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Donald Trump’s presidency is so polarizing and such a catastrophe that a plurality or outright majority of Americans now oppose much of whatever he supports. The mood of the public is the most progressive it’s been in nearly 70 years. During the Trump era, the nation has moved to the left on a whole series of issues, including those that matter most to evangelical Trump supporters.

he Trump presidency, which has produced few significant legislative or governing achievements, has inflicted gaping wounds on the Republican Party, conservative causes, and the evangelical movement.

The greatest cost of the Trump years to evangelical Christianity isn’t in the political sphere, but rather in what Christians refer to as bearing witness—showing how their lives have been transformed by their faith

Much of the evangelical movement, in aligning itself with Donald Trump, has shown itself to be graceless and joyless, seized by fear, hypocritical, censorious, and filled with grievances.

it’s true of enough of them, and certainly of the political leadership of the white evangelical movement, to have done deep injury to their public witness.

One pastor of a large church on the Pacific Coast told me: “There are many reasons why young people are turning away from the Church, but my observation is, Trump has vastly accelerated that trend. He’s put it into hyperdrive.”

He added, “Yes, Hollywood and the media created a decidedly unattractive stereotype of Christians. And Donald Trump fits it perfectly. Made it all seem true. And sadly, I now realize that stereotype is more true than I ever knew. It breaks my heart. In volleyball terms, Hollywood did the set, but Trump was the spike that drove the ball home. He’s everything I’ve been trying to say isn’t what the church is all about. But sadly, maybe it is.”

John McWhorter, a Columbia University professor of English and linguistics, cast the Pinker controversy within a moment when, he said, progressives look suspiciously at anyone who does not embrace the politics of racial and cultural identity.

“Steve is too big for this kerfuffle to affect him,” Professor McWhorter said. “But it’s depressing that an erudite and reasonable scholar is seen by a lot of intelligent people as an undercover monster.”

“We’re in this moment that’s like a collective mic drop, and civility and common sense go out the window,” he said. “It’s enough to cry racism or sexism, and that’s that.”

chological context.ADThe good news: Americans are no “crazier” — that is, no more paranoid or predisposed to conspiracy thinking — than in the past

“our political elites are amplifying the fringe more than we’ve seen” in modern times, while a president mounts a “grinding attack on factual evidence.” The result, he says, is “conspiracy theories and misinformation become yoked to partisanship in increasingly powerful ways.”

There has always been what the late historian Richard Hofstadter called the “paranoid style” in U.S. politics: witch hunts, Illuminati, Red Scares. William Jennings Bryan promoted conspiracy theories. Richard Nixon believed in them. But Trump is unique in promoting conspiracy thinking from the bully pulpit, and in building a system in which elites — Republican Party leaders — validate the paranoia.

Americans, by nature, are more distrustful of authority than citizens of other advanced democracies. “You always hear Americans say, ‘I know my rights,’ but you never hear an American say, ‘I know my responsibilities and obligations,’

The distrust is compounded by polarization of the political system: the collapse of local media (replaced by coastal national media); the growing tendency to live, work and worship among people of similar beliefs; the divisive effect of social media; and increased “sorting” of political parties into ideologically homogeneous blocs.

This has encouraged what Eitan Hersh of Tufts University describes as “political hobbyism,” in which partisans embrace political parties as they do hometown sports teams

Hersh explains the thinking: “I care about truth, but I care less about truth than about supporting the Patriots because the stakes are really low. … It’s a catharsis, camaraderie with our partisan peers.

“The science is very clear: People take cues from political leaders,” Nyhan says. Leaders typically rejected conspiracy theories, and the public followed. Now, Trump embraces them, and his followers concur — some out of partisan solidarity, others out of genuine belief.

“Human psychology has not changed,” Nyhan says. What’s changed is we’re discovering that “democratic systems don’t work well when political elites don’t deal in factual information.”

or me, the most damning indicator is that the rest of the world no longer thinks that the United States is the world’s leading economic power. Despite Trump’s claims about building the greatest economy in history, and despite a two-year trade war, a plurality of respondents believe that China is now the world’s most powerful economy:

The United States has encountered antipathy like this in the past, such as during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

In 2003, the antipathy toward the United States was because it was perceived as a bully. In 2020, it was because the United States was perceived as incompetent at responding to the pandemic and withdrawing from the rest of the world.

The most striking finding to me, however, was the American public’s declining faith and growing worry about the United States itself. This came through in two poll findings

The first asked Americans about what they viewed as critical threats. In this century, the hardy perennials on this list were usually terrorism, threats to American jobs and illegal narcotics.

What was striking about this year’s top threats is how many of them are internal. The top three were covid-19 (cited by 67 percent of respondents), domestic violent extremism (57 percent) and political polarization (55 percent). Of the traditional foreign threats, only the rise of China (also 55 percent) came close.

The second poll finding asked Americans whether “the United States has a unique character that makes it the greatest country in the world.” In 2017, 63 percent of respondents said yes

Only 54 percent of respondents said yes in 2020, a record low in this century.

So, to sum up: After Donald Trump’s first term, global respect for the United States has plummeted. A plurality of respondents no longer think that the United States is the world’s leading economic power. Americans are showing waning faith in American exceptionalism and believe the country’s biggest threats are internal.

t is not just society that is built for person-to-person interactions, according to Mr. Lanier. People are, too. Humans subconsciously register interlocutors’ eye direction, head pose and posture when they face each other in the flesh. Being unable to do it inhibits communication.

Mr. Trump’s suburban deficit has emerged as a significant problem for his re-election bid,

“Suburban women, will you please like me?” the president said at a rally in Johnstown, Pa., this week. “Please. Please.”

Perhaps most worrisome for the president and his party is that the shift could go beyond Mr. Trump on the ballot this year, and outlast him. Armed with insulated tumblers of wine, the women described how Mr. Trump had turned them off from a Republican Party they once supported, one that they now see as intertwined with the president’s divisive rhetoric

“I cannot imagine a Republican candidate that I would rally behind,” said Hannah Dasgupta, who is a stay-at-home mother of two school-age children and grew up in a conservative home. “Wow, that’s mind-blowing to think about. That’s a huge departure.”

She connects her support of Mr. Biden to her role as a mother, saying that she spends time teaching her children basic skills like sharing and speaking respectfully — traits she believes the president lacks.

“In the last four years, my children have grown and developed more than he has in regards to the way he speaks to other people, the way he speaks about other people,” she said.

She believes that for Democrats to keep the support of women like Ms. Dasgupta, they must recognize the intimate nature of their politics.

“We can’t leave this all on Black voters to carry all the weight in Ohio,” added Ms. Paris, who is white. “It’s going to take all of us.”

She and her team are particularly proud of their large presence on social media. One recent viral effort featured women posting photos of themselves in aprons and curlers with Democratic campaign signs while holding cocktails, a spoof on Mr. Trump’s Twitter appeals to the “Suburban Housewives of America.”

Four years ago, Mr. Trump won Ohio by eight percentage points. Now, polling shows a tied race. Still, Ohio may remain out of reach for Democrats this year.

Since the summer of racial justice protests and unrest around the country, Republicans have tried to woo back white suburban women with a focus on “law and order,” stoking racial fears and depicting the increasingly diverse suburbs as the sole province of white, affluent families.

The women in Columbus, who are all white, described the killing of George Floyd as a seminal event in their political awakenings, one that drew attention to issues of racism and police violence beyond their personal purview.

The video of Mr. Floyd’s killing, she said, forced her to acknowledge structural problems in American society.

“I have to think of everybody,” she said. “So if I’m voting against Donald Trump, that’s not a vote for me or a vote for my son. That’s a vote for everyone. Everyone’s sons.”

In the final months of the campaign, the pandemic and its cascading effects on schools and the economy have deepened the opposition to Mr. Trump among female voters.

As the pandemic roars on, voters across America remain deeply angry and worried about the future. But the vocal outrage from women, in particular, is clear on protest lines and in polling data. Women were more likely than men to report having participated in protests over the past two years, and mothers with children in the home were twice as likely as fathers to report participating in a protest, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll from June.

Now, the rage moms are railing in Facebook groups about school shutdowns and in teacher union meetings about reopening without proper protection from the virus. They’re also packing virtual town halls with frustrations about schools, child care and the lack of leadership.

“There’s nobody giving us solutions,

Ms. Lopez is exactly the kind of voter Democrats hope will push them to victory in November, and they are aiming to turn that frustration with government inaction into a vote against Mr. Trump.

While the anger is loudest on the left, Democrats hope to capitalize on indications that the rage reaches across party lines

The broader focus on caregiving issues marks a significant shift in the political climate of even a few months ago, when Senator Elizabeth Warren made child care a centerpiece of her campaign in the Democratic presidential primary

At campaign events six months ago, Ms. Warren’s proposals for universal, government-funded child care would elicit nods primarily from mothers in the crowd, she said, followed by quiet conversations in the selfie line with women about their personal struggle balancing work and child care.During a virtual town hall meeting she held last month, however, more than half of the questions from the audience of 70,000 people were about schools, child care and working parents.

The pandemic is the spark but the backlash against Mr. Trump has been burning since the day after his inauguration, when millions of women joined protests across the country. Their fire has endured through #MeToo, waves of teachers’ strikes led by predominantly female unions, the outcry against school shootings, and Black Lives Matter demonstrations, a movement started largely by female racial justice activists. For the second election cycle in a row, a record-breaking number of female candidates are running for federal office. Mr. Biden’s selection of Ms. Harris was widely seen as a nod to the energy women have given the Democratic Party during the Trump era.

“Women are mobilized on a bigger scale than we’ve seen in a generation at least,” said Annelise Orleck, a historian at Dartmouth College who studies women’s political activism. “Women are organizing all across the spectrum.”

The activism is diffuse and multiracial, reflecting political battles that working class women have long waged for better health care, schools and child care. In some ways, more affluent suburban women are simply waking up to the untenable choices poorer women and women of color have faced for generations.

Last month, the Biden campaign kicked off a “Moms for Biden” group

The rebellion by white college-educated women against Mr. Trump helped Democrats win key swing districts in 2018, giving the party control of the House.

In recent weeks, support for Mr. Trump has begun to drop among white non-college educated women and older women — two more ideologically moderate groups that bolstered his winning coalition four years ago

In a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll, Mr. Biden leads by 24 points among suburban women and just four points among suburban men, a statistical dead heat.

Last month, Mr. Biden announced a sweeping $775 billion caregiving proposal that would cover care for young children, older adults and family members with disabilities.

Mr. Biden has repeatedly described caregiving as an economic necessity that deserves sustained support, a marked shift in political rhetoric on a topic that was often seen by politicians as a special interest, not an issue to put at the center of a campaign

Parents with minor children make up about one-third of the country’s work force, according to the Brookings Institutions. In 2018, 23.5 million working parents relied upon school and child care programs while they went to work.

“For the last 10, 20 years, this has been sidelined and siloed as just a women’s issue,” said Brigid Schulte, who runs the Better Life Lab at New America, a research group. “It’s not and it never has been.”

Ms. Richards says Supermajority planned for 800 women to sign up for a recent organizing training it offered. It got 1,800 responses in the first week.

“The fact that we do not value child care, that we don’t value early education, this is not something that Covid created — it’s something that Covid exposed,” she said

While Democrats have proposed the most ambitious plans to tackle child care, there are some signs that Republicans, too, are facing pressure to address the issue. Last month, the House passed two bills that would provide more than $220 billion in funding for child care centers and tax credits. Each bill had support from more than a dozen Republicans, a notable number in a deeply polarized Congress.

“It wasn’t easy for most parents that I’ve talked to. To have no access to child care is crippling,” she said. She hopes the crisis point reached by many families during the pandemic will create political momentum for policies like paid leave, universal early childhood education and universal sick days.

“This pandemic has ripped wide an open wound that families have struggled with for a long time.”

The median U.S. adult Twitter user tweeted just once per month during the time period of the study. The median Democrat posts just one tweet per month, and the median Republican has no monthly tweets

the typical adult on the platform – regardless of party — has relatively few followers. The median Democrat is followed by just 32 other people, while 21 other users follow the median Republican.

Trump’s persona in 2016 was markedly different: Trump’s slogan, his policies, and his rhetoric about the “forgotten man” and “American carnage” all helped him connect with an independent type of voter who doesn’t like a GOP that seems too dominated by politicians who are comfortable in loafers and seersucker in the summer.

Trump has become ensconced within two entities: a GOP that has finally realized Trump only requires praise from the party — not ideological change — and right-leaning Twitter.

The Extremely Online conservative is not any more reflective of the priorities of the voting public than the Extremely Online left was at times in the Democratic primary. And Trump, who once touted his ability to speak for those often ignored by elites on Twitter, is now the most online politician of them all.

There’s plenty of blame to go around, involving Democrats as well as Republicans, but Trump in particular “recklessly squandered lives,” in the words of an unusual editorial this month in the New England Journal of Medicine. Death certificates may record the coronavirus as the cause of death, but in a larger sense vast numbers of Americans died because their government was incompetent.

As many Americans are dying every 10 days of Covid-19 as U.S. troops died during 19 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan

The paradox is that a year ago, the United States seemed particularly well positioned to handle this kind of crisis. A 324-page study by Johns Hopkins found last October that the United States was the country best prepared for a pandemic.

Then there’s an immeasurable cost in soft power as the United States is humbled before the world.

“It’s really sad to see the U.S. presidency fall from being the champion of global health to being the laughingstock of the world,”

in terms of destruction of American lives, treasure and well-being, this pandemic may be the greatest failure of governance in the United States since the Vietnam War.

the economists David Cutler and Lawrence Summers estimate that the economic cost of the pandemic in the United States will be $16 trillion, or about $125,000 per American household — far more than the median family’s net worth.

It’s true that the Obama administration did not do enough to refill the national stockpile with N95 masks, but Republicans in Congress wouldn’t provide even the modest sums that Obama requested for replenishment. And the Trump administration itself did nothing in its first three years to rebuild stockpiles.

The Obama administration updated this playbook and in the presidential transition in 2016, Obama aides cautioned the Trump administration that one of the big risks to national security was a contagion. Private experts repeated similar warnings. “Of all the things that could kill 10 million people or more, by far the most likely is an epidemic,” Bill Gates warned in 2015.

Credit for that goes to President George W. Bush, who in the summer of 2005 read an advance copy of “The Great Influenza,” a history of the 1918 flu pandemic. Shaken, Bush pushed aides to develop a strategy to prepare for another great contagion, and the result was an excellent 396-page playbook for managing such a health crisis.

Trump argues that no one could have anticipated the pandemic, but it’s what Bush warned about, what Obama aides tried to tell their successors about, and what Joe Biden referred to in a blunt tweet in October 2019 lamenting Trump’s cuts to health security programs and adding: “We are not prepared for a pandemic.”

When the health commission of Wuhan, China, announced on Dec. 31 that it had identified 27 cases of a puzzling pneumonia, Taiwan acted with lightning speed. Concerned that this might be an outbreak of SARS, Taiwan dispatched health inspectors to board flights arriving from Wuhan and screen passengers before allowing them to disembark. Anyone showing signs of ill health was quarantined.

If either China or the rest of the world had shown the same urgency, the pandemic might never have happened.

In hindsight, two points seem clear: First, China initially covered up the scale of the outbreak. Second, even so, the United States and other countries had enough information to act as Taiwan did. The first two countries to impose travel restrictions on China were North Korea and the Marshall Islands, neither of which had inside information.

That first half of January represents a huge missed opportunity for the world. If the United States, the World Health Organization and the world media had raised enough questions and pressed China, then perhaps the Chinese central government would have intervened in Wuhan earlier. And if Wuhan had been locked down just two weeks earlier, it’s conceivable that this entire global catastrophe could have been averted.

the C.D.C. devised a faulty test, and turf wars in the federal government prevented the use of other tests. South Korea, Germany and other countries quickly developed tests that did work, and these were distributed around the world. Sierra Leone in West Africa had effective tests before the United States did.

It’s true that local politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, made disastrous decisions, as when Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City urged people in March to “get out on the town despite coronavirus.” But local officials erred in part because of the failure of testing: Without tests, they didn’t know what they faced.

t’s unfair to blame the testing catastrophe entirely on Trump, for the failures unfolded several pay grades below him. Partly that’s because Trump appointees, like Robert Redfield, director of the C.D.C., simply aren’t the A team.

In any case, presidents set priorities for lower officials. If Trump had pushed aides as hard to get accurate tests as he pushed to repel refugees and migrants, then America almost certainly would have had an effective test by the beginning of February and tens of thousands of lives would have been saved.

Still, testing isn’t essential if a country gets backup steps right. Japan is a densely populated country that did not test much and yet has only 2 percent as many deaths per capita as the United States. One reason is that Japanese have long embraced face masks, which Dr. Redfield has noted can be at least as effective as a vaccine in fighting the pandemic. A country doesn’t have to do everything, if it does some things right.

Trump’s missteps arose in part because he channeled an anti-intellectual current that runs deep in the United States, as he sidelined scientific experts and responded to the virus with a sunny optimism apparently meant to bolster the financial markets.

Yet in retrospect, Trump did almost everything wrong. He discouraged mask wearing. The administration never rolled out contact tracing, missed opportunities to isolate the infected and exposed, didn’t adequately protect nursing homes, issued advice that confused the issues more than clarified them, and handed responsibilities to states and localities that were unprepared to act.

The false reassurances and dithering were deadly. One study found that if the United States had simply imposed the same lockdowns just two weeks earlier, 83 percent of the deaths in the early months could have been prevented.

A basic principle of public health is the primacy of accurate communications based on the best science. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who holds a doctorate in physics, is the global champion of that approach

Trump was the opposite, sowing confusion and conspiracy theories; a Cornell study found that “the President of the United States was likely the largest driver of the Covid-19 misinformation.”

A conservative commentariat echoed Trump in downplaying the virus and deriding efforts to stay safe.

A University of Chicago study found that watching the Sean Hannity program correlated to less social distancing, so watching Fox News may well have been lethal to some of its fans.

Americans have often pointed to the Soviet Union as a place where ideology trumped science, with disastrous results. Stalin backed Trofim Lysenko, an agricultural pseudoscientist who was an ardent Communist but scorned genetics — and whose zealous incompetence helped cause famines in the Soviet Union. Later, in the 1980s, Soviet leaders were troubled by data showing falling life expectancy — so they banned the publication of mortality statistics

It was in the same spirit that Trump opposed testing for the coronavirus in the hope of holding down the number of reported cases.

Most striking, Trump still has never developed a comprehensive plan to fight Covid-19. His “strategy” was to downplay the virus and resist business closures, in an effort to keep the economy roaring — his best argument for re-election.

This failed. The best way to protect the economy was to control the virus, not to ignore it, and the spread of Covid-19 caused economic dislocations that devastated even homes where no one was infected.

Eight million Americans have slipped into poverty since May, a Columbia University study found, and about one in seven households with children have reported to the census that they didn’t have enough food to eat in the last seven days.

More than 40 percent of adults reported in June that they were struggling with mental health, and 13 percent have begun or increased substance abuse, a C.D.C. study found

More than one-quarter of young adults said they have seriously contemplated suicide

So in what is arguably the richest country in the history of the world, political malpractice has resulted in a pandemic of infectious disease followed by pandemics of poverty, mental illness, addiction and hunger.

The rejection of science has also exacerbated polarization and tribalism

An old school friend shared this conspiracy theory on Facebook:Create a VIRUS to scare people. Place them in quarantine. Count the number of dead every second of every day in every news headline. Close all businesses …. Mask people. Dehumanize them. Close temples and churches …. Empty the prisons because of the virus and fill the streets with criminals. Send in Antifa to vandalize property as if they are freedom fighters. Undermine the law. Loot …. And, in an election year, have Democrats blame all of it on the President. If you love America, our Constitution, and the Rule of Law, get ready to fight for them.

During World War II, American soldiers died at a rate of 9,200 a month, less than one-third the pace of deaths from this pandemic, but the United States responded with a massive mobilization

Yet today we can’t even churn out enough face masks; a poll of nurses in late July and early August found that one-third lacked enough N95 masks

Trump and his allies have even argued against mobilization. “Don’t be afraid of Covid,” Trump tweeted this month. “Don’t let it dominate your life.”

It didn’t have to be this way. If the U.S. had worked harder and held the per capita mortality rate down to the level of, say, Germany, we could have saved more than 170,000 lives

And if the U.S. had responded urgently and deftly enough to achieve Taiwan’s death rate, fewer than 100 Americans would have died from the virus.

“It is a slaughter,” Dr. William Foege, a legendary epidemiologist who once ran the C.D.C., wrote to Dr. Redfield. Dr. Foege predicted that public health textbooks would study America’s response to Covid-19 not as a model of A-plus work but as an example of what not to do.

They found that “at least 60 percent of them are white, Christian and male. Further, around half are retired, over 65 years of age, and earn at least $50K per year. Finally, roughly 30 percent have at least a college degree.” More than 50 percent were born at a time of white hegemony, before the civil rights and women’s rights movements and the sexual revolution.

whether Trump “bears responsibility for the Capitol riot.” They found that “barely 30 percent of these respondents believe Trump bears any responsibility whatsoever,” and, of those, more than half said Trump bears “a little” responsibility.

Not only are these voters partisan, the authors note, but “when we asked our respondents about whether or not they agreed with Trump’s fraud claims, 98 percent believed them valid.”

“75 percent of Americans believe that Trump bears at least some responsibility” for the Jan. 6 mob attack on Congress. Among all Republicans, “this figure declines significantly to 52 percent.”

These MAGA supporters, who were recruited after signaling sympathy for the movement on Facebook, were rock-solid Republicans, Blum and Parker found, voting at or near 100 percent for the party’s House and Senate candidates in 2018 and 2020, and for Trump last year. They are far more engaged in politics — contributing money, going to meetings and volunteering — than the average American. “By any metric, this group appears committed to the political process,” Blum and Parker wrote.

Should Trump be “charged with the crime of inciting a riot?” All adults: yes 54, no 43. Republicans: yes 12, no 84.

Along similar lines, a Washington Post/ABC News survey taken Jan. 10-13 demonstrated how the views of a majority of Republicans stand far apart from the views of a majority of Americans.

Asked if Trump has acted “responsibly” or “irresponsibly” since the Nov. 3 election, the 1002 adults polled chose “irresponsibly” by 66-30. Republicans, in contrast, chose “responsibly” by 66-29.

It would come at a cost: more government instability as potential coalition allies jockey over cabinet posts, a particular issue or a budget item. It would also give the far ends of the political spectrum continuous formal representation in the political system. The Trumps could more easily realize their goal of becoming the Le Pens of America.

Using their accusations almost as a lingua franca, a way to identify the like-minded, MAGA partisans and followers of QAnon signal one another by alleging that pedophile rings seek to wrest control of government or by alleging that school shootings were staged by leftists to win passage of gun control. They evoke a world in which unknown forces pull the levers of government, where nothing is as it seems to be. Professing your belief in claims like these attests to MAGA loyalties while expressing — in an arcane, politicized shorthand — your fervent opposition to liberalism and racial and cultural change

In contrast, they wrote, “roughly 95 percent of MAGA supporters believe Antifa — the left wing protest group — bears some responsibility for the riots,” with more than 85 percent agreeing that Antifa bears “a great deal” or “a lot” of responsibility.

Drutman wrote that he has “come to realize how much of an existential threat the current Republican Party is to the continuation of America democracy.” A two-party democracy cannot survive “for very long if one of two dominant parties gives up on the foundational institution of democracy: free and fair elections, in which all votes count equally.”

I’ve also come to appreciate how much democracy depends on a conservative party that believes in democracy, and thus how important it is to create electoral institutions in this moment that will allow the currently-marginalized small “l” liberal Republicans to separate from the MAGA wing of the party and still win some representation in the Congress.

Proportional representation, he argued “is the only way to break up the current Republican coalition and free the pro-democracy forces within the Republican Party to compete on their own.”

Representative Don Beyer, Democrat of Virginia, plans to reintroduce The Fair Representation Act, which would, if enacted, put into place many of the reforms Drutman supports. Beyer wrote on his website that the measurewould move U.S. House elections into multi-member districts drawn by independent redistricting commissions and elected through ranked choice voting. The multi-member districts would be effective in states apportioned six or more seats in the House, and would elect three to five Representatives each, depending on the size of the state. Taken together, these three measures would incentivize congressional candidates to appeal to a broader range of voters.

Pippa Norris, a political scientist at Harvard who examined different levels of dissatisfaction in democratic countries in “Is Western Democracy Backsliding?” finds evidence supportive of Drutman’s argument:Parliamentary democracies with PR elections and stable multiparty coalition governments, typical of the Nordic region, generate a broader consensus about welfare policies addressing inequality, exclusion, and social justice, and this avoids the adversarial winner-take-all divisive politics and social inequality more characteristic of majoritarian systems.

I would prefer ranked-choice voting with some multi-member districts for state and national legislatures, and proportional representation (by state popular vote, not by Congressional district which are already gerrymandered) for the Electoral College.” These, she wrote, “could all be accomplished with just legislative change, no constitutional amendments.

Stephen Ansolabehere, a political scientist at Harvard, said by email that “a PR system would be political suicide for the parties.” Why, he asked, “would either party — let alone both — want to change?”

Several political scholars and strategists argue that the fault lies in our political system, that the unique way America has combined its government structure with the mechanics of its elections serves to exacerbate conflict in a deeply polarized country. These scholars have produced a variety of proposals, many involving the creation of multi-member congressional districts and the encouragement of proportional representation to replace the current single district, winner-take-all system.

a separate 2019 survey by Echelon Insights, a survey research firm, that asked voters “Suppose the Democratic and Republican Parties were replaced by a new set of political parties. Which of these parties would you be most likely to support?”

A center-left party committed to putting “the middle class first, pass universal health insurance, strengthen labor unions, and raise taxes on the wealthy to support programs for those less well off” amassed 28 percent.A green party with a platform calling for passage of “a Green New Deal to build a carbon-free economy with jobs for all, break up big corporations, end systemic inequality, and promote social and economic justice” picked up 10 percent.

A traditional-right party, committed to “defend the American system of free enterprise, promote traditional family,” won 21 percent.A culturally liberal and globalist party with a platform committed to “advance social progress including women’s rights and LGBTQ rights, to work with other countries through free trade and diplomacy, to cut the deficit, and reform capitalism with sensible regulation” gathered 12 percent.

The firm gave respondents five choices,A nationalist-right party promising to “stop illegal immigration, put America First, stand up to political correctness” attracted 19 percent.

the racial contract is a codicil rendered in invisible ink, one stating that the rules as written do not apply to nonwhite people in the same way.

The Declaration of Independence states that all men are created equal; the racial contract limits this to white men with property

The law says murder is illegal; the racial contract says it’s fine for white people to chase and murder black people if they have decided that those black people scare them.

“The terms of the Racial Contract,” Mills wrote, “mean that nonwhite subpersonhood is enshrined simultaneously with white personhood.”

as the process in the Arbery case shows, the racial contract most often operates unnoticed, relying on Americans to have an implicit understanding of who is bound by the rules, and who is exempt from them.

Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign, with its vows to enforce state violence against Mexican immigrants, Muslims, and black Americans, was built on a promise to enforce terms of the racial contract that Barack Obama had ostensibly neglected, or violated by his presence.

Struggling white farmers in Iowa taking billions in federal assistance are hardworking Americans down on their luck; struggling single parents in cities using food stamps are welfare queens.

Black Americans struggling in the cocaine epidemic are a “bio-underclass” created by a pathological culture; white Americans struggling with opioid addiction are a national tragedy.

Poor European immigrants who flocked to an America with virtually no immigration restrictions came “the right way”; poor Central American immigrants evading a baroque and unforgiving system are gang members and terrorists.

The coronavirus epidemic has rendered the racial contract visible in multiple ways. Once the disproportionate impact of the epidemic was revealed to the American political and financial elite, many began to regard the rising death toll less as a national emergency than as an inconvenience.

The lives of workers at the front lines of the pandemic—such as meatpackers, transportation workers, and grocery clerks—have been deemed so worthless that legislators want to immunize their employers from liability even as they force them to work under unsafe conditions.

In East New York, police assault black residents for violating social-distancing rules; in Lower Manhattan, they dole out masks and smiles to white pedestrians.

The implied terms of the racial contract are visible everywhere for those willing to see them. A 12-year-old with a toy gun is a dangerous threat who must be met with lethal force; armed militias drawing beads on federal agents are heroes of liberty.

the pandemic has introduced a new clause to the racial contract. The lives of disproportionately black and brown workers are being sacrificed to fuel the engine of a faltering economy, by a president who disdains them. This is the COVID contract.

by mid-April, conservative broadcasters were decrying the restrictions, small bands of armed protesters were descending on state capitols, and the president was pressing to lift the constraints.

In the interim, data about the demographics of COVID-19 victims began to trickle out. On April 7, major outlets began reporting that preliminary data showed that black and Latino Americans were being disproportionately felled by the coronavirus. That afternoon, Rush Limbaugh complained, “If you dare criticize the mobilization to deal with this, you’re going to be immediately tagged as a racist.”

That night, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson announced, “It hasn’t been the disaster that we feared.” His colleague Brit Hume mused that “the disease turned out not to be quite as dangerous as we thought.” The nationwide death toll that day was just 13,000 people; it now stands above 70,000, a mere month later.

That more and more Americans were dying was less important than who was dying.

The disease is now “infecting people who cannot afford to miss work or telecommute—grocery store employees, delivery drivers and construction workers,”

Containing the outbreak was no longer a question of social responsibility, but of personal responsibility. From the White House podium, Surgeon General Jerome Adams told “communities of color” that “we need you to step up and help stop the spread.”

Public-health restrictions designed to contain the outbreak were deemed absurd. They seemed, in Carlson’s words, “mindless and authoritarian,” a “weird kind of arbitrary fascism.” To restrict the freedom of white Americans, just because nonwhite Americans are dying, is an egregious violation of the racial contract.

majority-black counties “account for more than half of coronavirus cases and nearly 60 percent of deaths.” The disproportionate burden that black and Latino Americans are bearing is in part a direct result of their overrepresentation in professions where they risk exposure, and of a racial gap in wealth and income that has left them more vulnerable to being laid off. Black and Latino workers are overrepresented among the essential, the unemployed, and the dead.

“Due to the meatpacking, though, that’s where Brown County got the flare,” Roggensack interrupted to clarify. “It wasn’t just the regular folks in Brown County.”

Roggensack was drawing a line between “regular folks” and the workers who keep them fed, mobile, safe, and connected. And America’s leaders have treated those workers as largely expendable, praising their valor while disregarding their safety.

In South Dakota, where a Smithfield plant became the site of an outbreak infecting more than 700 workers, a spokesperson told BuzzFeed News that the issue was their “large immigrant population.”

“We can’t keep our country closed down for years,” Trump said Wednesday. But that was no one’s plan. The plan was to buy time to take the necessary steps to open the country safely. But the Trump administration did not do that, because it did not consider the lives of the people dying worth the effort or money required to save them.

the only tension between stopping the virus and reviving the economy is one the Trump administration and its propaganda apparatus have invented. Economists are in near-unanimous agreement that the safest path requires building the capacity to contain the virus before reopening the economy—precisely because new waves of deaths will drive Americans back into self-imposed isolation, destroying the consumer spending that powers economic growth

The frame of war allows the president to call for the collective sacrifice of laborers without taking the measures necessary to ensure their safety, while the upper classes remain secure at home.

But the workers who signed up to harvest food, deliver packages, stack groceries, drive trains and buses, and care for the sick did not sign up for war, and the unwillingness of America’s political leadership to protect them is a policy decision, not an inevitability

Trump is acting in accordance with the terms of the racial contract, which values the lives of those most likely to be affected less than the inconveniences necessary to preserve them.

Collective solidarity in response to the coronavirus remains largely intact—most Americans support the restrictions and are not eager to sacrifice their lives or those of their loved ones for a few points of gross domestic product. The consistency across incomes and backgrounds is striking in an era of severe partisan polarization

But solidarity with the rest of the nation among elite Republicans—those whose lives and self-conceptions are intertwined with the success of the Trump presidency—began eroding as soon as the disproportionate impact of the outbreak started to emerge.

Churchill set a frenetic pace for his whole government, showering his aides with “Action This Day” memos.

The second element of British resilience was intense social connection. People were forced together every night in tightly packed group or family shelters.

In national crises, a sort of social and psychological arms race takes place. The threat—whether bombings or a pandemic—ramps up fear, unpredictability, divisiveness, fatalism, and feelings of weakness and meaninglessness. Nations survive when they can ramp up countervailing emotions and mindsets

Third, laughter. Brits credit themselves, accurately, for being a comic people. During the war, every disaster was turned into an occasion for humor,

The fourth factor in British resilience was moral purpose. Friedrich Nietzsche once remarked that “he who has a why to live for can endure any how.” The Brits had a firm sense of the moral rightness of their cause, the unique evil Hitler represented, and the reason they had to endure all this

Finally, there was equality. During moments of threat and crisis, people are intensely sensitive to inequality, to the feeling that some people are being treated better than everybody else.

The pressure of the situation induced people to be frenetically social. Singers offered free concerts, which were packed. Larson reports that young women would set up dates for every night, planning weeks in advance, so as to never be alone

This happens when countries take actions, even if only symbolic ones, that make frightening situations feel more controllable and predictable. This happens when they foster social solidarity by paying extreme attention to fairness. This happens when they intensify social connection and create occasions for social bonding and shared work.

Societies that build resilience do not hide behind a wall of happy talk or try to minimize the danger.

Resilience is built when people confront a threat realistically, and discover that they have the resources to cope with it together.

Resilience is built when people tell a collective story about the danger that places the current terror they are facing within a larger redemptive context. When all this is over, we’ll be better because of it.

What was once a scary threat to be avoided, releasing a surge of destructive cortisol, becomes a challenge to be met, releasing a cascade of adrenaline.

Evolution equipped us to deal with short bursts of terror, such as getting chased by a lion, not to cope with long, unrelenting months of stress.

Isolation, fear, and stress send the autonomic nervous system into overdrive, and weaken the immune system. The social-distancing measures we are taking to avoid the coronavirus make us more susceptible to it when it comes.

in some ways, COVID-19 presents an even more dire challenge to us than the bombing did to Great Britain in 1940. A study by the Russell Sage Foundation found that what makes societies resilient during a crisis are high levels of faith in institutions, high social trust, high levels of patriotism and optimism, and high levels of social and racial integration. The United States that confronts the coronavirus pandemic has catastrophically low levels of all these things.

Worse, unlike the Blitz, this pandemic deprives us of the thing social resilience needs most—close physical and social connectio

In America, the pandemic finds a country that has already seen a recent tripling of the number of people suffering from depression, a sharp increase in mental-health issues of all varieties; a sharp rise in suicides, and record levels of tribal hostility and polarization. The dread and isolation that COVID-19 causes threaten to exacerbate all this, to drive people even farther apart.

Today, the world is threatened by a virus. The moral story we tell has to be less about the evil we face and more about the solidarity we are building with one another. The story we tell has to be about how we took this disease and turned it into an occasion to become a better society

it is worth exploring the protections bad cops get from union rules, and the level of deference that prosecutors afford the police in questionable cases, among other things. It’s not true that the police are a racist, occupying force in American cities, but we have to be cognizant of the fact that they have lost the confidence of many of the communities they serve.

At the heart of the protests is the sense that the necessity of such reform is felt with an urgency in black America while white America thinks of it as a kind of desirable abstraction

It is notable that the police action leading to the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis has not in itself produced a polarizing national disagreement: In fact, there has been broad agreement — broadly shared horror — across the political spectrum, because Americans are a generally decent and fair-minded people who are perfectly capable of understanding what they see with their own eyes, in this case a fellow American who died an unjust death at the hands of American police.

it wears off faster among the young and energetic than among the older, more world-weary but also more patient

Middle-class Singaporean families often refer to themselves nowadays as the “sandwich generation,” by which they mean that between needing to care for elderly parents and spending heavily on tuition or tutoring and uniforms for school-age children, they have little left to spend on themselves

There are more than 10,000 cases, and numbers are rising fast. More than 800 cases were registered in just five and a half days this past week, more than the previous all-time record for a full week.

The Singaporean system lacks an open-ended entitlement akin to the U.S. Social Security system. It uses a market-based system with much to commend it, but it isn’t perfect. The system is designed to rely in part on multigenerational families taking care of the elderly, so as is the case everywhere, when a family doesn’t cohere well for one reason or another, its elderly members often suffer most.

with the coming of Singapore’s second monsoon season, the island is suffering the worst bout of dengue fever infections in more than a decade.

No country in the world has benefited more than Singapore from U.S. postwar grand strategy, except perhaps China. Which is an interesting observation, often made here, in its own right.

He proceeded to explain that the U.S. effort in Vietnam had already bought the new nations of Southeast Asia shelter from communist onslaught for three to four precious years.

LKY’s son, current Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, repeated the same conclusion in a recent Foreign Affairs essay. He added that ever since the Vietnam War era, regardless of the end of the Cold War and dramatic changes in China, the U.S. role in East Asia has been both benign—he did not say error-free—and stabilizing.

More than that, U.S. support for an expanding free-trade accented global economic order has enabled Singapore to surf the crest of burgeoning economic growth in Asia, becoming the most successful transshipment platform in history. It has enabled Singapore to benefit from several major technological developments—containerization is a good example—that have revolutionized international trade in manufactures

Few realize that military power can do more than either compel or deter. Most of the time most military power in the hands of a status quo actor like the United States neither compels nor deters; it “merely” reassures, except that over time there is nothing mere about it

The most important of these reasons—and, I’ve learned, the hardest one for foreigners to understand—is that the Protestant/Enlightenment DNA baked indelibly into the American personality requires a belief in the nation’s exceptionalist virtue to justify an activist role abroad

Singapore has ridden the great whale of Asian advancement in a sea of American-guaranteed tranquility.

Singapore’s approach to dealing with China has been one of strategic hedging. There is no getting around the need to cooperate economically and functionally with China, for Chinese influence permeates the entire region. Do a simple thought experiment: Even if Singaporeans determined to avoid China, how could they avoid the emanations of Chinese relations with and influence on Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Japan, and Korea? Impossible.

Singapore’s close relationship with the United States needs to be seen as similarly enmeshed with the greater web of U.S. relationships in littoral Asia, as well as with India and the Middle East. It is misleading, therefore, to define the issue as one of Singapore’s confidence, or lack thereof, that the United States will come to Singapore’s aid and defense en extremis.

The utility of the U.S. role vis-à-vis China is mainly one of regional balancing that indirectly benefits Singaporean security.

Singapore’s hedging strategy, which reflects a similar disposition throughout Southeast Asia with variations here and there, only works within certain ranges of enabling reality. It doesn’t work if American power or will wanes too much, and it doesn’t work if the broader Sino-American regional balance collapses into glaring enmity and major-power conflict.

Over the past dozen years the worry has been too much American waning, less of capability than of strategic attention, competence, and will. Now, over the past year or two, the worry has shifted to anxiety over potential system collapse into conflict and even outright war.

It’s no fun being a sentient ping pong ball between two behemoths with stinging paddles, so they join together in ASEAN hoping that this will deflect such incentives. It won’t, but people do what they can when they cannot do what they like.

the flat-out truth: The United States is in the process of doing something no other great power in modern history has ever done. It is knowingly and voluntarily abdicating its global role and responsibilities

It is troubled within, so is internally directed for reasons good and otherwise. Thus distracted from the rest of the world in a Hamlet-like act sure to last at least a decade, it is unlikely ever to return in full to the disinterested, active, and constructive role it pioneered for itself after World War II.

The recessional began already at the end of the George W. Bush Administration, set roots during the eight years of the Obama presidency, and became a bitter, relentless, tactless, and barely shy of mad obsession during the Trump presidency.

the strategy itself is unlikely to be revivified for several reasons.

One Lee Kuan Yew vignette sums up the matter. In the autumn of 1968, at a dinner in his honor at Harvard, the Prime Minister had to sit through a litany of complaints from leading scholars about President Johnson’s disastrously escalatory war policies in Vietnam. When they were through, no doubt expecting sympathy from an Asian leader, LKY, never one to bite his tongue, turned on his hosts and announced: “You make me sick.”

When, for justifiable reasons or not, the nation loses its moral self-respect, it cannot lift its chin to look confidently upon the world, or bring itself to ask the world to look upon America as a worthy model, let alone a leader.

That fact that most Americans today also increasingly see expansive international engagement as too expensive, too dangerous, too complex to understand, and unhelpful either to the “main street” American economy or to rock-bottom American security, is relevant too

the disappearance of a single “evil” adversary in Soviet communism, the advent of near-permanent economic anxiety punctuated by the 2008-9 Great Recession—whatever numbers the stock market puts up—and the sclerotic polarization of American politics have left most Americans with little bandwidth for foreign policy narratives.

Few listen to any member of our tenured political class with the gumption to argue that U.S. internationalism remains in the national interest. In any event, few try, and even fewer manage to make any sense when they do.

In that context, pleas from thoughtful observers that we must find a mean between trying to do too much and doing too little are likely to be wasted. No thoughtful, moderate approach to any public policy question can get an actionable hearing these days.

what has happened to “the America I knew and so admired” that its people could elect a man like Donald Trump President? How could a great country deteriorate so quickly from apparent competence, lucidity of mind, and cautious self-confidence into utterly debilitating spasms of apparent self-destruction?

The political culture as a whole has become a centrism incinerator, an immoderation generator, a shuddering dynamo of shallow intellectual impetuosity of every description.

in the wake of the George Floyd unrest one side thinks a slogan—“law and order”—that is mighty close to a dogwhistle for “shoot people of color” can make it all better, while the other side advocates defunding or abolishing the police, for all the good that would do struggling inner-city underclass neighborhoods.

To any normal person these are brazenly unserious propositions, yet they suck up nearly all the oxygen the U.S. media has the inclination to report about. The optic once it reaches Singapore, 9,650 miles away, is one of raving derangement.

Drop any policy proposal into any of the great lava flows of contemporary American irrationality and any sane center it may possess will boil away into nothingness in a matter of seconds

It’s hard for many to let go of hoary assurances about American benignity, constancy, and sound judgment

It is a little like trying to peel a beloved but thoroughly battered toy out of the hands of a four-year old. They want to hold onto it, even though at some level they know it’s time to loosen their grip.

Since then the mendacious narcissism of Donald Trump, the eager acquiescence to it of nearly the entire Republican Party, and its deadly metathesis in the COVID-19 and George Floyd contexts, have changed their questions. They no longer ask how this man could have become President. Now they ask where is the bottom of this sputtering cacophonous mess? They ask what will happen before and then on and after November 3

Singapore’s good fortune in recent decades is by no means entirely an accident of its ambient geostrategic surroundings, but it owes much to those surroundings. While Singaporeans were honing the arts of good government, saving and investing in the country, educating and inventing value-added jobs for themselves, all the while keeping intercommunal relations inclined toward greater tolerance and harmony, the world was cooperating mightily with their ambitions. At the business end of that world was the United States

The U.S. grand strategy of providing security goods to the global commons sheltered Singapore’s efforts in more ways than one over the years

In 1965, when Singapore was thrust into independence from the Malaysian union, a more fraught environment could barely have been imagined. Indonesia was going crazy in the year of living dangerously, and the konfrontasi spilled over violently onto Singapore’s streets, layering on the raw feelings of race riots here in 1964. Communist Chinese infiltration of every trade union movement in the region was a fact of life, not to exclude shards of Singapore’s, and the Cultural Revolution was at full froth in China. So when U.S. Marines hit the beach at Da Nang in February 1965 the independence-generation leadership here counted it as a blessing.

this is exactly the problem now: Those massively benign trends are at risk of inanition, if not reversal.

While China is no longer either Marxist or crazy, as it was during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, it is still Leninist, as its recent summary arrogation of Hong Kong’s negotiated special status shows. It has meanwhile grown mighty economically, advanced technologically at surprising speed, and has taken to investing grandly in its military capabilities. Its diplomacy has become more assertive, some would even say arrogant, as its Wolf Warrior nationalism has grown

The downward economic inflection of the pandemic has exacerbated pre-existing economic strains

At the height of the crisis, with more than 2,000 dying each day, Americans found themselves members of a failed state, ruled by a dysfunctional and incompetent government largely responsible for death rates that added a tragic coda to America’s claim to supremacy in the world.

For more than two centuries, reported the Irish Times, “the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the U.S. until now: pity.”

As American doctors and nurses eagerly awaited emergency airlifts of basic supplies from China, the hinge of history opened to the Asian century.

Since 2001, the U.S. has spent over $6 trillion on military operations and war, money that might have been invested in the infrastructure of home. China, meanwhile, built its nation, pouring more cement every three years than America did in the entire 20th century.

More than any other country, the United States in the post-war era lionized the individual at the expense of community and family. It was the sociological equivalent of splitting the atom. What was gained in terms of mobility and personal freedom came at the expense of common purpose. In wide swaths of America, the family as an institution lost its grounding.

With slogans like “24/7” celebrating complete dedication to the workplace, men and women exhausted themselves in jobs that only reinforced their isolation from their families

The average American father spends less than 20 minutes a day in direct communication with his child. By the time a youth reaches 18, he or she will have spent fully two years watching television or staring at a laptop screen, contributing to an obesity epidemic that the Joint Chiefs have called a national security crisis.

Only half of Americans report having meaningful, face-to-face social interactions on a daily basis. The nation consumes two-thirds of the world’s production of antidepressant drugs. The collapse of the working-class family has been responsible in part for an opioid crisis that has displaced car accidents as the leading cause of death for Americans under 50.

At the root of this transformation and decline lies an ever-widening chasm between Americans who have and those who have little or nothing

But when all the old certainties are shown to be lies, when the promise of a good life for a working family is shattered as factories close and corporate leaders, growing wealthier by the day, ship jobs abroad, the social contract is irrevocably broken.

The vast majority of Americans — white, black, and brown — are two paychecks removed from bankruptcy. Though living in a nation that celebrates itself as the wealthiest in history, most Americans live on a high wire, with no safety net to brace a fall.

COVID-19 didn’t lay America low; it simply revealed what had long been forsaken. As the crisis unfolded, with another American dying every minute of every day, a country that once turned out fighter planes by the hour could not manage to produce the paper masks or cotton swabs essential for tracking the disease

s a number of countries moved expeditiously to contain the virus, the United States stumbled along in denial, as if willfully blind. With less than four percent of the global population, the U.S. soon accounted for more than a fifth of COVID deaths. The percentage of American victims of the disease who died was six times the global average.

The American cult of the individual denies not just community but the very idea of society. No one owes anything to anyone. All must be prepared to fight for everything: education, shelter, food, medical care.

What every prosperous and successful democracy deems to be fundamental rights — universal health care, equal access to quality public education, a social safety net for the weak, elderly, and infirmed — America dismisses as socialist indulgences, as if so many signs of weakness.

How can the rest of the world expect America to lead on global threats — climate change, the extinction crisis, pandemics — when the country no longer has a sense of benign purpose, or collective well-being, even within its own national community?

Asked what he thought of Western civilization, Mahatma Gandhi famously replied, “I think that would be a good idea.” Such a remark may seem cruel, but it accurately reflects the view of America today as seen from the perspective of any modern social democracy.

The measure of wealth in a civilized nation is not the currency accumulated by the lucky few, but rather the strength and resonance of social relations and the bonds of reciprocity that connect all people in common purpose.

American politicians dismiss the Scandinavian model as creeping socialism, communism lite, something that would never work in the United States. In truth, social democracies are successful precisely because they foment dynamic capitalist economies that just happen to benefit every tier of society.

That social democracy will never take hold in the United States may well be true, but, if so, it is a stunning indictment, and just what Oscar Wilde had in mind when he quipped that the United States was the only country to go from barbarism to decadence without passing through civilization.

even should Trump be resoundingly defeated, it’s not at all clear that such a profoundly polarized nation will be able to find a way forward. For better or for worse, America has had its time.

The end of the American era and the passing of the torch to Asia is no occasion for celebration, no time to gloat.

“We are at the brink of a technological revolution that promises not just to fundamentally alter the structure of our economy, but also to reshape the social fabric more broadly. History tells us anxiety tends to accompany rapid technological change, especially when technology takes the form of capital which threatens people’s jobs.” 

Over the past two centuries we’ve learned that there’s a significant time lag, between the broad acceptance of major new transformative technologies and their long-term economic and productivity growth.

In their initial phase, transformative technologies require massive complementary investments, such as business process redesign, co-invention of new products and business models, and the re-skilling of the workforce.  The more transformative the technologies, the longer it takes them to reach the harvesting phase

The time lags between the investment and harvesting phases are typically quite long.

While James Watt’s steam engine ushered the Industrial Revolution in the 1780s, “British factories were for the most part powered by water up until the 1840.”

Similarly, productivity growth did not increase until 40 years after the introduction of electric power in the early 1880s.  

In their early stages, the extensive investments required to embrace a GPT like AI will generally reduce productivity growth.

“the short run consequences of rapid technological change can be devastating for working people, especially when technology takes the form of capital which substitutes for labor.

In the long run, the Industrial Revolution led to a rising standard of living, improved health, and many other benefits.  “Yet in the short run, the lives of working people got nastier, more brutish, and shorter. And what economists regard as ‘the short run’ was a lifetime, for some,”

A 2017 McKinsey study concluded that while a growing technology-based economy will create a significant number of new occupations, as has been the case in the past, “the transitions will be very challenging - matching or even exceeding the scale of shifts out of agriculture and manufacturing we have seen in the past.” 

The US and other industrial economies have seen a remarkable rise in the polarization of job opportunities and wage inequality by educational attainment, with the earnings of the most-educated increasing, and the earnings of the least-educated falling in real terms

Since the 1980s, the earnings of those with a four year college degree have risen by 40% to 60%, while the earnings of those with a high school education or less have fallen among men and barely changed among women.

When upskilling is lagging behind, entire social groups might end up being excluded from the growth engine.”

America’s impatience, its unwillingness to do what it takes to deal with a threat that can’t be beaten with threats of violence, runs much deeper than one man.

It doesn’t help that Republicans are ideologically opposed to government safety-net programs, which are what make the economic consequences of social distancing tolerable

Nor does it help that even low-cost measures to limit the spread of Covid-19, above all wearing face masks (which mainly protect other people), have been caught up in our culture wars.

America in 2020, it seems, is too disunited, with too many people in the grip of ideology and partisanship, to deal effectively with a pandemic. We have the knowledge, we have the resources, but we don’t have the will.

In the big picture, earmarks add up to little more than a rounding error, generally constituting not more than 1 percent of the federal budget. They are used to determine spending priorities, not spending levels, meaning they determine how the pie gets divided rather than how big it is.

As conceived, earmarks allow the people who presumably best understand a state or district — its elected officials — to direct federal dollars to where they are most needed.

In 2011, Republicans assumed control of the chamber and went even further, declaring a moratorium on earmarks.

In 2007, the Democratic-controlled House began reforming the practice, increasing transparency and accountability.

This ban has made Congress less accountable and more dysfunctional. It is time to abandon the experiment.

Since America’s earliest days, they have proved a useful tool for building coalitions. (The first known instance of congressional earmarking dates to the Lighthouse Act of 1789.)

Considering the thicket of crises the nation is facing, big-ticket legislation, including another meaty round of coronavirus relief, is precisely what is needed.

According to QAnon, President Donald Trump is secretly working to stop a child sex cabal run by Hollywood and political elites

During the pandemic, QAnon-related content has exploded online, growing nearly 175% on Facebook and nearly 63% on Twitter, according a British think tank.

The FBI has called QAnon a domestic terror threat and an internal FBI memo warned that "fringe conspiracy theories very likely motivate some domestic extremists, wholly or in part, to commit criminal and sometimes violent activity." Facebook finally pledged to ban QAnon content earlier this month.

"I see this circulating through conservative and Charismatic churches and it breaks my heart," said Anleitner, who spent time in Pentecostal churches, where he says QAnon's influence is distressingly pervasive.

Some Christian pastors are actually leading their followers to QAnon, or at least introducing them to its dubious conspiracy theories.

During services in July, Rock Urban Church in Grandville, Michigan, played a discredited video that supports QAnon conspiracy theories.

Danny Silk, a leader at Bethel Church, a Pentecostal megachurch in Redding, California, has posted QAnon-related ideas and hashtags on his Instagram account.

"If you are just learning about QAnon and The Great Awakening, this is the right spot for you," reads the ministry's website. Representatives from the ministry did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

"Right now QAnon is still on the fringes of evangelicalism," said Ed Stetzer, an evangelical pastor and dean at Wheaton College in Illinois who wrote a recent column warning Christians about QAnon. "But we have a pretty big fringe.

Earlier this year a young Christian friend of his recirculated QAnon ideas posted online by a national Christian leader, Anleitner said. (He declined to name the pastor on the record).

QAnon is complex, said Brian Friedberg, a researcher at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government who has studied the movement.

Q himself (or herself, or themselves for that matter -- no one quite knows who Q is) has posted nearly 5,000 messages since 2017.

In QAnon, some observers see a mass delusion, others see a political cult, and still others claim to see the sprouts of a new faith.

If QAnon is a new religion, it bears the birthmarks of our truth-deprived time: Born on an obscure internet image board, it spreads through social media, preaches a perverted form of populism and is amplified by a president who has demonstrated little regard for facts.

"It's kinda like checking Fox News or CNN," -- that is, a place to find the latest news, said Park Neff, who has a masters in divinity and a doctorate from New Orleans Baptist Seminary. "It just seemed to be good, solid conservative thought."

"What resonated with me is the idea of moving toward a global government," she said, "and that actually goes along with the Christian belief about the End Times."

It interprets world events through the lens of Scripture or Q posts. It's obsessed with a grand, apocalyptic reckoning that will separate good from evil, deeply distrusts the media and finds an unlikely champion -- and hero -- in President Trump.

That's no accident, say experts who have studied QAnon. The group intentionally uses emotionally fraught topics, like suffering children, to draw Christians to their movement.

"That's a recruiting tactic," said Travis View, a host of "QAnon Anonymous," a podcast that seeks to explain the movement. "It's their red pill." (Travis View is a pseudonym he uses for safety. )

View compared it to a religion that proselytizes by offering potential converts seemingly mundane services before laying the hard sell on them."The 'Save the Children' messaging is very effective, because everyone wants to protect children."

"People who start with 'saving the children' don't stay there -- and that's the problem," he said. "It's like Alice in Wonderland. They follow the rabbit and enter a totally different framework for reality."

"This is an information operation that has gotten out of the direct control of whoever started it," he said. It's an operation, he added, that likely would not exist in a less polarized, confusing and frightening time.

When Jesus didn't arrive, the Millerites were greatly disappointed, but they adjusted their apocalyptic timetables and soldiered on, eventually becoming the Seventh Day Adventist Church.

These days, Q shies away from giving specific dates, View noted, suggesting a shift in tactics. Even so, believers attempt to explain away any contradictions between QAnon and reality, just as the Millerites did centuries ago.

"Some of it seems like deliberate misinformation to throw off the other side," Neff said, "as should be apparent to anyone who watches the news. Sometimes he (Q) does it to rattle their cages, sometimes to keep them guessing. It seems to work."