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It’s the vast imbalance that turns mere force into unforgivable vice, which is why we tend to associate cruelty with tyranny. Cruelty also violates any sense of human dignity and empathy. It tears at our connective, human tissue. And it is almost always imposed out of cowardice rooted in some kind of fear

it is a vice particularly dangerous for any sort of liberal democracy. Its incompatibility with the liberal idea is rooted, quite simply, in the immense inequality that cruelty invariably entails — between, say, an armed adult agent of the law and a helpless, alien, exhausted child

Many evils and vices exist, some arguably worse than cruelty. It is not included in the deadly sins, for example

Except, of course, we haven’t. America was founded in cruelty

Cruelty, in this view, is abuse of power at its most extreme. Which is why, in so many ways, our wanton destruction of this planet’s ecosystem and the subsequent suffering of so many other species may be the cruelest act of humankind in our time.

It spreads, this stuff, which is why we have slowly constructed a liberal civilization over the last few centuries in which this most ordinary and yet most pernicious of the vices has been kept under control

We have progressed immensely over the centuries on this question, but it is always a temptation. Small cruelties easily lead to larger ones. And larger ones require, for most people, the dehumanization of the victims, which makes cruelty more tolerable and therefore more likely

Letting it slip, allowing it to fester, becoming numb to it: this is the danger we face in this authoritarian moment

We simply cannot let these children down. We simply cannot look away until everyone is accounted for.

It’s worth noting that the original version of the Green New Deal was devised by the left-leaning British National Economic Foundation, as a means for recovery after the 2008 economic collapse

Once Labour’s full, staggeringly bold proposals were unveiled, support for the party soared

Labour climbed a full 20 points in the six weeks of the 2017 campaign, robbing the Tories of a majority in the Parliament

So it seems to me there is a massive opportunity for the left now across the Western world. Look at how popular a 70 percent top rate is … in America! The left is correct to sense a huge opportunity and they are right, I think, to be bold.

I wrote about Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour last year in these pages, and that, under his leadership, “it turned out to be difficult to propel a new movement of left radicalism without simultaneously tapping into a vein of left extremism,” and that seems to me to be precisely the challenge in the U.S. as well

the full package from the contemporary radicalized left in both the U.K. and U.S. brings with it far more troubling ideas

If they insist on calling our multicultural and multiracial democracy a manifestation of “white supremacy,” they will empower real white supremacists.

A passion for social justice curdles into attacks on free speech

Postmodern critical gender theory denies any meaningful natural differences between men and women, and casts an entire sex as inherently problematic

Concern about mass immigration is dismissed as nothing but racism and xenophobia.

so Labour, after so much promise and success, has not been able to get any sustainable polling lead over the most shambolic Tory government in memory.

If the Democrats want to fight the next election on the need for a radical rebalancing of the economy in favor of the middle and working class, for massive investment in new green technology, for higher taxes on the superrich, and for health-care security for all Americans, they can win

If they conflate those goals with extremist rhetoric about abolishing everyone’s current health insurance, and starting from scratch, as the Green New Deal advises, not so much

If they insist that men and women are indistinguishable, that girls can have penises and boys can have periods, as transgender ideology now demands, they’ll seem nuts to most fair-minded people.

Hostility to the policies of the state of Israel — a perfectly legitimate position — morphs swiftly into ugly anti-Semitic tropes

It’s not easy to find any heroes in Washington these days, so allow me to eulogize one. Walter Jones was a longtime Republican congressman from North Carolina, who died earlier this wee

Are they really capable of fucking this up once again? The answer that is emerging in the first months of the new Democratic House is: of course they can.

we may be underestimating what the constant drumbeat of news about the accelerating sixth great extinction has been doing to us psychologically.

I’m haunted all the time by the knowledge of what my lifetime will have witnessed. Humans are committing countless species to death; we are destroying the life of our oceans and skies; we are changing the planet’s ecosystem more quickly than at any time since the asteroids wiped out the dinosaurs. From the perspective of life itself, we are conducting a holocaust of the natural world. How is the knowledge of this not traumatizing?

A new report from the Institute for Public Policy Research notes, according to the BBC, that “since 1950, the number of floods across the world has increased by 15 times, extreme temperature events by 20 times, and wildfires seven-fold.”

Last week, research emerged showing that the insect biomass is declining by 2.5 percent a year, which means that we may wipe out the entire insect population within a century — and lose a quarter of it in the next ten years.

This amounts to what Jill Kieldash describes as the “actual structural and functional collapse of the natural systems which have supported life on Earth for the last 400 million years.”

I don’t know how this paradigm affects you every day, but it is for me the gutting context for everything, a growing nausea laced with guilt and shame.

In a century, we will have destroyed this Earth as we have known it — in absolutely full awareness of what we are doing. It’s the greatest crime humanity has ever committed

One answer could be that they are behaving in a classic way when a catastrophe strikes: They’re traumatized by this knowledge, and they cope with this trauma by a classic form of disassociation. In fact, we are all living through this collective trauma

Once we become aware of its true scope, depth, and accelerating pace, we then begin to view everything else through the traumatic lens of the climate crisis

How could anyone with a reasonably realistic, educated worldview not be haunted by the perpetual specter of Climate Trauma when considering fundamental life and identity choices?

I am not surprised by declining birth rates in the West. Having a child in today’s era means initiating another human being into the end of the world as we have known it

I find my own witnessing of the collapse of liberal democratic values in the West inseparable from the mass extinction of life on Earth our civilization has wrought — and the double depression this creates makes me want to escape

this collective trauma is never-ending. It’s a 9/11 all the time. Woodbury notes the similarity between our knowledge of future planetary collapse and a diagnosis of a terminal disease: “You may put it out of your mind for spells, but the grief associated with prospective loss comes at you in waves.

The challenge is to resist disassociation — which is “the human capacity to mentally escape an insufferable reality.

We are disassociating from America in our current dystopian politics. But we are also, more profoundly, disassociating ourselves from our deepest ecological reality: that we are killing what created us. And we cannot seem to stop.

If they call a border wall an “immorality” and refuse to fund a way to detain and humanely house the huge surge of migrant families and children now overwhelming the southern border (up 290 percent over the same period in 2018, with a record 1,800 apprehensions on Monday of this week alone!), they will rightly be called in favor of open borders

when it became clear that the Iraq War had been based on phony intelligence, he actually changed his mind. More than that: He took moral responsibility for his vote for the war, and rethought a great deal of his previous views. Ashamed of what he had done — and the lives lost because of the war — he went on to write 12,000 letters to family members of service members killed

he tirelessly fought to bring back war-making powers to the Senate, where they belong. He took on his own party leadership in demanding votes before military adventures

He was that very rare creature: a true Republican fiscal conservative

Of course a man of this character was a dogged defender of his own constituents, especially those in the military subjected to unfairness or injustice of any kin

This didn’t make him a liberal. It made him a conservative. And he proved that to be a conservative these days — a humane, decent, honest, principled conservative — you really have no place in the Republican Party

Men and women, for the APA, are not intrinsically or naturally different: “When researchers strip away stereotypes and expectations, there isn’t much difference in the basic behaviors of men and women.” As you keep reading, you begin to realize just how saturated psychology has now become with critical gender theory, and its profound rejection of anything we might call “nature.”

Because biology has no influence on sex and gender at all, and testosterone is thereby irrelevant in understanding the psychological nature of men (it is never mentioned in the report), everything is a social construct, and social constructs — a function of patriarchy and white supremacy — can be changed. “If we can change men,” one psychologist tellingly admits, “we can change the world.” If this sounds more like a political project than a guide to therapy, you’re not wrong

What is TMI? The definition varies throughout the document

Here’s one such definition: “anti-femininity, achievement, eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure, risk, and violence.” Just weigh that list for a minute — and how expansive it is. Men are exhibiting a dangerous ideology when they seek to “achieve” things, when they risk their lives or fortunes, when they explore unfamiliar territory — and these character traits are interchangeable with violence

As you read the guidelines, you realize that the APA believes that psychologists should be informing men that what they might think is their nature is actually just a set of social constructs that hurt them, murders thousands, and deeply wounds the society as a whole.

There are indeed issues that men today need a help with, and emotional repression is definitely part of it. Aspects of maleness — aggression without virtue, glorification of violence, difficulties with communication and collaboration — are worth understanding better if men are to grapple with an economic and social environment where they are increasingly being left behind.

When you think of the last two Democratic presidents, Bill and Barack, you see the same thing: They both have charisma and, yes, likability, that they deployed to get elected and reelected. That’s how Kennedy beat Nixon; it’s how Reagan defeated Carter. And this is not a gendered thing

When I think back to the modern Democrats who lost, they all have something in common. They regard their unlikability as a kind of achievement, proof that they can win on substance alone, that the media is obsessed with trivia, and that most people are dumb and easily bamboozled.

In a historical stroke with resonance today, American Jewish leaders gathered in Pittsburgh in 1885 to produce what is known as the Pittsburgh Platform, a new theology for an American Judaism, less focused on a Messianic return to the land of Israel and more on fixing a broken world, the concept of Tikkun Olam. Jews, the rabbi behind the platform urged, must achieve God’s purpose by “living and working in and with the world.”

For a faith that for thousands of years was insular and self-contained, its people often in mandated ghettos, praying for the Messiah to return them to the Promised Land, this was a radical notion. But for most American Jews, it is now accepted as a tenet of their religion: building a better, more equal, more tolerant world now, where they live.

Last summer, when a Conservative rabbi in Haifa was hauled in for questioning by the Israeli police after he officiated at a non-Orthodox wedding, it was too much for Rabbi Steven Wernick, chief executive of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, the umbrella organization of the Conservative movement in North America.

“I do not believe we can talk about a ‘gap’ between Israel and the Diaspora,” Rabbi Wernick wrote in a letter to the Israeli government. “It is now a ‘canyon.’”My rabbi in Washington, Daniel Zemel, said in despair during Kol Nidre, the Yom Kippur evening service, this fall: “For the first time in my life, I feel a genuine threat to my life in Israel. This is not an external threat. It is an internal threat from nationalists and racists.”

These 109 retired officers, like their active-duty counterparts—who are of course obliged to hold their tongues regarding the administration’s political choices—know one thing by heart: torture is proscribed by the Geneva Convention, the U.S. Code, and the military’s own Uniform Code.

Aside from the strictures of law, they have a very pragmatic reason for opposing those who would advocate or practice torture being placed in command positions in our government. An America that tortures its enemies would not have a moral or practical leg to stand on if in the future a hostile nation or group declares U.S. personnel to be “unlawful combatants” and waterboards them.

Because of Putin’s highly conspirological mindset, he apparently blamed Goldman Sachs and Hillary Clinton for the release of the embarrassing information, Soldatov and Borogan reported.

An October report from the Russian business media outlet RBC explained in great detail how the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency, also known as the “troll factory,” operated during the 2016 election. The report, authored by two Russian journalists, detailed the funding, budget, operating methods, and tactics, of the 100 trolls who spent 2016 populating American social media sites with divisive commentary and imitating civil rights groups. The report showed how the Agency was financed through its owner, Putin’s court caterer Yevgeny Prigozhin. It also detailed the reach of various politically inflammatory posts. It showed, for example, how the Agency produced over 20 Facebook posts that gathered over a million unique views each.

That same month, TVRain, Russia’s last independent television network, interviewed “Maxim,” a man who had worked as a troll at this factory. He revealed that the factory was largely staffed by college students from the prestigious St. Petersburg State University, Russia’s #2 university; their majors included international relations, linguistics, and journalism. They were, in other words, young, educated, worldly, and urban—the very cohort Americans imagine would rise up against someone like Putin. Instead, they worked in the factory, making nearly double the average Russian’s salary, sowing discord on Twitter, Facebook, and in the comments sections of various websites. They were instructed not to mention Russia, but instead to focus on issues that divided Americans, like guns and race.

ozlovsky told the journalists how he had been entrapped and blackmailed into working for the FSB, the main Russian security agency, nearly a decade ago. He said that when he hacked into the servers of the DNC, he purposely left behind a calling card: a data file with the number of his visa to the Caribbean Island of St. Martin, as well as his passport number. Kozlovsky also said that he was arrested now because the FSB wanted “to hide the digital traces” of what he did. (It’s worth noting that many of these claims are unverified.)

This had previously been the exclusive domain of the FSB—once run by Putin—and the GRU was trying to muscle in on the FSB’s territory and money. A side effect of this internal rivalry, Reiter concluded, was how the Americans discovered the hack.

Why has there been so little reporting on Russian election interference coming out of the place that perpetrated it? For one thing, the Russian security services and the Kremlin do not leak, at least not nearly as much as their American counterparts, and they are suspicious of Western journalists, of whom there are fewer and fewer these days. Russian government officials also “don’t like talking to independent journalists, but they’re still better to talk to than to American journalists,” said Liza Osetinskaya, a legendary Russian editor who now runs The Bell.

The problem is that independent journalism in Russia has been decimated.

Facing this kind of political and economic pressure, many of Russia’s journalists—many of them among the country’s best—either left home or abandoned the profession altogether.* What we are witnessing “is the last phase of the death of independent Russian media,” Galina Timchenko said at last summer’s Aspen Ideas Festival. She is another well-known Russian editor forced out under Kremlin pressure. She now runs the independent Meduza from Latvia. It has a fraction of the reach of the outlet she ran for a decade, Lenta.ru.The squelching of press freedom and the shuttering of independent media abroad is, in other words, not an academic matter. As 2017 has shown, when these voices are silenced, we know far less than we need about vital national security interests. If the violation of an abstract principle doesn’t bother you, its very concrete repercussions should.

Now, Donald Trump leads the Republican Party, the personification of the scarcity mind-set.

Trump’s scarcity mind-set demands has been a disaster for conservative governance. He insists on perpetual warfare — against all comers. Stuck fighting his wars with him, Republican politicians have had to say goodbye to most of the pillars of conservatism: rule of law, fiscal discipline, global engagement, moral decency, the idea that people should be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.

The fact is that the scarcity mentality and the perpetual warrior style it demands are incompatible with any civilized political creed.

Under the influence of this mentality, evangelicalism turns from a faith into a siege-mentality interest group that reveres a pagan immoralist. Under the influence of this mentality, liberalism goes from a creed that values individual rights and deliberation to one that values group separatism and intellectual intolerance. Advertisement Continue reading the main story

North Korea has a long history of provocation in the face of what it regards as threats from the United States and South Korea. It has warned of a “merciless strike” in retaliation against their joint military exercises, and said it would accelerate its nuclear-weapons program in response to the deployment in South Korea of the Terminal High Altitude Thermal Defense System, a U.S. anti-missile defense network.

The U.S. position can be better understood through the lens of a pair of earlier failed agreements with North Korea—failures caused, in Washington’s view, by Pyongyang

The view from Washington is quite different. Government officials and experts alike believe North Korea’s pursuit of nuclear weapons has aggressive and offensive objectives

Chinese experts believe North Korea’s leaders pursue nuclear weapons because they feel genuinely threatened by the United States and South Korea.

Unless China adopts America’s approach, at least in part (or vice versa), the crisis is unlikely to diminish. “Even though at the surface level they appear cooperative, deep down their approaches of dealing with North Korea are fundamentally different,” Zhao said. Ultimately, Zhao said, the nature of the disagreements between Washington and Beijing ensures that the crisis of North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs will remain unresolved for some time to come.

If those effects were repeated in Medicaid, it could prove disastrous for the health of the program’s beneficiaries. Especially in states that expanded Medicaid under Obamacare, work requirements could create a new underclass of people ineligible for any health insurance. That includes a large contingent of people with disabilities who don’t qualify for Supplemental Security Income and vulnerable populations like young men with felonies. Caught in a vicious cycle, those people would then be less healthy and less financially secure, and thus less likely to be able to work and make it out of poverty

Such a program would have its most drastic effects on wages, productivity, and reducing racial and class-based wealth inequality if it were implemented as a universal program. But it could probably achieve CMS’s goals of long-term health benefits and poverty reduction if it were instituted solely for current Medicaid beneficiaries. If the 4.4 million non-elderly adults who aren’t working; aren’t caregivers, retired, or students; and don’t qualify for disability insurance are used as a floor, providing jobs for them would cost a little more than Lowrey’s total of $158 billion, around 30 percent of Medicaid’s annual budget of over $550 billion. If people who self-report as ill or disabled are excluded from that number, Medicaid would need to pay for a maximum of 880,000 jobs, or $35 billion a year, 6 percent of the annual Medicaid budget.

A Medicaid jobs guarantee could serve to amplify both of those roles. It could essentially set a wage floor for Medicaid enrollees, who often work near the bottom of the wage scale and often barely crack the poverty line even while working full-time hours (or more). Integrating Medicaid into bespoke job structures for people with disabilities could provide transportation and rehabilitation, and further increase the accessibility of those positions, thus creating more synergy between health and employment.

Similar to how employer-sponsored insurance has become a backbone to the economic growth of the middle class, a jobs guarantee for Medicaid would take the largest health-insurance program in America and transform it into a nexus of anti-poverty policy and health equity. Put more simply: The easiest way to make sure people receive the health benefits of employment could be to employ them.

while it is fun to scoff at her hokey spiritual woo and self-help bromides, it is easy to forget that hokey spiritual woo and self-help bromides are extremely powerful and popular among a massive subset of Americans, many of whom represent the exact sort of voters who decide Democratic primaries.

hey can also fall into war with one another, over differences more significant than the debate over Medicare for All.

because the mix of hard scientific materialism and well-meaning liberal humanitarianism has always been somewhat incoherent, the cult of reason necessarily shares space in liberal circles — especially liberal circles outside the innermost ring of the meritocracy — with other cults, other commitments, of the sort associated with “A Course in Miracles.”

in the long run her fusion of spiritual celebrity and political activism might be imitated and amplified, even as her distance from the technocratic norm points to a potential schism in the mind of liberalism

you might usefully describe certain potential intra-liberal conflicts as left-romanticism versus left-technocracy, or “Waldorf versus STEM.”

within the new progressive world there is a tension between a desire to claim the mantle of science and a yearning to fuse the political and mystical — what Tara Isabella Burton has described as the “progressive occultism” of astrological charts and anti-Kavanaugh séances and “Trump-era how-to spellbooks that blend folk magic with activist practice.

t’s also not a coincidence that perhaps the most popular of the Intellectual Dark Webbers, Jordan Peterson, talks about Enlightenment values in one breath while offering Jungian wisdom and invoking biblical archetypes in the next. Chase religious ideas out one door and they inevitably come in another — because the human mind naturally rebels against a worldview as incomplete, as manifestly threadbare, as pure materialism.

her warnings of spiritual crisis are at least as relevant to an America beset by addiction, suicide and atomization as any of Elizabeth Warren’s white papers.

It would take the entire course in miracles to put Williamson in the White House, but she’s right about one big thing: There’s more to heaven and earth, and even to national politics, than is dreamed of in the liberal technocrat’s philosophy.

She thought that both the most extreme authoritarians and the most extreme libertarians have powerful, largely innate and highly durable psychological predispositions that affect how they react to all that is unfamiliar and different

If contacted by white interviewers, the “authoritarians” were almost indistinguishable from the “libertarians” in their willingness to schedule a conversation. They proved dramatically more reluctant to participate when contacted by black interviewers.

The authoritarians were more hostile, suspicious, and anxious with black interviewers, whereas “especially given a black interviewer, libertarians were vastly more likely than authoritarians to display great warmth toward their visitors.”

With white interviewers, authoritarians were less likely than libertarians to introduce talk about “social exclusion, isolation, and disconnection,” but with a black interviewer they were far more likely, even as libertarians were indifferent to the interviewer’s race. “The language of authoritarians was especially inclusive when it was just ‘us’ talking among ourselves,” Stenner explained, “but they were clearly thinking exclusion when confronting one of ‘them.’”

Regardless of the interviewers, authoritarians tended to say fewer overall words and fewer different words than libertarians. And the evident differences were greatly magnified in the presence of black interviewers. The sophistication of discussions “tended to diverge by just over one grade level when both interviewers were white,” with authoritarians “talking at almost a fifth-grade level” and libertarians talking “around the sixth-grade level,”

when forced to engage in conversations with a black primary interviewer, the two characters were as distinct as third and ninth graders in the complexity of their discussions.” Why? The critical distinction between libertarians and authoritarians, Stemmer argues, is that “the former are excited and engaged and the latter frightened and unhinged by difference.”

“fears regarding immorality and crime, claims about the critical need to reestablish some normative order, and elaboration of plans for accomplishing this” occupied the bulk of “their psychic space,” consuming a vastly disproportionate share of their time and energy.

the left needs to know that it will better grasp reality and increase its odds of defeating Trumpism if it understands that anti-authoritarianism rather than antiracism is the most apt, effective framework for opposing what ails the right.

their intolerance of difference was much broader than racism, encompassing racial and ethnic out-groups, political dissidents, and people they consider moral deviants. Authoritarians display distinct traits across very different domains of tolerance.

“much of what we think of as racism, likewise political and moral intolerance, is more helpfully understood as ‘difference-ism,’” defined as “a fundamental and overwhelming desire to establish and defend some collective order of oneness and sameness.”

Stenner began her research with a questionnaire that probed the attitudes of her subjects toward child-rearing

many on the left and the right misunderstand racism in politics because neither quite understands the role of authoritarians.

the left makes several significant errors with regard to racism on the right

most important, leftists too often conceive of Trumpist politics as rooted primarily in racism, or even an ideological belief in white supremacy, rather than an authoritarian “different-ism” that manifests as racism at times but as distinct (if psychologically similar) intolerances at other times

“All the available evidence indicates that exposure to difference, talking about difference, and applauding difference… are the surest way to aggravate those who are innately intolerant, and to guarantee the expression of their predispositions in manifestly intolerant attitudes and behaviors,”

“parading, talking about, and applauding our sameness” seems wise when possible.

“the authoritarian dynamic” provides a better account than mere racism of political conflict “across the seemingly diverse domains of race and immigration, civil liberties, crime and punishment, and of when and why those battles will be the most heated

Trump sometimes seems like the paradigmatic example of the authoritarian personality type. But he may simply be a charismatic leader who understands – whether by some advisor’s dark calculation, or his own instincts – the vulnerability and malleability of his audience

showy celebration of an absolute insistence upon individual autonomy and unconstrained diversity pushes those by nature least equipped to live comfortably in a liberal democracy not to the limits of their tolerance, but to their intolerant extremes.”

I’d also advise the left to bear in mind that the right is a diverse coalition composed of authoritarians as well as many libertarians and people in between

when directed at non-authoritarian non-racists, false accusations could conceivably make them less inclined to probe, ponder, or perceive actual racism in others

The left should refine its best critiques on race and abandon its worst as lacking fairness and rigor.

And the non-authoritarian right needs to wake up to the authoritarians in their midst, taking responsibility for trying to deprive them of power rather than scapegoating or fixating on the least persuasive of the left’s critiques.

“Changing our lives is now unavoidable,” Orban told lawmakers last week when justifying the proposed bill. “Everyone has to leave their comfort zone. This law gives the government the power and means to defend Hungary.”

The emergency law also stipulates five-year prison sentences for Hungarians found to be spreading “false” information, as well as prison terms for those defying mandated quarantines. Critics argue that vital support for the country’s health-care system is still lacking, while Orban has given himself carte blanche to exercise even more domineering control.

On Monday, former Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi tweeted what many liberal Europeans feel — that Hungary’s illiberal slide threatens the values of the European Union as a whole and could merit its expulsion from the bloc.

But there’s no clear path forward for such drastically punitive action, not least as the continent flounders in its battle against the coronavirus. And Orban has his supporters, too. He has been lionized as a nationalist hero for the West’s anti-immigrant populists and welcomed to the White House by President Trump.

“Everyone should think twice before giving Orban the benefit of the doubt,” Dalibor Rohac of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, wrote last week. “His decade-long premiership has been marked by a continual assault on any constraints on his power — whether by courts, civil society or the media.”

what happens when an extraordinarily rich society can’t find enough new ideas that justify investing all its stockpiled wealth. We inflate bubbles and then pop them, invest in Theranos and then repent, and the supposed cutting edge of capitalism is increasingly defined by technologies that have almost arrived, business models that are on their way to profitability, by runways that go on and on without the plane achieving takeoff.

what this tells us, unfortunately, is that 21st-century growth and innovation are not at all that we were promised they would be.

slowly compounding growth is not the same as dynamism. American entrepreneurship has been declining since the 1970s: Early in the Jimmy Carter presidency, 17 percent of all United States businesses had been founded in the previous year; by the start of Barack Obama’s second term, that rate was about 10 percent. In the late 1980s, almost half of United States companies were “young,” meaning less than five years old; by the Great Recession, that share was down to only 39 percent, and the share of “old” firms (founded more than 15 years ago) rose from 22 percent to 34 percent over a similar period

From World War II through the 1980s, according to a recent report from Senator Marco Rubio’s office, private domestic investment often approached 10 percent of G.D.P.; in 2019, despite a corporate tax cut intended to get money off the sidelines, the investment-to-G.D.P. ratio was less than half of that.

This suggests that the people with the most experience starting businesses look around at their investment opportunities and see many more start-ups that resemble Theranos than resemble Amazon, let alone the behemoths of the old economy.

the dearth of corporate investment also means that the steady climb of the stock market has boosted the wealth of a rentier class — basically, already-rich investors getting richer off dividends — rather than reflecting surging prosperity in general.

In 2017 a group of economists published a paper asking, “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?” The answer was a clear yes: “We present a wide range of evidence from various industries, products, and firms showing that research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply.”

In his 2011 book “The Great Stagnation,” Tyler Cowen cited an analysis from the Pentagon physicist Jonathan Huebner, who modeled an innovations-to-population ratio for the last 600 years: It shows a slowly ascending arc through the late 19th century, when major inventions were rather easy to conceive and adopt, and a steepening decline ever since, as rich countries spend more and more on research to diminishing returns.

the trends reveal a slowdown, a mounting difficulty in achieving breakthroughs — a bottleneck if you’re optimistic, a ceiling if you aren’t

the relative exception, the internet and all its wonders, highlights the general pattern.

The Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon, one of the most persuasive theorists of stagnation, points out that the period from 1840 to 1970 featured dramatic growth and innovation across multiple arenas — energy and transportation and medicine and agriculture and communication and the built environment.

in the last two generations, progress has become increasingly monodimensional — all tech and nothing else.

Take a single one of the great breakthroughs of the industrial age — planes and trains and automobiles, antibiotics and indoor plumbing — and it still looms larger in our everyday existence than all of the contributions of the tech revolution combined.

We used to travel faster, build bigger, live longer; now we communicate faster, chatter more, snap more selfies.

With this stagnation comes social torpor. America is a more peaceable country than it was in 1970 or 1990, with lower crime rates and safer streets and better-behaved kids

it’s also a country where that supposedly most American of qualities, wanderlust, has markedly declined: Americans no longer “go west” (or east or north or south) in search of opportunity the way they did 50 years ago; the rate at which people move between states has fallen from 3.5 percent in the early 1970s to 1.4 percent in 2010. Nor do Americans change jobs as often as they once did.

Meanwhile, those well-behaved young people are more depressed than prior cohorts, less likely to drive drunk or get pregnant but more tempted toward self-harm

For adults, the increasingly legal drug of choice is marijuana, whose prototypical user is a relaxed and harmless figure — comfortably numb, experiencing stagnation as a chill good time.

then there is the opioid epidemic, whose spread across the unhappiest parts of white America passed almost unnoticed in elite circles for a while because the drug itself quiets rather than inflames, supplying a gentle euphoria that lets its users simply slip away, day by day and bit by bit, without causing anyone any trouble

In the land of the lotus eaters, people are also less likely to invest in the future in the most literal of ways. The United States birthrate was once an outlier among developed countries, but since the Great Recession, it has descended rapidly, converging with the wealthy world’s general below-replacement norm.

This demographic decline worsens economic stagnation; economists reckoning with its impact keep finding stark effects. A 2016 analysis found that a 10 percent increase in the fraction of the population over 60 decreased the growth rate of states’ per capita G.D.P. by 5.5 percent.

This doesn’t excuse the grifting or the rage stoking, especially presidential grifting and rage stoking, and it doesn’t make the mass shootings, when they come, any less horrific. But it’s important context for thinking about whether online politics is really carrying our society downward into civil strife

This feedback loop — in which sterility feeds stagnation, which further discourages childbearing, which sinks society ever-deeper into old age — makes demographic decline a clear example of how decadence overtakes a civilization

Both populism and socialism, Trump and Bernie Sanders, represent expressions of discontent with decadence, rebellions against the technocratic management of stagnation that defined the Obama era.

in practical terms the populist era has mostly delivered a new and deeper stalemate. From Trump’s Washington to the capitals of Europe, Western politics is now polarized between anti-establishment forces that are unprepared to competently govern and an establishment that’s too disliked to effectively rule.

The hysteria with which we’re experiencing them may represent nothing more than the way that a decadent society manages its political passions, by encouraging people to playact extremism, to re-enact the 1930s or 1968 on social media, to approach radical politics as a sport, a hobby, a kick to the body chemistry, that doesn’t put anything in their relatively comfortable late-modern lives at risk.

The terrorist in 21st-century America isn’t the guy who sees more deeply than the rest; he’s the guy who doesn’t get it, who takes the stuff he reads on the internet literally in a way that most of the people posting don’t

once we crossed over into permanent below-replacement territory, the birth dearth began undercutting the very forces (youth, risk -taking, dynamism) necessary for continued growth, meaning that any further gains to individual welfare are coming at the future’s expense.

It suggests that the virtual realm might make our battles more ferocious but also more performative and empty; and that online rage is a steam-venting technology for a society that is misgoverned, stagnant and yet, ultimately, far more stable than it looks on Twitter

in the real world, it’s possible that Western society is leaning back in an easy chair, hooked up to a drip of something soothing, playing and replaying an ideological greatest-hits tape from its wild and crazy youth.

Human beings can still live vigorously amid a general stagnation, be fruitful amid sterility, be creative amid repetition. And the decadent society, unlike the full dystopia, allows those signs of contradictions to exist

The last hundred-odd years of Western history offer plenty of examples of how the attempt to throw off decadence can bring in far worse evils, from the craving for Meaning and Action that piled corpses at Verdun and Passchendaele, to the nostalgic yearning for the Cold War that inspired post-9/11 crusading and led to a military quagmire in the Middle East.

So you can even build a case for decadence, not as a falling-off or disappointing end, but as a healthy balance between the misery of poverty and the dangers of growth for growth’s sake

A sustainable decadence, if you will, in which the crucial task for 21st-century humanity would be making the most of a prosperous stagnation: learning to temper our expectations and live within limits; making sure existing resources are distributed more justly; using education to lift people into the sunlit uplands of the creative class; and doing everything we can to help poorer countries transition successfully into our current position

this argument carries you only so far. Even if the dystopia never quite arrives, the longer a period of stagnation continues, the narrower the space for fecundity and piety, memory and invention, creativity and daring.

So decadence must be critiqued and resisted

by the hope that where there’s stability, there also might eventually be renewal,

The next renaissance will be necessarily different, but realism about our own situation should make us more inclined, not less, to look and hope for one — for the day when our culture feels more fruitful, our politics less futile and the frontiers that seem closed today are opened once again.

Together, they are determined to hold on to a country that was paid for 55 years ago in blood. In the South, as in the rest of America, that may be a hard thing to do.

Faced with the prospect of their children losing the basic rights they won over many generations, these voters, as the old Chicago political saw goes, don’t want nobody that nobody sent.

In Tennessee and Alabama, in Arkansas and Oklahoma and Mississippi, Democrats, black and white, told me they were united by a single, urgent goal: defeating Mr. Trump this November, with any candidate, and at any cost.

Mr. Clyburn, 79, talking about the first time he was arrested protesting for civil rights decades ago. “When I sat in jail that day, I wondered whether we were doing the right thing, but I was never fearful for the future,” he said. “As I stand before you today I am fearful of the future of this country. I’m fearful for my daughters and their futures, and their children, and their children’s futures.”

As Paul Blest wrote in the Outline, “To pretend that the alt-right and Antifa are comparable is like equating the danger of playing Russian roulette with taking a walk.”

Meanwhile, one white supremacist and Ku Klux Klan leader, Chris Barker, said last month that his movement would destroy immigrants: “We killed 6 million Jews the last time. Eleven million is nothing.”

Right-wing extremists committed 74 percent of the 372 politically motivated murders recorded in the United States between 2007 and 2016. Left-wing extremists committed less than 2 percent.

He was comparing things that aren’t the least bit equal, neither in scale nor in intent.

“Trump was playing into a meme about violent leftists that was well developed on the right,”

For months, the likes of Hannity have been using “alt-left” to trash mainstream journalists. Then along came Charlottesville, and the ubiquitous image of the black-clad, shield-wielding leftists.

“What about the alt-left that came charging at, what you say, the alt-right?” Trump asked a few days after Charlottesville’s confrontation. “What about the fact they came charging with clubs in their hands, swinging clubs, do they have any problem? I think they do.”

In Angela Merkel’s Europe right now, that should mean making peace with Brexit, ceasing to pursue ever further political centralization by undemocratic means, breaking up the ’60s-era intellectual cartels that control the commanding heights of culture, creating space for religious resistance to the lure of nihilism and suicide — and accepting that the days of immigration open doors are over, and the careful management of migrant flows is a central challenge for statesmen going forward.