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My concern here is more with cultural protectionism — the impulse not to conquer the rest of the world but rather to tune it out.

in terms of volume and distinction, the last 15 years also qualify as a golden age. What has changed is the sense of cultural cachet and social currency.

“We must recognize that security means more than defense,” they write. After ending the 20th century as the world’s most powerful country, “we failed to recognize that dominance, like fossil fuel, is not a sustainable form of energy.”

In their paper, the officers argue that the United States has to move from “containment” — the foreign policy established after World War II to limit the expansion and influence of the Soviet Union — to what they call “sustainment” or sustainability.

The first priority, they write, should be “intellectual capital and a sustainable infrastructure of education, health and social services to provide for the continuing development and growth of America’s youth.”

what is wrong with us?

entire

We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe – and would benefit the vast majority – are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets.

As the suburbs have turned against the Republican Party of President Donald Trump, rural whites have embraced the Party’s new message of economic protectionism, immigration restrictions, and an “America First” foreign policy. In this month’s midterm elections, rural whites sent new Republicans to Congress from Pennsylvania’s southwestern coalmining region and the farming regions of southern and northeastern Minnesota. Rural whites were also the key to the Republican Party’s Senate victories in Indiana, Missouri, and North Dakota. And in Tennessee, rural whites replaced a centrist conservative senator with a self-described “hard-core” conservative

The Republican Party’s campaign messages targeting the rural South suggest that rural whites are once again being mobilized by fear. This time, the enemies include “liberal” politicians who allegedly want to take their guns, along with “illegal” immigrants who are allegedly invading the nation. It is perhaps no accident that the full conversion of rural white southerners to the Republican Party occurred in 1994, immediately after President Bill Clinton signed into law the last gun control bill passed at the federal level and after an emerging conservative talk radio network, with Rush Limbaugh in the vanguard, succeeded in branding Clinton and his party as incompatible with white rural values

But today the problem that the Democratic Party has with white rural voters goes far beyond specific policy differences. After decades of denunciations of “liberal” Democrats from conservative media and evangelical churches, many rural whites in both North and South have equated loyalty to the Republican Party with their own values and self-identity. In nearly every region of the country – even northern California and the northeastern corner of Vermont – rural whites are voting Republican,

What do I mean by cynical politics? Partly I mean the tacit alliance between businesses and the wealthy, on one side, and racists on the other, that is the essence of the modern conservative movement.

sooner or later something like Trump was going to happen: a candidate who meant the racism seriously, with the enthusiastic support of the Republican base, and couldn’t be controlled.

Recently Tom Donohue, the chamber’s head, published an article decrying Trump’s mistreatment of children at the border, declaring “this is not who we are.” Sorry, Mr. Donohue, it is who you are: You and your allies spent decades empowering racists, and now the bill is coming due.

e has persisted and produced an intelligent explanation of the mechanisms that produced the crisis and the response to it. We continue to live with the consequences of both today.

By 2007, many were warning about a dangerous fragility in the system. But they worried about America’s gargantuan government deficits and debt

it was not a Chinese sell-off of American debt that triggered the crash, but rather, as Tooze writes, a problem “fully native to Western capitalism — a meltdown on Wall Street driven by toxic securitized subprime mortgages.”

A much-discussed new report from the pro-EU European Council on Foreign Relations sums up the problem from this perspective right in its title: “How Anti-Europeans Plan to Wreck Europe and What Can Be Done to Stop It.”

The years since the last election in 2014 have seen the emergence across Europe of parties united only by their skepticism of more Europe.

Meanwhile, institutional changes within the Parliament and the EU at large have vested real power in the body, while allowing a large plurality of members to steer (or obstruct) its business. As the ECFR notes in its alarmist report, with one-third of seats a euroskeptic bloc could strangle trade deals, dictate policy on economic sanctions against Russia, throw a wrench into complex negotiations for the EU’s next seven-year budget, and much more.

President Donald Trump’s planned tariffs on steel and aluminum threaten a world-trading regime already battered by mounting protectionism and its struggle to tame China’s state-driven capitalism.

duties of 25% on steel imports and 10% on aluminum, citing national security concerns, is forcing members of the World Trade Organization to grapple with flaws and weaknesses in the global body.

“I don’t believe that the WTO is set up to deal with a country like China and their industrial policy,” Mr. Trump’s trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, told Congress last year.

President Trump will make the first visit of his presidency to Latin America next month, the White House said on Saturday, traveling to Peru for a summit meeting of Western Hemisphere nations where he will convene with a group of leaders who have criticized his statements and policies on immigration.

As he has moved the United States toward a more protectionist stance on trade, Mr. Trump has abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which includes Mexico, Peru and Chile. The United States is also engaged in difficult negotiations with Mexico and Canada over changes to the North American Free Trade Agreement.

American presidents have attended the Western Hemisphere meeting, known as the Summit of the Americas, in previous years — Barack Obama made history there in 2015 by meeting with President Raúl Castro of Cuba — but few have stoked as much indignation as Mr. Trump.

And while Trump was winning, a certain amount of evidence emerged to confirm his darker view of the American situation — the surging opioid epidemic

“deaths of despair” among lower-income white Americans, growing evidence that the opening to China had worked out far better for Beijing’

All of this has left conservative policy wonks, the erstwhile reformocons and others, with a dilemma. Should they defend the post-Reagan economic order against Trump’s blustering, blundering assault — defend the benefits of “neoliberalism” and free trade and global openness, warn against the sclerosis that protectionism and industrial policy often bring, champion the innovative culture of Silicon Valley against its populist despisers? Or should they take Trump’s success as evidence that even reform conservatism was ultimately too sanguine and too moderate, and that there are deeper problems in the economic order that require a more-than-moderate conservative response?

Markets fell after President Donald Trump announced planned tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, an effect that was exacerbated by what the move symbolizes fo

When a key economic input suddenly becomes scarce,  it’s called a supply shock: It pushes costs up and economic activity down.

This helps explain why markets have responded so badly to President Donald Trump’s announcement of a 25% tariff on steel imports and 10% on aluminum. Like a geopolitical shock that reduces the supply of oil, it’s bad for both inflation and growth.

we don’t really have to wonder what it’s like to live in a tribal society anymore, do we? Because we already do. Over the past couple of decades in America, the enduring, complicated divides of ideology, geography, party, class, religion, and race have mutated into something deeper, simpler to map, and therefore much more ominous. I don’t just mean the rise of political polarization (although that’s how it often expresses itself), nor the rise of political violence (the domestic terrorism of the late 1960s and ’70s was far worse), nor even this country’s ancient black-white racial conflict (though its potency endures).

I mean a new and compounding combination of all these differences into two coherent tribes, eerily balanced in political power, fighting not just to advance their own side but to provoke, condemn, and defeat the other.

I mean two tribes whose mutual incomprehension and loathing can drown out their love of country, each of whom scans current events almost entirely to see if they advance not so much their country’s interests but their own. I mean two tribes where one contains most racial minorities and the other is disproportionately white; where one tribe lives on the coasts and in the cities and the other is scattered across a rural and exurban expanse; where one tribe holds on to traditional faith and the other is increasingly contemptuous of religion altogether; where one is viscerally nationalist and the other’s outlook is increasingly global; where each dominates a major political party; and, most dangerously, where both are growing in intensity as they move further apart.

The Great Enrichment is McCloskey’s term for what, in a sense, started with steam and has been, she believes, the most important human development since the invention of agriculture 10,000 years ago. The development is the explosion of economic growth that began around 1800 and has, especially since reaching China and India, lifted billions of people from poverty. Today, however, the Great Enrichment might be running out of steam in the United States

Now, however, the Great Enrichment is being superseded by the Great Flinch, a recoil against the frictions and uncertainties — the permanent revolution — of economic dynamism. If this continues, the consequences, from increased distributional conflicts to decreased social mobility, are going to be unpleasant.

Tyler Cowen thinks a bigger problem is complacency. In his latest book, “The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream,” Cowen, professor of almost everything (economics, law, literature) at George Mason University and co-author of the Marginal Revolution blog, argues that the complacent class, although a minority, is skillful at entrenching itself in ways detrimental to the majority.

In the spring of 2016, National Review published its “Against Trump” issue. Twenty-one prominent conservatives signed individual statements of opposition to Trump’s candidacy. Of those 21, only six continue to speak publicly against his actions. Almost as many have become passionate defenders of the Trump presidency

As a survival strategy, this is viable enough in the short term. But let’s understand what is driving it.

The conservative intellectual world is whipsawed between distaste for President Trump and fear of its own audience. The conservative base has become ever more committed to Trump—and ever less tolerant of any deviation. Those conservative talkers most susceptible to market pressure—radio and TV hosts—have made the most-spectacular conversions and submissions: Mark Levin, Tucker Carlson.

Without Saying ‘Trump,’ Bush and Obama Deliver Implicit Rebukes

Neither of them mentioned President Trump by name but two of his predecessors emerged from political seclusion on Thursday to deliver what sounded like pointed rebukes of the current occupant of the Oval Office and the forces of division that propelled him to power.

In separate and unrelated appearances, former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama both warned that the United States was being torn apart by ancient hatreds that should have been consigned to history long ago and called for addressing economic anxiety through common purpose.

What’s different this time is the acquiescence of Republican elites. The Big Lie about the election didn’t well up from the grass roots — it was promoted from above, initially by Trump himself, but what’s crucial is that almost no prominent Republican politicians have been willing to contradict his claims and many have rushed to back them up.

olitical scientists have long noted that our two major political parties are very different in their underlying structures. The Democrats are a coalition of interest groups — labor unions, environmentalists, L.G.B.T.Q. activists and more. The Republican Party is the vehicle of a cohesive, monolithic movement. This is often described as an ideological movement, although given the twists and turns of recent years — the sudden embrace of protectionism, the attacks on “woke” corporations — the ideology of movement conservatism seems less obvious than its will to power.

The field I know best, economics, contains (or used to contain) quite a few Republicans with solid academic reputations. Like just about every academic discipline, the field leans Democratic, but much less so than other social sciences and even the hard sciences. But the G.O.P. has consistently preferred to get its advice from politically reliable cranks.

Joe Biden’s inauguration, with its camp authoritarian light displays and general atmosphere of praetorian menace, was exactly the sort of swearing-in that his predecessor might have relished

Between announcing that the remaining 2,500 American troops would return from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, he has carried out airstrikes in Syria, spoken equivocally about our shameful adventures in Yemen and largely ignored the genocide being carried out in the Tigray region of Ethiopia.

This month he briefly committed his administration to maintaining Mr. Trump’s parsimonious annual cap on the number of refugees the United States will accept (though in response to criticism the White House now claims that it will reconsider the issue next month).

“We’re in a competition with China and other countries to win the 21st Century,” Biden said. His aides describe the president as preoccupied with the challenge from China.

aides say Biden believes it is a key test by which historians will judge his presidency.”

As Biden said to the nation from the well of the House of Representatives, the authoritarian President Xi Jinping is “deadly earnest” about China “becoming the most significant, consequential nation in the world. He and others—autocrats—think that democracy can’t compete in the 21st century with autocracies.”

Four years ago, Argentina shocked the international community by turning its back on Peronism, the divisive political movement that had ruled the South American country of 44 million consistently since 2001

Two decades of economic dysfunction and state intervention made the country a pariah on global capital markets, and, Macri argued, severely limited the country’s growth. Economists around the world rejoiced about the measures he was taking.

But today, with the value of the peso plummeting, inflation soaring and several million Argentines falling into poverty in a single year, many inside the country say Macri’s experiment with economic liberalism has failed.

After a volcano exploded in Hawaii in May 2018, US scientists used drones to save a man from the lava: "Follow the drone," they said. He made it through the jungle.Drones save people. They also map terrain, survey land and inspect pipelines. The scientists use drones for these and other purposes on a daily basis, and they have bragged about their successes in the field.Many of the aircraft are made by Chinese companies, though. They are now grounded because of concerns about espionage.

the head of the federal agency, David Bernhardt, is apparently now worried that the drones could be used for espionage.

He is examining the agency's civilian drone programme in an effort to determine whether or not it should be continued. During this time, many of the drones are grounded, according to an agency spokeswoman, Melissa Brown.