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Even after his election that year, Mr. Trump falsely insisted that he had lost the popular vote only because millions of immigrants ineligible to vote had cast ballots for his opponent, Hillary Clinton.

“The only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election,” Mr. Trump said

The once-unthinkable notion that a president might refuse to accept the results of an election and leave office without resistance has become an increasingly major theme in the 2020 campaign.

“The peaceful transfer of power is essential to a functioning democracy,”

The most important thing, she said, was for Americans to vote and insist their ballots are counted.

Any suggestion that a president might not respect this Constitutional guarantee is both unthinkable and unacceptable,”

It may take longer than usual to know the outcome, but it will be a valid one

“I don’t know what his thinking was, but we have always had a controlled transition between administrations.”

That promise comes as Mr. Graham and other Republicans face sharp criticism for changing their positions on their past vow not to fill a Supreme Court seat during an election year.

The comments by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York were made in a message to progressives as a rallying cry after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and were not a call to contest or resist the election results.

Democratic lawmakers warned Americans on Thursday to take deadly seriously President Trump’s refusal to commit to accepting the results of November’s election

Kate Bedingfield, a deputy campaign manager for Mr. Biden, said that he “has participated in a peaceful transition of power before. He certainly will this time around as well.”

r. Trump’s vulnerability even in conservative-leaning states underscores just how precarious his political position i

“Donald Trump is trying to distract from his catastrophic failures as president of the United States in order to talk about something that frankly, you know, spins up the press corps,

Calling Mr. Trump “the greatest threat to democracy,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the party leader in the Senate, demanded that Republicans join Democrats in insisting Mr. Trump accept the election results

everal prominent Republicans, including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, insisted Thursday that there would be a peaceful transition, but they stopped short of criticizing the president directly for his remarks.

Earlier Wednesday, he flatly predicted that the presidential election would end up in the Supreme Court and said that was why he wanted a full slate of justices, barely concealing his hope for a friendly majority on the court.

The night before that, at another rally, Mr. Trump said the coronavirus “affects virtually nobody” — never mind that the country’s death toll from the virus just crossed 200,000.

The F.B.I. has not seen evidence of a “coordinated national voter fraud effort,”

Any fraud would have to be widespread and well coordinated to change the election outcome, and carrying it out would be a “major challenge for an adversary,”

President Trump paid his respects to the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Thursday morning, standing silently by her coffin at the top of the Supreme Court steps as he was jeered by protesters on the street below.

Mr. Trump continues to face a wall of opposition from women

“Fundamental to democracy is the peaceful transition of power; without that, there is Belarus

Mr. Trump’s large advantage among men in Texas is enough to give him a small advantage there, 46 percent to 43 percent. Men prefer the president to his Democratic challenger by 16 points, while women favor Mr. Biden by an eight-point margin.

“We are living in a situation that was unthinkable for all of us. Some accuse me of having done too much, of being a liberticide, while others accuse me of having done too little. I’m aware that before responding to public opinion or a judicial authority, I should respond to my conscience. And I say this humbly: I think I did everything possible to manage a really difficult situation.”

"That is true," Barrett responded.

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the Judiciary Committee's top Democrat, also asked the nominee about the severability doctrine. Barrett explained to Feinstein that the doctrine was like a game of "Jenga," where a court must decide whether a law can stand if it pulls out part of it.

Vermont Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy said that Barrett had not written or spoken in defense of the ACA but had publicly criticized the court and Chief Justice John Roberts for voting to uphold sections of it. Barrett said on Wednesday she had previously spoken as an academic rather than as a judge, and had "never had occasion to speak on the policy question."

Barrett later told Minnesota Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar, "I have no animus to, or agenda for, the Affordable Care Act."

Barrett said, "No one is above the law," but declined to answer the question, saying it "has never been litigated."

"So because it would be opining on an open question when I haven't gone through the judicial process to decide it, it's not one in which I can offer a view."

Delaware Democratic Sen. Chris Coons asked Barrett if she agreed with her mentor and former boss, the late Justice Antonin Scalia, that Griswold v. Connecticut, which established that married couples have a right to obtain and use contraception in the privacy of their own home, was wrongly decided.

She explained that it's "unthinkable that any legislature would pass such a law" prohibiting the use of birth control and that it's "very unlikely" a lower court would buck the Supreme Court precedent.

Barrett said that "the only reason that it's even worth asking that question" is because the 1965 case underpins the 1973 landmark case Roe v. Wade, which found a constitutional right to abortion. "So because Griswold involves substantive due process, an area that remains subject to litigation to the country, I don't think it's an issue or case that I can opine on," she said. "But nor do I think Griswold is in danger of going anywhere."

California Sen. Kamala Harris, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, asked Barrett about Shelby County v. Holder, which allowed some jurisdictions with a history of voter suppression to escape additional federal scrutiny under the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

"I think racial discrimination still exists in the United States, and I think we've seen evidence of that this summer," added Barrett.Harris later asked Harris if Covid-19 is infectious, whether smoking causes cancer and whether climate change is "happening and is threatening the air we breathe and the water we drink."

"I will not do that," she said. "I will not express a view on a matter of public policy, especially one that is politically controversial because that's inconsistent with the judicial role as I have explained."

Republican senators appeared confident on Wednesday that they will confirm the Notre Dame law professor and judge on the 7th US Circuit Court of Appeals by the end of the month, giving conservatives a strong 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court.

Before Trump, I’d never had the feeling of wanting to fast-forward through the era I was living in, of longing to be in the future, looking back at how it all turned out.

Of course, it can be thrilling when art and entertainment are politically relevant. But when politics are so alarming that the rest of the world seems to recede, it creates cultural claustrophobia. Since Election Day 2016, writers, artists and critics have wondered what many forms of cultural production — novels, fine art, theater, fashion — mean “in the age of Trump.” It’s a cliché — one I know I’ve used — about the reorientation of almost everything around the monstrous fact of the Trump presidency.

Living in Trump’s panic-inducing eternal present is bad for art, but it’s also bad for imagination more broadly, including the imagination needed to conceive a future in which Trumpism is unthinkable.

There’s a notion that the social web was once useful, or at least that it could have been good, if only we had pulled a few levers: some moderation and fact-checking here, a bit of regulation there, perhaps a federal antitrust lawsuit. But that’s far too sunny and shortsighted a view.

Today’s social networks, Facebook chief among them, were built to encourage the things that make them so harmful. It is in their very architecture.

I realized only recently that I’ve been thinking far too narrowly about the problem.

Megascale is nearly the existential threat that megadeath is. No single machine should be able to control the fate of the world’s population—and that’s what both the Doomsday Machine and Facebook are built to do.

Facebook does not exist to seek truth and report it, or to improve civic health, or to hold the powerful to account, or to represent the interests of its users, though these phenomena may be occasional by-products of its existence.

The company’s early mission was to “give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” Instead, it took the concept of “community” and sapped it of all moral meaning.

Facebook—along with Google and YouTube—is perfect for amplifying and spreading disinformation at lightning speed to global audiences.

Facebook decided that it needed not just a very large user base, but a tremendous one, unprecedented in size. That decision set Facebook on a path to escape velocity, to a tipping point where it can harm society just by existing.

No one, not even Mark Zuckerberg, can control the product he made. I’ve come to realize that Facebook is not a media company. It’s a Doomsday Machine.

Scale and engagement are valuable to Facebook because they’re valuable to advertisers. These incentives lead to design choices such as reaction buttons that encourage users to engage easily and often, which in turn encourage users to share ideas that will provoke a strong response.

Every time you click a reaction button on Facebook, an algorithm records it, and sharpens its portrait of who you are.

The hyper-targeting of users, made possible by reams of their personal data, creates the perfect environment for manipulation—by advertisers, by political campaigns, by emissaries of disinformation, and of course by Facebook itself, which ultimately controls what you see and what you don’t see on the site.

there aren’t enough moderators speaking enough languages, working enough hours, to stop the biblical flood of shit that Facebook unleashes on the world, because 10 times out of 10, the algorithm is faster and more powerful than a person.

At megascale, this algorithmically warped personalized informational environment is extraordinarily difficult to moderate in a meaningful way, and extraordinarily dangerous as a result.

These dangers are not theoretical, and they’re exacerbated by megascale, which makes the platform a tantalizing place to experiment on people

Even after U.S. intelligence agencies identified Facebook as a main battleground for information warfare and foreign interference in the 2016 election, the company has failed to stop the spread of extremism, hate speech, propaganda, disinformation, and conspiracy theories on its site.

it wasn’t until October of this year, for instance, that Facebook announced it would remove groups, pages, and Instragram accounts devoted to QAnon, as well as any posts denying the Holocaust.

In the days after the 2020 presidential election, Zuckerberg authorized a tweak to the Facebook algorithm so that high-accuracy news sources such as NPR would receive preferential visibility in people’s feeds, and hyper-partisan pages such as Breitbart News’s and Occupy Democrats’ would be buried, according to The New York Times, offering proof that Facebook could, if it wanted to, turn a dial to reduce disinformation—and offering a reminder that Facebook has the power to flip a switch and change what billions of people see online.

reducing the prevalence of content that Facebook calls “bad for the world” also reduces people’s engagement with the site. In its experiments with human intervention, the Times reported, Facebook calibrated the dial so that just enough harmful content stayed in users’ news feeds to keep them coming back for more.

Facebook’s stated mission—to make the world more open and connected—has always seemed, to me, phony at best, and imperialist at worst.

Facebook is a borderless nation-state, with a population of users nearly as big as China and India combined, and it is governed largely by secret algorithms

How much real-world violence would never have happened if Facebook didn’t exist? One of the people I’ve asked is Joshua Geltzer, a former White House counterterrorism official who is now teaching at Georgetown Law. In counterterrorism circles, he told me, people are fond of pointing out how good the United States has been at keeping terrorists out since 9/11. That’s wrong, he said. In fact, “terrorists are entering every single day, every single hour, every single minute” through Facebook.

Evidence of real-world violence can be easily traced back to both Facebook and 8kun. But 8kun doesn’t manipulate its users or the informational environment they’re in. Both sites are harmful. But Facebook might actually be worse for humanity.

In previous eras, U.S. officials could at least study, say, Nazi propaganda during World War II, and fully grasp what the Nazis wanted people to believe. Today, “it’s not a filter bubble; it’s a filter shroud,” Geltzer said. “I don’t even know what others with personalized experiences are seeing.”

Mary McCord, the legal director at the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law, told me that she thinks 8kun may be more blatant in terms of promoting violence but that Facebook is “in some ways way worse” because of its reach. “There’s no barrier to entry with Facebook,” she said. “In every situation of extremist violence we’ve looked into, we’ve found Facebook postings. And that reaches tons of people. The broad reach is what brings people into the fold and normalizes extremism and makes it mainstream.” In other words, it’s the megascale that makes Facebook so dangerous.

Facebook’s megascale gives Zuckerberg an unprecedented degree of influence over the global population. If he isn’t the most powerful person on the planet, he’s very near the top.

“The thing he oversees has such an effect on cognition and people’s beliefs, which can change what they do with their nuclear weapons or their dollars.”

Facebook’s new oversight board, formed in response to backlash against the platform and tasked with making decisions concerning moderation and free expression, is an extension of that power. “The first 10 decisions they make will have more effect on speech in the country and the world than the next 10 decisions rendered by the U.S. Supreme Court,” Geltzer said. “That’s power. That’s real power.”

Facebook is also a business, and a place where people spend time with one another. Put it this way: If you owned a store and someone walked in and started shouting Nazi propaganda or recruiting terrorists near the cash register, would you, as the shop owner, tell all of the other customers you couldn’t possibly intervene?

In 2004, Zuckerberg said Facebook ran advertisements only to cover server costs. But over the next two years Facebook completely upended and redefined the entire advertising industry. The pre-social web destroyed classified ads, but the one-two punch of Facebook and Google decimated local news and most of the magazine industry—publications fought in earnest for digital pennies, which had replaced print dollars, and social giants scooped them all up anyway.

localized approach is part of what made megascale possible. Early constraints around membership—the requirement at first that users attended Harvard, and then that they attended any Ivy League school, and then that they had an email address ending in .edu—offered a sense of cohesiveness and community. It made people feel more comfortable sharing more of themselves. And more sharing among clearly defined demographics was good for business.

in 2007, Zuckerberg said something in an interview with the Los Angeles Times that now takes on a much darker meaning: “The things that are most powerful aren’t the things that people would have done otherwise if they didn’t do them on Facebook. Instead, it’s the things that would never have happened otherwise.”

We’re still in the infancy of this century’s triple digital revolution of the internet, smartphones, and the social web, and we find ourselves in a dangerous and unstable informational environment, powerless to resist forces of manipulation and exploitation that we know are exerted on us but remain mostly invisible

The Doomsday Machine offers a lesson: We should not accept this current arrangement. No single machine should be able to control so many people.

we need a new philosophical and moral framework for living with the social web—a new Enlightenment for the information age, and one that will carry us back to shared reality and empiricism.

In other words, if the Dunbar number for running a company or maintaining a cohesive social life is 150 people; the magic number for a functional social platform is maybe 20,000 people. Facebook now has 2.7 billion monthly users.

we need to adopt a broader view of what it will take to fix the brokenness of the social web. That will require challenging the logic of today’s platforms—and first and foremost challenging the very concept of megascale as a way that humans gather.

The web’s existing logic tells us that social platforms are free in exchange for a feast of user data; that major networks are necessarily global and centralized; that moderators make the rules. None of that need be the case.

We need people who dismantle these notions by building alternatives. And we need enough people to care about these other alternatives to break the spell of venture capital and mass attention that fuels megascale and creates fatalism about the web as it is now.

We must also find ways to repair the aspects of our society and culture that the social web has badly damaged. This will require intellectual independence, respectful debate, and the same rebellious streak that helped establish Enlightenment values centuries ago.

Right now, too many people are allowing algorithms and tech giants to manipulate them, and reality is slipping from our grasp as a result. This century’s Doomsday Machine is here, and humming along.

Within weeks of those remarks, cases spiked, I.C.U.s overflowed, and we were reminded yet again of Covid’s power to outwit us.

Dr. Mokdad can literally map how our desire to prematurely claim victory, rather than accept the virus’s continuance, has led us to throw off restrictions, with deadly effect

“We all want it to be over. But contingency planning for long-term response is absolutely essential.”

If we think Covid-19 is going away, then we will drop our guard and not make essential investments now.

we need to organize effectively for the very long haul, dramatically improve our pandemic response and embed safeguards into our everyday lives.

Masks, which so many Americans abandoned when it seemed the end of the pandemic was in sight, could still make a difference: If 95 percent of Americans wore a mask, his model projects roughly 56,000 fewer deaths by Feb. 1.

An escape variant

is not a certainty, said the experts with whom I spoke. But it is not far-fetched, either, in part because of our slow pace at vaccinating the world.

That mind-set is not only a crucial hedge against complacency, in which we settle for the good-enough defenses we have now. It could drive us to capitalize on the extraordinary scientific progress of the past year.

As we come to terms with Covid forever, what might our daily lives look like?

Will we have to pare back our holiday party guest lists for years to come? Will home testing before any social gathering become de rigueur? Will vending machines in every subway station carry cheap KN95 masks?

“We would expect that the transmission will never go to zero,” Dr. Mokdad told me. “The virus is going to be with us for a long time” — meaning that deaths, and efforts to prevent them, could continue for years.

the biggest shift in our new normal could be a growing societal embrace of protective measures, rather than a continued war over school mask wearing or workplace vaccine mandates.

he MAGA brain was rewired. The psychologist Daniel Goleman refers to “amygdala hijack,” an intense emotional reaction that’s dramatically disproportionate to the situation. When a person has been triggered, their emotions take over, and they see the world through a distorted lens.

For many, Trump’s behaviors were initially a bug; eventually, they became a feature. Republicans ignored his corruptions and reveled in his cruelty. They entered Trump’s hall of mirrors, and they rather enjoyed it.

To better understand what’s happening in the GOP, think of a person with addiction who over time develops a tolerance; as a result, they need more potent and more frequent doses of the drug to get their desired high. And sometimes even that isn’t enough. They might turn to a more potent drug, which offers a more intense experience and a longer-lasting high, but at the price of considerably more danger.

What was seen as shocking in 2017 is now anodyne. The ethical lines that existed then turned out to have been drawn in sand. When you cross into territory devoid of moral axioms or epistemic standards—the kind of world you would find in a Turgenev novel—things can get very ugly, very quickly.

And that was just the beginning. Here are five significant ways that America was changed by 9/11.

When President George W. Bush addressed Congress and the nation on September 20, 2001, he made a case for a new kind of military response; not a targeted air strike on a single training facility or weapons bunker, but a wide-ranging global War on Terror.

When American troops invaded Afghanistan less than a month after September 11th, they were launching what became the longest sustained military campaign in U.S. history. The fight in Afghanistan had support from the American people and the backing of NATO allies to dismantle al Qaeda, crush the Taliban and kill Osama bin Laden, the murderous mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.

in 2015 and in 2016, that figure surpassed 2001 numbers, reaching 127.

One of the most disturbing aspects of the 9/11 attacks was that 19 al Qaeda hijackers were not only able to board commercial aircraft with crude weapons but also force their way into the cockpit. It was clear that 9/11 was both a failure of America’s intelligence apparatus to identify the attackers and a failure of airport security systems to stop them. Even though there had already been a handful of high-profile hijackings and bombings of commercial planes, including the tragic 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, security was not a high priority for airlines before 9/11, says Jeffrey Price, a professor of aviation and aerospace science at Metropolitan State University and a noted aviation security expert.

 Yet the ever-present shadow of 9/11, Jenkins says, kept U.S. troops on the ground in Afghanistan and elsewhere for nearly 20 years.

In addition to an army of blue-uniformed screeners, TSA introduced U.S. travelers to extensive new security protocols. Tickets and photo IDs became required to get through the screening area. Laptop computers and electronics had to be removed from carry-on bags. Shoes were taken off. Liquids were restricted to three-ounce containers. And conventional X-ray machines, which only detected metal objects, were eventually replaced with full-body scanners.

Just four days after the 9/11 attacks, a gunman in Mesa, Arizona went on a shooting rampage. First, he shot and killed Balbir Singh Sodhi, a gas station owner of Indian descent. Sodhi was Sikh, so he wore a turban. The gunman assumed he was Muslim. Minutes later, the gunman shot at another gas station clerk of Lebanese descent, but missed, and then shot through the windows of an Afghan-American family.

Before 9/11, people didn’t have to have a ticket to wander around the airport or wait at the gate. No one checked passengers' IDs before boarding the plane. And the only item people had to remove when passing through security was loose change from their pockets. Price says that most airports didn’t bother running background checks on their employees, and checked baggage was never scanned.

FBI conducted surveillance. Long-standing rules meant to protect Americans from “unreasonable search and seizure” were loosened or thrown out in the name of national security.

Congress gave the FBI and NSA new abilities to collect and share data. For example, the Patriot Act gave intelligence agencies the power to search an individual’s library records and internet search history with little judicial oversight. Agents could search a home without notifying the owner, and wiretap a phone line without establishing probable cause.

This law gave the NSA nearly unchecked authorities to eavesdrop on American phone calls, text messages and emails under the premise of targeting foreign nationals suspected of terrorism. 

“If anyone had said this is what they expected the threat to be the day after 9/11, they probably would have been laughed at,” says Sterman. “That would have seemed hopelessly naive.”

The third factor is the speed with which higher interest rates pass through to homeowners. The biggest risk is to borrowers on floating-rate mortgages

not all fixed-term loans are alike. In America the bulk of them are fixed for two or three decades. In other countries, even fixed-rate borrowers will face soaring mortgage costs soon enough

all the ingredients for a deep housing slump are in place. This time, though, it is likely to be led not by America, but by Canada, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand and Norway

First-time buyers and recent borrowers are especially vulnerable. Many stretched their finances to buy a home, leaving less spare cash to cover a jump in mortgage costs

First-time buyers have also had less time to accumulate equity. Oxford Economics estimates that a 15% drop in house prices in America over a year would cancel out two-thirds of the housing equity they have accumulated since the start of the pandemic

the housing squeeze will have profound consequences. “The housing cycle IS the business cycle”, wrote Edward Leamer of the University of California, Los Angeles, in a paper published in 2007

The link between the two cycles arises because housing confers “wealth effects” on owner occupiers. When house prices rise, people feel good about their financial situation, so borrow and spend more.

It noted that housing slowdowns had preceded eight of the past ten recessions in America

2019 research by the Bank of England found that a 10% increase in house prices raises consumption by 0.35–0.5%

Another important channel between the housing market and the rest of the economy is investment. Capital spending associated with housing, especially house building, can be extremely volatile—and is often the difference between a growing or shrinking economy.

Some people see an upside to a housing crash. They hope lower prices will allow young folk to buy their first houses. These hopes are almost certain to be dashed. In housing corrections, and sometimes for years after, home ownership rates tend to fall, rather than rise

Economic conditions that cause house prices to fall simultaneously imperil the chances of would-be homeowners. Unemployment rises and wages decline. If interest rates jump, people are able to borrow less and mortgage lenders tend to become more skittish about lending

The biggest effect of a housing downturn may be in politics

In countries where home ownership is seen as a rite of passage, lower prices without any increase in affordability will rub salt in already sore wounds. “Falling to what? Falling to absurdly grotesque prices instead of just unthinkable?”

For years more established homeowners took comfort in the thought that, even if real-wage growth was terrible, at least the price of their house was rising. Those days are over. Even baby-boomers, the great winners from a decade of price growth, now face the prospect of living off a smaller nest-egg in retirement, as downsizing becomes less lucrative

All this means rising interest rates will have unpredictable political repurcussions, as people who once benefited from the status quo discover what it feels like to lose out.

Do not be surprised, then, if policymakers launch enormous rescue operations

If you believe that climate change is a boutique issue prioritized only by out-of-touch liberal elites, as one poll found, then this bill, should it pass, represents a political achievement of astonishing magnitude: the triumph of a moral crusade against long odds.

if you believe there is quite a lot of public support for climate action, as other polls suggest — then this bill marks the success of outsider activists in holding establishment forces to account, both to their own rhetoric and to the demands of their voters.

whatever your read of public sentiment, what is most striking about the news this week is not just that there is now some climate action on the table but also how fast the landscape for climate policy has changed, shifting all of our standards for success and failure along with it

The bill may well prove inadequate, even if it passes. It also represents a generational achievement — achieved, from the point of view of activists, in a lot less time than a full generation.

None of this is exclusively the work of the climate left

To trust the math of its architects, this deal between Manchin and the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, splits the difference — the United States won’t be leading the pack on decarbonization, but it probably won’t be seen by the rest of the world as a laughingstock or climate criminal, either.

Technological progress has driven the cost of renewable energy down so quickly, it should now seem irresistible to anyone making long-term policy plans or public investments. There has been rapid policy innovation among centrists and policy wonks, too, dramatically expanding the climate tool kit beyond carbon taxes and cap-and-trade systems to what has been called a whole-of-government approach to decarbonizing.

They got their wish. And as a result, we got a bill. That’s not naïveté but the opposite.

as the political scientist Matto Mildenberger has pointed out, the legislation hadn’t failed at the ballot box; it had stalled on Manchin’s desk

He also pointed to research showing climate is driving the voting behavior of Democrats much more than it is driving Republicans into opposition and that most polling shows high levels of baseline concern about warming and climate policy all across the country. (It is perhaps notable that as the Democrats were hashing out a series of possible compromises, there wasn’t much noise about any of them from Republicans, who appeared to prefer to make hay about inflation, pandemic policy and critical race theory.)

It is hard not to talk about warming without evoking any fear, but the president was famous, on the campaign trail and in office, for saying, “When I think ‘climate change,’ I think ‘jobs.’”

He focused on green growth and the opportunities and benefits of a rapid transition.

In the primaries, Sunrise gave Biden an F for his climate plan, but after he sewed up the nomination, its co-founder Varshini Prakash joined his policy task force to help write his climate plan. As the plan evolved and shrank over time, there were squeaks and complaints here and there but nothing like a concerted, oppositional movement to punish the White House for its accommodating approach to political realities.

over the past 18 months, since the inauguration, whenever activists chose to protest, they were almost always protesting not the inadequacy of proposed legislation but the worrying possibility of no legislation at all

When they showed up at Manchin’s yacht, they were there to tell him not that they didn’t want his support but that they needed him to act. They didn’t urge Biden to throw the baby out with the bathwater; they were urging him not to.

When, last week, they thought they’d lost, Democratic congressional staff members staged an unprecedented sit-in at Schumer’s office, hoping to pressure the Senate majority leader back into negotiations with Manchin. And what did they say? They didn’t say, “We have eight years to save the earth.” They didn’t say, “The blood of the future is on your hands.” What their protest sign said was “Keep negotiating, Chuck.” As far as I can tell, this was code for “Give Joe more.”

The present-day climate left was effectively born, in the United States, with the November 2018 Sunrise Movement sit-in. At the time, hardly anyone on the planet had heard of Greta Thunberg, who had just begun striking outside Swedish Parliament — a lonely, socially awkward 15-year-old holding up a single sign. Not four years later, her existential rhetoric is routinely echoed by presidents and prime ministers and C.E.O.s and secretaries general, and more than 80 percent of the world’s economic activity and emissions are now, theoretically, governed by net-zero pledges pointing the way to a carbon-neutral future in just decades.

The deal, if it holds, is very big, several times as large as anything on climate the United States passed into law before. The architects and supporters of the $369 billion in climate and clean-energy provisions in Joe Manchin’s Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, announced Wednesday, are already calculating that it could reduce American carbon emissions by 40 percent, compared with 2005 levels, by 2030. That’s close enough to President Biden’s pledge of 50 percent that exhausted advocates seem prepared to count it as a victory

— giving the next generation of Republican officeholders, senior advisers, judges and appointees explicit permission and encouragement to believe that the country is on the verge of collapse.

The list of people making these arguments includes former officials in the Trump administration, some of whom are likely to be considered for top jobs in the event of a Trump restoration in 2024.

The ideas about the threat of an all-powerful totalitarian left and the dismal state of the country — even the most outlandish of them — are taken seriously by conservative politicians as well as prominent influencers on the right.

If Mr. Trump manages to win the presidency again in 2024, many of these intellectual catastrophists could be ready and willing to justify deeds that could well bring American liberal democracy to its knees.

Mr. Anton’s “Flight 93” essay originally appeared on a website with modest traffic, but two days later Rush Limbaugh was reading it aloud in its entirety on his radio show. The essay set the tone of life-or-death struggle (and related imagery) that is common among catastrophists.

Mr. Anton updated and amplified the argument in a 2021 book, “The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return.”

The prospect of Mr. Biden’s becoming president constituted an “existential threat,” Mr. Eastman said, to the survivability of the country. Would we “completely repudiate every one of our founding principles” and allow ourselves to be “eradicated”? Those were the stakes, as he viewed them.

Once a thinker begins to conceive of politics as a pitched battle between the righteous and those who seek the country’s outright annihilation, extraordinary possibilities open up.

in May 2021, Mr. Anton came to conduct a two-hour podcast with a far-right Silicon Valley tech guru and self-described “monarchist,” Curtis Yarvin, in which the two agreed that the American “regime” is today most accurately described as a “theocratic oligarchy.” In that arrangement, an elite class of progressive “priests” ensconced in executive branch agencies, the universities, elite media and other leading institutions of civil society promulgate and enforce a distorted and self-serving version of reality that illegitimately justifies their rule.

It culminated in Mr. Yarvin sketching a scenario in which a would-be dictator he alternatively describes as “Caesar” and “Trump” defies the laws and norms of democratic transition and uses a “Trump app” to direct throngs of his supporters on the streets of the nation’s capital to do his bidding, insulating the would-be dictator from harm and the consequences of his democracy-defying acts.

Mr. Anton described Caesarism as one-man rule that emerges “after the decay of a republican order, when it can no longer function.”

he would prefer the country to embrace the principles of “1787 forever.” But if that is no longer possible, he said, the rule of a Caesar can be a necessary method to restore order.)

Those on the right primarily concerned about the fate of traditionalist Christian morals and worship in the United States insist that we already live in a regime that oppresses and brutalizes religious believers and conservatives. And they make those charges in a theologically inflected idiom that’s meant to address and amplify the right’s intense worries about persecution by progressives.

Among the most extreme catastrophists writing in this vein is Stephen Wolfe, whose book “The Case for Christian Nationalism” calls for a “just revolution” against America’s “gynocracy” (rule by women) that emasculates men, persuading them to affirm “feminine virtues, such as empathy, fairness and equality.” In its place, Mr. Wolfe proposes the installation of a “Christian prince,” or a form of “theocratic Caesarism.”

Other authors aspire to greater nuance by calling the dictatorship weighing down on religious believers soft totalitarianism, usually under the rule of social-justice progressivism. These writers often draw direct parallels between the fate of devout Christians in the contemporary United States and the struggles of Eastern Europeans who sought to practice their faith but were harshly persecuted by Soviet tyranny

the most recent book by the writer Rod Dreher, “Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents.”

Patrick Deneen of the University of Notre Dame offers the most elaborate and intellectually sophisticated response in his recent book, “Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future.”

“Regime Change” is a much darker book that goes well beyond diagnosing America’s ills to propose what sounds, in certain passages, like a radical cure.

Mr. Deneen and other discontented intellectuals of the religious right can perhaps be most accurately described as political reactionaries looking to undertake a revolutionary act in reverse.

Growing numbers of Americans supposedly reject this outlook, demanding a postliberal government and social, cultural and economic order — basically, hard-right policies on religious and moral issues and hard left on economics. But the forces of liberalism are entrenched on the center left and center right, using every power at their disposal to prevent regime change.

In some passages, he advocates a “peaceful but vigorous overthrow of a corrupt and corrupting liberal ruling class” and proposes modest reforms to replace i

in other passages, Mr. Deneen goes much further, describing the separation of church and state as a “totalitarian undertaking” that must be reversed so that American public life can be fully integrated with conservative forms of Christianit

He even affirmatively quotes a passage from Machiavelli in which he talks of the need to use “extralegal and almost bestial” forms of resistance, including “mobs running through the streets,” in order to topple the powers that be.

The source of these maladies, Mr. Deneen claims, is liberalism, which until recently has dominated both political parties in the United States, imposing an ideology of individual rights and historical progress on the country from above. This ideology, he says, denigrates tradition, faith, authority and community.

Costin Alamariu, the person generally understood to be writing under the pseudonym Bronze Age Pervert.

He self-published a book in 2018, “Bronze Age Mindset,” which follows Friedrich Nietzsche and other authors beloved by the European far right in proclaiming that Western civilization itself is on the verge of collapse, its greatest achievements far in the past, its present a “garbage world” in an advanced state of decay.

All around us, Mr. Alamariu declares, greatness and beauty are under assault. Who are its enemies? Women, for one. (“It took 100 years of women in public life for them to almost totally destroy a civilization.”) Then there’s belief in democratic equality. (“I believe that democracy is the final cause of all the political problems I describe.”)

But blame must most of all be laid at the feet of the creature Mr. Alamariu calls the “bugman,” a term he uses to describe a majority of human beings alive today. This insectlike infestation venerates mediocrity and is “motivated by a titanic hatred of the well-turned-out and beautiful.”

Mr. Alamariu proposes breeding great men of strength who model themselves on pirates, disregarding laws and norms, plundering and taking anything they want and ultimately installing themselves as absolute rulers over the rest of us.

“Now imagine a man of Trump’s charisma, but who is not merely beholden to the generals, but one of them, and able to rule and intimidate them as well as seduce the many. … Caesars and Napoleons are sure to follow.”

In a recent essay, Mr. Alamariu wrote: “I believe in fascism or ‘something worse’ …. I believe in rule by a military caste of men who would be able to guide society toward a morality of eugenics.”

Mr. Alamariu’s recently self-published doctoral dissertation reached No. 23 on Amazon sitewide in mid-September. Among those on the right treating the author as a friend, ally or interlocutor worthy of respectful engagement are the prominent activist Christopher Rufo, the author Richard Hanania and the economist-blogger Tyler Cowen.

These writers are giving Republican elites permission and encouragement to do things that just a few years ago would have been considered unthinkable.

In a second term, Mr. Trump’s ambition is to fire tens of thousands of career civil servants throughout the federal bureaucracy and replace them with loyalists. He also reportedly plans to staff the executive branch with more aggressive right-wing lawyers. These would surely be people unwaveringly devoted to the president and his agenda as well as the danger the Democratic Party supposedly poses to the survival of the United States.

These writers also exercise a powerful influence on media personalities with large audiences. Tucker Carlson has interviewed Curtis Yarvin and declared that with regard to the 2024 election, “everything is at stake. What wouldn’t they do? What haven’t they done? How will you prepare yourself?”

Other right-wing influencers with large followings assert more bluntly that if conservatives lose in 2024, they will be hunted down and murdered by the regime.

It’s important that we respond to such statements by pointing out there is literally no evidence to support them. Other intellectual catastrophists are likewise wrong to suggest the country is ruled by a progressive tyranny, and we can know this because people on the right increasingly say such things while facing no legal consequences at all.

The question, then, is why the intellectual catastrophists have gotten to this point — and why others on the right are listening to them. The answer, I think, is an intense dislike of what America has become, combined with panic about the right’s ability to win sufficient power in the democratic arena to force a decisive change.

In refusing to accept that deal, many of the right’s most prominent writers are ceasing to behave like citizens, who must be willing to share rule with others, in favor of thinking and acting like commissars eager to serve a strongman.

Mr. Khamenei’s ruling philosophy has been shaped and reinforced by three notable authoritarian collapses: The 1979 fall of Iran’s monarchy, the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Arab uprisings of 2011. His takeaway from each of these events has been to never compromise under pressure and never compromise on principles.

The Iranian regime’s repressive capacity — at least on paper — remains formidable. Ayatollah Khamenei is commander in chief of 190,000 armed members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who oversee tens of thousands of Basij militants tasked with instilling public fear and morality.

Iran’s nonideological conscription army, whose active forces are an estimated 350,000, is unlikely to take part in mass repression

Until now, the political and financial interests of Ayatollah Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards have been intertwined. But persistent protests and chants of “Death to Khamenei” might change that

The sociologist Charles Kurzman wrote in his seminal book, “The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran,” that the paradox of revolutionary movements is that they are not viable until they attract a critical mass of supporters but that to attract a critical mass of supporters, they must be perceived as viable.

If the organizing principle that united Iran’s disparate opposition forces in 1979 was anti-imperialism, the organizing principles of today’s socioeconomically and ethnically diverse movement are pluralism and patriotism.

The faces of this movement are not ideologues or intellectuals but athletes, musicians and ordinary people, especially women and ethnic minorities, who have shown uncommon courage. Their slogans are patriotic and progressive — “We will not leave Iran, we will reclaim Iran,” and “Women, life, freedom.”

The demands of the current movement are brilliantly distilled in Shervin Hajipour’s song “Baraye,” or “For,” which has become the anthem of the protests and articulates a “yearning for a normal life” rather than the “forced paradise” of a religious police state.

Abbas Amanat, a historian of Iran, observed that one of the keys to Iran’s civilizational longevity, which dates to the Persian Empire of 2,500 years ago, is the power of its culture to co-opt its military invaders. “For nearly two millenniums, Persian political culture and, in a broader sense, a repository of Persian civilizational tools successfully managed to convert Turkic, Arab and Mongolian conquerors,” he told me. “Persian language, myth, historical memories and timekeeping endured. Iranians persuaded invaders to appreciate a Persian high culture of poetry, food, painting, wine, music, festivals and etiquette.”

When Ayatollah Khomeini acquired power in 1979, he led a cultural revolution that sought to replace Iranian patriotism with a purely Islamic identity. Ayatollah Khamenei continues that tradition, but he is one of the few remaining true believers. While the Islamic Republic sought to subdue Iranian culture, it is Iranian culture and patriotism that are threatening to undo the Islamic Republic.

Four decades of the Islamic Republic’s hard power will ultimately be defeated by two millenniums of Iranian cultural soft power. The question is no longer about whether this will happen but when.

Altman and OpenAI have been candid on this front. The end goal of OpenAI has always been to build a so-called artificial general intelligence, or AGI, that would, in their imagining, alter the course of human history forever, ushering in an unthinkable revolution of productivity and prosperity—a utopian world where jobs disappear, replaced by some form of universal basic income, and humanity experiences quantum leaps in science and medicine. (Or, the machines cause life on Earth as we know it to end.) The stakes, in this hypothetical, are unimaginably high—all the more reason for OpenAI to accelerate progress by any means necessary.

As with other grand projects of the 20th century, the voting public had a voice in both the aims and the execution of the Apollo missions. Altman made it clear that we’re no longer in that world. Rather than waiting around for it to return, or devoting his energies to making sure that it does, he is going full throttle forward in our present reality.

In response to one question about AGI rendering jobs obsolete, Jeff Wu, an engineer for the company, confessed, “It’s kind of deeply unfair that, you know, a group of people can just build AI and take everyone’s jobs away, and in some sense, there’s nothing you can do to stop them right now.” He added, “I don’t know. Raise awareness, get governments to care, get other people to care. Yeah. Or join us and have one of the few remaining jobs. I don’t know; it’s rough.”

Part of Altman’s reasoning, he told Andersen, is that AI development is a geopolitical race against autocracies like China. “If you are a person of a liberal-democratic country, it is better for you to cheer on the success of OpenAI” rather than that of “authoritarian governments,” he said. He noted that, in an ideal world, AI should be a product of nations. But in this world, Altman seems to view his company as akin to its own nation-state.

Wu’s colleague Daniel Kokotajlo jumped in with the justification. “To add to that,” he said, “AGI is going to create tremendous wealth. And if that wealth is distributed—even if it’s not equitably distributed, but the closer it is to equitable distribution, it’s going to make everyone incredibly wealthy.”

This is the unvarnished logic of OpenAI. It is cold, rationalist, and paternalistic. That such a small group of people should be anointed to build a civilization-changing technology is inherently unfair, they note. And yet they will carry on because they have both a vision for the future and the means to try to bring it to fruition

Wu’s proposition, which he offers with a resigned shrug in the video, is telling: You can try to fight this, but you can’t stop it. Your best bet is to get on board.

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.

AlphaGo’s victory demonstrated the unbridled potential of A.I. to achieve superhuman mastery of skills once considered too complicated for machines.

Mr. Lee, now 41, retired three years later, convinced that humans could no longer compete with computers at Go. Artificial intelligence, he said, had changed the very nature of a game that originated in China more than 2,500 years ago.

As society wrestles with what A.I. holds for humanity’s future, Mr. Lee is now urging others to avoid being caught unprepared, as he was, and to become familiar with the technology now. He delivers lectures about A.I., trying to give others the advance notice he wishes he had received before his match.

“I faced the issues of A.I. early, but it will happen for others,” Mr. Lee said recently at a community education fair in Seoul to a crowd of students and parents. “It may not be a happy ending.”

Mr. Lee is not a doomsayer. In his view, A.I. may replace some jobs, but it may create some, too. When considering A.I.’s grasp of Go, he said it was important to remember that humans both created the game and designed the A.I. system that mastered it.

What he worries about is that A.I. may change what humans value.

His immense talent was apparent from the start. He quickly became the best player of his age not only locally but across all of South Korea, Japan and China. He turned pro at 12.

“People used to be in awe of creativity, originality and innovation,” he said. “But since A.I. came, a lot of that has disappeared.”

By the time he was 20, Mr. Lee had reached 9-dan, the highest level of mastery in Go. Soon, he was among the best players in the world, described by some as the Roger Federer of the game.

Go posed a tantalizing challenge for A.I. researchers. The game is exponentially more complicated than chess, with it often being said that there are more possible positions on a Go board (10 with more than 100 zeros after it, by many mathematical estimates) than there are atoms in the universe.

The breakthrough came from DeepMind, which built AlphaGo using so-called neural networks: mathematical systems that can learn skills by analyzing enormous amounts of data. It started by feeding the network 30 million moves from high-level players. Then the program played game after game against itself until it learned which moves were successful and developed new strategies.

Mr. Lee said not having a true human opponent was disconcerting. AlphaGo played a style he had never seen, and it felt odd to not try to decipher what his opponent was thinking and feeling. The world watched in awe as AlphaGo pushed Mr. Lee into corners and made moves unthinkable to a human player.“I couldn’t get used to it,” he said. “I thought that A.I. would beat humans someday. I just didn’t think it was here yet.”

AlphaGo’s victory “was a watershed moment in the history of A.I.” said Demis Hassabis, DeepMind’s chief executive, in a written statement. It showed what computers that learn on their own from data “were really capable of,” he said.

Mr. Lee had a hard time accepting the defeat. What he regarded as an art form, an extension of a player’s own personality and style, was now cast aside for an algorithm’s ruthless efficiency.

His 17-year-old daughter is in her final year of high school. When they discuss what she should study at university, they often consider a future shaped by A.I.“We often talk about choosing a job that won’t be easily replaceable by A.I. or less impacted by A.I.,” he said. “It’s only a matter of time before A.I. is present everywhere.”