the pandemic, more likely to have trouble sleeping, more likely to feel depressed, less likely to say the public authorities were responding well to the pandemic
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Eighty-one percent of Americans under 30 reported feeling anxious, depressed, lonely, or hopeless at least one day in the previous week, compared to 48 percent of adults 60 and over.
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Americans looked to their governing institutions to keep them safe. And nearly every one of their institutions betrayed them
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention produced faulty tests, failed to provide up-to-date data on infections and deaths, and didn’t provide a trustworthy voice for a scared public.
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The Food and Drug Administration wouldn’t allow private labs to produce their own tests without a lengthy approval process.
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In nations that ranked high on the World Values Survey measure of interpersonal trust—like China, Australia, and most of the Nordic states—leaders were able to mobilize quickly, come up with a plan, and count on citizens to comply with the new rules.
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In low-trust nations—like Mexico, Spain, and Brazil—there was less planning, less compliance, less collective action, and more death.
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Countries that fell somewhere in the middle—including the U.S., Germany, and Japan—had a mixed record depending on the quality of their leadership.
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South Korea, where more than 65 percent of people say they trust government when it comes to health care, was able to build a successful test-and-trace regime. In America, where only 31 percent of Republicans and 44 percent of Democrats say the government should be able to use cellphone data to track compliance with experts’ coronavirus social-contact guidelines, such a system was never really implemented.
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For decades, researchers have been warning about institutional decay. Institutions get caught up in one of those negative feedback loops that are so common in a world of mistrust. They become ineffective and lose legitimacy. People who lose faith in them tend not to fund them. Talented people don’t go to work for them. They become more ineffective still.
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On the right, this anti-institutional bias has manifested itself as hatred of government; an unwillingness to defer to expertise, authority, and basic science; and a reluctance to fund the civic infrastructure of society, such as a decent public health system
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On the left, distrust of institutional authority has manifested as a series of checks on power that have given many small actors the power to stop common plans, producing what Fukuyama calls a vetocracy
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In 2020, American institutions groaned and sputtered. Academics wrote up plan after plan and lobbed them onto the internet. Few of them went anywhere. America had lost the ability to build new civic structures to respond to ongoing crises like climate change, opioid addiction, and pandemics, or to reform existing ones.
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In a lower-trust era like today, Levin told me, “there is a greater instinct to say, ‘They’re failing us.’ We see ourselves as outsiders to the systems—an outsider mentality that’s hard to get out of.”
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Americans haven’t just lost faith in institutions; they’ve come to loathe them, even to think that they are evil
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55 percent of Americans believe that the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 was created in a lab and 59 percent believe that the U.S. government is concealing the true number of deaths
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Half of all Fox News viewers believe that Bill Gates is plotting a mass-vaccination campaign so he can track people.
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This spring, nearly a third of Americans were convinced that it was probably or definitely true that a vaccine existed but was being withheld by the government.
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institutions like the law, the government, the police, and even the family don’t merely serve social functions, Levin said; they form the individuals who work and live within them. The institutions provide rules to live by, standards of excellence to live up to, social roles to fulfill.
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Instead, they see institutions as stages on which they can perform, can display their splendid selves.
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People run for Congress not so they can legislate, but so they can get on TV. People work in companies so they can build their personal brand.
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The result is a world in which institutions not only fail to serve their social function and keep us safe, they also fail to form trustworthy people. The rot in our structures spreads to a rot in ourselves.
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The coronavirus has confronted America with a social dilemma. A social dilemma, the University of Pennsylvania scholar Cristina Bicchieri notes, is “a situation in which each group member gets a higher outcome if she pursues her individual self-interest, but everyone in the group is better off if all group members further the common interest.”
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Social distancing is a social dilemma. Many low-risk individuals have been asked to endure some large pain (unemployment, bankruptcy) and some small inconvenience (mask wearing) for the sake of the common good. If they could make and keep this moral commitment to each other in the short term, the curve would be crushed, and in the long run we’d all be better off. It is the ultimate test of American trustworthiness.
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While pretending to be rigorous, people relaxed and started going out. It was like watching somebody gradually give up on a diet. There wasn’t a big moment of capitulation, just an extra chocolate bar here, a bagel there, a scoop of ice cream before bed
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in reality this was a mass moral failure of Republicans and Democrats and independents alike. This was a failure of social solidarity, a failure to look out for each other.
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Alexis de Tocqueville discussed a concept called the social body. Americans were clearly individualistic, he observed, but they shared common ideas and common values, and could, when needed, produce common action. They could form a social body.
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Over time, those common values eroded, and were replaced by a value system that put personal freedom above every other value
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When Americans were confronted with the extremely hard task of locking down for months without any of the collective resources that would have made it easier—habits of deference to group needs; a dense network of community bonds to help hold each other accountable; a history of trust that if you do the right thing, others will too; preexisting patterns of cooperation; a sense of shame if you deviate from the group—they couldn’t do it. America failed.
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The week before George Floyd was killed, the National Center for Health Statistics released data showing that a third of all Americans were showing signs of clinical anxiety or depression. By early June, after Floyd’s death, the percentage of Black Americans showing clinical signs of depression and anxiety disorders had jumped from 36 to 41 percent
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By late June, American national pride was lower than at any time since Gallup started measuring, in 2001
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In another poll, 71 percent of Americans said they were angry about the state of the country, and just 17 percent said they were proud.
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By late June, it was clear that America was enduring a full-bore crisis of legitimacy, an epidemic of alienation, and a loss of faith in the existing order.
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The most alienated, anarchic actors in society—antifa, the Proud Boys, QAnon—seemed to be driving events. The distrust doom loop was now at hand.
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Cultures are collective responses to common problems. But when reality changes, culture takes a few years, and a moral convulsion, to completely shake off the old norms and values.
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The culture that is emerging, and which will dominate American life over the next decades, is a response to a prevailing sense of threat.
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This new culture values security over liberation, equality over freedom, the collective over the individual.
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we’ve entered an age of precarity in which every political or social movement has an opportunity pole and a risk pole. In the opportunity mentality, risk is embraced because of the upside possibilities. In the risk mindset, security is embraced because people need protection from downside dangers
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In this period of convulsion, almost every party and movement has moved from its opportunity pole to its risk pole.
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In the new culture we are entering, that meritocratic system looks more and more like a ruthless sorting system that excludes the vast majority of people, rendering their life precarious and second class, while pushing the “winners” into a relentless go-go lifestyle that leaves them exhausted and unhappy
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Equality becomes the great social and political goal. Any disparity—racial, economic, meritocratic—comes to seem hateful.
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If we’ve lived through an age of the isolated self, people in the emerging culture see embedded selves. Socialists see individuals embedded in their class group. Right-wing populists see individuals as embedded pieces of a national identity group. Left-wing critical theorists see individuals embedded in their racial, ethnic, gender, or sexual-orientation identity group.
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When there is massive distrust of central institutions, people shift power to local institutions, where trust is higher. Power flows away from Washington to cities and states.
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enlightenment liberalism, which was a long effort to reduce the role of passions in politics and increase the role of reason. Politics was seen as a competition between partial truths.
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Liberalism is ill-suited for an age of precarity. It demands that we live with a lot of ambiguity, which is hard when the atmosphere already feels unsafe. Furthermore, it is thin. It offers an open-ended process of discovery when what people hunger for is justice and moral certainty.
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liberalism’s niceties come to seem like a cover that oppressors use to mask and maintain their systems of oppression. Public life isn’t an exchange of ideas; it’s a conflict of groups engaged in a vicious death struggle
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The cultural shifts we are witnessing offer more safety to the individual at the cost of clannishness within society. People are embedded more in communities and groups, but in an age of distrust, groups look at each other warily, angrily, viciously.
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The shift toward a more communal viewpoint is potentially a wonderful thing, but it leads to cold civil war unless there is a renaissance of trust. There’s no avoiding the core problem. Unless we can find a way to rebuild trust, the nation does not function.
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Historians have more to offer, because they can cite examples of nations that have gone from pervasive social decay to relative social health. The two most germane to our situation are Great Britain between 1830 and 1848 and the United States between 1895 and 1914.
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In both periods, a highly individualistic and amoral culture was replaced by a more communal and moralistic one.
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But there was a crucial difference between those eras and our own, at least so far. In both cases, moral convulsion led to frenetic action.
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As Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett note in their forthcoming book, The Upswing, the American civic revival that began in the 1870s produced a stunning array of new organizations: the United Way, the NAACP, the Boy Scouts, the Forest Service, the Federal Reserve System, 4-H clubs, the Sierra Club, the settlement-house movement, the compulsory-education movement, the American Bar Association, the American Legion, the ACLU, and on and on
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After the civic revivals, both nations witnessed frenetic political reform. During the 1830s, Britain passed the Reform Act, which widened the franchise; the Factory Act, which regulated workplaces; and the Municipal Corporations Act, which reformed local government.
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The Progressive Era in America saw an avalanche of reform: civil-service reform; food and drug regulation; the Sherman Act, which battled the trusts; the secret ballot; and so on. Civic life became profoundly moralistic, but political life became profoundly pragmatic and anti-ideological. Pragmatism and social-science expertise were valued.
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Can America in the 2020s turn itself around the way the America of the 1890s, or the Britain of the 1830s, did? Can we create a civic renaissance and a legislative revolution?
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I see no scenario in which we return to being the nation we were in 1965, with a cohesive national ethos, a clear national establishment, trusted central institutions, and a pop-culture landscape in which people overwhelmingly watch the same shows and talked about the same things.
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The age of distrust has smashed the converging America and the converging globe—that great dream of the 1990s—and has left us with the reality that our only plausible future is decentralized pluralism.
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The key to making decentralized pluralism work still comes down to one question: Do we have the energy to build new organizations that address our problems, the way the Brits did in the 1830s and Americans did in the 1890s?
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social trust is built within organizations in which people are bound together to do joint work, in which they struggle together long enough for trust to gradually develop, in which they develop shared understandings of what is expected of each other, in which they are enmeshed in rules and standards of behavior that keep them trustworthy when their commitments might otherwise falter.
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Over the past 60 years, we have given up on the Rotary Club and the American Legion and other civic organizations and replaced them with Twitter and Instagram. Ultimately, our ability to rebuild trust depends on our ability to join and stick to organizations.
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Whether we emerge from this transition stronger depends on our ability, from the bottom up and the top down, to build organizations targeted at our many problems. If history is any guide, this will be the work not of months, but of one or two decades.
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For centuries, America was the greatest success story on earth, a nation of steady progress, dazzling achievement, and growing international power. That story threatens to end on our watch, crushed by the collapse of our institutions and the implosion of social trust
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But trust can be rebuilt through the accumulation of small heroic acts—by the outrageous gesture of extending vulnerability in a world that is mean, by proffering faith in other people when that faith may not be returned. Sometimes trust blooms when somebody holds you against all logic, when you expected to be dropped.
How Misinformation Threatened a Montana National Heritage Area - The New York Times - 0 views
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Ms. Grulkowski had just heard about a years-in-the-making effort to designate her corner of central Montana a national heritage area, celebrating its role in the story of the American West. A small pot of federal matching money was there for the taking, to help draw more visitors and preserve underfunded local tourist attractions.
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She collected addresses from a list of voters and spent $1,300 sending a packet denouncing the proposed heritage area to 1,498 farmers and ranchers. She told them the designation would forbid landowners to build sheds, drill wells or use fertilizers and pesticides. It would alter water rights, give tourists access to private property, create a new taxation district and prohibit new septic systems and burials on private land, she said.
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From the vantage point of informed democratic decision making, it’s a haunting tale about how a sustained political campaign can succeed despite — or perhaps as a result of — being divorced from reality.
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“Misinformation is the new playbook,” Bob Kelly, the mayor of Great Falls, said. “You don’t like something? Create alternative facts and figures as a way to undermine reality.”
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“We’ve run into the uneducable,” Ellen Sievert, a retired historic preservation officer for Great Falls and surrounding Cascade County, said. “I don’t know how we get through that.”
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Steve Taylor, a former mayor of Neihart (pop. 43) whose family owns a car dealership in Great Falls, is a conservative who voted for Donald J. Trump twice, though he said he has regretted those votes since the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Fellow Republicans, he said, have painted the heritage area as a liberal plot
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“They make it a political thing because if you have a Democrat involved, then they are all against it,” he said. “It’s so hard to build something and so easy to tear it down. It’s maddening. It’s so easy to destroy something with untruths.”
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And she came across a vein of conspiratorial accusations that national heritage areas were a kind of Trojan horse that could open the door to future federal land grabs.
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Beginning in 2013, Ms. Weber teamed up with local preservationists, formed a nonprofit, enlisted local businesses and raised $50,000 for a required feasibility study. In 2014, the Great Falls City Commission included the heritage area as part of its official growth policy.
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The proposal would take in four National Historic Landmarks: Lewis and Clark’s portage route around Great Falls; Fort Benton, a pioneer town along the Missouri River that was the last stop for steamships heading west from St. Louis in the 1800s; the First Peoples Buffalo Jump, a steep cliff over which Blackfoot hunters herded buffalo to their deaths; and the home and studio of C.M. Russell, the turn-of-the-century “cowboy artist” whose paintings of the American West shaped the popular image of frontier life.
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The park service requires demonstrations of public support, which Ms. Weber and her allies solicited. For six years, the process went on largely undisturbed. Ms. Weber hosted dozens of public meetings and was a regular on local radio stations. Opponents made scarcely a peep.
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Ms. Grulkowski’s interest was piqued.At the time, she was becoming engrossed in the online world of far-right media. From her home on 34 acres in Stockett, a farming community of 157 people south of Great Falls, she watched videos from outlets like His Glory TV, where hosts refer to President Biden as “the so-called president.” She subscribed to the Telegram messaging channel of Seth Keshel, a prolific disinformation spreader.
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The proposal for the Big Sky Country National Heritage Area, encompassing most of two central Montana counties that are together roughly the size of Connecticut, was the brainchild of Jane Weber, a U.S. Forest Service retiree who spent a decade on the Cascade County Commission.
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By May, their campaign had reached the state capital, where Mr. Gianforte signed the bill barring any national heritage area in Montana after it passed on a near-party-line vote. A heritage area, the bill’s text asserted, would “interfere with state and private property rights.”
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In two hours of talking at his farm, Mr. Bandel could offer no evidence to back up that claim. He said he distrusted assurances that there were no such designs. “They say, ‘Don’t worry, we’re going to do it right. Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you. I think Adolf Hitler said that, too, didn’t he?” Mr. Bandel said. “The fear of the unknown is a huge fear.”
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But when pressed, Ms. Grulkowski, too, was unable to identify a single instance of a property owner’s being adversely affected by a heritage area. “It’s not that there are a lot of specific instances,” she said. “There’s a lot of very wide open things that could happen.”
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“We didn’t believe in any of that stuff until last July,” Ms. Grulkowski said. “Then we stumbled on something on the internet, and we watched it, and it took us two days to get over that. And it had to do with the child trafficking that leads to everything. It just didn’t seem right, and that was just over the top. And then we started seeing things that are lining up with that everywhere.”
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One thing Ms. Grulkowski does not do — because she refuses to pay — is read The Great Falls Tribune, the local daily. It’s not what it once was, with just eight journalists, down from 45 in 2000, said Richard Ecke, who spent 38 years at the paper before the owner, Gannett, laid him off as opinion editor in 2016. He is vice chairman of the proposed heritage area’s board.
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In the paper’s place, information and misinformation about the heritage area spread on Facebook and in local outlets that parroted Ms. Grulkowski. Last winter, a glossy magazine distributed to Montana farmers put the subject on its cover, headlined “Intrusive Raid on Private Property Rights.”
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Ms. Grulkowski now has ambitions beyond Montana. She wants to push Congress not to renew heritage areas that already exist.Buoyed by the trust her neighbors have placed in her, she has begun campaigning for Ms. Weber’s old seat on the county commission, in part to avenge the way she feels: mistreated by those in power.She doesn’t feel she’s been told the whole truth.
10 Things You May Not Know About the Jamestown Colony - HISTORY - 0 views
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In May of 1607, a hearty group of Englishmen arrived on the muddy shores of modern-day Virginia under orders from King James I to establish an English colony. But despite their efforts,
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In December of 1606, the Virginia Company, under charter from King James I, sent an expedition to establish an English settlement in North America. When their ships, the Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery, arrived near the banks of the James River on May 14, 1607, 104 men and boys set foot on what would soon become Jamestown. The initial group contained well-to-do adventurers, a handful of artisans and craftsmen, and laborers eager to forge a new home. Notably absent were members of the opposite sex. It would be another nine long months before any women arrived at the fledgling colony.
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While the terrain might have appeared ideal from the deck of a ship—unoccupied and ripe with natural resources—the Virginia Company established its settlement on a swath of swampy land with no source of fresh water. Soon after, the men began to perish. Only 38 of the 104 original settlers were still alive by January 1608.
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Before more colonists arrived from England, the population of Jamestown dwindled. The Virginia Company had predicted that disease would manifest, and lives would be lost. Concerned about prying eyes and an ambush on a weakened colony, they had stressed "above all things" that the colonists hide the sick and bury the dead in unmarked graves. The men followed orders, burying their deceased out of sight behind the fort wall. When the death toll spiked between May and September of 1607, they also made use of double burials with two men laid to rest in the same shaft.
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Surrounded by Powhatan’s warriors and trapped inside the fort, the settlers eventually ran out of food and were forced to eat whatever they could find: horses, dogs, rats, snakes, leather shoes and, according to forensic evidence, even each other.
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The Virginia Company offered attractive incentives for would-be wives: free transportation, a plot of land, a dowry of clothing and furnishings. They also allowed the women to choose their husbands after entertaining the eager suitors. The tactic had some success, and, the women, in theory, became America’s first mail-order brides.
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Before their arrival, European explorers assumed America's climate would match that of other lands situated at the same latitude. They soon discovered that the New World was both hotter and colder than they expected. To make matters worse, the already harsh and unpredictable environment was exacerbated by climate change, namely a “Little Ice Age” that lasted from 1550 to 1800.
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. Thereafter, each new English colony sought its own legislature. Although there were challenges and power struggles, the concept of elections, creation of laws and power through and by the people, began in America's first English settlement.
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King James I had a strong, and well-known, distaste for tobacco. “A custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose,” he once declared. It’s ironic that this very crop gave Jamestown its economic viability. The settlement had struggled to find a marketable commodity that it could trade and ship back to England for profit. The colonists dabbled in forestry, silk making and glassmaking, with little financial return.
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No one knows where or how Rolfe obtained the seeds. Until then, Spain had controlled tobacco on the European markets and selling seeds to non-Spaniards was a crime punishable by death. Rolfe may have smuggled the seeds from Bermuda, where some of the fleet was shipwrecked for 10 months before arriving in Jamestown, or somewhere in the Caribbean. Either way, the risk paid off.
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Historians believe that Rolfe either falsified his report to conceal what the English had done or that the White Lion swapped flags with a Dutch ship while out at sea, causing Rolfe to incorrectly record the ship’s country of origin.
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Active archaeological excavation, research and analysis have been ongoing since 1994 at the original site of Jamestown. Archaeologists have found parts of the palisade of the original 1607 fort, discovered the site of the second church and unearthed the remains of a handful of the settlement’s early inhabitants.
10 Things You May Not Know About the Mexican-American War - HISTORY - 0 views
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1. Before invading Mexico, the U.S. tried to buy some of its territory. In late-1845, President James K. Polk sent diplomat John Slidell on a secret mission to Mexico. Slidell was tasked with settling a longstanding disagreement about the border between the two countries, but he was also authorized to offer the Mexicans up to $25 million for their territories in New Mexico and California.
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3. Santa Anna used the war to reclaim power in Mexico. Most Americans considered Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna a mortal enemy for his actions at 1836’s Battle of the Alamo, but the charismatic general returned to power during the Mexican-American War thanks to a surprising ally: James K. Polk.
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In August 1846, he convinced the Polk administration that he would negotiate a favorable peace if he were allowed to return home through an American naval blockade.
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who took to the House floor in 1847 and introduced a series of resolutions demanding to know the location of the “spot of soil” where the war’s first skirmish took place.
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U.S. forces found the western route into the capital blocked by Chapultepec Castle, an imposing fortress that was home to Mexico’s military academy. General Scott ordered an artillery bombardment, and on September 13 his troops stormed the citadel and used ladders to scale its stone façade. Most of the Mexican defenders soon withdrew, but a group of six teenaged military cadets remained at their posts and fought to the last.
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The 200-man outfit was mostly made up of Irish Catholics and other immigrants who resented the prejudice they faced from Protestants in the United States.
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Under the leadership of an Irishman named John Riley, the “San Patricios” defected and became Santa Anna’s elite artillery force. They served with distinction at the Battles of Buena Vista and Cerro Gordo, but most of their unit was later killed or captured during an August 1847 clash at Churubusco
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Having secured Veracruz, Scott’s army launched the war’s final thrust: a six-month, 265-mile fighting march to the “Halls of Montezuma” at Mexico City.
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Trist, however, would do no such thing. Believing that he was on the verge of a breakthrough with Mexicans, he disobeyed the President’s order and instead wrote a 65-page letter defending his decision to continue his peace efforts. Polk was left seething. He called Trist “destitute of honor or principle” and tried to have him removed from the U.S. Army headquarters, but he was unable to stop the negotiations.
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a plot larger than the size of Peru. The lands ceded by Mexico would later encompass all or part of the future states of California, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, Oklahoma and Kansas.
Opinion | Vaccine Hesitancy Is About Trust and Class - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...vaccine-hesitancy-covid.html
collective action pandemic politics history crisis culture common
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The world needs to address the root causes of vaccine hesitancy. We can’t go on believing that the issue can be solved simply by flooding skeptical communities with public service announcements or hectoring people to “believe in science.”
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For the past five years, we’ve conducted surveys and focus groups abroad and interviewed residents of the Bronx to better understand vaccine avoidance.
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We’ve found that people who reject vaccines are not necessarily less scientifically literate or less well-informed than those who don’t. Instead, hesitancy reflects a transformation of our core beliefs about what we owe one another.
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Over the past four decades, governments have slashed budgets and privatized basic services. This has two important consequences for public health
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second, public health is no longer viewed as a collective endeavor, based on the principle of social solidarity and mutual obligation. People are conditioned to believe they’re on their own and responsible only for themselves.
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compared with white Americans, communities of color do experience the American health care system differently. But a closer look at the data reveals a more complicated picture.
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Since the spring, when most American adults became eligible for Covid vaccines, the racial gap in vaccination rates between Black and white people has been halved. In September, a national survey found that vaccination rates among Black and white Americans were almost identical.
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Other surveys have determined that a much more significant factor was college attendance: Those without a college degree were the most likely to go unvaccinated.
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Education is a reliable predictor of socioeconomic status, and other studies have similarly found a link between income and vaccination.
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“People are thinking, ‘If the government isn’t going to do anything for us,’” said Elden, “‘then why should we participate in vaccines?’”
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But as the public purse shrunk in the 1980s, politicians insisted that it’s no longer the government’s job to ensure people’s well-being; instead, Americans were to be responsible only for themselves and their own bodies
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Entire industries, such as self-help and health foods, have sprung up on the principle that the key to good health lies in individuals making the right choices.
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there are problems with reducing public health to a matter of choice. It gives the impression that individuals are wholly responsible for their own health.
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This is despite growing evidence that health is deeply influenced by factors outside our control; public health experts now talk about the “social determinants of health,” the idea that personal health is never simply just a reflection of individual lifestyle choices, but also the class people are born into, the neighborhood they grew up in and the race they belong to.
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food deserts and squalor are not easy problems to solve — certainly not by individuals or charities — and they require substantial government action.
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Being healthy is not cheap. Studies indicate that energy-dense foods with less nutritious value are more affordable, and low-cost diets are linked to obesity and insulin resistance.
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Another problem with reducing well-being to personal choice is that this treats health as a commodity.
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This isn’t surprising, since we shop for doctors and insurance plans the way we do all other goods and services
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mothers devoted many hours to “researching” vaccines, soaking up parental advice books and quizzing doctors. In other words, they act like savvy consumers
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When thinking as a consumer, people tend to downplay social obligations in favor of a narrow pursuit of self-interest. As one parent told Reich, “I’m not going to put my child at risk to save another child.”
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Vaccine uptake is so high among wealthy people because Covid is one of the gravest threats they face. In some wealthy Manhattan neighborhoods, for example, vaccination rates run north of 90 percent.
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For poorer and working-class people, though, the calculus is different: Covid-19 is only one of multiple grave threats.
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Most of the people we interviewed in the Bronx say they are skeptical of the institutions that claim to serve the poor but in fact have abandoned them.
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he and his friends find reason to view the government’s sudden interest in their well-being with suspicion. “They are over here shoving money at us,” a woman told us, referring to a New York City offer to pay a $500 bonus to municipal workers to get vaccinated. “And I’m asking, why are you so eager, when you don’t give us money for anything else?”
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These views reinforce the work of social scientists who find a link between a lack of trust and inequality. And without trust, there is no mutual obligation, no sense of a common good.
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The experience of the 1960s suggests that when people feel supported through social programs, they’re more likely to trust institutions and believe they have a stake in society’s health.
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While the reasons vary by country, the underlying causes are the same: a deep mistrust in local and international institutions, in a context in which governments worldwide have cut social services.
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In one Syrian city, for example, the health care system now consists of one public hospital so underfunded that it is notorious for poor care, a few private hospitals offering high-quality care that are unaffordable to most of the population, and many unlicensed and unregulated private clinics — some even without medical doctors — known to offer misguided health advice. Under such conditions, conspiracy theories can flourish; many of the city’s residents believe Covid vaccines are a foreign plot.
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In many developing nations, international aid organizations are stepping in to offer vaccines. These institutions are sometimes more equitable than governments, but they are often oriented to donor priorities, not community needs.
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“We have starvation and women die in childbirth.” one tribal elder told us, “Why do they care so much about polio? What do they really want?”
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In America, anti-vaccine movements are as old as vaccines themselves; efforts to immunize people against smallpox prompted bitter opposition in the turn of the last century. But after World War II, these attitudes disappeared. In the 1950s, demand for the polio vaccine often outstripped supply, and by the late 1970s, nearly every state had laws mandating vaccinations for school with hardly any public opposition.
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The anti-measles policy, for example, was an outgrowth of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and War on Poverty initiatives.
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Research shows that private systems not only tend to produce worse health outcomes than public ones, but privatization creates what public health experts call “segregated care,” which can undermine the feelings of social solidarity that are critical for successful vaccination drives
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The types of social programs that best promote this way of thinking are universal ones, like Social Security and universal health care.
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If the world is going to beat the pandemic, countries need policies that promote a basic, but increasingly forgotten, idea: that our individual flourishing is bound up in collective well-being.
Putin is risking a Kremlin coup, says ex-Russian minister | News | The Times - 0 views
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As analysts ponder the state of Putin’s mental health, Kozyrev, 70, caused a stir this week with a declaration on Twitter that he considered the president’s war calculus rational. “It’s horrific but it’s not irrational,” he wrote. “To understand why the invasion was rational for Putin, we have to step into his shoes.”
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Through the president’s lens, there was a need to bring western-leaning Ukraine back into the Kremlin fold since the Maidan Uprising of 2014 that ousted its pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych. However, of the money that Putin thought had gone into his military, billions of roubles was plundered. And the narrative around the West’s state of weakness was propaganda spread among Russia’s ruling elite,
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Putin miscalculated, “but that doesn’t make him insane. Simply wrong and immoral”. Kozyrev told The Times: “Even if he takes Kyiv with a couple of other cities, it leads nowhere. This war is unwinnable for Putin because he fights against the people.”
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The 1979-1989 Soviet-Afghan war should have been a valuable lesson, he said. “It also started with an invasion and looked like the Soviets were winning. But after that, the West provided assets like Stinger missiles and then it became evident that the ground war started to fall apart . . . the Soviet Union had to evacuate its forces and was defeated,” Kozyrev said. “That was a heavy blow to Soviet stability. My prediction is the same for Russia now . . . the probably very dramatic outcome, like the Soviet Union, of collapse.”
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For Putin to have nuclear intentions, he would need to be suicidal, a prospect that Kozyrev scoffs at. For all his hard-man posturing, the president has family, friends and too much of a liking for beautiful women and fine wine to press the nuclear button, he believes. “He’s just a kind of guy able to be brazen and he has more risk tolerance and that’s the problem with the West.”
Shipwreck From 1891 is Found in Lake Superior - The New York Times - 0 views
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On May 4, 1891, as gale-force winds and waves raged on Lake Superior, the crew of a schooner barge named Atlanta abandoned ship as it sank. The six men and one woman, a cook, clung to their lifeboat for nine hours, fighting at its oars to guide it to the Michigan shore.
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This month, the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society said that the wreckage of the Atlanta had been found after it had sat undetected in the cold oblivion of the lake’s depths for more than a century. The announcement revived the story of how the Atlanta’s crew members fought for their lives on the world’s largest freshwater lake.
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“We were the first human eyes to be looking at this since that dramatic moment. I about jumped out of my chair.”
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In 2021, the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society, the nonprofit that operates the museum, had its best season for locating wrecks, Mr. Lynn said, helped by good weather and side-scan sonar, which sends and receives acoustic pulses that help map the seafloor and detect submerged objects. It discovered nine shipwrecks, including the Atlanta, the most in any season, after towing the sonar 2,500 miles, said Darryl Ertel, the society’s director of marine operations.
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“It was a target we had found earlier but were not exactly sure what it was,” Mr. Lynn said. “You never quite know until you see a smoking gun. That name board was it. It announced with no uncertain terms, ‘This is what I am.’”
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The Atlanta’s voyage was typical of the Industrial Revolution, when schooner barges hauled iron ore and coal across Lake Superior, said Fred Stonehouse, a local historian.
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The Atlanta will remain undisturbed. A Michigan law makes it illegal to raise shipwrecks, but Mr. Lynn said it would also be like raiding a burial plot.
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“These are like grave sites,” he said. Finding the Atlanta, he added, “was fortunate. There were survivors who can tell us what happened.”
The End of German Exceptionalism - The Atlantic - 0 views
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what happens in an “economy in search of a political raison d’être,” as the historian Werner Abelshauser once described the postwar Federal Republic, if its GDP suddenly stops growing? We are about to find out.
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Germany’s economy is running out of steam, and not only because of COVID or because Russian President Vladimir Putin has turned off the gas tap.
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A recent poll shows that, notwithstanding this radical program, only 57 percent of Germans now say that they could never imagine voting for the AfD
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Together with—and perhaps because of—its economic malaise, the country is living through a political earthquake. Germany’s wealth, its exemplary parliamentary democracy, and its big efforts to confront its Nazi history are no longer keeping nativist parties at bay.
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Outside the EU, “made in Germany” goods struggle to find new clients. Exports to China have been roughly flat since mid-2015 and may even start to drop, as President Xi Jinping has made clear that he wants to make his country less dependent on European industry
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The Federal Republic is the only big Euro member whose economy has not yet fully recovered to pre-pandemic levels. In fact, German GDP has roughly stagnated since 2019. And German manufacturing is the main problem: Industrial output lags pre-pandemic levels by some 5 percent.
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The reason Germany ceased to be Europe’s growth engine has less to do with Russian energy than with changing circumstances in the export markets where the country’s industrial champions once flourished
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In the 2000s, former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder slashed unemployment benefits and created a low-wage sector to help German exporters increase their market shares across Europe. Since then, many other European countries, including France and Italy, have made reforms to cut labor costs themselves, and Germany faces tougher competition in its biggest export market and has been running a trade deficit in goods with other EU members since 2020.
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We are living through the end of German exceptionalism. The country’s economy is fragile, and the rise of the AfD makes its politics as unpredictable as those of Austria or Italy. In short, Germany is joining the European mainstream. And that means that trouble is ahead.
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German car exports to China were down 24 percent in the first three months of 2023 compared with the same period in 2022
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The U.S. is Germany’s second-largest market after the EU, accounting for 8.9 percent of its exports, but to top off Germany’s troubles, Washington is becoming more protectionist under Joe Biden.
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The obvious solution is for Germany to spend more. Greater investment could raise productivity in a country where the railways have the worst delays among major European countries and cellphone and internet connectivity are underfunded
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Investment could boost demand, and liberalizing policies could rebalance the economy toward services.
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But a dogma of balanced budgets and debt avoidance remains deeply anchored among German politicians and voters.
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Now Germany, whose effort to confront its Nazi history seemed to inoculate its politicians from having to deal with a large far-right party, is also falling prey to populism and nationalism.
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ore and more governments across Europe are led by right-wing parties: in Italy, Sweden, Finland, and soon possibly Spain. In all of these countries, the center-right no longer has qualms about working with the far-right.
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the penny has not yet dropped. Germany’s political elite hasn’t been moved to take the risky step of running up debts and liberalizing at the same time. But until it does, the country’s economy will likely lag European growth. And if the economy ceases to serve as a source of national pride, political forces may thrive by brandishing more nativist concepts of German identity.
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The AfD’s rise to 20 percent in the polls—twice what it commanded in the 2021 parliamentary elections—has many causes. The party’s bastion is the formerly Communist east, where authoritarian attitudes and resentment of traditional parties feed off of feelings of having been the losers in Germany’s reunification
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But something broader is going on. For Germans, the hallmark of good government is “Ruhe und Ordnung,” calm and order. The three parties in Scholz’s ruling coalition—the center-left SPD, the Greens, and the pro-business FDP—squabble over everything
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The party has also benefited from a backlash against Germany’s progressive agenda on climate and migration
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Despite the country’s reputation abroad as a climate champion, in a poll of seven European countries, Germans were the least willing among Europeans to switch to electric cars, cut meat consumption, or spend out of their own pockets to renovate their houses to save the climate.
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But the AfD has also been able to mobilize an anti-immigration electorate in big, rich, formerly West German states, such as Bavaria, the land of Siemens and Weisswurst, and Baden-Württemberg
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the CDU will need to decide whether it will continue marginalizing the far-right or start working with it instead. The AfD is leading the polls in Thuringia and polling a strong second in Saxony
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ermany is joining the European mainstream, with its political class struggling to counter rising far-right support and an economy that is no longer best-in-class. The two things that made postwar Germany unique in Europe are no more
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the rise of the AfD is pushing Berlin to become an unreliable partner in Europe. The CDU was once the champion of Schengen, the EU’s policy to allow for passport-less travel across the continent. The party’s leader, Merz, clearly concerned about covering his right flank, has now called for reintroducing passport checks at Germany’s borders with other EU members, such as Czechia, in order to turn away migrants.
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As the AfD criticizes the “reckless” spending of the Scholz government, the FDP and the chancellor are doubling down on spending cuts. Germany is becoming less willing to spend for itself and the EU.
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The AfD may one day accede to national government, but it cannot do so on its own. To work in a coalition, the party will almost certainly have to compromise on its most radical policy propositions, such as closing the U.S. military base in Ramstein. But even with the AfD merely exerting pressure on German politics, the EU must sooner or later face an adjustment—to a future in which Germany is no longer an economic and political anchor so much as a source of instability.
Opinion | Will A.I. Transform the Economy, and if So, How? - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...ai-jobs-economy-budget.html
economy ai effects employment debt inequality policy economics
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what we’ve been calling A.I. — or what more careful people call “generative A.I.” — isn’t really intelligence. What it is instead is extrapolation from pattern recognition. Or as some people I talk to put it, it’s basically souped-up autocorrect.
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a lot of what human workers, even workers considered highly skilled, do for a living is also arguably souped-up autocorrect. How many workers regularly engage in creative thinking? Even among creative workers, how much time is spent being creative as opposed to engaging in pattern recognition?
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what we’re calling A.I. could be a big deal for the economy even if it doesn’t lead to the creation of HAL 9000 or SkyNet.
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Some people are trying to figure out the impact from the bottom up, looking at various kinds of work and guesstimating how much of that work can be replaced or augmented by A.I. The most widely circulated numbers come from Goldman Sachs, whose base case has A.I. increasing the growth rate of productivity — output per person-hour — by almost 1.5 percentage points a year over a decade, for a total over that decade of about 15 percent:
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By the time the productivity surge tapered off, productivity was about 12 percent higher than the previous trend would have led you to expect it would be. Since A.I. is arguably an even more profound innovation than the technologies that drove the 1995-2005 boom, 15 percent isn’t at all unreasonable.
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economists often identify total factor productivity growth with technological progress. That’s sometimes a bit dubious, since T.F.P. is really a “measure of our ignorance,” simply the part of economic growth we can’t explain otherwise. But from 1995 to 2005 it seems fairly clear that the boom was driven by information technology.
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Here’s another view of that boom, in which I show the natural log of productivity — so that a straight line corresponds to steady growth — and plot a continuation of the growth rate from 1973 to 1995 (the red line), so that you can see how actual growth compared:
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Is this plausible? Actually, yes. One parallel, if you’ve studied the historical relationship between technology and productivity, is the productivity boom from 1995 to 2005, which followed decades of weak productivity growth.
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But will higher productivity make us richer or simply reduce the number of jobs? Fears of technological unemployment — a term invented by none other than John Maynard Keynes in 1930 — go back at least to the early 19th century.
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While technology has often eliminated some jobs, however, historically this has always been, as Keynes wrote, “a temporary phase of maladjustment,” with other forms of employment rising to replace the jobs lost
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while there’s no reason to believe that what we’re calling A.I. will lead to mass unemployment, it may well hurt the people who are displaced from their jobs and either have trouble finding new employment or are obliged to accept lower wages. Who are the potential losers?
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The likely answer is that big impacts will fall on relatively high-end administrative jobs, many of them currently highly paid, while blue-collar jobs will be largely unscathed
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there are other applications of big data that may affect blue-collar work. For example, with all the buzz around ChatGPT there has been relatively little attention paid to the fact that after years of failed hype, self-driving cars are actually beginning to go into service.
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Still, at this point it seems more likely than not that A.I. will, unlike technological progress over the past 40 years, be a force for lower rather than higher income inequality.
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rapidly rising interest rates have made debt considerably more worrisome. Conventional estimates of the economy’s long-run sustainable growth rate, like those of the Federal Reserve, tend to put it around 1.8 percent. And real interest rates on federal debt are now above that number:
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if optimistic estimates of the boost from the technology are at all right, growth will be much higher than 1.8 percent over the next decade, and debt won’t be a big concern after all — especially because faster growth will boost revenue and reduce the budget deficit.
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All of this is, of course, highly speculative. Nobody really knows how big an impact A.I. will have. But again, it doesn’t have to be “true” artificial intelligence to be a big deal for the economy, and the best guess is that it will probably matter a lot.
Opinion | Climate Change Is Real. Markets, Not Governments, Offer the Cure. - The New Y... - 0 views
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For years, I saw myself not as a global-warming denier (a loaded term with its tendentious echo of Holocaust denial) but rather as an agnostic on the causes of climate change and a scoffer at the idea that it was a catastrophic threat to the future of humanity.
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It’s not that I was unalterably opposed to the idea that, by pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, modern civilization was contributing to the warming by 1 degree Celsius and the inches of sea-level rise the planet had experienced since the dawn of the industrial age. It’s that the severity of the threat seemed to me wildly exaggerated and that the proposed cures all smacked of old-fashioned statism mixed with new-age religion.
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Hadn’t we repeatedly lived through previous alarms about other, allegedly imminent, environmental catastrophes that didn’t come to pass, like the belief, widespread in the 1970s, that overpopulation would inevitably lead to mass starvation? And if the Green Revolution had spared us from that Malthusian nightmare, why should we not have confidence that human ingenuity wouldn’t also prevent the parade of horribles that climate change was supposed to bring about?
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I had other doubts, too. It seemed hubristic, or worse, to make multitrillion-dollar policy bets based on computer models trying to forecast climate patterns decades into the future. Climate activists kept promoting policies based on technologies that were either far from mature (solar energy) or sometimes actively harmful (biofuels).
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Expensive efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions in Europe and North America seemed particularly fruitless when China, India and other developing countries weren’t about to curb their own appetite for fossil fuels
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just how fast is Greenland’s ice melting right now? Is this an emergency for our time, or is it a problem for the future?
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His pitch was simple: The coastline we have taken for granted for thousands of years of human history changed rapidly in the past on account of natural forces — and would soon be changing rapidly and disastrously by man-made ones. A trip to Greenland, which holds one-eighth of the world’s ice on land (most of the rest is in Antarctica) would show me just how drastic those changes have been. Would I join him?
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Greenland is about the size of Alaska and California combined and, except at its coasts, is covered by ice that in places is nearly two miles thick. Even that’s only a fraction of the ice in Antarctica, which is more than six times as large
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Greenland’s ice also poses a nearer-term risk because it is melting faster. If all its ice were to melt, global sea levels would rise by some 24 feet. That would be more than enough to inundate hundreds of coastal cities in scores of nations, from Jakarta and Bangkok to Copenhagen and Amsterdam to Miami and New Orleans.
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There was also a millenarian fervor that bothered me about climate activism, with its apocalyptic imagery (the Statue of Liberty underwater) and threats of doom unless we were willing to live far more frugally.
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“We haven’t had a good positive mass balance year since the late 1990s,” he told me in a follow-on email when I asked him to explain the data for me. The losses can vary sharply by year. The annualized average over the past 30 years, he added, is 170 gigatons per year. That’s the equivalent of about 5,400 tons of ice loss per second. That “suggests that Greenland ice loss has been tracking the I.P.P.C. worse-case, highest-carbon-emission scenario.
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The data shows unmistakably that Greenland’s ice is not in balance. It is losing far more than it is gaining.
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scientists have been drilling ice-core samples from Greenland for decades, giving them a very good idea of climatic changes stretching back thousands of years. Better yet, a pair of satellites that detect anomalies in Earth’s gravity fields have been taking measurements of the sheet regularly for nearly 20 years, giving scientists a much more precise idea of what is happening.
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it’s hard to forecast with any precision what that means. “Anyone who says they know what the sea level is going to be in 2100 is giving you an educated guess,” said NASA’s Willis. “The fact is, we’re seeing these big ice sheets melt for the first time in history, and we don’t really know how fast they can go.”
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His own educated guess: “By 2100, we are probably looking at more than a foot or two and hopefully less than seven or eight feet. But we are struggling to figure out just how fast the ice sheets can melt. So the upper end of range is still not well known.”
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On the face of it, that sounds manageable. Even if sea levels rise by eight feet, won’t the world have nearly 80 years to come to grips with the problem, during which technologies that help us mitigate the effects of climate change while adapting to its consequences are likely to make dramatic advances?
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Won’t the world — including countries that today are poor — become far richer and thus more capable of weathering the floods, surges and superstorms?
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The average rate at which sea level is rising around the world, he estimates, has more than tripled over the past three decades, to five millimeters a year from 1.5 millimeters. That may still seem minute, yet as the world learned during the pandemic, exponential increases have a way of hitting hard.
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“When something is on a straight line or a smooth curve, you can plot its trajectory,” Englander said. “But sea level, like earthquakes and mudslides, is something that happens irregularly and can change rather quickly and surprise us. The point is, you can no longer predict the future by the recent past.”
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In The Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages, where I used to work, the theoretical physicist Steven Koonin, a former under secretary for science in the Obama administration’s Energy Department, cast doubt on the threat from Thwaites in a voice that could have once been mine. He also thinks the risks associated with Greenland’s melting are less a product of human-induced global warming than of natural cycles in North Atlantic currents and temperatures, which over time have a way of regressing to the mean.
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Even the poorest countries, while still unacceptably vulnerable, are suffering far fewer human and economic losses to climate-related disasters.
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Another climate nonalarmist is Roger Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. I call Pielke a nonalarmist rather than a skeptic because he readily acknowledges that the challenges associated with climate change, including sea-level rise, are real, serious and probably unstoppable, at least for many decades.
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“If we have to have a problem,” he told me when I reached him by phone, “we probably want one with a slow onset that we can see coming. It’s not like an asteroid coming from space.”
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“Since the 1940s, the impact of floods as a proportion of U.S. gross domestic product has dropped by 70 percent-plus,” Pielke said. “We see this around the world, across phenomena. The story is that fewer people are dying and we are having less damage proportional to G.D.P.”
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“Much climate reporting today highlights short-term changes when they fit the narrative of a broken climate but then ignores or plays down changes when they don’t, often dismissing them as ‘just weather,’” he wrote in February.
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Global warming is real and getting worse, Pielke said, yet still it’s possible that humanity will be able to adapt to, and compensate for, its effects.
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A few years ago, I would have found voices like Koonin’s and Pielke’s persuasive. Now I’m less sure. What intervened was a pandemic.
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That’s what I thought until the spring of 2020, when, along with everyone else, I experienced how swiftly and implacably nature can overwhelm even the richest and most technologically advanced societies. It was a lesson in the sort of intellectual humility I recommended for others
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It was also a lesson in thinking about risk, especially those in the category known as high-impact, low-probability events that seem to be hitting us with such regularity in this century: the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001; the tsunamis of 2004 and 2011, the mass upheavals in the Arab world
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What if the past does nothing to predict the future? What if climate risks do not evolve gradually and relatively predictably but instead suddenly soar uncontrollably? How much lead time is required to deal with something like sea-level rise? How do we weigh the risks of underreacting to climate change against the risks of overreacting to it?
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I called Seth Klarman, one of the world’s most successful hedge-fund managers, to think through questions of risk. While he’s not an expert on climate change, he has spent decades thinking deeply about every manner of risk
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And we will almost certainly have to do it from sources other than Russia, China, the Democratic Republic of Congo and other places that pose unacceptable strategic, environmental or humanitarian risks
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“If you face something that is potentially existential,” he explained, “existential for nations, even for life as we know it, even if you thought the risk is, say, 5 percent, you’d want to hedge against it.”
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“One thing we try to do,” he said, “is we buy protection when it’s really inexpensive, even when we think we may well not need it.” The forces contributing to climate change, he noted, echoing Englander, “might be irreversible sooner than the damage from climate change has become fully apparent. You can’t say it’s far off and wait when, if you had acted sooner, you might have dealt with it better and at less cost. We have to act now.”
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In other words, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. That’s particularly true if climate change is akin to cancer — manageable or curable in its earlier stages, disastrous in its later ones.
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As I’ve always believed, knowing there is grave risk to future generations — and expecting current ones to make immediate sacrifices for it — defies most of what we know about human nature. So I began to think more deeply about that challenge, and others.
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For the world to achieve the net-zero goal for carbon dioxide emissions by 2050, according to the International Energy Agency, we will have to mine, by 2040, six times the current amounts of critical minerals — nickel, cobalt, copper, lithium, manganese, graphite, chromium, rare earths and other minerals and elements — needed for electric vehicles, wind turbines and solar panels.
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The poster child for this kind of magical thinking is Germany, which undertook a historic Energiewende — “energy revolution” — only to come up short. At the turn of the century, Germany got about 85 percent of its primary energy from fossil fuels. Now it gets about 78 percent, a puny reduction, considering that the country has spent massive sums on renewables to increase the share of electricity it generates from them.
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As in everything else in life, so too with the environment: There is no such thing as a free lunch. Whether it’s nuclear, biofuels, natural gas, hydroelectric or, yes, wind and solar, there will always be serious environmental downsides to any form of energy when used on a massive scale. A single industrial-size wind turbine, for instance, typically requires about a ton of rare earth metals as well as three metric tons of copper, which is notoriously destructive and dirty to mine.
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no “clean energy” solution will easily liberate us from our overwhelming and, for now, inescapable dependence on fossil fuels.
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Nobody brings the point home better than Vaclav Smil, the Canadian polymath whose most recent book, “How the World Really Works,” should be required reading for policymakers and anyone else interested in a serious discussion about potential climate solutions.
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“I’ve talked to so many experts and seen so much evidence,” he told me over Zoom, “I’m convinced the climate is changing, and addressing climate change has become a philanthropic priority of mine.”
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Things could turn a corner once scientists finally figure out a technical solution to the energy storage problem. Or when governments and local actors get over their NIMBYism when it comes to permitting and building a large energy grid to move electricity from Germany’s windy north to its energy-hungry south. Or when thoughtful environmental activists finally come to grips with the necessity of nuclear energy
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Till then, even as I’ve come to accept the danger we face, I think it’s worth extending the cancer metaphor a little further: Just as cancer treatments, when they work at all, can have terrible side effects, much the same can be said of climate treatments: The gap between an accurate diagnosis and effective treatment remains dismayingly wide
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Only when countries like Vietnam and China turned to a different model, of largely bottom-up, market-driven development, did hundreds of millions of people get lifted out of destitution.
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the most important transformation has come in agriculture, which uses about 70 percent of the world’s freshwater supply.
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Farmers gradually adopted sprinkler and drip irrigation systems, rather than more wasteful flood irrigation, not to conserve water but because the technology provided higher crop yields and larger profit margins.
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Water shortages “will spur a revolutionary, aggressive approach to getting rid of flood irrigation,” said Seth Siegel, the chief sustainability officer of the Israeli AgTech company N-Drip. “Most of this innovation will be driven by free-market capitalism, with important incentives from government and NGOs.
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meaningful environmental progress has been made through market forces. In this century, America’s carbon dioxide emissions across fuel types have fallen to well below 5,000 million metric tons per year, from a peak of about 6,000 million in 2007, even as our inflation-adjusted G.D.P. has grown by over 50 percent and total population by about 17 percent.
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1) Engagement with critics is vital. Insults and stridency are never good tools of persuasion, and trying to cow or censor climate skeptics into silence rarely works
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the biggest single driver in emissions reductions from 2005 to 2017 was the switch from coal to natural gas for power generation, since gas produces roughly half the carbon dioxide as coal. This, in turn, was the result of a fracking revolution in the past decade, fiercely resisted by many environmental activists, that made the United States the world’s largest gas producer.
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In the long run, we are likelier to make progress when we adopt partial solutions that work with the grain of human nature, not big ones that work against it
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The problem with our civilization isn’t overconfidence. It’s polarization, paralysis and a profound lack of trust in all institutions, including the scientific one
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Devising effective climate policies begins with recognizing the reality of the social and political landscape in which all policy operates. Some thoughts on how we might do better:
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They may not be directly related to climate change but can nonetheless have a positive impact on it. And they probably won’t come in the form of One Big Idea but in thousands of little ones whose cumulative impacts add up.
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2) Separate facts from predictions and predictions from policy. Global warming is a fact. So is the human contribution to it. So are observed increases in temperature and sea levels. So are continued increases if we continue to do more of the same. But the rate of those increases is difficult to predict even with the most sophisticated computer modeling
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3) Don’t allow climate to become a mainly left-of-center concern. One reason the topic of climate has become so anathema to many conservatives is that so many of the proposed solutions have the flavor, and often the price tag, of old-fashioned statism
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4) Be honest about the nature of the challenge. Talk of an imminent climate catastrophe is probably misleading, at least in the way most people understand “imminent.”
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A more accurate description of the challenge might be a “potentially imminent tipping point,” meaning the worst consequences of climate change can still be far off but our ability to reverse them is drawing near. Again, the metaphor of cancer — never safe to ignore and always better to deal with at Stage 2 than at Stage 4 — can be helpful.
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5) Be humble about the nature of the solutions. The larger the political and financial investment in a “big fix” response to climate change on the scale of the Energiewende, the greater the loss in time, capital and (crucially) public trust when it doesn’t work as planned
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We can also stop providing incentives for building in flood-prone areas by raising the price of federal flood insurance to reflect the increased risk more accurately.
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7) Stop viewing economic growth as a problem. Industrialization may be the leading cause of climate change. But we cannot and will not reverse it through some form of deindustrialization, which would send the world into poverty and deprivation
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8) Get serious about the environmental trade-offs that come with clean energy. You cannot support wind farms but hinder the transmission lines needed to bring their power to the markets where they are needed.
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9) A problem for the future is, by its very nature, a moral one. A conservative movement that claims to care about what we owe the future has the twin responsibility of setting an example for its children and at the same time preparing for that future.
Opinion | Trump taking the Fifth should disqualify him from office - The Washington Post - 0 views
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taking the Fifth — especially concerning his alleged misconduct related to the attempted coup — should disqualify him from the presidency.
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a president “has a constitutional as well as a moral duty to see to it that the laws are faithfully executed — not just a passive duty to avoid violating the law, a duty everyone of course shares, but an active duty to ensure that the law is fully enforced as well as complied with. That active duty arguably includes an obligation to avoid invoking various otherwise available privileges — including the privilege to withhold criminally incriminating information.”
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“In that special sense, a president or a former president, more than any other public official or private citizen, arguably betrays his or her duty to the American people by taking the Fifth.”
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“Fealty to the law meant nothing to him. The country’s interests meant nothing to him. The only oath he has taken is to his own greed and self-preservation.” But that does not mean voters can ignore the obvious conflict that occurs when someone simultaneously thwarts a government investigation and pledges to enforce the Constitution.
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Tribe notes that Article VI of the Constitution specifies that public officials must take an oath “not just to obey the Constitution and laws of the United States but ‘to support this Constitution.’ ”
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In other words, should members of Congress implicated in the plot to overturn the 2020 election choose to take the Fifth, they would be setting up a conflict between their self-interest and the interest in upholding and supporting the Constitution
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True, the Constitution spells out no disqualifications for federal office, other than conviction through impeachment and Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which bars a person from office if they have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”
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voters certainly should consider the underlying conflict when a candidate for office takes the Fifth, especially when the issue goes to the core of our democracy.
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Defenders might insist that Trump has not been convicted of any crime. But voters are allowed to draw their own conclusions about not only his underlying conduct but also his refusal to testify.
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there is a “bond” between an official and the people of the nation, which is “created by election or appointment and also cemented by the oath of office.” Just as a civil jury can draw an adverse conclusion from Trump’s refusal to answer questions, “it should be disqualifying for Trump if he seeks to run again.”
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Taking the Fifth is their prerogative, but it is the prerogative of voters to hold it against them as evidence that they are putting themselves above the interests of the country.
The Books Briefing: 'The Crown,' Hilary Mantel - The Atlantic - 1 views
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But in historical fiction, the aim is to capture a story, so fidelity to literal facts and timelines is not always the goal. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with that: “Authenticity is not just what happened,” Min Jin Lee explained in 2017. “It’s about emotional truth too.”
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“Successful historical fiction makes past events come alive in a more inviting or personal way than textbooks can,”
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This makes it especially useful in classrooms, where it can help students understand different perspectives and imagine themselves in distant situations
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Once maligned as lowbrow, the genre has gained popularity over the past two decades. In 2009, Jay Parini hypothesized one reason for this: “In our high-velocity, high-volume world, the present can seem just too bright, too close. We need the filter of memory to pull reality into focus.”
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the Cromwell of Mantel’s creation begins to “double” Mantel by the end of the series. He spends much of the trilogy’s final book looking at himself “with a novelist’s wonderment at a character who defies understanding.” Mantel’s resurrected version of the man, unlike the real Cromwell, seems to know that he’s a character in a narrative—and the effect is thrilling.
Trump crosses a crucial line - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Fascism is not mere oppression. It is a more holistic ideology that elevates the state over the individual (except for a sole leader, around whom there is a cult of personality), glorifies hypernationalism and racism, worships military power, hates liberal democracy, and wallows in nostalgia and historical grievances. It asserts that all public activity should serve the regime, and that all power must be gathered in the fist of the leader and exercised only by his party.
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Add the language in these speeches to all of the programmatic changes Trump and his allies have threatened to enact once he’s back in office—establishing massive detention camps for undocumented people, using the Justice Department against anyone who dares to run against him, purging government institutions, singling out Christianity as the state’s preferred religion, and many other actions—and it’s hard to describe it all as generic “authoritarianism.” Trump no longer aims to be some garden-variety supremo; he is now promising to be a threat to every American he identifies as an enemy—and that’s a lot of Americans
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We will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists, Marxists, fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country … On Veterans Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible … legally or illegally to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.
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According to some reports, he never expected to win in 2016. But even then, in the run-up to the election, Trump’s opponents were already calling him a fascist. I counseled against such usage at the time, because Trump, as a person and as a public figure, is just so obviously ridiculous; fascists, by contrast, are dangerously serious people, and in many circumstances, their leaders have been unnervingly tough and courageous. Trump—whiny, childish, unmanly—hardly fits that bill. (A rare benefit of his disordered character is that his defensiveness and pettiness likely continue to limit the size of his personality cult.)
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Unfortunately, the overuse of fascist (among other charges) quickly wore out the part of the public’s eardrums that could process such words.
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ere I want to caution my fellow citizens. Trump, whether from intention or stupidity or fear, has identified himself as a fascist under almost any reasonable definition of the word.
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He is also constrained by circumstance: The country is not in disarray, or at war, or in an economic collapse
A Professor Reviews CliffsNotes and Other Cheat Sheets - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...16basics.html
cheat study notes online summary learning school culture trends education
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What has changed is how many study guides, or cheat sheets, are available online and on mobile phones. Whether you know them as CliffsNotes, SparkNotes or Shmoop, these seemingly ubiquitous guides are now, in many cases, free.
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“Two to three years ago, the wisdom was that students do research online, but not study online,” said Emily Sawtell, a founder of McGraw-Hill’s online collaborative study site called GradeGuru. “That has changed in the last 12 months.” Ms. Sawtell said she had tracked a significant increase in the search term “study guide” on Google.
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Professors warn that these guides are no substitutes for reading great works of literature, but concede, grudgingly, that as an adjunct, they can stimulate thought and deepen insight.
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CliffsNotes guides cover not only literature, but also foreign languages, math, science, history and other topics, and many of the guides are free online.
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In booklet form, 159 literature study guides are available, costing about $6 to $10 each. But more than 250 are available online, and all can be viewed free. Downloading them as PDF files costs $5 to $10 each. A comparatively paltry 39 CliffsNotes for literature are available for mobile at $1.99 each for the iPhone.
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CliffsNotes, owned by Wiley Publishing, also offers free podcasts called CramCasts, which are three- to five-minute overviews of books with a plot summary.
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Dr. Fisher liked the idea behind Shmoop’s “Why Should I care?” section. It explains the satire in “Candide” by comparing it to modern satires like “The Simpsons” and “The Family Guy.” The problem, he said, is that the writing strains to relate to students. “It makes an interesting attempt to be hip,” he said, “but it is just so high school-y.”
Trump and allies plot revenge, Justice Department control in a second term - The Washin... - 0 views
Afghanistan Tries to Stamp Out Opium Again - The New York Times - 0 views
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For years, opium has been the monster too big to slay. One Afghan government after another has pledged to stamp out opium production and trafficking, only to prove unable to resist billions of dollars in illicit profits.
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But after the U.S.-led invasion in 2001, opium taxes and smuggling helped fuel the Taliban’s own 20-year insurgency.
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The Taliban announced on April 3 that poppy cultivation had been outlawed, with violators to be punished under Shariah law.
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Water pumps powered by cheap and highly efficient solar panels are able to drill deep down into rapidly dwindling desert aquifers. The solar panels have helped generate bumper opium harvests year after year since farmers in southern Afghanistan’s poppy-growing belt began installing them around 2014.
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The opium trade earned about $1.8 billion to $2.7 billion last year, the United Nations has estimated. Opium sales have provided 9 to 14 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product, compared with 9 percent provided by legal exports of goods and services.
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The Taliban, for their part, have condemned opium as anti-Islamic, as Afghanistan’s poppy crop sustains addicts in Europe and the Middle East, as well as a huge number inside Afghanistan. But given their own deep ties to opium smuggling during the insurgency, Taliban leaders are walking a fine line between hypocrisy and holiness.
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Now, solar power is a defining feature of southern Afghan life. Tiny solar panels power light bulbs in mud huts, and solar-driven pumps irrigate cash crops like wheat and pomegranates, as well as subsistence farmers’ vegetable plots.
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The panels, which supplanted more expensive and less reliable diesel to run water pumps, have helped turn the desert green.
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Opium farmers now rely on at least 67,000 solar-power-fed water reservoirs across Afghanistan’s desert southwest, according to a European Union-funded research project by David Mansfield, a consultant who has studied illicit economies and rural livelihoods in Afghanistan for two decades.
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“For many opium farmers, abundant water is now a given,” he said. “No one perceives it to have a cost.”
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“Do not destroy the fields, but make the fields dry out,” Gov. Maulave Talib Akhund said in a statement. He added, “We are committed to fulfilling the opium decree.”
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The opium ban was met with a collective shrug this spring by southern farmers, many of whom were already harvesting their spring crops. Opium prices surged almost immediately, several farmers said, to roughly $180 per kilogram from $60 per kilogram.
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Dr. Mansfield said that determining how long the aquifers could continue to supply water was uncharted territory because no one had been able to conduct a rigorous scientific study of the desert groundwater.
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Even when prices are high, many poppy farmers say, they earn only about $2 a day for each family member. They are at the very bottom of a narcotic trafficking system in which profits increase exponentially from growers to middlemen to processing labs to major cross-border traffickers.
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Farmers whose poppy fields were plowed under by the previous government could send their sons to paying jobs as soldiers or police officers — or to the constellation of unskilled jobs provided by the United States and NATO. But those options are gone, and unemployment has soared under the Taliban.
As Women's Marches Gain Steam in Pakistan, Conservatives Grow Alarmed - The New York Times - 0 views
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The reaction to Pakistan’s first women’s march was relatively mild: criticism and condemnation from Islamist parties and conservatives, who called the participants “anti-religion” and “vulgar.”
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That did not deter the organizers of the 2018 march in Karachi, the significance of which reverberates to this day.
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Women planning to join the Aurat Marches, as they are called — Urdu for “women’s march” — have faced countless threats of murder and rape, along with accusations that they receive Western funding as part of a plot to promote obscenity in Pakistan.
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Last year, opposition peaked when Islamist groups demonstrated in major cities, accusing the marchers of using blasphemous slogans — a crime punishable by death in Pakistan, accusations of which have provoked lynchings and murders.
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The first Aurat March was organized by a small group of women in the port city of Karachi, who hoped to draw attention to the violence, inequality and other challenges faced by women across the country.
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“We had held discussions and mobilized women in various communities, collected funds by small contributions from individuals, and wrote a manifesto to articulate demands related to women’s bodily rights to the government and Pakistani society,” Ms. Kermani said.
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“Younger feminists who were inspired by a series of global women’s marches took their rage against violence, moral policing and lack of bodily or sexual choices for women and marginalized genders to the streets,” s
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“My body, my choice,” and performed an Urdu version of a Chilean protest song, “A Rapist in Your Path,” that assails rape culture and victim-shaming.
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Some Islamist parties responded to the marches’ growing popularity by organizing their own “modesty march.” In 2020, conservatives filed court petitions in an unsuccessful attempt to stop the Aurat Marches.
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“As a minority, we feel increasingly insecure,” Mrs. Masih said. “At the workplace, we fear anyone can harm us on the false allegations of blasphemy, and at our homes, we fear that our daughters could be kidnapped and converted to Islam
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They campaigned against the physically intrusive “virginity tests” often inflicted on women who bring accusations of rape, and a court in the northern city of Lahore banned them last year. The government has also passed a measure allowing the chemical castration of convicted rapists, another demand of the marchers.
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“We were and are scared, but we know that without putting ourselves in such a dangerous situation we cannot bring change,” Ms. Kermani said.
How Politics Poisoned the Evangelical Church - The Atlantic - 0 views
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in the spring of 2021, Brown told me his alarm had only grown. “The crisis for the Church is a crisis of discernment,” he said over lunch. “Discernment”—one’s basic ability to separate truth from untruth—“is a core biblical discipline. And many Christians are not practicing it.”
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Paul’s admonishment of the early Church contains no real ambiguity. Followers of Jesus are to orient themselves toward his enduring promise of salvation, and away from the fleeting troubles of humanity.
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To many evangelicals today, the enemy is no longer secular America, but their fellow Christians, people who hold the same faith but different beliefs.
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Having convinced so many evangelicals that the next election could trigger the nation’s demise, Christian leaders effectively turned thousands of churches into unwitting cells in a loosely organized, hazily defined, existentially urgent movement—the types of places where paranoia and falsehoods flourish and people turn on one another.
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“Hands down, the biggest challenge facing the Church right now is the misinformation and disinformation coming in from the outside,” Brown said.Because of this, the pastor told me, he can no longer justify a passive approach from the pulpit. The Church is becoming radicalized—and pastors who don’t address this fact head-on are only contributing to the problem
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“The battle lines have been drawn,” Bolin told me, sitting in the back of his darkened sanctuary. “If you’re not taking a side, you’re on the wrong side.”
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It’s the story of millions of American Christians who, after a lifetime spent considering their political affiliations in the context of their faith, are now considering their faith affiliations in the context of their politics.
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“We fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen,” Paul wrote. “Since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”
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The pastor said his concern was not simply for his congregation of 300, but for the millions of American evangelicals who had come to value power over integrity, the ephemeral over the eternal, moral relativism over bright lines of right and wrong.
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For much of my lifetime, however, American Christians have done the opposite. Beginning in the 1980s, white evangelicals imposed themselves to an unprecedented degree on the government and the country’s core institutions
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Once left to cry jeremiads about civilizational decline—having lost fights over sex and sexuality, drugs, abortion, pornography, standards in media and education, prayer in public schools—conservative Christians organized their churches, marshaled their resources, and leveraged their numbers,
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Evangelical leaders set something in motion decades ago that pastors today can no longer control. Not only were Christians conditioned to understand their struggle as one against flesh and blood, fixated on earthly concerns, a fight for a kingdom of this world—all of which runs directly counter to the commands of scripture—they were indoctrinated with a belief that because the stakes were getting so high, any means was justified.
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When Trump was elected thanks to a historic showing among white evangelicals—81 percent voted for him over Hillary Clinton—the victory was rightly viewed as the apex of the movement’s power. But this was, in many ways, also the beginning of its unraveling.
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what’s notable about the realignment inside the white evangelical Church is its asymmetry. Pastors report losing an occasional liberal member because of their refusal to speak on Sunday mornings about bigotry or poverty or social injustice. But these same pastors report having lost—in the past few years alone—a significant portion of their congregation because of complaints that they and their staff did not advance right-wing political doctrines
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Substantial numbers of evangelicals are fleeing their churches, and most of them are moving to ones further to the right.
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Christianity has traditionally been seen as a stabilizing, even moderating, influence on American life. In 1975, more than two-thirds of Americans expressed “a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the church,” according to Gallup, and as of 1985, “organized religion was the most revered institution” in American life
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to Jeff and Deidre, Jenkinson’s stance amounted to cowardice. “I realize these are hard conversations, but the reason we left Milford is they were never willing to have the conversation,” Jeff said. “They were just trying to keep everybody happy. Paul is a conservative, but his conservatism has no teeth.”
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a strictly apolitical approach can be counterproductive; their unwillingness to engage only invites more scrutiny. The whisper campaigns brand conservative pastors as moderate, and moderate pastors as Marxists. In this environment, a church leader’s stance on biblical inerrancy is less important than whether he is considered “woke.
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“A pastor asked me the other day, ‘What percentage of churches would you say are grappling with these issues?’ And I said, ‘One hundred percent. All of them,’ ”
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“It may sound like Chicken Little. But I’m telling you, there is a serious effort to turn this ‘two countries’ talk into something real. There are Christians taking all the populist passions and adding a transcendent authority to it.”
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More than a few times, I’ve heard casual talk of civil war inside places that purport to worship the Prince of Peace. And, far from feeling misplaced, these conversations draw legitimacy from a sense of divine justice.
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The Church is not a victim of America’s civic strife. Instead, it is one of the principal catalysts.
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“Back when I believed there was an honorable alliance between Republicans and evangelicals, it was because I believed that our values would ultimately prevail, come what may on this Earth, whether we win or lose some election,” Brown said. “But over time, there was a shift. Losing was no longer an option. It became all about winning.”
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And then,” Brown said, “came Barack Obama.”It felt silly at first—jokes about Obama’s birth certificate, comments about his faith. But over time, the discourse inside the church became more worrisome.
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The cultural climate was getting chilly for evangelicals; the Great Recession was squeezing his blue-collar congregation. But much of the anxiety felt amorphous, cryptic—and manufactured. However effective Brown might be at soothing his congregants for 45 minutes on a Sunday morning, “Rush [Limbaugh] had them for three hours a day, five days a week, and Fox News had them every single night.”
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Brown kept reminding his people that scripture’s most cited command is “Fear not.” But he couldn’t break through. Looking back, he understands why.
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“Biblically, fear is primarily reverence and awe. We revere God; we hold him in awe,” Brown told me. “You can also have reverence and awe for other things—really, anything you put great value on. I think, in conservative-Christian circles, we place a lot of value on the life we’ve known. The earthly life we have known. The American life we’ve known …
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If we see threats to something we value, we fear—that is, we revere, we hold in inappropriate awe—those who can take it away. That’s Barack Obama. That’s the left.”
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For white evangelicals, the only thing more galvanizing than perceptions of their idealized nation slipping away was the conviction that their favored political party was unwilling to fight for the country’s survival.
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“There was this sense that America is under siege, that the barbarians were at the gates,” Brown said. “Then along comes Donald Trump, who says he can make America great again. And for evangelicals, it was time to play for keeps.”
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The Trump conversion experience—having once been certain of his darkness, suddenly awakening to see his light—is not to be underestimated, especially when it touches people whose lives revolve around notions of transformation.
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Modern evangelicalism is defined by a certain fatalism about the nation’s character. The result is not merely a willingness to act with desperation and embrace what is wrong; it can be a belief, bordering on a certainty, that what is wrong is actually right.
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This downward spiral owes principally to two phenomena: the constant stench of scandal, with megachurches and prominent leaders imploding on what seems like a weekly basis; and the growing perception that Christians are embracing extremist views.
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Tony DeFelice is another new arrival at FloodGate—and another Christian who got tired of his pastor lacking teeth. At his previous church, in the Democratic-leaning Detroit suburb of Plymouth, “they did not speak a single word about politics. Not on a single issue,” he told me. “When we got to FloodGate, it confirmed for us what we’d been missing.”
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“We didn’t leave the church. The church left us,” Tony told me. “COVID, the whole thing, is the biggest lie perpetrated on humanity that we’re ever going to see in our lifetime. And they fell for it.”
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Tony and Linda say FloodGate’s style—and Bolin’s fiery messages on topics like vaccines and voter fraud—has changed the way they view their responsibilities as Christians. “This is about good against evil. That’s the world we live in. It’s a spiritual battle, and we are right at the precipice of it,” Tony said.
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With the country on the brink of defeat at the hands of secularists and liberals, Tony no longer distinguishes between the political and the spiritual. An attack on Donald Trump is an attack on Christians. He believes the 2020 election was stolen as part of a “demonic” plot against Christian America. And he’s confident that righteousness will prevail: States are going to begin decertifying the results of the last election, he says, and Trump will be returned to office.
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He is just as convinced that Trump won the 2020 election, he said, as he is that Jesus rose from the dead 2,000 years ago.
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Most evangelicals don’t think of themselves as Locke’s target demographic. The pastor has suggested that autistic children are oppressed by demons. He organized a book-burning event to destroy occult-promoting Harry Potter novels and other books and games. He has called President Biden a “sex-trafficking, demon-possessed mongrel.”
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Not long ago, Locke was a small-time Tennessee preacher. Then, in 2016, he went viral with a selfie video, shot outside his local Target, skewering the company’s policies on bathrooms and gender identity. The video has collected 18 million views, and it launched Locke as a distinct evangelical brand. He cast himself on social media as a lone voice of courage within Christendom. He aligned himself with figures like Dinesh D’Souza and Charlie Kirk to gain clout as one of the Christian right’s staunchest Trump supporters. All the while, his congregation swelled—moving from their old church building, which seated 250, into a large outdoor tent, then into an even bigger tent, and eventually into the current colossus. The tent holds 3,000 people and would be the envy of Barnum & Bailey.
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“We are born for such a time as this. God is calling you to do something,” Schneider says. “We have a country to get back. And if that fails, we have a country—yes, I’ll say it—to take back.”
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“I really don’t. No. Not too much. I don’t,” Bolin says, shaking his head. “Firebrand statements have been part of the pulpit, and part of politics, for as long as we’ve been a nation. And there is a long history of both sides exaggerating—like in a post like that.”
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How many pastors at smaller right-wing churches—pastors like Bolin—would have felt uneasy sitting inside this tent? The answer, I suspect, is very few. Global Vision and FloodGate may be different in degree, but they are not different in kind.
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his mission creep inside evangelicalism is why some churches have taken an absolutist approach: no preaching on elections, no sermons about current events.
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“What’s coming is going to be brutal. There’s no way around that,” Bingham told me. “Churches are breaking apart everywhere. My only hope is that, when the time comes, our people can separate without shattering.”
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At one point, I show Bolin a Facebook post he wrote months earlier: “I’m still wondering how 154,000,000 votes were counted in a country where there are only 133,000,000 registered voters.” This was written, I tell him, well after the Census Bureau had published data showing that more than 168 million Americans were registered to vote in 2020. A quick Google search would have given Bolin the accurate numbers.
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“Yeah, that’s one I regret,” he tells me, explaining that he subsequently learned that the numbers he’d posted were incorrect. (The post was still active. Bolin texted me the following day saying he’d deleted it.)
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Doesn’t he worry that if people see him getting the easy things wrong, they might suspect he’s also getting the hard things wrong? Things like sanctity and salvation?
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Let’s be clear: Locke belongs to a category of his own. He recently accused multiple women at his church of being witches (his source: a demon he encountered during an exorcism). That makes it easy for evangelicals to dismiss Global Vision as an outlier, the same way they did Westboro Baptist. It’s much harder to scrutinize the extremism that has infiltrated their own church and ponder its logical end point. Ten years ago, Global Vision would have been dismissed as a blip on Christianity’s radar. These days, Locke preaches to 2.2 million Facebook followers and has posed for photos with Franklin Graham at the White House.
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Bolin says FloodGate and churches like it have grown in direct proportion to how many Christians “felt betrayed by their pastors.” That trend looks to be holding steady. More people will leave churches that refuse to identify with a tribe and will find pastors who confirm their own partisan views. The erosion of confidence in the institution of American Christianity will accelerate. The caricature of evangelicals will get uglier. And the actual work of evangelizing will get much, much harder.