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Musk and other right-wingers who bemoan a coming “population collapse” tend to oppose foreign immigration. Musk—once an immigrant himself, and possibly an illegal one, for a time—consistently emphasizes the ways in which immigrants weaken or threaten American society. He’s even trafficked in conspiracy theories, such as the story that President Joe Biden was secretly flying hundreds of thousands of immigrants into the country. Musk has publicly affirmed his belief in core aspects of Great Replacement Theory.

These positions have led Musk into obvious contradictions. Despite claiming the world is “basically empty of humans,” Musk has also posted, “America will fail if it tries to absorb the world.” Why would America “fail” if there’s nothing to absorb?

Instead, the new pronatalism of the hard right is exclusionary and authoritarian. Instead of being portrayed as equal partners with men in building stable families, women in this paradigm are understood as either mere tools for reproduction or targets of sexual violence who require men’s protection. Family is not a good in itself, in this picture: It receives its value instrumentally, as a method of achieving the deeper goals that underlie right-wing cultural politics.

All this makes clear that Musk’s interest in raising birth rates is about producing not more people per se but more of what he considers the right sort of people. It’s why he claims that “the culture of Italy, Japan, and France will disappear” if the women of those countries don’t have more babies. In today’s right-wing pronatalist picture, children, like women, are demographic tools.

Musk has become a leading voice of right-wing pronatalism in the United States. Malcolm and Simone Collins, the oddball couple described by the Guardian as “America’s premier pronatalists,” celebrate Musk as one of their most important allies in spreading their vision for a genetically selective, IQ-focused, eugenics-adjacent pronatalism. “What Elon stands for, largely, I wholly support. Our politics are very aligned,” Malcolm told a profiler just after interrupting himself to smack one of his children in the face.

The demographic anxieties that give rise to these sorts of concerns also shape right-wing pronatalist views of white women. On Wednesday, Dave Rubin implored Taylor Swift to rethink her endorsement of Harris, invoking the threat of sexual violence from immigrant men: “You are a young pretty girl, do you know what the gang members from Venezuela do to young pretty girls? It ain’t pretty!”

Attractive, white American women are not fellow subjects or citizens so much as sexual prizes that must be protected from the threat of violence by foreign men. Men like Musk might offer, seriously or not, to give them a child. Rubin might act as if he’s protecting them from sexual savages. The common thread is that the role of women in all of this is to be beautiful, to produce children, and to remain unsullied by foreigners. There’s nothing pro-family about any of that.

So, who are we? Payne argues that, although our identities are infinitely variable, we share a “psychological bottom line”: the conviction that we are “good and reasonable people.”

We have “psychological immune systems,” Payne concludes, and they keep us feeling good. Really, they do more than that—they help us maintain a stable sense of who we are.

According to Payne, a professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, flexible reasoning is a fundamental part of our mental tool kit. We reason flexibly in all sorts of nonpolitical situations. A young scholar might dread being denied tenure; a girlfriend might fear being dumped. But, when disaster strikes, they find ways of reasoning themselves back to happiness—as do we all

After taking the surveys away, the researchers secretly altered some of the answers that the respondents had given, then handed the surveys back and asked people to explain their views. Those surveyed only noticed that the answers had been changed twenty-two per cent of the time. “Astonishingly, on the majority of switched questions, participants then proceeded to explain why they chose an answer that they had in fact rejected,” Payne writes. “And the explanations they gave were every bit as sincere and compelling as the explanations they gave to answers that they actually had chosen.”

our determination to see ourselves as good, reasonable people extends to our tribes: we pledge our strongest loyalties to those groups that can “create and sustain our sense of identity as a good and valuable person.”

studies have shown that most people are pretty disorganized in their political thinking: very few of us hold a suite of positions that’s intellectually coherent or consistent over time

the uncomfortable reality we face, he argues, is that psychological drama is of national importance. Journalists and policy experts focus on the issues, and our changing views of them. But “the reasoning loops we go through are less like the linear thinking of a computer and more like painting,”

We desperately want a stable sense of ourselves, yet our views are profoundly unstable. What this adds up to, Payne argues, is the near-total subordination of political discourse to group identities.

most people are “winging it,” saying and thinking what they need to do in order to “preserve the bottom line that they are good and reasonable people and their group is good and reasonable.”

despite our missteps, we still see ourselves as basically decent, and decades of work in psychology have affirmed that we freely rewrite history to maintain this view. When psychologists convince people that they’re wrong about an issue, for instance, those people often later misremember their prior stance, forgetting that they ever thought differently.

In Payne’s account, we’re far more likely to try seeing ourselves as the good guys; we might accomplish this most efficiently by further dehumanizing those who have accused us of being bad.

The group affiliations that necessitate our ad-hoc beliefs are often “thrust upon us by accidents of history,” Payne writes. He points to the experience of Southern whites during and after slavery: having been born into a group that was perpetrating a heinous crime, many found it almost impossible not to believe that racism was in some sense justifiable.

For Payne, the divisions in our society are baked in, and we don’t really choose to belong to one tribe or another. Moreover, whether we are actually good and reasonable people depends on much more than our political opinions. Our lives are wider and deeper than our votes.

Still, politics is powerfully magnetic; it’s easy (and perhaps convenient) to experience it as the central moral arena of our lives, and so to invest extraordinary energy on the tending of our political identities

What if a group does things that aren’t good and reasonable? What if—say—its leader encourages people to invade the United States Capitol and overturn an election? And what if that group’s opponents say, loud and clear, that what happened was bad and crazy? In that case, winging it goes into overdrive. The insurrectionist group may even find it necessary to “say that the other side are fascists or socialists bent on destroying America,” Payne suggests. This is extreme behavior—but it’s in keeping with perfectly ordinary mental habits. In fact, Payne insists, it reflects a genuine desire to be good, giving one’s zany improvisations the feeling of moral force.

“If something doesn’t feel right, you can always go back and change it. News channels and social media are constantly serving up an assortment of arguments to fill your palette. If one combination doesn’t work you can keep mixing and shading, until everything feels right.” Our pictures alter from day to day, but a troubling status quo is preserved.

Payne’s analysis points to a different, more troubling level of irrationality. In his version of our political life, our deepest and most ineradicable habits of mind push some of us to indulge in radical fantasies about the rest of us

Irrespective of the underlying reality, these fantasies shape our collective life

“We need more humanizing, because people in our country have been dehumanizing one another a lot,” he writes. “Democrats call Trump supporters MAGAts. Republicans call Democrats demon rats.” And “decades of research have found that dehumanizing words and images are a strong predictor that political violence is around the corner.”

Democrats dream of a time when Republicans turn their backs on Donald Trump, and when all of America views him as a baddie. But is this really possible? If there’s a path out of our current political hellscape, it may very well involve the cultivation of a vast, exculpatory fiction in which the extremities of Trumpism are either forgotten or framed as understandable.

aybe, looking back, it will all be seen as part of some larger and largely innocent semi-mistake—a good-faith effort, undertaken for decent reasons, by people who were ultimately good and reasonable. This fiction will be galling to some people, but deeply reassuring to others. It could be that living with it will be the price we’ll have to pay to live with each other.

Trump has spent the past nine years not even trying to expand his base but just playing to the same MAGA grievances over and over again

Both parties “treat narrow victories like landslides and wave away narrow defeats, somehow seeing both as confirmation of their existing strategies.”

The parties, they write, “have prioritized the wishes of their most intensely devoted voters — who would never vote for the other party — over the priorities of winnable voters who could go either way.”

The problem is that where you find their weaknesses, there you find the priesthood. The public conversation on the Democratic side of things is dominated by highly educated urban progressives who work in academia, the media, the activist groups and so on

In days gone by, parties were political organizations designed to win elections and gain power. Party leaders would expand their coalitions toward that end. Today, on the other hand, in an increasingly secular age, political parties are better seen as religious organizations that exist to provide believers with meaning, membership and moral sanctification. If that’s your purpose, of course you have to stick to the existing gospel.

These folks have a highly developed and self-confident worldview — a comprehensive critique of American society. The only problem is that this worldview is rejected by most Americans, who don’t share the critique.

On these, as on so many other issues, the position that is held by a vast majority of Americans is unsayable in highly educated progressive circles. The priesthood has established official doctrine, and woe to anyone who contradicts it.

For example, the progressive priesthood, quite admirably, is committed to fighting racial oppression. Its members believe that the way to do that is to be hyperaware of racial categories — in the diversity, equity and inclusion way — in order to rearrange preferences to support historically oppressed groups.

Most Americans also seek to fight racism, but they seek to do it in a different way. Their goal is to reduce the salience of racial categories so that people’s talents and initiative determine their life outcomes.

Or take energy. Most members of the Democratic clerisy are properly alarmed by climate change and believe we should rapidly shift from fossil fuels. Liberal white college graduates favor eliminating fossil fuels by two to one. It’s no skin off their teeth; they work on laptops.

But if you live in Oklahoma or work in an industry that runs on oil, coal or natural gas, this idea seems like an assault on your way of life, which, of course, it is.

An overwhelming 72 percent of Americans favor an all-of-the-above approach, relying on both renewables and traditional energy sources.

Or take immigration. Highly educated white progressives tend to see the immigration and asylum issue through the lens of oppressor and oppressed: The people coming across our border are fleeing horror in their home countrie

most Americans see immigration through a law-and-order lens: We need to control our boundaries, preserve social order and take care of our own. In a June CBS survey 62 percent of Americans, including 53 percent of Hispanics, said they supported a program to deport undocumented immigrants — the most extreme version of this approach.

I think the reason for all this is that political parties no longer serve the function they used to

But in just the few months she has had to campaign, Harris can’t turn around the Democratic Party’s entire identity. Plus, her gestures have all been stylistic; she hasn’t challenged Democratic orthodoxy on any substantive issue

The result is that each party has its own metaphysics. Each party is no longer just a political organism; it is a political-cultural-religious-class entity that organizes the social, moral and psychological lives of its believers.

The political problem for Harris is that there are a lot more Americans without a college degree than with one. Class is growing more salient in American life, with Hispanic and Black working-class voters shifting steadily over to the working-class party, the G.O.P.

John Kelly, Trump’s second chief of staff, is known to have bought the book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President,” seeking insight on the man he served. Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s third chief of staff, recommended aides read “A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness.” He thought it would help them understand the way Trump’s strange psychology, maybe even his mental illness, helped make him a powerful and unique leader.

The history of pathologizing political leaders we do not like is not an admirable one. So I am not a psychiatrist, and I am saying something simpler and, I think, more neutral here: Trump moves through the world without the behavioral inhibition most of us labor under.

every person’s strengths are also their weaknesses. Disinhibition is the engine of Trump’s success. It is a strength. It is what makes him magnetic and compelling on a stage. It is what allows him to say things others would not say, to make arguments they would not make, to try strategies they would not try.

The politicians we sense to be inauthentic — it’s often that the software is slower and buggier. You can see the seams

One of Trump’s verbal tics is to say, “Many people are saying.” But it’s the opposite. He’s saying what many people want somebody to be saying. He’s saying what people are saying in private but often are not saying in public.

You certainly don’t get his politics without his personality. How many people must want to do what Trump has done? How many millionaires and billionaires and celebrities must have thought to themselves, “I’d be a good president. I’m smarter and more charismatic and better on a stage and wiser than these idiots up there”?

What Donald Trump has done is remarkable. It is historic. It is unique in the entire history of American politics. To run as an outsider to a political party and capture that political party totally. Break its fundamental consensus. Slander its previous standard-bearers. To then become president, having never held elective office or served in the military, while saying things and doing things that, until you, everybody believed you could not do or say in politics. To achieve something unique, you must yourself be unique. Donald Trump is unique.

Politicians are inhibited. Before anything comes out of their mouth, they are running their response through this internal piece of software. Some of them are really good at it. Pete Buttigieg, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama — the software is so fast and efficient as to be almost seamless.

Let me state what everybody knows: There are many things politicians believe that they do not say. The norms of politics — the norms of simple politeness — suppress much that people feel. There are vast swaths of political opinion you’re not really supposed to talk about. A lot of people believe that immigrants are bad and dangerous and that we shouldn’t have so many of them in this country. That free trade is ripping this country off and it’s the fault of these corrupt idiots in Washington lining their own pockets. That China isn’t our ally or our partner — it’s our enemy. And that the great threat to America comes from within, that other Americans are disloyal, that they are the enemy and the power of the state should be turned against them.

It is Trump’s absence of inhibition that makes him feel, to so many, like not a politician — the fact that he was already the U.S. president notwithstanding. It is why the people who want to be like him — the mini-Trumps, the Ron DeSantises and Blake Masterses and Ted Cruzes — can’t pull it of

During his presidency, Trump repeatedly proposed firing Patriot missiles at suspected drug labs in Mexico. He mused about launching nuclear weapons at other countries, and in one very strange case, at a hurricane

It is his great strength. It is also his terrible flaw.

Trump’s disinhibition is yoked to a malignancy at his core. I do believe he’s a narcissist. If Putin praises him, he will praise Putin. If John McCain mocks him, he will mock John McCain. Trump does not see beyond himself and what he thinks and what he wants and how he’s feeling

He does not listen to other people. He does not take correction or direction. Wisdom is the ability to learn from experience, to learn from others. Donald Trump doesn’t really learn

He once told a biographer: “When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same. The temperament is not that different.”I believe him totally when he says that

If Donald Trump is so bad, why were things so good? Why were they at least OK?

There is an answer to this question: It’s that as president, Trump was surrounded by inhibitors. In 2020 the political scientist Daniel Drezner published a book titled “The Toddler in Chief.” The core of the book was over 1,000 instances Drezner collected in which Trump is described by those around him in terms befitting an impetuous child.

In 2017 his deputy chief of staff Katie Walsh described working with President Trump as “trying to figure out what a child wants.” Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, said — quote — “I’m sick of being a wet nurse for a 71-year-old.” James Mattis, Trump’s first secretary of defense, and John Kelly, later his chief of staff, often described themselves like babysitters; they made a pact to never be overseas at the same tim

Miles Taylor, the chief of staff of the Department of Homeland Security. In a 2020 interview with ABC, he described the lengths he and others took to shield America — to shield their own staff — from the commander in chief’s whims and rages:

Miles Taylor: The president at the time would get into these phone rants with us, the secretary, myself, about Jerry Brown, and how frustrated he was with Jerry Brown and later Gavin Newsom, because they didn’t support him. And he didn’t have a base of supporters in California. So as wildfires were burning down houses in the state, the president basically said to us, “I don’t care. These people haven’t done enough to deserve it. Cut off the money.”

Our answer was: We’re not going to do it. Don’t worry. We’ll go back to the president. But then, George, months after, again in January 2019, the president said he wanted to do it. And again, I think subsequently, he tweeted about doing it. Fortunately, it never happened. FEMA didn’t follow through on it because I think because they determined from their lawyers that a tweet wasn’t an official order.

The Trump administration was rife with this sort of thing. In 2019 a senior national security official told CNN’s Jake Tapper: “Everyone at this point ignores what the president says and just does their job. The American people should take some measure of confidence in that.”

there is something undeniably electric to watch someone unchained from the bundle of inhibitions the rest of us carry around. Watching someone just say it. There is something aspirational about it

He mused about the efficacy of untested or dangerous treatments for Covid

In 2020, during the protests following George Floyd’s murder, Trump raged at his staff, demanding they turn the full force of the military against the protesters.

Esper: He says: “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?” And he is suggesting that that’s what we should do, that we should bring in the troops and shoot the protesters.

After Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, he refused to admit that loss, perhaps refused to even believe that loss. I’m personally persuaded by the reporting that he’d come to believe very weird theories both of fraud and that he could be reinstated as president.

Trump did not care. He was unrestrained by those inhibitions. He tried, in every possible way he could, to overturn the election

What is remarkable to me about that answer — which, to be sure, Trump gave just last week at a Univision town hall — is that it doesn’t serve Trump’s own interests. He needs to reassure people about this. That’s the problem with lacking the restraint that most of us hav

When JD Vance showed up at the vice-presidential debate as a kinder, gentler, more accommodating version of himself, all that anger and contempt sanded off, he did that for a reason. He inhibited himself to achieve his goals. But Trump has no ability to do the same. That is why he lost the debate with Harris so decisively

If you want to see Trump lose the 2024 election, that answer is perfect. If you want to see him win it — which he does, which his staff does — that answer is insane. The man cannot help himself.

The best argument you can make about Trump’s first term is that there was a constructive tension between his disinhibition and the constraints of the staff and the bureaucracy and the institutions that surrounded him

Yes, some of his ideas were bad, dangerous and unconstitutional. But those mostly didn’t happen: They were stopped by his aides, by the so-called deep state, by the courts, by civil society.

And the way he pushed, the way he didn’t constrain himself to what other presidents would have done or said, maybe that led to changes that — at least if you agree with him — were positive. Changes that wouldn’t have happened under another president: tariffs on China, a sharp drop in border crossings, NATO allies spending more on defense.

But now the people around Trump have spent four years plotting to dismantle everything that stopped Trump the first time. That’s what Project 2025, and the nearly 20,000 résumés it reportedly vetted, is really all about. That’s what Trump’s inner circle is spending its time and energy doin

I’ve heard this from a number of people preparing for a second Trump term. Personnel was a problem in the first. Vetting for loyalty is the answe

When, Ross asked, did Vance decide he actually liked Donald Trump?

Vance is one of many now who’ve made it their mission to see that Trump’s future orders are carried out, no matter their content

Vance has been arguing this for some time. Here he is in 2021, again arguing that the true threat to democracy isn’t Trump trying to overturn elections or Trump doing dangerous things in office but Trump’s will being frustrated by the bureaucracy around him:

The thing to see here is that Trump’s supporters want to have it both ways: They point to what didn’t happen in his first term as proof that the same or worse would not happen in his second term. But they themselves are trying to remove everything that stopped Trump’s worst impulses from becoming geopolitical or constitutional crises.

we know that aging can make disinhibition worse. The August 2020 edition of the journal Psychology and Aging was entirely devoted to research on how the ability to control our behavior appears, in many studies, to decline as we get older

It is hard not to think of that research when I read that Trump’s rallies have stretched to an average of 82 minutes, up from about 45 minutes in 2016. Trump’s ability to ramble on a stage is often used as evidence of his continued vigor. I think it’s the opposite. I think his inability to stop rambling on a stage is evidence that what little capacity he once had to control himself is weakening

What has changed even more than Trump are the people and institutions around him. The leader of the House Republicans is Mike Johnson, not Paul Ryan. Mitch McConnell is stepping down from Senate leadership. And while I do not consider McConnell a profile in courage, his successor will be more in need of Trump’s patronage. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, for all their flaws, are out, while Don Jr. and Lara Trump are in. JD Vance wormed his way onto the ticket by promising to do what Mike Pence would not. Elon Musk is doing everything in his power to buy influence, centrality even, in another Trump administration. The Supreme Court has given Trump immunity from prosecution for official presidential actions. Republicans have spent four years plotting to take control of the administrative state — to stock it with loyalists who would never, ever do anything to impede Trump — and turn the entire machinery of the government to Trump’s whims.

Donald Trump is not cognitively fit to be president. The presidency is a position that requires an occupant able to act strategically and carefully.

for years, his supporters have said: Don’t watch the man. Don’t listen to what he says. Look at the results. But those results reflected the power and ability of others to check Trump, to inhibit him when he could not inhibit himself. It is not just the man who is now unfit; it is the people and institutions that surround him.

Here is one difference between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. The people who work most closely with Joe Biden, his top staff, have always said he is up to the job of the presidency. Fit cognitively. Fit morally. The people who worked most closely with Donald Trump, many of his cabinet secretaries, many of them now say he is not.

But to admit the obvious is to be excommunicated, to go from one of Trump’s amazing hires — he only brings on the best people — to one of his deranged enemies, a loser, someone he fired. And so he is now surrounded by yes men and enablers, by opportunists and scam artists, by ideologues and foot soldiers.

What we saw on that stage in Pennsylvania, as Trump D.J.’d, was not Donald Trump frozen, paralyzed, uncertain. It was the people around him frozen, paralyzed, uncertain. He knew exactly where he was. He was doing exactly what he wanted to do. But there was no one there, or no one left, who could stop him.

by the time it invaded Ukraine in 2022, disillusionment with Western liberalism had gone so far that President Vladimir V. Putin’s tirades against the supposed decadence of the West enjoyed wide support among far-right nationalist movements across Europe, in the United States and elsewhere.

The curious resurrection and resounding victory of Donald J. Trump amounted to the apotheosis of a long-gathering revolt against the established order. No warning of the fragility of democracy or freedom, no allusion to 20th-century cataclysm or Mr. Trump’s attraction to dictators, could hold back the tide.

“The Sleepwalkers” was the title of Christopher Clark’s book on the onset of World War I. They appear to many to be afoot once more.

With nationalist and anti-immigrant political currents strong throughout the continent, Mr. Trump will have more levers than during his first term with which to undermine the 27-nation European Union. The possibility that Europe will splinter, with each nation cutting its own deals with Washington, appears real.

many Americans believe that Mr. Trump, at heart a businessman for whom foreign policy is merely a matter of transactional resolve, will usher in an era of prosperity incompatible with the turbulence of war. During his first term, he forged the Abraham Accords normalizing relations between Israel and four Arab states.

Speaking as Germany’s coalition government collapsed and uncertainty loomed before a general election next year, he added that Mr. Trump’s victory was particularly troubling because “the German Federal Republic is a creation of the United States of America, the fruit of postwar enlightened American policy.”

For the international system, a Russian victory in Ukraine would affirm a principle of might over right, and for Europe it would pose a direct threat.

“There is no possible good outcome in Ukraine today,” said Ms. Bacharan, the French political scientist. “Trump wants the war over and, with Putin, will do whatever it takes.”

To this mire will now be added the chaotic, impulsive, high-risk approach to foreign policy described with near unanimity by Mr. Trump’s top aides during his first term, as well as his expressed contempt for NATO and the European Union, anchors of postwar Western security and stability, and his threats of confrontation with China in the form of punishing tariffs. A turbulent world and a turbulent personality make for a dangerous mix.

“As a nation we don’t have a way to deal with a world where every country is only looking out for itself,” Mr. Bagger said of Germany. “We nurtured the idea of an international community because it was the only post-Nazi way to think of ourselves. So where we turn in Trump’s world is unclear.”

The BRICS group of emerging market nations is now a powerful counterweight to the West, as illustrated at its meeting last month, hosted by Mr. Putin. Entrenched Russian and Chinese hostility toward the United States will complicate Mr. Trump’s every foreign policy endeavor.

India, at once a BRIC member with close ties to Russia and a close friend of the United States, enjoyed good relations with Mr. Trump during his first term. Jawed Ashraf, the Indian ambassador to France, said he expected that to continue.

But Mr. Ashraf added: “We are in a state of the world where people are seeking new answers. There’s a lack of belief in the future. Economic models unable to deliver, unfettered social media, and global volatility lead to taking it out on immigrants and questioning of democratic systems.”

In societies atomized by the overwhelming pace of technological change, and marked by growing inequality, Mr. Trump had simple answers that resonated.

Those answers were the border and the pocketbook, the former too porous and the latter too empty. He would fix both.

“It was the fight-fight-fight backlash,”

“No more complex diagnosis, no more delicate decisions.”

“God spared my life for a reason,” Mr. Trump said at his victory speech early Wednesday. The possibility of a sense of divine mission, backed by a clear electoral mandate, could make the likelihood of balanced policy more remote.

People want strength,” he said then. “We’re going to be so tough and so mean and so nasty,” he said. He got the blood up. Many dismissed him as a buffoon. But with his uncanny political antennae, attuned to humanity’s fears and resentments, he was onto something.

China was rising; American power ebbing; Afghanistan and Iraq were graveyards of American glory; millions of struggling Americans felt forgotten or invisible; and the establishment had not understood the fact-lite theater of the contemporary world.

It was the perfect storm for rabble-rousing. Far from an anomaly, Mr. Trump now looks like an inevitability, the answer, not once but twice, to the shattering of hopes for liberal democracy that accompanied the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Donald Trump played to the irritation of many Americans disgusted at being regarded as insensitive for talking the way they’d always talked. At rallies, he referred to women as “beautiful” and then pretended to admonish himself, saying he’d get in trouble for using that word

One thing that makes Democrats great is that they unabashedly support groups that have suffered from inequality. But they have to begin avoiding extreme policies that alienate many Americans who would otherwise be drawn to the party.

Democrats learned the hard way in this election that mothers care both about abortion rights and having their daughters compete fairly and safely on the playing field.

A revealing chart that ran in The Financial Times showed that white progressives hold views far to the left of the minorities they champion. White progressives think at higher rates than Hispanic and Black Americans that “racism is built into our society.” Many more Black and Hispanic Americans surveyed, compared with white progressives, responded that “America is the greatest country in the world.”

Representative Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat, said the party needs rebranding. “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone,” he said. “I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”

The Trump campaign’s most successful ad showed Kamala favoring tax-funded gender surgery for prisoners. Bill Clinton warned in vain that she should rebut it.

James Carville gave Kamala credit for not leaning into her gender and ethnicity. But he said the party had become enamored of “identitarianism” — a word he uses because he won’t say “woke” — radiating the repellent idea that “identity is more important than humanity.”

“We could never wash off the stench of it,” he said, calling “defund the police” “the three stupidest words in the English language.”

Classical liberalism is a doctrine built around respect for the equal dignity of individuals through a rule of law that protects their rights, and through constitutional checks on the state’s ability to interfere with those rights

But over the past half century that basic impulse underwent two great distortions. The first was the rise of “neoliberalism”, an economic doctrine that sanctified markets and reduced the ability of governments to protect those hurt by economic change. The world got a lot richer in the aggregate, while the working class lost jobs and opportunity. Power shifted away from the places that hosted the original industrial revolution to Asia and other parts of the developing world.

The second distortion was the rise of identity politics or what one might call “woke liberalism”, in which progressive concern for the working class was replaced by targeted protections for a narrower set of marginalised groups: racial minorities, immigrants, sexual minorities and the like. State power was increasingly used not in the service of impartial justice, but rather to promote specific social outcomes for these groups.

In the meantime, labour markets were shifting into an information economy. In a world in which most workers sat in front of a computer screen rather than lifted heavy objects off factory floors, women experienced a more equal footing. This transformed power within households and led to the perception of a seemingly constant celebration of female achievement.

The rise of these distorted understandings of liberalism drove a major shift in the social basis of political power. The working class felt that leftwing political parties were no longer defending their interests, and began voting for parties of the right.

Thus the Democrats lost touch with their working-class base and became a party dominated by educated urban professionals. The former chose to vote Republican. In Europe, Communist party voters in France and Italy defected to Marine Le Pen and Giorgia Meloni

With regard to immigration, Trump no longer simply wants to close the border; he wants to deport as many of the 11mn undocumented immigrants already in the country as possible. Administratively, this is such a huge task that it will require years of investment in the infrastructure needed to carry it out — detention centres, immigration control agents, courts and so on.

The Republican victory was built around white working-class voters, but Trump succeeded in peeling off significantly more Black and Hispanic working-class voters compared with the 2020 election. This was especially true of the male voters within these groups.

There is no particular reason why a working-class Latino, for example, should be particularly attracted to a woke liberalism that favours recent undocumented immigrants and focuses on advancing the interests of women.

It is also clear that the vast majority of working-class voters simply did not care about the threat to the liberal order, both domestic and international, posed specifically by Trump.

what is the underlying nature of this new phase of American history?

The real question at this point is not the malignity of his intentions, but rather his ability to actually carry out what he threatens. Many voters simply don’t take his rhetoric seriously, while mainstream Republicans argue that the checks and balances of the American system will prevent him from doing his worst. This is a mistake: we should take his stated intentions very seriously.

Trump is a self-proclaimed protectionist, who says that “tariff” is the most beautiful word in the English language. He has proposed 10 or 20 per cent tariffs against all goods produced abroad, by friends and enemies alike, and does not need the authority of Congress to do so.

As a large number of economists have pointed out, this level of protectionism will have extremely negative effects on inflation, productivity and employment.

Donald Trump not only wants to roll back neoliberalism and woke liberalism, but is a major threat to classical liberalism itself.

It will have devastating effects on any number of industries that rely on immigrant labour, particularly construction and agriculture. It will also be monumentally challenging in moral terms, as parents are taken away from their citizen children, and would set the scene for civil conflict, since many of the undocumented live in blue jurisdictions

He has vowed to use the justice system to go after everyone from Liz Cheney and Joe Biden to former Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Mark Milley and Barack Obama. He wants to silence media critics by taking away their licences or imposing penalties on them.

Whether Trump will have the power to do any of this is uncertain: the court system was one of the most resilient barriers to his excesses during his first term. But the Republicans have been working steadily to insert sympathetic justices into the system, such as Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida, who threw out the strong classified documents case against him.

Trump has privately threatened to pull out of Nato, but even if he doesn’t, he can gravely weaken the alliance by failing to follow through on its Article 5 mutual defence guarantee. There are no European champions that can take the place of America as the alliance’s leader, so its future ability to stand up to Russia and China is in grave doubt. On the contrary, Trump’s victory will inspire other European populists such as the Alternative for Germany and the National Rally in France.

East Asian allies and friends of the US are in no better position. While Trump has talked tough on China, he also greatly admires Xi Jinping for the latter’s strongman characteristics, and might be willing to make a deal with him over Taiwan

At the end of his term, he issued an executive order creating a new “Schedule F” that would strip all federal workers of their job protections and allow him to fire any bureaucrat he wanted. A revival of Schedule F is at the core of the plans for a second Trump term, and conservatives have been busy compiling lists of potential officials whose main qualification is personal loyalty to Trump. This is why he is more likely to carry out his plans this time around.

critics including Kamala Harris accused Trump of being a fascist. This was misguided insofar as he was not about to implement a totalitarian regime in the US. Rather, there would be a gradual decay of liberal institutions, much as occurred in Hungary after Viktor Orbán’s return to power in 2010.

This decay has already started, and Trump has done substantial damage. He has deepened an already substantial polarisation within society, and turned the US from a high-trust to a low-trust society; he has demonised the government and weakened belief that it represents the collective interests of Americans; he has coarsened political rhetoric and given permission for overt expressions of bigotry and misogyny; and he has convinced a majority of Republicans that his predecessor was an illegitimate president who stole the 2020 election.

In 2011, with Mr. Trump making headlines as the leading spokesman for birtherism, Barack Obama’s team seized the opportunity to cast him as the face of the entire Republican opposition. Years later, David Plouffe, an Obama campaign manager turned presidential adviser, explained the strategy. “Let’s really lean into Trump here,” Mr. Plouffe remembered thinking. “That’ll be good for us.”

the anti-MAGA coalition had rallied time and again, conveniently relieving Democrats of the burden that comes with deciding what to believe other than not being Mr. Trump.

But there was a price to be paid. No matter how progressive the rhetoric, Resistance politics inevitably feels conservative. It’s reactionary in a literal sense: The other side decides the terms of debate, and it usually ends with finding yet another norm under assault, a new outrage to be tutted over or another institution that needs protecting.

her biggest challenges were downstream from the failure to build a Democratic identity beyond #Resistance. Commitment to stitching together an anti-MAGA coalition made it impossible to lay out the priorities that would have guided a Harris administration

There was no way to tie her policies together into a unifying vision that set her apart from Mr. Biden, no account of what Democrats learned presiding over a country that most Americans feel is on the wrong track.

This fundamental problem explains the strange incoherence of Ms. Harris’s strategy. Judge the campaign by how it was described in the press, and you’d think the chief targets were Never Trump Republicans

Check out the ads that ran in swing states, though, and you’d hear a populist message that wouldn’t have sounded out of place coming from Bernie Sanders,

she struggled to harness material frustrations, even though testing from her chief super PAC, Future Forward, repeatedly demonstrated that it was her strongest argument with swing voters

the broad-based character of the shift toward Republicans is the classic tell of an electorate frustrated with an incumbent party. For now, the election looks like a rejection of Mr. Biden, not a realignment for Mr. Trump.

the pendulum that swung against Democrats on Tuesday will bring them back into power eventually. If history is any guide, that day will probably arrive sooner than feels possible right now.

Still, progressives worried that fascism is on the march would benefit from taking a closer look at how these movements gain power.

Reflecting on Hitler’s rise in her native Germany, Hannah Arendt pointed out that by the final days of the Weimar Republic, politics had split into two irreconcilable factions: “those who wanted the status quo at any price” versus “those who wanted change at any price.” One thing both groups had in common, she added, was “the tacit assumption that the electorate would go to the polls because it was frightened.”

He was impeached, indicted and convicted, and then he won more votes in a fair fight with what could well be the most racially diverse Republican coalition in decades. Trumpism doesn’t have a generational lock on American politics, but it has broad and deep support, with the potential to grow in the years to come.

It’s going to take a sprawling, messy and sometimes brutal debate inside the Democratic coalition — a debate that ends with a party that can plausibly present itself as a champion of ordinary people trying to make a better life in a broken system.

The Resistance has run into a dead end

it does mean giving up on the hope that laws, norms or one last impeachment will deliver us from Trumpism

After the Civil War, a series of amnesties were passed, eventually encompassing almost all Confederate soldiers.

The complicit were so great in number that identifying and trying every one of them would come at significant cost, but more important, no law could sufficiently condemn what they had done, and no criminal procedure could adequately consecrate the memory of their wrongs.

the “act of oblivion,” an ancient, imperfect legal and moral mechanism for bringing an end to episodes of political violence. These acts were invoked when forgiveness was impossible, yet when pragmatism demanded a certain strain of forgetting — a forgetting that instead of erasing unforgivable transgressions, paradoxically memorialized them in the minds of all who had survived their assault

Rather than relying upon the courts to deliver impossible and unattainable forms of reckoning, oblivion provided opportunities for the extralegal recognition of political and moral wrongs, and reminded its subjects of the desire for, and necessity of, coexistence.

For centuries, legislative “acts of oblivion” were declared in times when betrayal, war and tyranny had usurped and undermined the very foundations of law; when a household or nation had been torn apart, its citizens pitted against one another; when identifying, investigating, trying and sentencing every single guilty party threatened to redouble the harm

Under the oblivions of old, the ringleaders of riots, insurrections and tyrannical reigns were prosecuted for their crimes and in many cases were forced out of the cities and states they had once claimed to rule. Treasonous leaders were prohibited from holding public office

I wondered what it would mean to revive the old idea of oblivion in our age of seemingly unending memory.

Oblivion demanded accountability for those who bore primary responsibility for political rupture and often required material compensation and restitution for the harms don

consecrating the facts of what had occurred while refusing to allow the misfortunes of the past to dictate the future.

over the course of the 20th century, as the cultural tide gradually turned toward an embrace of remembrance and recrimination, oblivion fell out of favor, and out of collective memory.

The oldest act of oblivion is usually dated to 403 B.C., when the Athenians, having survived the bloody reign of the Thirty Tyrants, swore to never remember the wrongs of a war within the family, a civil war that had divided Athens.

The 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, the supposed origin point of our world of sovereign states, promised that all the violence, hostility, damage and expenses that had been incurred “on the one side, and the other … shall be bury’d in eternal Oblivion.”

In 1660, the Indemnity and Oblivion Act restored the British monarchy after the English Civil War

To remember the power of oblivion is not to naïvely wish away the wrongs of the recent past, but rather quite the opposite: By marking certain transgressions as unforgivable and unforgettable, it recognizes the depth of the loss while also opening a path toward political pragmatism

the Continental Congress passed a resolution recommending that states treat loyalists with leniency, “to receive such returning penitents with compassion and mercy, and to forgive and bury in oblivion their past failings and transgressions.” Punishments for loyalists were, according to the scholar Mugambi Jouet, “particularly mild” for the era.

Over the past several decades, our society has become oversaturated with memory. In our legal system, a single, low-level crime can ruin an individual’s life forever, people are forced to serve sentences for acts that are no longer illegal, and even a sealed conviction or an arrest with no charge can jeopardize job, housing and volunteer opportunities.

This virtual culture of incessant, uncompromising remembrance and recrimination has seeped from our screens, affecting the kinds of conversations we are willing to have in public, and with whom.

Every day, we depend on our devices to store every photograph, every video, every file. We store all these things because we have learned a bit too well that it is important to remember, to archive, to keep receipts and screenshots. To create a faithful, digitized log not only of our own lives but also of those around us

we have been very good students of memory. So good that we have, I think, forgotten what all our memory is for — that it can guide us to choose justice over vengeance

Revisiting the forgotten idea of oblivion would give us permission to reconsider our unthinking overdependence on memory and perhaps to begin to let go of all the data, digital and otherwise, that we do not need

our personal and political memories, which, left to fester for too long, can corrode and transform, causing us to lose sight of their original force and feeling.

Gripped too tightly, memory can become a vengeful and violent force.

The unique power of oblivion is that it does not forgive the crimes committed on one side or the other, but rather consecrates and memorializes the profound gravity of the wrongs. It demands accountability and refuses absolution, yet it rejects the project of perpetual punishment.

Historically, appeals to oblivion offered political communities the prospect of rethinking the present, presenting a rare opportunity to re-evaluate and confront societal divisions.

we don’t know what the eff we’re talking about when we talk about religion. People start comparing religion, and the thing is ill-defined. Some religions are religions. Some religions are just bodies of laws

Judaism and Islam are not religions like Christianity is a religion, the exact opposite. Let me explain.

Islam and Judaism are laws. It’s law — there’s no distinction between holy and profane — whereas Christianity is not law. Why isn’t it law? A simple reason — you remember the Christ said what is for Caesar and is not for Caesar? It’s because the Romans had the laws. You’re not going to bring the law because they already have the law, and very sophisticated law at that, the Romans.

With Christianity was born the separation of church and state. It’s secular, so it’s effectively a secular religion that says that when you go home, you do whatever you want.

when people are talking about Salafi Islam — it’s not a religion in the sense that Mormon Christianity is a religion. It is a body of laws. It’s a legal system. It’s a political system. It’s a legal system.

So people are very confused when they talk about religion. They’re comparing things that are not the same

Sometimes religion becomes an identity, sometimes law, sometimes very universal.

The same weakness that I see sometimes describe ethnicity. Being Greek Orthodox is more ethnicity than something else, or being Serbian versus Croatian

Comparing religions naively is silly, it’s heuristic and leads to things like saying, “Well, he has a right to exercise his faith.”

Some faiths should not have the right to be exercised, like Salafis or extreme jihadism because they’re not religions. They’re a legal system. They’re like a political party that wants to ban all other political parties

countries that have too much stability become weaker, particularly if it’s propped up, sort of like companies. You see companies that go bust, you get companies that have zero volatility, compressed volatility.

Many of them really should have a little volatility, but some of them would be sitting on dynamite.

COWEN: What can we learn from Sufism?

The problem, that it was destroyed by Saudi Arabian funding. What can we learn from them is how your religion can be destroyed without anybody noticing. The number of Sufis —take Tripoli in Lebanon, it was Sufi. Why did it become non-Sufi? Because of funding from Saudi Arabia — you indoctrinate two generations, and that’s it.

as people get rich, they get controlled by the preferences, they’re controlled by the outside. It was $200 a person. I said, “OK, I’d rather pay $200 for a pizza and would pay $6.95 for the same meal except that by social pressure.” This is how we use controlling preferences. It’s the skin in the game. You discover that your preferences are . . . People are happier in small quarters. You have neighbors around you and narrow streets.

I’d rather eat with someone else a sandwich, provided it’s good bread — not this old bread — than eat at a fancy restaurant. It’s the same thing I discovered little by little. Even from a hedonic standpoint, sophistication is actually a burden.

Aside from that, there is something also that, from the beginning, you realize that hedonism — that pursuit of pleasure for pleasure’s sake — there’s something about it that gives me anxiety. On the other hand, doing something productive — not productive in the sense of virtual signaling, but something that fits a sense of honor — you feel good.

the window is a description, not a tactic: Shifting it doesn’t mean proposing extreme ideas to make somewhat less extreme ideas seem reasonable.

“It just explains how ideas come in and out of fashion, the same way that gravity explains why something falls to the earth,”

The key is that shifts begin with the public. Mr. Overton argued that the role of organizations like his own was not to lobby politicians to support policies outside the window, but to convince voters that policies outside the window should be in it. If they are successful, an idea derided as unthinkable can become so inevitable that it’s hard to believe it was ever otherwise.

“We have come a very, very long way in the American people now demanding legislation and concepts that just a few years ago were thought to be very radical,” Mr. Sanders said in a recent interview.

That the Overton window is shifting doesn’t necessarily mean policies like Medicare for all will be enacted, and it doesn’t say anything about whether they are good or bad. But it does say something meaningful about the political climate.

Part of the story is polarization: Democrats moving left and Republicans right, to an extent “that we haven’t seen previously in a modern political period,”

As support for more ambitious policies has increased among Democrats, there has also been “a wave of young party leaders who are less encumbered by a long voting history tying them to more moderate and less progressive policy stances,” Dr. Atkinson said. “And they’re being supported by a base that is ready to hear these messages.”

Out of the 7,000 rooms in the Village, 2,500 have been supplied mobile air conditioning units at the teams’ requests, a Paris 2024 spokesman said

Keeping cool at all times is that much more important given the erratic schedules that some of the athletes here are facing, said Carroll, the Australian Olympic committee executive. Since many athletes’ events are at night, they’ll need to sleep during the hottest part of the day. So the decision to pay for air conditioners was a no-brainer.

But not everyone is all-in on A/C. Germany’s Olympic sports federation will have one of the larger contingents in the village with around 350 athletes. That includes 6-foot-7½-inch decathlon medal favorite Leo Neugebauer, who recently won the NCAA title competing for the Texas Longhorns in Austin, where air conditioning isn’t merely a suggestion—it’s a way of life.

When Germany asked its individual sport federations if they wanted to order air conditioning units for the athletes’ village, demand for frigid air was lukewarm, according to Olympic committee spokesman Michael Schirp.

“A total of 11 AC have been ordered. Eleven,” he wrote, adding an emoji of a face wearing sunglasses.

Today, those who express different ideas about racial identity often encounter serious resistance. When Tiger Woods, the child of two mixed-race people, announced himself to be “Cablinasian” — as a combination of Caucasian, Black, American Indian and Asian — he was mocked as not knowing who he is. The writer Thomas Chatterton Williams encountered skepticism when he said he couldn’t see his blond, blue-eyed child as Black.

all signs indicate that my children are growing up in a world that’s very different from the one I grew up in. I experienced plenty of passing instances of racism, even as a student at fancy private schools. But it’s been a half century now. Experiences of the kind Harris has recounted, of suburban white kids whose parents told them not to play with her because she was Black, have been alien to my girls so far.

If someday they decide not to define themselves as Black, it will not be because they are ashamed or in some kind of denial. It will be because the world has changed, and we should be thankful for that.

American discourse is, happily, becoming more amenable to the idea that a person who is half Black can be two things rather than just one

What is most important is that Harris, Obama and other people of mixed racial heritage can now get as far as they have. As for our habit of processing Blackness as foundational — much as Strom Thurmond did — it will be ever more absurd as the races mix further over the coming generations. On this custom, history will look upon us in puzzlement.

Analyzing data covering a near universe of Americans born from 1978 to 1992, the researchers found that when employment among the poor parents of children in a community improves, those children are better off economically as adults

it doesn’t rely on whether a child’s own parents are employed: Outcomes also improve for children who simply grow up in a neighborhood where more parents have jobs. In other words, their own parents might be unemployed, but if their schoolmates’ parents work, their outcomes will be better.

: In places where parental employment deteriorates, the opposite happens—children do worse as adults.

“Growing up in a community where employment rates are higher for people in your race and class—if those employment rates are higher, the kids who grew up in those environments do better in the long run,”

For poor white children born in 1978, vast swaths of the U.S. were a land of opportunity. Apart from some areas, such as Appalachia and Rust Belt areas of Michigan and Ohio, these children overall had a good chance of making it to a higher rung on the income ladder than their parents. 

For poor white children born in 1992, the map was more constrained. While some parts of America, such as the upper Midwest, remained bastions of opportunity, much of the U.S. did worse. Children with parents at the 25th percentile who grew up in Milwaukee had lower income when they turned 27 in 2019—an inflation-adjusted $30,619—than their older counterparts had.

But poor Black children born in 1992 who grew up in Kent County did better. On average, a Black child at the 25th percentile in that birth cohort had inflation-adjusted household income of $23,547 at age 27, or 38% more than their 1978 counterpart. 

In contrast to the environment for poor white children, few places in America provided poor Black children born in 1978 much opportunity for advancement.

Kent County, Mich., is a little more than 100 miles directly east of Milwaukee, and home to Grand Rapids, another old-line manufacturing city. Black children born to parents at the 25th percentile by income in 1978 who grew up in Kent had an average household income of $17,029 at age 27. That put them at the 28th percentile by income, leaving them on essentially the same rung as their parents.

This dynamic, playing out across the country, led to a significant widening of the income gap between poor and well-off white children. A white child born to parents at the 25th percentile in 1978 made, on average, an inflation-adjusted $10,383 less at age 27 than a child born to parents at the 75th percentile. But for children born in 1992, that income difference was 27% larger at $13,202.

One thing that changed for poor white children compared with poor Black children was the relative share of their parents who were employed. 

In Milwaukee County, for example, the share of the parents of low-income white children who were employed went from 69.1% for children born in 1978 to 55.6% for children born in 1992—a 13.5 percentage point decline. Those employment declines were likely driven by the loss of more than a third of the county’s manufacturing jobs during those years. Children born at the 25th percentile in 1992 reached the 44th percentile on average, 4 percentage points lower than those born in 1978.

And this pattern of falling parental employment and worsening outcomes repeated itself across much of the country. In counties where employment rates among poor white parents fell sharply, such as Philadelphia County, Pa., the income ranks of poor white children in adulthood fell too. Mobility tended not to deteriorate as much for poor white children growing up in counties such as Sumner, Tenn., where parental employment held up better.

the experience in Kent was the general pattern across the country, with employment rates for the parents of poor Black children falling less than their poor white counterparts, or gaining. And as was the case with poor whites, the new research finds that changes in parental employment rates in a community were strongly associated with changes in children’s outcomes.

the researchers emphasize that it is not a zero-sum game, with mobility for poor Black people improving only because mobility for poor white people is falling: Indeed, places where opportunity for Black children improved most are also where white children did best.

The purpose of journalism is to get the story and tell the story.

Now the cavemen turn to the tribal elder. “What should we do?” “Short term, climb a tree if you see a wolf,” she says. “They don’t like fire and noise, so we should keep lit torches and scream. In the longer term, wolf packs are seen in the west, so we should go east to high ground.” That is the authentic sound of commentary, of editorials and columns. Advice, exhortation—they’re part of the news too. People will always want it, question it, disagree.

It is as if journalism is no longer about Get the Story but about Meeting People Where They Are and helping them navigate through a confusing world. But do you really think current editors know where people are? Do you think they know how to navigate? It all feels presumptuous.

The great news for journalism is there will always be a huge market for this. The need for news is built into human nature. Tech platforms change, portals change, but the need is forever.

The past two decades, accelerating over the past four years, newsrooms have increasingly become distracted from their main mission, confused about their purpose. Really, they’ve grown detached from their mission

the journalistic product now being offered has become something vaguer than it was, more boring, less swashbuckling, more labored, as if it’s written by frightened people. There’s an emphasis on giving the story “context,” but the story doesn’t feel alive and the context seems skewed

But even cavemen who eat bugs and wear hides are not always grim. Man wants not only to be informed but to be amused, entertained. He wants humor, wit, mischief, a visual tour of the latest cave paintings. Cave man want cooking app. And word games and reporting on the richest tribes: “Most Expensive Cave Dwelling Sells in Malibu.”

More disturbing, major stories go unreported because, the reader senses, they don’t relate to the personal obsessions of the editors and reporters, or to their political priors.

Facebook and social media can’t get the story. They can amplify it, give an opinion, comment. But they don’t have the resources and expertise; they don’t have trained investigative journalists and first-class experienced editors and a publisher willing to take a chance and spend the money. Social media has opinions, emotions, propaganda.

And the great thing for newspapers is if you get the story—if you are known to get the story, like the Washington Post in the Watergate years—you will be read.

In early 2023, Len Downie and Andrew Heyward, formerly executive editor of the Washington Post and president of CBS News, respectively, wrote a paper about how modern journalists see standards within their professions, and it seemed to me not only confused but a kind of capitulation. There had been a “generational shift” in journalism, and the many editors and reporters they interviewed think objectivity is more or less “outmoded,” a false standard created by the white male patriarchy.

What was really striking was there was no mention, not one, of the thrill of the chase, of getting the story—of journalism itself. It was all about the guck and mess, not the mission, and made them look like news bureaucrats, joyless grinds, self-infatuated bores.

They were obsessed with who’s in the newsroom when their readers are obsessed with what comes out of the newsroom.

current ways of encouraging diversity seem to yield a great sameness in terms of class and viewpoint, and in any case diversity is a mission within a mission, it isn’t the mission itself, which is: Get the story, tell the story.

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

In their place, Trump’s stump speech has become dominated by grievances about the wrongs he believes have been done to him and his promises to get even for them. It doesn’t quite create the festive atmosphere of eight years ago, when many attendees were clearly having a great time. Where the new, more prosaic feeling lacks the uplift of the past, though, it has still managed to generate enough enthusiasm

The lack of catchy slogans might not matter if they were just slogans. But in 2016, they were a symbol of Trump’s willingness to talk about things that other candidates, including other Republicans, shied away from.

Regarding the war in Gaza, he has criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and called for the conflict to end quickly—but on Israel’s terms.

He had several such policy positions, including breaking with the bipartisan consensus on free trade, pledging to protect Social Security and Medicare, and claiming to have opposed the Iraq War from the start.

The focus on the wall also showed that he was willing to deploy (putatively) “commonsense” ideas that other politicians weren’t. This helped Trump to appeal not just to Republicans but to disaffected voters of all stripes

Where Trump once trumpeted his appointment of justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, he is now fumblingly trying to formulate a position on abortion that doesn’t alienate either his base or swing voters, mostly relying on ambiguity

Trump is emphasizing fewer big transformational ideas compared with 2016. His promises are a scattershot collection of ideas targeted at particular segments of the electorate: ending taxes on salary earned from tips, defending TikTok (a platform he once tried to ban), declassifying files on John F. Kennedy’s assassination, rolling back fossil-fuel regulations. Although he promises to clamp down on the border and deport undocumented immigrants, you won’t catch a “Round ’em up” chant at his rallies. And Project 2025, his allies’ proposal to overhaul the federal government by massively expanding political patronage, doesn’t lend itself to a bumper sticker.

Trump allots a great deal of his stump speech to mocking Biden as incoherent and senile (sometimes awkwardly) while also warning that Biden’s administration has made the United States a failed nation, and that his reelection could be fatal to the country. The disconnect between the images of Biden as doddering fool and as evil schemer is one that Republicans have struggled to reconcile but that Trump has concluded doesn’t need resolving.

Grievance is not a new note at Trump rallies, but four and eight years ago, he used to talk about other people’s grievances and promise to redress them. Now the grievances are largely his own

One big problem for Clinton was the criticism that she had no compelling goal for her candidacy other than that she wanted to be president. Trump’s campaign now is about nothing so much as his desire to be president.

Even Project 2025 is about the accumulation of executive power itself, rather than any particular policy goal