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As those contrasts have faded, so have these distinct regional, rural identities. Everywhere it’s the same cloying pop country, the same aggressively oversized Ford F-150s, the same tumbledown Wal-Marts and Dollar Generals, the same eagle-heavy fashion, the same confused, aggrieved air of relentless material decline. Even the accents are more and more the same, trending toward a generalized Larry the Cable Guy twang.

America’s increasingly placeless, homogenous white rural culture isn’t a blend of all our various regional cultures. Rural Iowans and Minnesotans sound more like rural Missourians than the reverse.

I suspect that battle between North and South lives on both culturally and geographically. The North has drifted out of the countryside and concentrated itself into our cities. At the same time, America’s rural and exurban counties have slowly become more and more homogenously Southern. The South has risen again … in rural Maine?

He also performed a service by keeping the preservation of American democracy central to his campaign. He has faced plenty of second-guessing for this choice. Democracy is a big, amorphous concept like climate change, the critics say. Regular people struggle to understand it as concretely as they do, say, crime or the economy.

But as Mr. Biden explained, “Without democracy, no progress is possible.” It’s all connected, he said.

“Democracy means having the freedom to speak your mind, to be who you are, to be who you want to be,” he said. “Democracy is about being able to bring about peaceful change. Democracy — democracy is how we’ve opened the doors of opportunity wider and wider with each successive generation, notwithstanding our mistakes. But if democracy falls, we’ll lose that freedom.”

D.E.I. Short for “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” the term — like the related progressive concepts of wokeness and critical race theory — used to have an agreed-upon meaning but has now been essentially redefined on the populist right. In that world, D.E.I. has become yet another catchall boogeyman, a stand-in not just for actual policies or practices designed to increase diversity, but also a scapegoat for unrelated crises.

the immense backlash from parts of the right against almost any diversity initiative is a sign of the extent to which millions of white Americans are content with their vastly disproportionate share of national wealth and power.

Outside the reactionary right, there is a cohort of Americans, on both right and left, who want to eradicate illegal discrimination and remedy the effects of centuries of American injustice yet also have grave concerns about the way in which some D.E.I. efforts are undermining American constitutional values, especially on college campuses.

June 2024 Issue

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it is impossible to know, in the first few years of any novel intervention, whether its success will last.

The notion behind the commercial is fairly obvious. Apple wants to show you that the bulk of human ingenuity and history can be compressed into an iPad, and thereby wants you to believe that the device is a desirable entry point to both the consumption of culture and the creation of it.

Most important, it wants you to know that the iPad is powerful and quite thin.

But good Lord, Apple, read the room. In its swing for spectacle, the ad lacks so much self-awareness, it’s cringey, even depressing.

One theme emerges in much of the research: Our politics tend be more emotional now. Policy preferences are increasingly likely to be entangled with a visceral dislike of the opposition. The newly embraced academic term for this is “affective polarization.”

“It’s feelings based,” said Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University and author of “Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity.” “It’s polarization that’s based on our feelings for each other, not based on extremely divergent policy preferences.”

The tendency to form tightly knit groups has roots in evolution, according to experts in political psychology. Humans evolved in a challenging world of limited resources in which survival required cooperation — and identifying the rivals, the competitors for those resources.

Defense Minister Boris Pistorius has begun warning Germans that they should prepare for decades of confrontation with Russia — and that they must speedily rebuild the country’s military in case Vladimir V. Putin does not plan to stop at the border with Ukraine.

Russia’s military, he has said in a series of recent interviews with German news media, is fully occupied with Ukraine. But if there is a truce, and Mr. Putin, Russia’s president, has a few years to reset, he thinks the Russian leader will consider testing NATO’s unity.

“Nobody knows how or whether this will last,” Mr. Pistorius said of the current war, arguing for a rapid buildup in the size of the German military and a restocking of its arsenal.

In the course of those cases and confrontations, I’ve learned that the issue of campus protest is remarkably complex and that campus culture is at least as important as law and policy in setting the boundaries of debate.

There is profound confusion on campus right now around the distinctions between free speech, civil disobedience and lawlessness. At the same time, some schools also seem confused about their fundamental academic mission

Does the university believe it should be neutral toward campus activism — protecting it as an exercise of the students’ constitutional rights and academic freedoms, but not cooperating with student activists to advance shared goals — or does it incorporate activism as part of the educational process itself, including by coordinating with the protesters and encouraging their activism?

Each year, it’s no surprise that Finland tops the annual World Happiness Report. And this year was no different, marking the country’s seventh consecutive year doing so

Americans — particularly those under 30 — have become drastically less happy in recent years

the latest data point in what some researchers have described as a crisis among America’s youth.

As the leaders of the West gathered in Munich over the past three days, President Vladimir V. Putin had a message for them: Nothing they’ve done so far — sanctions, condemnation, attempted containment — would alter his intentions to disrupt the current world order.

In Munich, the mood was both anxious and unmoored, as leaders faced confrontations they had not anticipated. Warnings about Mr. Putin’s possible next moves were mixed with Europe’s growing worries that it could soon be abandoned by the United States, the one power that has been at the core of its defense strategy for 75 years.

Barely an hour went by at the Munich Security Conference in which the conversation did not turn to the question of whether Congress would fail to find a way to fund new arms for Ukraine, and if so, how long the Ukrainians could hold out. And while Donald Trump’s name was rarely mentioned, the prospect of whether he would make good on his threats to pull out of NATO and let Russia “do whatever the hell they want” with allies he judged insufficient hung over much of the dialogue.

Sullivan first had to dismantle establishment orthodoxies within himself — the same orthodoxies he now sought to undo at Brookings: That globalization and free trade were an unalloyed good, growing economies and improving people’s lives in the process. What was good for the stock market, in effect, was great for everybody. Given enough time, swelling wallets would produce a steady middle class, one that demands its political and human rights from its government. Even the most repressive regimes, the thinking went, would eventually crumble under the weight of inflowing capital. Consistent pressure via greenbacks did the most good for the most people.

“Those were the heady days when the mainstream foreign policy consensus was that globalization was a force for good,” Sullivan recalled in a 2017 interview. There was, of course, reason to think this. Capitalism helped keep the Soviet Union at bay, China still wasn’t a major power and building the economies of enemies turned them into friends. Globalization, per its champions, had the benefit of making many people rich while making the world safer in general and U.S. foreign policy less costly.

“After the Second World War, the United States led a fragmented world to build a new international economic order. It lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. It sustained thrilling technological revolutions. And it helped the United States and many other nations around the world achieve new levels of prosperity. But the last few decades revealed cracks in those foundations,”

Though libertarianism as a political philosophy will continue, there is no longer anything resembling a coherent libertarian movement in American politics. That’s because the movement still bearing its name is no longer recognizably libertarian in any meaningful sense of the term. Nor can it still claim to be a political movement, which implies an association organized around not just a consistent set of ideas but a distinct political identity

For over a decade now, since Trump has dominated the national stage, longstanding disagreements have boiled over into a complete schism. There are those who have effectively become adjuncts of MAGA, and some who have gone firmly in the opposite direction, while others took a stance more akin to anti-anti-Trump voices who neither endorse nor firmly oppose the former president but train their ire toward those opposing Trump.

requires tracing internal libertarian disputes that began long before the rise of Trump. In some ways, they are a microcosm of similar developments in the American intellectual landscape writ large

I was thrilled when the Biden administration came in with a plan for big federal investments in the American industrial base, tariffs, support for labor unions and actions against monopolies. No one knew what to call it — Post-neoliberalism? Democratic capitalism? Neopopulism? — but for the first time in generations a U.S. administration was saying that people should control the market, not the other way around.

But if it was the right path, why didn’t more voters trust President Biden on the economy?

To understand who Ms. Harris is, you have to know who she used to be.