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What happens if the incoming administration directs that the “Russia did it” file be closed? Would standing intelligence requirements to learn more about this be eliminated? And if they were, what would the agency do with relevant data that would inevitably come through its collection network?

And what about the statute that requires the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community to keep Congress “fully and currently informed” about all significant intelligence activities? Data on a foreign power manipulating the federal electoral process would certainly qualify. What will the White House position be when the agency is asked by Congress if it has learned anything more on the issue?

His future workforce will be looking for clues about his willingness to defend them against charges of incompetence and politicization simply for saying what their craft tells them to be true.

TPP -- its fate was bleak on Capitol Hill no matter what the White House did

Nothing changes because of Trump's move.

in doing so, he ends all hopes for a deal Obama wanted as a major part of his legacy.

Trump's move to withdraw from the TPP is likely to be politically popular.

The deal's critics complained that it didn't directly address the issue of currency manipulation.

he'd start to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement.

is in position to reverse decades of American presidents pushing for lower trade barriers and an interconnected global economy.

through his negotiating prowess, force of will and willingness to walk away from the table, he can convince other countries to accept terms that previous presidents -- from George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton on NAFTA to Barack Obama on the TPP -- have not been able to achieve.

TPP -- which has also included Canada, Mexico, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Peru, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam and Brunei -- would have slashed tariffs for American imports and exports with those countries.

Sen. Bernie Sanders -- a leading Trump critic -- praised it, saying he is "glad the Trans-Pacific Partnership is dead and gone."

"Now is the time to develop a new trade policy that helps working families, not just multi-national corporations," Sanders said in a statement. "If President Trump is serious about a new policy to help American workers then I would be delighted to work with him."

Republicans have long supported free trade -- and now find themselves torn between a protectionist President and a business community that sees Trump's position as detached from the reality that new technology, rising wages and an increasingly interconnected world mean that many manufacturing and low-skill jobs won't return to the United States;

"I don't see any benefit in trying to crawl back into our shell as a country," Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas, told CNN.

Because the TPP hadn't taken effect, there will be no immediate impact.

United States is foregoing by turning down what would have been a deal including countries that make up 40% of the global economy

Businesses will also lose access to potential new markets, though. US automakers hoped to see tariffs slashed in Asia. Farmers were set to see the removal of trade taxes that currently prevent them from selling products

from Google to cell phone providers, sought to lessen regulations and gain entry into some of the countries involved in the deal.

"This decision will forfeit the opportunity to promote American exports, reduce trade barriers, open new markets, and protect American invention and innovation," Arizona Sen. John McCain

"We must remain committed to promoting free trade and investment through opening up and say no to protectionism," Chinese President Xi Jinping

Obama had pitched the TPP as a way to counter China's growing influence by imposing US-backed labor, environmental and patent protections.

The 11 remaining TPP nations are now set to regroup.

the United States' withdrawal could mean a major rewrite, or an opening for another global superpower to pursue an alternative agreement.

For the most part, I have loved raising my kids here. But I have struggled, too. My closest friends and I have a long-standing joke about needing to remember to “lower the bar” around here — about not falling prey to the pressures to conform and compete, not buying the line that the schools or the kids here are special. Most of us understand our privilege and good fortune. Many do not.

There is an Oakwood in every city; there’s a Brock Turner in every Oakwood: the “nice,” clean-cut, “happy-go-lucky,” hyper-achieving kid who’s never been told “no.” There’s nothing he can’t have, do, or be, because he is special

it’s not hard to draw a straight line from this little ‘burb (or a hundred like it) to that dumpster at Stanford. What does being told “no” mean to that kid? If the world is his for the taking, isn’t an unconscious woman’s body? When he gets caught, why wouldn’t his first impulse be to run, make excuses — blame the Fireball, or the girl or the campus drinking culture? That is entitlement. That is unchecked privilege.

I find that I’m hiding from social media and avoiding conversations on this subject, lest I have to listen to someone defend him. I don’t want to hear anyone start in about the nice family or the good kid. My kids went to high school with him. I ran the community center swim team he was on

No, I don’t “know” Brock Turner like his friends or neighbors do. But I do know what he did, and so do we all, based on the unanimous verdict of a jury and two eyewitnesses.

We now also know exactly what his victim suffered, and we know that he doesn’t own any of it. Neither do his apologists.

I’ve wondered if all of this was the attorney’s doing — that Turner and his family were manipulated into denial because their lawyer told them there was no other alternative. But his father’s letter and his own lame “apology” make it seem clear that they truly believe that bad timing and alcohol — not Turner himself — were to blame.

The joy he takes in humiliating women is not something he even bothers to disguise. He told the journalist Timothy L. O’Brien, “My favorite part [of the movie Pulp Fiction] is when Sam has his gun out in the diner and he tells the guy to tell his girlfriend to shut up. Tell that bitch to be cool. Say: ‘Bitch be cool.’ I love those lines.” Or as he elegantly summed up his view to New York magazine in the early ’90s, “Women, you have to treat them like shit.”

Women labor under a cloud of Trump’s distrust. “I have seen women manipulate men with just a twitch of their eye—or perhaps another body part,” he wrote in Trump: The Art of the Comeback. Working moms are particularly lacking in loyalty, he believes, and thus do not make for good employees. “She’s not giving me 100 percent. She’s giving me 84 percent, and 16 percent is going towards taking care of children,

This is one reason that evangelicals, both men and women, gravitate to Trump, despite his obvious lack of interest in religion and blatantly loose morals. He represents the possibility of a return to patriarchy, to a time when men were men, and didn’t have to apologize for it

In 1989, Trump had returned home from a painful scalp-reduction surgery, intended to remove a bald spot. His ex-wife Ivana had suggested the doctor—and he blamed her for his suffering. He held her arms and began pulling hair from her scalp, then tore off her clothes. Hurt writes: “Then he jams his penis inside her for the first time in more than sixteen months. Ivana is terrified … It is a violent assault. According to versions she repeats to some of her closest confidantes, ‘he raped me.’ ” When the story resurfaced last summer, Trump’s campaign disavowed it. When Hurt was writing his book, Trump’s lawyers forced the author to include a statement from Ivana in the book, “A Note to Readers,” which softens the account but doesn’t disavow it: “As a woman, I felt violated, as the love and tenderness, which he normally exhibited towards me, was absent. I referred to this as a ‘rape,’ but I do not want my words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.”

The scene offers a graphic summation of Trump’s retrograde beliefs and real brutality. What’s worse, the same spirit informs his politics—the rampant cruelty, the violent impulses, the thirst for revenge, the absence of compassion. Misogyny isn’t an incidental part of Donald Trump. It’s who he is.

Though working-class whites earn, on average, more than working-class people of other ethnicities, we are in a steep social decline. Incarceration rates for white women are on the rise, white youths are more likely than their peers from other groups to die from drug overdoses and rates of divorce and domestic chaos have skyrocketed. Taken together, these statistics reveal a social crisis of historic proportions

Though many working-class whites have lost any ties to church, they haven’t necessarily abandoned their faith. More than one in three identify as evangelical, and well over 75 percent claim some Christian affiliation

many absorb the vernacular and teachings of modern Christianity, but miss out on the advantages of church itself.

This deinstitutionalization of the faith has occurred alongside its politicization

While it’s hard to fault people for voting their conscience, this fusion of religion and politics necessarily forces people to look externally

The sometimes tough love of the Christian faith of my childhood demanded a certain amount of self-reflection and, occasionally, self-criticism.

A Christianity constantly looking for political answers to moral and spiritual problems gives believers an excuse to blame other people when they should be looking in the mirror.

The most significant evangelical contribution to fiction in the past 20 years was the apocalyptic “Left Behind” series. The books are riveting, but their core message is that corrupt, evil elites have gone to war against Christians. Some version of this idea — whether delivered in church or on TV — finds its way into many topics in a modern evangelical sermon: Evolution is a lie that secular science tells to counter the biblical creation story, the gay rights movement usurps God’s law. Recently, a friend sent me the online musings of a televangelist who advised his thousands of followers that the Federal Reserve achieved satanic ends by manipulating the world’s money supply. Paranoia has replaced piety.

In the white working class, there are far too many wolves: heroin, broken families, joblessness and, more often than we’d like to believe, abusive and neglectful parents. Confronted with those forces, we need, most of all, a faith that provides the things my faith gave to me: introspection, moral guidance and social support. Yet the most important institution in our lives, if it exists at all, encourages us to point a finger at faceless elites in Washington. It encourages us to further withdraw from our communities and country, even as we need to do the opposite.

It’s hardly surprising that into that vacuum has stepped Donald J. Trump. For many, he is the only thing left that offers camaraderie, community and a sense of purpos

among those attending church only “a few” times per year, Mr. Trump won handily

the white working class needs neither more finger-pointing nor more fiery sermons. What it needs is the same thing I needed many years ago: a reassurance that God does indeed love us, and a church that demonstrates that love to a broken community

The president of the United States, on the other hand, is restrained first and foremost by his own ethics and public spirit. What happens if somebody comes to the high office lacking those qualities?

Donald Trump, however, represents something much more radical. A president who plausibly owes his office at least in part to a clandestine intervention by a hostile foreign intelligence service? Who uses the bully pulpit to target individual critics? Who creates blind trusts that are not blind, invites his children to commingle private and public business, and somehow gets the unhappy members of his own political party either to endorse his choices or shrug them off? If this were happening in Honduras, we’d know what to call it. It’s happening here instead, and so we are baffled.

As politics has become polarized, Congress has increasingly become a check only on presidents of the opposite party. Recent presidents enjoying a same-party majority in Congress—Barack Obama in 2009 and 2010, George W. Bush from 2003 through 2006—usually got their way.

Trump has scant interest in congressional Republicans’ ideas, does not share their ideology, and cares little for their fate. He can—and would—break faith with them in an instant to further his own interests. Yet here they are, on the verge of achieving everything they have hoped to achieve for years, if not decades. They owe this chance solely to Trump’s ability to deliver a crucial margin of votes in a handful of states—Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—which has provided a party that cannot win the national popular vote a fleeting opportunity to act as a decisive national majority.

What excites Trump is his approval rating, his wealth, his power. The day could come when those ends would be better served by jettisoning the institutional Republican Party in favor of an ad hoc populist coalition, joining nationalism to generous social spending—a mix that’s worked well for authoritarians in places like Poland.

A scandal involving the president could likewise wreck everything that Republican congressional leaders have waited years to accomplish. However deftly they manage everything else, they cannot prevent such a scandal. But there is one thing they can do: their utmost not to find out about it.

Ryan has learned his prudence the hard way. Following the airing of Trump’s past comments, caught on tape, about his forceful sexual advances on women, Ryan said he’d no longer campaign for Trump. Ryan’s net favorability rating among Republicans dropped by 28 points in less than 10 days. Once unassailable in the party, he suddenly found himself disliked by 45 percent of Republicans.

Ambition will counteract ambition only until ambition discovers that conformity serves its goals better. At that time, Congress, the body expected to check presidential power, may become the president’s most potent enabler.

Discipline within the congressional ranks will be strictly enforced not only by the party leadership and party donors, but also by the overwhelming influence of Fox News.

Fox learned its lesson: Trump sells; critical coverage does not. Since the election, the network has awarded Kelly’s former 9 p.m. time slot to Tucker Carlson, who is positioning himself as a Trump enthusiast in the Hannity mold.

Gingrich said: The president “has, frankly, the power of the pardon. It is a totally open power, and he could simply say, ‘Look, I want them to be my advisers. I pardon them if anybody finds them to have behaved against the rules. Period.’ And technically, under the Constitution, he has that level of authority.”

In 2009, in the run-up to the Tea Party insurgency, South Carolina’s Bob Inglis crossed Fox, criticizing Glenn Beck and telling people at a town-hall meeting that they should turn his show off. He was drowned out by booing, and the following year, he lost his primary with only 29 percent of the vote, a crushing repudiation for an incumbent untouched by any scandal.

Fox is reinforced by a carrier fleet of supplementary institutions: super pacs, think tanks, and conservative web and social-media presences, which now include such former pariahs as Breitbart and Alex Jones. So long as the carrier fleet coheres—and unless public opinion turns sharply against the president—oversight of Trump by the Republican congressional majority will very likely be cautious, conditional, and limited.

His immediate priority seems likely to be to use the presidency to enrich himself. But as he does so, he will need to protect himself from legal risk. Being Trump, he will also inevitably wish to inflict payback on his critics. Construction of an apparatus of impunity and revenge will begin haphazardly and opportunistically. But it will accelerate. It will have to.

By filling the media space with bizarre inventions and brazen denials, purveyors of fake news hope to mobilize potential supporters with righteous wrath—and to demoralize potential opponents by nurturing the idea that everybody lies and nothing matters

The United States may be a nation of laws, but the proper functioning of the law depends upon the competence and integrity of those charged with executing it. A president determined to thwart the law in order to protect himself and those in his circle has many means to do so.

The powers of appointment and removal are another. The president appoints and can remove the commissioner of the IRS. He appoints and can remove the inspectors general who oversee the internal workings of the Cabinet departments and major agencies. He appoints and can remove the 93 U.S. attorneys, who have the power to initiate and to end federal prosecutions. He appoints and can remove the attorney general, the deputy attorney general, and the head of the criminal division at the Department of Justice.

Republicans in Congress have long advocated reforms to expedite the firing of underperforming civil servants. In the abstract, there’s much to recommend this idea. If reform is dramatic and happens in the next two years, however, the balance of power between the political and the professional elements of the federal government will shift, decisively, at precisely the moment when the political elements are most aggressive. The intelligence agencies in particular would likely find themselves exposed to retribution from a president enraged at them for reporting on Russia’s aid to his election campaign.

The McDonnells had been convicted on a combined 20 counts.

The Supreme Court objected, however, that the lower courts had interpreted federal anticorruption law too broadly. The relevant statute applied only to “official acts.” The Court defined such acts very strictly, and held that “setting up a meeting, talking to another official, or organizing an event—without more—does not fit that definition of an ‘official act.’ ”

Trump is poised to mingle business and government with an audacity and on a scale more reminiscent of a leader in a post-Soviet republic than anything ever before seen in the United States.

Trump will try hard during his presidency to create an atmosphere of personal munificence, in which graft does not matter, because rules and institutions do not matter. He will want to associate economic benefit with personal favor. He will create personal constituencies, and implicate other people in his corruption.

You would never know from Trump’s words that the average number of felonious killings of police during the Obama administration’s tenure was almost one-third lower than it was in the early 1990s, a decline that tracked with the general fall in violent crime that has so blessed American society. There had been a rise in killings of police in 2014 and 2015 from the all-time low in 2013—but only back to the 2012 level. Not every year will be the best on record.

A mistaken belief that crime is spiraling out of control—that terrorists roam at large in America and that police are regularly gunned down—represents a considerable political asset for Donald Trump. Seventy-eight percent of Trump voters believed that crime had worsened during the Obama years.

From the point of view of the typical Republican member of Congress, Fox remains all-powerful: the single most important source of visibility and affirmation with the voters whom a Republican politician cares about

Civil unrest will not be a problem for the Trump presidency. It will be a resource. Trump will likely want not to repress it, but to publicize it—and the conservative entertainment-outrage complex will eagerly assist him

Immigration protesters marching with Mexican flags; Black Lives Matter demonstrators bearing antipolice slogans—these are the images of the opposition that Trump will wish his supporters to see. The more offensively the protesters behave, the more pleased Trump will be.

If there is harsh law enforcement by the Trump administration, it will benefit the president not to the extent that it quashes unrest, but to the extent that it enflames more of it, ratifying the apocalyptic vision that haunted his speech at the convention.

In the early days of the Trump transition, Nic Dawes, a journalist who has worked in South Africa, delivered an ominous warning to the American media about what to expect. “Get used to being stigmatized as ‘opposition,’ ” he wrote. “The basic idea is simple: to delegitimize accountability journalism by framing it as partisan.”

Mostly, however, modern strongmen seek merely to discredit journalism as an institution, by denying that such a thing as independent judgment can exist. All reporting serves an agenda. There is no truth, only competing attempts to grab power.

In true police states, surveillance and repression sustain the power of the authorities. But that’s not how power is gained and sustained in backsliding democracies. Polarization, not persecution, enables the modern illiberal regime.

A would-be kleptocrat is actually better served by spreading cynicism than by deceiving followers with false beliefs: Believers can be disillusioned; people who expect to hear only lies can hardly complain when a lie is exposed.

The inculcation of cynicism breaks down the distinction between those forms of media that try their imperfect best to report the truth, and those that purvey falsehoods for reasons of profit or ideology. The New York Times becomes the equivalent of Russia’s RT; The Washington Post of Breitbart; NPR of Infowars.

Trump had not a smidgen of evidence beyond his own bruised feelings and internet flotsam from flagrantly unreliable sources. Yet once the president-elect lent his prestige to the crazy claim, it became fact for many people. A survey by YouGov found that by December 1, 43 percent of Republicans accepted the claim that millions of people had voted illegally in 2016.

A clear untruth had suddenly become a contested possibility. When CNN’s Jeff Zeleny correctly reported on November 28 that Trump’s tweet was baseless, Fox’s Sean Hannity accused Zeleny of media bias—and then proceeded to urge the incoming Trump administration to take a new tack with the White House press corps, and to punish reporters like Zeleny.

the whipping-up of potentially violent Twitter mobs against media critics is already a standard method of Trump’s governance.

I’ve talked with well-funded Trump supporters who speak of recruiting a troll army explicitly modeled on those used by Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Russia’s Putin to take control of the social-media space, intimidating some critics and overwhelming others through a blizzard of doubt-casting and misinformation.

he and his team are serving notice that a new era in government-media relations is coming, an era in which all criticism is by definition oppositional—and all critics are to be treated as enemies.

“Lying is the message,” she wrote. “It’s not just that both Putin and Trump lie, it is that they lie in the same way and for the same purpose: blatantly, to assert power over truth itself.”

lurid mass movements of the 20th century—communist, fascist, and other—have bequeathed to our imaginations an outdated image of what 21st-century authoritarianism might look like.

In a society where few people walk to work, why mobilize young men in matching shirts to command the streets? If you’re seeking to domineer and bully, you want your storm troopers to go online, where the more important traffic is. Demagogues need no longer stand erect for hours orating into a radio microphone. Tweet lies from a smartphone instead.

“Populist-fueled democratic backsliding is difficult to counter,” wrote the political scientists Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Erica Frantz late last year. “Because it is subtle and incremental, there is no single moment that triggers widespread resistance or creates a focal point around which an opposition can coalesce … Piecemeal democratic erosion, therefore, typically provokes only fragmented resistance.”

If people retreat into private life, if critics grow quieter, if cynicism becomes endemic, the corruption will slowly become more brazen, the intimidation of opponents stronger. Laws intended to ensure accountability or prevent graft or protect civil liberties will be weakened.

If the president uses his office to grab billions for himself and his family, his supporters will feel empowered to take millions. If he successfully exerts power to punish enemies, his successors will emulate his methods.

If citizens learn that success in business or in public service depends on the favor of the president and his ruling clique, then it’s not only American politics that will change. The economy will be corrupted too, and with it the larger cultur

A culture that has accepted that graft is the norm, that rules don’t matter as much as relationships with those in power, and that people can be punished for speech and acts that remain theoretically legal—such a culture is not easily reoriented back to constitutionalism, freedom, and public integrity.

The oft-debated question “Is Donald Trump a fascist?” is not easy to answer. There are certainly fascistic elements to him: the subdivision of society into categories of friend and foe; the boastful virility and the delight in violence; the vision of life as a struggle for dominance that only some can win, and that others must lose.

He is so pathetically needy, so shamelessly self-interested, so fitful and distracted. Fascism fetishizes hardihood, sacrifice, and struggle—concepts not often associated with Trump.

Perhaps the better question about Trump is not “What is he?” but “What will he do to us?”

By all early indications, the Trump presidency will corrode public integrity and the rule of law—and also do untold damage to American global leadership, the Western alliance, and democratic norms around the world

The damage has already begun, and it will not be soon or easily undone. Yet exactly how much damage is allowed to be done is an open question—the most important near-term question in American politics. It is also an intensely personal one, for its answer will be determined by the answer to another question: What will you do?

Mr. Trump is about to welcome Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, for an extravagant three-day visit

visit that will be closely monitored in China.

president’s commitment to a mutual defense treaty with Japan, which surfaced during the campaign

Mr. Trump said he was prepared to pull back from the pact unless Tokyo did more to reimburse the United States for defending Japanese territory.

Mr. Tillerson specifically rejected the idea, advanced by Mr. Trump, that Taiwan be used as a bargaining chip in a broader negotiation with China on trade, security and other issues.

Relations between Washington and Beijing had been frozen since December, when Mr. Trump took a congratulatory phone call from Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen

has not had diplomatic relations with Taiwan since 1979

He also said he “looks forward to working with President Xi to develop a constructive relationship that benefits both the United States and China.”

“This letter means they’re looking for creative ways to stabilize this relationship when Trump and Xi can’t talk due to differences over Taiwan policy,”

Mr. Tillerson, officials said, suggested that Mr. Trump publicly reaffirm his commitment to the One China policy as a way of breaking the deadlock and getting the two presidents back on the phone.

conversation last week with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull of Australia turned contentious when Mr. Turnbull urged Mr. Trump to honor an agreement made under Mr. Obama to accept 1,250 refugees from an offshore detention center.

the fact that Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi had not talked since Mr. Trump took office in January has drawn increasing scrutiny.

During the campaign, Mr. Trump advocated a 45 percent tariff on Chinese exports to the United States, complaining that China manipulated the value of its currency.

Jared Kushner, who is a senior adviser to Mr. Trump, met with Mr. Cui before the embassy event, part of a blossoming dialogue between the two men.

relationships between some of Mr. Trump’s advisers and leading Chinese companies with close links to the Communist Party may also be strengthening ties.

During the Cold War, the Ford administration convened a Team B comprised of conservative foreign-policy thinkers to challenge the intelligence community’s estimates of Soviet nuclear capabilities. Then-CIA director and future President George H.W. Bush later concluded the group’s work lent “itself to manipulation for purposes other than estimative accuracy.”

In the early 1990s, after a rocky confirmation process during which he was accused of politicizing intelligence analysis, Director of the CIA Robert Gates implemented a series of reforms aimed at guarding against political or ideological thinking coloring intelligence analysis. Gates described politicization as “deliberately distorting analysis or judgments to favor a preferred line of thinking irrespective of evidence.”

during my tenure as an analyst with the CIA—President George W. Bush’s administration exerted unusual pressure to have the CIA support its plans to invade Iraq because of that country’s alleged ties to al-Qaeda and its weapons of mass destruction program. Both assumptions proved flawed.

It is anathema to the training most analysts receive and the values that lie at the heart of the vocation. There is a high cost to putting ideology over informed assessments of political, economic, and military realities.

Intelligence analysis is more an imperfect art than it is a science: Gaps in reporting, bad sources, and circular reporting all complicate the analyst’s quest for knowledge and understanding

Politicization, however, sits on top of all of these complicating factors because it is an act of willful commission: At its most overt, it amounts to using a political position to get people to say that a clear, bright blue sky is cloudy

Speaking “truth to power” requires courage, because political partisans are all too happy to causally decry dissent as disloyalty.

What is the cost of politicization? As of 2013, it was estimated that the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 cost an estimated $1.7 trillion, and saw over 4,000 Americans killed in action and over 30,000 wounded in action. Those numbers don’t include the families of the fallen; the innocent Iraqis killed or wounded during the conflict; or the insurgency that evolved into the extremist threat that we now know as ISIS.

The irony is that President Trump is a vocal critic of his predecessors’ decisions to invade, occupy, and ultimately withdraw from Iraq. In the run-up to that war, the Department of Defense formed an Office of Special Plans, conceived by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, which as Seymour Hersh argued in The New Yorker, “was created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true” about Iraq the threat it posed to the world

Conard said Baker was undercounting the social benefits of investment. He looks, in particular, at agriculture, where, since the 1940s, the cost of food has steadily fallen because of a constant stream of innovations. While the businesses that profit from that innovation — like seed companies and fast-food restaurants — have made their owners rich, the average U.S. consumer has benefited far more. Conard concludes that for every dollar an investor gets, the public reaps up to $20 in value. This is crucial to his argument: he thinks it proves that we should all appreciate the vast wealth of others more, because we’re benefiting, proportionally, from it.

What about investment banks, with their complicated financial derivatives and overleveraged balance sheets? Conard argues that they make the economy more efficient, too. The financial crisis, he writes, was not the result of corrupt bankers selling dodgy financial products. It was a simple, old-fashioned run on the banks, which, he says, were just doing their job

He argues that collateralized-debt obligations, credit-default swaps, mortgage-backed securities and other (now deemed toxic) financial products were fundamentally sound. They were new tools that served a market need for the world’s most sophisticated investors,

“A lot of people don’t realize that what happened in 2008 was nearly identical to what happened in 1929,” he says. “Depositors ran to the bank to withdraw their money only to discover, like the citizens of Bedford Falls” — referring to the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” — “that there was no money in the vault. All that money had been lent.”

In 2008 it was large pension funds, insurance companies and other huge institutional investors that withdrew in panic. Conard argues in retrospect that it was these withdrawals that led to the crisis — not, as so many others have argued, an orgy of irresponsible lending

Conard concedes that the banks made some mistakes, but the important thing now, he says, is to provide them even stronger government support. He advocates creating a new government program that guarantees to bail out the banks if they ever face another run.

the central role of banks, Conard says, is to turn the short-term assets of nervous savers into risky long-term loans that help the economy grow.

we live longer, healthier and richer lives because of countless microimprovements like that one. The people looking for them, Conard likes to point out, are not only computer programmers, engineers and scientists. They are also wealthy investors like him

As Conard told me, one of the crucial lessons he learned at Bain is that it makes no sense to look for easy solutions. In a competitive market, all that’s left are the truly hard puzzles. And they require extraordinary resources. While we often hear about the greatest successes — penicillin, the iPhone — we rarely hear about the countless failures and the people and companies who financed them.

A central problem with the U.S. economy, he told me, is finding a way to get more people to look for solutions despite these terrible odds of success. Conard’s solution is simple. Society benefits if the successful risk takers get a lot of money

He said the only way to persuade these “art-history majors” to join the fiercely competitive economic mechanism is to tempt them with extraordinary payoffs.

When I look around, I see a world of unrealized opportunities for improvements, an abundance of talented people able to take the risks necessary to make improvements but a shortage of people and investors willing to take those risks. That doesn’t indicate to me that risk takers, as a whole, are overpaid. Quite the opposite.” The wealth concentrated at the top should be twice as large, he said. That way, the art-history majors would feel compelled to try to join them.

he expressed anger over the praise that Warren Buffett has received for pledging billions of his fortune to charity. It was no sacrifice, Conard argued; Buffett still has plenty left over to lead his normal quality of life. By taking billions out of productive investment, he was depriving the middle class of the potential of its 20-to-1 benefits. If anyone was sacrificing, it was those people. “Quit taking a victory lap,” he said, referring to Buffett. “That money was for the middle class.”

Unlike Romney, Conard rejects the notion that America has “some monopoly on hard work or entrepreneurship.” “I think it’s simple economics,” he said. “If the payoff for risk-taking is better, people will take more risks

Conard sees the success of the U.S. economy as, in part, the result of a series of historic accidents. Most recently, the coincidence of Roe v. Wade and the late 1970s economic malaise allowed Ronald Reagan to unify social conservatives and free-market advocates and set the country on a pro-investment path for decades. Europeans, he says, made all the wrong decisions. Concern about promoting equality and protecting favored industries have led to onerous work rules, higher taxes and all sorts of social programs that keep them poorer than Americans.

Now we’re at a particularly crucial moment, he writes. Technology and global competition have made it more important than ever that the United States remain the world’s most productive, risk-taking, success-rewarding society. Obama, Conard says, is “going to dampen the incentives.” Even worse, Conard says, “he’s slowing the accumulation of equity” by fighting income inequality.

Conard’s book addresses what is perhaps the most important question in economics, the one Adam Smith set out to answer in “The Wealth of Nations”: Why do some countries grow so rich and others stay poor? Where you come down on the answer has as much to do with your politics as your economic worldview (two things that can often be the same)

Nearly every economist I spoke with said that Conard has too much faith in the market’s ability to reward only those who create real value. Conard, for instance, insists that even the dodgiest financial products must have been beneficial or else nobody would have bought them in the first place. If a Wall Street trader or a corporate chief executive is filthy rich, Conard says that the merciless process of economic selection has assured that they have somehow benefited society. Even pro-market Romney supporters take issue with this. “Ed ought to be more concerned about crony capitalism,” Hubbard told me.

“Unintended Consequences” ignores some of the most important economic work of the past few decades, about how power and politics influence economic growth. In technical language, this field is the study of “rent seeking,” in which people or companies get rich because of their power, not because of their ideas.

wealthy individuals and corporations are able to influence politicians and regulators to make seemingly insignificant changes to regulations that benefit themselves. In other words, to rig the game

Conard’s version of the financial crisis ignores much reporting and analysis — including work I’ve done with NPR’s “Planet Money” team — that shows that some of the nation’s largest banks actively manipulated customers and regulators and, sometimes, their own stockholders to profit from dangerous risk

Rather than simply serving as an invitation for everybody to engage in potentially beneficial risk-taking, inequality can allow those with wealth to crush new ideas.

Perhaps concentrated wealth will inspire a nation of innovative problem-solvers. But if the view of many economists is right — that it sometimes discourages innovation — then we should worry

on this one he resorted to anecdotes and gut feelings. During his work at Bain, he said, he saw that successful companies had to battle against one another. Nobody was just given a free ride because of their power. “Was a person, like me, excluded from opportunity?” he asked rhetorically. “If so, I wasn’t aware!”

both could be true. The rich could earn a great deal of wealth through their own hard work, skill and luck. They could also use their subsequent influence to make themselves even richer

One of the great political and economic challenges of our time is figuring out the balance between wealth that benefits society and wealth that distorts.

Glenn Hubbard said only that at a broad level, Romney and Conard share “beliefs about innovation and growth and responsible risk-taking.”

Conard and Romney certainly share views on numerous policy matters. Like many Republicans, they promote lower taxes and less regulation for those who achieve financial succes

There was a documentary several years ago called “The Corporation” that accepted the premise that corporations are persons and then asked what kind of people they are. The answer was, precisely, psychopaths: indifferent to others, incapable of guilt, exclusively devoted to their own interests.

To expect morality in the market is to commit a category error. Capitalist values are antithetical to Christian ones.

Capitalist values are also antithetical to democratic ones. Like Christian ethics, the principles of republican government require us to consider the interests of others. Capitalism, which entails the single-minded pursuit of profit, would have us believe that it’s every man for himself.

Enormous matters of policy depend on these perceptions: what we’re going to tax, and how much; what we’re going to spend, and on whom. But while “job creators” may be a new term, the adulation it expresses — and the contempt that it so clearly signals — are not. “Poor Americans are urged to hate themselves,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote in “Slaughterhouse-Five.” And so, “they mock themselves and glorify their betters.” Our most destructive lie, he added, “is that it is very easy for any American to make money.” The lie goes on. The poor are lazy, stupid and evil. The rich are brilliant, courageous and good.

Mandeville believed the individual pursuit of self-interest could redound to public benefit, but unlike Adam Smith, he didn’t think it did so on its own. Smith’s “hand” was “invisible” — the automatic operation of the market. Mandeville’s involved “the dextrous Management of a skilful Politician” — in modern terms, legislation, regulation and taxation. Or as he versified it, “Vice is beneficial found, / When it’s by Justice lopt, and bound.”

The industrial era favored the inner-directed personality type. The inner-directed person was guided by a set of strong internal convictions, like Victorian morality. The inner-directed person was a hardy pioneer, the stolid engineer or the resilient steelworker — working on physical things. This person was often rigid, but also steadfast.

The other-directed personality type emerges in a service or information age economy. In this sort of economy, most workers are not working with physical things; they are manipulating people. The other-directed person becomes adept at pleasing others, at selling him or herself. The other-directed person is attuned to what other people want him to be. The other-directed person is a pliable member of a team and yearns for acceptance. He or she is less notable for having a rigid character than for having a smooth personality.

How to reconcile these two Americas? I didn’t even try. It was a country I always looked at with one eye shut. With my left eye I saw the America of John Hersey; with my right eye I saw the America of the two atom bombs. This one-eyed seeing was easy enough from a distance. But then I came to America as an undergraduate and realized that with a few honorable exceptions, all of America looked at America with one eye shut.

I had grown up in a country with military rule; I had grown up, that is to say, with the understanding that the government of a nation is a vastly different thing than its people. The government of America was a ruthless and morally bankrupt entity; but the people of America, well, they were different, they were better. They didn’t think it was okay for America to talk democracy from one side of its mouth while heaping praise on totalitarian nightmares from the other side. They just didn’t know it was happening, not really, not in any way that made it real to them. For a while this sufficed. I grumbled a little about American insularity. But it was an affectionate grumble. All nations have their failings. As a Pakistani, who was I to cast stones from my brittle, blood-tipped glass house?

Then came September 11, and for a few seconds, it brought this question: why do they hate us?

It was asked not only about the men on the planes but also about those people in the world who didn’t fall over with weeping but instead were seen to remark that now America, too, knew what it felt like to be attacked. It was asked, and very quickly it was answered: they hate our freedoms. And just like that a door was closed and a large sign pasted onto it saying, “You’re Either With Us or Against Us.” Anyone who hammered on the door with mention of the words “foreign policy” was accused of justifying the murder of more than three thousand people.

I found myself looking to writers. Where were the novels that could be proffered to people who asked, “Why do they hate us?”, which is actually the question “Who are these people and what do they have to do with us?” No such novel, as far as I knew, had come from the post-Cold War generation of writers who started writing after the 1980s when Islam replaced Communism as the terrifying Other. But that would change, I told myself.

The writers would write. The novels would come. They didn’t. They haven’t.

So where are they, the American fiction writers—and I mean literary fiction—whose works are interested in the question “What do these people have to do with us?” and “What are we doing out there in the world?”

I grew up in Pakistan in the 1980s, aware that thinking about my country’s history and politics meant thinking about America’s history and politics. This is not an unusual position. Many countries of the world from Asia to South America exist, or have existed, as American client states, have seen U.S.-backed coups, faced American missiles or sanctions, seen their government’s policies on various matters dictated in Washington. America may not be an empire in the nineteenth century way which involved direct colonization. But the neo-imperialism of America was evident to me by the time I was an adolescent and able to understand these things.

why is it that the fiction writers of my generation are so little concerned with the history of their own nation once that history exits the fifty states. It’s not because of a lack of dramatic potential in those stories of America in the World; that much is clear.

The stories of America in the World rather than the World in America stubbornly remain the domain of nonfiction. Your soldiers will come to our lands, but your novelists won’t. The unmanned drone hovering over Pakistan, controlled by someone in Langley, is an apt metaphor for America’s imaginative engagement with my nation.

Where is the American writer who looks on his or her country with two eyes, one shaped by the experience of living here, the other filled with the sad knowledge of what this country looks like when it’s not at home. Where is the American writer who can tell you about the places your nation invades or manipulates, brings you into those stories and lets you draw breath with its characters?

why, when there are astonishing stories out in the world about America, to do with America, going straight to the heart of the question: who are these people and what do they have to do with us?—why are the fiction writers staying away from the stories? The answer, I think, comes from John Hersey. He said of novelists, “A writer is bound to have varying degrees of success, and I think that that is partly an issue of how central the burden of the story is to the author’s psyche.” And that’s the answer. Even now, you just don’t care very much about us. One eye remains closed. The pen, writing its deliberate sentences, is icy cold.

U.S. officials draw a distinction between cyber espionage and cyberattacks, which have a destructive or manipulative purpose and could be considered an act of war.

He illustrates how difficult it was to have any foresight at all, let along to see clearly, and he reserves his greatest interest for players whose imaginations were most fertile. Lawrence was the best and most eloquent of these manipulators, but he was by no means alone.

Mr. Anderson is especially illuminating about Lawrence’s purely political gifts: his way of anticipating the fallout from strategic or military maneuvers, his “peculiar skill at polite belligerence,” his no-nonsense powers of description.

Yes, it was history à la Hollywood, with moments of clear exaggeration. But its effort to depict Lawrence, his military raids, the tribal leaders with whom he dealt, the inept British military effort and the sly French diplomatic one are all shown by this book to be unusually faithful to the facts. It’s high praise for both the visually grand film and this grandly ambitious book to say that they do have a lot in common.