Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

In fact, “unity” turned out to be the wrong goal to pursue. What mattered was defending the republic’s values, a defense never made forcefully enough.

As a historian of modern France, I’ve followed with great interest the innumerable comparisons drawn between Trumpism and Nazism that began even before Trump took office: the endless debate over whether Trump can be called a “fascist” (I would say yes), whether American society today resembles Weimar Germany before it fell to the Nazis (I would say no), and if we can really say that the Republican Party is just a confederation of “collaborators” (of course we can).

All historical analogies are flawed, and they might not mean much at all. Even if they underscore the gravity of the moment, they often obscure its causes and might, in fact, prevent us from seeing them.

In seeking to understand Trump, and Trumpism, we have preferred to tell ourselves stories about violent rupture and hostile takeovers—of Hitler’s rise, of Nazism’s threat, of the perils of collaboration—but not so much about the valorization of falsehood and a republic that ignores, and even embraces, its own terminal impotence. That is the story of France’s Third Republic and its defining psychodrama.

What is most important to remember about the Third Republic is that, as long-lasting as it might have been, it was a parliamentary system constantly stalled in political gridlock

much like in America today, there was a self-absorbed intellectual establishment obsessed with decline and the mysterious disease of “decadence,” which was spoken of in the same pompous outrage that our own pundits use to decry what happens on Ivy League campuses or in major newsrooms.

In the end, the opportunism and the cynicism of political elites earned them the distrust of both ordinary voters and the bureaucrats left to run things when they themselves would not. What emerged was a “politics of resentment,”

The spectacular crash of the Union Générale bank in 1882 triggered an economic downturn that would take years to overcome; this, and the corruption of the Panama scandal just four years later, might be seen as19th-century versions of 2008, economic crises whose root causes were similarly ignored by the elite and, among the masses, blamed on the Jews.

there were multiple Trumpian moments and characters in the Third Republic as well, most notably Georges Boulanger, the swashbuckling, garish hard-line nationalist general who seemed to emerge from nowhere and launched a populist movement of mass appeal, an anti-republican crusade that nearly toppled the republic in 1889. Boulangism did not last politically, but it represented a new fault line in French society: a powerful right-wing bloc that united some in the working class along with conservative Catholics and the remnants of the old nobility. It only radicalized from there a few years later, and the Dreyfus affair was the moment when what was left of the social fabric definitively unraveled.

What is especially useful to remember about the Dreyfus affair now is the point of no return it represented, the repugnant embrace of lies by one half of society, educated people who were not ignorant but who had simply ceased to care. For them, the truth was irrelevant; what mattered was preserving their vision of the nation, regardless of the facts.

From start to finish, the Dreyfus affair was a seemingly endless social drama. Much like the Trump presidency, it was an all-consuming, emotional experience that left no aspect of public or even private life untouched. It would be hard to overstate the polarization it triggered in France, which found its population split over the fate of an obscure officer hardly anyone had heard of before the episode began.

In some ways, the Dreyfus affair was the culmination of an age-old clash begun by the French Revolution: On one side were the defenders of the republic and its “universal” values, on the other the anti-republican faction that preferred the grandeur of the monarchy, the sanctity of the Church, and the prestige of the military.

Then, as now, these people had undertaken a deliberate embrace of irrationality, an almost primal flaunting of decency and civilized norms, merely because that was possible, and because there were never any real consequences.

this might not solve the deeper problem, which is that so many in Trump’s mob—like so many of his supporters in general—remain comfortably ensconced in the mansion of lies their champion has built. As we have seen for years on end, any attempt to expose those lies with facts or evidence of any kind is a fool’s errand. These people deliberately inhabit an alternate universe because it makes them feel powerful, because it frustrates their enemies, and, in the end, because they can.

he line among certain Democrats has been that there can be “no healing without accountability.” But this is naïve. There can be no accountability for those who engage in surreality, the dark province in which the world is apparently run by a cabal of prominent pedophiles and where Trump somehow retained the White House in a landslide. As long as the president’s supporters insult the notion of objective truth, coddled by conspiracy theories and social-media networks that simulate a sense of community, there will be no common ground to seek, no “America” to reclaim

if the past rarely offers lessons, sometimes it offers warnings.

What, after all, is the main alternative to investing in stocks? Buying bonds. Yet these days bonds offer incredibly low returns. The interest rate on 10-year U.S. government bonds is only 0.6 percent

So buying stock in companies that are still profitable despite the Covid-19 recession looks pretty attractive.

And why are interest rates so low? Because the bond market expects the economy to be depressed for years to come, and believes that the Federal Reserve will continue pursuing easy-money policies for the foreseeable future

for a few weeks in March the world teetered on the edge of a 2008-type financial crisis, which caused investors to flee everything with the slightest hint of risk.

That crisis was, however, averted thanks to extremely aggressive actions by the Fed, which stepped in to buy an unprecedented volume and range of assets.

But back to the disconnect between stocks and economic reality. It turns out that this is a long-term phenomenon, dating back at least to the mid-2000s.

Think about all the negative things we’ve learned about the modern economy since, say, 2007. We’ve learned that advanced economies are much less stable, much more subject to periodic crises, than almost anyone believed possible.

Productivity growth has slumped, showing that the information technology-fueled boom of the 1990s and early 2000s was a one-shot affair. Overall economic performance has been much worse than most observers expected around 15 years ago.

Stocks, however, have done very well. On the eve of the Covid crisis, the ratio of market capitalization to G.D.P. — Warren Buffett’s favorite measure — was well above its 2007 level, and a bit higher than its peak during the dot-com bubble. Why?

The main answer, surely, is to consider the alternative. While employment eventually recovered from the Great Recession, that recovery was achieved only thanks to historically low interest rates. The need for low rates was an indication of underlying economic weakness: businesses seemed reluctant to invest despite high profits, often preferring to buy back their own stock. But low rates were good for stock prices.

None of this should be taken as a statement that current market valuations are exactly right. My gut sense is that investors are too eager to seize on good news; but the truth is that I have no idea where the market is headed.

The point, instead, is that the market’s resilience does, in fact, make some sense despite the terrible economic new

CRT makes two basic observations: First, that bias and prejudice exist not just in the hearts and minds of individuals, but also in society’s social structures and systems.

second, that bias embedded in systems is frequently invisible to the dominant class but perfectly perceptible to its victims

we must begin to attend in a serious way to heterodox black voices

Both of these observations are true at least some of the time

The problem is that the second—sometimes referred to as “standpoint epistemology”—contends that only minorities have standing to articulate a view on race and racism.

In her book What Does It Mean to Be White?, Robin DiAngelo puts it this way: “Sometimes I am asked, ‘But what if the person of color is wrong and what they think is racism isn’t racism at all?’ To this I say that people of color are much more qualified than we are to make this determination. My not being able to see racism is unrelated to its reality.” Anyone who proffers an alternative perspective can be accused of “privilege.”

This insight goes a long way to explaining the current fetishization of experience, especially if it is (redundantly) “lived.” Black people from all walks of life find themselves deferred to by non-blacks

black people certainly don’t all “feel” or “experience” the same things. Nor do they all "experience" the same event in an identical way. Finally, even when their experiences are similar, they don’t all think about or interpret their experiences in the same way.

Given America’s history of racism, we do have a special obligation to listen closely when marginalized people talk about their experience: The victims of racism will indeed have insights that others cannot possibly glean on their own.

This need is especially urgent given the ideological homogeneity of the “antiracist” outlook and efforts of elite institutions, including media, corporations, and an overwhelmingly progressive academia. For the arbiters of what it means to be black that dominate these institutions, there is a fairly narrowly prescribed “authentic” black narrative, black perspective, and black position on every issue that matters.

The practical effects of the new antiracism are everywhere to be seen, but in few places more clearly than in our children’s schools

But I cannot agree that, in making space for marginalized voices, everyone else should defer to whatever ideological claims members of a minority group attach to their definition of racism.

it tends to go like this: Defer to my lived experience; my lived experience reveals that critical race theory is true; you, too, must abide by critical race theory.

First, insisting that large swaths of people keep quiet is not a sustainable moral undertaking

Calling on those deemed privileged to mute themselves permanently on issues of race and racism only engenders resentment.

When we hear the demand to “listen to black voices,” what is usually meant is “listen to the right black voices.”

Many non-black people have heard a certain construction of “the black voice” so often that they are perplexed by black people who don’t fit the familiar model.

Similarly, many activists are not in fact “pro-black”: they are pro a rather specific conception of “blackness” that is not necessarily endorsed by all black people.

There’s a difference between listening to someone’s experience and tying oneself to their entire worldview. Challenging someone’s viewpoint should not be taken as invalidating their feelings.

This is where our new website, Free Black Thought (FBT), seeks to intervene in the national conversation. FBT honors black individuals for their distinctive, diverse, and heterodox perspectives, and offers up for all to hear a polyphony, perhaps even a cacophony, of different and differing black voices.

Second, oppressed people, like all people, are sometimes wrong.

Lived experience, while important, is just one data point in understanding social reality. Being oppressed doesn’t give anyone a monopoly on wisdom, even about oppression. Indeed, our experience can bias our insight

Shelly Eversley’s The Real Negro suggests that in the latter half of the 20th century, the criteria of what constitutes “authentic” black experience moved from perceptible outward signs, like the fact of being restricted to segregated public spaces and speaking in a “black” dialect, to psychological, interior signs. In this new understanding, Eversley writes, “the ‘truth’ about race is felt, not performed, not seen.”

one might reasonably question what could be wrong with teaching children “antiracist” precepts. But the details here are full of devils.

Third, marginalized communities are diverse.

To take an example that could affect millions of students, the state of California has adopted a statewide Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) that reflects “antiracist” ideas. The ESMC’s content inadvertently confirms that contemporary antiracism is often not so much an extension of the civil rights movement but in certain respects a tacit abandonment of its ideals.

“The spectrum of thought amongst African Americans is and has always been much broader and multifarious than commonly perceived,” he writes. “Neglect of that fact has led to a homogenization that has tended to submerge African American individuality.”

It has thus been condemned as a “perversion of history” by Dr. Clarence Jones, MLK’s legal counsel, advisor, speechwriter, and Scholar in Residence at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Institute at Stanford University:

Today, Black people are no less diverse in their political views than they’ve been through the ages.

Who alone speaks for a marginalized people? I, for one, will listen to anyone willing to talk with me.

Fourth, oppressed people around the world hold claims that directly contradict those of other oppressed people.

If you agree that one oppressed group has standing to define reality, it’s hard to argue that all oppressed people around the world don’t have similar standing to define their narratives of oppression, some of which conflict with each other.

Finally, some schools are adopting antiracist ideas of the sort espoused by Ibram X. Kendi, according to whom, if metrics such as tests and grades reveal disparities in achievement, the project of measuring achievement must itself be racist.

Fifth, once you allow someone else to define reality for you, you never know where it will take you. You’ve now outsourced your analysis to a third party, who may down the line make absurd statements or engage in untenable behavior that you now feel compelled to defend

Or consider the third-grade students at R.I. Meyerholz Elementary School in Cupertino, California

The children with “white” in their identity map were taught that they were part of the “dominant culture” which has been “created and maintained…to hold power and stay in power.” They were also taught that they had “privilege” and that “those with privilege have power over others.

In contrast, the non-white students were taught that they were “folx (sic) who do not benefit from their social identities,” and “have little to no privilege and power.”

We will never effectively address our problems, however, if one set of voices claims unique insight and seeks to shut out the rest from the discussion.

Or take New York City’s public school system, one of the largest educators of non-white children in America. In an effort to root out “implicit bias,” former Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza had his administrators trained in the dangers of “white supremacy culture.”

A slide from a training presentation listed “perfectionism,” “individualism,” “objectivity” and “worship of the written word” as white supremacist cultural traits to be “dismantled,”

Essentialist thinking about race has also gained ground in some schools. For example, in one elite school, students “are pressured to conform their opinions to those broadly associated with their race and gender and to minimize or dismiss individual experiences that don’t match those assumptions.” These students report feeling that “they must never challenge any of the premises of [the school’s] ‘antiracist’ teachings.”

Parents are justifiably worried about such innovations. What black parent wants her child to hear that grading or math are “racist” as a substitute for objective assessment and real learning? What black parent wants her child told she shouldn’t worry about working hard, thinking objectively, or taking a deep interest in reading and writing because these things are not authentically black?

Clearly, our children’s prospects for success depend on the public being able to have an honest and free-ranging discussion about this new antiracism and its utilization in schools. Even if some black people have adopted its tenets, many more, perhaps most, hold complex perspectives that draw from a constellation of rather different ideologies.

So let’s listen to what some heterodox black people have to say about the new antiracism in our schools.

Coleman Hughes, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, points to a self-defeating feature of Kendi-inspired grading and testing reforms: If we reject high academic standards for black children, they are unlikely to rise to “those same rejected standards” and racial disparity is unlikely to decrease

Chloé Valdary, the founder of Theory of Enchantment, worries that antiracism may “reinforce a shallow dogma of racial essentialism by describing black and white people in generalizing ways” and discourage “fellowship among peers of different races.”

We hope it’s obvious that the point we’re trying to make is not that everyone should accept uncritically everything these heterodox black thinkers say. Our point in composing this essay is that we all desperately need to hear what these thinkers say so we can have a genuine conversation

We promote no particular politics or agenda beyond a desire to offer a wide range of alternatives to the predictable fare emanating from elite mainstream outlets. At FBT, Marxists rub shoulders with laissez-faire libertarians. We have no desire to adjudicate who is “authentically black” or whom to prefer.

Both of these observations are true at least some of the time

The problem is that the second—sometimes referred to as “standpoint epistemology”—contends that only minorities have standing to articulate a view on race and racism.

In her book What Does It Mean to Be White?, Robin DiAngelo puts it this way: “Sometimes I am asked, ‘But what if the person of color is wrong and what they think is racism isn’t racism at all?’ To this I say that people of color are much more qualified than we are to make this determination. My not being able to see racism is unrelated to its reality.” Anyone who proffers an alternative perspective can be accused of “privilege.”

Given America’s history of racism, we do have a special obligation to listen closely when marginalized people talk about their experience: The victims of racism will indeed have insights that others cannot possibly glean on their own.

There’s a difference between listening to someone’s experience and tying oneself to their entire worldview. Challenging someone’s viewpoint should not be taken as invalidating their feelings.

it tends to go like this: Defer to my lived experience; my lived experience reveals that critical race theory is true; you, too, must abide by critical race theory.

First, insisting that large swaths of people keep quiet is not a sustainable moral undertaking

Calling on those deemed privileged to mute themselves permanently on issues of race and racism only engenders resentment.

We will never effectively address our problems, however, if one set of voices claims unique insight and seeks to shut out the rest from the discussion.

But I cannot agree that, in making space for marginalized voices, everyone else should defer to whatever ideological claims members of a minority group attach to their definition of racism.

Lived experience, while important, is just one data point in understanding social reality. Being oppressed doesn’t give anyone a monopoly on wisdom, even about oppression. Indeed, our experience can bias our insight

Third, marginalized communities are diverse.

“The spectrum of thought amongst African Americans is and has always been much broader and multifarious than commonly perceived,” he writes. “Neglect of that fact has led to a homogenization that has tended to submerge African American individuality.”

Today, Black people are no less diverse in their political views than they’ve been through the ages.

Who alone speaks for a marginalized people? I, for one, will listen to anyone willing to talk with me.

Fourth, oppressed people around the world hold claims that directly contradict those of other oppressed people.

If you agree that one oppressed group has standing to define reality, it’s hard to argue that all oppressed people around the world don’t have similar standing to define their narratives of oppression, some of which conflict with each other.

Fifth, once you allow someone else to define reality for you, you never know where it will take you. You’ve now outsourced your analysis to a third party, who may down the line make absurd statements or engage in untenable behavior that you now feel compelled to defend

Second, oppressed people, like all people, are sometimes wrong.

The implication of Hannah-Jones’s tweet and candidate Biden’s quip seems to be that you can have African ancestry, dark skin, textured hair, and perhaps even some “culturally black” traits regarding tastes in food, music, and ways of moving through the world. But unless you hold the “correct” political beliefs and values, you are not authentically black.

In a now-deleted tweet from May 22, 2020, Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times, opined, “There is a difference between being politically black and being racially black.”

Shelly Eversley’s The Real Negro suggests that in the latter half of the 20th century, the criteria of what constitutes “authentic” black experience moved from perceptible outward signs, like the fact of being restricted to segregated public spaces and speaking in a “black” dialect, to psychological, interior signs. In this new understanding, Eversley writes, “the ‘truth’ about race is felt, not performed, not seen.”

This insight goes a long way to explaining the current fetishization of experience, especially if it is (redundantly) “lived.” Black people from all walks of life find themselves deferred to by non-blacks

black people certainly don’t all “feel” or “experience” the same things. Nor do they all "experience" the same event in an identical way. Finally, even when their experiences are similar, they don’t all think about or interpret their experiences in the same way.

we must begin to attend in a serious way to heterodox black voices

This need is especially urgent given the ideological homogeneity of the “antiracist” outlook and efforts of elite institutions, including media, corporations, and an overwhelmingly progressive academia. For the arbiters of what it means to be black that dominate these institutions, there is a fairly narrowly prescribed “authentic” black narrative, black perspective, and black position on every issue that matters.

When we hear the demand to “listen to black voices,” what is usually meant is “listen to the right black voices.”

Many non-black people have heard a certain construction of “the black voice” so often that they are perplexed by black people who don’t fit the familiar model.

Similarly, many activists are not in fact “pro-black”: they are pro a rather specific conception of “blackness” that is not necessarily endorsed by all black people.

This is where our new website, Free Black Thought (FBT), seeks to intervene in the national conversation. FBT honors black individuals for their distinctive, diverse, and heterodox perspectives, and offers up for all to hear a polyphony, perhaps even a cacophony, of different and differing black voices.

The practical effects of the new antiracism are everywhere to be seen, but in few places more clearly than in our children’s schools

one might reasonably question what could be wrong with teaching children “antiracist” precepts. But the details here are full of devils.

To take an example that could affect millions of students, the state of California has adopted a statewide Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) that reflects “antiracist” ideas. The ESMC’s content inadvertently confirms that contemporary antiracism is often not so much an extension of the civil rights movement but in certain respects a tacit abandonment of its ideals.

It has thus been condemned as a “perversion of history” by Dr. Clarence Jones, MLK’s legal counsel, advisor, speechwriter, and Scholar in Residence at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Institute at Stanford University:

Essentialist thinking about race has also gained ground in some schools. For example, in one elite school, students “are pressured to conform their opinions to those broadly associated with their race and gender and to minimize or dismiss individual experiences that don’t match those assumptions.” These students report feeling that “they must never challenge any of the premises of [the school’s] ‘antiracist’ teachings.”

In contrast, the non-white students were taught that they were “folx (sic) who do not benefit from their social identities,” and “have little to no privilege and power.”

The children with “white” in their identity map were taught that they were part of the “dominant culture” which has been “created and maintained…to hold power and stay in power.” They were also taught that they had “privilege” and that “those with privilege have power over others.

Or consider the third-grade students at R.I. Meyerholz Elementary School in Cupertino, California

Or take New York City’s public school system, one of the largest educators of non-white children in America. In an effort to root out “implicit bias,” former Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza had his administrators trained in the dangers of “white supremacy culture.”

A slide from a training presentation listed “perfectionism,” “individualism,” “objectivity” and “worship of the written word” as white supremacist cultural traits to be “dismantled,”

Finally, some schools are adopting antiracist ideas of the sort espoused by Ibram X. Kendi, according to whom, if metrics such as tests and grades reveal disparities in achievement, the project of measuring achievement must itself be racist.

Parents are justifiably worried about such innovations. What black parent wants her child to hear that grading or math are “racist” as a substitute for objective assessment and real learning? What black parent wants her child told she shouldn’t worry about working hard, thinking objectively, or taking a deep interest in reading and writing because these things are not authentically black?

Clearly, our children’s prospects for success depend on the public being able to have an honest and free-ranging discussion about this new antiracism and its utilization in schools. Even if some black people have adopted its tenets, many more, perhaps most, hold complex perspectives that draw from a constellation of rather different ideologies.

So let’s listen to what some heterodox black people have to say about the new antiracism in our schools.

Coleman Hughes, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, points to a self-defeating feature of Kendi-inspired grading and testing reforms: If we reject high academic standards for black children, they are unlikely to rise to “those same rejected standards” and racial disparity is unlikely to decrease

Chloé Valdary, the founder of Theory of Enchantment, worries that antiracism may “reinforce a shallow dogma of racial essentialism by describing black and white people in generalizing ways” and discourage “fellowship among peers of different races.”

We hope it’s obvious that the point we’re trying to make is not that everyone should accept uncritically everything these heterodox black thinkers say. Our point in composing this essay is that we all desperately need to hear what these thinkers say so we can have a genuine conversation

We promote no particular politics or agenda beyond a desire to offer a wide range of alternatives to the predictable fare emanating from elite mainstream outlets. At FBT, Marxists rub shoulders with laissez-faire libertarians. We have no desire to adjudicate who is “authentically black” or whom to prefer.

Unfortunately, that also means that the more the fact-based media tries to debunk the president’s falsehoods, the further it will entrench the battle lines.

The press secretary also declined to answer a straightforward question about the unemployment rate, suggesting that the number will henceforth be whatever the Trump administration wants it to be.

In a stunning demonstration of the power and resiliency of our new post-factual political culture, Mr. Trump and his allies in the right media have already turned the term “fake news” against its critics, essentially draining it of any meaning. During the campaign, actual “fake news” — deliberate hoaxes — polluted political discourse and clogged social media timelines.

For years, the widely read Drudge Report has linked to the bizarre conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who believes that both the attacks of Sept. 11 and the Sandy Hook shootings were government-inspired “false flag” operations.

But now any news deemed to be biased, annoying or negative can be labeled “fake news.” Erroneous reports that the bust of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been removed from the Oval Office or misleading reports that sanctions against Russia had been lifted will be seized on by Mr. Trump’s White House to reinforce his indictment.

Mr. Trump and his allies are empowering this alt-reality media, providing White House access to Breitbart and other post-factual outlets that are already morphing into fierce defenders of the administration.

By now, it ought to be evident that enemies are important to this administration, whether they are foreigners, refugees, international bankers or the press.

But discrediting independent sources of information also has two major advantages for Mr. Trump: It helps insulate him from criticism and it allows him to create his own narratives, metrics and “alternative facts.”

The Russian dissident and chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov drew upon long familiarity with that process when he tweeted: “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”

In that world, the leader becomes the only reliable source of truth; a familiar phenomenon in an authoritarian state, but a radical departure from the norms of a democratic society. The battle over truth is now central to our politics.

Scottie Nell Hughes, was asked to defend the clearly false statement by Mr. Trump that millions of votes had been cast illegally. She answered by explaining that everybody now had their own way of interpreting whether a fact was true or not.

Or as George Orwell said: “The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.”

In the meantime, we must recognize the magnitude of the challenge. If we want to restore respect for facts and break through the intellectual ghettos on both the right and left, the mainstream media will have to be aggressive without being hysterical and adversarial without being unduly oppositional.

There may be short-term advantages to running headlines about millions of illegal immigrants voting or secret United Nations plots to steal your guns, but the longer the right enables such fabrications, the weaker it will be in the long run. As uncomfortable as it may be, it will fall to the conservative media to police its worst actors.

A time traveler from the Reagan era would no longer recognize the Republican Party, but most Republican politicians feel no embarrassment supporting policies they once condemned.

Since World War II, Republicans have styled themselves the party of national defense. Yet under President Trump, they have unsettled our alliances and professed a strange new respect for Vladimir Putin.

The Republicans were once the party of global free trade, a system with major flaws but one that requires reform, not ham-handed overthrow. Yet the president believes he can bully longtime allies and force them to accept bilateral trade deals on his terms.

An enduring caricature of the old-time Republican is the penny-pinching deficit hawk.

But the president’s high-decibel smear campaign against the professionals of the F.B.I. destroys the party’s pretense of being a friend of law enforcement

the deficit, thanks partly to the tax cut, is projected after years of decline to explode to a trillion dollars annually.

Tax cuts, regardless of the deficit, are an obsession with Republicans and a source of shameless hypocrisy.

Republicans were once the party of conservation and the environment: from Abraham Lincoln, who set aside Yosemite for what later became a national park, to Theodore Roosevelt, preserving 230 million acres of public land, to Richard Nixon, who signed the Clean Air Act and created the Environmental Protection Agency.

Now the E.P.A. is being systematically gutted. Its administrator, Scott Pruitt, has named as chairman of its science advisory board a person who criticizes the E.P.A.’s standards for exposure to mercury (a neurotoxin causing severe brain damage) and believes ozone pollution rules are unnecessary because Americans spend most of their time indoors.

Republicans always counted themselves as strong supporters of law and order.

Under Mr. Trump, who has extolled leveraging other people’s money while declaring that debt is good, the party is no longer even half pregnant. His tax act, passed exclusively with Republican votes in both the House and the Senate, increases the national debt by over a trillion dollars and awards 62 percent of its monetary benefits to the richest 1 percent of Americans.

So what do Republicans have left? The tax cut, the sole important legislation from the Republican Congress, shows that catering to its rich contributors is the party’s only policy. The rest of its agenda is simply tactics and trickery.

As the party has become unmoored from positive belief, it has grown manipulative, demagogic and contemptuous of truth.

It has culminated in the president’s counselor Kellyanne Conway’s appealing to “alternative facts,” meaning lies, on behalf of her boss, who has made an average of 5.6 false or misleading claims a day since his inauguration.

Today’s Republican Party is incapable of honest and coherent governance, with “right” or “wrong” reduced to a question of whether it helps the party.

A few Republicans protest the president’s disgraceful behavior, but never in a way that matters. Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona has become famous for sanctimonious speeches denouncing the latest outrage, but he votes with machine-like consistency in favor of the president’s destructive agenda and unqualified nominees.

Ultimately, the party’s spiritual sickness isn’t about Mr. Trump. Eight years ago, did Republican officeholders shut down the nonsense that Mr. Obama was a secret Muslim? For that matter, a quarter-century ago, did they quash the idiotic charge that the Clintons murdered Vince Foster?

the benefits are really vivid, they are really clear. Everybody agrees that the world will be better off the faster we move. And that really wasn’t the case five or 10 years ago. There was much more muddled analysis and messaging then. And I think we have to take advantage of the new unanimity and not let people fall back on the logic of status quo bias and incumbency and just think that change is expensive and difficult

david wallace-wellsMy basic feeling is that the changes that we need are all systemic. And so the things that individuals can do to make that change are primarily through the political realm, not through their individual behavior. If we want to really halt this problem and get a handle on it, it means large, large scale changes that are beyond the capacity of individuals to enact on their own.

jane coastonHow do we get our house in order? What do I as an individual or the people listening to this podcast, how do I make this happen on my level? Knowing all of that, what do I do? What do I personally need to do? Give me a thing to do, Genevieve!

If you want to learn more about personal responsibility, I recommend Jason Marks’s article in the Sierra Club magazine, “Yes, actually, individual responsibility is essential to solving the climate crisis,” and the New York Times guest essay by Auden Schendler, “Worrying About Your Carbon Footprint is Exactly What Big Oil Wants You to Do.”

david wallace-wells

I don’t know that we have to all take on a feeling of guilt for the rise of G.D.P. under neoliberalism, because I don’t know that most of us have actually even seen that money.

ultimately, the things that we need to do to really get a hold of this are way bigger than cutting your food emissions by 10 percent or 50 percent or whatever. It’s like, the three of us in this room, we can’t build an electric grid, a solar farm. We can’t make sure that there are Tesla charging stations all across the country. We can’t re-imagine land use policy or agricultural policy. We can’t put an honest price on carbon so that when you’re buying gas, you’re actually paying for the environmental damage that’s being caused or when you’re buying an airplane ticket. Those are just things that are well outside of our capacity to control

jane coastonCould you explain what climate justice means to an audience that is me?genevieve guentherBasically, it means that the global north historically has been responsible for the vast majority of carbon pollution. And the global south has been responsible for almost none of it. Since 1990, for example, the top 10 percent of earners have been responsible for 52 percent of the growth of global emissions. And the poorest, 50 percent, who largely live in the global south, have been responsible for about 7 percent of global emissions. But that hasn’t grown at all. Historically, they have contributed nothing to the exponential growth of emissions and the increased and accelerating global heating that we’re already seeing. So the idea of climate justice is that global north nations have a moral responsibility to reduce their emissions first and faster so that there is some room left in whatever carbon budget we still have for the global south to pull themselves out of poverty.

jane coastonDavid, what do you make of what Genevieve said about the messaging about good and evil there?

david wallace-wellsI would say even more importantly, we can’t set our standard at extinction. It’s not like if we survive and avoid extinction, that that’s a success. There is huge suffering between here and there. And every degree of temperature rise is going to create more suffering. And every degree we avoid can help us avoid that.

The climate crisis has begun in the United States, too. But the real violence of it is in the global south. And I would argue that the global north doesn’t see it because the news media isn’t reporting on it and because the kind of white supremacy prevents people in this country from really recognizing that this is a violence that would feel unimaginable if it happened to their children.

genevieve guentherOK, so the first part is understanding why we have to do this. And I would argue that most Americans still don’t know enough about global heating and the climate crisis.

jane coastonYeah, but and a benefit when? Because I think a lot of this messaging relies on something that, in general, people do not like, which is, you may need to do a thing or change a thing about your life for a future that we have not yet defined. From a messaging perspective, how do we message the urgency

To think about the concrete impacts, 350,000 Americans, it’s estimated, die every single year from the air pollution from the burning of fossil fuels. That is a death toll literally equal to the 2020 death toll from COVID.

Or is it going to take so long that, in fact, things are going to spiral out of control?

within the space of a few years, by simply refusing to accept their own impotence, they have literally remade the entire landscape of global climate politics. Like in the U.S., when we have Joe Biden who Sunrise gave an F to in the primary, talking about this as an existential threat, that is because the protests worked. And they worked in an incredibly short amount of time

I personally think the high consumption, and particularly the flying of people who are in the public eye, trying to communicate the urgency of the climate crisis, is incredibly destructive to building a political movement. They’re actually doing something extremely counterproductive in my interpretation. They’re reinforcing everybody’s cognitive dissonance with their behavior, which is also a form of speech. They’re communicating that they’re not willing to make transformative changes and not willing to support transformative policies, and that, in fact, you need to use fossil fuels even to do climate work. And so, for me, I feel like the people who need to worry about their carbon footprints insofar as anybody does are the 1 percent and people in the climate movement.

here are huge, huge health consequences from this pollution. It may be the case that air pollution may even be a bigger crisis than climate change. That is how dramatic these impacts are. They happen to be caused largely by the same thing so we can solve them at the same time, but we’re talking about rising rates of respiratory disease and coronary disease and cancers of all kinds and Alzheimer’s and dementia and ADHD and criminality and premature birth and low birth weight. And just every aspect of human flourishing is damaged by the pollution that is produced by the burning of fossil fuels

david wallace-wellsIt’s really, really stark, as Genevieve lays out, that it is the wealthy countries of the world and the wealthy people of the world who have engineered this crisis. So whenever we hear about the problem of India, the problem of electrifying sub-Saharan Africa, these are problems. We need to figure them out and do them clean in a way that doesn’t imperil the future of the planet. But those are only problems that we have to deal with now because of the development patterns that countries like ours and across northern Europe went through over the last few decades and centuries.

Half of all emissions in the entire history of humanity have come in the last 30 years. Now since Al Gore published his first book on warming, you know I often joke it’s since the premiere of “Friends,” which means that, actually, the people who have done the lion’s share of the damage to the planet are alive today. And it is true, of course, that the people who have been running Shell and Chevron and ExxonMobil have much more responsibility than I do or Genevieve does or Jane does. But it is also the case that all of us have benefited in significant ways from economic activity that has been powered by fossil fuels and to which we could have raised louder objections earlier.

genevieve guentherI think it’s worthwhile to point out that the vast majority of Americans are literally going to be richer once we have decarbonized, because their electricity, their heating, their transportation, and their health care costs are going to go down significantl

genevieve guentherPick one. Do it once a week, and things will change. First thing is vote. You can’t do that once a week, but vote in every election. Vote

some of the actions that you’re talking about, the individual actions, I think can be useful in terms of generating small scale political energy that can eventually sort of trickle up into politics. Leaders see that we’re making changes. They see that we’re demanding changes. They may feel more comfortable making those changes themselves.

We as a culture need to normalize that it’s actually healthy not to be happy in the face of climate change and that it doesn’t mean we’re failed Americans. It means that we’re actually human beings who are having an appropriate and ethical moral response to the suffering that is coming in the pipe for everybody, also our own children

Or you can donate to groups that are working on electoral politics directly, like the Environmental Voter Project or Stacey Abrams’s Verified Action

david wallace-wellsHonestly, the person I was talking to was the United States. I mean, that is the perspective that we have as a country. And as guilty as I feel as responsible as I feel, as I’m sure, Genevieve, and to some extent, Jane, you feel, all of us are actually behaving in ways that are imposing that kind of suffering on people elsewhere in the world. It’s almost unavoidable, given the systems that we live in today. And that is really horrifying. But I think the more clearly that we can see that, the more likely we are to be demanding real change of our leaders and the systems in which we live

david wallace-wellsWell, some of them can matter in limiting your carbon footprint. So if you don’t eat beef, if you don’t take airplanes, if you drive an electric car, you’re probably pretty far along in reducing your own carbon footprint. And that is one measure of climate responsibility, carbon responsibility

The ability to put your preferred candidates in office is a huge part of the climate fight

david wallace-wellsI think that this story is one about our responsibility towards other humans, in which collectively, human behavior has imperiled the future of the planet. I think as a result, we have to talk about it in terms of good and evil, that there are very obvious sides.

And it is borne disproportionately by Black and Brown and poor people.

genevieve guentherI actually agree with David. This is a systemic problem that is only going to be solved by governments and large corporations leading the transformation of our economies to zero-emission economies. That said, rich people across the globe have a responsibility, a personal responsibility, to reduce their discretionary emissions, to reduce their consumption, both for climate justice reasons and also simply because we need them to do it if we’re going to meet our emissions targets and halt global heating.

what is hopeful about these net zero pledges, even as they are greenwashing, is the fact that these companies feel pressure to make them at all, right? This is a sea change in politics. If they can’t actually transform, they’re going to be pushed out, and new incumbents are going to come in. And the question is, can we do this fast enough to halt global warming in time to preserve much of the habitable world?

The second piece is a kind of climate communication that shows people how this is going to affect them. Most people think of this as a crisis that’s for the global south or for the distant future or for our grandchildren’s grandchildren or whatever. And it’s up to every single communicator, as far as I’m concerned, to make it clear in really concrete embodied terms what this crisis is going to mean for the children who are alive today.

When I started writing about climate five years ago, I would not have thought that this kind of political change was at all possible. We are living through what is a genuinely unprecedented global climate awakening, which has totally changed the landscape of what is possible. And it really has made the world and the future look sunnier

famously last year, Drew Shindell, who’s an air pollution expert at Duke, testified before U.S. Congress saying that a green transition of the American energy system would entirely pay for itself through the public health benefits of cleaner air. You could put aside all of the climate impacts. You could put aside all the benefits of cheaper electricity. And just because we would be healthier as a result, even in the U.S. where air is already clean, the dollars and cents would add up and make that a very, very clear win for all of us

here’s another thing you can do. You can organize your workplace to ask your company to make greener business decisions or to lobby Congress for climate policies

once they’re in office, keep pressuring them. Call their D.C. offices. Call their local offices. Send them emails regularly

he dynamic is even more horrifying elsewhere in the world where other countries have much dirtier air than we do. Estimates are as high as 10 million people globally dying of air pollution every single year, 8.7 million of them from the burning of fossil fuels

then the third piece of that is really showing how making these changes that are required would be such a benefit to them.

that you have to live like a monk to make this work. That may have been, to some degree, true 25, 30 years ago when the alternative systems that we now see right around the corner were much farther away in the distance and much more expensive. But it just isn’t the case now that to green our economy will require an enormous burden

when we think of it simply in terms of, is the economy going to grow faster or is it going to go slower, I think we really, really miss the huge, huge public health consequences of continuing running the systems as we are running them today, and also the huge benefits we would get from getting off those systems

david wallace-wellsIn 2070, we’re in a net zero world. Nobody has a carbon footprint. So having more kids is not going to make one difference in either direction. And I think we’re still in a place where we can keep that goal in mind and fight to make that possible so that we don’t have to do things like reduce family size.

I had this interaction just before the pandemic at an event I did. I keep thinking about it. I think about it maybe every week, maybe every day, where I gave a talk about looking at how dire some of these situations could be. And afterwards, somebody came up to me who assured me that he was not a climate denier. And then he said, so really, how bad is it going to get? And I said, well, at two degrees, we’re talking about 150 million people dying of air pollution. And he said, but that’s out of 8 billion. And I said, well, yeah, I mean, I’m not talking about the total extinction of the human race here, but 150 million is 150 million. That’s 25 Holocausts. And he said, but out of 8 billion.

the true, are we going to make humans extinct, kind of futures that we were talking about as slim but real possibilities a few years ago, I think are much, much less likely today. And that is in large part the result of climate protests by people who started their activism within the last few years.

genevieve guentherAnd just say that the word “responsibility” has two different definitions, right? There’s the sense of responsibility as guilt. Who is responsible for this crime? Who has to pay the price? But then there’s responsibility as duty. Who’s going to take responsibility for cleaning up this mess?

There is a very small ask that can be made, which is just to support the people who support aggressive climate action. We’re talking about massive, immediate, or quasi immediate payback for all of the investments we’re making.

If you don’t have the time to do that, donate money. Donate money to organizations that are putting their bodies on the line. Here are some of them— Sunrise, Fridays for Future

finally, one of the most impactful things that you can do is simply talk about climate change in your social networks, especially when it feels most socially awkward and embarrassing. Because unless we continue to break the kind of conspiracy of climate silence that allows people to look away, we’re not actually going to have the kind of pressure internally and psychologically in people that will help them join the climate movemen

genevieve guentherWell, let me contextualize this for a moment. The concept of the carbon footprint is actually a legitimate concept in sustainability research. It was developed by two researchers in the 1990s

What is the 1 percent? In the United States, I would define the 1% as people making $450,000 a year and above. So it’s hard to imagine how much consumption is normalized among these people. It is not at all considered wasteful to buy a new SUV every two or three years as new models come out. It is not all considered extravagant to fly up to 20 times a year. It is not at all horrific to buy an entirely new wardrobe two or three times a year and throw it all away. In fact, this is considered a signal that you are in the rich group and that you are living your best life.

it actually has to be done right now. We don’t get another shot at this.

Do my personal actions, be they avoiding plastic straws or composting or calculating my personal carbon footprint, as oil companies seem to really want me to do, or switching light bulbs or becoming a vegetarian, in the scheme of averting climate change or mitigating climate change, do those actions really matter?

I think that there are certain actors who have played hugely disproportionate, often toxic, roles in that story, namely the fossil fuel industry and their allies in political power, not just in the U.S. but all around the world.

that’s not to say that that person is as culpable as the CEOs of ExxonMobil. Obviously, there’s a huge spectrum of culpability, but I think that a huge majority of Americans are understandably viewed by people elsewhere in the world as contributing to the problem as opposed to contributing to the solution, and that we should not dismiss that judgment because we happen to think, well, I was just doing it for myself, or I was just acting in the system in which I live. We should take seriously that judgment and try to think about what we can do to sort of make it right, so to speak.

But BP extracted this concept from academia and created a multimillion dollar campaign, trying to change the discourse of the climate crisis and make, as you said, Jane, everybody feel responsible for causing the climate crisis, but also feeling responsible for solving it by doing things like no longer driving or no longer flying or no longer eating beef or turning off lights or using plastic straws. And as David said, this is impossible. Even if every single one of us brought our personal carbon emissions down to zero, we would not halt global heating.

number two, join a campaign or an activist group. There are local chapters of groups called the Sunrise Movement and 350.org in many communities. If you’re really hardcore, you can join Extinction Rebellion

It will require an investment, but that will sort of pay for itself in the relatively short term. And so we’re now in a situation where a lot of people often think that moving into a sustainable future is going to make their lives suck. And the truth is that just isn’t the case, but that is what the companies that are profiting from the status quo would like you to think because nobody wants their lives to suck.

I think we need to really tell the climate story as a story of good and evil because these people have known for decades what their products were going to do. And not only did they keep producing and selling fossil fuels, they lied about it. They lied about what they knew. And they tried to do everything they could to capture our political system just to sustain their own wealth and power. I think that’s pretty bad. It’s criminal. It’s absolutely criminal.

some of the changes that you’re talking about, people are compelled to do because they don’t want to feel a part of the ugliness of the destruction of the planet, more than because they’re making a rational calculation about how best to use their time and what they can do that has the highest impact

But the fossil fuel industry, as part of their disinformation campaign, wants to make everyone feel helpless, feel overwhelmed, and wants to shift our attention away from the political action that has a chance of resolving the climate crisis to what can’t possibly work, which is focusing on our carbon footprint.

I just don’t think that that’s the end all, be all of it, because I do think that many people, even today, think, OK, I want the future to be stable and green and prosperous. But I don’t want to pay $1 more at the pump for a gallon of gas and may actually vote in an election on that basis

That said, reducing the discretionary emissions of the top 1 percent is actually a piece of the decarbonization puzzle. So, if the top 10 percent reduced their carbon emissions do

n to the level of the average European, which is still quite significant — eight tons a year — we would be about one-third of the way to decarbonizing our systems. So we emit as a globe about 30 gigatons of carbon dioxide a year. And this reduction in luxury consumption would reduce emissions by about 10 gigatons a year. So that is just a staggering number.

Most of the people who are listening to this podcast and nobody in this room, for sure, is responsible for causing the climate crisis. But we’re all responsible for now solving it to the best way that we can.

Greenpeace. And here are some social justice organizations — UPROSE and WE ACT. There are also two new organizations who are writing climate policy in a new way and lobbying on the Hill to get them passed. They are Climate Power and Evergreen Action.

While there is a sort of transition bump and we should have public policy that addresses it, especially for communities who are already suffering, it’s also the case that the obvious economic logic is also the obvious environmental logic here. These are no longer in tension.

for me, that answer is really exclusively through a political engagement and political activism because we really need to shake the whole infrastructure of the world. And the only people who are capable of doing that are the people who are in corridors of power in politics and the corporate worl

the red-blue divide is perhaps less illuminating than the gap between engaged and disengaged Americans, in which an exhausted majority encounters the highly polarized activist wings of both parties and shrinks back from the fray

The wings aren’t changing each other’s minds — hard-core Democrats aren’t going to persuade hard-core Republicans — but they’re also not reaching sufficient numbers of persuadable voters to break America’s partisan deadlock.

In 2020, when I was doing research for my book about the growing danger of partisan division, I began to learn more about what extreme partisanship does not only to our hearts but also to our minds.

It can deeply and profoundly distort the way we view the world. We become so emotionally and spiritually invested in the outcome of a political contest that we can inadvertently become disconnected from reality.

Our heart connects with our mind in such a way that the heart demands that the mind conform to its deepest desires

When a partisan encounters negative information, it can often trigger the emotional equivalent of a fight-or-flight response. This applies not just to negative arguments but also to negative facts. To deal with the emotional response, we seek different arguments and alternative facts.

If you are a true partisan, you essentially become an unpaid lawyer for your side. Every “good” fact that bolsters your argument is magnified. Every “bad” fact is minimized or rationalized.

When partisanship reaches its worst point, every positive claim about your side is automatically believed, and every negative allegation is automatically disbelieved.

allegations of wrongdoing directed at your side are treated as acts of aggression — proof that “they” are trying to destroy “us.”

You see this reality most plainly in the daily Republican theatrics surrounding Trump’s criminal indictments. Rather than wrestle seriously with the profoundly troubling claims against him, they treat the criminal cases as proof of Democratic perfidy. They believe every claim against Hunter and Joe Biden and not a single claim against Trump.

ask why people are checking out, and one reason is that partisans make it so very difficult to engage.

The problem is most pronounced (and often overtly threatening) on the MAGA right, but it’s endemic to our partisan wings

as partisanship deepens, partisan subcultures can get increasingly weird. They become so convinced of the us-versus-them dynamic that they’ll eventually believe virtually anything, as long as it’s a claim against the other side.

If decades of partisanship have persuaded you that your opponents are evil, have no morals and want to destroy the country, then why wouldn’t they hack voting machines or recruit a pop star as a government asset?

I have some rules to help temper my worst partisan impulses.

Expose yourself to the best of the other side’s point of view — including the best essays, podcasts and books.

when you encounter a new idea, learn about it from its proponents before you read its opponents.

when you encounter bad news about a cause that you hold dear — whether it’s a presidential campaign, an international conflict or even a claim against a person you admire, take a close and careful look at the evidence

The only word amiss in this analysis is “may.” The crisis described in Continetti’s essay was not created by the conservative intelligentsia alone. But three signal failures of that intelligentsia clearly contributed to the right’s disastrous rendezvous with Trumpism.

The first failure was a failure of governance and wisdom, under George W. Bush and in the years that followed. Had there been weapons of mass destruction under Iraqi soil and a successful occupation, or had Bush and his advisers chosen a more prudent post-Sept. 11 course, the trust that right-wing populists placed in their elites might not have frayed so quickly.

The second failure was a failure of recognition and self-critique, in which the right’s best minds deceived themselves about (or made excuses for) the toxic tendencies of populism, which were manifest in various hysterias long before Sean Hannity swooned for Donald Trump

But the same Bush-era failures that alienated right-wing populists from their own intelligentsia also discredited conservative ideas within the broader elite.

Some conservatives told themselves that Fox and Drudge and Breitbart were just the evolving right-of-center alternative to the liberal mainstream media, when in reality they were more fact-averse and irresponsible.

Both of these errors were linked to the most important failure of the right’s intellectuals: The failure to translate the power accrued through their alliance with populists into a revolution within the managerial class

Partial revolutions there were. Free-market ideas were absorbed into the managerial consensus after the stagflation of the 1970s. The fall of Communism lent a retrospective luster to Reaganism within the foreign policy establishment.

There was even a period in the 1990s — and again, briefly, after Sept. 11 — when a soft sort of social conservatism seemed to be making headway among Atlantic-reading, center-left mandarins.

What the intellectuals did not see clearly enough was that Fox News and talk radio and the internet had made right-wing populism more powerful, relative to conservatism’s small elite, than it had been during the Nixon or Reagan eras, without necessarily making it more serious or sober than its Bircher-era antecedents.

So it is that today, three generations after Buckley and Burnham, the academy and the mass media are arguably more hostile to conservative ideas than ever, and the courts and the bureaucracy are trending in a similar direction

Reflecting on this harsh reality has confirmed some conservatives in their belief that the managerial order is inherently left wing, and that the goal of a conservative politics should be to sweep the managerial class away entirely

This idea strikes me as fatuous and fantastical at once. But is there an alternative?

Continetti’s essay hints at one: to make intellectual conservatism a more elite-focused project, to seek “a conservative tinged Establishment capable of permeating the managerial society and gradually directing it in a prudential, reflective, virtuous manner respectful of both freedom and tradition.

To begin anew, at such steep disadvantages, what amounts to missionary work?

as another alternative, conservative elites might simply try to build a more intellectually serious populism out of the Trumpian wreckage and wait for a less toxic backlash against liberal overreach to ride back into power.

can the populist right actually be de-Hannitized, de-Trumpified, rendered 100 percent Breitbart-free? Or would building on populism once again just repeat the process that led conservatism to its present end?

In a famous journal he kept from 1935 to 1944, the Romanian writer Mihail Sebastian chronicled an even more extreme shift in his own country. Like me, Sebastian was Jewish; like me, most of his friends were on the political right. In his journal, he described how, one by one, they were drawn to fascist ideology, like a flock of moths to an inescapable flame. He recounted the arrogance and confidence they acquired as they moved away from identifying themselves as Europeans—admirers of Proust, travelers to Paris—and instead began to call themselves blood-and-soil Romanians. He listened as they veered into conspiratorial thinking or became casually cruel. People he had known for years insulted him to his face and then acted as if nothing had happened. “Is friendship possible,” he wondered in 1937, “with people who have in common a whole series of alien ideas and feelings—so alien that I have only to walk in the door and they suddenly fall silent in shame and embarrassment?”

This is not 1937. Nevertheless, a parallel transformation is taking place in my own time, in the Europe that I inhabit and in Poland, a country whose citizenship I have acquired

the Dreyfus affair is most interesting because it was sparked by a single cause célèbre. Just one court case—one disputed trial—plunged an entire country into an angry debate, creating unresolvable divisions between people who had previously not known that they disagreed with one another. But this shows that vastly different understandings of what is meant by “France” were already there, waiting to be discovered

More important, though the people I am writing about here, the nativist ideologues, are perhaps not all as successful as they would like to be (about which more in a minute), they are not poor and rural, they are not in any sense victims of the political transition, and they are not an impoverished underclass. On the contrary, they are educated, they speak foreign languages, and they travel abroad—just like Sebastian’s friends in the 1930s.

What has caused this transformation

My answer is a complicated one, because I think the explanation is universal. Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all societies eventually will.

And it is taking place without the excuse of an economic crisis of the kind Europe suffered in the 1930s. Poland’s economy has been the most consistently successful in Europe over the past quarter century. Even after the global financial collapse in 2008, the country saw no recession. What’s more, the refugee wave that has hit other European countries has not been felt here at all. There are no migrant camps, and there is no Islamist terrorism, or terrorism of any kind.

Two decades ago, different understandings of “Poland” must already have been present too, just waiting to be exacerbated by chance, circumstance, and personal ambition

All of these debates, whether in 1890s France or 1990s Poland, have at their core a series of important questions: Who gets to define a nation? And who, therefore, gets to rule a nation? For a long time, we have imagined that these questions were settled—but why should they ever be?

the illiberal one-party state, now found all over the world—think of China, Venezuela, Zimbabwe—was first developed by Lenin, in Russia, starting in 1917. In the political-science textbooks of the future, the Soviet Union’s founder will surely be remembered not for his Marxist beliefs, but as the inventor of this enduring form of political organization.

Unlike Marxism, the Leninist one-party state is not a philosophy. It is a mechanism for holding power. It works because it clearly defines who gets to be the elite—the political elite, the cultural elite, the financial elite.

In monarchies such as prerevolutionary France and Russia, the right to rule was granted to the aristocracy, which defined itself by rigid codes of breeding and etiquette. In modern Western democracies, the right to rule is granted, at least in theory, by different forms of competition: campaigning and voting, meritocratic tests that determine access to higher education and the civil service, free markets

in modern Britain, America, Germany, France, and until recently Poland, we have assumed that competition is the most just and efficient way to distribute power. The best-run businesses should make the most money. The most appealing and competent politicians should rule. The contests between them should take place on an even playing field, to ensure a fair outcome.

Lenin’s one-party state was based on different values. It overthrew the aristocratic order. But it did not put a competitive model in place. The Bolshevik one-party state was not merely undemocratic; it was also anticompetitive and antimeritocratic. Places in universities, civil-service jobs, and roles in government and industry did not go to the most industrious or the most capable. Instead, they went to the most loyal.

As Hannah Arendt wrote back in the 1940s, the worst kind of one-party state “invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”

Lenin’s one-party system also reflected his disdain for the idea of a neutral state, of apolitical civil servants and an objective media. He wrote that freedom of the press “is a deception.” He mocked freedom of assembly as a “hollow phrase.” As for parliamentary democracy itself, that was no more than “a machine for the suppression of the working class.”

These parties tolerate the existence of political opponents. But they use every means possible, legal and illegal, to reduce their opponents’ ability to function and to curtail competition in politics and economics. They dislike foreign investment and criticize privatization, unless it is designed to benefit their supporters. They undermine meritocracy. Like Donald Trump, they mock the notions of neutrality and professionalism, whether in journalists or civil servants. They discourage businesses from advertising in “opposition”—by which they mean illegitimate—media.

nepotism, state capture. But if you so choose, you can also describe it in positive terms: It represents the end of the hateful notions of meritocracy and competition, principles that, by definition, never benefited the less successful. A rigged and uncompetitive system sounds bad if you want to live in a society run by the talented. But if that isn’t your primary interest, then what’s wrong with it?

If you are someone who believes that you deserve to rule, then your motivation to attack the elite, pack the courts, and warp the press to achieve your ambitions is strong. Resentment, envy, and above all the belief that the “system” is unfair—these are important sentiments among the intellectuals of the Polish right.

picking apart personal and political motives is extremely difficult. That’s what I learned from the story of Jacek Kurski, the director of Polish state television and the chief ideologist of the Polish illiberal state. He started out in the same place, at the same time, as his brother, Jarosław Kurski, who edits the largest and most influential liberal Polish newspaper. They are two sides of the same coin.

the polarizing political movements of 21st-century Europe demand much less of their adherents. They don’t require belief in a full-blown ideology, and thus they don’t require violence or terror police. They don’t force people to believe that black is white, war is peace, and state farms have achieved 1,000 percent of their planned production. Most of them don’t deploy propaganda that conflicts with everyday reality.

yet all of them depend, if not on a Big Lie, then on what the historian Timothy Snyder once told me should be called the Medium-Size Lie, or perhaps a clutch of Medium-Size Lies. To put it differently, all of them encourage their followers to engage, at least part of the time, with an alternative reality. Sometimes that alternative reality has developed organically; more often, it’s been carefully formulated, with the help of modern marketing techniques, audience segmentation, and social-media campaigns.

In Hungary, the lie is unoriginal: It is the belief, shared by the Russian government and the American alt-right, in the superhuman powers of George Soros, the Hungarian Jewish billionaire who is supposedly plotting to bring down the nation through the deliberate importation of migrants, even though no such migrants exist in Hungary.

In Poland, at least the lie is sui generis. It is the Smolensk conspiracy theory: the belief that a nefarious plot brought down the president’s plane in April 2010.

The truth, as it began to emerge, was not comforting to the Law and Justice Party or to its leader, the dead president’s twin brother. The plane had taken off late; the president was likely in a hurry to land, because he wanted to use the trip to launch his reelection campaign. There was thick fog in Smolensk, which did not have a real airport, just a landing strip in the forest; the pilots considered diverting the plane, which would have meant a drive of several hours to the ceremony. After the president had a brief phone call with his brother, his advisers apparently pressed the pilots to land. Some of them, against protocol, walked in and out of the cockpit during the flight. Also against protocol, the chief of the air force came and sat beside the pilots. “Zmieścisz się śmiało”—“You’ll make it, be bold,” he said. Seconds later, the plane collided with the tops of some birch trees, rolled over, and hit the ground.

When, some weeks after the election, European institutions and human-rights groups began responding to the actions of the Law and Justice government, they focused on the undermining of the courts and public media. They didn’t focus on the institutionalization of the Smolensk conspiracy theory, which was, frankly, just too weird for outsiders to understand. And yet the decision to put a fantasy at the heart of government policy really was the source of the authoritarian actions that followed.

Although the Macierewicz commission has never produced a credible alternate explanation for the crash, the Smolensk lie laid the moral groundwork for other lies. Those who could accept this elaborate theory, with no evidence whatsoever, could accept anything.

Whatever mistakes the party might make, whatever laws it might break, at least the “truth” about Smolensk would finally be told.

The Smolensk conspiracy theory, like the Hungarian migration conspiracy theory, served another purpose: For a younger generation that no longer remembered Communism, and a society where former Communists had largely disappeared from politics, it offered a new reason to distrust the politicians, businesspeople, and intellectuals who had emerged from the struggles of the 1990s and now led the country.

More to the point, it offered a means of defining a new and better elite. There was no need for competition, or for exams, or for a résumé bristling with achievements. Anyone who professes belief in the Smolensk lie is by definition a true patriot—and, incidentally, might well qualify for a government job.

Hungary’s belated reckoning with its Communist past—putting up museums, holding memorial services, naming perpetrators—did not, as I thought it would, help cement respect for the rule of law, for restraints on the state, for pluralism

16 years after the Terror Háza’s opening, Hungary’s ruling party respects no restraints of any kind. It has gone much further than Law and Justice in politicizing the state media and destroying the private media, achieving the latter by issuing threats and blocking access to advertising. It has created a new business elite that is loyal to Orbán.

Schmidt embodies what the Bulgarian writer Ivan Krastev recently described as the desire of many eastern and central Europeans to “shake off the colonial dependency implicit in the very project of Westernization,” to rid themselves of the humiliation of having been imitators, followers of the West rather than founders.

Listening to her, I became convinced that there was never a moment when Schmidt’s views “changed.” She never turned against liberal democracy, because she never believed in it, or at least she never thought it was all that important. For her, the antidote to Communism is not democracy but an anti-Dreyfusard vision of national sovereignty

It’s clear that the Medium-Size Lie is working for Orbán—just as it has for Donald Trump—if only because it focuses the world’s attention on his rhetoric rather than his actions.

I described my 1999 New Year’s Eve party to a Greek political scientist. Quietly, he laughed at me. Or rather, he laughed with me; he didn’t mean to be rude. But this thing I was calling polarization was nothing new. “The post-1989 liberal moment—this was the exception,” Stathis Kalyvas told me. Polarization is normal. More to the point, I would add, skepticism about liberal democracy is also normal. And the appeal of authoritarianism is eternal.

Americans, with our powerful founding story, our unusual reverence for our Constitution, our relative geographic isolation, and our two centuries of economic success, have long been convinced that liberal democracy, once achieved, cannot be altered. American history is told as a tale of progress, always forward and upward, with the Civil War as a kind of blip in the middle, an obstacle that was overcome.

In Greece, history feels not linear but circular. There is liberal democracy and then there is oligarchy. Then there is liberal democracy again. Then there is foreign subversion, then there is an attempted Communist coup, then there is civil war, and then there is dictatorship. And so on, since the time of the Athenian republic.

In truth, the argument about who gets to rule is never over, particularly in an era when people have rejected aristocracy, and no longer believe that leadership is inherited at birth or that the ruling class is endorsed by God

Democracy and free markets can produce unsatisfying outcomes, after all, especially when badly regulated, or when nobody trusts the regulators, or when people are entering the contest from very different starting points. Sooner or later, the losers of the competition were always going to challenge the value of the competition itself.

More to the point, the principles of competition, even when they encourage talent and create upward mobility, don’t necessarily answer deeper questions about national identity, or satisfy the human desire to belong to a moral community.

The authoritarian state, or even the semi-authoritarian state—the one-party state, the illiberal state—offers that promise: that the nation will be ruled by the best people, the deserving people, the members of the party, the believers in the Medium-Size Lie.

It’s why the “bad war” of Vietnam was only escaped at the cost of betraying the South Vietnamese and making a deal with yet another monster in Beijing.

The alternative is a form of argument in which essential aspects of the world, being inconvenient to moral absolutism, simply disappear.

A “realist” foreign policy can slide from describing power to excusing depredations.

But seeing statecraft as a tragic balancing of evils is still essential, especially amid the kind of moral fervor that attends a conflict like Israel’s war in Gaza.

But in active controversies the tragic vision can seem like a cold way of looking at the world. Lean into it too hard, and you get accused of ignoring injustice or recapitulating the indifference that gave cover to past atrocities.

The difficulty is that liberal “freedom” is on offer almost nowhere in the Middle East, certainly not in Gaza under Hamas’s rule, and the most challenging “otherness of beliefs” in this situation are the beliefs that motivated the massacres of Oct. 7.

a hype around Israeli moral failures — it's not enough for a war that yields so many casualties to be unjust, if it’s wrong it must be genocide — that ends up suppressing the harsh implications of a simple call for peace.

A representative passage, from Pankaj Mishra in The London Review of Books, describes many protesters as “motivated by the simple wish to uphold the ideals that seemed so universally desirable after 1945: respect for freedom, tolerance for the otherness of beliefs and ways of life; solidarity with human suffering; and a sense of moral responsibility for the weak and persecuted.”

No doubt many campus protesters have these motivations.

The alternative articulated by, for instance, Mitt Romney — “We stand by allies, we don’t second-guess them” — is not a serious policy for a hegemon balancing its global obligations

For example, reading the apologia for pro-Palestinian protests from certain left-wing intellectuals, you have a sense of both elision and exaggeration

seem untroubled by this fact, and perfectly comfortable with supporting not just peaceful negotiation but a revolutionary struggle led by Islamist fanatics.

Which yields the moral dilemma the protests don’t acknowledge: Ending the war on the terms they want could grant a major strategic victory to the regional alliance dedicated to the murder of Israelis and their expulsion from the Middle East.

Maybe the Gaza war is unjust enough, and Israeli goals unachievable enough, that there’s no alternative to vindicating Hamas’s blood-soaked strategy

you have to be honest about what you’re endorsing: a brutal weighing-out of evils, not any sort of triumph for “universally desirable” ideals.

Then a similar point applies to supporters of the Israeli war, for whom moral considerations — the evil of Hamas, the historical suffering of the Jewish people, the special American relationship with Israel — are invoked as an argument-ender in an inflexible way

We are constantly urged to “stand with Israel” when it’s unclear if Israel knows what it’s doing.

Joe Biden’s administration is chastised for betrayal when it tries to influence Israel’s warmaking, even though the Israeli government’s decisions before and since Oct. 7 do not inspire great confidence.

Biden’s specific attempts to micromanage the conflict may be misguided or hamfisted

But it’s not misguided for America, an imperium dealing with multiplying threats, to decline to write a blank check for a war being waged without a clear plan for victory or for peace.

Another difficulty is that some instigators of the protests

In each case, you have a desire that mirrors the impulse of the left-wing intellectuals — to make foreign policy easy by condensing everything to a single moral judgment. But the problems of the world cannot be so easily reduced.

Being cold-eyed and tragic-minded does not mean abandoning morality. But it means recognizing that often nobody is simply right, no single approach is morally obvious, and no strategy is clean.

Brexit was a political project based on the idea that identity politics could answer technocratic questions. If the technocratic question keeps proving problematic, you just need to have more faith in your identity. It was like trying to unlock a door with a slice of bread.

It said, in a not legally binding manner, that Parliament would back the Brexit deal if “alternative arrangements” were found for the backstop. What were these alternative arrangements? How do you promise to keep a border open while simultaneously not promising to keep a border open? Brady couldn’t say. Neither could the prime minister or any other member of her government. They had no idea what they were doing. They just needed some words, any words, that could win majority support in the Commons. The fact that the specific words they chose made no sense was an advantage: If the amendment had made sense, someone would have taken offense at its implications

There was a weird, and very un-British, quasi-religious undercurrent to all this — a sense that things would work if you just believed in them hard enough

Not only did Brady’s proposition have no meaning, it was common knowledge before it was voted on that it could not be delivered

That’s what made the debate so truly pitiful. It was a return to the world of fairy tales and hallucinations, of the kind of quasi-religious nationalist politics that have fueled the Brexit project from the start. British politicians were confronted with reality and given a chance to fix the problems with Brexit instead of pretending there weren’t any, and they once again fled back into mythmaking

The country is now on the verge of disaster. On March 29, unless something is done, Britain will fall out the European Union without a deal. That will affect every aspect of the economy. It’s likely to block cargo  at the border; pulverize agricultural exports; trigger shortages of food, medicine and radioactive isotopes; spark employment chaos by suddenly canceling the mutual recognition of qualifications between British and European institutions; halt the legal basis for data transfer overnight; and lead to massive and sudden flows of immigration in both directions. The list goes on and on. There is no part of society that is unaffected. And yet not only does the British political class not seem to understand the consequences of what it is doing, it is lost in populist fantasies instead of addressing the cold reality

Britain is one of the richest and most advanced democracies in the world. It is currently locked in a room, babbling away to itself hysterically while threatening to blow its own kneecaps off. This is what nationalist populism does to a country.

“Obviously it’s an improvement, but I think that it is inadequate given the health care crisis that we’re in,” said Representative Ro Khanna, a progressive Democrat from California who favors the single-payer, government-run system called Medicare for All that has been embraced by Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, and the Democratic left.

“We’re in a national health care crisis,” Mr. Khanna said. “Fifteen million people just lost private health insurance. This would be the time for the government to say, at the very least, for those 15 million that we ought to put them on Medicare.”

The stimulus bill would make upper-middle-income Americans newly eligible for financial help to buy plans on the federal marketplaces, and the premiums for those plans would cost no more than 8.5 percent of an individual’s modified adjusted gross income. It would also increase subsidies for lower-income enrollees.

Just when Mr. Biden or Democrats would put forth such a plan remains unclear, and passage in an evenly divided Senate would be an uphill struggle. White House officials have said Mr. Biden wants to get past the coronavirus relief bill before laying out a more comprehensive domestic policy agenda.

The Affordable Care Act is near and dear to Mr. Biden, who memorably used an expletive to describe it as a big deal when he was vice president and President Barack Obama signed it into law in 2010. It has expanded coverage to more than 20 million Americans, cutting the uninsured rate to 10.9 percent in 2019 from 17.8 percent in 2010.

Even so, some 30 million Americans were uninsured between January and June 2020, according to the latest figures available from the National Health Interview Survey. The problem has only grown worse during the coronavirus pandemic, when thousands if not millions of Americans lost insurance because they lost their jobs.

Mr. Biden made clear when he was running for the White House that he did not favor Medicare for All, but instead wanted to strengthen and expand the Affordable Care Act. The bill that is expected to reach his desk in time for a prime-time Oval Office address on Thursday night would do that. The changes to the health law would cover 1.3 million more Americans and cost about $34 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Republicans have always said that their plan was to repeal and replace the health law, but after 10 years they have yet to come up with a replacement. Mr. Ayres said his firm is working on “coming up with some alternative health care message” that does not involve “simply throwing everybody into a government-run health care problem.”

Yet polls show that the idea of a government-run program is gaining traction with voters. In September, the Pew Research Center reported that over the previous year, there had been an increase, especially among Democrats, in the share of Americans who say health insurance should be provided by a single national program run by the government.

“I would argue there is more momentum for Medicare expansion given the pandemic and the experience people are having,” said Mr. Khanna, the California congressman. “They bought time, but I think at some point there will be a debate on a permanent fix.”

WASHINGTON — President Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill will fulfill one of his central campaign promises, to fill the holes in the Affordable Care Act and make health insurance affordable for more than a million middle-class Americans who could not afford insurance under the original law.

Under the changes, the signature domestic achievement of the Obama administration will reach middle-income families who have been discouraged from buying health plans on the federal marketplace because they come with high premiums and little or no help from the government.

“For people that are eligible but not buying insurance it’s a financial issue, and so upping the subsidies is going to make the price point come down,” said Ezekiel Emanuel, a health policy expert and professor at the University of Pennsylvania who advised Mr. Biden during his transition.

But because those provisions last only two years, the relief bill almost guarantees that health care will be front and center in the 2022 midterm elections, when Republicans will attack the measure as a wasteful expansion of a health law they have long hated. Meantime, some liberal Democrats may complain that the changes only prove that a patchwork approach to health care coverage will never work.

The Affordable Care Act is near and dear to Mr. Biden, who memorably used an expletive to describe it as a big deal when he was vice president and President Barack Obama signed it into law in 2010. It has expanded coverage to more than 20 million Americans, cutting the uninsured rate to 10.9 percent in 2019 from 17.8 percent in 2010.

The poll found that 36 percent of Americans, and 54 percent of Democrats, favored a single national program. When asked if the government had a responsibility to provide health insurance, either through a single national program or a mix of public and private programs, 63 percent of Americans and 88 percent of Democrats said yes.

Just when Mr. Biden or Democrats would put forth such a plan remains unclear, and passage in an evenly divided Senate would be an uphill struggle. White House officials have said Mr. Biden wants to get past the coronavirus relief bill before laying out a more comprehensive domestic policy agenda.

Republicans have always said that their plan was to repeal and replace the health law, but after 10 years they have yet to come up with a replacement. Mr. Ayres said his firm is working on “coming up with some alternative health care message” that does not involve “simply throwing everybody into a government-run health care problem.”

In January, he ordered the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance marketplaces reopened to give people throttled by the pandemic economy a new chance to obtain coverage.

Yet polls show that the idea of a government-run program is gaining traction with voters. In September, the Pew Research Center reported that over the previous year, there had been an increase, especially among Democrats, in the share of Americans who say health insurance should be provided by a single national program run by the government.

With its expanded subsidies for health plans under the Affordable Care Act, the coronavirus relief bill makes insurance more affordable, and puts health care on the ballot in 2022.

cludes rich new incentives to entice the few holdout states — including Texas, Georgia and Florida — to finally expand Medicaid to those with too much money to qualify for the federal health program for the poor, but too little to afford private covera

“Biden promised voters a public option, and it is a promise he has to keep,” said Waleed Shahid, a spokesman for Justice Democrats, the liberal group that helped elect Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other progressive Democrats. Of the stimulus bill, he said, “I don’t think anyone thinks this is Biden’s health care plan.”

“I think that argument has been fought and lost,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, conceding that the repeal efforts are over, at least for now, with Democrats in charge of the White House and both houses of Congress.

From the ugly tolerance of the pernicious falsehood about President Barack Obama’s place of birth to the bizarre and fanatical fable about the size of inauguration crowds, to the introduction of the term “alternative facts” into the American lexicon, the party’s steady embrace of dishonesty as a central premise has brought us to this low and dangerous place.

In January 2018, three years before the Capitol insurrection, I said the following on the Senate floor:

“Mr. President, let us be clear. The impulses underlying the dissemination of such untruths are not benign. They have the effect of eroding trust in our vital institutions and conditioning the public to no longer trust them. The destructive effect of this kind of behavior on our democracy cannot be overstated.”

It is elementary to have to say this, but we did not become a great nation by believing or espousing nonsense, or by embracing lunacy. And if my party continues down this path, we will not be fit to govern.