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Early 2017 Gallup data echoed this. It showed 32 percent of Republicans suddenly liked the man who had just interfered in an American election.

But a significant and influential segment of the party has demonstrated a tendency toward a brand of moral relativism and even authoritarianism that creates an opening for giving Putin a pass.

Maybe these Republicans just disliked Biden that much, or maybe they saw something admirable in Putin’s strongman mystique (a sentiment Trump has spent years cultivating). It certainly wouldn’t be the only evidence of Trump supporters flirting with the merits of authoritarianism.

Regardless, the data show how, when these loud voices on the right project softness on Putin or his invasion of Ukraine, there’s a willingness to hear that out — even if the base doesn’t actually like Putin. Influential voices on the right have spent years creating a permission structure for shrugging at things like Navalny’s death (see: Jamal Khashoggi).

there’s been little in the way of a desire to fight back against these noisy and influential forces — in part because that would entail going against the most powerful Republican and the onetime most influential conservative commentator.

Reading their books, he tells us, can be as exciting as reading a great novel or poem. In particular, Krishnan emphasizes the virtues they embodied in themselves and their work. “Some of these virtues were, by any reckoning, moral ones: humility, self-awareness, collegiality, restraint. Others are better thought aesthetic: elegance, concision, directness.”

Consider Gilbert Ryle. As the Waynflete professor of metaphysics, he was asked if he ever read novels, to which he replied, “All six of them, once a year.” Jane Austen’s, of course.

Another time, an American visitor wondered if it was true that Ryle, as editor of the journal Mind, would “accept or reject an article on the basis of reading just the first paragraph.” “That used to be true at one time,” Ryle supposedly answered. “I had a lot more time in those days.”

J.L. Austin gradually emerges as the central figure. “He listened, he understood, and when he started to speak, with the piercing clarity he brought to all things, philosophical or not, it ‘made one’s thoughts race.’”

Oxford discussion groups and tutorials tried to avoid those “cheap rhetorical ploys” that aim “at victory and humiliation rather than truth.” Instead their unofficial motto stressed intellectual fraternity: “Let no one join this conversation who is unwilling to be vulnerable.”

their meetings continually resounded with “short, punchy interrogations” that aimed “to clarify positions, pose objections and expose inconsistencies.”

Austin “wanted to be, all he wanted other people to be, was rational.” His highest praise was to call someone “sensible.”

When Oxford announced plans to award Truman an honorary degree, Anscombe objected. She wasn’t protesting against nuclear weapons per se (as was Bertrand Russell) but simply standing up for what she regarded as an inviolable principle: “Choosing to kill the innocent as a means to your ends is always murder.” End of argument. Anscombe’s was a lonely voice, however, except for the support of her philosopher friend, Philippa Foot, whose imposing manner Krishnan brilliantly captures: “She looked like the sort of young woman who knew how to get a boisterous dog to sit.”

Despite the sheer entertainment available in “A Terribly Serious Adventure,” readers will want to slow down for its denser pages outlining erudite theories or explaining category mistakes and other specialized terms

All these philosophers, as well as a half-dozen others I haven’t been able to mention, come across as both daunting and charismatic

“What Putin wants is to transform the world order” that evolved since World War II and the post-Cold War — where “the competition between nations was about who can be richer and who can help their people prosper the most . … Putin hates that world because he loses in that world — his system is a loser in a peaceful, global, wealth-enhancing paradigm. And so what he wants is to move us back to dog-eat-dog, to a 19th-century, great power competition, because he thinks he can, if not win, be more effective there. … Let’s not think that this is a Ukrainian problem; this is a problem for us all.”

These wars very much are our business — and now clearly inescapable, since we’re deeply entwined in both conflicts. What’s crucial to keep in mind about America — as the leader of the Inclusion Network — is that right now we’re fighting the war in Ukraine on our terms, but we’re fighting the war in the Middle East on Iran’s terms.

CNN recently described, per a source familiar with it, a declassified U.S. intelligence assessment provided to Congress saying that Russia had lost 87 percent of its preinvasion active-duty ground troops and two-thirds of its tanks that it had prior to its invasion of Ukraine. Putin can still inflict a lot of damage on Ukraine with missiles, but his dream of occupying the whole country and using it as a launching pad to threaten the Inclusion Network — particularly the NATO-protected European Union — is now out of reach. Thank you, Kyiv.

At a breakfast with NATO leaders devoted to the Ukraine issue at Davos this year, Canada’s deputy prime minister, Chrystia Freeland, noted that it is we, the West, who should be thanking the Ukrainians, not forcing them to beg us for more weapons.

China under President Xi Jinping straddles the two networks, along with much of what’s come to be called the global south. Their hearts, and often pocketbooks, are with the Resistors but their heads are with the Includers

the Resistance Network “is orchestrated by Iran, Islamists and jihadists” in a process they refer to as the “unity of battlefields.” This network, he noted, “seeks to bridge militias, rejectionists, religious sects and sectarian leaders,” creating an anti-Israel, anti-American, anti-Western axis that can simultaneously pressure Israel in Gaza, in the West Bank and on the Lebanon border — as well as America in the Red Sea, in Syria and in Iraq and Saudi Arabia from all directions.

In stark contrast, Koteich said, stands the Inclusion Network, one that’s focused on “weaving together” global and regional markets instead of battlefronts, business conferences, news organizations, elites, hedge funds, tech incubators and major trade routes. This inclusion network, he added, “transcends traditional boundaries, creating a web of economic and technological interdependence that has the potential to redefine power structures and create new paradigms of regional stability.”

things are different in the Middle East. There, it is Iran that is sitting back comfortably — indirectly at war with Israel and America, and sometimes Saudi Arabia, by fighting through Tehran’s proxies: Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, and Shiite militias in Iraq.

Iran is reaping all the benefits and paying virtually no cost for the work of its proxies, and the U.S., Israel and their tacit Arab allies have not yet manifested the will or the way to pressure Iran back — without getting into a hot war, which they all want to avoid.

The members of the Resistance Network are great at tearing down and breaking stuff, but, unlike the Inclusion Network, they have shown no capacity to build any government or society to which anyone would want to emigrate, let alone emulate

For all of these reasons, this is a moment of great peril as well as great opportunity — especially for Israel. The competition between the Resistance Network and the Inclusion Network means that the region has never been more hostile or more hospitable to accepting a Jewish state.

“Please talk about money, everyone,” she said. “The more people are active in it, the better the results will be.”

The Israeli military relies on reservist soldiers, some of whom have described growing exhaustion as Israel manages conflicts for months on end on multiple fronts, including the border with Lebanon and in the West Bank. An end to fighting in Gaza would give Israeli forces a respite that analysts say is needed, especially if fighting with Hezbollah escalates further.

Israel Ziv, a retired Israeli general and veteran of multiple wars, said tensions between the Israeli military and security establishment and Netanyahu are at a record high.“The IDF feels and the security echelon feels that we exhausted the purpose of the war. We reached the maximum tactical peak that we can achieve,” he said. “As long as Rafah was there, they could say finish the job. OK it’s finished now.”

Netanyahu has rejected a series of proposals for possible alternatives to Hamas, including an American plan to bring in the Palestinian Authority and Arab calls for a Palestinian unity government that would include Hamas. Some military analysts and former Israeli officials have questioned whether installing a new government in Gaza was ever possible, given that Hamas has managed to survive the Israeli military assault.

“We need to make a decision,” said Ziv. “Even a bad decision, that’s OK. Let’s say [we] occupy Gaza in the next few years because we need to clear up the last few terrorists. OK, it’s a bad decision, but it’s a decision. The military needs to know.”

The dispute between Netanyahu and the military centers in part on how officials define a defeat of Hamas. An Israeli military official said the army considers a battalion “dismantled” not when all its fighters are killed, but when its command structure and ability to carry out organized attacks are eliminated. 

Military analysts say that Hamas’s militia forces are likely to survive the Israeli military operation even in Rafah, in part because the Israeli army’s approach leaves many lower-ranking Hamas fighters in place. Hamas’s top leadership in the enclave, including its leader, Yahya Sinwar, have also eluded Israeli forces throughout the war.

“Hamas is preserving its forces in Rafah rather than engaging the Israel Defense Forces, likely because Hamas does not believe Israel’s Rafah operation will be decisive,” said an assessment this week from the Institute for the Study of War and the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project.

All the old deficiencies and blind spots of male socialization are still in circulation — the same mass failure to teach boys relational skills and emotional intelligence, the same rigid masculinity norms and social prohibitions that push them away from intimacy and emotionality.

in many ways this environment has apparently had the opposite effect — it has shut them down even further.

The micro-generation that was just hitting puberty as the #MeToo movement exploded in 2017 is now of college (and voting) age. They have lived their whole adolescence not just in the digital era, with a glorious array of virtual options to avoid the angst of real-world socializing, but also in the shadow of a wider cultural reckoning around toxic masculinity.

We have spent the past half-decade wrestling with ideas of gender and privilege, attempting to challenge the old stereotypes and power structures. These conversations should have been an opportunity to throw out the old pressures and norms of manhood, and to help boys and men be more emotionally open and engaged.

in screen-addicted, culture war-torn America, we have also added new ones.

For many progressives, weary from a pileup of male misconduct, the refusal to engage with men’s feelings has now become almost a point of principle

For every right-wing tough guy urging his crying son to “man up,” there’s a voice from the left telling him that to express his concerns is to take airtime away from a woman or someone more marginalized

In many cases, the same people who are urging boys and men to become more emotionally expressive are also taking a moral stand against hearing how they actually feel

For many boys, it can seem as though their emotions get dismissed by both sides. This political isolation has combined with existing masculine norms to push a worrying number of boys into a kind of resentful, semi-politicized reclusion.

Over a quarter of men under 30 say they have no close friends

Teenage boys now spend two hours less a week socializing than girls and they also spend about seven hours more per week than their female peers on screens.

my own research has fed my fears.

the same theme came up over and over for boys who on the face of it had little else in common. They were lonely.

almost all of them had the nagging sense that something important was missing in those friendships. They found it almost impossible to talk to their male peers about anything intimate or express vulnerability.

One teenager described his social circle, a group of boys who had been best friends since kindergarten, as a “very unsupportive support system.” Another revealed that he could recall only one emotionally open conversation with a male friend in his life, and that even his twin brother had not seen him cry in years

they felt unable to articulate this pain or seek help, because of a fear that, because they were boys, no one would listen.

As one 20-year-old put it, “If a man voices any concern, they get deflected with all of their so-called privileges.” He added: “They’d be like, ‘Whatever. Women have suffered more than you, so you have no right to complain.’”

Almost without exception, the boys I talked to craved closer, more emotionally open relationships, but had neither the skills nor the social permission to change the story.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that boys don’t know how to listen and engage with their friends’ emotions on any deeper level; after all, no one really engages with theirs.

in a sexist society, male opinions hold outsized value. But the world — including their own parents — has less time for their feelings.

One study from 2014 showed that parents were more likely to use emotional words when talking with their 4-year-old daughters than those speaking to their 4-year-old sons.

A more recent study comparing fathers of boys with fathers of girls found that fathers of boys were less attentively engaged with their boys, spent less time talking about their son’s sad feelings and instead were more likely to roughhouse with them. They even used subtly different vocabularies when talking with boys, with fewer feelings-centered words, and more competition and winning-focused language.

Spend any time in the manosphere, and it’s easy to start to hate men and boys. The extreme misogyny, the gleeful hate speech, the violent threats and thrum of menace make it hard to summon much sympathy for male concerns, and easy to forget the ways that patriarchy harms them, too.

in the grip of the culture wars, caring about boys has become subtly coded as a right-wing cause,

Men have had way more than their fair share of our concern already, the reasoning goes, and now it’s time for them to pipe down

But for boys, privilege and harm intertwine in complex ways — male socialization is a strangely destructive blend of indulgence and neglect. Under patriarchy, boys and men get everything, except the thing that’s most worth having: human connection.

The prescription for creating a generation of healthier, more socially and emotionally competent men is the same in the wider political discourse as it is in our own homes — to approach boys generously rather than punitively

We need to acknowledge boys’ feelings, to talk with our sons in the same way we do our daughters, to hear them and empathize rather than dismiss or minimize, and engage with them as fully emotional beings.

They also claim that OpenAI has used hardball tactics to prevent workers from voicing their concerns about the technology, including restrictive nondisparagement agreements that departing employees were asked to sign.

“OpenAI is really excited about building A.G.I., and they are recklessly racing to be the first there,” said Daniel Kokotajlo, a former researcher in OpenAI’s governance division and one of the group’s organizers.

Other members include William Saunders, a research engineer who left OpenAI in February, and three other former OpenAI employees: Carroll Wainwright, Jacob Hilton and Daniel Ziegler. Several current OpenAI employees endorsed the letter anonymously because they feared retaliation from the company,

At OpenAI, Mr. Kokotajlo saw that even though the company had safety protocols in place — including a joint effort with Microsoft known as the “deployment safety board,” which was supposed to review new models for major risks before they were publicly released — they rarely seemed to slow anything down.

So was the departure of Dr. Leike, who along with Dr. Sutskever had led OpenAI’s “superalignment” team, which focused on managing the risks of powerful A.I. models. In a series of public posts announcing his departure, Dr. Leike said he believed that “safety culture and processes have taken a back seat to shiny products.”

“When I signed up for OpenAI, I did not sign up for this attitude of ‘Let’s put things out into the world and see what happens and fix them afterward,’” Mr. Saunders said.

Mr. Kokotajlo, 31, joined OpenAI in 2022 as a governance researcher and was asked to forecast A.I. progress. He was not, to put it mildly, optimistic.In his previous job at an A.I. safety organization, he predicted that A.G.I. might arrive in 2050. But after seeing how quickly A.I. was improving, he shortened his timelines. Now he believes there is a 50 percent chance that A.G.I. will arrive by 2027 — in just three years.

He also believes that the probability that advanced A.I. will destroy or catastrophically harm humanity — a grim statistic often shortened to “p(doom)” in A.I. circles — is 70 percent.

Last month, two senior A.I. researchers — Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike — left OpenAI under a cloud. Dr. Sutskever, who had been on OpenAI’s board and voted to fire Mr. Altman, had raised alarms about the potential risks of powerful A.I. systems. His departure was seen by some safety-minded employees as a setback.

Mr. Kokotajlo said, he became so worried that, last year, he told Mr. Altman that the company should “pivot to safety” and spend more time and resources guarding against A.I.’s risks rather than charging ahead to improve its models. He said that Mr. Altman had claimed to agree with him, but that nothing much changed.

In April, he quit. In an email to his team, he said he was leaving because he had “lost confidence that OpenAI will behave responsibly" as its systems approach human-level intelligence.

“The world isn’t ready, and we aren’t ready,” Mr. Kokotajlo wrote. “And I’m concerned we are rushing forward regardless and rationalizing our actions.”

On his way out, Mr. Kokotajlo refused to sign OpenAI’s standard paperwork for departing employees, which included a strict nondisparagement clause barring them from saying negative things about the company, or else risk having their vested equity taken away.

Many employees could lose out on millions of dollars if they refused to sign. Mr. Kokotajlo’s vested equity was worth roughly $1.7 million, he said, which amounted to the vast majority of his net worth, and he was prepared to forfeit all of it.

Mr. Altman said he was “genuinely embarrassed” not to have known about the agreements, and the company said it would remove nondisparagement clauses from its standard paperwork and release former employees from their agreements.)

In their open letter, Mr. Kokotajlo and the other former OpenAI employees call for an end to using nondisparagement and nondisclosure agreements at OpenAI and other A.I. companies.

“Broad confidentiality agreements block us from voicing our concerns, except to the very companies that may be failing to address these issues,”

They also call for A.I. companies to “support a culture of open criticism” and establish a reporting process for employees to anonymously raise safety-related concerns.

They have retained a pro bono lawyer, Lawrence Lessig, the prominent legal scholar and activist

Mr. Kokotajlo and his group are skeptical that self-regulation alone will be enough to prepare for a world with more powerful A.I. systems. So they are calling for lawmakers to regulate the industry, too.

“There needs to be some sort of democratically accountable, transparent governance structure in charge of this process," Mr. Kokotajlo said. “Instead of just a couple of different private companies racing with each other, and keeping it all secret.”

Still others believe that the advent of civil rights laws created, in essence, a second Constitution entirely, one that privileges group identity over individual liberty.

Protestant Christian nationalists tend to have a higher regard for the American founding, but they believe it’s been corrupted. They claim that the 1787 Constitution is essentially dead, replaced by progressive power politics that have destroyed constitutional government.

Catholic post-liberals believe that liberal democracy itself is problematic. According to their critique, the Constitution’s emphasis on individual liberty “atomizes” American life and degrades the traditional institutions of church and family that sustain human flourishing.

The original Constitution and Bill of Rights, while a tremendous advance from the Articles of Confederation, suffered from a singular, near-fatal flaw. They protected Americans from federal tyranny, but they also left states free to oppress American citizens in the most horrific ways

if your ultimate aim is the destruction of your political enemies, then the Constitution does indeed stand in your way.

Right-wing constitutional critics do get one thing right: The 1787 Constitution is mostly gone, and America’s constitutional structure is substantially different from the way it was at the founding. But that’s a good thing

its guardrails against tyranny remain vital and relevant today.

Individual states ratified their own constitutions that often purported to protect individual liberty, at least for some citizens, but states were also often violently repressive and fundamentally authoritarian.

The criminal justice system could be its own special form of hell. Indigent criminal defendants lacked lawyers, prison conditions were often brutal at a level that would shock the modern conscience, and local law enforcement officers had no real constitutional constraints on their ability to search American citizens and seize their property.

Through much of American history, various American states protected slavery, enforced Jim Crow, suppressed voting rights, blocked free speech, and established state churches.

As a result, if you were traditionally part of the local ruling class — a white Protestant in the South, like me — you experienced much of American history as a kind of golden era of power and control.

The Civil War Amendments changed everything. The combination of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments ended slavery once and for all, extended the reach of the Bill of Rights to protect against government actions at every level, and expanded voting rights.

But all of this took time. The end of Reconstruction and the South’s “massive resistance” to desegregation delayed the quest for justice.

decades of litigation, activism and political reform have yielded a reality in which contemporary Americans enjoy greater protection for the most fundamental civil liberties than any generation that came before.

And those who believe that the civil rights movement impaired individual liberty have to reckon with the truth that Americans enjoy greater freedom from both discrimination and censorship than they did before the movement began.

So why are parts of the right so discontent? The answer lies in the difference between power and liberty

One of the most important stories of the last century — from the moment the Supreme Court applied the First Amendment to state power in 1925, until the present day — is the way in which white Protestants lost power but gained liberty. Many millions are unhappy with the exchange.

Consider the state of the law a century ago. Until the expansion of the Bill of Rights (called “incorporation”) to apply to the states, if you controlled your state and wanted to destroy your enemies, you could oppress them to a remarkable degree. You could deprive them of free speech, you could deprive them of due process, you could force them to pray and read state-approved versions of the Bible.

The argument that the Constitution is failing is just as mistaken as the argument that the economy is failing, but it’s politically and culturally more dangerous

Powerful people often experience their power as a kind of freedom. A king can feel perfectly free to do what he wants, for example, but that’s not the same thing as liberty.

Looked at properly, liberty is the doctrine that defies power. It’s liberty that enables us to exercise our rights.

Think of the difference between power and liberty like this — power gives the powerful freedom of action. Liberty, by contrast, protects your freedom of action from the powerful.

At their core, right-wing attacks on the modern Constitution are an attack on liberty for the sake of power.

An entire class of Americans looks back at decades past and has no memory (or pretends to have no memory) of marginalization and oppression. They could do what they wanted, when they wanted and to whom they wanted.

Now they don’t have that same control

Muslims, Sikhs, Jews, Buddhists and atheists all approach the public square with the same liberties. Drag queens have the same free speech rights as pastors, and many Americans are livid as a result.

when a movement starts to believe that America is in a state of economic crisis, criminal chaos and constitutional collapse, then you can start to see the seeds for revolutionary violence and profound political instability. They believe we live in desperate times, and they turn to desperate measures.

“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” So much American angst and anger right now is rooted in falsehoods. But the truth can indeed set us free from the rage that tempts American hearts toward tyranny.

A lot of the news, however, is bad.

The bad news includes examples of people who reacted to Saturday’s events by glorifying violence, or by mocking its victims

The abject tactical failures of the Secret Service pose structural questions that urgently need to be answered.

The first conspiracies came from Trump’s detractors. As soon as the first pictures of his injury emerged, some influential Democratic activists and advisors suggested that this was a false flag operation, designed to strengthen his appeal.

Biden has, for example, repeatedly claimed that he decided to enter the 2020 presidential race after hearing Trump referring to the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who assembled for a deadly rally in Charlottesville in 2017 as “very fine people.” But while Trump was characteristically meandering and irresponsible in his remarks after that rally, he explicitly stated that “I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.”

Parts of the left have justified some forms of violence in the last years. Movements like Antifa explicitly glorify political violence, reserving for themselves both the right to take action against anyone they consider fascist, and the right to determine who should be included in that category

All of this is shameful. It must be called out and condemned without hedging or special pleading. But it also shouldn’t be inflated to imply that the Democratic establishment or the mainstream media has in general started to glorify violence.

Conversely, there is no doubt that parts of the Republican Party and the conservative movement have glorified political violence in the last years.

All of this is shameful, all the more so for coming from the most senior officials within the Republican Party. All of this must be called out and condemned without hedging or special pleading, something that the conservative media ecosystem have notably failed to do.

no excuse for overstating the extent to which the other side embraces political violence. And that is something that the most senior Democrats, from Joe Biden on down, have consistently done.

But the extent of conspiracism was much worse on the right.

he question of the day has come to be whether it is appropriate to portray Trump as an existential threat to democracy.

If it was appropriate to resist Hitler by violent means, and Trump is his modern-day equivalent, then (so goes the tacit implication of the New Republic’s cover), why shouldn’t it be legitimate to resist Trump by violent means?

Depressingly often, in American politics, both sides are badly wrong. In this particular case, it seems to me that both sides are mostly right.

It is perfectly appropriate—even in the aftermath of Saturday’s unconscionable attack on Trump—to warn about what his presidency may mean for America’s democracy. But there is never an excuse—even and especially when the stakes are truly high—for fear-mongering that distorts the exact nature of that threat.

if moments of tragedy and upheaval reveal the true state of a country, the first draft of America’s report card puts it in danger of failing. Most Americans continue to abhor violence. Our mutual hatred still knows limits. And yet the mix of institutional failure, conspiracist thinking, and partisan fear-mongering is very potent. The risk that it may yet set in motion dynamics which overwhelm the decent instincts of most ordinary Americans remains very real

As a history teacher in a large, diverse suburban high school, I have spent more and more time in recent years trying (with mixed results) to "win back" white boys falling down dark internet rabbit holes of racist, Islamophobic and antisemitic conspiracy theories, misogyny, etc. Most of these boys of course do not end up as shooters (when I suspect that might be the case I go right to administration), but they do end up holding horrifying views that bode ill for the future of our polity.

What defies the typical "shooter" stereotype among most in this larger universe of white boys getting radicalized online is that most, though not all, of the latter (in my experience) are among my most intellectually curious, thoughtful and sensitive students. But, to use Professor Henderson's phraseology, they are not "alphas." Some have friends, even girlfriends, but none of them are part of the "popular" crowd. They are bright, but not "good at school" like the students who end up in your Ivy League courses. At 15 or 16 or 17, they feel (correctly) that they have something to offer the world, but feel they have been locked out of all the paths to success in their narrow world: They'll never be star athletes, or valedictorian, or one of the popular kids.

They feel like the message we as a society (schools, YA literature, "mainstream media") are sending them is that "You are privileged; you are the oppressor, you are the cause and beneficiary of all the world's injustices." The complexities of graduate level political theory are generally lost on a teenage boy who feels like the whole world is against him. The irony is these are the boys who actually care about issues of justice. The quarterback and the debate champion don't care if you throw their privilege in their face. They know their worth and are too busy to care.

I am sharing this comment not so much to identify what motivates shooters - I have no expertise in criminal pathology - but more in terms of the educational vacuum creating a generation of disaffected young men open to believe conspiracy theories because we are no longer offering them an alternative narrative of Americanism that speak to them as powerfully as those of the conspiracy theorists, the White Nationalists, and the miraculously save man who will be their retribution.