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Parliament is the sovereign apex of the nation’s democratic government. Its credibility depends upon the executive telling the truth to MPs, and through them the nation. If Johnson did not do that, especially in the circumstances of a killer pandemic in which obeying the rules was so paramount, he must pay the price.

That he ought to have erred on the side of strictness – in the way that the Queen and so many millions of others so visibly did – seems never to have occurred to him.

The Tesla Inc. CEO tweeted in February that OpenAI had been founded as an open-source nonprofit “to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft. Not what I intended at all.”

Backers say his brand of social-minded capitalism makes him the ideal person to lead OpenAI. Others, including some who’ve worked for him, say he’s too commercially minded and immersed in Silicon Valley thinking to lead a technological revolution that is already reshaping business and social life. 

In the long run, he said, he wants to set up a global governance structure that would oversee decisions about the future of AI and gradually reduce the power OpenAI’s executive team has over its technology. 

OpenAI researchers soon concluded that the most promising path to achieve artificial general intelligence rested in large language models, or computer programs that mimic the way humans read and write. Such models were trained on large volumes of text and required a massive amount of computing power that OpenAI wasn’t equipped to fund as a nonprofit, according to Mr. Altman. 

In its founding charter, OpenAI pledged to abandon its research efforts if another project came close to building AGI before it did. The goal, the company said, was to avoid a race toward building dangerous AI systems fueled by competition and instead prioritize the safety of humanity.

While running Y Combinator, Mr. Altman began to nurse a growing fear that large research labs like DeepMind, purchased by Google in 2014, were creating potentially dangerous AI technologies outside the public eye. Mr. Musk has voiced similar concerns of a dystopian world controlled by powerful AI machines. 

Messrs. Altman and Musk decided it was time to start their own lab. Both were part of a group that pledged $1 billion to the nonprofit, OpenAI Inc. 

Mr. Altman said he doesn’t necessarily need to be first to develop artificial general intelligence, a world long imagined by researchers and science-fiction writers where software isn’t just good at one specific task like generating text or images but can understand and learn as well or better than a human can. He instead said OpenAI’s ultimate mission is to build AGI, as it’s called, safely.

“We didn’t have a visceral sense of just how expensive this project was going to be,” he said. “We still don’t.”

Tensions also grew with Mr. Musk, who became frustrated with the slow progress and pushed for more control over the organization, people familiar with the matter said. 

OpenAI executives ended up reviving an unusual idea that had been floated earlier in the company’s history: creating a for-profit arm, OpenAI LP, that would report to the nonprofit parent. 

Reid Hoffman, a LinkedIn co-founder who advised OpenAI at the time and later served on the board, said the idea was to attract investors eager to make money from the commercial release of some OpenAI technology, accelerating OpenAI’s progress

“You want to be there first and you want to be setting the norms,” he said. “That’s part of the reason why speed is a moral and ethical thing here.”

The decision further alienated Mr. Musk, the people familiar with the matter said. He parted ways with OpenAI in February 2018. 

Mr. Musk announced his departure in a company all-hands, former employees who attended the meeting said. Mr. Musk explained that he thought he had a better chance at creating artificial general intelligence through Tesla, where he had access to greater resources, they said.

OpenAI said that it received about $130 million in contributions from the initial $1 billion pledge, but that further donations were no longer needed after the for-profit’s creation. Mr. Musk has tweeted that he donated around $100 million to OpenAI. 

Mr. Musk’s departure marked a turning point. Later that year, OpenAI leaders told employees that Mr. Altman was set to lead the company. He formally became CEO and helped complete the creation of the for-profit subsidiary in early 2019.

A young researcher questioned whether Mr. Musk had thought through the safety implications, the former employees said. Mr. Musk grew visibly frustrated and called the intern a “jackass,” leaving employees stunned, they said. It was the last time many of them would see Mr. Musk in person.  

In the meantime, Mr. Altman began hunting for investors. His break came at Allen & Co.’s annual conference in Sun Valley, Idaho in the summer of 2018, where he bumped into Satya Nadella, the Microsoft CEO, on a stairwell and pitched him on OpenAI. Mr. Nadella said he was intrigued. The conversations picked up that winter.

“I remember coming back to the team after and I was like, this is the only partner,” Mr. Altman said. “They get the safety stuff, they get artificial general intelligence. They have the capital, they have the ability to run the compute.”   

Mr. Altman disagreed. “The unusual thing about Microsoft as a partner is that it let us keep all the tenets that we think are important to our mission,” he said, including profit caps and the commitment to assist another project if it got to AGI first. 

Some employees still saw the deal as a Faustian bargain. 

OpenAI’s lead safety researcher, Dario Amodei, and his lieutenants feared the deal would allow Microsoft to sell products using powerful OpenAI technology before it was put through enough safety testing,

They felt that OpenAI’s technology was far from ready for a large release—let alone with one of the world’s largest software companies—worrying it could malfunction or be misused for harm in ways they couldn’t predict.  

Mr. Amodei also worried the deal would tether OpenAI’s ship to just one company—Microsoft—making it more difficult for OpenAI to stay true to its founding charter’s commitment to assist another project if it got to AGI first, the former employees said.

Microsoft initially invested $1 billion in OpenAI. While the deal gave OpenAI its needed money, it came with a hitch: exclusivity. OpenAI agreed to only use Microsoft’s giant computer servers, via its Azure cloud service, to train its AI models, and to give the tech giant the sole right to license OpenAI’s technology for future products.

In a recent investment deck, Anthropic said it was “committed to large-scale commercialization” to achieve the creation of safe AGI, and that it “fully committed” to a commercial approach in September. The company was founded as an AI safety and research company and said at the time that it might look to create commercial value from its products. 

Mr. Altman “has presided over a 180-degree pivot that seems to me to be only giving lip service to concern for humanity,” he said. 

“The deal completely undermines those tenets to which they secured nonprofit status,” said Gary Marcus, an emeritus professor of psychology and neural science at New York University who co-founded a machine-learning company

The cash turbocharged OpenAI’s progress, giving researchers access to the computing power needed to improve large language models, which were trained on billions of pages of publicly available text. OpenAI soon developed a more powerful language model called GPT-3 and then sold developers access to the technology in June 2020 through packaged lines of code known as application program interfaces, or APIs. 

Mr. Altman and Mr. Amodei clashed again over the release of the API, former employees said. Mr. Amodei wanted a more limited and staged release of the product to help reduce publicity and allow the safety team to conduct more testing on a smaller group of users, former employees said. 

Mr. Amodei left the company a few months later along with several others to found a rival AI lab called Anthropic. “They had a different opinion about how to best get to safe AGI than we did,” Mr. Altman said.

Anthropic has since received more than $300 million from Google this year and released its own AI chatbot called Claude in March, which is also available to developers through an API. 

Mr. Altman shared the contract with employees as it was being negotiated, hosting all-hands and office hours to allay concerns that the partnership contradicted OpenAI’s initial pledge to develop artificial intelligence outside the corporate world, the former employees said. 

In the three years after the initial deal, Microsoft invested a total of $3 billion in OpenAI, according to investor documents. 

More than one million users signed up for ChatGPT within five days of its November release, a speed that surprised even Mr. Altman. It followed the company’s introduction of DALL-E 2, which can generate sophisticated images from text prompts.

By February, it had reached 100 million users, according to analysts at UBS, the fastest pace by a consumer app in history to reach that mark.

n’s close associates praise his ability to balance OpenAI’s priorities. No one better navigates between the “Scylla of misplaced idealism” and the “Charybdis of myopic ambition,” Mr. Thiel said. 

Mr. Altman said he delayed the release of the latest version of its model, GPT-4, from last year to March to run additional safety tests. Users had reported some disturbing experiences with the model, integrated into Bing, where the software hallucinated—meaning it made up answers to questions it didn’t know. It issued ominous warnings and made threats. 

“The way to get it right is to have people engage with it, explore these systems, study them, to learn how to make them safe,” Mr. Altman said.

After Microsoft’s initial investment is paid back, it would capture 49% of OpenAI’s profits until the profit cap, up from 21% under prior arrangements, the documents show. OpenAI Inc., the nonprofit parent, would get the rest.

He has put almost all his liquid wealth in recent years in two companies. He has put $375 million into Helion Energy, which is seeking to create carbon-free energy from nuclear fusion and is close to creating “legitimate net-gain energy in a real demo,” Mr. Altman said.

He has also put $180 million into Retro, which aims to add 10 years to the human lifespan through “cellular reprogramming, plasma-inspired therapeutics and autophagy,” or the reuse of old and damaged cell parts, according to the company. 

He noted how much easier these problems are, morally, than AI. “If you’re making nuclear fusion, it’s all upside. It’s just good,” he said. “If you’re making AI, it is potentially very good, potentially very terrible.” 

Then came 2016. The overreading began once again. The old electoral college “blue wall” had become a “red wall,” and Trump had supposedly unlocked the key to lasting control. But, well, you know the rest.

Everyone keeps looking for the political Battle of Yorktown—that moment when your opponents lose once and for all and they march out slowly before you while the band plays “The World Turned Upside Down.”

Instead, in a closely-divided nation that’s characterized mainly by negative polarization and calcification, the better analogy is to trench warfare—grinding, bloody attrition, with gains often measured in yards rather than miles and true breakthroughs few and far between. 

Thus, the question after any given election isn’t so much, “Who is ascendant?” Rather, it’s “In which direction did the lines move?” 

often the more important cultural changes can be harder to discern

in this instance one of those more important changes was the blow to the malice theory of American politics. 

The malice theory is a core element of Trumpism, and it’s a natural temptation of negative polarization. Negative polarization (or negative partisanship), as I’ve written many times, is the term for politics that is fundamentally motivated by animosity for the other side more than affection to your own party’s leaders or ideas. 

Under the malice theory, the key to electoral victory is unlocking that anger. That means highlighting everything wrong with your opponents. That means hyping their alleged mortal threat to the Republic.

who should be kind to the “godless communist orcs” who are “trying to ruin this great country”? 

then persuasion is a waste of time. Defeating the enemy isn’t about persuading the enemy, but rather about mobilizing the righteous.

inspiring people is hard. Scaring them is easy—especially when the internet gives you constant access to the worst and weirdest voices on the other side. 

here’s where the malice theory collides with human nature. Most people aren’t content with simply thinking their opponents are terrible. They still want to see themselves as good. They want to see the world as “good versus evil,” not “lesser evil versus evil.” 

That’s why the argument that voters should always swallow deep moral objections to vote for the lesser evil are ultimately unsustainable

When confronted with relentless wrongdoing from your own partisans, one of two things happens—over time you’ll either redefine evil as good, or you’ll abandon evil for the good. 

The first response is core to much of the MAGA movement. It’s how someone goes from holding their nose and voting for Trump in 2016 to being the first bass boat in the boat parade in 2020. We all watched it happen.

The ultimate expression of this faction was represented by what’s been called the “Stop the Steal” slate of Republican candidates. These were the folks who were all-in, not just on Trump, but on some of the most transparently, incandescently absurd political conspiracies in modern American history. 

I don’t want to make the very mistake I identified at the start of this newsletter and overstate my case. Talk of a true MAGA “repudiation” is overblown

remember, the question isn’t whether anyone achieved ultimate victory or faced a final defeat. It’s in which direction the lines moved in our nation’s political trench warfare. And they most definitely moved back towards reason and our most basic moral norms. 

since politicians so often follow voters far more than they lead voters, it is ultimately up to us to demonstrate to them that the malice theory of American politics is truly a dead political end

The worst thing for American politics would be for the Trumpist narrative—that decency is for the weak—to prevai

If cruelty truly is the sole or best path to partisan victory, then the continued temptation to yield to our worst impulses would grow overwhelming. The temptation was already strong enough to distort and transform the political culture of the right simply based on Trump’s single, narrow win.

the opposite message seems to be true

Ever since Trump beat Hillary Clinton, the Trumpist GOP lost and kept losing. A movement that prioritized vicious political combat lost the House in the 2018 midterms, lost the presidency and the Senate in 2020, and has likely blown a virtually unlosable election in 2022, despite the fact that the country is struggling under the great weight of the worst crime and inflation in at least a generation.

It turns out that there’s some life left in decency yet. Even when times are hard, there are voters who are unwilling to call good evil and evil good

It turns out that it’s hard to escape the need to persuade and inspire, and that might be the best—and most important—consequence of a midterm election that gave neither party a mandate but reminded the Republicans that malice and lies can do far more political harm than good. 

What happened in 2012, when the oldest Gen-Z babies were in their middle teens? That was the year Facebook acquired Instagram and young people flocked to the latter site. It was also “the beginning of the selfie era.”

Mr. Haidt’s research, confirmed by that of others, shows that depression rates started to rise “all of a sudden” around 2013, “especially for teen girls,” but “it’s only Gen Z, not the older generations.” If you’d stopped collecting data in 2011, he says, you’d see little change from previous years. “By 2015 it’s an epidemic.” (His data are available in an open-source document.)

Mr. Haidt imagines “literally launching our children into outer space” and letting their bodies grow there: “They would come out deformed and broken. Their limbs wouldn’t be right. You can’t physically grow up in outer space. Human bodies can’t do that.” Yet “we basically do that to them socially. We launched them into outer space around the year 2012,” he says, “and then we expect that they will grow up normally without having normal human experiences.”

Social media and selfies hit a generation that had led an overprotected childhood, in which the age at which children were allowed outside on their own by parents had risen from the norm of previous generations, 7 or 8, to between 10 and 12.

That meant the first social-media generation was one of “weakened kids” who “hadn’t practiced the skills of adulthood in a low-stakes environment” with other children. They were deprived of “the normal toughening, the normal strengthening, the normal anti-fragility.

Now, their childhood “is largely just through the phone. They no longer even hang out together.” Teenagers even drive less than earlier generations did.

Mr. Haidt especially worries about girls. By 2020 more than 25% of female teenagers had “a major depression.” The comparable number for boys was just under 9%.

The comparable numbers for millennials at the same age registered at half the Gen-Z rate: about 13% for girls and 5% for boys. “Kids are on their devices all the time,”

Most girls, by contrast, are drawn to “visual platforms,” Instagram and TikTok in particular. “Those are about display and performance. You post your perfect life, and then you flip through the photos of other girls who have a more perfect life, and you feel depressed.

He calls this phenomenon “compare and despair” and says: “It seems social because you’re communicating with people. But it’s performative. You don’t actually get social relationships. You get weak, fake social links.”

Mr. Haidt says he has no antipathy toward the young, and he calls millennials “amazing.”

To illustrate his point about Gen Z, Mr. Haidt challenges people to name young people today who are “really changing the world, who are doing big things that have an impact beyond their closed ecosystem.”

He can think of only two, neither of them American: Greta Thunberg, 19, the Swedish climate militant, and Malala Yousafzai, 25, the Pakistani advocate for female education

I’m predicting that they will be less effective, less impactful, than previous generations.” Why? “You should always keep your eye on whether people are in ‘discover mode’ or ‘defend mode.’ ” In the former mode, you seize opportunities to be creative. In the latter, “you’re not creative, you’re not future-thinking, you’re focused on threats in the present.”

University students who matriculated starting in 2014 or so have arrived on campus in defend mode: “Here they are in the safest, most welcoming, most inclusive, most antiracist places on the planet, but many of them were acting like they were entering some sort of dystopian, threatening, immoral world.”

56% of liberal women 18 to 29 responded affirmatively to the question: Has a doctor or other healthcare provider ever told you that you have a mental health condition? “Some of that,” Mr. Haidt says, “has to be just self-presentational,” meaning imagined.

This new ideology . . . valorizes victimhood. And if your sub-community motivates you to say you have an anxiety disorder, how is this going to affect you for the rest of your life?” He answers his own question: “You’re not going to take chances, you’re going to ask for accommodations, you’re going to play it safe, you’re not going to swing for the fences, you’re not going to start your own company.”

Whereas millennial women are doing well, “Gen-Z women, because they’re so anxious, are going to be less successful than Gen-Z men—and that’s saying a lot, because Gen-Z men are messed up, too.”

The problem, he says, is distinct to the U.S. and other English-speaking developed countries: “You don’t find it as much in Europe, and hardly at all in Asia.” Ideas that are “nurtured around American issues of race and gender spread instantly to the U.K. and Canada. But they don’t necessarily spread to France and Germany, China and Japan.”

something I hear from a lot of managers, that it’s very difficult to supervise their Gen-Z employees, that it’s very difficult to give them feedback.” That makes it hard for them to advance professionally by learning to do their jobs better.

“this could severely damage American capitalism.” When managers are “afraid to speak up honestly because they’ll be shamed on Twitter or Slack, then that organization becomes stupid.” Mr. Haidt says he’s “seen a lot of this, beginning in American universities in 2015. They all got stupid in the same way. They all implemented policies that backfire.”

Mr. Haidt, who describes himself as “a classical liberal like John Stuart Mill,” also laments the impact of social media on political discourse

“Social media is incompatible with liberal democracy because it has moved conversation, and interaction, into the center of the Colosseum. We’re not there to talk to each other. We’re there to perform” before spectators who “want blood.”

Is there a solution? “I’d raise the age of Internet adulthood to 16,” he says—“and enforce it.”

By contrast, “life went onto phone-based apps 10 years ago, and the protections we have for children are zero, absolutely zero.” The damage to Generation Z from social media “so vastly exceeds the damage from Covid that we’re going to have to act.”

Gen Z, he says, “is not in denial. They recognize that this app-based life is really bad for them.” He reports that they wish they had childhoods more like those of their parents, in which they could play outside and have adventur

Blend these factors — a desire for escape from our virtual lives; bidding as fast as pushing a button; and the promotion of new collecting fields like outdated technology devices — and you have Heritage Auctions in Dallas.

Heritage is a whirlwind of activity, of passion, of hype, constantly trying new ways of enticing people to own something beautiful and useless. Ninety-one million Americans, according to U.S. Census Bureau surveys, are having trouble paying household bills. Everyone else is a potential bidder.

Twenty years ago, Heritage had four categories: coins, comics, movie posters and sports. Now it has more than 50, which generated revenue of $1.4 billion last year. Everything, at least in theory, is collectible.

“We don’t question the value or legitimacy of a particular subject matter relative to outmoded norms,” Mr. Benesh said. “We’re not here to tell you what’s worthwhile. The marketplace will tell you. The bidders” — Heritage has 1.6 million — “will tell you.”

In mid-2020, the privately held company moved to a 160,000-square-foot building by Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, doubling the size of its former headquarters. Hundreds of specialists, most of them collectors themselves, prepare hundreds of thousands of items for bids here — researching, photographing, writing catalog copy.

The problem is, older historical items that were previously unknown are becoming rare. Every barn, basement and attic has been ransacked for treasures. New items related to Washington or Lincoln, for instance, are nearly impossible to find.

what worries me even more is the change I see in ordinary Americans. I live in the heart of MAGA country, and Donald Trump is the single most culturally influential person here. It’s not close. He’s far more influential than any pastor, politician, coach or celebrity. He has changed people politically and also personally. It is common for those outside the Trump movement to describe their aunts or uncles or parents or grandparents as “lost.” They mean their relatives’ lives are utterly dominated by Trump, Trump’s media and Trump’s grievances.

never before have I seen extremism penetrate a vast American community so deeply, so completely and so comprehensively.

That percentage is far higher than the (still troubling) 22 percent of independents and 13 percent of Democrats who shared the same view.

In 2011, they were the American cohort least likely to agree that a politician could commit immoral acts in private yet “still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.”

They went from least likely to most likely to excuse the immoral behavior of politicians.

An increasing percentage are now tempted to embrace political violence. Last October, a startling 33 percent of Republicans (and an even larger 41 percent of pro-Trump Americans) agreed with the statement that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”

Polling data again and again backs up the reality that the right is abandoning decency, and doing so in the most alarming of ways. It began happening almost immediately with white evangelicals

As the Iowa caucuses approached, Trump escalated his language, going so far as to call his political opponents “vermin” and declaring that immigrants entering America illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country.” The statement was so indefensible and repugnant that many expected it to hurt Trump. Yet a Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom Iowa Poll found that a 42 percent plurality of likely Iowa Republican caucusgoers said the statement would make them more likely to support Trump — a substantially greater percentage than the 28 percent who said it would make them less likely to support him.

While political violence is hardly exclusive to the right, the hostility and vitriol embedded in MAGA America is resulting in an escalating wave of threats and acts of intimidation.

The result is a religious movement steeped in fanaticism but stripped of virtue. The fruit of the spirit described in Galatians in the New Testament — “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” — is absent from MAGA Christianity, replaced by the very “works of the flesh” the same passage warned against, including “hatreds, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambitions, dissensions” and “factions.”

in the upside-down world of MAGA morality, vice is virtue and virtue is vice. My colleague Jane Coaston even coined a term, “vice signaling,” to describe how Trump’s core supporters convey their tribal allegiance. They’re often deliberately rude, transgressive or otherwise unpleasant, just to demonstrate how little they care about conventional moral norms.

For most of my life, conservative evangelicals (including me) have been fond of quoting John Adams’s 1798 letter to the Massachusetts Militia. It’s a critical founding document, one that forcefully argues that our Republic needs a virtuous citizenry to survive. “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People,” he asserts. “It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

I’ve appreciated that quote because it recognizes the obligations of a free people in a constitutional republic to exercise their liberty toward virtuous purposes.

Absent public virtue, a republic can fall. And a Trump win in 2024 would absolutely convince countless Americans that virtue is for suckers, and vice is the key to victory.

if he wins again, the equation will change and history may record that he was not the culmination of a short-lived reactionary moment, but rather the harbinger of a greater darkness to come.

Since 2016, there have been two competing visions for the Democratic Party. One is the promise that began with Barack Obama of a multiracial coalition that would grow stronger as America’s demographics shifted; the other is the political revolution championed by Bernie Sanders as a way to unite nonvoters with the working class

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez bridges the gap between the two

what’s clear is that at a time when Democrats are struggling, she is quietly laying the groundwork to build a coalition broader than the one she came to power with, unafraid to take risks along the way.

After five years in Congress, she has emerged as a tested navigator of its byzantine systems, wielding her celebrity to further her political aims in a way few others have.

Three terms in, one gets the sense that we’re witnessing a skilled tactician exiting her political adolescence and coming into her own as a veteran operator out to reform America’s most dysfunctional political body.

To grasp what sets Ms. Ocasio-Cortez apart from many of her colleagues, you have to understand where she finds allies

In 2019, she and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas considered joining forces to write a bill that would bar former members of Congress from becoming lobbyists. Asked why she would consider an alliance with someone so loathed by liberals, she said, “I will swallow all of my distaste in this situation because we have found a common interest.”

It was a window into the politician she would become: pragmatic and results-driven, willing to work with people she considers her political adversaries, at least on legislation that appeals to her base

She has attributed the success of these efforts at least in part to her role as the second most powerful Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, which she said has “opened many windows” for collaboration.

while these bills may seem like small victories, they are more than that because, in a sense, she is redefining what bipartisanship looks like in Washington.

For decades, bipartisanship has meant bringing together moderates, lobbyists and establishment insiders to produce watered-down legislation unpalatable to many voters in both political partie

What Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is doing is different; she’s uniting politicians on the fringes of American politics around a broadly popular set of policies.

Americans in both parties overwhelmingly say that they don’t trust the government to do the right thing and that donors and lobbyists have too much sway over the legislative process.

more than 8 in 10 Americans believe politicians “are more focused on fighting each other than on solving problems.” One-fifth of respondents said lack of bipartisan cooperation was the biggest problem with the political system.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s efforts to reach out to Republicans are offering what a sizable portion of Americans want from Congress: a return to getting things done.

The few policy matters on which progressives and conservatives align often boil down to a distrust of politicians and of big corporations, particularly technology companies and pharmaceutical giants.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has shrewdly made those causes her passion, building alliances with conservative colleagues interested in holding these industries accountable.

Last spring, she cosponsored a bill with, among others, Brian Fitzpatrick, a moderate Republican from Pennsylvania, and Matt Gaetz, the Florida rabble-rouser who has become one of Mr. Trump’s most steadfast allies. The legislation would bar members of Congress from trading individual stocks, a measure that as of the fall of 2022 was supported by nearly 70 percent of voters across party lines.

On Gaza, too, she has been willing to buck other members of her party to pursue an agenda that a majority of voters support. She was one of the first Democrats to call for a cease-fire; within weeks, nearly 70 percent of Americans said Israel should call one and try to negotiate with Hamas.

In March, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was accosted by a handful of protesters who demanded that she call Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide.

Less than three weeks later, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez did accuse Israel of genocide and chastised the White House for providing military aid to the country while it blockaded Gaza. “If you want to know what an unfolding genocide looks like,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said in a speech on the House floor, “open your eyes. It looks like the forced famine of 1.1 million innocents. It looks like thousands of children eating grass as their bodies consume themselves, while trucks of food are slowed and halted just miles away.”

Last month, she voted against providing additional funding for Israel. Those were unpopular positions in Congress, where unconditional support for the country remains the norm, but they put her in line with a majority of Democratic voters.

These stances haven’t been enough to quell the doubts from a faction of the left that helped get her elected. Over the past few weeks, some have accused her of caving in to pressure from moderate Democrats

. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has taken much of the heat from leftist activists who see her as a symbol of the contradictions and compromises inherent in the political system. It may not be realistic to expect absolute purity from her; she is, after all, a politician. But these critiques overlook the promise of what she’s doing behind the scenes.

Democratic pollsters and strategists are searching for ways for Mr. Biden to win back Muslims and Arab Americans in swing states such as Michigan and Georgia, recent college graduates who hoped to have their student debt forgiven, immigrant-rights activists and Latinos.

Some of the betrayal these voters feel was hardly the president’s fault; he was hampered on student loan debt by a federal judiciary stacked with judges sympathetic to conservative legal arguments, and Congress refused to pass the comprehensive immigration bill he supported in 2021, which would have provided legal status to as many as 11 million undocumented immigrants.

A more gifted orator might have been able to make the structural impediments in his way clear to voters, while also putting forth a proactive vision for dismantling the core problems baked into our politics.

In that, someone like Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, who endorsed Mr. Biden for re-election in 2023, may be able to help. She’s the Democratic Party’s most charismatic politician since Barack Obama and its most ardent populist since Bernie Sanders.

she can offer voters something more substantial than a hollow rebuke of Trumpism

Last month, when the journalist Mehdi Hasan asked her how she’d respond to “a young progressive or Arab American who says to you, ‘I just can’t vote for Biden again after what he’s enabled in Gaza,’” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said a vote for Mr. Biden didn’t necessarily mean an endorsement of all his policies. “Even in places of stark disagreement, I would rather be organizing under the conditions of Biden as an opponent on an issue than Trump,” she said. It was a shrewd political maneuver, designed to distance herself from Democrats who support Israel unconditionally, while meeting voters — some of whom have lost family members in Gaza — where they are

There are, of course, limits to this strategy. Some on the left see Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsement of Mr. Biden as a betrayal of progressive values, particularly in the wake of the climbing death toll in Gaza.

The moderate Republicans who turned out for Mr. Biden in 2020 might shrink from a Democratic Party led by someone they consider an outspoken progressive.

But for every moderate or leftist voter lost with a strategy like Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s, the Democratic Party may be able to win someone new — from the pool of disillusioned Americans who feel shut out of the political process.

it is not just that Europeans spend a few extra weeks on the beach. The typical working day in Britain, France and Germany is half an hour shorter than in America, according to the International Labour Organisation.

which is the better way of living—with more money or more free time? The reality is that it is difficult for people to choose

Those in America work according to American schedules; those in Europe conform to European norms.

the more fruitful question is why Americans put in longer hours

The answer leads to a curious new observation: that remote work is making America’s office drones a little more European, albeit with a puritanical twist.

A first guess suggests that culture might account for the variation in work hours. Maybe Europeans enjoy their leisure more. They are spoilt for choice about how to spend time off

As for Americans, surveys indicate that they view hard work as intrinsically worthwhile. “Rugged individualism” is, after all, what built the country.

the difficulty with chalking up the difference to culture is that until the early 1970s many Europeans worked more

American working hours are basically the same now as back then. The big change is that Europeans now toil less. Hours are down a whopping 30% in Germany over the past half-century. Something beyond culture—a slow-moving, ill-defined variable—is at play.

Edward Prescott, an American economist, came to a provocative conclusion, arguing that the key was taxation

Until the early 1970s tax levels were similar in America and Europe, and so were hours worked. By the early 1990s Europe’s taxes had become more burdensome and, in Prescott’s view, its employees less motivated

A substantial gap persists today: American tax revenue is 28% of GDP, compared with 40% or so in Europe.

A recent study by Jósef Sigurdsson of Stockholm University examined how Icelandic workers responded to a one-year income-tax holiday in 1987, when the country overhauled its tax system. Although people with more flexibility—especially younger ones in part-time jobs—did indeed put in more hours, the overall increase in work was modest relative to that implied by Prescott’s model.

Regulation seems to matter more.

European rules give workers power, from generous parental-leave policies to stricter laws on firing staff. Many European countries try to put caps on working tim

most research agrees that they have reduced work hours.

Another important relationship is that, as people get richer, they typically want to work less

A recent paper by the IMF shows a remarkably strong link between GDP per person and hours worked in Europe. People in richer countries, such as the Netherlands, generally work less than those in poorer countries, such as Bulgaria.

Americans are wealthier than most Europeans, so why do they still work more?

Perhaps leisure is a collective-action problem. Americans may want to ask their bosses for longer holidays but are worried about being seen as slackers

A paper in 2005 by Alberto Alesina of Harvard University and colleagues argued that Europe’s stronger unions had in effect solved this collective-action problem by fighting for paid vacations, which ended up enshrined in law.

Europe’s well-regulated leisure time may then beget more leisure because it is more socially acceptable, and the market responds by supplying more good ways not to work. It is a virtuous cycle of lovely cafés.

One fascinating new development is a discrepancy in the rise of remote work

In 2023 the Global Survey of Working Arrangements found that full-time employees in America work from home 1.4 days a week, while those in Europe do so for 0.8 days

a striking result: Europeans and Americans now spend almost exactly the same amount of time in the office, with 1,320 hours a year for the former and 1,304 for the latter.

In other words, the extra 15% of work done by Americans annually is now from the comfort of their own homes—or occasionally on the beach, perhaps even one in Europe. Americans do still work harder, but rather more enjoyably than in the past

Research published in the weekly Der Spiegel shows that the AfD, a party started by nationally minded economists who advocated a return to the Deutsche mark as the national currency, now uses language nearly identical to that of the defunct National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), a small, virulently xenophobic, and openly neo-Nazi party that ran in German elections for decades but never managed to win seats in the Bundestag.

“They have major ideological overlaps. The AfD measures up to the NPD [of 2012] in almost all areas, even if the AfD appears more moderate in its party program.”

Documents attributed to both parties employ reactionary terminology, some of it straight from Nazi Germany, such as Umvolkung (population replacement) and Volkstod (death of the German nation), as well as Stimmvieh (voting cattle) for voters of opposing parties and Passdeutschen (foreign nationals holding German passports). And like the NPD, Spiegel reported in another study, the AfD maintains close links with violent militants.

this radicalism, which in the past had turned Germans off, has now lifted the AfD to new heights: It is polling at 22 percent support nationwide, second only to the Christian Democrats, and well over 30 percent in several states, making it the number one political force there in advance of autumn elections.

The current outburst of popular indignation at the AfD, echoed by all of the other major political parties, comes on the heels of an investigative exposé that found that at a clandestine meeting in November, ranking AfD personalities met with known neo-Nazis and wealthy financiers to hammer out plans for the forced deportation of foreign nationals and even foreign-born German citizens.

The extremists congregated at a hotel near Potsdam to design what they called a “remigration master plan” to forcibly repatriate millions of people. Shocked observers drew parallels to the 1942 Wannsee Conference, held not far from Potsdam, at which the Nazis coordinated their plan to deport and murder the entire Jewish population of Europe.

While some AfD politicos have tried to distance the party from the Potsdam meeting, others endorsed its purpose. “Remigration is not a secret plan, but a promise. … and there’s no better way to put it,” announced Hans-Christoph Berndt, the AfD point person in the Brandenburg state parliament, on Jan. 17.

they confirm the diagnosis of many experts that the AfD, under the leadership of its most extreme figures—particularly Björn Höcke, a member of the Thuringia legislature—has outpaced other European far-right parties in its radicalism. “The current AfD wouldn’t find a place in the ranks of the Sweden Democrats and most of the other more moderate far-right parties among the European Conservatives and Reformists faction in the European Parliament,”

She explained that like the AfD, the Sweden Democrats, the Finns Party (formerly the True Finns), and the Danish People’s Party are opposed to immigration and favor law-and-order states. But the Nordic rightists’ experiences in office pushed them to adapt to mainstream norms and policy options. (The Sweden Democrats are currently an informal supporter of the Swedish ruling coalition; the Finns are a coalition member in Finland; and the DPP acted as a support party to a conservative Danish government between 2001 and 2011, as well as from 2015 to 2019.)

The radicalized AfD, Jungar said, in contrast to these parties, actively courts militants, trades in antisemitic tropes, and toys with the proposition of Germany exiting NATO and the European Union

Moreover, AfD politicians have stood against adoption rights for same-sex couples, the inclusion of disabled kids in schools, and the legality of abortion. “These positions simply wouldn’t stand a chance in Sweden,”

“The FPO under Kickl has moved further to the right. It is now indistinguishable from the right-wingers in the AfD,” he argued. “They want people who they think don’t belong here out of Austria. They don’t want to gas them yet, but they want to strip people of their citizenship. They want to cut people’s social benefits to such an extent that their livelihoods are destroyed. That is essentially the program of parties like the AfD and the FPO. They harbor fantasies ranging from populist to fascist.

“By stacking the courts and clamping down on opposition forces, these parties gradually undermined the democratic order,” Opratko said. “This is the AfD’s model. It’s what they want to do.”

The comparison from Gessen’s essay, which caused such uproar, closely echoes a passage from Arendt’s correspondence written from Jerusalem in 1955 to her husband Heinrich Blücher, which is far more damning:

“The galut-and-ghetto mentality is in full bloom. And the idiocy is right in front of everyone’s eyes: Here in Jerusalem I can barely go for a walk, because I might turn the wrong corner and find myself ‘abroad’, ie, in Arab territory. Essentially it’s the same everywhere. On top of that, they treat the Arabs, those still here, in a way that in itself would be enough to rally the whole world against Israel.”

Within the culture of German memory politics the Holocaust is treated as singular; it is understood as a historical exception

his exception-to-history mentality has the effect of placing the Holocaust outside of history altogether, which allows the German government to espo

By making the comparison between a Nazi-occupied ghetto and Gaza before 7 October, Gessen is making a political argument meant to invoke historical memory and draw attention to concepts like genocide, crimes against humanity and “never again”, which emerged out of the second world war.

For Arendt, the political emancipation of the bourgeoisie was the cornerstone of the modern nation-state, in which political laws were governed by the private interests of businessmen who had found it necessary to take over the apparatus of the state in order to deploy the military in their colonial ventures

In exile in Paris from 1933 until she was interned in 1940, she worked to help Jewish youth escape to Palestine and even went there in 1935 with Youth Aliyah.

he said she only wanted to do Jewish work to help the Jewish people, because her mother had taught her that when one is attacked as a Jew one must fight back as a Jew

She was attacked at the conference for calling for a rejection of Ben-Gurion’s vision

in 1948, she joined Albert Einstein and Sidney Hook among others in signing a letter published in the New York Times to protest against Menachem Begin’s visit to America, comparing his “Freedom” party “to the organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist Parties”.

Hannah Arendt would not qualify for the Hannah Arendt prize. She would be cancelled in Germany today for her political position on Israel and opinions about contemporary Zionism, which she remained critical of from 1942 until her death in 1975

while antisemitism as an ideology was central to the organization of the masses, it was not the only political factor at play in her account.

Arendt was critical of the nation-state of Israel from its founding, in part because she was worried that the state would exhibit the worst tendencies of the European nation-state

It was this co-option of the nation, and transformation of the nation into a nation-state by private economic interests that lay at the heart of her understanding. And what she emphasized – and was criticized for – was the argument that antisemitism was being used politically by the nation-state in order to further its political and economic interests.

Of course Eichmann had been antisemitic, she argued, but his hatred of the Jewish people was not his primary motivation. Instead, she argued it was his commonplace hubris that made him want to ascend the ranks of the Third Reich

She argued that this was the banality of evil, and defined the banality of evil as the inability to imagine the world from the perspective of another

All of which is to say, it is necessary that we as human beings be able to imagine the world from the perspective of another to prevent evil from happening, and to stand up to evil when we are confronted with it

right now Germany’s resolution forbids it

This moral obligation to compare means two things: that Germany is not allowed to continue to treat the Jewish people or Jewish history as an exception to the rule in order to justify their political support of Israel; and that all people have a right to exist freely everywhere, regardless of where they appeared in the world by chance of birth

The question she wrote in her notebook as she thought about how Germany should remember the war was this: “Is there a way of thinking that is not tyrannical?”

What Arendt meant by banality, arguing that it was the inability to imagine the world from the perspective of another, was that people had gone along with the radical shift in moral norms overnight that transformed “Thou shalt not kill” into “Thou shalt kill”, without questioning

Moral complexity is necessary in the face of evil

Perhaps the greatest irony of reality today is that the rhetoric of Germany’s “antiantisemitism” is being used to justify the mass slaughter of Palestinian people, while having the effect of actually increasing antisemitism and making Jewish people less safe everywhere.

The roots of this phenomenon have been well studied. They include the cultural aggression of elite institutions and the predictable reaction to it, the nationalization of issues abetted by the collapse of local media and the pernicious effects of the antisocial media.

The gerrymandering that once exaggerated a dominant party’s political margin is no longer much of a factor; social clustering and these other factors have often done a more effective job than the political bosses ever did. In many jurisdictions today, one would have to reverse gerrymander, mixing geographies and crossing all kinds of legal boundary lines, to produce a truly competitive electorate.

Our campaign messages, as they had to, mostly centered on specific, new ideas: ethics reforms, access to health insurance, property tax caps, automatic tax refunds and many more, all couched in rhetoric stressing Indianans’ commonality as people, and the need for every part of the state to participate fully in its better future. Boy, is that passé.

Ideas fashioned not to stroke the erogenous zones of a riled-up minority of left or right, but to speak to the broader public in pursuit of a general election victory, evoke our common interest instead of our differences and antagonisms. But such campaigns rarely make sense these days.

Political campaigns need not necessarily be dispiriting, narrowcasting mudfests. They can be vehicles, in fact the best possible vehicles, for floating constructive ideas to an attentive public. Ideas proposed by a successful campaign have a higher likelihood of enactment after the election

Once in office, to make effective change, we had to engage with our Democratic counterparts, even in the years when we achieved full but narrow legislative control.

In 2024, 30 states feature not only trifecta government but 2-to-1 majorities in at least one house. In that setting, both campaigns and governance look totally different than they do in genuine two-party polities.

This year, our next governor ran a smart race and won his victory fair and square. The problem is that neither he, nor any of his competitors, had an incentive to offer their soon-to-be employers a sense of how Indiana could move forward.

What voters saw instead, besides attacks on each other, were political advertisements centered on “standing up to China,” taking on foreign drug cartels and closing the Mexican border. It became difficult to tell whether these folks were running for secretary of state or secretary of homeland security.

Wise policy and good government can and do emerge in lopsided states. But competition, always and everywhere, fosters innovation. In politics, it also compels a sensitivity and an outreach to the widest possible audiences.

The contours of the current system don’t conduce to those outcomes; until that changes, we have to hope for candidates who, elected by 5 percent of the state, somehow come to consider their duty of service to all the rest.

Bowman also indulged a penchant—again shared broadly on the anti-Israel, anti-Zionist left—for performative and self-righteous politics.

For weeks, prominent left-wing organizers on social media slammed Latimer, a centrist liberal, as a reactionary white man backed by billionaires. The New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, which endorsed Bowman, decried Latimer as an AIPAC-picked, MAGA-bought racist.

using the term genocide has become de rigueur for candidates seeking an endorsement from DSA and Justice Democrats. Bowman obliged, repeatedly.

Bowman’s rhetoric was undisciplined and incendiary, while Latimer was a popular local politician whose internal polls showed him leading by double digits before AIPAC spent anything.

“The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” A modern left-wing update might be titled “The Infantile Style in American Politics”—as the conspiratorial mixes with obstinacy and braggadocio.

The Bronx rally offered a glimpse, too, of the sectarianism that routinely afflicts the left. Pro-Palestine protesters from Within Our Lifetime showed up and beat drums and chanted throughout the rally, doing their best to disrupt the proceedings. They denounced Bowman, Ocasio-Cortez, and Sanders as “Zionists” who backed “Genocide Joe” for president.

victories coexist with a growing shrillness and insistence by many on the left upon political purity. So longtime liberal Democratic politicians find themselves denounced as pro-genocide for supporting Israel and Biden’s position on the Gaza conflict.

Many mainstream Democrats seem less and less patient with the activist left. Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader and possible future speaker, would have none of the Bowman camp’s talk of martyrdom.

Jeffries took a noticeably removed and dispassionate view of that loss. “The results speak for themselves. The voters have spoken,” he said, sounding less than distraught. A senior Jeffries adviser later noted on social media that the minority leader has now supported six candidates challenged by DSA, and his candidates have won all six races.