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For comparison, what people had heard about Donald Trump at the same stage, according to the same Gallup poll:

First, a Gallup word-cloud image of what voters associated with Hillary Clinton in the summer of 2015:

One was its blow-out-the-front-page treatment after James Comey talked about re-opening the email investigation, less than two weeks before the election. This was in keeping with the Times’s emphasis through many months on the “doubts” and “questions” that Clinton’s email practices “raised”:

And here is how it shaped up as the campaign intensified last summer, from the time of the party conventions through the beginning of the Clinton-Trump debates:

No sane person can believe that the consequences of last fall’s election—for foreign policy, for race relations, for the environment, for anything else you’d like to name (from either party’s perspective)—should have depended more than about 1 percent on what Hillary Clinton did with her emails. But this objectively second- or third-tier issue came across through even our best news organizations as if it were the main thing worth knowing about one of the candidates.

No sane person can believe that the consequences of last fall’s election—for foreign policy, for race relations, for the environment, for anything else you’d like to name (from either party’s perspecti

But the press is among the groups that messed this up, badly, in particular through the relentless push in New York Times coverage that made “but, her emails!” a rueful post-campaign meme. With this book, Hillary Clinton has gone  a considerable distance toward facing her responsibility for the current state of the country. Before any news organization tells her to pipe down or stop explaining herself, I’d like to see them be as honest about their own responsibility

The French leader has a growing fan club: in France, the US and across the globe, among people who see him as the polar opposite, the perfect antithesis of his counterpart in the White House.

Macron himself never planned any of this. When he first thought of running for the presidency, the chances of a Trump in the White House seemed too ludicrous to contemplate.

Just as in domestic politics doors seemed to open miraculously for President Macron, so in the world of international affairs shifts of power and ideology are also working in his favour - for now. Media playback is unsupported on your device

With its perpetual harping on about ideals and morals, France's capacity to irritate is prodigious. Perhaps it will not be long before Macron loses his touch and the world starts panting for his comeuppance.

President Trump has made several references to human rights in Cuba, both as a candidate and since winning the presidency. Initially it was hard to say whether he was simply appealing to his supporters in Florida or if he genuinely intended to unpick Mr Obama's Cuba legacy using the island's human rights record as his reasoning. It is looking increasingly likely that it's the latter.

In the years leading up to 1914, prohibitions on sexual relations between European women and black men (though not between European men and African women) were enforced across European colonies in Africa. The presence of the “dirty Negroes” in Europe after 1914 seemed to be violating a firm taboo.

“These savages are a terrible danger,” a joint declaration of the German national assembly warned in 1920, to “German women”. Writing Mein Kampf in the 1920s, Adolf Hitler would describe African soldiers on German soil as a Jewish conspiracy aimed to topple white people “from their cultural and political heights”. The Nazis, who were inspired by American innovations in racial hygiene, would in 1937 forcibly sterilise hundreds of children fathered by African soldiers. Fear and hatred of armed “niggers” (as Weber called them) on German soil was not confined to Germany, or the political right. The pope protested against their presence, and an editorial in the Daily Herald, a British socialist newspaper, in 1920 was titled “Black Scourge in Europe”.

The first world war, in fact, marked the moment when the violent legacies of imperialism in Asia and Africa returned home, exploding into self-destructive carnage in Europe. And it seems ominously significant on this particular Remembrance Day: the potential for large-scale mayhem in the west today is greater than at any

In one predominant but highly ideological version of European history – popularised since the cold war – the world wars, together with fascism and communism, are simply monstrous aberrations in the universal advance of liberal democracy and freedom.

In many ways, however, it is the decades after 1945 – when Europe, deprived of its colonies, emerged from the ruins of two cataclysmic wars – that increasingly seem exceptional. Amid a general exhaustion with militant and collectivist ideologies in western Europe, the virtues of democracy – above all, the respect for individual liberties – seemed clear. The practical advantages of a reworked social contract, and a welfare state, were also obvious.

But neither these decades of relative stability, nor the collapse of communist regimes in 1989, were a reason to assume that human rights and democracy were rooted in European soil.

debasing hierarchy of races was established because the promise of equality and liberty at home required imperial expansion abroad in order to be even partially fulfilled. We tend to forget that imperialism, with its promise of land, food and raw materials, was widely seen in the late 19th century as crucial to national progress and prosperity. Racism was – and is – more than an ugly prejudice, something to be eradicated through legal and social proscription. It involved real attempts to solve, through exclusion and degradation, the problems of establishing political order, and pacifying the disaffected, in societies roiled by rapid social and economic change.

In this new history, Europe’s long peace is revealed as a time of unlimited wars in Asia, Africa and the Americas. These colonies emerge as the crucible where the sinister tactics of Europe’s brutal 20th-century wars – racial extermination, forced population transfers, contempt for civilian lives – were first forged

Whiteness became “the new religion”, as Du Bois witnessed, offering security amid disorienting economic and technological shifts, and a promise of power and authority over a majority of the human population.

The resurgence of these supremacist views today in the west – alongside the far more widespread stigmatisation of entire populations as culturally incompatible with white western peoples – should suggest that the first world war was not, in fact, a profound rupture with Europe’s own history.

Our complex task during the war’s centenary is to identify the ways in which that past has infiltrated our present, and how it threatens to shape the future: how the terminal weakening of white civilisation’s domination, and the assertiveness of previously sullen peoples, has released some very old tendencies and traits in the west.

Relatively little is known about how the war accelerated political struggles across Asia and Africa; how Arab and Turkish nationalists, Indian and Vietnamese anti-colonial activists found new opportunities in it; or how, while destroying old empires in Europe, the war turned Japan into a menacing imperialist power in Asia

A broad account of the war that is attentive to political conflicts outside Europe can clarify the hyper-nationalism today of many Asian and African ruling elites, most conspicuously the Chinese regime, which presents itself as avengers of China’s century-long humiliation by the west.

in order to grasp the current homecoming of white supremacism in the west, we need an even deeper history – one that shows how whiteness became in the late 19th century the assurance of individual identity and dignity, as well as the basis of military and diplomatic alliances.

Such a history would show that the global racial order in the century preceding 1914 was one in which it was entirely natural for “uncivilised” peoples to be exterminated, terrorised, imprisoned, ostracised or radically re-engineered.

At the time of the first world war, all western powers upheld a racial hierarchy built around a shared project of territorial expansion. In 1917, the US president, Woodrow Wilson, baldly stated his intention, “to keep the white race strong against the yellow” and to preserve “white civilisation and its domination of the planet”

this entrenched system was not something incidental to the first world war, with no connections to the vicious way it was fought or to the brutalisation that made possible the horrors of the Holocaust. Rather, the extreme, lawless and often gratuitous violence of modern imperialism eventually boomeranged on its originators.

it is too easy to conclude, especially from an Anglo-American perspective, that Germany broke from the norms of civilisation to set a new standard of barbarity, strong-arming the rest of the world into an age of extremes. For there were deep continuities in the imperialist practices and racial assumptions of European and American powers.

Rhodes’ scramble for Africa’s gold fields helped trigger the second Boer war, during which the British, interning Afrikaner women and children, brought the term “concentration camp” into ordinary parlance. By the end of the war in 1902, it had become a “commonplace of history”, JA Hobson wrote, that “governments use national animosities, foreign wars and the glamour of empire-making in order to bemuse the popular mind and divert rising resentment against domestic abuses”

With imperialism opening up a “panorama of vulgar pride and crude sensationalism”, ruling classes everywhere tried harder to “imperialise the nation”, as Arendt wrote. This project to “organise the nation for the looting of foreign territories and the permanent degradation of alien peoples” was quickly advanced through the newly established tabloid press.

In 1920, a year after condemning Germany for its crimes against Africans, the British devised aerial bombing as routine policy in their new Iraqi possession – the forerunner to today’s decade-long bombing and drone campaigns in west and south Asia. “The Arab and Kurd now know what real bombing means,” a 1924 report by a Royal Air Force officer put it. “They now know that within 45 minutes a full-sized village … can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured.” This officer was Arthur “Bomber” Harris, who in the second world war unleashed the firestorms of Hamburg and Dresden, and whose pioneering efforts in Iraq helped German theorising in the 1930s about der totale krieg (the total war).

the frenzy of jingoism with which Europe plunged into a bloodbath in 1914 speaks of a belligerent culture of imperial domination, a macho language of racial superiority, that had come to bolster national and individual self-esteem.

One of the volunteers for the disciplinary force was Lt Gen Lothar von Trotha, who had made his reputation in Africa by slaughtering natives and incinerating villages. He called his policy “terrorism”, adding that it “can only help” to subdue the natives.

his real work lay ahead, in German South-West Africa (contemporary Namibia) where an anti-colonial uprising broke out in January 1904. In October of that year, Von Trotha ordered that members of the Herero community, including women and children, who had already been defeated militarily, were to be shot on sight and those escaping death were to be driven into the Omaheke Desert, where they would be left to die from exposure. An estimated 60,000-70,000 Herero people, out of a total of approximately 80,000, were eventually killed, and many more died in the desert from starvation. A second revolt against German rule in south-west Africa by the Nama people led to the demise, by 1908, of roughly half of their population.

Such proto-genocides became routine during the last years of European peace. Running the Congo Free State as his personal fief from 1885 to 1908, King Leopold II of Belgium reduced the local population by half, sending as many as eight million Africans to an early death. The American conquest of the Philippines between 1898 and 1902, to which Kipling dedicated The White Man’s Burden, took the lives of more than 200,000 civilians.

In light of this shared history of racial violence, it seems odd that we continue to portray the first world war as a battle between democracy and authoritarianism, as a seminal and unexpected calamity. The Indian writer Aurobindo Ghose was one among many anticolonial thinkers who predicted, even before the outbreak of war, that “vaunting, aggressive, dominant Europe” was already under “a sentence of death”, awaiting “annihilation”

These shrewd assessments were not Oriental wisdom or African clairvoyance. Many subordinate peoples simply realised, well before Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, that peace in the metropolitan west depended too much on outsourcing war to the colonies.

The experience of mass death and destruction, suffered by most Europeans only after 1914, was first widely known in Asia and Africa, where land and resources were forcefully usurped, economic and cultural infrastructure systematically destroyed, and entire populations eliminated with the help of up-to-date bureaucracies and technologies. Europe’s equilibrium was parasitic for too long on disequilibrium elsewhere.

Populations in Europe eventually suffered the great violence that had long been inflicted on Asians and Africans. As Arendt warned, violence administered for the sake of power “turns into a destructive principle that will not stop until there is nothing left to violate”.

nothing better demonstrates this ruinous logic of lawless violence, which corrupts both public and private morality, than the heavily racialised war on terror. It presumes a sub-human enemy who must be “smoked out” at home and abroad – and it has licensed the use of torture and extrajudicial execution, even against western citizens.

It was always an illusion to suppose that “civilised” peoples could remain immune, at home, to the destruction of morality and law in their wars against barbarians abroad. But that illusion, long cherished by the self-styled defenders of western civilisation, has now been shattered, with racist movements ascendant in Europe and the US,

This is also why whiteness, first turned into a religion during the economic and social uncertainty that preceded the violence of 1914, is the world’s most dangerous cult today. Racial supremacy has been historically exercised through colonialism, slavery, segregation, ghettoisation, militarised border controls and mass incarceration. It has now entered its last and most desperate phase with Trump in power.

We can no longer discount the “terrible probability” James Baldwin once described: that the winners of history, “struggling to hold on to what they have stolen from their captives, and unable to look into their mirror, will precipitate a chaos throughout the world which, if it does not bring life on this planet to an end, will bring about a racial war such as the world has never seen”.

Certainly the risk of not confronting our true history has never been as clear as on this Remembrance Day. If we continue to evade it, historians a century from now may once again wonder why the west sleepwalked, after a long peace, into its biggest calamity yet.

“A lot of these kids have lost their homes and their school. It’s already so difficult,”

Authorities encountered 9,297 children without a parent in February, a 30% increase from 2019 during the last major influx of unaccompanied children. To be sure, it's still below the peaks of 11,000 unaccompanied minors who arrived in May 2019 and above 10,000 in June 2014, but experts and administration officials expect those records to be broken this year.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said last week that U.S. agents are on pace to intercept more migrants on the southwest border in 2021 than they have in the last two decades.The reasons for the influx of migrants from Central America are vast and complex. They are also deeply personal for each family who chooses to leave their home.

Jessica Bolter, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, says they involve a mix of longstanding factors, such as poverty and corruption, as well as new factors such as two recent hurricanes and widespread unemployment due to the pandemic.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents apprehended an average of 5,000 undocumented immigrants per day over the past 30 days, including about 500 unaccompanied children, according to a senior Border Patrol official who spoke to reporters on Friday.

The official said the influx was "much different" than previous years, citing the large number of unaccompanied children and families traveling. As of Wednesday, more than 5,000 unaccompanied migrant children and teens were stuck in Border Patrol facilities waiting for beds in more appropriate shelters built for children, according to Department of Homeland Security data viewed by NPR.

The Border Patrol official told reporters Friday that agents are trying to discharge the children from warehouses and jail-like holding cells as quickly as possible, but there's a bottleneck because the government can't open child shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Services fast enough to accommodate everyone who's crossing.

The Biden administration is working with other agencies trying find more bed space. They're using places like the San Diego Convention Center to hold unaccompanied minors so they're not sleeping in cells on the border. The challenges in Central America – and at the border – have become cyclical.

Like under previous presidents, the Biden administration was not prepared to shelter this many arriving children. But Bolter questions whether this is some kind of a new "crisis." She says this part of the same flow of migrants that the United States has been experiencing over the last decade.

Up until 2012, the vast majority of apprehensions at the southwest border were of young Mexican males coming across to find work in the United States. Two years later, the majority of cases coming across the southwest border were from Central America and were a mix people, families and unaccompanied children.

The Biden administration also has long term plans to deal more directly with these issues in Central America. They include developing more legal avenues to seek asylum so that migrants don't feel they have to choose illegal avenues. And Biden just sent three top officials to Mexico and Guatemala as part of efforts to tackle the root causes of migration, something he also just tasked Vice President Harris with leading.

He told NPR's Steve Inskeep Friday that the administration wants to help countries in the region create the right environment for international investment that drives economic prosperity, but also has ways to encourage better behavior from money launderers and other corrupt officials.

The station will be "built on the lunar surface and/or on the lunar orbit," the statement said, and will carry out activities such as "lunar exploration and utilization, lunar-based observation, basic scientific experiment and technical verification.

Russia and China "will jointly develop a Roadmap for the creation" of the station, and "conduct close interaction in planning, justification, design, development, implementation, [and] operation [of] the project ... including its presentation to the world space community."

The announcement from the former Cold War rivals comes as NASA is working toward a return to the moon, decades after the last of the Apollo landings wrapped up in 1972.

The joint China-Russia proposal doesn't include a timeline.

The former Soviet Union put the first human in space in 1961 and managed a number of firsts in the decades-long "space race" with the U.S. However, since the collapse of the U.S.S.R., Russia has shown more willingness to engage in cooperative efforts in space. It has built and launched sections of the International Space Station, sent periodic re-supply missions to the orbiting laboratory, and provided transportation to and from the ISS for astronauts from the U.S. and other countries.

But other proposed changes reflect the growing consensus among experts that accelerating climate risk is fast becoming uninsurable — and if governments want insurance to remain affordable, it will mean finding new ways to limit people’s exposure to that risk.In California, like most other states, local officials have significant control over where homes are built. Those officials face powerful incentives to permit the construction in fire-prone areas: New houses mean more jobs and more residences, which translate into more tax revenue.

And if local officials insist on building in places exposed to wildfires, the recommendations call for preventing those homes from getting insurance through the state’s FAIR Plan.

State Senator Bill Dodd, a Democrat whose district includes Napa, Sonoma and other areas hit hard by recent wildfires, said he was open to many of the recommendations, including stopping access to the FAIR Plan for new homes in high-risk areas, halting infrastructure spending and expanding building codes. “We’ve got to rethink how we are developing” in those places, he said.

The U.S. government had more than 4,200 unaccompanied migrant children in its custody as of Sunday, according to a Department of Homeland Security document obtained by NPR.

The children are spending an average of 117 hours in detention facilities before being moved to more hospitable shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Services — far longer than the 72 hours allowed by law.

The 16-year-old boy from Guatemala died in the care of U.S. Customs and Border Protection during the last record-breaking detention of unaccompanied minors during the Trump administration, when Sanders led the agency

Back in 2019, Long served as a detention monitor for the legal team that advocated for the children in court. She testified to Congress at the time about sick kids sleeping in cells and older children caring for younger ones.

She largely blames the Trump administration for hollowing out what little infrastructure existed to handle these cyclical flows of unaccompanied minors.But Long also raises concerns about transparency in President Biden's administration and questions why detention monitors like herself have been blocked from seeing certain areas of concerning facilities.

David Lapan, a former senior official in Trump's Department of Homeland Security, said the former president was more focused on sending a message about enforcement than caring for the children.

Sanders, the former acting CBP commissioner, quit the Trump administration in the midst of the last border crisis.He described the deaths of children on his watch as a transformational experience and now works with an organization, Glasswing International, that works to address the root causes of migration in Central America.

Like Biden, Harris is determined to take the oath of office outside, on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol, despite security concerns that have led to the garrison of soldiers inside the building for the first time since the Civil War.

And, like Biden, Harris is equally determined to move forward with an ambitious legislative agenda despite the fact that the early weeks of their administration will likely also see a second Senate impeachment trial of Trump.

Harris spoke to NPR on the day Biden unveiled a $1.9 trillion rescue package that would expand unemployment benefits, issue another round of direct stimulus payments, spend billions on coronavirus vaccination and testing efforts, and raise the federal minimum wage to $15, among many other provisions.

I want to start with last week with the Capitol attack. You were in Washington, D.C. What was that day like from your vantage point?It was horrific. It was a day that wherein we witnessed an assault on America's democracy, a day when we witnessed the terror that a few can wreak on so many.

Why is it so important to you to stick with the planned ceremony and take the oath outside?I think that we cannot yield to those who would try and make us afraid of who we are.

Ticking through some of the details — $20 billion for vaccinations, $50 billion for expanded testing, $130 billion for schools to reopen safely. If this is passed and signed into law, how quickly can Americans expect to see life to return to normal?Let me be very clear that the president-elect and I know this is not going to be easy, but we are putting everything we've got into this, and to deal with it as soon as possible, which is why we're prepared right now to, on day one, push through and get this package, so that it hits the ground and hits the streets and we get relief to the American people.

How quickly can this get passed? Democrats have the narrowest of narrow majorities in both chambers.Well, let me tell you, it's our highest priority. It is our highest priority.

But there is going to be so much else going on, including now a Senate impeachment trial. So you have not only this bill, you have to confirm the Cabinet through the Senate. There is an impeachment trial. How does that affect everything you're trying to do beyond legislation and confirmations?

We know how to multitask [laughs]. There's a reason that word exists in the English language. That's what's going to be required. We have to multitask, which means, as with anyone, we have a lot of priorities and we need to see them through.

This proposal has billions of dollars to fund vaccine distribution, but it's not just funding. There are distribution problems, information sharing problems. There are trust problems, supply problems. What can the federal government do immediately in the coming weeks to start to fix these?Well, part of it is pass our plan because we are, for example, putting $50 billion into increased testing and tracing, as you mentioned earlier. We need to increase the supply of PPE.

This is a major stimulus package coming through. Are you going to be a point person in getting it passed or in any of these areas once it starts going to effect, if he does sign it into law?Let me tell you something, on every decision that we have made as an incoming administration, we're in the room together, Joe and I, the president-elect and I. And on every, you know, I can't even tell you how many meetings we've been in together that range from this to many other topics that are priorities for us. And so all of the priorities are going to be a priority for me and for the president-elect, obviously.

One kindergarten in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou interspersed its lessons in September with four days of what it called “military training” for its 5- and 6-year-olds. The children, dressed in military fatigues, held Chinese flags and performed salutes, according to the school’s official WeChat social-media account.

In 2016, the party issued what it said were reform guidelines calling on its Communist Youth League to help lead on social media. The Youth League began opening accounts on platforms including Douyin, China’s version of TikTok. It also started an official account on Bilibili, a video-hosting platform akin to China’s YouTube whose users are mainly under 25. The Youth League and its regional arms now have almost 11.5 million followers there.

As the members of Congress listened to a clerk read it, they often broke into applause, stunned that their new president had found a language so compelling.

Should our politicians fail to reform regulations for internet platforms and digital advertising, our political future will be at risk. The 2016 election revealed the tremendous harm to the American democratic process that can result from coordinated misinformation campaigns; 2020 will be far worse if we do nothing to contain the capacity for politicians to lie on social media.

Warren responded to the Trump ad with a cheeky point: In an ad she has circulated over Facebook, she claims that "Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook just endorsed Donald Trump for re-election." Later in the ad, she acknowledges this is a falsehood, and contends that "what [Mark] Zuckerberg has done is given Donald Trump free rein to lie on his platform — and then to pay Facebook gobs of money to push out their lies to American voters."

It is disconcerting to think that by fiat, Facebook can deem a political ad to be dishonest because it contains fake buttons (which can deceive the viewer into clicking on a survey button when in fact there is no interactive feature in the ad), but the company will refuse to take action against ads containing widely-debunked political lies, even during an American presidential election.

Facebook has one principal counterargument against regulation: that the company must maintain strong commitments to free speech and freedom of political expression. This came across in Mark Zuckerberg's speech at Georgetown University on Thursday, in which he described social media as a kind of "Fifth Estate" and characterized politicians' calls to take action as an attempt to restrict freedom of expression. Quoting at times from Frederick Douglass and Supreme Court jurisprudence, Zuckerberg said "we are at a crossroads" and asserted: "When it's not absolutely clear what to do, we should err on the side of free expression."

Unfortunately for Facebook, this argument holds little water. If you determine that an ad containing a fake button is non-compliant because it "[entices] users to select an answer," then you certainly should not knowingly broadcast ads that entice voters to unwittingly consume publicly-known lies -- whether they are distributed by the President or any other politician. Indeed, as one official in Biden's presidential campaign has noted, Zuckerberg's argumentation amounts to an insidious "choice to cloak Facebook's policy in a feigned concern for free expression" to "use the Constitution as a shield for his company's bottom line."

If Facebook cannot take appropriate action and remove paid political lies from its platform, the only answer must be earnest regulation of the company -- regulation that forces Facebook to be transparent about the nature of political ads and prevents it from propagating political falsehoods, even if they are enthusiastically distributed by President Trump.

Keep your spirits up, don’t get down, it’s not all on you. “God is in charge of history.”

in 2002. Zevon was dying of mesothelioma, and Mr. Letterman asked how his illness had changed him.

“From your perspective now,” Mr. Letterman asked, “Do you know something about life and death that maybe I don’t know now?” Mr. Zevon answered: “I know how much you’re supposed to enjoy every sandwich.”

from the writer Laurens van der Post in 1961: “We live not only our own lives but, whether we know it or not, also the life of our time.” We are all making history together, we are part of an era, and we are responsible to each other and to this great project.

The Democratic primary field is still flailing and doesn’t see it’s flailing. At the moment their theory of the country is wrong, and it’s wrong because it’s a theory, not a cold-eyed look at circumstances and facts on the ground.

It isn’t true that America will never go socialist. Maybe it will, but not under current conditions—full employment, rising wages.

Maybe all this will be settled at an open convention. But they ought to know by now they went too far left too quickly. And sometimes you have to stand up to the base.

Underlying his eventual decisions will be an unspoken theme of his re-election campaign: I’ve been president three years and the world didn’t blow up. My critics said it would because I’m crazy. I’m crazy like a fox! I kept things cool. That theme is about to be put to a test.

The belief that big tech needs to be corralled—to be broken up or declared public utilities—will grow on the left and right

No president has been convicted and removed: Clinton and Andrew Johnson survived Senate trials and Richard Nixon resigned before he could be formally impeached. On the BBC, Dershowitz was asked if he thought Trump was a good president and how he felt about potentially facilitating his re-election.

As the White House faces into the storm, Dershowitz will join a Trump legal team that also includes Ken Starr, who played a leading role in the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Jay Sekulow, a Trump lawyer and regular media surrogate, and Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, will also represent the president.

On Friday, it was reported that documents released by House Democrats showed that an aide to Devin Nunes, the ranking Republican on the House intelligence committee and a key Trump ally, worked with Lev Parnas on approaches to Ukraine last year.

“I’m not going to allow my partisan views to impact my constitutional views and what I think is best for the long term survival of the constitution rather than the short-term partisan advantage of getting my person elected to be president.”

He also said that in the Senate trial he would be “only arguing on behalf of the constitution”. He would answer questions from senators, he said, but would have a “limited role”, as agreed with Trump.

Dershowitz answered: “Let me perfectly clear, I am an advocate … against impeachment. But I’m politically neutral, that is I would make the same argument whether it was a Democrat or a Republican. I don’t let my political preferences interfere with my constitutional analysis.”

More people than ever before are reading and supporting our journalism, in more than 180 countries around the world. And this is only possible because we made a different choice: to keep our reporting open for all, regardless of where they live or what they can afford to pay.

None of this would have been attainable without our readers’ generosity – your financial support has meant we can keep investigating, disentangling and interrogating. It has protected our independence, which has never been so critical. We are so grateful.

Self-determination, the rule of law between and within countries, liberal economics, and the protection of human rights: the “new world order” that both the George H. W. Bush and the Clinton administrations worked to create was very much in the Wilsonian mold. 

When the Berlin Wall fell, in 1989, it seemed that the opportunity for a Wilsonian world order had finally come. The former Soviet empire could be reconstructed along Wilsonian lines, and the West could embrace Wilsonian principles more consistently now that the Soviet threat had disappeared.

American leaders during and after World War II laid the foundations of what they hoped would be a Wilsonian world order, in which international relations would be guided by the principles put forward in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and conducted according to rules established by institutions such as the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, and the World Trade Organization.

the order of things

The next stage in world history will not unfold along Wilsonian lines. The nations of the earth will continue to seek some kind of political order, because they must. And human rights activists and others will continue to work toward their goals. But the dream of a universal order, grounded in law, that secures peace between countries and democracy inside them will figure less and less in the work of world leaders. 

Although Wilsonian ideals will not disappear and there will be a continuing influence of Wilsonian thought on U.S. foreign policies, the halcyon days of the post–Cold War era, when American presidents organized their foreign policies around the principles of liberal internationalism, are unlikely to return anytime soon. 

Today, however, the most important fact in world politics is that this noble effort has failed.

Wilsonianism is only one version of a rules-based world order among many.

the pre-Wilsonian European order had moved significantly in the direction of elevating human rights to the level of diplomacy. 

The preservation of the balance of power was invoked as a goal to guide states; war, although regrettable, was seen as a legitimate element of the system. From Wilson’s standpoint, these were fatal flaws that made future conflagrations inevitable. To redress them, he sought to build an order in which states would accept enforceable legal restrictions on their behavior at home and their international conduct. 

Although Wilson was an American, his view of world order was first and foremost developed as a method for managing international politics in Europe, and it is in Europe where Wilson’s ideas have had their greatest success and where their prospects continue to look strongest.

His ideas were treated with bitter and cynical contempt by most European statesmen when he first proposed them, but they later became the fundamental basis of the European order, enshrined in the laws and practices of the EU.

the arc of history

The real problem of Wilsonianism is not a naive faith in good intentions but a simplistic view of the historical process, especially when it comes to the impact of technological progress on human social order.

Wilson was the devout son of a minister, deeply steeped in Calvinist teachings about predestination and the utter sovereignty of God, and he believed that the arc of progress was fated

he shared the optimism of what the scholar Herbert Butterfield called “the Whig historians,” the Victorian-era British thinkers who saw human history as a narrative of inexorable progress and betterment. Wilson believed that the so-called ordered liberty that characterized the Anglo-American countries had opened a path to permanent prosperity and peace.

Today’s Wilsonians have given this determinism a secular twist: in their eyes, liberalism will rule the future and bring humanity to “the end of history” as a result of human nature rather than divine purpose

In the early 1990s, leading U.S. foreign policymakers and commentators saw the fall of the Soviet Union through the same deterministic prism: as a signal that the time had come for a truly global and truly liberal world order. On all three occasions, Wilsonian order builders seemed to be in sight of their goal. But each time, like Ulysses, they were blown off course by contrary winds. 

Technical difficulties Today, those winds are gaining strength. Anyone hoping to reinvigorate the flagging Wilsonian project must contend with a number of obstacles

The most obvious is the return of ideology-fueled geopolitics. China, Russia, and a number of smaller powers aligned with them—Iran, for example—correctly see Wilsonian ideals as a deadly threat to their domestic arrangements.

Seeing Wilsonianism as a cover for American and, to some degree, EU ambitions, Beijing and Moscow have grown increasingly bold about contesting Wilsonian ideas and initiatives inside international institutions such as the UN and on the ground in places from Syria to the South China Sea.

These powers’ opposition to the Wilsonian order is corrosive in several ways.

It raises the risks and costs for Wilsonian powers to intervene in conflicts beyond their own borders.

The presence of great powers in the anti-Wilsonian coalition also provides shelter and assistance to smaller powers that otherwise might not choose to resist the status quo

Finally, the membership of countries such as China and Russia in international institutions makes it more difficult for those institutions to operate in support of Wilsonian norms: take, for example, Chinese and Russian vetoes in the UN Security Council, the election of anti-Wilsonian representatives to various UN bodies, and the opposition by countries such as Hungary and Poland to EU measures intended to promote the rule of law. 

Biological and technological research, by contrast, are critical for any country or company that hopes to remain competitive in the twenty-first century. An uncontrollable, multipolar arms race across a range of cutting-edge technologies is on the horizon, and it will undercut hopes for a revived Wilsonian order. 

The irony is that Wilsonians often believe that technological progress will make the world more governable and politics more rational—even if it also adds to the danger of war by making it so much more destructive. Wilson himself believed just that, as did the postwar order builders and the liberals who sought to extend the U.S.-led order after the Cold War. Each time, however, this faith in technological change was misplaced

As seen most recently with the rise of the Internet, although new technologies often contribute to the spread of liberal ideas and practices, they can also undermine democratic systems and aid authoritarian regimes.

Meanwhile, the torrent of technological innovation and change known as “the information revolution” creates obstacles for Wilsonian goals

It also makes it harder for national leaders to pursue the compromises that international cooperation inevitably requires and increases the chances that incoming governments will refuse to be bound by the acts of their predecessors. 

Wilsonians prioritize arms control not just because nuclear warfare could destroy the human race but also because, even if unused, nuclear weapons or their equivalent put the Wilsonian dream of a completely rules-based, law-bound international order out of reach. Weapons of mass destruction guarantee exactly the kind of state sovereignty that Wilsonians think is incompatible with humanity’s long-term security. One cannot easily stage a humanitarian intervention against a nuclear power. 

What is more, the technological progress that underlies the information revolution significantly exacerbates the problem of arms control. The development of cyberweapons and the potential of biological agents to inflict strategic damage on adversaries—graphically demonstrated by the COVID-19 pandemic—serve as warnings that new tools of warfare will be significantly more difficult to monitor or control than nuclear technology.

Today, as new technologies disrupt entire industries, and as social media upends the news media and election campaigning, politics is becoming more turbulent and polarized in many countries.

it’s not for everybody One of the central assumptions behind the quest for a Wilsonian order is the belief that as countries develop, they become more similar to already developed countries and will eventually converge on the liberal capitalist model that shapes North America and western Europe

The Wilsonian project requires a high degree of convergence to succeed; the member states of a Wilsonian order must be democratic, and they must be willing and able to conduct their international relations within liberal multilateral institutions. 

Today, China, India, Russia, and Turkey all seem less likely to converge on liberal democracy than they did in 1990. These countries and many others have developed economically and technologically not in order to become more like the West but rather to achieve a deeper independence from the West and to pursue civilizational and political goals of their own. 

In truth, Wilsonianism is a particularly European solution to a particularly European set of problems

With the specter of great-power war constantly hanging over them, European states developed a more intricate system of diplomacy and international politics than did countries in other parts of the world.

Although it would take another devastating world war to ensure that Germany, as well as its Western neighbors, would adhere to the rules of a new system, Europe was already prepared for the establishment of a Wilsonian order.

The idea of a single legitimate state with no true international peers is as deeply embedded in the political culture of China as the idea of a multistate system grounded in mutual recognition is embedded in that of Europe. There have been clashes among Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans, but until the late nineteenth century, interstate conflict was rare. 

In human history as a whole, enduring civilizational states seem more typical than the European pattern of rivalry among peer states.

For states and peoples in much of the world, the problem of modern history that needed to be solved was not the recurrence of great-power conflict. The problem, instead, was figuring out how to drive European powers awa

International institutions face an even greater crisis of confidence. Voters skeptical of the value of technocratic rule by fellow citizens are even more skeptical of foreign technocrats with suspiciously cosmopolitan views

After colonialism formally ended and nascent countries began to assert control over their new territories, the classic problems of governance in the postcolonial world remained weak states and compromised sovereignty. 

expert texpert

The recent rise of populist movements across the West has revealed another danger to the Wilsonian project. If the United States could elect Donald Trump as president in 2016, what might it do in the future? What might the electorates in other important countries do? And if the Wilsonian order has become so controversial in the West, what are its prospects in the rest of the world?

Postcolonial and non-Western states often joined international institutions as a way to recover and enhance their sovereignty, not to surrender it, and their chief interest in international law was to protect weak states from strong ones, not to limit the power of national leaders to consolidate their authority

Yet from the standpoint of Wilson and his fellow progressives, the solution to these problems could not be simply to vest power in the voters. At the time, most Americans still had an eighth-grade education or less

The progressives’ answer to this problem was to support the creation of an apolitical expert class of managers and administrators. The progressives sought to build an administrative state that would curb the excessive power of the rich and redress the moral and political deficiencies of the poor.

The Internet and social media have undermined respect for all forms of expertise. Ordinary citizens today are significantly better educated and feel less need to rely on expert guidance. And events including the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the 2008 financial crisis, and the inept government responses during the 2020 pandemic have seriously reduced confidence in experts and technocrats, whom many people have come to see as forming a nefarious “deep state.”

Wilson lived in an era when democratic governance faced problems that many feared were insurmountable. The Industrial Revolution had divided American society, creating unprecedented levels of inequality.

when it comes to international challenges such as climate change and mass migration, there is little evidence that the cumbersome institutions of global governance and the quarrelsome countries that run them will produce the kind of cheap, elegant solutions that could inspire public trust. 

what it means for biden

For all these reasons, the movement away from the Wilsonian order is likely to continue, and world politics will increasingly be carried out along non-Wilsonian and in some cases even anti-Wilsonian lines

the international order will increasingly be shaped by states that are on diverging paths. This does not mean an inevitable future of civilizational clashes, but it does mean that global institutions will have to accommodate a much wider range of views and values than they have in the past.

Non-Wilsonian orders have existed both in Europe and in other parts of the world in the past, and the nations of the world will likely need to draw on these examples as they seek to cobble together some kind of framework for stability and, if possible, peace under contemporary conditions. 

For U.S. policymakers, the developing crisis of the Wilsonian order worldwide presents vexing problems that are likely to preoccupy presidential administrations for decades to come. One problem is that many career officials and powerful voices in Congress, civil society organizations, and the press deeply believe not only that a Wilsonian foreign policy is a good and useful thing for the United States but also that it is the only path to peace and security and even to the survival of civilization and humanity.

Those factions will be hemmed in by the fact that any internationalist coalition in American foreign policy must rely to a significant degree on Wilsonian voters. But a generation of overreach and poor political judgment has significantly reduced the credibility of Wilsonian ideas among the American electorate.

But American foreign policy is always a coalition affair. As I wrote in my book Special Providence, Wilsonians are one of four schools that have contended to shape American foreign policy since the eighteenth century.

Hamiltonians and Wilsonians largely dominated American foreign-policy making after the Cold War, but Obama began to reintroduce some Jeffersonian ideas about restraint, and after the Libyan misadventure, his preference for that approach clearly strengthened.

Trump, who hung a portrait of President Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office, sought to build a nationalist coalition of Jacksonians and Jeffersonians against the globalist coalition of Hamiltonians and Wilsonians that had been ascendant since World War II. 

Even as the Biden administration steers American foreign policy away from the nationalism of the Trump period, it will need to re-adjust the balance between the Wilsonian approach and the ideas of the other schools in light of changed political conditions at home and abroad.

Saving the planet from a climate catastrophe and building a coalition to counter China are causes that many Wilsonians will agree both require and justify a certain lack of scrupulosity when it comes to the choice of both allies and tactics. 

The Biden administration can also make use of other techniques that past presidents have used to gain the support of Wilsonians

Even as the ultimate goals of Wilsonian policy become less achievable, there are particular issues on which intelligent and focused American policy can produce results that Wilsonians will like

International cooperation to make money laundering more difficult and to eliminate tax havens is one area where progress is possible.

Concern for international public health will likely stay strong for some years after the COVID-19 pandemic has ended.

Promoting education for underserved groups in foreign countries—women, ethnic and religious minorities, the poor—is one of the best ways to build a better world,

however problematic Wilson’s personal views and domestic policies were, as a statesman and ideologist, he must be counted among the most influential makers of the modern world

“What Republicans need to figure out is the people who have been systematically lied to as to the results of this election—how do you re-engage with those folks who are aligned ideologically and not radical in any way, but misinformed?” Mr. Holmes said. “How do you bring them back into the fold and start communicating with them in a much more rational way about the governance of the United States?”

“One Boogaloo movement follower indicated the building with the snipers would need to be blown up in order to protect Boogaloo fighters in the event of a gun battle during the event,” the report states. Another planned to “put colored duct tape on the back of his body armor to appear as law enforcement and cause confusion.”

“Boogaloo movement supporters believe an impending insurgency against the government is forthcoming and some believe they should accelerate the timeline with armed, anti-government actions leading to a civil war,” explained the alert issued by the FBI Minneapolis field office in December. 

The anti-government militia members arrested in October for allegedly plotting to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer are also believed to have been tied to the boogaloo movement. 

“The idea behind it was to have a huge showing of firearms and...for it to take place all across the U.S.,” Holt told Yahoo News, adding that “this is among the first major national events that has come out of the boogaloo movement.”

“This is a boogaloo movement organized call to arms that’s been spreading with increasing velocity outside of its usual communities,” said Holt, noting that he’s recently observed flyers for the Jan. 17th rallies circulating among many militia groups online, as well as “some run-of-the-mill Trump supporting groups and, interestingly enough, re-open protest.” 

“I feel like the FBI and DHS completely fell down on the job before the sixth…which was embarrassing, frankly, given all the stuff that was on the web,” she said. “So I’m glad that they’re taking this seriously, because they need to.”

"You can be tested every time you cross a border. You cannot be vaccinated every time you cross a border," Thomas Crampton, chief marketing and communications officer for The Commons Project, told CNN Business.

Large tech firms are also getting in on the act. IBM (IBM) developed its own app, called Digital Health Pass, which allows companies and venues to customize indicators they would require for entry including coronavirus tests, temperature checks and vaccination records.

Early on in the pandemic, Apple (AAPL) and Google (GOOG) set aside their smartphone rivalry to jointly develop a Bluetooth-based system to notify users if they'd been exposed to someone with Covid-19.

"I think where exposure notification ran into some challenges was more of the piecemeal implementation choices, lack of federal leadership ... where each state had to go it alone and so each state had to figure it out independently," said Jenny Wanger, who leads the exposure notification initiatives for Linux Foundation Public Health, a tech-focused organization helping public health authorities around the world combat Covid-19.

"If we're successful, you should be able to say: I've got a vaccine certificate on my phone that I got when I was vaccinated in one country, with a whole set of its own kind of health management practices... that I use to get on a plane to an entirely different country and then I presented in that new country a vaccination credential so I could go to that concert that was happening indoors for which attendance was limited to those who have demonstrated that they've had the vaccine," said Brian Behlendorf, executive director of Linux Foundation.

A few companies within the Covid-19 Credentials Initiative are also developing a smart card that strikes a middle ground between the traditional paper vaccine certificates and an online version that's easier to store and reproduce.

CommonPass, IBM and the Linux Foundation have all stressed privacy as central to their initiatives. IBM says it allows users to control and consent to the use of their health data and allows them to choose the level of detail they want to provide to authorities.

"Trust and transparency remain paramount when developing a platform like a digital health passport, or any solution that handles sensitive personal information," the company said in a blog post. "Putting privacy first is an important priority for managing and analyzing data in response to these complex times."

"A point of entry — whether that's a border, whether that's a venue — is going to want to know, did you get the Pfizer vaccine, did you get the Russian vaccine, did you get the Chinese vaccine, so they can make a decision accordingly,"

The variance can be wide: the vaccine developed by Chinese state-owned pharmaceutical giant Sinopharm, for example, has an efficacy of 86% against Covid-19, while the vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna each have an efficacy of around 95%.

It's also unclear how effective the vaccines are in stopping the transmission of the virus, says Dr. Julie Parsonnet, an infectious disease specialist at Stanford University. So while a vaccine passport app will show that you've received the shot, it may not be a guarantee that you safely attend an event or get on a flight.

Still, Behlendorf anticipates that the rollout and adoption of vaccine passports will happen rather quickly once everything falls into place and expects a variety of apps that can work with each other to be "widely available" within the first half of 2021.