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“Many millionaires perhaps may consider themselves tomorrow’s billionaires.”

The billionaire class has long leaned on farmers and ranchers to beat back efforts to tax inheritances more heavily. This year, the tactic worked to kill a proposal from Mr. Biden that would have set the value of inherited assets at their original purchase price, not their worth at the time of the original owner’s death.

“Not only does it distort discussion of incredibly important policy,” he said, “it ends up advancing the interest of this very small number of people and industries that have a chokehold on public policy in Washington.”

On May 4, 1891, as gale-force winds and waves raged on Lake Superior, the crew of a schooner barge named Atlanta abandoned ship as it sank. The six men and one woman, a cook, clung to their lifeboat for nine hours, fighting at its oars to guide it to the Michigan shore.

Only two men survived.

This month, the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society said that the wreckage of the Atlanta had been found after it had sat undetected in the cold oblivion of the lake’s depths for more than a century. The announcement revived the story of how the Atlanta’s crew members fought for their lives on the world’s largest freshwater lake.

Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, said in an interview published on Monday that she attended the Jan. 6, 2021, rally at the Ellipse in Washington.

Ms. Thomas sits on the nine-member board of CNP Action, a conservative group that helped advance the “Stop the Steal” movement that tried to keep Mr. Trump in office.

“I was disappointed and frustrated that there was violence that happened following a peaceful gathering of Trump supporters on the Ellipse on Jan. 6,” she said. “There are important and legitimate substantive questions about achieving goals like electoral integrity, racial equality, and political accountability that a democratic system like ours needs to be able to discuss and debate rationally in the political square. I fear we are losing that ability.”

Long before the “zero Covid” policy, China had a “zero sparrow” policy.

In the spring of 1958, the Chinese government mobilized the entire nation to exterminate sparrows, which Mao declared pests that destroyed crops. All over China, people banged on pots and pans, lit firecrackers and waved flags to prevent the birds from landing so they would fall and die from exhaustion. By one estimation, nearly two billion sparrows were killed nationwide within months.

The near extinction of sparrows led to insect infestations, which ruined crops and contributed to the Great Famine, which starved tens of millions of Chinese to death in the next three years.

The moral of this story? High-coercion authoritarian systems are low-information systems — so they often drive blind more than they realize. And even when the truth filters up, or reality in the form of a more powerful foe or Mother Nature slams them in the face so hard it can’t be ignored, their leaders find it hard to change course because their claims to the right to be presidents-for-life rest on their claims to infallibility. And that is why Russia and China are both now struggling.

I am worried sick about our own democratic system. But as long as we can still vote out incompetent leaders and maintain information ecosystems that will expose systemic lying and defy censorship, we can adapt in an age of rapid change — and that is the single most important competitive advantage a country can have today.

What is conservative? It is, above all, the conviction that abrupt and profound changes to established laws and common expectations are utterly destructive to respect for the law and the institutions established to uphold it — especially when those changes are instigated from above, with neither democratic consent nor broad consensus.

As conservatives, you are philosophically bound to give considerable weight to judicial precedents, particularly when they have been ratified and refined — as Roe was by the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision — over a long period.

It’s also a matter of originalism. “To avoid an arbitrary discretion in the courts,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 78, “it is indispensable that they” — the judges — “should be bound down by strict rules and precedents, which serve to define and point out their duty in every particular case that comes before them.”

The political and pedagogical firefight encapsulates a broader debate that has erupted across the country about what to teach about race, history and the intersection of the two. It underscores how the nation’s metastasizing culture wars — now firmly ensconced in the nation’s classrooms — have broadened to strip Americans of a shared sense of history, leaving many to view the past through the filter of contemporary polarization.

“Most of our prior arguments were about who to include in the story, not the story itself,” said Jonathan Zimmerman, a University of Pennsylvania professor who studies the history of education. “America has lost a shared national narrative.”

history has become a defining topic for contenders angling for the presidency.

Wulf says that Romanticism is difficult to define because it emphasized not an absolute truth but “the process of understanding” — a fuzziness that pleased the Romantics themselves, who refused to be hemmed in by any rules

there was still a core to their movement, which emphasized the limits of rationality and extolled the imagination. Science wasn’t something to be resisted; it was to be integrated, because everything was connected.Romanticizing the world meant grasping it as a resonant whole.