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To avoid detection, Lewis’ captors snuck him and the other survivors into Alabama at night and made them hide in a swamp for several days. To hide the evidence of their crime, the 86-foot sailboat was then set ablaze on the banks of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta (its remains may have been uncovered in January 2018).

Most poignantly, Lewis’ narrative provides a first-hand account of the disorienting trauma of slavery. After being abducted from his home, Lewis was forced onto a ship with strangers. The abductees spent several months together during the treacherous passage to the United States, but were then separated in Alabama to go to different owners.

“We very sorry to be parted from one ’nother,” Lewis told Hurston. “We seventy days cross de water from de Affica soil, and now dey part us from one ’nother. Derefore we cry. Our grief so heavy look lak we cain stand it. I think maybe I die in my sleep when I dream about my mama.”

Lewis also describes what it was like to arrive on a plantation where no one spoke his language, and could explain to him where he was or what was going on. “We doan know why we be bring ’way from our country to work lak dis,” he told Hurston. “Everybody lookee at us strange. We want to talk wid de udder colored folkses but dey doan know whut we say.”

As for the Civil War, Lewis said he wasn’t aware of it when it first started. But part-way through, he began to hear that the North had started a war to free enslaved people like him. A few days after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered in April 1865, Lewis says that a group of Union soldiers stopped by a boat on which he and other enslaved people were working and told them they were free.

Lewis expected to receive compensation for being kidnapped and forced into slavery, and was angry to discover that emancipation didn’t come with the promise of “forty acres and a mule,” or any other kind of reparations. Frustrated by the refusal of the government to provide him with land to live on after stealing him away from his homeland, he and a group of 31 other freepeople saved up money to buy land near Mobile, which they called Africatown.

Many decades later, her principled stance means that modern readers get to hear Lewis’ story the way that he told it.

since the civil-rights movement, Republicans (and many non-Republicans) have expressed two conflicting racial mantras: (1) racism no longer exists, and (2) racism is spreading against white people. Since Joe Biden’s election, this second mantra has overtaken the first.

White-supremacist ideology lives on what Heather McGhee calls the “zero-sum myth,” the idea that progress for people of color necessarily comes at white folks’ expense.

It fearmongers about the future: If white people are not worshipped in schools, then they will be demonized; if white people don’t reign supreme, then they will be subjugated; if white people don’t hoard resources and opportunities, then they will be starved; if white people cannot kill at will, then they will be killed at will

White violence is presumed to be self-defense. Defending yourself against a white supremacist is presumed to be a criminal act.

Extreme fear perhaps breeds this extreme fear. White supremacists probably fear revenge, retaliation, the tables turning—as they wipe the blood of democracy, of equality, of the dying and dead off their hands

they know the level of brutality they have leveled against people of color and their white allies.

They probably can’t imagine that Indigenous anti-racists just want their land back and aren’t genocidal; that Black anti-racists just want reparations and don’t want to enslave; that Asian anti-racists just want to be visible and don’t want to render white people invisible; that Latino and Middle Eastern anti-racists just want to flee violence and don’t want to invade predominantly white nations.

History reproduces itself. But when people don’t know history—or are barred from learning it—how can they ever recognize its reproduction?

It doesn’t matter to these Republicans that their assertions have no basis in fact; for them, words have no intrinsic meaning. A party that once portrayed itself as a fierce critic of relativism and a fierce defender of objective truth now delights in debasing words in order to gain and maintain political power. Theirs is the ethic of Thrasymachus, the cynical Sophist in Plato’s Republic who believes that might makes right and that injustice is better than justice.

The base of the Republican Party fell in love with the Trump Show—with his “owning the libs” and willingness to validate conservatives’ grievances and resentments, his chaos-creating ways, and his capacity to shatter norms and channel hatreds. To his supporters, Trump is entertaining and cathartic, a “fighter,” a middle finger to an establishment they revile. Every criticism of him, every legal action taken against him, provides them with one more reason to rally around him. The stronger the evidence against him, the deeper their devotion to him and the more intense their rage at those who call him out

The trials of Donald Trump will deepen the divides in a country already brimming with political hate. The more threatened he feels, the more he will advocate political violence. We saw what he did when he was losing his presidency; imagine what he’ll do when he’s losing his freedom.

Here’s something we should prepare for: If Donald Trump thinks he’s going down, he’s going to try to burn down our institutions. He will mobilize his MAGA base, his Republican enablers, and the right-wing media to unleash yet more lies and conspiracy theories. He will portray himself as a martyr who is being persecuted for the sake of his supporters. He will claim that his legal troubles prove that the system is corrupt, and not him. Trump and his supporters will try to tamper with witnesses, intimidate jurors, and threaten public officials. And he will try to cause enough confusion, disorientation, discord, fear, and even violence to escape accountability yet again.

Donald Trump has already deeply wounded our nation. He’s perfectly willing to break it. It’s up to us to keep him from succeeding.

Men now receive about 74 bachelor’s degrees for every 100 awarded to women, and men account for more than 70 percent of the decline in college enrollment overall

In 2020, nearly half of women reported in a TD Ameritrade survey that they out-earn or make the same amount as their husbands or partners — a huge jump from fewer than 4 percent of women in 1960.

women are “increasingly selective,” leading to a rise in lonely, single young men — more of whom now live with their parents than a romantic partner.

Men also account for almost 3 of every 4 “deaths of despair,” either from a suicide, alcohol abuse or an overdose.

In my opinion, Peterson served up fairly banal advice: “Stand up straight,” “delay gratification.” His evolutionary-biology-informed takes ranged from amusingly weird to mildly insulting.

Women are still dealing with historical discrimination and centuries of male domination that haven’t been fully accounted for or rectified. Are we really worrying that men feel a little emasculated because their female classmates are doing well?

But millions of men lack access to that kind of power and success — and, downstream, cut loose from a stable identity as patriarchs deserving of respect, they feel demoralized and adrift. The data show it, but so does the general mood: Men find themselves lonely, depressed, anxious and directionless.

It seems like there’s been a breakdown, right? But there’s a very real way in which, at this moment, a lot of guys don’t know — they have no sense of what it means to be them, particularly. They have no idea what it means to be a man.”

Past models of masculinity feel unreachable or socially unacceptable; new ones have yet to crystallize. What are men for in the modern world? What do they look like? Where do they fit

Only one group seems to have no such doubts about offering men a plan.

an entire academic discipline emerged to theorize about gender and excavate women’s history — there hasn’t been a corresponding conversation about what role men should play in a changing world. At the same time, the increasing visibility of the LGBTQ+ movement has made the gender dynamic seem less stable, less defined.

went to that 2018 Peterson appearance as a skeptic. But his appeal — along with that of his fellow “manfluencers” — has become clearer since

Technically, men are slightly in the minority in the United States. But apart from that, Bray had a point — and what he said explained a lot about why the left and the mainstream are losing men.

What’s notable, first, is their empathy. For all Peterson’s barking and, lately, unhinged tweeting, he’s clearly on young men’s side.

This is especially compelling in a moment when many young men feel their difficulties are often dismissed out of hand as whining from a patriarchy that they don’t feel part of. For young men in particular, the assumption of a world built to serve their sex doesn’t align with their lived experience, where girls out-achieve them from pre-K to post-graduate studies and “men are trash” is an acceptable joke.

Then there’s the point-by-point advice. If young men are looking for direction, these influencers give them a clear script to follow — hours of video, thousands of book pages, a torrent of social media posts — in a moment when uncertainty abounds

if instruction is lacking elsewhere, even basic tips (“Clean your room!” Peterson famously advises) feel like a revelation. Plus, the community that comes with joining a fandom can feel like a buffer against an increasingly atomized world.

As one therapist told me: “I have used Jordan Peterson to turn a boy into a man. I used him to turn this guy without a strong father figure into someone who, yes, makes his bed and stands up straight and now is successful.” The books, she said, “do provide a structure that was clearly missing.”

It’s also important that the approach of these male models is both particular and aspirational. The BAPs and Hawleys find ways to celebrate aspects of the male experience — from physical strength to competitiveness to sex as a motivator — that other parts of modern society have either derided as “toxic” or attempted to explain aren’t specific to men at al

the 20-something guy in front of me swung around. “Jordan Peterson,” he told me without a hint of irony in his voice, “taught me how to live.”

the fact that they’re willing to define it outright feels bravely countercultural.

A baby-faced, 19-year-old University of Florida freshman with short, white-blond hair, Bray was wearing a hoodie despite the heat. (He grew up in Sarasota, so he was used to it.) He had agreed to talk to me about how he saw uncertainties about masculinity playing out on his campus.

First, he laid out his liberal, Gen Z bona fides — he’s in a fraternity, but many of his close friends are LGBTQ+. He feels that old versions of masculinity might be dissolving for the better.

But then he got candid. He doesn’t really identify with the manosphere, he told me, but can understand why others might. “I feel like there’s a lot of room to be proudly feminine, but there’s not, in my opinion, the same room to be proudly masculine.”

Men were constantly told to be “better” and less “toxic,” he said, but what that “better” might look like seemed hard to pin down. “You pretty much have to figure it out yourself. But yet society still has the expectation that, you know, you have to be a certain way.

Then he turned wistful. “I don’t feel like men in general have the same types of role models that women do, even in their own personal lives. … Just because you’re in the majority doesn’t mean you don’t need support.”

At their best, these influencers highlight positive traits that were traditionally associated with maleness — protectiveness, leadership, emotional stability — and encourage them, making “masculinity” out to be a real and necessary thing, and its acquisition something honorable and desirable

Even today, some progressives react touchily to any efforts to help men as a group.

In the conversations I had with men for this essay, I kept hearing that many would still find some kind of normative standard of masculinity meaningful and useful, if only to give them a starting point from which to expand.

The strategist described his party as having almost an allergy to admitting that some men might, in fact, be struggling in a unique way and could benefit from their own tailored attention and aid

when you strip out the specificity, people feel less seen,” he said. “There’s less of a resonance. If the question is what scripts we have for men, how are we appealing to men, then being willing and able to talk about men is a pretty key component of that.”

To the extent that any vision of “nontoxic” masculinity is proposed, it ends up sounding more like stereotypical femininity than anything else: Guys should learn to be more sensitive, quiet and socially apt, seemingly overnight

I’m convinced that men are in a crisis. And I strongly suspect that ending it will require a positive vision of what masculinity entails that is particular — that is, neither neutral nor interchangeable with femininity. Still, I find myself reluctant to fully articulate one. There’s a reason a lot of the writing on the crisis in masculinity ends at the diagnosis stage.

Take Richard Reeves’s book “Of Boys and Men,” omnipresent in the discourse since its 2022 release.

even he acknowledges he has felt pressure to shy away from some of the harder questions his subject matter raises.

Reeves told me that in his writing, he tried to stay descriptive, only going so far as saying there are some differences between the sexes that need to be taken into account to create the most viable solutions. He frames the biological differences between the sexes not as a binary but as overlapping distributions of traits — aggression, risk appetite, sex drive — with clusters of one sex or the other at the extremes.

But when it came to writing any kind of script for how men should be, the self-possessed expert scholar faltered.

“That’s a question I basically dodged in the book,” Reeves told me. “Because, candidly, it’s outside of my comfort zone. It’s more personal. It’s harder to empirically justify. There are no charts I can brandish.” After all, as he said, he’s a think-tank guy, a wonk.

“But I think I’m now trying to articulate more prescriptively, less descriptively, some of these discussions about masculinity and trying to send some messages around it” — here, his speech became emphatic — “because, honestly, nobody else is f---ing doing it except the right.”

“As soon as you start articulating virtues, advantages, good things about being male … then you’ve just dialed up the risk factor of the conversation,” he said. “But I’m also acutely aware that the risk of not doing it is much greater. Because without it, there’s a vacuum. And along comes Andrew Tate to make Jordan Peterson look like a cuddly old uncle.”

many progressives have ignored the opportunity to sell men on a better vision of what they can be

As a result, there’s a temptation to minimize men’s problems or erase references to masculinity altogether.

“I mean, there are certain attributes around masculinity that we should embrace. Men think about sex more than women. Use that as motivation to be successful and meet women. Men are more impulsive. Men will run out into a field and get shot up to think they’re saving their buddies.”

He was careful to point out that he doesn’t believe that women wouldn’t do as much but that the distributions are different.

“Where I think this conversation has come off the tracks is where being a man is essentially trying to ignore all masculinity and act more like a woman. And even some women who say that — they don’t want to have sex with those guys. They may believe they’re right, and think it’s a good narrative, but they don’t want to partner with them.”I, a heterosexual woman, cringed in recognition.

so men should think, ‘I want to take advantage of my maleness. I want to be aggressive, I want to set goals, go hard at it. I want to be physically really strong. I want to take care of myself.’”

“My view is that, for masculinity, a decent place to start is garnering the skills and strength that you can advocate for and protect others with. If you’re really strong and smart, you will garner enough power, influence, kindness to begin protecting others. That is it. Full stop. Real men protect other people.

Reeves, in our earlier conversation, had put it somewhat more subtl

His recipe for masculine success echoed Galloway’s: proactiveness, agency, risk-taking and courage, but with a pro-social cast

many young men I spoke with would describe as aspirational, once they finally felt safe enough to admit they did in fact carry an ideal of manhood with its own particular features.

Physical strength came up frequently, as did a desire for personal mastery. They cited adventurousness, leadership, problem-solving, dignity and sexual drive. None of these are negative traits, but many men I spoke with felt that these archetypes were unfairly stigmatized: Men were too assertive, too boisterous, too horny.

in fact, most of these features are scaffolded by biology — all are associated with testosterone, the male sex hormone. It’s not an excuse for “boys will be boys”-style bad behavior, but, realistically, these traits would be better acknowledged and harnessed for pro-social aims than stifled or downplayed

despite a push by some advocates to make everything from bathrooms to birthing gender-neutral, most people don’t actually want a completely androgynous society. And if a new model for masculinity is going to find popular appeal, it will depend on putting the distinctiveness of men to good use in whatever form it comes.

“Femininity or masculinity are a social construct that we get to define,” Galloway concluded. “They are, loosely speaking, behaviors we associate with people born as men or born as women, or attributes more common among people born as men or as women. But the key is that we still get to fill that vessel and define what those attributes are, and then try and reinforce them with our behavior and our views and our media.”

What would creating a positive vision of masculinity look like? Recognizing distinctiveness but not pathologizing it. Finding new ways to valorize it and tell a story that is appealing to young men and socially beneficial, rather than ceding ground to those who would warp a perceived difference into something ugly and destructive.

more than 20 years ago, anthropologist David D. Gilmore published “Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity,” a cross-cultural study of manliness around the world. He found that almost all societies had a concept of “real,” “true” or “adult” manhood that was seen as a valuable and indispensable ideal. But masculinity had to be earned — and proved

Men achieved it by providing for their families and broader society, by protecting their tribe and others, and by successfully procreating

all three of these goals seem less celebrated and further from reach. Young men who disappear into online forums, video games or pornography see none of the social or personal rewards of meeting these goals, and their loneliness and despair suggest how painful it has been to lose track of this ideal.

The other feature of Gilmore’s findings was that boys generally had to be ushered into manhood and masculinity by other men. And that seems to be a key link missing today.

“When I talk to my friends, I can literally count on one hand the number of friends I have who have a good relationship with their dad and actually have learned things from him,

Many of the young men I talked to for this essay told me they had troubled relationships with their fathers, or no father figure in their lives at all. The data bear this out: Since 1960, the percentage of boys living apart from their biological fathers has nearly doubled, from 17 percent to 32 percent.

“If you’re growing up in a single-parent household, and you go to a typical public school and typical medical system, there’s a decent chance that you will not encounter a male figure of authority until middle school or later. Not your doctor, not your teachers. No one else around you. What does that feel like?”

In 2018, Harvard economist Raj Chetty published a groundbreaking study on race and economic opportunity. Among the findings was that persistent income inequality between Black and White people was disproportionately driven by poor outcomes among Black boys.

those boys who grew up in neighborhoods where there were more fathers present — even if not their own — had significantly higher chances of upward mobility.

“Ultimately,” Reynolds mused, “it’s about relationships and finding older men who, you know — they’re not flashy, they’re not ‘important,’ necessarily, but they actually are living virtuous lives as men. And then being able to then learn from them.”

fostering positive representations of manhood requires relationships and mentorship on an individual level in a way that can’t be mandated.

nearly every thinker on the masculinity problem advocates getting more men into classrooms, from kindergarten up — not just for their effects as teachers but also because they’re more likely to serve as coaches, especially of boys’ sports.

the change will need to come from the bottom up — from everyday men who notice the crisis of identity hitting their younger counterparts and can put themselves forward to help. “Ninety percent of this, if not 95, is on us, is on older men, is on society,”

We can find ways to work with the distinctive traits and powerful stories that already exist — risk-taking, strength, self-mastery, protecting, providing, procreating. We can recognize how real and important they are. And we can attempt to make them pro-social — to help not just men but also women, and to support the common good.

For the left, there’s room to elaborate on visions of these qualities that are expansive, not reductive, that allow for many varieties of masculinity and don’t deny female value and agency.

In my ideal, the mainstream could embrace a model that acknowledges male particularity and difference but doesn’t denigrate women to do so. It’s a vision of gender that’s not androgynous but still equal, and relies on character, not just biology

it acknowledges that certain themes — protector, provider, even procreator — still resonate with many men and should be worked with, not against.

it will be slow. A new masculinity will be a norm shift, and that takes time.

empathy will be required, as grating as that might feel.

In the American system, it is the voters, the courts, and Congress that are meant to serve as checks on a president’s behavior, not the generals. Civilians provide direction, funding, and oversight; the military then follows lawful orders.

“As chairman, you swear to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, but what if the commander in chief is undermining the Constitution?” McMaster said to me.

“General Milley has done an extraordinary job under the most extraordinary of circumstances,” Gates said. “I’ve worked for eight presidents, and not even Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon in their angriest moments would have considered doing or saying some of the things that were said between the election and January 6.

Trump called Gallagher a hero and said he didn’t understand why he was being punished.“Because he slit the throat of a wounded prisoner,” Milley said.“The guy was going to die anyway,” Trump said.

Milley answered, “Mr. President, we have military ethics and laws about what happens in battle. We can’t do that kind of thing. It’s a war crime.” Trump answered that he didn’t understand “the big deal.” He went on, “You guys”—meaning combat soldiers—“are all just killers. What’s the difference?”

There’s a little bit of a ‘There but for the grace of God go I’ feeling in all of this. What happened to Gallagher can happen to many human beings.” Milley told me about a book given to him by a friend, Aviv Kochavi, a former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces. The book, by an American academic named Christopher Browning, is called Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland.

“It’s a great book,” Milley said. “It’s about these average police officers from Hamburg who get drafted, become a police battalion that follows the Wehrmacht into Poland, and wind up slaughtering Jews and committing genocide. They just devolve into barbaric acts. It’s about moral degradation.”

During Milley’s time in the Trump administration, the disagreements and misunderstandings between the Pentagon and the White House all seemed to follow the same pattern: The president—who was incapable of understanding or unwilling to understand the aspirations and rules that guide the military—would continually try to politicize an apolitical institution.

The image of a general in combat fatigues walking with a president who has a well-known affection for the Insurrection Act—the 1807 law that allows presidents to deploy the military to put down domestic riots and rebellions—caused consternation and anger across the senior-officer ranks, and among retired military leaders.

According to Esper, Trump desperately wanted a violent response to the protesters, asking, “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?” When I raised this with Milley, he explained, somewhat obliquely, how he would manage the president’s eruptions.“It was a rhetorical question,” Milley explained. “ ‘Can’t you just shoot them in the legs?’ ”“He never actually ordered you to shoot anyone in the legs?” I asked.“Right. This could be interpreted many, many different ways,” he said.

Milley and others around Trump used different methods to handle the unstable president. “You can judge my success or failure on this, but I always tried to use persuasion with the president, not undermine or go around him or slow-roll,” Milley told me. “I would present my argument to him. The president makes decisions, and if the president ordered us to do X, Y, or Z and it was legal, we would do it. If it’s not legal, it’s my job to say it’s illegal, and here’s why it’s illegal. I would emphasize cost and risk of the various courses of action. My job, then and now, is to let the president know what the course of action could be, let them know what the cost is, what the risks and benefits are. And then make a recommendation. That’s what I’ve done under both presidents.”

He went on to say, “President Trump never ordered me to tell the military to do something illegal. He never did that. I think that’s an important point.”

For his part, General Chiarelli concluded that his friend had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Quoting Peter Feaver, an academic expert on civil-military relations, Chiarelli said, “You have to judge Mark like you judge Olympic divers—by the difficulty of the dive.”

That summer, Milley visited Chiarelli in Washington State and, over breakfast, described what he thought was coming next. “It was unbelievable. This is August 2, and he laid out in specific detail what his concerns were between August and Inauguration Day. He identified one of his biggest concerns as January 6,” the day the Senate was to meet to certify the election. “It was almost like a crystal ball.”

Chiarelli said that Milley told him it was possible, based on his observations of the president and his advisers, that they would not accept an Election Day loss. Specifically, Milley worried that Trump would trigger a war—an “October surprise”­—to create chaotic conditions in the lead-up to the election. Chiarelli mentioned the continuous skirmishes inside the White House between those who were seeking to attack Iran, ostensibly over its nuclear program, and those, like Milley, who could not justify a large-scale preemptive strike.

In the crucial period after his road-to-Damascus conversion, Milley set several goals for himself: keep the U.S. out of reckless, unnecessary wars overseas; maintain the military’s integrity, and his own; and prevent the administration from using the military against the American people. He told uniformed and civilian officials that the military would play no part in any attempt by Trump to illegally remain in office.

The desire on the part of Trump and his loyalists to utilize the Insurrection Act was unabating. Stephen Miller, the Trump adviser whom Milley is said to have called “Rasputin,” was vociferous on this point. Less than a week after George Floyd was murdered, Miller told Trump in an Oval Office meeting, “Mr. President, they are burning America down. Antifa, Black Lives Matter—they’re burning it down. You have an insurrection on your hands. Barbarians are at the gate.”

According to Woodward and Costa in Peril, Milley responded, “Shut the fuck up, Steve.” Then he turned to Trump. “Mr. President, they are not burning it down.”

In the weeks before the election, Milley was a dervish of activity. He spent much of his time talking with American allies and adversaries, all worried about the stability of the United States. In what would become his most discussed move, first reported by Woodward and Costa, he called Chinese General Li Zuocheng, his People’s Liberation Army counterpart, on October 30, after receiving intelligence that China believed Trump was going to order an attack

“General Li, I want to assure you that the American government is stable and everything is going to be okay,” Milley said, according to Peril. “We are not going to attack or conduct any kinetic operations against you. General Li, you and I have known each other for now five years. If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise … If there was a war or some kind of kinetic action between the United States and China, there’s going to be a buildup, just like there has been always in history.”

Milley later told the Senate Armed Services Committee that this call, and a second one two days after the January 6 insurrection, represented an attempt to “deconflict military actions, manage crisis, and prevent war between great powers that are armed with the world’s most deadliest weapons.”

Milley also spoke with lawmakers and media figures in the days leading up to the election, promising that the military would play no role in its outcome. In a call on the Saturday before Election Day, Milley told news anchors including George Stephan­opoulos, Lester Holt, and Norah O’Donnell that the military’s role was to protect democracy, not undermine it.

“The context was ‘We know how fraught things are, and we have a sense of what might happen, and we’re not going to let Trump do it,’ ” Stephanopoulos told me. “He was saying that the military was there to serve the country, and it was clear by implication that the military was not going to be part of a coup.” It seemed, Stephanopoulos said, that Milley was “desperately trying not to politicize the military.

“The motto of the United States Army for over 200 years, since 14 June 1775 … has been ‘This we will defend,’ ” Milley said. “And the ‘this’ refers to the Constitution and to protect the liberty of the American people. You see, we are unique among armies. We are unique among militaries. We do not take an oath to a king or queen, a tyrant or dictator. We do not take an oath to an individual. No, we do not take an oath to a country, a tribe, or religion. We take an oath to the Constitution … We will never turn our back on our duty to protect and defend the idea that is America, the Constitution of the United States, against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

He closed with words from Thomas Paine: “These are times that try men’s souls. And the summer soldier and the sunshine Patriot will in this crisis shrink from the service of their country. But he who stands by it deserves the love of man and woman. For tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.”

“World War II ended with the establishment of the rules-based international order. People often ridicule it—they call it ‘globalism’ and so on—but in fact, in my view, World War II was fought in order to establish a better peace,” Milley told me. “We the Americans are the primary authors of the basic rules of the road—and these rules are under stress, and they’re fraying at the edges. That’s why Ukraine is so important. President Putin has made a mockery of those rules. He’s making a mockery of everything. He has assaulted the very first principle of the United Nations, which is that you can’t tolerate wars of aggression and you can’t allow large countries to attack small countries by military means. He is making a direct frontal assault on the rules that were written in 1945.”

“It is incumbent upon all of us in positions of leadership to do the very best to maintain a sense of global stability,” Milley told me. “If we don’t, we’re going to pay the butcher’s bill. It will be horrific, worse than World War I, worse than World War II.”

If Trump is reelected president, there will be no Espers or Milleys in his administration. Nor will there be any officials of the stature and independence of John Kelly, H. R. McMaster, or James Mattis. Trump and his allies have already threatened officials they see as disloyal with imprisonment, and there is little reason to imagine that he would not attempt to carry out his threats.

This was clearest in his attitude to India. When Gandhi began his campaign of peaceful resistance, Churchill raged that he “ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back.” He later added: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”

If Churchill had been interested only in saving the empire, he could probably have cut a deal with Hitler. No: he had a deeper repugnance to Nazism than that. He may have been a thug, but he knew a greater thug when he saw one — and we may owe our freedom today to this wrinkle in history.

Hussein Onyango Obama is unusual among Churchill’s victims only in one respect: his story has been rescued from the slipstream of history. Churchill believed the highlands, the most fertile land in Kenya, should be the sole preserve of the white settlers, and approved of the clearing out of the local “kaffirs.” When the Kikuyu rebelled under Churchill’s postwar premiership, some 150,000 of them were forced at gunpoint into detention camps, later called “Britain’s gulag” by the historian Caroline Elkins. Obama never truly recovered from the torture he endured.

In 1943, to give just one example, a famine broke out in Bengal, caused, as the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has proven, by British mismanagement. To the horror of many of his colleagues, Churchill raged that it was their own fault for “breeding like rabbits” and refused to offer any aid for months while hundreds of thousands died.

This is the great, enduring paradox of Churchill’s life. In leading the charge against Nazism, he produced some of the richest prose poetry in defense of freedom and democracy ever written. It was a check he didn’t want black or Asian people to cash, but as the Ghanaian nationalist Kwame Nkrumah wrote, “all the fair brave words spoken about freedom that had been broadcast to the four corners of the earth took seed and grew where they had not been intended.”

In other words: Conservatism and the Republican party have not changed because the elites changed. It has changed because this is what the voters (and consumers) of the tribe want it to be. The elites who were willing to change their ideas to conform with the preferences of the volk were permitted to remain in the movement. The elites who were not, were cast out.

maybe it’s half-right: Maybe living in a largely homogenous monoculture meant that those people didn’t have to be nervous about what classical liberalism could lead to and it was only diversity, demographic change, and the fracturing of the monoculture that awakened an openness to illiberalism.

No. The big question is: Did the people’s desires change? Or were they always like this—but the power of the Republican and conservative elites was able to keep most of their illiberal preferences underground?

know that for many Democrats, the answer is: The Republican base voters were always like this. “Small government” and “states rights” were just code words. None of this is new. That’s why we’re Democrats.

To me, the interesting question isn’t, “How much of the shift is because of the elites and how much is because of the people?”

Or maybe something fundamental really did change: The decline of religious practice opened people to treating politics like faith. The stagnation of the middle class made people desperate. Social stratification and decreased mobility created resentment.

“Fealty to the law meant nothing to him. The country’s interests meant nothing to him. The only oath he has taken is to his own greed and self-preservation.” But that does not mean voters can ignore the obvious conflict that occurs when someone simultaneously thwarts a government investigation and pledges to enforce the Constitution.

Tribe notes that Article VI of the Constitution specifies that public officials must take an oath “not just to obey the Constitution and laws of the United States but ‘to support this Constitution.’ ”

In other words, should members of Congress implicated in the plot to overturn the 2020 election choose to take the Fifth, they would be setting up a conflict between their self-interest and the interest in upholding and supporting the Constitution

True, the Constitution spells out no disqualifications for federal office, other than conviction through impeachment and Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which bars a person from office if they have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

voters certainly should consider the underlying conflict when a candidate for office takes the Fifth, especially when the issue goes to the core of our democracy.

Defenders might insist that Trump has not been convicted of any crime. But voters are allowed to draw their own conclusions about not only his underlying conduct but also his refusal to testify.

there is a “bond” between an official and the people of the nation, which is “created by election or appointment and also cemented by the oath of office.” Just as a civil jury can draw an adverse conclusion from Trump’s refusal to answer questions, “it should be disqualifying for Trump if he seeks to run again.”

Taking the Fifth is their prerogative, but it is the prerogative of voters to hold it against them as evidence that they are putting themselves above the interests of the country.

The oldest of the books of the Hebrew Bible date to roughly 3,000 years ago; the pyramids of Egypt go back about 5,000 years. These were not prehumans or near relatives. They were like us: complex, organized, alive to meaning and living at a time beyond reckoning.

Ruth Tringham of the University of California, Berkeley, who has devoted years to humanizing the remnants of this city of the dim past by focusing on one skeleton, of a woman she has dubbed Dido. Dido replastered her walls regularly, kept her home swept clean, covered the floor in reed mats and decorated the place with art: clay figures of animals and stylized human females. In other words: much like us.

Catalhoyuk was founded by pioneers of urban living. “When the earliest construction began,” Newitz writes, “many people coming to live at Catalhoyuk were only a generation or two removed from nomadism.” It was brand-new, this fixed settlement thing, but it proved remarkably successful. By the time Dido was born, the city was about 600 years old

A thousand years ago, meanwhile, East St. Louis, Ill., was the site of an urban sanctuary that archaeologists today call Cahokia. With a population of 30,000, it was larger than Paris was at the time. Like Paris, with its Eiffel Tower and Notre-Dame, it had distinguishing physical landmarks in the form of black earthen pyramids. It sprawled across both sides of the Mississippi River, beckoning visitors from all over the present-day Southern United States.

Cahokia seems to have been a place of spiritual pilgrimage, which drew diverse groups of Native American peoples, who spoke different languages and worshiped in various ways but came to share a reverence for this city and its ceremonial customs, which included human sacrifice. Its multiethnic, year-round population apparently serviced the religious pilgrims and, in the off-season, went about their own affairs.

Cahokia died not as a result of sudden catastrophe, like Pompeii, but seemingly because it lost its spiritual significance over time. Its people didn’t perish. The pilgrims just stopped coming; the local residents merged with other tribes. There is linguistic and other evidence that the Sioux are their descendants.

Newitz devotes space to debunking the popular notion that civilizations of the past “collapse” and become “lost,” pointing instead to indications of gradual change.

The operative lesson from the past, at least from this curated offering of former metropolises, seems to be that human culture is a plastic thing. Rather than lamenting the fragility of our current urban structures, we might do better figuring out how to bend and shape society for the future.

the effect of reading “Four Lost Cities” was more meditative. This is a long, long, long ride we are on. Much is beyond our control. Humanity trundles on.

even now, as their stories are being dramatized in a movie and shown in theaters across the country, there is a campaign in Oklahoma — this time with legislation — to deter the history from being taught in schools.

The movement to suppress elements of American history extends well beyond Oklahoma. According to an analysis by The Washington Post, more than two dozen states have adopted laws that make it easier to remove books from school libraries and to prevent certain teaching on race, gender and sexuality

In 2023, PEN America, which defends freedom of speech, reported that book bans in U.S. public school classrooms and libraries had surged 33 percent over the previous school year, with more than 3,000 recorded removals; among them are classics by the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison (banned in 30 school districts) and Margaret Atwood (banned in 34). School curriculums are being revised to mask discomfiting truths — so much so that in Florida students will now be taught that some African Americans benefited from slavery because it gave them “skills.”

the intellectual right effectively dismissed the book

Here is David Brooks, echoing the conservative consensus in 2006:

As any number of historians, sociologists and pollsters can tell you, the evangelical Protestants who now exercise a major influence on the Republican Party are an infinitely diverse and contradictory group, and their relationship to these hyperpartisans is extremely ambivalent.

The idea that members of the religious right form an “infinitely diverse and contradictory group” and were in no way “hyperpartisan” is now clearly absurd. Christianism, in fact, turned out to be the central pillar of Trump’s success, with white evangelicals giving unprecedented and near-universal support — 84 percent — to a shameless, disgusting pagan, because and only because he swore to smite their enemies.

The fusion of Trump and Christianism is an unveiling of a sort — proof of principle that, in its core, Christianism is not religious but political, a reactionary cult susceptible to authoritarian preacher

Christianism is to the American right what critical theory is to the American left: a reductionist, totalizing creed that “others” half the country, and deeply misreads the genius of the American project.

Christianism starts, as critical theory does, by attacking the core of the Founding: in particular, its Enlightenment defense of universal reason, and its revolutionary removal of religion from the state.

Mike Johnson’s guru, pseudo-historian David Barton, claims that the Founders were just like evangelicals today, and intended the government at all levels to enforce “Christian values” — primarily, it seems, with respect to the private lives of others. As Pete Wehner notes, “If you listen to Johnson speak on the ‘so-called separation of Church and state’ and claim that ‘the Founders wanted to protect the church from an encroaching state, not the other way around,’ you will hear echoes of Barton.”

Christianism is a way to think about politics without actually thinking. Johnson expressed this beautifully last week: “I am a Bible-believing Christian. Someone asked me today in the media, they said, ‘It’s curious, people are curious: What does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?’ I said, ‘Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.

this tells us nothing, of course. The Bible demands interpretation in almost every sentence and almost every word; it contains universes of moral thought and thesauri of ambiguous words in a different ancient language; it has no clear blueprint for contemporary American politics, period

Yet Johnson uses it as an absolute authority to back up any policy he might support

The submission to (male) authority is often integral to fundamentalism

Trump was an authority figure, period. He was a patriarch. He was the patriarch of their tribe. And he was in power, which meant that God put him there. After which nothing needs to be said. So of course if the patriarch says the election is rigged, you believe him.

And of course you do what you can to make sure that God’s will be done — by attempting to overturn the election results if necessary.

Christianism is a just-so story, with no deep moral conflicts. Material wealth does not pose a moral challenge, for example, as it has done for Christians for millennia. For Christianists, it’s merely proof that God has blessed you and you deserve it.

“I believe that scripture, the Bible is very clear: that God is the one that raises up those in authority. And I believe that God has ordained and allowed each one of us to be brought here for this specific moment.” That means that Trump was blessed by God, and not just by the Electoral College in 2016. And because he was blessed by God, it was impossible that Biden beat him fairly in 2020.

More than three-quarters of those representing the most evangelical districts are election deniers, compared to just half of those in the remaining districts. Fully three-quarters of the deniers in the caucus hail from evangelical districts.

since the Tea Party, the turnover in primary challenges in these evangelical districts has been historic — a RINO-shredding machine. No wonder there were crosses being carried on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021. The insurrectionists were merely following God’s will. And Trump’s legal team was filled with the faithful.

Tom Edsall shows the skew that has turned American politics into something of a religious war: “When House districts are ranked by the percentage of voters who are white evangelicals, the top quintile is represented by 81 Republicans and 6 Democrats and the second quintile by 68 Republicans and 19 Democrats.”

the overwhelming majority of the Republican House Caucus (70%) represents the Most Evangelical districts (top two quintiles). Thus, we can see that a group that represents less than 15% of the US population commands 70% of the districts comprising the majority party in the House of Representatives.

And almost all those districts are safe as houses. When you add Christianism to gerrymandering, you get a caucus that has no incentive to do anything but perform for the cable shows.

This is not a caucus interested in actually doing anything.

I don’t know how we best break the grip of the fundamentalist psyche on the right. It’s a deep human tendency — to give over control to a patriarch or a holy book rather than engage in the difficult process of democratic interaction with others, compromise, and common ground.

he phenomenon has been given new life by a charismatic con-man in Donald Trump, preternaturally able to corral the cultural fears and anxieties of those with brittle, politicized faith.

What I do know is that, unchecked, this kind of fundamentalism is a recipe not for civil peace but for civil conflict

It’s a mindset, a worldview, as deep in the human psyche as the racial tribalism now endemic on the left. It controls one of our two major parties. And in so far as it has assigned all decisions to one man, Donald Trump, it is capable of supporting the overturning of an election — or anything else, for that matter, that the patriarch wants. Johnson is a reminder of that.

In 1453, Mehmed II the Conqueror led the Ottoman Turks in seizing the ancient city of Constantinople, the Byzantine Empire’s capital. This put an end to 1,000-year reign of the Byzantine Empire.

Sultan Mehmed renamed the city Istanbul, meaning “the city of Islam” and made it the new capital of the Ottoman Empire.

By 1517, Bayezid’s son, Selim I, brought Syria, Arabia, Palestine, and Egypt under Ottoman control.

The Ottoman Empire reached its peak between 1520 and 1566, during the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent

The Ottomans were known for their achievements in art, science and medicine.

Some of the most popular forms of art included calligraphy, painting, poetry, textiles and carpet weaving, ceramics and music.

The Ottomans learned and practiced advanced mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, physics, geography and chemistry.

Under Sultan Selim, a new policy emerged, which included fratricide, or the murder of brothers.

The threat of assassination was always a concern for a Sultan. He relocated every night as a safety measure.

the millet system, a community structure that gave minority groups a limited amount of power to control their own affairs while still under Ottoman rule.

The devshirme system lasted until the end of the 17th century.

Starting in the 1600s, the Ottoman Empire began to lose its economic and military dominance to Europe.

n 1878, the Congress of Berlin declared the independence of Romania, Serbia and Bulgaria.During the Balkan Wars, which took place in 1912 and 1913, the Ottoman Empire lost nearly all their territories in Europe.

At the start of World War I, the Ottoman Empire was already in decline. The Ottoman Turks entered the war in 1914 on the side of the Central Powers (including Germany and Austria-Hungary) and were defeated in 1918.

In 1915, Turkish leaders made a plan to massacre Armenians living the Ottoman Empire. Most scholars believe that about 1.5 million Armenians were killed.

After ruling for more than 600 years, the Ottoman Turks are often remembered for their powerful military, ethnic diversity, artistic ventures, religious tolerance and architectural marvels.

The mighty empire’s influence is still very much alive in the present-day Turkish Republic, a modern, mostly secular nation thought of by many scholars as a continuation of the Ottoman Empire.

The long and triumphant reign of its first emperor, Augustus, began a golden age of peace and prosperity;

As legend has it, Rome was founded in 753 B.C. by Romulus and Remus,

twin sons

Romulus became the first king of Rome,

Rome’s era as a monarchy ended in 509 B.C.

The power of the monarch passed to two annually elected magistrates called consuls. They also served as commanders in chief of the army.

Politics in the early republic was marked by the long struggle between patricians and plebeians (the common people), who eventually attained some political power through years of concessions from patricians

In 450 B.C., the first Roman law code was inscribed on 12 bronze tablets–known as the Twelve Tables–and publicly displayed in the Roman Forum.

By around 300 B.C., real political power in Rome was centered in the Senate, which at the time included only members of patrician and wealthy plebeian families.

During the early republic, the Roman state grew exponentially in both size and power

Rome then fought a series of wars known as the Punic Wars with Carthage, a powerful city-state in northern Africa. The first two Punic Wars ended with Rome in full control of Sicily, the western Mediterranean and much of Spain. In the Third Punic War (149–146 B.C.), the Romans captured and destroyed the city of Carthage and sold its surviving inhabitants into slavery, making a section of northern Africa a Roman province.

Rome’s military conquests led directly to its cultural growth as a society, as the Romans benefited greatly from contact with such advanced cultures as the Greeks.

The first Roman literature appeared around 240 B.C., with translations of Greek classics into Latin; Romans would eventually adopt much of Greek art, philosophy and religion.

Rome’s complex political institutions began to crumble under the weight of the growing empire, ushering in an era of internal turmoil and violence.

The gap between rich and poor widened as wealthy landowners drove small farmers from public land,

When the victorious Pompey returned to Rome, he formed an uneasy alliance known as the First Triumvirate

After earning military glory in Spain, Caesar returned to Rome to vie for the consulship in 59 B.C.

Caesar received the governorship of three wealthy provinces in Gaul beginning in 58 B.C.

In 49 B.C., Caesar and one of his legions crossed the Rubicon, a river on the border between Italy from Cisalpine Gaul

Consul Mark Antony and Caesar’s great-nephew and adopted heir, Octavian, joined forces to crush Brutus and Cassius and divided power in Rome with ex-consul Lepidus in what was known as the Second Triumvirate. With Octavian leading the western provinces, Antony the east, and Lepidus Africa, tensions developed by 36 B.C. and the triumvirate soon dissolved. In 31 B.C., Octavian triumped over the forces of Antony and Queen Cleopatra of Egypt (also rumored to be the onetime lover of Julius Caesar) in the Battle of Actium

To avoid meeting Caesar’s fate, he made sure to make his position as absolute ruler acceptable to the public by apparently restoring the political institutions of the Roman republic while in reality retaining all real power for himself. In 27 B.C., Octavian assumed the title of Augustus, becoming the first emperor of Rome.

By 29 B.C., Octavian was the sole leader of Rome and all its provinces.

Augustus’ rule restored morale in Rome after a century of discord and corruption and ushered in the famous pax Romana–two full centuries of peace and prosperity.

He instituted various social reforms, won numerous military victories and allowed Roman literature, art, architecture and religion to flourish.

When he died, the Senate elevated Augustus to the status of a god, beginning a long-running tradition of deification for popular emperors.

The decadence and incompetence of Commodus (180-192) brought the golden age of the Roman emperors to a disappointing end. His death at the hands of his own ministers sparked another period of civil war, from which Lucius Septimius Severus (193-211) emerged victorious.

Meanwhile, threats from outside plagued the empire and depleted its riches, including continuing aggression from Germans and Parthians and raids by the Goths over the Aegean Sea.

Diocletian divided power into the so-called tetrarchy (rule of four), sharing his title of Augustus (emperor) with Maximian. A pair of generals, Galerius and Constantius, were appointed as the assistants and chosen successors of Diocletian and Maximian; Diocletian and Galerius ruled the eastern Roman Empire, while Maximian and Constantius took power in the west.

The stability of this system suffered greatly after Diocletian and Maximian retired from office. Constantine (the son of Constantius) emerged from the ensuing power struggles as sole emperor of a reunified Rome in 324. He moved the Roman capital to the Greek city of Byzantium, which he renamed Constantinople. At the Council of Nicaea in 325, Constantine made Christianity (once an obscure Jewish sect) Rome’s official religion.

An entirely different story played out in the west, where the empire was wracked by internal conflict as well as threats from abroad–particularly from the Germanic tribes now established within the empire’s frontiers like the Vandals (their sack of Rome originated the phrase “vandalism”)–and was steadily losing money due to constant warfare.

Rome eventually collapsed under the weight of its own bloated empire, losing its provinces one by one:

In September 476, a Germanic prince named Odovacar won control of the Roman army in Italy.

After deposing the last western emperor, Romulus Augustus, Odovacar’s troops proclaimed him king of Italy, bringing an ignoble end to the long, tumultuous history of ancient Rome. The fall of the Roman Empire was complete.

Roman aqueducts, first developed in 312 B.C., enabled the rise of cities by transporting water to urban areas, improving public health and sanitation.

Roman cement and concrete are part of the reason ancient buildings like the Colosseum and Roman Forum are still standing strong today.

Roman arches, or segmented arches, improved upon earlier arches to build strong bridges and buildings, evenly distributing weight throughout the structure.

Roman roads, the most advanced roads in the ancient world, enabled the Roman Empire

to stay connected

Most religious faiths instruct us to welcome the strangers we encounter, and there’s good reason for this. If we engaged only with the people we knew, our world would be small.

That leap of faith toward the unknown other is what allows us to grow beyond the family unit, tribe or nation. Everyone you converse with who is not a biological relative — your best friend, neighbor, lover, spouse or even that chatty taxi driver from last weekend — was a stranger before you spoke to that person. Anytime we ignore strangers in our vicinity, whether because of fear, bigotry or the everyday convenience and efficiency of digital technology, we weaken that contract.

the small, transactional relationships we create by talking to strangers are important pillars of our social and emotional well-being.

Far from random human inconveniences, strangers are actually one of the richest and most important resources we have. They connect us to the community, teach us empathy, build civility and are full of surprise and potentially wonder.

“We have all these kinds of people who populate our lives, who we aren’t that close to and we don’t share our deepest, darkest secrets with,” said Dr. Sandstrom, who forces herself to speak to strangers every day, despite identifying as an introvert. “But they form this tapestry that when we’re not there, our life feels kind of empty.”

A study published last fall showed that despite our fears of awkwardness, deep, meaningful conversations with strangers are not only easier than expected but also left participants feeling better about themselves.

In some ways, our recent aversion to strangers is a byproduct of technological evolution. Sure, newspapers and magazines, cassette players and televisions were all potential distractions, but none of them fully normalized ignoring other people in the way that smartphones have. E-commerce sites and third-party restaurant delivery apps incentivize us against entering stores and restaurants filled with strangers

Then came the pandemic, and suddenly, each physical encounter with a stranger carried the potential of death. We were ordered to stay home, avoid public spaces and to speak only within our trusted bubbles.

Having convinced so many evangelicals that the next election could trigger the nation’s demise, Christian leaders effectively turned thousands of churches into unwitting cells in a loosely organized, hazily defined, existentially urgent movement—the types of places where paranoia and falsehoods flourish and people turn on one another.

“Hands down, the biggest challenge facing the Church right now is the misinformation and disinformation coming in from the outside,” Brown said.Because of this, the pastor told me, he can no longer justify a passive approach from the pulpit. The Church is becoming radicalized—and pastors who don’t address this fact head-on are only contributing to the problem

“The battle lines have been drawn,” Bolin told me, sitting in the back of his darkened sanctuary. “If you’re not taking a side, you’re on the wrong side.”

It’s the story of millions of American Christians who, after a lifetime spent considering their political affiliations in the context of their faith, are now considering their faith affiliations in the context of their politics.

“We fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen,” Paul wrote. “Since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”

The pastor said his concern was not simply for his congregation of 300, but for the millions of American evangelicals who had come to value power over integrity, the ephemeral over the eternal, moral relativism over bright lines of right and wrong.

For much of my lifetime, however, American Christians have done the opposite. Beginning in the 1980s, white evangelicals imposed themselves to an unprecedented degree on the government and the country’s core institutions

Once left to cry jeremiads about civilizational decline—having lost fights over sex and sexuality, drugs, abortion, pornography, standards in media and education, prayer in public schools—conservative Christians organized their churches, marshaled their resources, and leveraged their numbers,

Evangelical leaders set something in motion decades ago that pastors today can no longer control. Not only were Christians conditioned to understand their struggle as one against flesh and blood, fixated on earthly concerns, a fight for a kingdom of this world—all of which runs directly counter to the commands of scripture—they were indoctrinated with a belief that because the stakes were getting so high, any means was justified.

When Trump was elected thanks to a historic showing among white evangelicals—81 percent voted for him over Hillary Clinton—the victory was rightly viewed as the apex of the movement’s power. But this was, in many ways, also the beginning of its unraveling.

what’s notable about the realignment inside the white evangelical Church is its asymmetry. Pastors report losing an occasional liberal member because of their refusal to speak on Sunday mornings about bigotry or poverty or social injustice. But these same pastors report having lost—in the past few years alone—a significant portion of their congregation because of complaints that they and their staff did not advance right-wing political doctrines

Substantial numbers of evangelicals are fleeing their churches, and most of them are moving to ones further to the right.

Christianity has traditionally been seen as a stabilizing, even moderating, influence on American life. In 1975, more than two-thirds of Americans expressed “a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the church,” according to Gallup, and as of 1985, “organized religion was the most revered institution” in American life

Today, Gallup reports, just 37 percent of Americans have confidence in the Church.

to Jeff and Deidre, Jenkinson’s stance amounted to cowardice. “I realize these are hard conversations, but the reason we left Milford is they were never willing to have the conversation,” Jeff said. “They were just trying to keep everybody happy. Paul is a conservative, but his conservatism has no teeth.”

a strictly apolitical approach can be counterproductive; their unwillingness to engage only invites more scrutiny. The whisper campaigns brand conservative pastors as moderate, and moderate pastors as Marxists. In this environment, a church leader’s stance on biblical inerrancy is less important than whether he is considered “woke.

“A pastor asked me the other day, ‘What percentage of churches would you say are grappling with these issues?’ And I said, ‘One hundred percent. All of them,’ ”

“It may sound like Chicken Little. But I’m telling you, there is a serious effort to turn this ‘two countries’ talk into something real. There are Christians taking all the populist passions and adding a transcendent authority to it.”

More than a few times, I’ve heard casual talk of civil war inside places that purport to worship the Prince of Peace. And, far from feeling misplaced, these conversations draw legitimacy from a sense of divine justice.

The Church is not a victim of America’s civic strife. Instead, it is one of the principal catalysts.

“Back when I believed there was an honorable alliance between Republicans and evangelicals, it was because I believed that our values would ultimately prevail, come what may on this Earth, whether we win or lose some election,” Brown said. “But over time, there was a shift. Losing was no longer an option. It became all about winning.”

And then,” Brown said, “came Barack Obama.”It felt silly at first—jokes about Obama’s birth certificate, comments about his faith. But over time, the discourse inside the church became more worrisome.

The cultural climate was getting chilly for evangelicals; the Great Recession was squeezing his blue-collar congregation. But much of the anxiety felt amorphous, cryptic—and manufactured. However effective Brown might be at soothing his congregants for 45 minutes on a Sunday morning, “Rush [Limbaugh] had them for three hours a day, five days a week, and Fox News had them every single night.”

Brown kept reminding his people that scripture’s most cited command is “Fear not.” But he couldn’t break through. Looking back, he understands why.

“Biblically, fear is primarily reverence and awe. We revere God; we hold him in awe,” Brown told me. “You can also have reverence and awe for other things—really, anything you put great value on. I think, in conservative-Christian circles, we place a lot of value on the life we’ve known. The earthly life we have known. The American life we’ve known …

If we see threats to something we value, we fear—that is, we revere, we hold in inappropriate awe—those who can take it away. That’s Barack Obama. That’s the left.”

For white evangelicals, the only thing more galvanizing than perceptions of their idealized nation slipping away was the conviction that their favored political party was unwilling to fight for the country’s survival.

“There was this sense that America is under siege, that the barbarians were at the gates,” Brown said. “Then along comes Donald Trump, who says he can make America great again. And for evangelicals, it was time to play for keeps.”

The Trump conversion experience—having once been certain of his darkness, suddenly awakening to see his light—is not to be underestimated, especially when it touches people whose lives revolve around notions of transformation.

Modern evangelicalism is defined by a certain fatalism about the nation’s character. The result is not merely a willingness to act with desperation and embrace what is wrong; it can be a belief, bordering on a certainty, that what is wrong is actually right.

This downward spiral owes principally to two phenomena: the constant stench of scandal, with megachurches and prominent leaders imploding on what seems like a weekly basis; and the growing perception that Christians are embracing extremist views.

Tony DeFelice is another new arrival at FloodGate—and another Christian who got tired of his pastor lacking teeth. At his previous church, in the Democratic-leaning Detroit suburb of Plymouth, “they did not speak a single word about politics. Not on a single issue,” he told me. “When we got to FloodGate, it confirmed for us what we’d been missing.”

“We didn’t leave the church. The church left us,” Tony told me. “COVID, the whole thing, is the biggest lie perpetrated on humanity that we’re ever going to see in our lifetime. And they fell for it.”

Tony and Linda say FloodGate’s style—and Bolin’s fiery messages on topics like vaccines and voter fraud—has changed the way they view their responsibilities as Christians. “This is about good against evil. That’s the world we live in. It’s a spiritual battle, and we are right at the precipice of it,” Tony said.

With the country on the brink of defeat at the hands of secularists and liberals, Tony no longer distinguishes between the political and the spiritual. An attack on Donald Trump is an attack on Christians. He believes the 2020 election was stolen as part of a “demonic” plot against Christian America. And he’s confident that righteousness will prevail: States are going to begin decertifying the results of the last election, he says, and Trump will be returned to office.

He is just as convinced that Trump won the 2020 election, he said, as he is that Jesus rose from the dead 2,000 years ago.

Most evangelicals don’t think of themselves as Locke’s target demographic. The pastor has suggested that autistic children are oppressed by demons. He organized a book-burning event to destroy occult-promoting Harry Potter novels and other books and games. He has called President Biden a “sex-trafficking, demon-possessed mongrel.”

Not long ago, Locke was a small-time Tennessee preacher. Then, in 2016, he went viral with a selfie video, shot outside his local Target, skewering the company’s policies on bathrooms and gender identity. The video has collected 18 million views, and it launched Locke as a distinct evangelical brand. He cast himself on social media as a lone voice of courage within Christendom. He aligned himself with figures like Dinesh D’Souza and Charlie Kirk to gain clout as one of the Christian right’s staunchest Trump supporters. All the while, his congregation swelled—moving from their old church building, which seated 250, into a large outdoor tent, then into an even bigger tent, and eventually into the current colossus. The tent holds 3,000 people and would be the envy of Barnum & Bailey.

“We are born for such a time as this. God is calling you to do something,” Schneider says. “We have a country to get back. And if that fails, we have a country—yes, I’ll say it—to take back.”

“I really don’t. No. Not too much. I don’t,” Bolin says, shaking his head. “Firebrand statements have been part of the pulpit, and part of politics, for as long as we’ve been a nation. And there is a long history of both sides exaggerating—like in a post like that.”

How many pastors at smaller right-wing churches—pastors like Bolin—would have felt uneasy sitting inside this tent? The answer, I suspect, is very few. Global Vision and FloodGate may be different in degree, but they are not different in kind.

his mission creep inside evangelicalism is why some churches have taken an absolutist approach: no preaching on elections, no sermons about current events.

“What’s coming is going to be brutal. There’s no way around that,” Bingham told me. “Churches are breaking apart everywhere. My only hope is that, when the time comes, our people can separate without shattering.”

At one point, I show Bolin a Facebook post he wrote months earlier: “I’m still wondering how 154,000,000 votes were counted in a country where there are only 133,000,000 registered voters.” This was written, I tell him, well after the Census Bureau had published data showing that more than 168 million Americans were registered to vote in 2020. A quick Google search would have given Bolin the accurate numbers.

“Yeah, that’s one I regret,” he tells me, explaining that he subsequently learned that the numbers he’d posted were incorrect. (The post was still active. Bolin texted me the following day saying he’d deleted it.)

Doesn’t he worry that if people see him getting the easy things wrong, they might suspect he’s also getting the hard things wrong? Things like sanctity and salvation?

Let’s be clear: Locke belongs to a category of his own. He recently accused multiple women at his church of being witches (his source: a demon he encountered during an exorcism). That makes it easy for evangelicals to dismiss Global Vision as an outlier, the same way they did Westboro Baptist. It’s much harder to scrutinize the extremism that has infiltrated their own church and ponder its logical end point. Ten years ago, Global Vision would have been dismissed as a blip on Christianity’s radar. These days, Locke preaches to 2.2 million Facebook followers and has posed for photos with Franklin Graham at the White House.

Bolin says FloodGate and churches like it have grown in direct proportion to how many Christians “felt betrayed by their pastors.” That trend looks to be holding steady. More people will leave churches that refuse to identify with a tribe and will find pastors who confirm their own partisan views. The erosion of confidence in the institution of American Christianity will accelerate. The caricature of evangelicals will get uglier. And the actual work of evangelizing will get much, much harder.

I think that the age of the New Democrats, which was a very successful political project for the Democratic Party, has come to an end. The assumption of that politics, which began in earnest in the late 1980s and early 1990s, was that the Cold War had been settled, that democracy had prevailed, that the West was ascendant. But with China’s decision to take the route that they’ve gone on, with Russia now having waged this intense insurgency against the West, the assumption that that system is going to prevail in the world is now under question.

Rosenberg: Any honest assessment of the New Democrat project has to view it as wildly successful, because when I went to work for Clinton in 1992, Democrats had lost five out of the six previous presidential elections. And the central project of the New Democrats was to make the Democratic Party competitive at the presidential level again. Since then, we’ve won more votes in seven of eight presidential elections

I think that it’s birthing now for the United States a different era of politics, where we must be focused on two fundamental, existential questions. Can democracy prevail given the way that it’s being attacked from all sides? And can we prevent climate change from overwhelming the world that we know?

I want to try to write a book and to take the perspective of having been part of the beginning of the last big shift in American politics, the emergence of the New Democrats, and start imagining what’s going to come next for the center left in the United States and around the world.

Simon Rosenberg:

We’ve also seen three Democratic presidents that have served [since then]—Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden have also made the country materially better during their presidencies.

what’s the main lesson you take from his emergence?

Rosenberg: Yeah, it’s obviously disappointing. The emergence of what I call “Greater MAGA” has been a dark period in our history.

You have to recognize just how central to that is this narrative of the white tribe rallying around itself, and the sense of grievance, the sense of loss, the sense of decline. That’s what MAGA is. That’s all it is

We know from history, we know from other countries, when countries go into sectarian or tribal warfare, it can destroy a country, pull it apart. And Trump has created a domestic argument here that could potentially destroy the U.S. Look at Marjorie Taylor Greene this week—advocating for the country to split into two, red and blue.

Part of the reason I’m taking a step back from NDN is that I don’t think that we have yet figured out how to talk to the American people about the nature of the conflict we’re in right now, with rising authoritarianism around the world, the weakening of democratic institutions here and in other places.

My hope is that because Biden won’t be able to legislate very much for the next two years, he’ll spend his time talking to the American people and the West about the necessity of winning this conflict.

Rosenberg: The threat is still here. Look, I think [Florida Governor] Ron DeSantis is even more MAGA than Trump. This idea that in 2024, Republicans are going to end up with a moderate, center-right candidate and distance themselves from the insanity of the Trump years, that’s just fantasy talk.

DeSantis has decided to double down on extremism and on MAGA. We will learn in the next year and a half about how it all plays out. But I think he misread the room; he’s misread the moment in history. He needed to become an anti-Trump; instead, he became more Trump than Trump

In this last election, there were really two elections. There was a bluer election inside the battlegrounds, and there was a redder election outside the battlegrounds. We actually gained ground in seven battleground states: Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania. It’s an extraordinary achievement given high inflation, a low Biden approval rating, traditional midterm dynamics. My view is, that happened because the fear of MAGA has created a supercharged grass roots; our candidates are raising unprecedented amounts of money; we have more labor to work in these races than we’ve ever had before. And where we have these muscular campaigns, we were able to control the information environment. And also push turnout up through the roof.

But outside the battlegrounds, we fell back in New York and California, and in Florida and Texas, the four biggest states in the country. And the admonition to us is that we are still not competitive enough in the national daily discourse;

Republicans, because of this incredible noise machine that they built, are still far louder than we are. Democrats have to become obsessive about being more competitive in the daily political discourse in the country.

We have to build more media institutions. Republicans use ideological media to advance their politics in a way that we’ve never done. And we’re going to have to match that to some degree.

The second piece is that average Democratic activists have to recognize that they need to become information warriors daily

I think the way we have to think of the war room now, it’s 4 million proud patriots getting up every day, spending a little bit of their day putting good information into our daily discourse to try to crowd out the poisonous information and right-wing propaganda. There’s a lot that average citizens can do in this.

The key is to defeat MAGA in such a definitive and declarative way that Republicans move on to a different kind of politics and become something more like a traditional center-right political party.

We must stick together as a party because what will cause far-right political parties to succeed is when the prodemocracy coalition splits, and we can’t allow that to happen. As much as sometimes we want to have interfamily battles, those are self-indulgent at this point.

I don’t think that this emerging criticism is entirely wrong, but it’s only half right. The goal should be to expand, not to reposition. There are four areas that I think we have to bear down on in the next two years for a potential Democratic expansion: young voters, Latinos, Never-MAGA or -Trumpers, and young women, post-Dobbs.

The No. 1 job is we just need more young people voting, period. It’s more registration, more communications, targeting them more in our campaigns. In the Democratic Party, young people are still at the kids’ table; they have to become the center of our politics now.

I think that we’re favored in the presidential election. For us to win next year, the economy has to be good. And we have to look like we’ve been successful in Ukraine. Those two things are going to be paramount in him being able to say, “I’ve been a good president, and I may be a little bit old, but I still got 90 miles an hour on my fastball, and I’m able to get the job done right versus they’re still a little bit too crazy.”

What the Republicans should be worried about is we’ve had three consecutive elections where the battleground states have rejected MAGA. And so, if the Republicans present themselves as MAGA again, which looks almost inevitable, it’s going to be hard for them to win a presidential election in 2024 given that the battleground has muscle memory about MAGA and has voted now three times against it.

That’s still well below the national median, but the conditions of the White population are dismal: a median household income of $24,800, only 41% with any post-high school education, and 30% living in poverty.

In a growing nationwide trend, the median household incomes of people of color, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, now exceed those of White people in nearly 200 of the 1,500 Republican-trifecta counties—those in which the party controls the governor’s office and both legislative chambers of state government (see Figure 1)

In the most telling statistics, White people in Antlers are nearly twice as likely to die by guns as Native Americans (see Figure 2). Compared with Whites nationally, Antlers Whites suffer excessive death rates from drugs and alcohol (1.3 times the national average), suicide (1.5 times), all violent deaths (1.8 times), homicide (2.5 times), and gunfire (2.6 times).

When I was growing up in Antlers 60 years ago and visited it 20 years ago, my family’s old block consisted of well-kept middle-class homes fronting yards for chickens and horses. On my latest visit in January 2022, I found the houses all boarded up or blowing open in the wind (see photo at top). There are hundreds of abandoned dwellings with collapsing roofs and walls and junk-filled empty lots alongside barely intact, yet still occupied, houses.

Antlers is not all devastation, however. It sports a gleaming Choctaw-built travel center financed by casino revenues, which are also invested in local Native Americans’ well-being.

Across America, the partisan gap in gross domestic product per capita is also huge and growing: $77,900 in Democratic-voting areas, compared with $46,600 in Republican-voting areas

444 Republican counties have a GDP per capita of under $30,000, and 10 times as many people live in those counties than in the seven similarly low-GDP Democratic counties.

Whites in about 40% of all Republican counties lost income over the past two decades. And Trump’s administration was no help to his base. During his presidency, the overall Democrat–Republican GDP per capita gap widened by another $1,800.

For the largest urbanized states, the three with Democratic control of all branches of government (California, New York, and Illinois) had GDPs per capita vastly higher than the three biggest Republican-controlled states (Texas, Florida, and Ohio).

The right-wing canard that hardworking White people subsidize welfare-grubbing cities is backward. Democrat-voting counties, with 60% of America’s population, generate 67% of the nation’s personal income, 70% of the nation’s GDP, 71% of federal taxes, 73% of charitable contributions, and 75% of state and local taxes.

Mirroring Antlers, White Republican America also suffers violent death rates, including from suicide, homicide, firearms, and drunken driving crashes, far higher than Whites in Democratic America and higher than non-White people everywhere.

To top it off, Republican-governed Americans are substantially more likely to die from COVID-19.

As the death gap between Republican and Democratic areas widens over time, the life expectancy for Whites in Republican-voting areas (77.6 years) is now three years shorter than that of Whites in Democratic areas (80.6 years), shorter than those of Asians and Latino people everywhere, and only a few months longer than Black and Native Americans in Democratic areas.

That White people are falling behind across key economic, health, and safety indexes is not due to victimization by immigrants and liberal conspiracies, however, but to victimization by other Whites and self-inflicted alcoholism, drug overdose, and suicide.

Aside from the problem that Republican members of congress (and two recalcitrant Democrats) have sabotaged beneficial initiatives, former President Barack Obama already tried that. From 2010 to 2016, the Obama administration’s economic recovery measures fostered millions of new jobs and thousands of dollars in real median income growth for Whites in urban and most rural areas alike, reversing the recession under Republican George W. Bush’s presidency.

Is the solution to undividing America massive federal programs to improve Republican America’s struggling economies and troubled social conditions, then?

this global fur trade coincided with what American geomorphologists call “the great drying,” the three centuries between 1600 and 1900 when the country’s rivers and wetlands shrank and in some cases disappeared.

The Europeans, however, knew that rich aristocrats back home in drafty stone castles were willing to pay huge sums of money for warm beaver pelts, and so upon their arrival in the New World the fur trade proceeded accordingly — decimating the beaver population nearly to the point of extinction.

dams are also why some ecologists insist that beavers may be able to help remedy the effects of climate change. Beavers build dams, which create ponds, which create ecosystems. They move water, and so could help alleviate both droughts and floods. They create “beaver meadows,” in which flowing water isn’t necessarily visible but is nevertheless there, as if absorbed by a giant sponge.

Karahan Tepe, and its penis chamber, and everything that inexplicably surrounds the chamber – shrines, cells, altars, megaliths, audience halls et al – is vastly older than anything comparable, and plumbs quite unimaginable depths of time, back before agriculture, probably back before normal pottery, right back to a time when we once thought human ‘civilisation’ was simply impossible.

After all, hunter gatherers – cavemen with flint arrowheads – without regular supplies of grain, without the regular meat and milk of domesticated animals, do not build temple-towns with water systems.

Taken together with its age, complexity, sophistication, and its deep, resonant mysteriousness, and its many sister sites now being unearthed across the Harran Plains – collectively known as the Tas Tepeler, or the ‘stone hills’ – these carved, ochre-red rocks, so silent, brooding, and watchful in the hard whirring breezes of the semi-desert, constitute what might just be the greatest archaeological revelation in the history of humankind.

The solitary Kurdish man, on that summer’s day in 1994, had made an irreversibly profound discovery – which would eventually lead to the penis pillars of Karahan Tepe, and an archaeological anomaly which challenges, time and again, everything we know of human prehistory.