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But here was the reality for progressives: Medicare for All got little more than a hearing or two, while the House passed bill after bill pressing more incremental health care changes (but none of which the Republican-controlled Senate would even entertain).

The Green New Deal had a messy if high-profile roll out, then fizzled.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez did not have even the modest legislative victories enjoyed by other freshman Democrats

What is more, many Democrats began to fret early on that the far left was going to do to them what the Tea Party had done to Republicans a few years back: Run them out of town, one primary at a time.

“There are some people who one don’t really seem to understand the math of the majority making,”

“There’s some people that just think that we’re out of touch and that if we just worked hard, more Democrats would come out of the woodwork, and so we should just try to say to all the things that excite all the Democrats. You can say that until you’re blue in the face, but there are just not that many Democrats in my district.”

While the narrative of her victory portrayed younger, nonwhite and working-class voters as her secret base, in reality Ms. Ocasio-Cortez had soundly beaten the incumbent in the areas of the district that were by and large more wealthy and educated, in particular parts of Queens filled with white residents fleeing overpriced Manhattan.

“Ocasio-Cortez, the young Latina who proudly identifies as a democratic socialist, hadn’t been all but vaulted into Congress by the party’s diversity, or a blue-collar base looking to even the playing field. She won because she had galvanized the college-educated gentrifiers who are displacing those people.”

In short, deeply blue areas, especially with young and affluent voters, may be seeking political representation far to the left of the Democrats who were once easily re-elected.

much of the rest of the country’s Democrats, especially older African-American voters who are a major component of the base, prefer more centrist candidates.

This is the dichotomy that hangs over the party today.

“The Biden campaign understands that they’ll have to work towards reaching out to progressives and building bridges to unity,” this senior Sanders adviser told us. “We think they’re operating with good intent.”

On student debt, the proposal seems to me an acknowledgment that typical workers’ failure to see labor market success (especially rising wages) in recent decades is not because they didn’t try hard enough to get the right skills and credentials. They did try hard to get these — including taking on risky debt. But, labor market success, it turns out, isn’t just about individual skills. It’s also about institutions and policy and power, and until you make these work for typical workers, not much will be fixed.

In a sense, then, these moves represent steps toward a real concession to a very different understanding of political economy than the one that has animated Democratic politicians such as Biden for decades.

Medicare, for example, has too often been treated first and foremost as a budget problem to be shrunk rather than valuable social insurance to be expanded. So the debate often included proposals to ratchet up the eligibility age. The fact that this proposal turns 180 degrees and lowers this age of eligibility is huge.

“We’ll give them space to make their best case,” the Sanders adviser told us, characterizing the Sanders team’s view of the situation.

As Sanders would no doubt tell you, that kind of influence is possible not only because of the inherent appeal of his ideas, but also precisely because politicians like Biden are not immutable in what they will support. They respond to public opinion and public pressure, which is why you pressure them.

Indeed, it needs to be seen as a highly significant fact about U.S. politics that Sanders really does command extraordinary support and loyalty among young voters, and that Biden has a great deal of work to do with these voters.

Young voters may view Biden as a relic of an earlier age. But this isn’t just personal; they’d also like the party to be more aggressive on liberal policies than Biden is naturally inclined to be. To no small degree, the Sanders agenda and worldview do represent the agenda and aspirations of the Democratic Party of the future.

The Biden team appears to recognize this, at least if these early moves are any indication.

The rollback of water quality rules has endangered drinking water, fisheries and recreational waters that support the health and economies of communities throughout the country. The failure to adequately fund cleanups at Superfund sites has left communities with contaminated land, fenced off from any beneficial use for years as remediation is delayed.

By August 2017, it was clear that EPA leadership had little regard for the expertise and historical knowledge of its career employees. That’s when I made the decision to publicly protest against the Trump administration when resigning from the agency after 33 years of service.

Replace the Obama Clean Power Plan, which limited harmful emissions from power plants, with a rule that is projected to significantly increase exposure to fine particles and ozone in the air. More people, especially those living in frontline communities, will have heart attacks; suffer from asthma, bronchitis and other respiratory diseases; and miss days of work and school because of illness.

oll back successful clean car regulations and fuel economy standards, which reduced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, improved air quality and increased fuel economy. The rollback is projected to increase GHG emissions by 1.5bn metric tons through 2040, contributing to the destructive impacts of climate change, and resulting in 18,500 more premature deaths by 2050.

ctions by the Trump administration over the past four years have set us back. But we will not let this administration obliterate 50 years of environmental and public health progress. We owe that to the generation that will celebrate the 100th anniversary of Earth Day in 2070.

North Korea has also been assessed as possessing a miniaturized nuclear warhead that can be fitted onto an ICBM

it stunned the world by testing what it called a hydrogen bomb, far more powerful than anything the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki

It used to be that they emphasized the importance of the military in their politics. Now they’ve begun de-emphasizing that and they’ve begun to emphasize the role of scientists in society both for advancing their economy and, even more than that, for advancing their nuclear weapons and missile technology

So far in 2017, the North has carried out a dozen successful missile tests, and is well on its way to surpassing last year’s 14 successful launches

The fact that they are willing to test missiles so frequently suggests they are not really worried about suppl

There’s evidence to suggest that North Korea is, in fact, accelerating its push toward the domestic manufacturing of parts needed for its missile and nuclear programs, turning slowly away from the international black market on which it had traditionally relied

That’s not to say that North Korea’s missile and nuclear technology is state-of-the-art. Many of the designs date back to the Cold War, when the North received nuclear technology from the Soviet Union. Over the years, it acquired weapons technology from China, Iran, Pakistan, and others, and through what can only be described as perseverance cobbled together successful programs

they are willing to have higher tolerances for failure and for less reliability.” That, ultimately, might be North Korea’s biggest advantage in the current standoff with the U.S. and its allies

Narang pointed out that the probability that North Korea is able to deliver a nuclear warhead over San Francisco, or Chicago, or a city on the U.S. East Coast, is not 100 percent—because its technology is not yet that accurate. “But to deter the United States or really induce risk, what percentage is necessary before you cause Washington to have some pause: Is 5 percent acceptable? Are you willing to lose 5,000 to 50,000 Americans, on average? Probably not, right?

The larger the warhead, the less accurate it needs to be

Rorty sympathizes with the reasons that an ascendant Leftist faction lost faith in American institutions. He is as horrified as they are by the historic treatment of indigenous people and African Americans, and by America’s behavior in the Vietnam War.

But like John Dewey, he rejects self-loathing as “a luxury which agents––either individuals or nations––cannot afford,” and finds other aspects of American history and national character to celebrate.

Today’s Left would more effectively advance social justice if its adherents possessed a historical memory that extended farther back than the 1960s, he argued, to a movement more than a century old “that has served human liberty well.” It would help, for example, “if students became as familiar with the Pullman Strike, the Great Coalfield War, and the passage of the Wagner Act as with the march from Selma, Berkeley free-speech demonstrations, and Stonewall.”

If more Leftists saw themselves as part of that history, with all its achievements, they might continue to lament that “America is not a morally pure country,” but might better understand that “no country ever has been or ever will be,” and that no country will ever have “a morally pure, homogeneous Left” to bring about social justice.

he criticizes the identity politics of the left for developing a politics “more about stigma than about money, more about deep and hidden psychosexual motivations than about shallow and evident greed,” because many of the dispossessed are thereby ignored.

Surveying academia, for example, he observes that “nobody is setting up a program in unemployed studies, homeless studies, or trailer-park studies, because the unemployed, the homeless, and residents of trailer parks are not the ‘other’ in the relative sense. To be other in this sense you must bear an ineradicable stigma, one which makes you a victim of socially accepted sadism rather than merely of economic selfishness.”

For Rorty, a Left that neglects victims of economic selfishness will not only fail; its neglect of class will trigger a terrible backlash that ultimately ill-serve the very groups that Leftist identity politics are intended to help. “The gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will very likely be wiped out,” he worried. “Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words ‘nigger’ and ‘kike’ will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.”

To avoid that future, to compete in national politics, Rorty believed that the Left would have to find a way to better address the consequences of globalization, and that it could only do so by “opening relations with the residue of the old reformist Left, and in particular with the labor unions.

What’s more, the Left “would have to talk much more about money, even at the cost of talking less about stigma.” In service of that transition, he advised the Left to “put a moratorium on theory … to kick its philosophy habit” and  to “try to mobilize what remains of our pride in being Americans.”

The contemporary academic Left seems to think that the higher your level of abstraction, the more subversive of the established order you can be. The more sweeping and novel your conceptual apparatus, the more radical your critique…

it is almost impossible to clamber back down from their books to a level of abstraction on which one might discuss the merits of a law, a treaty, a candidate, or a political strategy.

disengagement from practical politics “produces theoretical hallucinations,” he added. “The cultural Left is haunted by ubiquitous specters, the most frightening of which is called ‘power.’” This obsession with power elicited scathing words:

in committing itself to what it calls “theory,” this Left has gotten something which is entirely too much like religion. For the cultural Left has come to believe that we must place our country within a theoretical frame of reference, situate it within a vast quasi-cosmological perspective.

The cultural Left often seems convinced that the nation-sate is obsolete, and that there is therefore no point in attempting to revive national politics. The trouble with this claim is that the government of our nation-state will be, for the foreseeable future, the only agent capable of making any real difference in the amount of selfishness and sadism inflicted on Americans.

This Left will have to stop thinking up ever more abstract and abusive names for “the system” and start trying to construct inspiring images of the country. Only by doing so can it begin to form alliances with people outside the academy—and, specifically, with the labor unions

Outside the academy, Americans still want to feel patriotic. They still want to feel part of a nation which can take control of its destiny and make itself a better place … Nothing would do more to resurrect the American Left than agreement on a concrete political platform, a People’s Charter, a list of specific reforms.

Instead, “the cultural Left has a preference for talking about ‘the system’ rather than specific social practices and specific changes. The rhetoric of this Left remains revolutionary rather than reformist and pragmatic.

its abandonment of the melting-pot approach to racial justice, its substitution of multiculturalism, has destroyed the solidarity needed to advance justice in any manner

The pre-Sixties reformist Left, insofar as it concerned itself with oppressed minorities, did so by proclaiming that all of us—black, white, and brown—are Americans, and that we should respect one another as such. This strategy gave rise to the “platoon” movies, which showed Americans of various ethnic backgrounds fighting and dying side by side.

the contemporary cultural Left urges that America should not be a melting-pot, because we need to respect one another in our differences. This Left wants to preserve otherness rather than to ignore it… If the Cultural left insists on continuing its present strategy––on asking us to respect one another in our differences rather than asking us to cease noting those differences––then it will have to find a new way of creating a sense of commonality at the level of national politics. For only a rhetoric of commonality can forge a winning majority in national elections.

The cultural Left has a vision of an America in which the white patriarchs have stopped voting and have left all the voting to be done by members of previously victimized groups, people who have somehow come into possession of more foresight and imagination than the selfish suburbanites.

These formerly oppressed and newly powerful people are expected to be as angelic as the straight white males were diabolical. If I shared this expectation, I too would want to live under this new dispensation. Since I see no reason to share it. I think that the Left should get back into the business of piecemeal reform within the framework of a market economy.

This was the business the American Left was in during the first two-thirds of the century.

Our national character is still in the making. Few in 1897 would have predicted the Progressive Movement, the forty-hour week, Women’s Suffrage, the New Deal, the Civil Rights Movement, the successes of second-wave feminism, or the Gay Rights Movement. Nobody in 1997 can know that America will not, in the course of the next century, witness even greater moral progress.

upon his return to office in 2012, Putin realized that “large patches of the West despised feminism and the gay-rights movement.” Seizing the opportunity, he transformed himself into the “New World Leader of Conservatism” whose traditionalism would offer an alternative to the libertine West that had long shunned him.

Yet Bannon suggested that Putin is not really interested in conservatism but in changing Western perceptions of Russia, and for one main purpose: “At the end of the day, I think that Putin and his cronies are really a kleptocracy, that are really an imperialist power that want to expand.”

Here is where the ROC and ultra-conservative Russians have found allies in the West, and in particular among evangelicals: In a global fight for traditional families, it falls to them to promote heterosexual marriage, childbearing, and adoption as part of an overarching defense of “civilization.

the difference here is that we’re seeing an emergence of Christian traditionalist, rather than progressive, global coalitions.

previously many conservatives focused on disputing the legal legitimacy of progressive policies, some conservatives have switched to opposing these policies under the banner of religious freedom.

Russian conservatives, led by the Orthodox Church, frame their need for moral conservatism and family values as a different type of freedom. Russian moral leaders insist that theirs is a freedom of association, the freedom to adhere to tradition rather than to the “totalitarian freedom” of the capitalist, pluralist West.

The possibility of a new global resistance to the values that have become stays of the mainstream progressive West raises the question of who will lead this resistance.

While there are obvious connections between Trump and Bannon, Bannon and Dugin, American evangelicals and Russian Orthodox, there is no clear social, political or ideological framework tying them all together. And the gap between conservative and extreme right seems to be rapidly widening.

In a void that prelates and preachers struggle to fill, Trump will continue to be the face of a new traditionalism.

What was geared up to be a tense standoff between the British Prime Minister and the EU leaders has ended on an optimistic and cordial note -- with Merkel leading the change in tone.

“I think everyone is seeing through the P.R. at this point and focusing on both their economic and political power,” Sarah Miller, a critic of Amazon, said about the company. Ms. Miller, who runs the American Economic Liberties Project, an antitrust think tank, added, “I think the narrative is cooked now on their status as a monopoly, their status as an abusive employer and their status as one of the biggest spenders on lobbying in Washington, D.C.”

“As it relates to progressive Democrats in general, we’ve been surprised by some of the negative things we’ve seen certain members say in the press and on social media,” he said. “If there’s a progressive company in this country, it’s Amazon. Find me another large company paying two times the minimum wage, providing great health benefits from Day 1, 95 percent education reimbursement, safe working environment, and so on. We really think we are an example of what a U.S. company should be doing for its employees.”

Mr. Sanders said he appreciated Amazon’s help on the minimum wage. “On the other hand,” he said, “to my mind, I find it hard to understand why Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon and the wealthiest guy in the world, worth about $182 billion, is spending millions of dollars fighting a union organizing effort in Alabama, where his workers are trying to organize for better wages and better working conditions.”

Under Mr. Carney’s leadership, Amazon has taken steps to satisfy its liberal critics. In 2018, Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, attacked the company over its wages. Not long after that, the company announced that it would raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour and push federal policymakers to do the same.

The union organizers in Bessemer have increasingly attracted support from the White House and top lawmakers in Congress. Labor leaders spent weeks pushing Mr. Biden’s staff to have him weigh in on the election at the warehouse.

“We’ve got to protect every worker’s right to form and join a union, and to bargain collectively for better pay, quality health care, a safer workplace and a secure retirement,” said Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington

Amazon has made efforts to reach out to the new administration. Dave Clark, who runs the company’s consumer business, sent a letter to the White House in January offering to help with the distribution of the coronavirus vaccine and met virtually with Jeff Zients, the White House’s coronavirus coordinator, to discuss the vaccine rollout.

It recalled the message Amazon had waiting for a delegation of progressive lawmakers who met with union representatives in Alabama this month.At the warehouse, workers held up a large banner with text in bold letters: “CONGRESS: PLEASE MATCH AMAZON’S $15/HOUR MINIMUM WAGE!”

The second category of risk concerns the future potential for runaway climate change, which will take hold at that hard-to-call moment when the world falls prey to ruinous feedback mechanisms

A general recognition of climate change as a threat to national security in the short term and national existence in the long term would allow the mobilisation of the only modern ideological force that retains wide enough popularity to inspire collective sacrifice: nationalism (or patriotism,

If the last few years have taught us anything, it is that the combination of material disappointment with national insecurity and decline is a potent one. Climate change threatens both things, and so could translate into a politics of rage that though it rises through the ballot box, goes on to destroy democracy.

Clear-eyed national establishments will need to make a radical shift in focus and resources away from traditional great power threats (which, though real, are minor by comparison), and towards a new understanding of national security in a much wider sense, requiring new forms of national mobilisation in response.

In Europe, the most dramatic direct effects will be seen in the Mediterranean states, where the summer is predicted to last for an additional month, heatwaves (with temperatures over 35 degrees) to be extended by more than a month, and rainfall to decrease by up to 20 per cent.

The when and even the if of truly runaway climate change taking hold are uncertain, but should we slide down this slipway it would be so catastrophic—involving the destruction of the nations which militaries are sworn to defend—that even a remote possibility should be enough to mobilise militaries in response

In the decades to come, the most important single branch of the US armed forces will become not the Marines or the special forces but the Army Corps of Engineers.

But the need for western security establishments to prioritise climate change is not just about such practical reallocation of resources; an even more important impact could be about political persuasion.

The Greens’ blindness to the political importance of stable and rooted national communities risks driving voters into the arms of the chauvinists, while their contempt for the nation state leads to an overwhelming focus on international agreements demanded and driven by global movements.

Nationalism therefore helps address one of the greatest obstacles to action against climate change: namely, that considerable sacrifices will have to be made by present generations, but the most terrible results of refusal to make these sacrifices will only affect generations yet unborn.

It was only when I began to read how mainstream economists thought about climate change that I came fully to understand our moral decadence as a culture.

They look at things from a standpoint that deems that the interests of future generations matter little, or even not at all. One “discount rate” which has been used by economists when it comes to valuing future benefits is 6 per cent.

While the existential threat to humanity as a whole from runaway climate change would probably only appear in the next century, the threat to many individual states—and to western democracy—will appear in the next decades.

“To assume such a rate comes close to saying ‘forget about issues concerning 100 years or more from now.’” Such an attitude is antithetical not just to nationalism, but to the very idea of a nation (or of a family, for that matter).

The idea of a nation thinking of itself as living for only one generation is a contradiction in terms

Above all, with communism gone and religion in abeyance in the west, a sense of nationalism is essential to motivate sacrifice

We should not be surprised that individualistic and materialist cultures struggle with the most collective of all collective action problems. Even where these cultures are liberal and rational, they can do nothing to challenge the mindset of the individual who looks at the potentially big sacrifice being asked of them, and rationally judges that it will on its own make no difference to the big picture. Real change will need a new political dispensation.

Appealing to nationalism in the fight against climate change is abhorrent to most environmentalists, coming as they do from liberal and socialist internationalist traditions. Indeed, in many cases this hostility extends to the nation state itself,

 this is no innocuous technicality. It implies that a “unit of benefit” in 50 years is being valued 18 times lower than it would be today, and in 100 years, 339 times lower:

The language of “empowerment” that permeates much left-wing environmentalist discourse misses an absolutely central point. If you really want to act for the climate, then you need powerful allies, not powerless ones whom you have to expend energy empowering. This means state elites, state institutions, and, in the democracies, sweeping electoral majorities who can push through the painful changes required.

The centrality of states and nationalism also applies to very important proposals in the US and elsewhere for “Green New Deals” combining different goals: to support a new industrial revolution based on alternative energy and thereby convince dubious voters that climate change action is not an enemy of economic progress and prosperity; to build social solidarity by providing jobs and social welfare to the population, and especially workers in fossil fuel industries; and to legitimise the necessary sacrifices by ensuring that they will be shared through progressive taxation.

Any Green New Deal and the new bonds of social solidarity that it can engender will inevitably be national, not internationa

The alternative idea of massive transfers of resources from wealthy countries through systems of international solidarity has long been proved a complete fantasy, and will remain so

The fundamental issue at stake has been well expressed by the development economist Paul Collier: “The brute fact is that the domain of public policy is inevitably spatial… elections generate representatives with authority over a territory… The non-spatial political unit is a fantasy

So nationalism is indispensable, even though we also know it can often be dangerous. Thankfully, it does not have to be nationalism of an ethnic chauvinist variety.

Looking back at us from the perspective of a hundred years hence what may strike historians most (assuming for the moment that civilisation remains vigorous enough for historians still to exist) is the extent to which our institutions and political classes have become trapped by their own traditions

Military establishments amass huge arsenals at huge cost, though the existence of nuclear weapons has long banished any serious risk of direct war between the great powers; conservatives adhere blindly to a free-market ideology that has long been proved to be inadequate to the management of great modern states; and progressives remain fixated on dreams of an internationalist utopia that stand no chance whatsoever of being realised

Understanding complicated social phenomena is difficult. Solving social problems, almost all of which involve race, is contentious. Liberals can’t respond by ceding huge swaths of the political landscape to the hardcore right — or to whichever activist happens to have most loudly proclaimed their own anti-racism.

But it would be a significant mistake for mainstream progressives to duck the substance of these controversies. After all, it is progressives who in recent years have attempted to increase the stigma attached to racist speech while also expanding the scope of what’s “racist.” That double move introduces complications into discussions of racism that should invite more argumentation, not less.

many progressives think they don’t have to engage with the argument that the left is too conformist and dogmatic on certain topics involving race. They don’t want to hear about the San Francisco Board of Education stripping Abraham Lincoln’s name from a high school, or Oregon teacher-training materials claiming that asking math students to “show their work” reinforces white supremacy.

More broadly, identifying a racial gap and declaring it to be racist is often insufficient. Such an approach impedes actually thinking about problems — particularly in media, academic and nonprofit circles, where the accusation of racism can carry severe consequences. And so to avoid controversy, people avoid important debates rather than risking offense.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said she believed lifting the ban would open up the Democratic Party to some of the best digital campaigners in the country.

“That happened to some of the best digital vendors in the country,” he said. “They work on a lot of progressive primary campaigns, and they can’t work for the party’s handpicked candidates.”

“Once the party got more formally involved, we were booted from the account,” Gustavo Sanchez, a principal at Data for Progress, said in an interview. “It’s not because the campaign wanted us gone. It was more that the campaign is forced to make a choice as to whether it wants to get money from the party or use us as a vendor.”

He added, “We didn’t really do much House work after that because we know the campaigns have to choose.”

It’s good to see this kind of realism. Remember, back in 2016 Donald Trump promised that he would restore coal to its former greatness, reopening shuttered mines — and voters in coal country believed him

The union’s document is in effect an endorsement, at least in principle, of the Biden administration’s plans to make action against climate change a centerpiece of its boost to infrastructure spending

It’s also a small but encouraging vindication of the thinking behind Build Back Better, the belief that climate action is most likely to be politically feasible if it eschews economic purism and relies more on carrots than on sticks.

The council, whose creation was announced in 2017, calls for carbon fees whose proceeds would be redistributed to families. This plan is part of a “bipartisan road map” for action.

This is, however, not the path the Biden administration is taking. Why?

First, the economic case for relying almost exclusively on a carbon tax misses the crucial role of technological development.

The reason large reductions in emissions look much easier to achieve now than they did a dozen years ago is that we’ve seen spectacular progress in renewable energy: a 70 percent fall since 2009 in the cost of wind power, an 89 percent fall in the cost of solar power.

And this technological progress didn’t just happen. It was at least partly a result of investments made by the Obama administration.

In retrospect, however, it is clear that government spending provided a crucial technological lift. And this suggests that public investment, as well as or even instead of a carbon tax, can be a way forward in fighting climate change.

Second, the idea that a carbon tax can achieve bipartisan support is hopelessly naïve. Only 14 percent of Republicans even accept the notion that climate change is an important issue

What might win over at least some of these voters, however, is the kind of program the United Mine Workers is calling for: targeted spending designed to help retrain former miners and support development in coal country communities.

while there’s a compelling case against relying exclusively on a carbon tax to fight climate change, public investment alone also probably isn’t enough. Eventually we will almost surely have to put a price on greenhouse gas emissions, politically difficult though that will be.

Promoting job creation in West Virginia or eastern Kentucky won’t be easy, and may be impossible.

we can and should make a good-faith effort to help workers and regions that will lose as we try to avoid environmental catastrophe, and in general to make climate policy as politically palatable as possible, even at some cost in efficiency. Climate action is too important a task to insist that it be done perfectly.

And I would worry about something else as well: As Hamas makes itself the vanguard of the Palestinian cause — and becomes its face — more and more progressives will come to understand what Hamas is — an Islamo-fascist movement that came to power in Gaza by a 2007 coup against the Palestinian Authority, during which, among other things, it threw a rival P.A. official off a 15-story rooftop.

This is not a “progressive” organization — and Hamas will not enjoy indefinitely the free pass it has gotten from the left because it is fighting Netanyahu

Indeed, what Kissinger began in 1973 and Jimmy Carter completed at Camp David was only possible because all these leaders actually agreed to ignore the core problem

So, my message to Biden would be this: You may be interested in China, but the Middle East is still interested in you. You deftly helped to engineer the cease-fire from the sidelines. Do you want to, do you dare to, dive into the middle of this new Kissingerian moment?

"Jews are the targets of the majority of hate crimes committed in the United States against any religious group, including attacks on houses of worship and Jewish community centers," the bill states.

But if there’s been a massive online campaign of progressive allyship with Jews, I’ve missed it. If corporate executives have sent out workplace memos expressing concern for the safety of Jewish employees, I’ve missed it. If academic associations have issued public letters denouncing the use of anti-Semitic tropes by pro-Palestinian activists, I’ve missed them.

It is especially despicable when Israel is singled out in ways that apply to no other country. To take just one example, when was the last time you heard of a campus demonstration or a call for boycotts and divestment in response to Turkey’s 47-year occupation of northern Cyprus or its routine bombardment, using American-made jets, of Kurdish militants in Iraq?

But, again, this doesn’t go far enough. The accusations made against Israel — stealing Palestinian land (despite the fact that Israel vacated the territory from which it was subsequently attacked) and wanton violence against Palestinian civilians, particularly children (despite the fact that Israel regularly warned its targets to vacate buildings before targeting them) — can’t help but make me think of ancient libels about Jewish greed and bloodlust.

This ought to be whistling loudly in the ears of progressives who claim to be horrified by every form of prejudice. Instead, they have indulged an anti-Israel movement that keeps descending into the crudest forms of anti-Semitism.

Progressives will have to come to their own reckoning about what to do about the burgeoning anti-Semitism in their midst. As for Jews, they should take the events of the last few days less as an outrage than as an omen.

U.S. history is often taught and popularly understood through the eyes of its great men, who are seen as either heroic or tragic figures in a global struggle for human freedom.

The 1619 Project, named for the date of the first arrival of Africans on American soil, sought to place “the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” Viewed from the perspective of those historically denied the rights enumerated in America’s founding documents, the story of the country’s great men necessarily looks very different.

given the stature of the historians involved, the letter is a serious challenge to the credibility of the 1619 Project

he letter sent to the Times says, “We applaud all efforts to address the foundational centrality of slavery and racism to our history,” but then veers into harsh criticism of the 1619 Project. The letter refers to “matters of verifiable fact” that “cannot be described as interpretation or ‘framing’” and says the project reflected “a displacement of historical understanding by ideology.” Wilentz and his fellow signatories didn’t just dispute the Times Magazine’s interpretation of past events, but demanded corrections.

Underlying each of the disagreements in the letter is not just a matter of historical fact but a conflict about whether Americans, from the Founders to the present day, are committed to the ideals they claim to revere.

while some of the critiques can be answered with historical fact, others are questions of interpretation grounded in perspective and experience.

Both sides agree, as many of the project’s right-wing critics do not, that slavery’s legacy still shapes American life—an argument that is less radical than it may appear at first glance. If you think anti-black racism still shapes American society, then you are in agreement with the thrust of the 1619 Project, though not necessarily with all of its individual arguments.

Was America founded as a slavocracy, and are current racial inequities the natural outgrowth of that? Or was America conceived in liberty, a nation haltingly redeeming itself through its founding principles?

The clash between the Times authors and their historian critics represents a fundamental disagreement over the trajectory of American society

The 1619 Project, and Hannah-Jones’s introductory essay in particular, offer a darker vision of the nation, in which Americans have made less progress than they think, and in which black people continue to struggle indefinitely for rights they may never fully realize.

The letter is rooted in a vision of American history as a slow, uncertain march toward a more perfect union.

Inherent in that vision is a kind of pessimism, not about black struggle but about the sincerity and viability of white anti-racism.

“The biggest obstacle to teaching slavery effectively in America is the deep, abiding American need to conceive of and understand our history as ‘progress,’ as the story of a people and a nation that always sought the improvement of mankind, the advancement of liberty and justice, the broadening of pursuits of happiness for all,”

The letter’s signatories recognize the problem the Times aimed to remedy, Wilentz told me. “Each of us, all of us, think that the idea of the 1619 Project is fantastic. I mean, it's just urgently needed. The idea of bringing to light not only scholarship but all sorts of things that have to do with the centrality of slavery and of racism to American history is a wonderful idea,” he said. In a subsequent interview, he said, “Far from an attempt to discredit the 1619 Project, our letter is intended to help it.”

The letter disputes a passage in Hannah-Jones’s introductory essay, which lauds the contributions of black people to making America a full democracy and says that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery” as abolitionist sentiment began rising in Britain.

“To teach children that the American Revolution was fought in part to secure slavery would be giving a fundamental misunderstanding not only of what the American Revolution was all about but what America stood for and has stood for since the Founding,” Wilentz told me. Anti-slavery ideology was a “very new thing in the world in the 18th century,” he said, and “there was more anti-slavery activity in the colonies than in Britain.”

Where Wilentz and his colleagues see the rising anti-slavery movement in the colonies and its influence on the Revolution as a radical break from millennia in which human slavery was accepted around the world, Hannah-Jones’ essay outlines how the ideology of white supremacy that sustained slavery still endures today.

On this question, the critics of the 1619 Project are on firm ground. Although some southern slave owners likely were fighting the British to preserve slavery, as Silverstein writes in his rebuttal, the Revolution was kindled in New England, where prewar anti-slavery sentiment was strongest. Early patriots like James Otis, John Adams, and Thomas Paine were opposed to slavery, and the Revolution helped fuel abolitionism in the North.

it is this profound pessimism about white America that many of the 1619 Project’s critics find most galling.

The most radical thread in the 1619 Project is not its contention that slavery’s legacy continues to shape American institutions; it’s the authors’ pessimism that a majority of white people will abandon racism and work with black Americans toward a more perfect union.

In an interview with the World Socialist Web Site, Oakes said, “The function of those tropes is to deny change over time … The worst thing about it is that it leads to political paralysis. It’s always been here. There’s nothing we can do to get out of it. If it’s the DNA, there’s nothing you can do. What do you do? Alter your DNA?”

The project’s pessimism has drawn criticism from the left as well as the right.

A major theme of the 1619 Project is that the progress that has been made has been fragile and reversible—and has been achieved in spite of the nation’s true founding principles, which are not the lofty ideals few Americans genuinely believe in.

“The fight for black freedom is a universal fight; it's a fight for everyone. In the end, it affected the fight for women's rights—everything. That's the glory of it,” Wilentz told me. “To minimize that in any way is, I think, bad for understanding the radical tradition in America.”

the question of whether black Americans have fought their freedom struggles “largely alone,” as Hannah-Jones put it in her essay, is subject to vigorous debate.

“I think one would be very hard-pressed to look at the factual record from 1619 to the present of the black freedom movement and come away with any conclusion other than that most of the time, black people did not have a lot of allies in that movement,” Hannah-Jones told me. “It is not saying that black people only fought alone. It is saying that most of the time we did.”

“The tone to me rather suggested a deep-seated concern about the project. And by that I mean the version of history the project offered. The deep-seated concern is that placing the enslavement of black people and white supremacy at the forefront of a project somehow diminishes American history,”

To Wilentz, the failures of earlier scholarship don’t illustrate the danger of a monochromatic group of historians writing about the American past, but rather the risk that ideologues can hijack the narrative. “[It was] when the southern racists took over the historical profession that things changed, and W. E. B. Du Bois fought a very, very courageous fight against all of that,” Wilentz told me. The Dunning School, he said, was “not a white point of view; it’s a southern, racist point of view.”

In the letter, Wilentz portrays the authors of the 1619 Project as ideologues as well. He implies—apparently based on a combative but ambiguous exchange between Hannah-Jones and the writer Wesley Yang on Twitter—that she had discounted objections raised by “white historians” since publication.

Hannah-Jones told me she was misinterpreted. “I rely heavily on the scholarship of historians no matter what race, and I would never discount the work of any historian because that person is white or any other race,” she told me. “I did respond to someone who was saying white scholars were afraid, and I think my point was that history is not objective. And that people who write history are not simply objective arbiters of facts, and that white scholars are no more objective than any other scholars, and that they can object to the framing and we can object to their framing as well.”

When I asked Wilentz about Hannah-Jones’s clarification, he was dismissive. “Fact and objectivity are the foundation of both honest journalism and honest history. And so to dismiss it, to say, ‘No, I'm not really talking about whites’—well, she did, and then she takes it back in those tweets and then says it's about the inability of anybody to write objective history. That's objectionable too,”

The problem, as Du Bois argued, is that much of American history has been written by scholars offering ideological claims in place of rigorous historical analysis. But which claims are ideological, and which ones are objective, is not always easy to discern.

Newt Gingrich called the 1619 Project a “lie,” arguing that “there were several hundred thousand white Americans who died in the Civil War in order to free the slaves." In City Journal, the historian Allen Guelzo dismissed the Times Magazine project as a “conspiracy theory” developed from the “chair of ultimate cultural privilege in America, because in no human society has an enslaved people suddenly found itself vaulted into positions of such privilege, and with the consent—even the approbation—of those who were once the enslavers.

To make certain that they would wield a veto over the proceedings, many of General Pinochet’s followers in the Senate and Congress wrote into the agreement that the final document produced by the Constitutional Convention would have to be approved by a two-thirds majority. They did so confident in their calculations that they would always be able to command more than one-third of the delegates.

That calculation backfired spectacularly over the past weekend as Chile Vamos, despite an enormous financial advantage, lost badly to independent and opposition candidates, and was sidelined from decision-making when it comes to the new charter. The defeat is all the more striking because the coalition also lost most of the mayor’s and governor’s races that were being held simultaneously.

there will be a series of drastic alterations in the way Chile dreams of its future. Two provisions already exist in the electoral process.

One stipulates that gender parity be achieved in the apportionment of the 155 delegates, so that women will not be greatly outnumbered by men in the halls of power. A majority of the 77 women elected, along with their male allies, can now fight successfully for reproductive rights in a country where abortion has traditionally been restricted and criminalized.

The other provision reserves 17 of the seats at the convention for Indigenous peoples, who form 9 percent of Chile’s 19 million people. Chile can henceforth proclaim itself a plurinational, multilingual republic.

Only 43 percent of the population voted in this election, compared with the more than 50 percent who turned out last year and overwhelmingly approved the idea of creating a new Constitution.

This absenteeism can be partly attributed to the pandemic (which also stopped me and my wife from traveling to Chile to cast our votes) and partly to the widespread apathy of vast sectors of the electorate, particularly among the poorest families.

The other problem is that though nearly 75 percent of the delegates embody a progressive agenda, they are fragmented and tend to squabble among themselves, making it difficult to reach a consensus on how far to carry out the reforms Chile requires.

n Israel too, the government has taken limited action to shut down the behavior of the so-called "hilltop youth," extremist settlers who deem themselves highly religious despite not respecting the rabbis of the settlement.

Here in the United States, there are Republican legislators and anchors on Fox News who have willingly participated in race-baiting and birtherism for years, even before President Trump hijacked the Republican Party. Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has looked the other way for close to five years as Trump incites violence and sows mistrust in our system.

Then came the insurrection. Mobs of Trump supporters, hopped up on Trump's conspiracy theory of a stolen election and encouraged to go to the Capitol by the President himself, stormed and vandalized our nation's Capitol building.

It was the disturbing culmination of a months-long series of attempts by Trump to bully state officials into "finding" votes that would help him win the 2020 presidential election, as almost all Republican "leaders" stood by with stunning silence -- though elections officials in Georgia, headed by Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, stood up for truth against pressure from Trump.

When thinking turns extreme, there is little room for nuance or aberration from the narrow mindset deemed acceptable.

Trump and a small subgroup of his most radicalized and violent supporters, who include White supremacists and Neo-Nazis, are responsible for this dark chapter. Nothing can justify their sedition. But beyond this specific situation, it would be simplistic to believe that extreme ways of thinking reside exclusively within the right.

All extremes are bound together by their intolerance for "the other." The far-left's tendency to call others out and automatically cast judgment harms all of society by stifling the critical thinking, nuanced debate, and exchange of differing ideas that lead to progress -- the very progress for which progressives advocate.

When terrorists or violent extremists cross the line, the only recourse is to forcefully stop them and prosecute them to the full extent of the law. For society at large, independent thinking and even avoiding partisan fanaticism can be antidotes to unruly tribalism in the future. Embracing the middle space characterized by critical thinking and nuance gives us a pathway for avoiding absolutist and hateful thinking that preys on societies from both the outside and within.