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The most dangerous threat in liberalism’s spiritual home comes from the Trumpian right. Populists denigrate liberal edifices such as science and the rule of law as façades for a plot by the deep state against the people. They subordinate facts and reason to tribal emotion. The enduring falsehood that the presidential election in 2020 was stolen points to where such impulses lead. If people cannot settle their differences using debate and trusted institutions, they resort to force.

The attack from the left is harder to grasp, partly because in America “liberal” has come to include an illiberal left

a new style of politics has recently spread from elite university departments. As young graduates have taken jobs in the upmarket media and in politics, business and education, they have brought with them a horror of feeling “unsafe” and an agenda obsessed with a narrow vision of obtaining justice for oppressed identity groups. They have also brought along tactics to enforce ideological purity, by no-platforming their enemies and cancelling allies who have transgressed—with echoes of the confessional state that dominated Europe before classical liberalism took root at the end of the 18th century.

Superficially, the illiberal left and classical liberals like The Economist want many of the same things. Both believe that people should be able to flourish whatever their sexuality or race. They share a suspicion of authority and entrenched interests. They believe in the desirability of change.

However, classical liberals and illiberal progressives could hardly disagree more over how to bring these things about

For classical liberals, the precise direction of progress is unknowable. It must be spontaneous and from the bottom up—and it depends on the separation of powers, so that nobody nor any group is able to exert lasting control.

By contrast the illiberal left put their own power at the centre of things, because they are sure real progress is possible only after they have first seen to it that racial, sexual and other hierarchies are dismantled.

Classical liberals believe in setting fair initial conditions and letting events unfold through competition—by, say, eliminating corporate monopolies, opening up guilds, radically reforming taxation and making education accessible with vouchers.

Progressives see laissez-faire as a pretence which powerful vested interests use to preserve the status quo. Instead, they believe in imposing “equity”—the outcomes that they deem just. For example, Ibram X. Kendi, a scholar-activist, asserts that any colour-blind policy, including the standardised testing of children, is racist if it ends up increasing average racial differentials, however enlightened the intentions behind it.

Mr Kendi is right to want an anti-racist policy that works. But his blunderbuss approach risks denying some disadvantaged children the help they need and others the chance to realise their talents.

Besides, society has many goals. People worry about economic growth, welfare, crime, the environment and national security, and policies cannot be judged simply on whether they advance a particular group.

Classical liberals use debate to hash out priorities and trade-offs in a pluralist society and then use elections to settle on a course.

The illiberal left believe that the marketplace of ideas is rigged just like all the others. What masquerades as evidence and argument, they say, is really yet another assertion of raw power by the elite.

Progressives of the old school remain champions of free speech. But illiberal progressives think that equity requires the field to be tilted against those who are privileged and reactionary

That means restricting their freedom of speech, using a caste system of victimhood in which those on top must defer to those with a greater claim to restorative justice

It also involves making an example of supposed reactionaries, by punishing them when they say something that is taken to make someone who is less privileged feel unsafe. The results are calling-out, cancellation and no-platforming.

Milton Friedman once said that the “society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither”.

Illiberal progressives think they have a blueprint for freeing oppressed groups. In reality theirs is a formula for the oppression of individuals

it is not so very different from the plans of the populist right. In their different ways both extremes put power before process, ends before means and the interests of the group before the freedom of the individual.

Countries run by the strongmen whom populists admire, such as Hungary under Viktor Orban and Russia under Vladimir Putin, show that unchecked power is a bad foundation for good government. Utopias like Cuba and Venezuela show that ends do not justify means

And nowhere at all do individuals willingly conform to state-imposed racial and economic stereotypes.

When populists put partisanship before truth, they sabotage good government. When progressives divide people into competing castes, they turn the nation against itself. Both diminish institutions that resolve social conflict. Hence they often resort to coercion, however much they like to talk about justice.

populists and progressives feed off each other pathologically. The hatred each camp feels for the other inflames its own supporters—to the benefit of both. Criticising your own tribe’s excesses seems like treachery. Under these conditions, liberal debate is starved of oxygen

Aspects of liberalism go against the grain of human nature. It requires you to defend your opponents’ right to speak, even when you know they are wrong. You must be willing to question your deepest beliefs. Businesses must not be sheltered from the gales of creative destruction. Your loved ones must advance on merit alone, even if all your instincts are to bend the rules for them. You must accept the victory of your enemies at the ballot box, even if you think they will bring the country to ruin.

Too many left-leaning liberals focus on how they, too, want social justice. They comfort themselves with the thought that the most intolerant illiberalism belongs to a fringe. Don’t worry, they say, intolerance is part of the mechanism of change: by focusing on injustice, they shift the centre ground.

Yet it is precisely by countering the forces propelling people to the extremes that classical liberals prevent the extremes from strengthening. By applying liberal principles, they help solve society’s many problems without anyone resorting to coercion

Only liberals appreciate diversity in all its forms and understand how to make it a strength. Only they can deal fairly with everything from education to planning and foreign policy so as to release people’s creative energies.

“Based on our research, I can’t see evidence that we can reach 1.9C,” he said. “But whether we are now on course for 1.9C or 2.7C, the main point is that we should focus on concrete action.”

China has released five documents detailing plans to achieve its dual goals of peaking carbon emissions in 2030 and reaching net zero by 2060. “If you read those reports you can find all of our actions, but nobody reads everything,”

As an example, he said the working guidance document on carbon peaking and neutrality outlined a strict control on the increase of coal consumption during the 14th five-year period and then a gradual reduction during the following five years. “That means China will peak coal consumption around 2025, though that is not a line you will see in the document. You need to interpret it and nobody [outside China] can do that.”

Similarly, he said the government 1+N policy system provided a roadmap of 37 tasks that the country needed to take until 2060 on areas ranging from legislation and policy to technology and finance

There will be another 30 documents published in the coming year that break down actions needed in key sectors, such as building and transport, as well as major industries including steel and chemicals. “No country has issued so many documents to support its targets,” he said. “It’s a holistic solution, but nobody knows.”

China’s two different targets pose very different challenges, he said. “The peaking issue is easy. More difficult is how to achieve neutrality … We are in transition. Our concern in the future is not that China is too slow, but that it is too fast.”

“Our coal-fired plants have a life of 10 to 12 years. If we shut them down, who will pay for the stranded assets? Who will employ the laid-off workers?”

By the end of this decade, the government plans to reach 1200GW of wind and solar power, which would exceed the entire installed electricity capacity of the US, he said.

As at previous Cops, China will also push wealthy nations to make greater financial contributions to developing countries, which have done least to cause the climate crisis but suffer most from its consequences.

“China would like more effort on supporting developing countries,” he said. “If we are going to aim for 1.5C instead of 2C, then there has to be an increase in the funds available to make that happen.”

“1.5C is possible, but it would carry a cost, social and economic. If we cannot solve these problems equally, especially for developing countries, then it is not a real target.”

“We are all in the same boat, but different cabins,” he said. “Some live in a big space and eat too much. We need balance.”

The world that emerges from the pandemic will be shaped by an adversarial rivalry that is not just about each side’s relative power, but has become an existential competition as each side strives to demonstrate the superiority of its system of government.

Starting with the Winter Olympics in February and culminating with the 20th Communist Party congress later in the year, China will stage a series of tightly choreographed events designed to project the competence, clout and all-round superiority of party rule, and formalise Mr Xi’s position at its helm beyond the ten-year tenure that has hitherto been the norm.

As the year goes on, the near certainty that, health permitting, Mr Trump will be the Republican presidential candidate in 2024 means America’s political debate will be overshadowed by fears of the biggest constitutional crisis since the civil war.

If the theatre of politics makes Western democracy look dysfunctional relative to Chinese autocracy, 2022 may offer a different verdict on which system delivers the most competent economic management. From tech companies to post-pandemic reopening, China and America are taking starkly divergent approaches to similar challenges

America and the rest of the West will move into a living-with-covid mindset. The disease will not disappear, but become endemic. Booster jabs will become the norm, remaining travel restrictions will be relaxed and lockdowns will become a thing of the past

China, by contrast, will stick with a zero-covid policy throughout 2022. Having terrified its citizens about the disease and touted its toughness as a mark of superiority, China’s government cannot easily change course. The country will remain walled off from the rest of the world with long quarantines and sharply restricted travel.

In both of these cases, China’s draconian approach will eventually cause economic damage.

All this will complicate China’s already challenging macroeconomic environment. China-watchers have worried for years about the consequences of unwinding the country’s enormous property boom and the jaw-dropping levels of debt that accompanied it. The crisis at Evergrande, a huge developer, suggests that this tricky transition is at last under way. It will dominate 2022 as other property-related firms fail. Add to that structural challenges, from a shrinking workforce to a rapidly growing number of old-age dependents, and the economic pressures are considerable. Annual GDP growth could fall to 5%

With covid-19 behind it, its fiscal tightening mostly complete and (assuming some version of Mr Biden’s bill is passed) with a long-overdue effort to improve infrastructure under way, America’s economy could grow smartly, even as its politics frays. GDP growth of 4%, not far off China’s, is plausible.

in theory the two sides could make progress in plenty of areas, such as devising a sensible deal on trade and technology to replace the tariffs of the Trump era; agreeing on a common approach to cyber-security, nuclear non-proliferation or the militarisation of space; or finding ways to accelerate the clean-energy transition in the wake of the COP26 climate meeting in Glasgow.

The good news is that a military confrontation seems unlikely in 2022. The overriding need to preserve stability in the run-up to the party congress will discourage China from adventurism or excessive sabre-rattling, whether around Taiwan or in the South China Sea. The bad news is that the Thucydides Trap will not have gone away.

Stanley McChrystal: If you go back, Covid-19 was not that formidable a threat. We knew that it was coming. Not Covid-19 particularly but we knew that kind of viral threat came on a periodic basis and that a pandemic level was inevitable. And then we knew what to do about it because our experience in public health is really pretty rich. And then, with this pandemic, we had the extraordinary medical miracle where we produced vaccines faster than any time in history. 

If you line those factors up, we should have had a win. Instead, we lost hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions more around the world. Some percentage probably could not have been saved. But the reality was that, from the outset, we didn’t communicate clearly and we therefore undermined our credibility on what the threat was and what we needed to do about it. 

The responsibility of leadership is to move rapidly and effectively, and we just didn’t do that. We’d better go to school on this because, if we can get punished this badly by a pandemic like this, imagine how much worse it would have been with a virus like smallpox. Society’s very existence could have been threatened.

MW: Let’s shift to another frontier of vulnerabilities. How do you view a company like Facebook, which has been criticized for enabling global terrorist groups to recruit while also allowing domestic extremists to promote hateful views?

I would use an analogy to nuclear weapons at the end of the Second World War. We developed this horrific technology and we really hadn’t figured out how we were going to control it. That was OK for the first couple of years because we had a monopoly. But once global proliferation began then we suddenly had a very complicated world. There was a need for a number of protocols pertaining to holding countries responsible for having that kind of power.  

The problem with social media is that we developed tools of equivalent danger because of the ability to pass information faster than we can think. I don’t think we’ve yet matured enough as a society to know how to control and deal with it. 

MW: Given these risks, could the next American battlefield be online? 

McChrystal: Yes, I think we will see war play out digitally. What if, on the Sunday afternoon before a Tuesday election, the Russians planted a semi-believable story about a candidate? And then there wasn’t time to gain clarity between Sunday afternoon and Tuesday morning before people started voting? The public would go into voting booths affected by that attack. 

We are all extraordinarily brittle given this exposure, and our society is no longer capable of operating without the information technology that connects us all.  

MW: With these types of dangers in mind, is the United States appropriately weighing the possibility of a major conflict with China? 

McChrystal: In my personal opinion, we are not. I am not advocating for the resumption of the Cold War, but our competition with China is going to be a very hard-edged, long-term, economic competition. There is also a military competition as the Chinese have been on a breakneck development of military capacity over the last decade or so, which now makes it much harder for the U.S. to credibly limit the risk they pose. 

We also have to recognize that we don’t have to be at war with China for there to be serious risks. We need to explore new policies that will increase protection for private investments, our national interests, our intellectual property, and our supply chains. In a peaceful environment, it makes sense for our supply chains to be built in low-cost areas of production. However, if they’re in a country like China that can then use that as leverage over us, then we’ve got to address that and find a different solution. 

No matter what, we have to make the appropriate investments so that our military effectiveness against the Chinese remains a viable option. We’ve got to be able to do what we need to do in that region, which may include defending Taiwan. 

MW: Do current global supply chains—and America’s dependence on single nations for various types of production—pose a risk to the U.S. economy? 

McChrystal: Consider our ability to produce batteries and that production for cobalt largely comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the product is then mostly processed in China. Items that are going to be central to our switch to electric vehicles and to different storage systems are dependent on a free flow of goods from China. 

We’ve got so many things that are part of our vital supply lines that are at risk. We’ve got to step back and we’ve got to make some national decisions on which items need to be sourced within the United States. We at least need that capability so we’re not completely dependent. If somebody gets their hand around our windpipe and squeezes, then the nation suffocates. 

In Poland, the government has just passed an emergency law allowing authorities to turn back refugees who cross into the country “illegally”. It is the latest development in a diplomatic standoff with Belarus, which has cynically been encouraging people from Iraq, Iran and parts of Africa to cross into the EU, in response to sanctions imposed on it earlier this year. Poland’s hardline response leaves many people trapped in the no man’s land between the two countries.

Priti Patel, the home secretary, claims this is an essentially benevolent measure: if boats in the Channel are turned around, it will eventually stop people attempting the dangerous trip in the first place. In fact, it undermines a key principle of international maritime law that makes it a duty to rescue people in distress.

In the UK, the Home Office has quietly tried to amend its draconian nationality and borders bill, currently at committee stage, by introducing a provision that gives Border Force staff immunity from prosecution if they fail to save lives at sea.

These developments are harmful in their own right, but they also set a disturbing precedent for how countries in rich parts of the world might deal with future displacements of people – not just from war and persecution, but from the climate crisis as well.

Three recent stories, from three different corners of Europe, suggest that governments are crossing a new threshold of violence in terms of how they police their borders.

This is not only a problem for today: it is a dress rehearsal for how our governments are likely to deal with the effects of the climate crisis in years to come.

a new report by the World Bank projects that 216 million people could be displaced within their own countries by water shortages, crop failure and rising sea levels by 2050.

Unfortunately, many of our politicians are primed to see displacement first and foremost as a civilisational threat. That was the logic of Boris Johnson’s comments ahead of the launch of Cop26 in Glasgow, when he claimed – incorrectly – that “uncontrolled immigration” was responsible for the fall of the Roman empire, and that a similar fate awaits the world today

In this telling, an environmental disaster that affects us all is transformed into a question of how the wealthy and powerful can preserve their privileges.

they are backed up by a burgeoning border security industry. A recent report by the Transnational Institute warns of what it calls “the border-industrial complex”, a growing multibillion dollar industry that ranges from security infrastructure to biometrics and artificial intelligence. The global market in fences, walls and surveillance alone is projected to be worth $65-$68bn by 2025.

Richer parts of the world have already begun to militarise their borders, a process that has accelerated in response to the refugee movements of the past decade.

What’s required, instead – beyond action to reduce emissions – is a plan to help people adapt to changing living circumstances and reduce global inequality, along with migration policies that recognise the reality of people’s situations

A major new US study commissioned by the Biden administration recommends new laws to protect climate migrants, but it is strikingly light on detail.

After nearly two years in which sports have delivered some of the most vivid case studies in public health, the Senators are presenting yet another: just how much Covid can still spread when a vaccinated group of people gather in poorly ventilated places and get up in each other’s bare faces

That’s a problem for every sport that plays indoors—and a warning for every coming holiday party. 

epidemiologists say they are not particularly surprised. They have long warned that while vaccines are highly effective in preventing serious illness from the coronavirus, they’re not as foolproof in blocking infections, especially as time passes, immunity fades and the highly contagious Delta variant spreads

“The high proportion of infections that occurred in this outbreak provides evidence for SARS-CoV-2 transmission during an indoor sporting activity where intense physical activity is occurring.”

especially when other preventive measures are not also in effect.

“We can see the effectiveness of the vaccines are slightly waning with time and it’s real, but we have to remember it’s waning against getting the infection — the vaccines are holding a lot of their strength against severe illness.”

there were rich examples of how easily the virus could spread inside an ice rink. In a paper published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Florida health officials recounted a June 2020 recreational hockey game in Tampa Bay during which a presymptomatic but infectious player appeared to have transmitted coronavirus to eight out of 10 teammates, five out of 11 players from the opposing team, and one rink staff member.

“The ice rink provides a venue that is likely well suited to Covid-19 transmission as an indoor environment where deep breathing occurs, and persons are in close proximity to one another,”

10 players and one coach tested positive in recent days. The team says it is fully vaccinated, but hasn’t specified which shots players have received. 

“A bubble I don’t think is reasonable at this point in time; nor is pretending that the pandemic is over.”

imilar increases occurred at the same time for girls in Canada for mood disorders and for self-harm. Girls in the U.K. also experienced very large increases in anxiety, depression, and self-harm (with much smaller increases for boys).

Some have argued that these increases reflect nothing more than Gen Z’s increased willingness to disclose their mental-health problems. But researchers have found corresponding increases in measurable behaviors such as suicide (for both sexes), and emergency-department admissions for self-harm (for girls only). From 2010 to 2014, rates of hospital admission for self-harm did not increase at all for women in their early 20s, or for boys or young men, but they doubled for girls ages 10 to 14.

The available evidence suggests that Facebook’s products have probably harmed millions of girls. If public officials want to make that case, it could go like this:

from 2010 to 2014, high-school students moved much more of their lives onto social-media platforms.

National surveys of American high-school students show that only about 63 percent reported using a “social networking site” on a daily basis back in 2010.

But as smartphone ownership increased, access became easier and visits became more frequent. By 2014, 80 percent of high-school students said they used a social-media platform on a daily basis, and 24 percent said that they were online “almost constantly.”

2. The timing points to social media.

Notably, girls became much heavier users of the new visually oriented platforms, primarily Instagram (which by 2013 had more than 100 million users), followed by Snapchat, Pinterest, and Tumblr.

Boys are glued to their screens as well, but they aren’t using social media as much; they spend far more time playing video games. When a boy steps away from the console, he does not spend the next few hours worrying about what other players are saying about him

Instagram, in contrast, can loom in a girl’s mind even when the app is not open, driving hours of obsessive thought, worry, and shame.

3. The victims point to Instagram.

In 2017, British researchers asked 1,500 teens to rate how each of the major social-media platforms affected them on certain well-being measures, including anxiety, loneliness, body image, and sleep. Instagram scored as the most harmful, followed by Snapchat and then Facebook.

Facebook’s own research, leaked by the whistleblower Frances Haugen, has a similar finding: “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression … This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.” The researchers also noted that “social comparison is worse” on Instagram than on rival apps.

4. No other suspect is equally plausible.

A recent experiment confirmed these observations: Young women were randomly assigned to use Instagram, use Facebook, or play a simple video game for seven minutes. The researchers found that “those who used Instagram, but not Facebook, showed decreased body satisfaction, decreased positive affect, and increased negative affect.”

Snapchat’s filters “keep the focus on the face,” whereas Instagram “focuses heavily on the body and lifestyle.

(Boys lost less, and may even have gained, when they took up multiplayer fantasy games, especially those that put them into teams.)

The subset of studies that allow researchers to isolate social media, and Instagram in particular, show a much stronger relationship with poor mental health. The same goes for those that zoom in on girls rather than all teens.

In a 2019 internal essay, Andrew Bosworth, a longtime company executive, wrote:While Facebook may not be nicotine I think it is probably like sugar. Sugar is delicious and for most of us there is a special place for it in our lives. But like all things it benefits from moderation.

Bosworth was proposing what medical researchers call a “dose-response relationship.” Sugar, salt, alcohol, and many other substances that are dangerous in large doses are harmless in small ones.

his framing also implies that any health problems caused by social media result from the user’s lack of self-control. That’s exactly what Bosworth concluded: “Each of us must take responsibility for ourselves.” The dose-response frame also points to cheap solutions that pose no threat to its business model. The company can simply offer more tools to help Instagram and Facebook users limit their consumption.

social-media platforms are not like sugar. They don’t just affect the individuals who overindulge. Rather, when teens went from texting their close friends on flip phones in 2010 to posting carefully curated photographs and awaiting comments and likes by 2014, the change rewired everyone’s social life.

Improvements in technology generally help friends connect, but the move onto social-media platforms also made it easier—indeed, almost obligatory––for users to perform for one another.

Public performance is risky. Private conversation is far more playful. A bad joke or poorly chosen word among friends elicits groans, or perhaps a rebuke and a chance to apologize. Getting repeated feedback in a low-stakes environment is one of the main ways that play builds social skills, physical skills, and the ability to properly judge risk. Play also strengthens friendships.

When girls started spending hours each day on Instagram, they lost many of the benefits of play.

First, Congress should pass legislation compelling Facebook, Instagram, and all other social-media platforms to allow academic researchers access to their data. One such bill is the Platform Transparency and Accountability Act, proposed by the Stanford University researcher Nate Persily.

The wrong photo can lead to school-wide or even national infamy, cyberbullying from strangers, and a permanent scarlet letter

Performative social media also puts girls into a trap: Those who choose not to play the game are cut off from their classmates

Instagram and, more recently, TikTok have become wired into the way teens interact, much as the telephone became essential to past generations.

f those platforms. Without a proper control group, we can’t be certain that the experiment has been a catastrophic failure, but it probably has been. Until someone comes up with a more plausible explanation for what has happened to Gen Z girls, the most prudent course of action for regulators, legislators, and parents is to take steps to mitigate the harm.

Correlation does not prove causation, but nobody has yet found an alternative explanation for the massive, sudden, gendered, multinational deterioration of teen mental health during the period in question.

Second, Congress should toughen the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. An early version of the legislation proposed 16 as the age at which children should legally be allowed to give away their data and their privacy.

Unfortunately, e-commerce companies lobbied successfully to have the age of “internet adulthood” set instead at 13. Now, more than two decades later, today’s 13-year-olds are not doing well. Federal law is outdated and inadequate. The age should be raised. More power should be given to parents, less to companies.

Third, while Americans wait for lawmakers to act, parents can work with local schools to establish a norm: Delay entry to Instagram and other social platforms until high school.

Right now, families are trapped. I have heard many parents say that they don’t want their children on Instagram, but they allow them to lie about their age and open accounts because, well, that’s what everyone else has done.

“What still needs more attention, however, is more and earlier education.”

Many schools have incorporated media literacy into their curriculum, but hearing directly from a practitioner connects those lessons to real life. Scientists and communicators who have young children or are otherwise connected with teachers or schools should volunteer to visit classrooms to talk about misinformation, what it is, how to spot it, and why it’s so dangerous.

No one, not entrepreneurs nor Whitehall officials, can predict the state of the energy sector in 30 years’ time.

But discussions over the cost are almost irrelevant because centralising all these decisions will shut down the market discovery process, meaning we’ll never know if cheaper, better routes were available.

We still don’t have a clear estimate from the government on the cost of reaching net zero by 2050, though the Office for Budget Responsibility put the total cost at £1.4 trillion in July. The Treasury this week warned UK households and businesses face the prospect of new taxes in the coming years to help meet the targe

Rather than gazing into a crystal ball, his officials would abandon their obsession with specific choices or sectors.

opportunity costs affect economic activity in unseen ways. Money spent on pumps today is money that cannot be spent on hydrogen boilers tomorrow, which may be a better solution. Jobs filled in green sectors are jobs unfilled elsewhere.

Perhaps Johnson should come down on the side of a border-adjusted carbon tax. It arguably offers the most cost-effective lever to reduce carbon emissions at the speed and scale necessary.

there’s no indication so far that anything this reasonable will replace current decision-making.

Support may soon give way to hostility if government remains stubbornly committed to its current approach.

The idea that, if we are to halt climate change then we need to start doing things differently, is no longer a fringe view.

Like the Holy Roman Empire that was once dismissed as being neither Holy, Roman, or an Empire, the Western alliance today is neither Western nor an alliance.

the policies that led to these failures were supported by the apparently functioning political consensus that Blair, Clinton, and others now believe needs to be resurrected to protect Western strength.

Since the turn of the century, the U.S. and its allies have lost one war, failed in at least one other, and seen the American-centered financial system implode, imposing huge costs on ordinary voters, many of whom have seen their industries hollow out and their wages stagnate.

All the while, the West’s central foreign-policy calculation—that trade and engagement with China and Russia would see these two powers liberalize, democratize, and take their place in the (American-led) international order—has collapsed under the weight of its absurdly utopian assumptions

this idea grew into what is the European Union today, in which German economic might is managed through a common market, with common rules and a common currency set by a common institution. Germany is the undisputed leader of the EU, the biggest, wealthiest, and most productive economy on the continent, yet France and Germany remain the closest of allies.

You cannot blame voters for their loss of faith in a system that has failed them and enriched a country that Western leaders now say is the main threat to global democracy.

this order gave us Trump and Brexit, and facilitated the rise of Putin and Xi. The world that confronts the West today exists not because the West had too little faith in itself, but because it had too much.

In the U.S., pressure was mounting for a collective European response to the continent’s crises. Monnet argued that the only way to stop the cycle of Franco-German antipathy from reasserting itself was to remove the source of tension—Germany’s industrial might. France could not simply requisition German coal and steel production, so Monnet suggested that it be Europeanized, managed by a new High Authority that looked out for the interests of Europe generally, not Germany or France specifically.

The proposal’s genius was that it created a policy out of a need, but did so in a way that smuggled a revolutionary idea into a living, breathing institution. The policy itself was small enough to be politically acceptable

et it was based on a radical idea: supranationalism. Suddenly, under Monnet’s plan, national interests would become common interests, and so German power and wealth would not become an existential threat to France.

they rarely offer an explanation as to why the West lost its faith in itself and became so apparently dysfunctional. Bad leaders did not emerge from nowhere, nor did voters suddenly became stupid.

The lesson for Western leaders is to find a similar combination of pragmatism and idealism based on a reasonable analysis of the global balance of power.

The most obvious power play America can make to contain China’s rise, for example, is to seek to split up its emerging alliance with Russia.

such a policy, debatable only a few months ago, now seems almost impossible—destroyed by Putin’s bloody megalomania.

An alternative would be to accept the reality of this new authoritarian axis and endeavor to protect Western democracies from it.

The problem is, the more the West builds a democratic alliance against China and Russia, as U.S. President Joe Biden has suggested, the more the West strengthens the very alliance that it fears. And if the world descends into a new cold war, the West will be forced to buddy up to decidedly undemocratic regimes

A less radical suggestion is for the U.S. to become the center of the Venn diagram where the two circles of Europe and Asia overlap—an offshore balancing power that has a foot on each side of the world, guaranteeing stability but allowing Europe to take the lead in the West while it corrals a new, more cohesive alliance in the East

To do otherwise would be to remake the mistakes of the past 20 years, when hubristic assumptions about the triumph of a universal liberal order wormed their way into policy making, with disastrous consequences.

what remains clear is that not building anything new to meet the reality of the changing circumstances risks allowing Chinese power to grow even more.

This economic hole has to be filled if the West is to mean anything. Greater economic tools need to be available with which the free-world can defend itself

whatever new organization or framework—if any—is created to empower the broader Western world in its rivalry with China must reflect the reality of power as it exists today. It must build on shared interests, not utopian idealism

there appears to be little appetite in Asia for its own NATO, little appetite in the U.S. to become even more committed to other countries’ defense, and little appetite in Europe to seriously step forward and allow such a notion to be viable.

It is now a common argument that if the leading military powers in the Western world—the U.S., Britain, and France—had shown more commitment to their mission, the world would be safer and more orderly.

The meanness of the public has forced many public-facing industries to rethink what used to be an article of faith: that the customer is always right. If employees are now having to take on many unexpected roles — therapist, cop, conflict-resolution negotiator — then workplace managers are acting as security guards and bouncers to protect their employees.

It’s not just your imagination; behavior really is worse. In a study of 1,000 American adults during the pandemic, 48 percent of adults and 55 percent of workers said that in November 2020, they had expected that civility in America would improve after the election.

By August, the expectations of improvement had fallen to 30 percent overall and 37 percent among workers. Overall, only 39 percent of the respondents said they believed that America’s tone was civil.

The study also found that people who didn’t have to work with customers were happier than those who did.

“It’s mentally exhausting to have to police adults over this matter,” wrote Adam Mosley, a 51-year-old flight attendant, responding to a request by The New York Times to describe conditions in the service industry at this odd juncture.

In part, the problem is the disconnect between expectation and reality

Before the pandemic, she said, consumers had been seduced into the idea of the “frictionless economy” — the notion that you could get whatever you wanted, the moment you wanted it.

“There’s a lack of outlets for people’s anger,” Ms. Swift said. “That waiter, that flight attendant — they become a stand-in for everything coming between what we experience and what we think we are entitled to.”

Customer Care Measurement and Consulting, has been conducting studies of consumer anger. The next iteration is set to come out this spring. He almost can’t believe what he has seen during the pandemic.

“When we founded the study, I never thought that the environment would be like it was today,” he said. “I would never in my wildest dreams have imagined that we would be seeing people fighting on planes and beating each other up.”

“There’s a growing delta between office workers and those that are interacting with consumers,”

“There is definitely a subset of people that don’t seem to think that any of the rules apply to them,”

most of the bad consumer behavior is low-grade — a persistent hum of incivility rather than an explosion of violence.

“Customers have been superaggressive and impatient lately,”

Such interactions used to make her weep. “But I’ve been calloused by it,” she said. “Now, instead of crying, I’m just really pessimistic and judgmental against the people around me.”

From across the country, workers responded with similar stories: of customers flying off the handle when the products they wanted were unavailable; of customers blaming the store, rather than supply-chain disruptions, for delays; of customers demanding refunds on nonrefundable items; of customers so wound up with worry and anxiety that the smallest thing sends them into a tailspin of hysteria.

The worst, she said, is the political commentary. Once a customer went into a diatribe against Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, saying she had it on good authority that he was about to be jailed for his “crimes.” Others have called Ms. Ashburn a “sheep” and a “fraidy-cat” for wearing a mask.Her go-to response — looking noncommittal and murmuring “hmm” — seems to make matters worse. “I am very discouraged at the polarization and at the unkind way that people treat each other,” she said.

Ms. Miller, from the Wisconsin trade association, said the pressures of the pandemic and the deterioration of elected officials’ behavior — the shouting, the threats, the hatred — had given normal people license to act out, too.

Any depolarizing event would need to be one where the causes are transparently external in a way that makes it hard for social groups to blame each other

Of the episodes since 1950 where democracies polarized, all of those aside from the United States involved less wealthy, less longstanding democracies, many of which had democratized quite recently.

A series of recent analyses reveals the destructive power of polarization across the American political system.

The United States is quite alone among the ranks of perniciously polarized democracies in terms of its wealth and democratic experience

It is increasingly hard to see what sort of event has that feature these days.

None of the wealthy, consolidated democracies of East Asia, Oceania or Western Europe, for example, have faced similar levels of polarization for such an extended period.

“the United States is the only advanced Western democracy to have faced such intense polarization for such an extended period. The United States is in uncharted and very dangerous territory.”

there are “a number of features that make the United States both especially susceptible to polarization and especially impervious to efforts to reduce it.”

The authors point to a number of causes, including “the durability of identity politics in a racially and ethnically diverse democracy.”

the United States has “a unique combination of a majoritarian electoral system with strong minoritarian institutions.”

An additional cause, the authors write, is thatbinary choice is deeply embedded in the U.S. electoral system, creating a rigid two-party system that facilitates binary divisions of society. For example, only five of twenty-six wealthy consolidated democracies elect representatives to their national legislatures in single-member districts.

The United States is perhaps alone in experiencing a demographic shift that poses a threat to the white population that has historically been the dominant group in all arenas of power, allowing political leaders to exploit insecurities surrounding this loss of status.

“The Senate is highly disproportionate in its representation,” they add, “with two senators per state regardless of population, from Wyoming’s 580,000 to California’s 39,500,000 persons,” which, in turn, “translates to disproportionality in the Electoral College — whose indirect election of the president is again exceptional among presidential democracies.”

finally, there is the three-decade trend of partisan sorting, in whichthe two parties reinforce urban-rural, religious-secular and racial-ethnic cleavages rather than promote crosscutting cleavages. With partisanship now increasingly tied to other kinds of social identity, affective polarization is on the rise, with voters perceiving the opposing party in negative terms and as a growing threat to the nation.

Two related studies — “Inequality, Identity and Partisanship: How Redistribution Can Stem the Tide of Mass Polarization” by Alexander J. Stewart, Joshua B. Plotkin and McCarty and “Polarization Under Rising Inequality and Economic Decline” by Stewart, McCarty and Joanna Bryson — argue that aggressive redistribution policies designed to lessen inequality must be initiated before polarization becomes further entrenched

“once polarization sets in, it typically remains stable under individual-level evolutionary dynamics, even when the economic environment improves or inequality is reversed.”

Interactions with more diverse out-group members pool greater knowledge, applicable to a wider variety of situations. These interactions, when successful, generate better solutions and greater benefits. However, we also assume that the risk of failure is higher for out-group interactions

At the same time, the spread of polarization goes far beyond politics, permeating the culture and economic structure of the broader society.

economic scarcity acts as a strong disincentive to cooperative relations between disparate racial and ethnic groups, in large part because such cooperation may produce more benefits but at higher risk:

In other words, a deeply polarized electorate is highly unlikely to support redistribution that would benefit their adversaries as well as themselves.

In times of prosperity, people are more willing to risk failure, they write, but that willingness disappears when populations arefaced with economic decline. We show that such group polarization can be contagious, and a subpopulation facing economic hardship in an otherwise strong economy can tip the whole population into a state of polarization.

A key finding in our studies is that it really matters when redistributive policies are put in place. Redistribution functions far better as a prevention than a cure for polarization in part for the reason your question suggests: If polarization is already high, redistribution itself becomes the target of polarized attitudes.

Using “data from Amazon, 82.5 million reviews of 9.5 million products and category metadata from 1996-2014,” the authors determined which “product categories are most politically relevant, aligned and polarized.”

While the processes Zmigrod describes characterize the extremes, the electorate as a whole is moving farther and farther apart into two mutually loathing camps.

even small categories like automotive parts have notable political alignment indicative of lifestyle politics. These results indicate that lifestyle politics spread deep and wide across markets.

political psychologists dispute the argument that only “conservatism is associated with prejudice” and that “the types of dispositional characteristics associated with conservatism (e.g., low cognitive ability, low openness) explain this relationship.”

“when researchers use a more heterogeneous array of targets, people across the political spectrum express prejudice against groups with dissimilar values and beliefs.”

Earlier research has correctly found greater levels of prejudice among conservatives, they write, but these studies have focused on prejudice toward liberal-associated groups: minorities, the poor, gay people and other marginalized constituencies.

when the targets of prejudice are expanded to include “conservative-associated groups such as Christian fundamentalists, military personnel and ‘rich people,’” similar levels of prejudice emerge.

Caughey and his co-authors showa surprisingly close correspondence between mass and elite trends.

“people high in cognitive ability are prejudiced against more conservative and conventional groups,” while “people low in cognitive ability are prejudiced against more liberal and unconventional groups.”

he “rigidity-of-the-right hypotheses” should be expanded in recognition of the fact that “cognitive rigidity is linked to ideological extremism, partisanship and dogmatism across political and nonpolitical ideologies.”

“extreme right-wing partisans are characterized by specific psychological traits including cognitive rigidity and impulsivity. This is also true of extreme left-wing partisans.”

a clear inverted-U shaped curve emerged such that those on the extreme right and extreme left exhibited cognitive rigidity on neuropsychological tasks, in comparison to moderates.

“Low openness to experience is associated with prejudice against groups seen as socially unconventional (e.g., atheists, gay men and lesbians),” they write, whereas high openness is “associated with prejudice against groups seen as socially conventional (e.g., military personnel, evangelical Christians).

Analyzing these “pervasive lifestyle politics,” Ruch, Decter-Frain and Batra find that “cultural products are four times more polarized than any other segment.”

1) ideological divergence between Democrats and Republicans has widened dramatically within each domain, just as it has in Congress;

(2) ideological variation across senators’ partisan subconstituencies is now explained almost completely by party rather than state, closely tracking trends in the Senate

(3) economic, racial and social liberalism have become highly correlated across partisan subconstituencies, just as they have across members of Congress

Caughey, Dunham and Warshaw describe the growing partisan salience of racial and social issues since the 1950s:The explanatory power of party on racial issues increased hugely over this period and that of state correspondingly declined. We refer to this process as the “ideological nationalization” of partisan subconstituencies.

In the late 1950s, they continue,party explained almost no variance in racial conservatism in either arena. Over the next half century, the Senate and public time series rise in tandem.

Contrary to the claim that racial realignment had run its course by 1980, they add, “our data indicate that differences between the parties continued to widen through the end of the 20th century, in the Senate as well as in the mass public. By the 2000s, party explained about 80 percent of the variance in senators’ racial conservatism and nearly 100 percent of the variance in the mass public.

“it has limited the two parties’ abilities to tailor their positions to local conditions. Moreover, it has led to greater geographic concentration of the parties’ respective support coalitions.”

Today, across all offices, conservative states are largely dominated by Republicans, whereas the opposite is true of liberal states. The ideological nationalization of the party system thus seems to have undermined party competition at the state level.

this will continue to give ideological extremists an advantage in both parties’ primaries. It also means that the pool of people that run for office is increasingly extreme.

It will probably reduce partisans’ willingness to vote for the out-party. This could dampen voters’ willingness to hold candidates accountable for poor performance and to vote across party lines to select higher-quality candidates. This will probably further increase the importance of primaries as a mechanism for candidate selection.

Looking over the contemporary political landscape, there appear to be no major or effective movements to counter polarization.

As the McCoy-Press report shows, only 16 of the 52 countries that reached levels of pernicious polarization succeeded in achieving depolarization and in “a significant number of instances later repolarized to pernicious levels. The progress toward depolarization in seven of 16 episodes was later undone.”

That does not suggest a favorable prognosis for the United States.

The Senate deal, which was reached late Friday night, was a grudging concession by Democrats to Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who has delayed the confirmation of dozens of President Biden’s nominees to protest what he called Mr. Biden’s weak opposition to the pipeline.

Mr. Cruz and others insist that Nord Stream 2 will provide Russia with a cash infusion and dangerous control over Europe’s energy supplies, while potentially costing Ukraine’s government around $3 billion in annual transit fees from a similar pipeline through its territory that Russia could circumvent.

“When the Senate reconvenes, we’ll finally have a vote on sanctioning Putin’s pipeline.”

It is a vote the Biden administration hoped to avoid. But in exchange, Mr. Cruz agreed to step aside and allow the confirmation of 36 of Mr. Biden’s State Department and Treasury Department nominees, including 28 ambassadors

Biden officials said at the time that while they opposed construction of the pipeline, which will pump gas from the Russian Arctic to Germany through the Baltic Sea, the project was nearly complete by the time Mr. Biden took office and virtually impossible to stop. At this point, White House officials say, the cost of friction with the German government outweighs any potential loss to Mr. Putin.

some analysts say the pipeline may be less important to Mr. Putin than his longtime designs on Ukrainian territory.

A Dec. 7 call between Mr. Biden and Mr. Putin has done little to soothe the situation, and last week the Kremlin issued a set of demands that Biden officials called largely unacceptable.

Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware and a close Biden ally who helped to negotiate the deal, said he would wait to see the final language in the measure and confer with Biden officials before deciding how he will vote. A State Department spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyMr. Coons said he recently met in Berlin with Olaf Sholz, who succeeded Angela Merkel this month as Germany’s chancellor. He noted the new German government’s pledge not to certify the pipeline until well into 2022.

“Imposing sanctions on a close ally like Germany when they are moving in the right direction is something that I would not do lightly,” Mr. Coons said.

“We need a fully staffed senior team at the State Department and at the United Nations, and ambassadors around the world,” Mr. Coons said. “And while I respect that senators of both parties have the right to use the occasional hold to force a policy discussion, I think this has gotten way out of hand.”

About one out of 10 utility customers in the state have solar power, according to the California Solar and Storage Association.

noting that it can take workers up to six months to do so if they are swamped with projects.

To achieve its climate goals, the city has already banned the use of natural gas in new buildings, the largest local government in the country to do so.

The company added that it supports the use of solar panels by nearly 600,000 of its residential customers and electric cars owned by 360,000 customers.

When he was recently charging his Tesla at his home on Long Island, the electrical equipment that connected the utility’s power line to his home became so hot that it melted.

People who are pushing for greater investment say the spending will pay off by saving people money on monthly bills and preventing the worst effects of climate change.

That’s because people could generate some electricity through rooftop solar panels and store that energy in home batteries.

But if regulators allowed more utilities to offer lower electricity rates at night, people would charge cars when there is plenty of spare capacity.

Robert Barrosa, senior director of sales and marketing at Electrify America, said that eventually the company could help utilities by taking power when there was too much of it and supplying it when there was not enough of it.

A prolonged period when more oil has been consumed than pumped has drained tank farms to low levels. Investment in new drilling for new oil has also fallen to multiyear lows, though it is expected to pick up this year. At the same time, demand is expected to grow strongly, reaching prepandemic levels this year.

Energy Aspects forecasts that the deficit will reach just over one million barrels a day this month, or 1 percent of world supplies, and will probably increase later in the year.

A variety of factors are causing production in some countries to fall short, including political turmoil, outmoded regulatory regimes and pressures on international oil companies to rethink their investments so as to bolster profits and reduce carbon emissions. That shift could leave developing countries that depend on oil income out in the cold.

Nigeria’s industry is plagued by damage to infrastructure caused by oil thieves and others, problems that have worsened in recent months, according to the industry.

Kamel al-Harami, a Kuwaiti analyst, said that the domestic industry “does not have the experience and the expertise to deal with old and aged oil fields” but that public opinion is resistant to bringing in international companies.

Following a schedule agreed to in July, the group plans to raise the overall output by 400,000 barrels a day each month, even though they are missing the targets.

Analysts say Saudi officials don’t want to unilaterally increase output and risk busting up the arrangement with other producers that gives them so much control.

Islington’s project is just one of many innovations by cities around the world to provide heat to residents and businesses while reducing greenhouse gas emissions, improving efficiency and saving people money.

Stockholm is also using heat from sewage, as well as tapping data centers and other sources to supply heat for much of the city.

If you can start to use a whole array of waste heat streams, you’re taking out a big chunk of greenhouse gas emissions,

We don’t really need to burn gas at 1,000 degrees centigrade [1,832 degrees Fahrenheit] to get your bath to 30 degrees centigrade,” Dr. Gluyas added. “What we need to do is work with nature to optimize the use of heat.

The concept of district heating networks is not new and may, in fact, date from 14th-century France or even, some say, the Roman Empire

New York City has one of the world’s largest district systems to provide heat, cooling and, in some cases, even electricity to many buildings in Manhattan.

Though perhaps less wasteful than having a boiler in every single building, it is not the most efficient district heating system, as it was designed to heat a building on the coldest day of the year with all the windows open — partly a public health legacy of the 1918 pandemic.

But the innovation — which took more than five years to plan and build, and began operations in March 2020 — was to feed in heat from the Underground.

Typically, the hot air from the Underground is released into the air through stations and ventilation shafts. In this case, however, air is drawn from a ventilation shaft at an abandoned Underground station into an energy center where a series of heat transfers take place, eventually leading to delivery of the heat into the buildings in the network.

For our residents, locally, this is absolutely the right thing to do,” because it saves money in an area where many residents struggle to afford heat, Mr. Townsend said. “And this is a perfect solution for big cities across the world.

Heat from wastewater and sewage now provides about 70 percent of the space heating and hot water for the 43 buildings connected to the network, with the remaining 30 percent coming from natural gas, though the goal is to end that by 2030. The electricity powering the heat pumps is 97 percent zero-carbon, supplied by hydroelectric dams.

Every time we take a shower, do the dishes or do a load of laundry, the water is still hot when it goes down the drain,” said Ashley St. Clair, Vancouver’s senior renewable energy planner.“It’s flowing under our streets, and we’re already collecting it through the traditional infrastructure of wastewater pipes, and to be able to tap into that waste heat is really the ultimate circular economy.”

And it cannot come soon enough: This year alone, Vancouver has experienced several bouts of extreme weather, made more likely and intense because of climate change: heat domes, wildfires and catastrophic flooding, which recently cut the city off by road and rail from the rest of Canada. Having its own heat and hot water supply has been an additional benefit of the project, Ms. St. Clair said.

Stockholm, Mr. Rylander said, has particularly good connectivity to Northern Europe, Finland and Russia, which makes it attractive to data center companies, as does Sweden’s relatively clean power mix. However, they use biomass to produce a significant amount of heat and power, the renewable classification of which is debated by experts.

“If you establish a data center in a cold place like Sweden, it’s stupid to waste the heat, because heat has power and value in a cold country.”

“We’re very clear that we are an experiment, and we are doing the work that will enable others to benefit from it.”

Meteorologists were not expecting the catastrophic rainfall that has deluged India and Nepal in recent days.

Torrential rains also soaked southern India, triggering flash floods and landslides in the state of Kerala.

This week, officials in Kerala opened overflowing dams, the first time state officials had made such a move since catastrophic flooding killed more than 400 people in 2018.

Rice paddy that was ready for harvest was damaged in the rain, causing Nepal’s farmers to despair and prompting fears of a food crisis in one of the world’s poorest countries.

“Rainfalls in October were reported in the past, too, but not to this intensity,” said Ajaya Dixit, an expert on climate change vulnerability in Nepal. “Climate change is real, and it is happening.”

officials urged residents of coastal areas in much of the West Coast, Alaska and Hawaii to stay away from the coastline and move to higher ground. The National Weather Service in Portland, Ore., reported possible one- to three-foot waves in some areas of Oregon and Washington.

In California, water surged into Santa Cruz Harbor on Saturday morning, damaging boats, submerging the parking lot and causing people to evacuate the docks, sidewalks and nearby stores

In the Bay Area, the National Weather Service said tsunami surges of up to a few feet could arrive in “pulses” throughout the day, and warned residents not to try to identify their arrival.

Jaclyn Rothenberg, a spokeswoman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said the agency did not expect damages from the tsunami, and stressed the importance of disaster preparedness.

She added that the agency had coordinated with its partners in American Samoa and Hawaii, which had “no impacts from this event.”

Across the Pacific warnings were sounded. New Zealand’s National Emergency Management Agency advised people in coastal areas to expect “strong and unusual currents and unpredictable surges at the shore.” And on their Facebook pages, the meteorological services for Fiji and Samoa also issued alerts, advising people to stay away from low-lying coastal areas.

The volcano, Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai, which is about 40 miles north of Tongatapu, had been relatively inactive for several years. It began erupting intermittently in December but by Jan. 3 the activity had decreased significantly, according to a report by the Smithsonian Institution’s Global Volcanism Program.

Satellite imagery of the eruption on Saturday, shared on Twitter by New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, showed a “brief spike in air pressure as the atmospheric shock wave pulsed across New Zealand.”

The V.E.I. of the eruption Saturday has not been estimated yet, but before the eruption, the volcano was estimated to be able to produce an eruption with a maximum V.E.I. of 2.