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The great theme of the Trump years, the one historians will note a century from now, was the failure of America’s expert class. The people who were supposed to know what they were talking about, didn’t. 

When intellectuals and journalists of the left use the word “democracy,” they typically are not referring to elections and decision-making by popularly elected officials

For the left, “democracy” is another word for progressive policy aims, especially the widening of special political rights and welfare-state provisions to new constituencies. By that definition any Republican president is carrying out an “assault on democracy.”

Mr. Trump assaulted democracy in the ordinary sense of the word, but he did so only after the 2020 election. That effort was discreditable and disruptive, but it was also delusional and ineffective. It was not the assault the president’s expert-class critics had foreseen.

It took a 22-month investigation by a special counsel to establish an absence of evidence that Mr. Trump’s campaign had conspired with the Russians.

Reporters treated every turn of events as evidence of Mr. Trump’s unique evil.

Reports of his defeat, accurate though they were, meant little coming from news organizations that cared so much about discrediting him and so little about factual truth.

Meanwhile the administration pressed ahead with a diplomatic push to strike commercial and diplomatic deals between Israel and Arab states

political talking points aside, this much is apparent: No nation—or anyhow no nation that values individual liberty and isn’t an island—has managed even to slow the spread of Covid-19 without causing economic ruin and attendant disorder.

The Trump administration made its share of mistakes during the early stages of the pandemic, although its chief failing was the president’s lack of rhetorical clarity

By any set of criteria outside the self-contained system of public-health best practices, the lockdowns failed. They purchased minor slowdowns in the spread of the virus at the cost of punishing economic destruction, untold social dysfunction, and mind-blowing public debt. 

many parts of the country didn’t lock down, or did so only loosely and briefly, and managed to keep their hospitals running just fine.

Controlling the spread of Covid-19 in the U.S. was always going to be a messy business: Many infected people don’t get sick and have no compelling reason to burrow in their homes, and America is an unruly nation with a long tradition of nonconformity

The experts might have accounted for these realities. They might have realized that the measures prescribed by their textbooks—contact tracing, forced quarantines, shelter-in-place orders—were mostly unworkable in America. They didn’t.

If this was an attempted coup, it was a comically inept one. Hardly anyone in Mr. Trump’s own administration, including the vice president, wanted anything to do with it.  

The most regrettable part of this class failure is that, with rare exceptions, the experts themselves acknowledge no error. Nothing about the Trump years has occasioned soul-searching or self-criticism on their part

“The triumph of democracy and liberalism over fascism and autocracy created the free world,” Mr. Biden wrote earlier this year in an essay in Foreign Affairs laying out his worldview. “But this contest does not just define our past. It will define our future, as well.”

“Lead” need not be a euphemism for “dominate.” Though we think of the Cold War as a series of military and diplomatic crises, liberals like Humphrey always understood it as a battle of ideas — a struggle over “the fundamental issue of man’s right to freedom,

The Marshall Plan as well as later food aid programs constituted acts of global leadership. But so, too, was civil rights, which liberals regarded as the ultimate demonstration project for the moral capacities of democracy.

“If we wish to inspire the peoples of the world whose freedom is in jeopardy,” President Harry Truman said in his historic 1948 message to Congress proposing laws banning employment discrimination and lynching as well as segregation in interstate transport, “we must correct the remaining imperfections in our practice of democracy.”

Now our situation is reversed. At a moment when the coronavirus pandemic has ravaged the economy and killed 400,000 people and counting, foreign policy feels like an afterthought; yet our failures at home contribute to democratic erosion abroad.

To take only the most obvious and shameful example, the haplessness of President Trump’s response to the pandemic — and, if somewhat less egregiously, that of other Western nations — stands in glaring contrast to China’s success in both reducing deaths and restoring economic growth

Trump’s canting about “the China virus” and his bluster over China’s (genuinely unfair) trading practices only accentuate America’s weak position at a time when China is aggressively promoting its model of autocratic capitalism through trade, investment and cultural diplomacy.

A politics of democratic renewal would once again bind together domestic and foreign affairs. Mr. Biden has in fact argued that such a policy must begin with a reassertion of moral principle at home by banning torture and ending the gross mistreatment of migrants at our borders.

Joe Biden has every reason to emulate Harry Truman, another political lifer disdained by the party’s activist wing and admired for common sense and decency rather than vision.

The coronavirus response will pose the first test: The Biden Administration must demonstrate that democratic citizens, under wise leadership, can voluntarily choose to take difficult public health decisions that autocratic states impose on their people

There is every reason to fear that Mr. Biden’s agenda will be stalemated by Senate Republicans who calculate that their political success depends upon making a Biden presidency fail — as they did with President Barack Obama. If they do so, the consequences, as Humphrey warned, will not be limited to domestic affairs. The gap in prestige between a China growing in wealth and confidence under the iron control of President Xi Jinping and a fragmented, dispirited America will only grow larger.

“To avoid destruction the United States need only measure up to its own best traditions and prove itself worthy of preservation as a great nation. Surely, there was never a fairer test of national quality than this.”

So you might step back and say Republicans should be happier with this system overall than Democrats are. But grassroots Republicans are as frustrated and disillusioned with this and as grassroots democrats

The problem is the way the system amplifies the power of the extremists.

if you think about the consequence of the inequality in the Senate and the consequence of the inequality in funding, those two things together pretty clearly benefit Republicans. When you think about voter suppression, the most dramatic examples that we see are examples that benefit Republicans. But the gerrymandering example is not benefiting either Republicans or Democrats.

We could change the way campaigns are funded, or at least the business model of how campaigns are funded, by adopting some version of public funding for national campaigns.

The second thing Congress can do quite easily is, using its power under the Constitution, it can ban partisan gerrymandering in the states.

The hardest problem to change, constitutionally, is the electoral college. I think that there’s that interpretation of the power of the states to allocate their electors proportionally at a fractional level. I think that’s constitutionally possible.

We’re not going to solve that, in the sense that we’re going to get to a place where we all know the same stuff. We need to think about solving it without trying to get everybody to the right place. We need alternatives to everyone being in the right place.

That’s why I talked about things like the civic juries that can help people decide issues

We should be really concerned that we fix the underlying causes of this, so we don’t produce a weakening of the commitment of the public to our democracy.

historical studies in and of themselves will not preserve our democracy. But when fostered in a critical and democratic spirit, they constitute an important piece of what we might call a culture of resistance and liberty

To survive and thrive, democracy needs a citizenry with an understanding of how economic, social and cultural forces have shaped our political institutions over time

Democracy also requires a citizenry confident that its own actions can make a difference.

Surveys routinely show that Black Americans are scattered across the ideological spectrum despite overwhelmingly voting for Democrats. Gallup data for last year showed that just over two in five Black Americans identify as moderate and that roughly a quarter each identify as liberal or conservative

An enduring unity at the ballot box is not confirmation that Black voters hold the same views on every contested issue, but rather that they hold the same view on the one most consequential issue: racial equality.

The existence of the Black electoral monolith is evidence of a critical defect not in Black America, but in the American practice of democracy. That defect is the space our two-party system makes for racial intolerance and the appetite our electoral politics has for the exploitation of racial polarization — to which the electoral solidarity of Black voters is an immune response.

To be Black in America has often meant to act in political solidarity with other Black people. Sometimes those politics have been formal and electoral, sometimes they have been of protest and revolt. But they have always, by necessity, been existential and utilitarian.

A recognition that achieving racial equality required a strong government fueled Black progressivism, which demanded anti-lynching federal legislation; eradication of the poll tax and other barriers to voting; and expansion of quality public education

The ratification of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments codified freedmen’s participation in the electoral process at a time when upward of 90 percent of Black Americans lived in the Southern states, constituting actual or near majorities in more than a few.

This was the Black monolith’s forceful debut. In a thriving democracy, one aligned to the nation’s professed values, a competition for these new voters would have ensued. The monolith would have dissipated as individual Black voters sought out their ideological compatriots instead of being compelled to band against segregation and racial violence.

In the first century of American politics, the word “compromise” — Three-Fifths, Missouri, 1850, 1877 — was often a euphemism for prying natural and constitutional rights from Black Americans’ grip.

These political arrangements underscored the paradox that plagued Black America from the outset: The same federalist government charged with the delivery and defense of constitutional rights was often the means of denying them. On matters of race, the state was at once dangerously unreliable and positively indispensable.

The contours of Black politics were shaped by this quandary. The lack of faith in American democracy’s ability to do what was right undergirded Black conservatism, producing economic philosophies like Booker T. Washington’s bootstrapping self-determination; social efforts toward civic acceptance like the respectability politics of the Black church; and separatist politics like the early iterations of black nationalism.

When Black men were first enfranchised after the end of the Civil War, they faced a partisan politics reduced to one stark choice: Side with those who would extend more rights of citizenship to Black people or with those who would deny them.

Truman’s decision to sign executive orders desegregating the military and the federal work force was an electoral broadside constructed, in part, to help win over the support of northern Black voters.

The Democrats’ and Republicans’ national platforms in this period often addressed civil rights in nearly equal measure, and sometimes Republicans were more progressive on the question.

President Dwight Eisenhower declared in the 1950s that racial segregation harmed the nation’s security interests.

Richard Nixon held positions on civil rights similar to John F. Kennedy’s during the 1960 presidential campaign, and won nearly a third of the Black vote that yea

Stumping for Nixon in 1960, Senator Barry Goldwater, the Arizona Republican, declared that “there’s hardly enough difference between Republican conservatives and the Southern Democrats to put a piece of paper between.” When Goldwater became the 1964 Republican presidential nominee and voiced his opposition to the Civil Rights Act, Black voters bunched themselves into the Democratic Party for good, supporting Lyndon Johnson at a rate comparable with Barack Obama’s nearly a half-century later.

Within a decade, white Southern Democrats were responding favorably to the appeals of the Republican Party. Richard Nixon’s “law and order” refrain and Ronald Reagan’s renewed call for “states’ rights” were racialized, implicitly communicating opposition to progressive policies like busing and tapping into anxieties about a rapidly integrating society.

With explicitly racist appeals now socially taboo, symbolic and ostensibly colorblind gestures made the transition easier by reframing the race question as one about free-market principles, personal responsibility and government nonintervention.

Racial segregation could be achieved without openly championing it; the social hierarchy maintained without evangelizing it. American voters, Black and white alike, got the message.

The result was that racial polarization was now less a product of partisan philosophies about the personhood or citizenship of Black Americans and more a fact of partisan identity — and a political instrument to hold and wield power.

This was a subtle but profound shift, and a dangerous one. As the University of Maryland professor Lilliana Mason writes in her 2018 book, “Uncivil Agreement,” “Partisan, ideological, religious and racial identities have, in recent decades, moved into strong alignment, or have become ‘sorted,’” such that partisan attacks can become race-based, personal and unmoored from policy disputes.

Partisan energy accordingly is hardly ever expended in an earnest competition for Black voters but rather in determining whether they can vote, tilting the axis of the issue away from the exercise of the franchise to access to it.

Racial identity has now become fully entangled with partisanship: The Republican Party is attracting more white voters while people of color are massing in the Democratic Party.

Not only does race now split the parties more cleanly than ever, but the racial gap exacerbates partisan polarization.

In “Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop,” the political scientist Lee Drutman notes that the modern American two-party system so consecrates competition that party leaders are more incentivized to disparage the other side as extreme and un-American than to compromise.

Deliberation is the lifeblood of a healthy democracy. A people that does not seriously deliberate about its nation and its leaders is a people ill suited to the task of providing the consent from which government derives its power.

For Black voters, agency and political freedom are luxuries they have never fully enjoyed.

It didn’t have to be this way. There have been moments in history in which better leaders and better people would have competed for Black America’s increasing electoral power instead of organizing against it.

or a nation deeply divided on race relations, the easy and more politically expedient strategy has always won out.

For our democracy to reach its final form, the answer cannot be that one party has tried to answer the call — it must be that each party does so and without penalty.

A young John Lewis made this argument in 1963 at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial. In his impassioned speech, he channeled the frustrations of Black America and excoriated the nation’s partisan democracy for posturing on race relations instead of taking revolutionary action to realize the promise of America.

“Where is the political party that will make it unnecessary to march on Washington? Where is the political party that will make it unnecessary to march in the streets of Birmingham?”

Color me alarmist, but that sounds like an invitation to do more than just watch. Trump put an exclamation point on it by exhorting those supporters to vote twice, once by mail and once in person, which is of course blatantly against the law.

On Wednesday Trump was asked if he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power in the event that he lost to Joe Biden. Shockingly but then not really, he wouldn’t. He prattled anew about mail-in ballots and voter fraud and, perhaps alluding to all of the election-related lawsuits that his minions have filed, said: “There won’t be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation.”

“sheriffs” and “law enforcement” who would monitor the polls on his behalf. At a rally in North Carolina, he told supporters: “Be poll watchers when you go there. Watch all the thieving and stealing and robbing they do.”

“I have never in my adult life seen such a deep shudder and sense of dread pass through the American political class.”

And the day after Ginsburg died, I felt a shudder just as deep.

This was an omen — and a harrowing one at that.

“I have never in my adult life seen such a deep shudder and sense of dread pass through the American political class.”

Is a fair fight still imaginable in America? Do rules and standards of decency still apply? For a metastasizing segment of the population, no.

Right on cue, we commenced a fight over Ginsburg’s Supreme Court seat that could become a protracted death match, with Mitch McConnell’s haste and unabashed hypocrisy

On Wednesday Trump was asked if he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power in the event that he lost to Joe Biden. Shockingly but then not really, he wouldn’t

“There won’t be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation.”

We’re in terrible danger. Make no mistake.

Trump, who rode those trends to power, is now turbocharging them to drive America into the ground.

The week since Ginsburg’s death has been the proof of that. Many of us dared to dream that a small but crucial clutch of Republican senators, putting patriotism above party,

Hah. Only two Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, broke with McConnell, and in Collins’s case, there were re-election considerations and hedged wording. All the others fell into line.

Most politicians — and maybe most Americans — now look across the political divide and see a band of crooks who will pick your pocket if you’re meek and dumb enough not to pick theirs first.

“If the situation were reversed, the Dems would be doing the same thing.”

Ugliness begets ugliness until — what? The whole thing collapses of its own ugly weight?

The world’s richest and most powerful country has been brought pitifully and agonizingly low. On Tuesday we passed the mark of 200,000 deaths related to the coronavirus, cementing our status as the global leader, by far, on that front. How’s that for exceptionalism?

What’s the far side of a meltdown? America the puddle? While we await the answer, we get a nasty showdown over that third Trump justice. Trump will nominate someone likely to horrify Democrats and start another culture war: anything to distract voters from his damnable failure to address the pandemic.

University of California-Irvine School of Law, with the headline: “I’ve Never Been More Worried About American Democracy Than I Am Right Now.”

you can be re-elected at the cost that American democracy will be permanently disfigured — and in the future America will be a failed republic — I don’t think either would have taken the deal.

“I don’t think the survival of the republic particularly means anything to Donald Trump.”

“Tribal,” “identity politics,” “fake news” and “hoax” are now mainstays of our vocabulary, indicative of a world where facts and truth are suddenly relative.

“The coronavirus pandemic, a reckless incumbent, a deluge of mail-in ballots, a vandalized Postal Service, a resurgent effort to suppress votes, and a trainload of lawsuits are bearing down on the nation’s creaky electoral machinery,”

But what if there’s bottom but no bounce? I wonder. And shudder.

This country, already uncivil, is on the precipice of being ungovernable, because its institutions are being so profoundly degraded, because its partisanship is so all-consuming, and because Trump, who rode those trends to power, is now turbocharging them to drive America into the ground. The Republican Party won’t apply the brakes.

At some point, someone had to be honorable and say, “Enough.”Hah. Only two Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, broke with McConnell, and in Collins’s case, there were re-election considerations and hedged wording. All the others fell into line.

So the lesson for Democrats should be to take all they can when they can? That’s what some prominent Democrats now propose: As soon as their party is in charge, add enough seats to the Supreme Court to give Democrats the greater imprint on it. Make the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico states, so that Democrats have much better odds of controlling the Senate. Do away with the filibuster entirely. That could be just the start of the list

And who the hell are we anymore? The world’s richest and most powerful country has been brought pitifully and agonizingly low. On Tuesday we passed the mark of 200,000 deaths related to the coronavirus, cementing our status as the global leader, by far, on that front. How’s that for exceptionalism?

he might contest the election in a manner that keeps him in power regardless of what Americans really want.

The coronavirus pandemic, a reckless incumbent, a deluge of mail-in ballots, a vandalized Postal Service, a resurgent effort to suppress votes, and a trainload of lawsuits are bearing down on the nation’s creaky electoral machinery,

this election might well degenerate into violence, as Democratic poll watchers clash with Republican poll watchers, and into chaos, as accusations of foul play delay the certification of state vote counts

headline: “I’ve Never Been More Worried About American Democracy Than I Am Right Now.”

“The republic is in greater self-generated danger than at any time since the 1870s,” Richard Primus, a professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School, told me, saying that Trump values nothing more than his own power and will do anything that he can get away with

“If you had told Barack Obama or George W. Bush that you can be re-elected at the cost that American democracy will be permanently disfigured — and in the future America will be a failed republic — I don’t think either would have taken the deal.” But Trump? “I don’t think the survival of the republic particularly means anything to Donald Trump.

What gave Primus that idea? Was it when federal officers used tear gas on protesters to clear a path for a presidential photo op? Was it when Trump floated the idea of postponing the election, just one of his many efforts to undermine Americans’ confidence in their own system of government?

Or was it when he had his name lit up in fireworks above the White House as the climax of his party’s convention? Was it on Monday, when his attorney general, Bill Barr, threatened to withhold federal funds from cities that the president considers “anarchist”? That gem fit snugly with Trump’s talk of blue America as a blight on red America, his claim that the pandemic would be peachy if he could just lop off that rotten fruit.

The deadly confrontations recently in Kenosha, Wis., and Portland, Ore., following months of mass protests against racial injustice, speak to how profoundly estranged from their government a significant percentage of Americans feel.

Litigation to determine the next president winds up with the Supreme Court, where three Trump-appointed justices are part of a majority decision in his favor. It’s possible.

Rush Limbaugh — you know, the statesman whom Trump honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom earlier this year — has urged McConnell not even to bother with a confirmation hearing for the nominee in the Judiciary Committee and to go straight to a floor vote. Due diligence and vetting are so 2018

You know who has most noticeably and commendably tried to turn down the temperature? Biden. That’s of course its own political calculation, but it’s consistent with his comportment during his entire presidential campaign, one that has steered clear of extremism, exalted comity and recognized that a country can’t wash itself clean with more muck.

He’s our best bid for salvation, which goes something like this: An indisputable majority of Americans recognize our peril and give him a margin of victory large enough that Trump’s challenge of it is too ludicrous for even many of his Republican enablers to justify. Biden takes office, correctly understanding that his mandate isn’t to punish Republicans. It’s to give America its dignity back.

Maybe we need to hit rock bottom before we bounce back up.But what if there’s bottom but no bounce? I wonder. And shudder.

“I have never in my adult life seen such a deep shudder and sense of dread pass through the American political class.”

When citizens cannot imagine security, politics becomes the distribution of insecurity, the allocation of fears and anxieties that push us away from an idea of common citizenship and toward authoritarianism. What is lethal for Americans is also lethal for our democracy.

I am an American historian who has seen the pandemic from both sides of the Atlantic, and who has just written a book about health care in the United States. When journalists from other countries ask me why so many Americans have died during the coronavirus pandemic, they phrase the question actively: “What have Americans done to bring about such needless mayhem?” And that is the right way to think about our COVID-19 policy. It is not a blundering, but a bludgeoning.

In other rich nations, it is easier to see a doctor and harder to die than in the United States. As I write these lines, I am sick in Austria. That means that if I call a doctor, I see her the same day, get tests right away, fill out no forms, and pay no fees. Without worries about access to care, I am a freer person. On the scale of a whole society, the gain in liberty is extraordinary. 

Lost to us are the political consequences: If we take for granted radical inequality and repeated emergencies in the realm of health, we are primed for authoritarianism in the realm of life.

Our babies and their mothers die at rates that Europeans find unbelievable. American Millennials will likely pay more for health care yet die younger than their parents and grandparents did. Life expectancy peaked here in 2014, even as it continues to rise elsewhere.

Americans pay twice as much per capita for health care as the citizens of peer countries do, for the privilege of dying years younger.

Many of us, by some calculations nearly half, simply avoid care because it seems unaffordable.

Those of us with insurance think about how good our insurance is, and where it will get us. Those of us who get access believe that we deserve it. It does not occur to us that the less-bad access we have is worse than what everyone has in countries with universal health care.

Too many of us take for granted that health and freedom are somehow in contradiction—and so we exclude our own bodies from our notion of rights. We treat as normal a system of commercial medicine in which decisions about life and death are made on the basis of profit.

In the health-care debate in the United States, proposals to extend coverage to all are decried as government overreach, socialism, even outright tyranny. But the lack of health security is what makes Americans vulnerable to demagogues and authoritarians.

Many white Americans regard their own suffering as virtuous, while maintaining that public health care would only be abused by Black people and immigrants. In other words, suffering is normal so long as others suffer more

ur sense that suffering is normal is also racial

Racial inequality brings unnecessary death. It also brings a sentiment that an authoritarian leader can exploit: Namely, that those who suffer the most are themselves at fault. When racism is a preexisting condition, the disproportionate death rates of Americans of color during a pandemic seem normal.

America’s only hope of stopping the COVID-19 pandemic was to do so at the outset. Such efforts have been mounted before. Under George W. Bush, the number of SARS cases in the U.S. was limited, and no one died. In 2014, the Obama administration took the fight against Ebola to West Africa, a prudent step that was normal then but that seems like science fiction now.

Before the novel coronavirus arrived in the U.S., the Trump administration dismantled the institutions that were responsible for early warning and early action

By telling Americans in February what they wanted to hear about the virus—that it was not serious, that it would disappear, that everyone could get a test—Trump ensured that death would be widespread.

By failing to institute a regime of testing, he made it normal for us to follow our own guesswork and emotions rather than dealing with facts.

The Trump administration announced a kind of new federalism, in which governors would have to show their loyalty to get federal assistance, and in which the Democratic ones would be blamed regardless of what happened

The bluster shrouded the basic decision, which was not to launch a federal response to the pandemic. No nationwide lockdown, no national testing initiative, no national contact-tracing initiative, no nationwide signaling on wearing masks and washing hands. This set the United States apart from every other comparable country.

After first blaming Democrats for not doing enough, Trump switched to blaming them for doing too much.

This is America’s basic problem: Health care is not a promise for all, but rather an expectation of the rich that they will do relatively better than the poor, and of white people that they will do relatively better than Black people

Suffering can seem meaningful if it affirms this basic order, even if that suffering is one’s own

Yet a democracy can become suffused with suffering, to the point where many voters do not even expect that policy might help them or loved ones stay well

An aspiring authoritarian such as Trump knows what to do: provide the emotional jolts of pleasure that distract from the general decline. “Winning” is no longer about gaining something for oneself, such as a healthier or longer life, but about taking pleasure in the suffering of others. This is a sensibility—the strong survive; the weak get what they deserve—that favors authoritarianism over democracy.

In this election, Americans face a choice not between individuals, but between regimes: between tyranny and a republic as forms of government, and between suffering and happiness as its aims. If Trump is defeated, our democracy should be reinforced by universal health care. Health and freedom collapse together, and they can be recovered together. We would be much freer as a people if we accorded ourselves health care as a right.

In any case, the fear of nuclear war has been around since the time of Hiroshima, but also, there are other fears. If we don’t get climate policy right, will we all be cooked? Or will climate-induced disruptions lead to great power war, nuclear conflict? Will changing technology — the AIs — take over? Whatever, we live in a time of existential fear, and foreign policy and all kinds of national policy questions get invested with these ultimate questions.

What makes democracy work under those circumstances tends to be senses of identification with elites, with different social-political groups. The glue that holds a democratic society — the cultural glue, intellectual glue, spiritual glue — becomes much more important

In terms of mass societies and democracies and large cultural groups, it’s profoundly destabilizing. You have that problem, that existential fear, which some people respond to by denial, some people fall into extremism — lots of responses, but you can see that.

Then the other thing is that, in a large democratic society like ours — 300-plus million people — if political power was divided equally among all 300 million Americans, it would mean that no one had any power.

Politics is less about, if we raise the sales tax half a percent, is that a good thing or a bad thing on balance? It’s more about, can we save the planet? Can we save human civilization? When people face those kinds of questions without some kind of grounding in some kind of religion, faith, it’s actually . . . There are individual people who can keep their psychological balance in the face of that. There are not many.

The American political-studies belief since World War II has essentially been, democracy is the only stable form of government. Everywhere democracy is inexorably rising, and every other form of government is incredibly unstable. This bears very, very little relationship to the facts outside of Western Europe, let’s say the world of NATO plus Japan and Australia.

to do foreign policy well

Which American president has best understood the Middle East, and then worst? MEAD: Interesting. Nobody’s gotten it totally. I’d say George H.W. Bush and Richard Nixon probably are the two, in my mind, who best understood what they were dealing with.

COWEN: What is it they had that maybe the others didn’t? MEAD: What they saw in the Middle East is that America has both hard-power goals and what you could call soft-power, idealistic goals in the Middle East, that our hard-power goals are vital, and they are achievable. Our soft-power goals are important but largely unachievable. What they did was, they set about dealing with what was essential, and they both did it pretty successfully.

The American academy is actually a terrible place for coming to understand how world politics works.

COWEN: Sorry. Is Germany still part of the Western Alliance? MEAD: Well, in the sense it’s been for some time. I remember that Kennan’s goal for Germany was to have a united, neutral, disarmed Germany at the heart of Europe. In some ways, [laughs] Kennan’s goal looks, maybe, closer than ever.

Look, I think Germany is a country whose basic economic model is now under question. The German model — and it’s very important in understanding that country — is based on the availability of cheap energy from Russia and large markets in China.

Again, let’s remember that the German establishment is more terrified of ordinary German public opinion than even the American liberal establishment is terrified of the Trumpists. You don’t have to look all that deeply into history to see why that would be the case. Providing stability, affluence, and employment for the mass of the German people is a key test of the legitimacy of the German state.

Really, ever since we failed to break up the large German corporations after World War II, that German establishment has been the motor of the astonishing success of postwar Germany. Now, suddenly, that engine is running out of fuel on the one hand, and its key customer, China, regardless of anything about human rights or geopolitics, the goal of the Chinese economic development strategy is to end its dependency on capital goods imported from countries like Germany by becoming an exporter of high-tech capital goods.

China’s development plans, much more than its Taiwan policy or its human rights, is a gun pointed at the head of German business. So, where do they go? It’s not clear where they go. I don’t think it’s clear to them where they go. That means that a fundamental element of the American alliance system is in a completely new place.

I think what we have to be doing in terms of analyzing where German foreign policy goes is to think a little bit less about ideology or things like the German anti-war sentiment or these kinds of things. Yes, these are all there, the Russian soul, all of that. It’s there, but really, how is Germany going to make a living? That’s the question that has to be answered, and that will drive Germany’s orientation in foreign policy.

I think, in our society, the ebbing of religion among some, certainly not all, Americans has tended to dissolve these bonds and leads, in all kinds of ways, both on the left and the right, to some of the sense of suspicion, of paranoia, a lack of trust, and declining support for democracy.

COWEN: How would you describe that advantage? MEAD: I don’t really believe in disciplines. I see connections between things. I start from reality. I’m not trying to be anti-intellectual here. You need ideas to help you organize your perceptions of reality. But I think there’s a tendency in a lot of social science disciplines — you start from a bunch of really smart, engaged people who have been thinking about a set of questions and say, “We’ll do a lot better if we stop randomly thinking about everything that pops up and try, in some systematic way, to organize our thinking of this.”

I think you do get some gains from that, but you see, over time, the focus of the discipline has this tendency to shift. The discipline tends to become more inward navel-gazing. “What’s the history of our efforts to systematize our thinking about this?” The discipline becomes more and more, in a sense, ideological and internally focused and less pragmatic.

I think that some of the problem, though, is not so much in the intellectual weaknesses of a lot of conventional postgrad education, but simply almost the crime against humanity of having whole generations of smart people spend the first 30, 35 years of their lives in a total bubble, where they’re in this academic setting, and the rule . . . They become socialized into the academy, just as much as prisoners get socialized into the routines of a prison.

COWEN: Do you think of it as an advantage that you don’t have a PhD? MEAD: Huge advantage.

COWEN: For our final segment, a few questions about the Walter Russell Mead production function. How much did growing up in South Carolina influence your views on foreign policy? MEAD: I think it’s affected my views of America, and that, in turn, affects my views. Growing up in the segregated South during the civil rights era, where, on the one hand, my father actually knew Martin Luther King and marched with him and was involved in a lot of things; but then I had relatives, older relatives who were very much on the other side. That gave me a certain sense of I could love my grandfather even though he voted for George Wallace.

MEAD: Yes. All right. The fact that I could love him while really disliking his politics helps me understand . . . I think it helps understand some of the divisions in America even today and gives you a more human rather than a strictly ideological look.

But there’s also this: that the South and the White South — which, of course, is where I come from — has had the experience of both being defeated and being wrong. That’s something that a lot of American political culture doesn’t have — your WASP Yankee patricians. I think neoconservatism reflected a sense of people who’ve never been wrong and never been beaten, at least in their own minds. There’s a hubris that comes with that.

Historically, one of the roles of Southern politics — think of William Fulbright during the Vietnam War — both for good and bad reasons, doubt that this American ideological project can be transferred, partly because they know America is bad at reconstruction. The failure of reconstruction, both in terms of the White South and the Black South after the Civil War, is a lesson that you get growing up in the South. And so you have an inherent sense of the limits of America’s ability to transform societies. That’s important.

COWEN: Your foreign policy understanding — what did it learn from going to Groton?

MEAD: Well, I learned a lot there. On the one hand, Groton is a place that prides itself on its tradition of producing foreign policy leaders: Dean Acheson, the Allsopp brothers, Averell Harriman, Franklin Roosevelt. That wonderful book, The Wise Men by David Halberstam — actually, my history teacher is in there. There’s a whole scene that could be from our fourth-form 10th-grade history class.

You got the sense of being part of a tradition, and you got the inside view. The way we were taught American history was in no way idealized. Just, say, reading something like the 1619 Project didn’t come to me as a shock. “Oh my gosh, there was slavery, there was injustice in America.”

In fact, one of the teachers at Groton used to take aside some of the boys — it was an all-boys school at the time — and explain to them how their family fortune was made. He might say, “Well, George, we’ve been reading a lot about war profiteers in World War I. You need to know that your grandfather . . .” Et cetera, et cetera. Unfortunately, none of my grandparents had participated in such things, so there was no need to explain to me the family fortune, as there wasn’t one.

More than that, though, I was at Groton ’65 to ’70. Those were the years of the Vietnam War. The national security adviser at the time, McGeorge Bundy, was the chair of the Groton Board of Trustees, so I had a close-up look at the aggressive self-confidence of the WASP establishment meeting the Vietnam War and beginning to come to grips with what was going wrong.

Those two visions of the inner workings of the American foreign policy elite, and then the ringside seat at the crisis of the old American foreign policy elite, have been profoundly important in my thinking about the world.

COWEN: You meet young people all the time. How do you spot the next Walter Russell Mead? What do you look for?

MEAD: Well, first of all, I’m hoping for somebody who’s a lot better than me. I’m looking for someone — what is it? Whose sandals I am unworthy to buckle. And I would say that I look for, first of all, curiosity, intense curiosity. I look for an understanding that the personal and the political are mixed, that character matters. You can learn about the world by coming to understand your own psychological flaws and distress, and vice versa.

That history matters a lot, and that you can’t know too much history. Now, you have to digest it, but you can’t know too much history. A hunger for travel. I think too many foreign policy types don’t actually get out into the field nearly as much as they should. Curiosity about other cultures. A strong grounding in a faith of your own, which can be a secular ideology, perhaps, in some cases, but more often is likely to be a great religious tradition of some kind.

I’m a Christian. I could wish that everyone was, but my friend Shadi Hamid is a Muslim, and I think his Muslim faith actually helps him navigate and understand the world, and I certainly have lots of Jewish friends in the same circumstance. Again, we’re ending up where we started, maybe, but a religious faith, connected to one of the great historical traditions, gives you a degree of insight and potential for self-criticism that are absolutely crucial to foreign affairs.

what the plan offered on paper is essentially what Putin — on the dangerous defensive after a raft of strategic miscalculations and mounting battlefield losses — is now trying to seize through sham referendums and illegal annexation. And Mariupol is shorthand for the horrors of his war, an occupied city in ruins after months of siege, its hulking steelworks spectral and silenced, countless citizens buried in mass graves.

Putin’s assault on Ukraine and his attack on American democracy have until now been treated largely as two distinct story lines.

Yet those two narratives came together that summer night at the Grand Havana Room. And the lesson of that meeting is that Putin’s American adventure might be best understood as advance payment for a geopolitical grail closer to home: a vassal Ukrainian state.

Even now, some influential voices in American politics, mostly but not entirely on the right, are suggesting that Ukraine make concessions of sovereignty similar to those contained in Kilimnik’s plan, which the nation’s leaders categorically reject.

This second draft of history emerges from a review of the hundreds of pages of documents produced by investigators for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, and for the Republican-led Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; from impeachment-hearing transcripts and the recent crop of Russiagate memoirs; and from interviews with nearly 50 people in the United States and Ukraine, including four hourlong conversations with Manafort himself.

the persistent, surreptitious effort to bring the Mariupol plan to life. The plan was hardly the only effort to trade peace in Ukraine for concessions to Putin; many obstacles stood in its way. And its provenance remains unclear: Was it part of a Putin long game or an attempt by his ally, Yanukovych, to claw back power? Either way, the prosecutors who uncovered the plan would come to view it as potential payoff for the Russian president’s election meddling.

The examination also brings into sharper relief the tricks of Putin’s trade as he pressed his revanchist mission to cement his power by restoring the Russian empire and weakening democracy globally. He pursued that goal through the cunning co-optation of oligarchs and power brokers in the countries in his sights, while applying ever-evolving disinformation techniques to play to the fears and hatreds of their people.

Manafort, a political operative known for treating democracy as a tool as much as an idea.

he had achieved great riches by putting his political acumen to work for the country’s Kremlin-aligned oligarchs, helping install a government that would prove pliant in the face of Putin’s demand

Then he helped elect an American president whose open admiration of the Russian strongman muddied more than a half-century of policy promoting democracy.

In the end, Putin would not get out of a Trump presidency what he thought he had paid for, and democracy would bend but not yet break in both the United States and Ukraine. But that, as much as anything, would set the Russian leader on his march to war.

he firm specialized in covering over the bloody records of dictators like Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire and Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines with copious coats of high-gloss spin, presenting them as freedom-loving democrats.

Together with Roger Stone, Manafort helped develop the slashing style of conservative politics, pushing “hot buttons” to rile up base voters and tar opponents.

Long before the Trump-era investigations, Manafort had established himself in Washington and abroad as a grand master of the political dark arts

Let’s start with the obvious: Israel has a right to defend itself, rescue the hostages, arrest and prosecute Hamas and engage in lawful armed combat with its enemy.

People claiming the Hamas attack is the ‘violence of the oppressed’ are deluded. Hamas rules Gaza like a mafia state: its operatives walk around neighbourhoods in twos, dressed in dark suits, prying into people’s business. They run the place on a mixture of terror, public service provision and the kudos of their fighters.

They are feared but there is widespread disrespect for them, especially among secular and nationalist sections of the population.

Paradoxically, the western ‘anti-imperialists’ trying to apologise for the terror attack, and the Israeli right calling for retribution against civilians, both need to identify Hamas with the Palestinian population of Gaza in order to justify violence. But there is no basis for doing so.

The fact that a violent action takes place in the context of a wider oppression does not make it either (a) just (b) lawful under international law or c) effective in pursuit of social justice.

In this case, Hamas’s act of terror looks set to achieve the opposite.

What does Hamas want?

Hamas has offered a truce and asked for negotiations, stating that it has ‘achieved its objective’. If so, it’s logical to conclude that the immediate objective was to demonstrate proof-of-concept of an unstoppable pogromist terror. Do as we ask or we do this again, might be a fair summary.

The wider aim, according to numerous experts, is to force Hamas and Iran back into the power-broking process in the Middle East region, paralysing Saudi-Israeli rapprochement.

The firm view of the Islamic Republic is that the governments that are gambling on normalizing relations with the Zionist regime will suffer losses. Defeat awaits them…Today, the situation of the Zionist regime is not a situation that encourages closeness to it. They [other governments] should not make this mistake. The usurper [Zionist] regime is coming to an end.

Hamas could only achieve the aim of ending Saudi-Israeli rapprochement with an attack designed to trigger massive retribution, risking a regional all-out war.

there’s a line in Khamenei’s 3 October speech that, in retrospect looks explanatory: Thus, [the Zionists] are filled with grudge. They are filled with anger! Of course, the Quran exclaims: “Say, “die of your rage!” (3:119). That’s right. Be angry, and die of your rage. And this will happen. They are dying. With God’s help, this matter of ‘die of your rage’ is happening now as regards the Zionist regime.

‘Die of your rage’ might actually be a good summary of what Hamas intends Israel to now do.

Enraged by the barbarity of the attacks, Israel unleashes unprecedented collective punishment against Gaza, triggering both Hezbollah and West Bank militants to join in the fight; this in turn prompts a wave of anti-Semitic demonstrations in western cities, and draws the USA into a regional quagmire, testing the limits of American support for Israel

Meanwhile combat losses, and retribution over the complete failure of Netanyahu’s strategy of ‘managing’ the conflict, raise political divisions in Israeli society to the point where its democracy fails.

In a context where both Russia and China have complex hybrid destabilisation operations going on in western democracies, and where the Brics+ project is pursuing the active decomposition of the rules-based order, this objective does not look as mad as at first sight.

the ‘multipolar world’ turns out not to be one of peaceful coexistence, but characterised by extreme conflicts and genocide.

In pursuit of systemic competition Beijing and Moscow are scraping at every open wound in the body geopolitic

it’s what you get when you purposefully dismantle an international order based on treaties and explicit rules. And where elites in Russia, the USA, Brasil and parts of Europe are openly experimenting with ethno-nationalist politics.

Chaos, then, is a feature of multipolarity, not a bug.

Israel has signalled its military objective is to destroy Hamas. From my experience in Gaza I would say: that is possible.

But be in no doubt. It will need a sustained urban combat operation, a long-term military occupation, massive loss of civilian life, an existential refugee crisis in Sinai, and the diversion of US-supplied ammunition and resources from Ukraine.

Attempting it with a largely conscript/reservist army, full of recently mobilised and enraged soldiers? Again it’s worth remembering Khamenei’s exhortation to Israelis to ‘die of your rage’.

The very impossibility of all these outcomes shows why we need an internationally mediated peace, alongside a functional two-state solution, which allows the people of Gaza to live in peace, exercise democracy and travel across borders.

not only will liberal sympathy for Israel evaporate, but the Muslim minorities in some Western countries will be radicalised.

Typically, from my experience, combat in Gaza takes the following form. There is a street with children playing at one end; in the middle it is eerily deserted; at the other end is the IDF and above is an IDF drone. But there is no front line. The mujahedeen are in tunnels, popping up to take sniper shots or lay IEDs at night, and only committing ATGMs once a vehicle comes into view. The only front line is, for most of the time, between the IDF and Palestinian civilians.

Both sides risk miscalculating. Hamas does not care what happens to Palestinian civilians in Gaza, many of whom hate Hamas.

But there is a danger of miscalculation for Israel too. Netanyahu’s far-right government completely missed the threat, actively stoked tensions in the West Bank and Al Aqsa, and could easily now double down on a self-destructive course.

Ultimately, you cannot hold two million people in an open air prison without a gaoler to keep order. If Hamas can’t do it, the IDF will have to be a permanent occupation force, or it will have to install the PA, or the UN will have to send a stabilisation force.

Danger of miscalculation

The Brics+ ideology

The Gaza crisis is the latest example of how the Russian/Chinese ‘multipolar world’ project works in practice. It doesn’t matter whether there is a chain of command that goes Moscow→Tehran→Hamas. There is a chain of understanding – seize every opportunity to militarise all conflict; exploit every unexpected breakthrough; make all violence symbolic; weaponise the information space and push conflict into the heartlands of ‘imperialism’.

the Brics+ ideology. Its central tenets are that a multipolar world is better than the charter system; that universalism and international law are over; that the West no longer has the right to use the structures of international governance to normalise concepts like democracy or human rights; and that everything that disorganises the rules-based order is progressive, even when carried out by reactionary political forces.

Arab nationalism no longer looks like the dominant ideology on the demonstrations we’ve seen in Sydney, London and NYC. Alongside it there’s a mixture of Islamism plus the ‘decolonisation’ agenda of postmodernist academia.

For the past two years, during the Ukraine war, this incipient red-brown ideology has been mostly contained:

with this conflict there is now a danger that the masses turn up, and are corralled into this emergent fusion of far-left/far-right politics.

I’ve spent the period post-2016 trying to equip the democratic left to defeat this ideology. It’s not about being ‘anti-woke’, or apologising for colonialism: it means teaching people that a cocktail of anti-humanism, anti-universalism and anti-rationality is a route to excusing the totalitarian states in Russia and China, and – now – the genocidal actions of their proxies.

A case study of this is the statement issued by 31 Harvard student groups saying they ‘hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all the unfolding violence’ – just hours after the Hamas attack began.

the global left is rapidly splitting into irreconcilable camps – as Edward Thompson recognised it would, under the influence of post-structuralism in the 1970s.

The logical implication is that Palestinians have no agency whatsoever. That Hamas murders civilians because Israel has ‘structured’ Palestinian reality to make that inevitable. For people presumably wedded to ‘decolonising’ the curriculum, it is a shockingly colonialist premise.

The logic is that Israel is responsible for everything Hamas does because its violence has ‘structured every aspect of Palestinian existence’ since the Nakba.

There are many civilisations, and none is superior or inferior to another. They are equal since each civilisation represents a unique expression of its own culture, traditions, and the aspirations of its people.

In a way, what Putin preaches is an ‘intersectionality of the peoples’: identity politics raised from the level of the individual to the level of the ethnic group.

And it turns out anti-Enlightenment leftism makes it pretty easy to converge with that view. The common assumptions are disdain for universalism, scorn for international law and human rights, repudiation of the Enlightenment (and thus liberalism, social democracy, humanistic Marxism and anarchism) and worship of any totalitarian government that delivers economic development.

This is the modern incarnation of Stalinism, and – to the surprise of nobody who has studied actual Stalinism – it has no problem seeing fascists like Hamas as the ‘agent of progress’.

we need to understand how closely this hyper-deterministic and anti-universal world view maps onto the ideology presented, for example, by Putin at Valdai last week. For Putin there is no single human civilisation, only civilisations, which must be rooted in ethnicity establish their co-existence through the survival of the fittest:

One camp, he said, is a theology. The other a tradition of active reason. The first repudiates liberalism and universalism. The second recognises its debt to liberalism and wants to make universalism consistent

The first claims international law is a sham; the second knows that, though the institutions of the rules-based order are flawed, they are better than chaos.

that you can stand with the Israeli people under attack while simultaneously standing up for the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination.

Those flaunting their joy at the murder of Israeli civilians need to understand the licence this creates in the minds of rightwing ethno-nationalists in our own society. What Hamas did to the kids of Kfar Azar, the far right wants to do to you.

But I was constantly confronted by the contradictions embedded in American leadership, the knowledge that our government arms autocrats while its rhetoric appeals to the dissidents trying to overthrow them or that our nation enforces rules — for the conduct of war, the resolution of disputes and the flow of commerce — while insisting that America be excused from following them when they become inconvenient.

He helped extend the war in Vietnam and expand it to Cambodia and Laos, where the United States rained down more bombs than it dropped on Germany and Japan in World War II. That bombing — often indiscriminately massacring civilians — did nothing to improve the terms on which the Vietnam War ended; if anything, it just indicated the lengths to which the United States would go to express its displeasure at losing.

For decades, he was a coveted guest at gatherings of statesmen and tycoons, perhaps because he could always provide an intellectual framework for why some people are powerful and justified in wielding power

Mr. Kissinger was fixated on credibility, the idea that America must impose a price on those who ignore our demands to shape the decisions of others in the future. It’s hard to see how the bombing of Laos, the coup in Chile or the killings in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) contributed to the outcome of the Cold War.

But Mr. Kissinger’s unsentimental view of global affairs allowed him to achieve consequential breakthroughs with autocratic countries closer to America’s weight class — a détente with the Soviet Union that reduced the escalatory momentum of the arms race and an opening to China that deepened the Sino-Soviet split, integrated the People’s Republic of China into the global order and prefaced Chinese reforms that lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.

From a strategic standpoint, Mr. Kissinger surely knew, being a superpower carried with it a cavernous margin of error that can be forgiven by history

Now history has come full circle. Around the world, we see a resurgence of autocracy and ethnonationalism, most acutely in Russia’s war against Ukraine

Just a few decades after the end of the Vietnam War, the same countries we’d bombed were seeking expanded trade with the United States. Bangladesh and East Timor are now independent nations that receive American assistance. Chile is governed by a millennial socialist whose minister of defense is Mr. Allende’s granddaughter.

Superpowers do what they must. The wheel of history turns. When and where you live determines whether you get crushed or lifted by it

But that worldview mistakes cynicism — or realism — for wisdom. The story, what it’s all about, matters. Ultimately, the Berlin Wall came down not because of chess moves made on the board of a great game but rather because people in the East wanted to live like the people in the West.

Economics, popular culture and social movements mattered. Despite all our flaws, we had a better system and story.

Credibility, after all, is not just about whether you punish an adversary to send a message to another; it’s also about whether you are what you say you are. No one can expect perfection in the affairs of state any more than in relations among human beings.

But the United States has paid a price for its hypocrisy, though it’s harder to measure than the outcome of a war or negotiation. Over the decades, our story about democracy has come to ring hollow to a growing number of people who can point to the places where our actions drained our words of meaning and “democracy” just sounded like an extension of American interests.

Similarly, our insistence on a rules-based international order has been ignored by strongmen who point to America’s sins to justify their own.

The generous defense is that Mr. Kissinger represented an ethos that saw the ends (the defeat of the Soviet Union and revolutionary Communism) as justifying the means. But for huge swaths of the world, this mind-set carried a brutal message that America has often conveyed to its own marginalized populations: We care about democracy for us, not for them.

In Gaza the United States has supported an Israeli military operation that has killed civilians at a pace that has once again suggested to much of the world that we are selective in our embrace of international laws and norms.

Meanwhile, at home, we see how democracy has become subordinate to the pursuit of power within a chunk of the Republican Party.

This is where cynicism can lead. Because when there is no higher aspiration, no story to give meaning to our actions, politics and geopolitics become merely a zero-sum game. In that kind of world, might makes right.

his is also a cautionary tale. As imperfect as we are, the United States needs our story to survive. It’s what holds together a multiracial democracy at home and differentiates us from Russia and China abroad.

That story insists that a child in Laos is equal in dignity and worth to our children and that the people of Chile have the same right of self-determination as we do. For the United States, that must be a part of national security. We forget that at our peril.

The picture is much the same in many other formerly communist countrie

Slovakia’s politics are particularly poisonous, swamped by wild conspiracy theories and bile.

The foundations of this were laid in the 1990s when Mr. Meciar formed what is still one of the country’s two main political blocs: an alliance of right-wing nationalists, business cronies and anti-establishment leftists. All thrived on denouncing their centrist and liberal opponents as enemies willing to sell out the country’s interests to the West

“Meciar was a pioneer,” he said. “He was a typical representative of national populism with an authoritarian approach, and so is Fico.”

On the day Mr. Fico was shot, Parliament was meeting to endorse an overhaul of public television to purge what his governing party views as unfair bias in favor of political opponents, a reprise of efforts in the 1990s by Mr. Meciar to mute media critics.

The legislation was part of a raft of measures that the European Commission in February said risked doing “irreparable damage” to the rule of law. These include measures to limit corruption investigations and impose what critics denounced as Russian-style restrictions on nongovernmental organizations. The government opposes military aid to Ukraine and L.G.B.T.Q. rights, is often at odds with the European Union and, like Mr. Orban, favors friendly relations with Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia.

In the run-up to the election last September that returned Mr. Fico, a fixture of Slovak politics for more than two decades, to power, he and his allies took an increasingly hostile stance toward the United States and Ukraine, combined with sympathetic words for Russia.

Their statements often recalled a remark by Mr. Meciar, who, resisting demands in the 1990s that he must change his ways if Slovakia wanted to join the European Union, held up Russia as an alternative haven: “if they don’t want us in the West, we’ll go East.”

But, he added, “the frames that the society and its elites use to interpret the conflict remain the same: a choice between a Western path and being something of a bridge between the East and the West, as well as a choice between liberal democracy and illiberal, authoritarian government.”

Andrej Danko, the leader of the party, which is now part of the new coalition government formed by Mr. Fico after the September election, said that the attempt to assassinate Mr. Fico represented the “start of a political war” between the country’s two opposing camps.

Iveta Radicova, a sociologist opposed to Mr. Fico who is a former prime minister, said Slovakia’s woes were part of a wider crisis with roots that extend far beyond its early stumbles under Mr. Meciar.

“Many democracies are headed toward the black hole,” as countries from Hungary in the East to the Netherlands in the West succumb to the appeal of national populism, she said. “This shift is happening everywhere.”

somebody threw a bottle of flammable liquid through the window of Orange County’s GOP headquarters, setting campaign signs, supplies and furniture ablaze before burning itself out.

A swastika and “Nazi Republicans get out of town or else” were spray painted on the side of an adjacent building.

I will use every resource as governor to assist local authorities in this investigation.”

incident took place in Orange County, home of the University of North Carolina in nearby Chapel Hill.

But Clinton’s campaign tweeted, “The attack on the Orange County HQ @NCGOP office is horrific and unacceptable. Very grateful that everyone is safe.”

“Violence has no place in our democracy and can not be tolerated. The culprits must be caught and brought to justice.”

“political terrorism.”

“Whether you are Republican, Democrat or Independent, all Americans should be outraged by this hate-filled and violent attack against our democracy. … Everyone in this country should be free to express their political viewpoints without fear for their own safety.”

“The idea is to intimidate us, to make us crawl back in the shadows,” he said. “But I think it’s going to backfire on them.”

“It always happens that toward the end of the campaign, emotions get both frayed and intensified.”

“However important it was for an individual to win fame and add to his and his family’s reputation, this should always be subordinated to the good of the Republic … no disappointed Roman politician sought the aid of a foreign power.”

now we have a president-elect who openly asked Russia to help smear his opponent, and all indications are that the bulk of his party was and is just fine with that. (A new poll shows that Republican approval of Vladimir Putin has surged even though — or, more likely, precisely because — it has become clear that Russian intervention played an important role in the U.S. election.) Winning domestic political struggles is all that matters, the good of the republic be damned.

Famously, on paper the transformation of Rome from republic to empire never happened. Officially, imperial Rome was still ruled by a Senate that just happened to defer to the emperor, whose title originally just meant “commander,” on everything that mattered.

For such people, toeing the party line and defending the party’s rule are all that matters. And if they sometimes seem consumed with rage at anyone who challenges their actions, well, that’s how hacks always respond when called on their hackery.

Consider what just happened in North Carolina.

Combine this sort of thing with continuing efforts to disenfranchise or at least discourage voting by minority groups, and you have the potential making of a de facto one-party state: one that maintains the fiction of democracy, but has rigged the game so that the other side can never win.

My question, instead, is why one party’s politicians and officials no longer seem to care about what we used to think were essential American values. And let’s be clear: This is a Republican story, not a case of “both sides do it.”

what directly drives the attack on democracy, I’d argue, is simple careerism on the part of people who are apparatchiks within a system insulated from outside pressures by gerrymandered districts, unshakable partisan loyalty, and lots and lots of plutocratic financial support.

the process of destroying democratic substance while preserving forms is already underway.

One thing all of this makes clear is that the sickness of American politics didn’t begin with Donald Trump, any more than the sickness of the Roman Republic began with Caesar. The erosion of democratic foundations has been underway for decades, and there’s no guarantee that we will ever be able to recover.

But if there is any hope of redemption, it will have to begin with a clear recognition of how bad things are. American democracy is very much on the edge.

you also have to consider a possibility that – if you are a liberal, humanist democrat – may be even more shocking: that oligarchic nationalism is the default form of failing economies.

In economics, political science and the study of international relations there has been, for about three decades, a general assumption that the current framework is permanent. Just as in Soviet academia, if globalisation turns out to have been just a temporary and reversible thing, textbooks once revered will have to lie abandoned.

there’s one big difference. The dissidents of the late Soviet era fought for democracy and human rights under the general concept of “the west”. For us, if xenophobic populism triumphs, there will be no “west” to aspire to: if liberal, democratic societies begin to go the way of Orbán’s Hungary, there will be no external power to help us.

Our last great hope will be ourselves. And there are enough of us to stop this second great collapse towards oligarchy and nationalism.

I spoke with Ceaser about Trump and the unintended effects of trying to make democracy more democratic.

You lay out four goals that a selection system should ideally be able to achieve:(1) It should promote candidates with presidential character,(2) the accession to power should be seen as legitimate,(3) the executive should have qualifications for the office, and(4) “highly ambitious” people should be prevented from taking office.

When Woodrow Wilson proposed [a popular-vote nomination system], the idea was that the types of appeals made to the public would be high-minded, and we would have these very deliberative debates by great statesmen. The minute this got underway, though, people started believing more in propaganda, public relations, and advertising.

When you look at recent races, you notice something in play: people for whom running for the presidency is their entry into politics rather than the capstone of a career

The difficulty of really walking it back substantially would be to ask the American people to have a different conception of what’s legitimate in the nomination.

There are disadvantages to a limited system, too—no system is perfect. It can become stale; it can protect too much of the status quo; it can fail to hear messages that are surging up.

They have other reasons, too—political reasons. They fear the opposite party more. They’re united in their distaste for Hillary Clinton. But it’s powerful—look, Trump is the winner. He won, fair and square.

For example, in the period of the Progressive Era up until the 1970s, you had some primaries—so you got to taste a little of what the people wanted—but the party still held control. You had a little bit of both. And that’s the superdelegate idea—you try to mix.

They don’t have a basis even of limiting who the candidates are to their own party. Bernie Sanders is not a Democratic. He was a socialist. And Trump was really not a Republican. But they came in and rented a party because that’s the way the rules are set up.

A party was a private organization that worked by its own rules and had its own purposes. It wasn’t obliged to run things according to popular majority rule of all the people, but maybe majority rule of all the party members—people who have been important in the party.

That was the idea—you’d have a high-minded debate, and the people would decide, it would be highly legitimate because there’s no stronger principal in a democracy than that the people should rule. Instead of forcing people to make deals behind the scenes and all that used to go on at conventions, they would articulate a program and the best person would win.

The Libertarian Party has been around—they’ve been trying to build up an actual party over the long term, and the better they do, the more that would be a conceivable strategy. I just don’t think they’re anywhere near a majority of the American people.

Obama’s resistance to direct intervention only grew. After several months of deliberation, he authorized the CIA to train and fund Syrian rebels, but he also shared the outlook of his former defense secretary, Robert Gates, who had routinely asked in meetings, “Shouldn’t we finish up the two wars we have before we look for another?”

In his first term, he came to believe that only a handful of threats in the Middle East conceivably warranted direct U.S. military intervention. These included the threat posed by al‑Qaeda; threats to the continued existence of Israel (“It would be a moral failing for me as president of the United States” not to defend Israel, he once told me); and, not unrelated to Israel’s security, the threat posed by a nuclear-armed Iran.

Bush and Scowcroft removed Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait in 1991, and they deftly managed the disintegration of the Soviet Union; Scowcroft also, on Bush’s behalf, toasted the leaders of China shortly after the slaughter in Tiananmen Square.

As Obama was writing his campaign manifesto, The Audacity of Hope, in 2006, Susan Rice, then an informal adviser, felt it necessary to remind him to include at least one line of praise for the foreign policy of President Bill Clinton, to partially balance the praise he showered on Bush and Scowcroft.

“When you have a professional army,” he once told me, “that is well armed and sponsored by two large states”—Iran and Russia—“who have huge stakes in this, and they are fighting against a farmer, a carpenter, an engineer who started out as protesters and suddenly now see themselves in the midst of a civil conflict …” He paused. “The notion that we could have—in a clean way that didn’t commit U.S. military forces—changed the equation on the ground there was never true.”

The message Obama telegraphed in speeches and interviews was clear: He would not end up like the second President Bush—a president who became tragically overextended in the Middle East, whose decisions filled the wards of Walter Reed with grievously wounded soldiers, who was helpless to stop the obliteration of his reputation, even when he recalibrated his policies in his second term. Obama would say privately that the first task of an American president in the post-Bush international arena was “Don’t do stupid shit.”

Hillary Clinton, when she was Obama’s secretary of state, argued for an early and assertive response to Assad’s violence. In 2014, after she left office, Clinton told me that “the failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad … left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled.” When The Atlantic published this statement, and also published Clinton’s assessment that “great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle,” Obama became “rip-shit angry,” according to one of his senior advisers. The president did not understand how “Don’t do stupid shit” could be considered a controversial slogan.

The Iraq invasion, Obama believed, should have taught Democratic interventionists like Clinton, who had voted for its authorization, the dangers of doing stupid shit. (Clinton quickly apologized to Obama for her comments,