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what should surprise and disturb all Americans is that our political institutions, and above all the Republican party, are so vulnerable to Russian interference. The Republican party, traditionally associated with a hawkish stance toward Moscow, threw its support behind a presidential candidate who openly called on Russia to hack his opponent’s campaign.

Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell told Obama and leading Democrats that he would regard any effort to release evidence of Russian interference before the election as partisan. In other words, he put his own party’s interest in electing Trump and gutting the welfare state ahead of the national interest.

Neither he, nor House speaker Paul Ryan, nor any other leading Republican seems the slightest bit apologetic about the Republican party’s all but open alliance with Putin.

Besides the Republican party, America’s weakness can be seen in what appears to be an escalating war between our domestic intelligence agency, the FBI and our foreign intelligence agency, the CIA. The FBI released damaging information about Hillary Clinton shortly before the election, which may have swung the outcome in key states and allowed for the election of Trump on a law and order platform. Meanwhile, the CIA is belatedly undermining Trump by releasing information about his foreign ties. This is not the sign of a healthy democracy.

America’s political system is as broken as that of 18th-century Poland. Our territory may not be under threat, but our ability to govern ourselves without outside interference is

Our antiquated electoral system has yielded a president-elect who is unqualified and temperamentally unstable, and who is openly building a kleptocratic state closely modeled on Putin’s

In an 1838 speech in Illinois, a young Abraham Lincoln considered how the United States might fall, asking: “Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never!” Instead, he warned, “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide.”

Lewandowski and Bossie, for all their campaign nostalgia, point out that Trump could be awful in person. “The mode that he switches into when things aren’t going his way can feel like an all-out assault. . . . Around the campaign, we’d call it getting your face ripped off.” (They took special delight in witnessing the removal of Paul Manafort’s face.) They also put the lie to Trump’s swamp-draining talk. “To tell you the truth, the establishment/outsider distinction never mattered all that much to Trump,” they admit. “In his mind, people are placed into two distinct categories: loyal and disloyal.”

More data is what he thinks we need. “Let’s do it wisely. Technology is neutral, number one. Number two, it's unstoppable,” he says

So we just have to accept more surveillance as the price of this new way of living? “For the advancement of your well-being, what's wrong with that?” he says.

But if we turn our homes and our bodies over to algorithms, how do we know they have our best interests at heart? “They have to be tested, and they have to go through peer review. They have to be scientifically validated as being useful in enhancing our well-being,” he says.

And tech companies will fail if they do not, Chopra says. “The businesses that will survive in the future are the businesses that improve the quality of life on our planet, the quality of the environment, the quality of our relationships and the quality of our social interactions,” he says.

Ashley also praised his workers, some of whom were made to come in on Tuesday for tasks such as stocktaking.

The government subsequently added bike shops to the list of essential businesses that can stay open. Ashley’s Evans Cycles is considering reopening its doors as a result.

Once upon a time, members of Congress of the same party as the president were not terrified to criticize him—even though he was popular with his base and the nation was at war.

Once upon a time, the institutions of a free government and a constitutional republic worked.

the Republican party was able to recover after Nixon, or Gingrich, or Bush, because—whatever one thought of particular policies or the new leaders—it had not sold its soul to those individuals.

In that world, conservatism could survive failures, ranging from moral to political to strategic, because as a movement it had a standing superior to and somewhat independent of any of particular actor.

No longer. It’s Trump, all the way down.

We have now reached the terminus of craven loyalty and pathetic apologetics. I don’t see how either the political institution of the Republican party or the intellectual movement of conservatism recovers from what we have seen over the last three years—but especially the last three months.

a provocative 2009 paper titled “Conspiracy Theories.” As always, they begin with a genuine problem: in this case, the spread of harmful untruths like birtherism or trutherism. Their basic idea is that government agencies should be allowed to pursue a project of “cognitive infiltration,” anonymously mucking about in conspiracy circles in order to sow doubt and confusion

Who, in the end, has the capacity to employ the awesome powers of the modern state?

Schmitt showed, they believe, that the executive branch is the proper locus of sovereignty and the one that is most legitimately linked with the people. It is also the only one with the capacity and speed to act in times of emergency.

Vermeule and Posner published two books, Terror in the Balance (2007) and Executive Unbound (2009), that brought Schmitt’s insights into the context of contemporary America and its global War on Terror. The books mount a robust defense of executive leeway, including the right to use “enhanced interrogation”—or, in layman’s terms, torture.

it is hard not to place him into a recognizable genealogy of liberal Protestants, ensconced in the mainstream intellectual culture of their day, who found their way to Rome. Jacques Maritain belongs in this camp, as do G.K. Chesterton and Alasdair MacIntyre. Like Vermeule, they brought the zeal of the convert with them, and were often more radical than cradle Catholics

one can find quite similar trajectories: deep engagement in mainstream, non-Catholic schools, which brought them to unresolvable contradictions. The Church offered them answers to questions they already had.

His scholarship with Sunstein and Posner labored mightily to persuade us that shreds of paper, be they constitutions or laws, were irrational guides to social betterment. And yet what was to take their place?

How can the state make decisions about ethical matters, which it must do, and why ought those decisions be viewed as legitimate? What, in the end, do citizens share with one another? These are first-order questions

Liberal individualism had always relied upon, and was even a relic of, constitutional legalism. The whole idea had been that law could structure social relations, allowing different cultures and religions to live in relative harmony. By depriving the law of this sort of social function, the law and economics circle opened up a vast new set of questions about how the social order might cohere.

Vermeule’s co-authors looked to the individual and her preferences, as stewarded by a free market and enlightened administrative agencies

Vermeule, however, came to see liberalism as purely destructive: as a set of tools and procedures whose primary purpose was to reshape social reality in its own image, steamrolling the virtues of the people in the name of individualism and science

he has begun to entertain dark visions about how the administrative state might coerce the unruly people toward virtue. He positively cites Joseph de Maistre, a Catholic critic of the French Revolution and fellow defender of torture. Vermeule dreams of a world in which we will “sear the liberal faith with hot irons” in order “to defeat and capture the hearts and minds of liberal agents.” A less honest thinker would be sure to remind readers that this is all meant metaphorically. Vermeule does no such thing and goes out of his way to assert that “coercion” ought to be on the table. There is only one way to read this: he is arguing that actual violence could legitimately be used to convert hearts and minds.

Vermeule’s theory, in Law’s Abnegation and elsewhere, has been that the modern state is not actually governed by law or courts but by administrative agencies like the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Education. And his proposal in his more radical writings is that those agencies ought to be staffed by integralists who would bend the powers of the state in his desired direction.

“We have learned from behavioral economics,” he reminds us, that administrative agents can “nudge whole populations in desirable directions.” The theory that the state might “nudge” citizens toward more optimal outcomes, as defined by technocrats, is the famous theory developed by Sunstein

Vermeule is saying, if we are going to grant the administrative state the right to mold citizen behavior, why stop there? We might be nudged, he thinks, with hot irons; we might be nudged right back to the Inquisition.

He is not exactly a “populist” and is more committed to the reign of the Church than he is to that of the Republican Party. And yet, given his apologetics for the Eastern European regimes that are currently committed to gutting judiciaries and human rights protections, there is no doubt which side he will be on if or when the true moment of crisis arrives in our imperiled republic

Vermeule’s story shows us just how easily technocracy, by evacuating the moral center of our politics, can tip toward a moralizing authoritarianism that promises to restore one—how easily, in other words, Bloomberg might tip into Bonaparte.

In March of 2020, for example, he forwarded a correspondence about the possible Covid-19 immunity of indigenous people harvesting guano (bat excrement), as well as an idea from a psychiatry professor about using the antibiotic minocycline to slow viral replication. He commented on an email from a Swedish psychiatrist, "There may be nothing to this, but we should at least be aware." And in April of that year, he told a persistent doctor with multiple ideas for possible antiviral agents, "You are not being ignored."

I find the emails about the funding of Fauci's agency particularly fascinating. Over the course of the messages, budget discussions transition from small funding increases to tremendous week-on-week growths in expenditures -- particularly when the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was empowered by Congress to dream bigger thanks to $1.532 billion in supplemental appropriations. To put a finer point on this group of emails: it was these bigger dreams and bigger trials that provided us with important answers and, ultimately, with the vaccines.

At other times, it feels like looking at the celebrity photos on the front pages of People magazine: "He felt that way, too?!"

Finally, in between the lines, we watch him manage this pandemic as a human. There are emails where he is clearly overwhelmed, forwarding media request after speaking request to his assistants at the Office of the Chief of Staff. (One has to wonder: who wouldn't be overwhelmed by this number of requests?)

There are emails where he is tremendously kind, thanking people for their service, telling staff to "stay well and safe" or complimenting folks on well-written papers and columns.

Again and again, he responds to concerned citizens, scientists and journalists with: "Thank you for your note." He pays attention both to people he knows -- apologetically telling Ralph Nader at 7 p.m. on a Sunday, "I receive over 1000 e-mails per day and even with staff screening, I do not see them for days." -- and to those he probably doesn't. There are times when he's funny, times when he's frustrated and times when he's clearly exhausted, admitting that he's simply too tired to make sense of something.

He is just like us -- or, at least, he's how most of us like to imagine ourselves to be, on our best days.

The speech might have been rambling and emotional but its motivation was clear. And it immediately created a quandary for many West-blamers and Putin-understanders. How would you square your belief in national sovereignty and the effective declaration by the Russian president that Ukraine shouldn’t have any?

On the left Russia stood as a flawed bulwark against imperialism, on the right against the supranational machinations of the New World Order (the EU, Nato, the UN, whatever).

I don’t call these western apologists for Putin traitors, or fifth columnists, or paid agents of Russia. They’re none of those things. I note that as of today, courtesy of Putin, these people all look foolish.

But if the Moscow autocrat follows through the logic of his own words, then things may get very difficult for us all. A price will be paid, economically certainly and possibly in something more precious.

It will be Putin’s doing but there will be an increasing number of voices raised blaming our own governments and institutions. Voices that must be heard but must be countered.