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“It was a pretty drastic change; it happened overnight,” McCormick says. “The ancient witnesses really were onto something. They were not being hysterical or imagining the end of the world.”

The effects of the 536 eruption were compounded by eruptions in 540 and 547, and it took a long time for the Northern Hemisphere to recover. “The Late Antique Little Ice Age that began in the spring of 536 lasted in western Europe until about 660, and it lasted until about 680 in Central Asia,” McCormick says.

This period of cold and starvation caused economic stagnation in Europe that intensified in 541 when the first bubonic plague broke out. The plague killed between one-third and one-half of the population in the Byzantine Empire, or Eastern Roman Empire.

in fact, that the birds eventually went extinct; the last known passenger pigeon died in 1914.

The Compleat Housewife would likely have been found in any well-to-do household in the late colonial era, when the mid-day “dinner” could consist of three courses, with multiple dishes per course.

Though regional, seasonal and other differences make it difficult to generalize about a typical colonial diet, the following seven foods and beverages are a small sample of what might have been found on many colonial tables.

Pickles

umble cookies—sometimes spelled “jumbal”—can be considered the ancestors of modern sugar cookies, though far less sweet. Recipes appeared in cookbooks in England as early as 1585, and the cookies became a popular staple in the colonies. “You will find recipes for jumble cookies by the thousands,” says Nahon; even Martha Washington was said to have her own.

Black pepper’s antibacterial properties make it a good preservative, and this imported spice took center stage in the pepper cake, a gingerbread-like loaf flavored with black pepper and molasses and studded with candied fruits.

Colonial Americans drank a lot of alcohol, and this popular drink-dessert dating to the 18th century combined sweetened whipped cream with wine or hard cider. The resulting frothy concoction was often served on special occasions. Amelia Simmons’ American Cookery, which in 1796 became the first cookbook by an American to be published in the United States, included a recipe for syllabub that called for the cook to flavor cider with sugar, grate nutmeg into it—and milk a cow directly into the liquor. 

They also provided up to three meals a day for children, with some offering prepared meals for mothers to take with them when they picked up their kids.

“The ones that we often hear about were the ‘model’ day nurseries that were set up at airplane factories [on the West coast],” says Michel. “Those were ones where the federal funding came very quickly, and some of the leading voices in the early childhood education movement…became quickly involved in setting [them] up,” she says. 

For these centers, organizers enlisted architects to build attractive buildings that would cater to the needs of childcare, specifically. “There was a lot of publicity about those, but those were unusual. Most of the childcare centers were kind of makeshift. They were set up in [places like] church basements.”

When the World War II childcare centers first opened, many women were reluctant to hand their children over to them. According to Chris M. Herbst, a professor of public affairs at Arizona State University who has written about these programs in the Journal of Labor Economics, a lot of these women ended up having positive experiences.

As the war ended in August 1945, the Federal Works Agency announced it would stop funding childcare as soon as possible. Parents responded by sending the agency 1,155 letters, 318 wires, 794 postcards and petitions with 3,647 signatures urging the government to keep them open. In response, the U.S. government provided additional funding for childcare through February 1946. After that, it was over.

This was during the Cold War, a time when anti-childcare activists pointed to the fact that the Soviet Union funded childcare as an argument for why the United States shouldn’t. President Richard Nixon vetoed the bill, arguing that it would “commit the vast moral authority of the National Government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over against the family-centered approach.”

U.S. history that the country came close to instituting universal childcare.

The principle of the equality of taxation was maintained, all citizens were liable. This reflected a confirmation of the abolition of feudalism and an expressed belief in “career open to talent”. There was to be both formal legal equality and equality of opportunities, holding office would depend on ability, loyalty and experience, not accident of birth.

Analysis of the massive votes in favour had undermined their credibility. The organiser of the 1800 plebiscite, Napoleon’s brother, perhaps worried at the Jacobin sympathies of many soldiers, simply added 500,000 votes to the “yes” column for the army. What is more, the system of voting was open rather than by secret ballot and the question in the plebiscite only sought approval for a decision that had already been taken.

In the government Napoleon agreed with Sieyes concept, there should be authority from above and trust from below, of the general nature of the Constitution but instead of 3 Consuls as Sieyes thought Napoleon wanted political authority in his own hand. At the end he accepted maintaining the government with 3 consuls but he named himself the First Consul and ordered that the other two would have no independent executive authority. This showed how Napoleon wanted power. He reinforced his power when in the 2 Constitution he was made the First Consul for life and in the 3 Constitution named himself Emperor. Moreover, Napoleon established effective control over the legislative process. He established a similar control over the executive. Under the Constitution he could appoint the second and third consuls, government ministers, the prefects of the departments of France and the mayor of larger communes. The first three were appointed from the national list and the last from the communal lists. At the centre there was no cabinet system, individual ministers reported directly to Napoleon. All effective decision making was concentrated in his hands, no minister or prefect, for instance, could take action unless sure that it was authorised by Napoleon. This was top-down government, centralised and authoritarian. Even at the local level, holders of government posts were appointed from above, not elected from below. Napoleon’s control of the government system was more absolute than that of the monarchy that ruled in France before 1789.

In terms of liberty, it could be argued that Napoleon fundamentally violated revolutionary principles. Whilst he allowed religious freedom by tolerating all religions, as is expressed in the Organic Articles, the hierarchies of the various churches were under his control. What is more, there was no freedom of speech. Censorship was a key element of Napoleonic rule of France, and those suspected of sedition could be tried and punished outside the normal framework of the law. Nor was there freedom of movement for workers compelled to carry their livret. It also affected Napoleon’s view about the subordinate position of women and children. Whilst a man could imprison an adulterous wife or disobedient child, a married woman had few property rights and could only sue for divorce if a husband insisted on his mistress sharing the family home.

Secondary education was largely restricted to the middle classes and sons of officers in the army. In the 37 schools that were found in France the curriculum was closed supervised. Free thinking was discouraged. Schools taught a utilitarian curriculum based around France, mathematics, history, geography and science and inculcated both military values and loyalty to the regime. Alongside this state system, independent and Catholic schools continued to flourish, despite high fees. In order to bring such schools under closer government supervision, in 1806 Napoleon set up the Imperial University, which was in some respects a kind of nineteenth-century Ofsted, to oversee the curriculum and inspect schools.

some South African scientists have pointed out that the travel ban may also be hampering the race to learn more about Omicron by blocking supplies of the reagents they need to study it.

Partly because of this South Africa was, until recently, recording less than one-tenth as many daily covid cases as Britain. “It boggles the mind that people in the United Kingdom can pile into a full football stadium and in the United States it appears as though it’s business as usual, but as soon as something happens on African soil, those countries go into a hysterical tailspin,”

The new travel restrictions will wallop the region’s tourism industry, just as hotels, game reserves and wine estates were preparing for their busiest months of the year

Because of the drop in tourism and the imposition of lockdowns the economy shrank by about 6% last year. Thousands of small businesses collapsed

The ripples may spread far beyond southern Africa to countries such as Kenya and Uganda that do not yet face travel restrictions.

South Africa’s health workers are gearing up for another December of mayhem as covid’s fourth wave washes over the country.

The emergence of Omicron, which seems to spread easily, will probably upset those estimates. “It looks like it's spreading quickly but there’s so much that’s unknown, specifically if it will evade the vaccines and its severity,”

since the civil-rights movement, Republicans (and many non-Republicans) have expressed two conflicting racial mantras: (1) racism no longer exists, and (2) racism is spreading against white people. Since Joe Biden’s election, this second mantra has overtaken the first.

White-supremacist ideology lives on what Heather McGhee calls the “zero-sum myth,” the idea that progress for people of color necessarily comes at white folks’ expense.

It fearmongers about the future: If white people are not worshipped in schools, then they will be demonized; if white people don’t reign supreme, then they will be subjugated; if white people don’t hoard resources and opportunities, then they will be starved; if white people cannot kill at will, then they will be killed at will

White violence is presumed to be self-defense. Defending yourself against a white supremacist is presumed to be a criminal act.

Extreme fear perhaps breeds this extreme fear. White supremacists probably fear revenge, retaliation, the tables turning—as they wipe the blood of democracy, of equality, of the dying and dead off their hands

they know the level of brutality they have leveled against people of color and their white allies.

They probably can’t imagine that Indigenous anti-racists just want their land back and aren’t genocidal; that Black anti-racists just want reparations and don’t want to enslave; that Asian anti-racists just want to be visible and don’t want to render white people invisible; that Latino and Middle Eastern anti-racists just want to flee violence and don’t want to invade predominantly white nations.

History reproduces itself. But when people don’t know history—or are barred from learning it—how can they ever recognize its reproduction?

UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency reported in November that Iran had stockpiled more than 2,300kg of enriched uranium, 11 times the level permitted in the deal.

America cannot provide such a guarantee—nor, for that matter, can the deal’s other signatories, including Iran itself.

Even if forbidden work is halted, Iran has gained valuable know-how that cannot be forgotten. American officials say time is short to restore the deal, but refuse to say what would constitute an irreparable step on Iran’s part.

November 29th that Iran had at last agreed to discuss not only sanctions but also its own activities.

America, they argue, will preserve non-nuclear sanctions that hobble Iran’s economy. They would rather shun the West, pursue trade with China and focus on building a so-called “resistance economy” at home.

Water shortages are common in Iran. The UN says that available water per person has dropped by 28% over the past three decades, to 1,675 cubic metres a year, a level it defines as “water stress”.

The rial has lost 86% of its value in the past five years. Though inflation eased last month, it is still running at 44% a year. Prices for staple foods like milk, bread and eggs are rising even faster.

Russia would see a 15-percent decline in its gross domestic product this year, which would wipe out much of the economic growth that Mr. Putin has presided over since taking office in 1999.

Further escalation of the war could lead more countries to refuse to buy Russian energy, the institute’s economists said, “which would drastically impair Russia’s ability to import goods and services, deepening the recession.”

The prospect of the Kremlin seizing private assets rattled Russia’s business community. Vladimir Potanin, a metals magnate who is one of Russia’s richest men, released a statement warning that such nationalization would “bring us back 100 years, to 1917” — the year of the Russian Revolution, when the Bolsheviks forcibly took over private enterprises.

Those employed by the sprawling public sector and state-owned companies — who make up much of Mr. Putin’s political base — are relatively insulated, with their jobs likely to be secure. By contrast, middle-class Russians whose jobs and lives are tied closely to the world economy, and who are already more likely than the average Russian to oppose Mr. Putin, are under greater threat.

“The medicine could turn out to be worse than the illness, even from the point of view of declared goals,” Mr. Enikolopov said, arguing that the sanctions could end up entrenching anti-Western views. “No one is looking at the collateral damage at all.”

Timofey Bordachev, a prominent political analyst, wrote that the new “Iron Curtain now descending between the West and Russia” offered the country “an absolutely fantastic chance to start a more meaningful and independent life.”

But not all Russians shared that optimism. Interviews with private sector workers across the country on Thursday revealed deep unease and showed that the economic crisis was already taking its toll on jobs and livelihoods.

It means scrapping rules about weapons exports, a huge boost in defence spending and an end to Russian energy imports. A Russian gas pipeline to Germany called Nord Stream 2 has already been suspended.

"For the foreseeable future, co-operation with Russia will not occur. It will be more about containment and deterrence and, if needed, defence against Russia," Mr Schmid tells me.

Unexpectedly hawkish words for a party that until seven weeks ago believed Germany's historical guilt and moral duty to make up for Nazi crimes meant peace with Russia at all costs.

Even Germany's view of its own history is changing.

Until the invasion mainstream opinion was that German reunification was thanks to dialogue with Moscow by another SPD chancellor, Willy Brandt. But now the debate has shifted, with reminders that Mr Brandt's diplomacy was backed up by strong deterrence, including a West German defence budget of 3% of GDP.

The issue of German historical war guilt has also become more nuanced. Before the invasion the government argued against weapon deliveries to Ukraine because of Nazi crimes against Russia.

"Under Putin, official Russian policy tried to monopolise the memory of the Second World War for the bilateral German-Russian relationship," explains Mr Schmid. This blinded parts of German society to the suffering of Ukrainians during he war, he adds.

Now there is a greater awareness of Ukraine's traumas under the Nazis.

Berlin's rhetoric has shifted dramatically. But some ask whether actions are following fast enough. Certainly warm words of support are not enough for Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky. He has criticised Germany's continued reliance on Russian oil and gas.

In a BBC interview last week, Mr Zelensky called payments for Russian energy "blood money". And a planned visit to Kyiv by President Steinmeier was cancelled at the last minute.

certainly German politicians and commentators interpret the failed visit as a sign of Ukraine's distrust in the German president, who as foreign minister under Angela Merkel spent years trying to achieve peace by engaging with Russia.

"Our partners look at us, and say: OK, you do a Zeitenwende but what are you practically doing?" she says. "On sanctions we are timid and on weapons delivery, we are reluctant. So, rightly, they wonder what that Zeitenwende is about, and given that Germany is a big economic, military, political power in the middle of Europe, whatever we do makes a difference, in good ways and bad."

"This is a dilemma that Germany has created itself," argues political scientist Liana Fix, head of the Körber Foundation. "That's obviously difficult to accept for other countries, who are willing to go ahead with an embargo and have done their homework on energy diversification."

Ironically, it's a Green Party politician, Economy Minister Robert Habeck, from a party that for years has been calling for energy independence from Russia, who is having to solve this dilemma.

On military support for Ukraine, Berlin says it is prepared to send whatever weapons Kyiv needs. But there are allegations that some ministries are getting tied up in bureaucracy. Here, too, it is a Green politician, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, who is pushing the governing coalition to go faster. She has called for heavy weaponry, such as tanks or fighter jets, for Ukraine.

Olaf Scholz has to keep his party onside, govern in a three-way coalition and overturn Germany's guilt-laden pacifist identity overnight.

But even his allies say the chancellor should at least communicate better what's going on

Meanwhile, it feels like many individual Germans are going through their own Zeitenwende. Ariane Bemmer, a columnist for the Tagesspiegel newspaper, has written about reassessing her own feelings towards Russia. "I definitely got it wrong, it's like losing a friend,"

Like many in the former West Germany in the 1980s, she was wary of US-style cutthroat capitalism. She bought a book called Ami Go Home - she never read it, but felt it would look good on her bookshelf - and was intrigued by the reforms in Russia.

"In America you had Ronald Reagan as a president, which was a shock for us. We thought: what will he do, this crazy actor with his cowboy boots? Will he set the world on fire? Russia was a place where all the good changes were, perestroika, freedom, wind of change," she says.

Few in Germany think that now. In one recent poll, 55% of Germans said Berlin should send heavy weapons, such as tanks and fighter jets, to Ukraine to fight against Russia.

For Ariane, and many other Germans, any lingering Russophile romanticism vanished for good the day Putin's tanks rolled over Ukraine's border.

Forty-five percent claimed they were so worried that they struggled to function on a daily basis, the definition of an anxiety disorder.

“climate change might not necessarily increase mental health issues because people might adapt over time, meaning that higher temperatures could become normal and not be experienced as anomalous or extreme.”

yes. Before the media began reporting on putative temperature records—the scientific evidence for which is also weak—heat waves were treated as a normal part of summer. Uncomfortable, but figuratively nothing to sweat about.

according to a World Health Organization report last year, the very “awareness of climate change and extreme weather events and their impacts” may lead to a host of ills, including strained social relationships, anxiety, depression, intimate-partner violence, helplessness, suicidal behavior and alcohol and substance abuse.

A study in 2021 of 16- to 25-year-olds in 10 countries including the U.S. reported that 59% were very or extremely worried about climate change, and 84% were at least moderately worried

The Bloomberg article cites a July meta-analysis in the medical journal Lancet, which found a tenuous link between higher temperatures and suicides and mental illness. But the study deems the collective evidence of “low certainty” owing to inconsistent study findings, methodologies, measured variables and definitions.

Displacement is a maladaptive mechanism by which people redirect negative emotions from one thing to another

These anxieties are no more rational than the threats from climate change are existential.

A more apt term for such fear is climate hypochondria.

The New Yorker magazine earlier this month published a 4,400-word piece titled “What to Do With Climate Emotions” by Jia Tolentino, a woman in the throes of such neurosis

Ms. Tolentino goes on to describe how climate therapists can help patients cope. “The goal is not to resolve the intrusive feeling and put it away” but, as one therapist advises her, “to aim for a middle ground of sustainable distress.” Even the climate left’s despair must be “sustainable.”

there’s nothing normal about climate anxiety, despite the left’s claims to the contrary.

Progressives may even use climate change to displace their other anxieties—for instance, about having children

“First and foremost, it is imperative that adults understand that youth climate anxiety (also referred to as eco-anxiety, solastalgia, eco-guilt or ecological grief) is an emotionally and cognitively functional response to real existential threats,” a May 10 editorial in the journal Nature explained. “Although feelings of powerlessness, grief and fear can be profoundly disruptive—particularly for young people unaccustomed to the depth and complexity of such feelings—it is important to acknowledge that this response is a rational one.”

Climate hypochondriacs deserve to be treated with compassion, much like anyone who suffers from mental illness. They shouldn’t, however, expect everyone else to enable their neuroses.

DeSantis, whose “anti-woke” agenda has put Florida at the forefront of revising how Black history is taught, has come under fire for supporting a set of standards for middle school instruction that include teaching “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

It all portends hopeless bifurcation, Zimmerman said, suggesting that America is becoming a place where what students learn about the country’s past will depend whether they live in a conservative or liberal state.

Conservatives contend that instruction on race and history has shifted since then to reflect liberal ideologies and values in ways inappropriate to the schoolhouse. They have advocated returning to a more traditional way of teaching American history, one less critical of the nation’s past flaws and less explicit about linking current inequalities to past injustices.

The dueling American histories “are about not just what has happened, but what we do about it going forward,” he said. “If you can tell a story that removes the harm that has been done, if you can tell a story that removes the violence, that removes the disenfranchisement, that removes the targeting of certain communities — then what you do is you change the way we believe we have to deal with it.”

Events during Trump’s presidency — including a deadly white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, the murder of George Floyd and the publication of the New York Times’s 1619 Project reexamining the role of slavery in America’s founding — propelled the country toward a cultural conflagration over the idea that America’s history of systemic racism was still affecting minorities today.

Various institutions embraced the Black Lives Matter movement and sought to take actions aimed at acknowledging and curing past injustices. The movement was especially potent among liberals, and then-candidate Biden reoriented much of his campaign in the summer of 2020 to focus on “equity.”

A string of recent activity — from Supreme Court decision striking down college affirmative action programs to mass shootings by white supremacists to book bans by some Republican officials — has propelled the issue back to the forefront of Democratic agenda.

After the 2020 protests over Floyd’s murder, more than 160 Confederate memorials were removed, relocated or renamed, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Still, a January 2022 report found that there were still 723 monuments and 741 roadways dedicated to Confederates, as well as hundreds of schools, counties, parks, buildings and holidays.

“There are states that can remove history from a textbook, but they can never destroy the physical places where history happened,” Leggs said. “Historic preservation is all the more important at this moment in our history, and through our work, we can ignite both a cultural reckoning and cultural renaissance.”

a different trend covered in the Peltzman paper: the persistent happiness advantage enjoyed by married couples over the unmarried, which has slightly widened since the early 1970s and now sits at around 35 points on a scale running from -100 to 100.

Over that same period, Americans have become much less likely to be married overall. In 1970, just 9 percent of people ages 25 to 50 had never tied the knot; in 2018, it was 35 percent.

the simplest possible explanation for declining happiness: For women maybe first, and for men too, eventually, less wedlock means more woe.

Barbieland itself is a female-first utopia that looks fundamentally dystopian — plastic, denatured, death-denying, cut off from love and procreation. The way that Barbiedom marginalizes images of pregnancy and motherhood, to say nothing of literal baby dolls, is a running preoccupation of the film

Is the Greta Gerwig movie proudly feminist, crypto-conservative or somewhere in between?

The simplest reading is the feminist one. The movie depicts a dolltopia where Barbies occupy every important job and office (with their Kens as arm candy) and tell themselves that their example has solved all of women’s problems in the real world, too — only to discover, when Margot Robbie’s “stereotypical Barbie” goes on a quest into our own contemporary reality, that sexism still exists, the patriarchy is disguised but maybe still resilient, the board of Mattel is proudly “feminist” but all male, and early 21st-century women are being asked to do it all for meager recompense.

Michael Knowles of The Daily Wire claims, “conservative, anti-feminist, pro-family, pro-motherhood” themes

In part, the conservative spin comes from the sheer fun of Gosling’s performance

I want to talk about these findings in the light of the running debate about the true ideological perspective of the billion-dollar box-office juggernaut “Barbie.”

Ken’s plight is treated sympathetically — he’s mostly running his coup to impress Barbie, and what are men for in the post-sexual-revolution landscape, anyway?

Barbie’s own arc is away from the female-dominated dystopia and back toward embodied womanhood, the real world with all its patriarchal holdovers

“Barbie” is a movie with a feminist default, but also complicated and sometimes muddled feelings about what the sexual revolution has done and where feminism ought to go.

It’s against the resilient patriarchy, but wary of the girlboss alternative

It wants womanhood and motherhood, but it doesn’t want the Kens back in charge, and it doesn’t really know what purpose men should serve.

In each narrative, the one way that the current dissatisfactions of women and men can’t be resolved is with the happy ending that even stories about the battle of the sexes used to take for granted — not a rearrangement of political power but a romantic partnership, not one sex’s rule but both sexes’ contentment.

so the movie ends — again, spoiler — with Barbie out of Barbieland but on her own, seeking out some sort of reproductive destiny at the gynecologist with a mother-daughter cheerleading squad beside her and no Ken in sight.

There’s an interesting parallel to the ending of Lena Dunham’s series “Girls,”

A guy can literally organize a revolution and it still isn’t enough to make Barbie see him as a lover, a romantic partner, an erotic object, a husband or a father.

In the movie they made, “Barbie and Ken” is a statement of reverse subordination, female rule and male eclipse. But in reality, nothing may matter as much to male and female happiness, and indeed, to the future of the human race, as whether Barbie and Ken can make that “and” into something reciprocal and fertile — a bridge, a bond, a marriage.

My boyfriend was supportive of my focus, but he didn’t share it. When I brought up global warming, he’d often try to comfort me: to wrap me in a hug, cue up an old episode of “Seinfeld,” offer a CBD gummy. I struggled to tell him that I didn’t need anesthesia or answers, I just wanted a relationship where we shared more of the same inquiries.

“if you do care about the same questions, it doesn’t necessarily matter if you arrive at the same answers.” Soon it wasn’t just the far-off future we’d stopped talking about, it was our dreams for the weekend. Outside of quarantine, our lives had slipped onto different rails. We broke up when it became easier not to talk about feelings at all.

relationships succeed not because you like holding hands but because you like looking in the same direction.

When another man told me he was looking for a woman with whom to visit places like Venice, in part because they were sinking into the sea, I didn’t know what to say except that I wasn’t her. As someone drawn to gray areas, I was put off by the guy who quipped that only “dumb” people were still having children.

If relationships depend on a shared fantasy of the future, then global warming does more than unsettle our environment; it creates uncertainty in our interpersonal ones.

I’ve started dating again. This time, I am swallowing my fear of sounding too anxious and am talking about climate change early on. After all, it is hard to fall in love with a person if we are not also falling in love with the future we want to create together.

I’ve found that talking about how global warming affects our lives, however casually, becomes a sort of canary in the coal mine for learning about people’s broader beliefs and behaviors. How black-and-white they see the world, how they view their role in the community, how they engage with science and systemic inequality.

I knew I wouldn’t mesh with the man who texted me “Life is better if you’re cheerful. I don’t read the news :)” but neither did I want to be with the one scheming up a walled compound of canned goods in Idaho.

She and my father had married while facing a horizon of stability. As middle-class white Americans, they saw a future of homeownership, health care and retirement funds

I don’t presume my own perspective is right, but I do know from my last relationship that I’m tired of trying to be chill. I can’t care any less than I do.

Chatting about climate change within the first few dates might not be standard yet, but the issue was the No. 1 concern for OkCupid daters in 2022, with a 368 percent increase in environmental and climate-change-related terms on profiles over the last five years

Tinder released a new campaign featuring a rendering of two people holding hands before a giant monster made of trash. “Someone to save the planet with,” it says.

I don’t think those daters just want a partner who believes in global warming: We want someone willing to grapple with it, to do the inconvenient work of reimagining our own lives in the face of it

It’s not just about when or whether to have a baby. Because global warming and pandemics go hand in hand — the progression of the first may increase the likelihood of the second — it seems likely that new long-term relationships could include both prolonged periods of staying inside and snap judgments about hitting the road.

I see now that it was not only conversations about our planet’s future that I struggled to have with my ex; it was conversations about our own future, too. It can be easy to feel as if the question of whether to have children, like rising sea levels, will be dealt with down the road.

But the future, as with the sea, does not obey its supposed bounds. If being alive right now sometimes feels like standing on a cliff, I want to be with someone who’s not afraid to peer at the frothing tides.

Not because I need to solve anything but because I don’t want a relationship built on looking away.

romantic relationships are not just distractions; they’re places for nourishment, bolstering us to face what’s outside the door.

The middle and lower classes in America are suffering disproportionately from fractured families. It looms behind the opioid crisis, the loneliness epidemic, low labor force participation rates for young men, and deaths of despair. It’s quite possible that feeling unattached and unnecessary—the kinds of feelings fatherless men often report—also fuels, at least in part, some political extremism.

The president’s allies are newly optimistic the brightening economic mood will further discredit the notion that a recession is necessary to tame inflation.

Despite the disagreement, senior White House aides still talk to Summers frequently and routinely seek his input. Summers has been to the White House several times this year alone, even as he continues to publicly hammer Biden’s industrial policy, student loan forgiveness and other economic programs.

Along with other centrist economists, Summers says inflation remains dangerously high, warning it could reaccelerate. The latest inflation report shows prices rising by 3.2 percent in July relative to one year ago, but a less volatile measure of price increases is still at 4.7 percent. The labor market remains strong not because Biden has defied the laws of economic reality, according to Summers, but because the battle against inflation is still far from won. Summers maintains the rescue plan sparked inflation that is at risk of becoming “entrenched” — a long-term problem for consumers and businesses.

“I don’t think anybody should reach any definitive judgments until we see how things play out,” Summers said in an interview. Summers said his predictions were based on standard macroeconomic models, and not meant to be interpreted as precise estimates. “The idea that bringing down inflation has nothing to do with increasing unemployment runs different from all conventional macroeconomic assessments.”

“The Democratic Party is currently split between people who thought the American Rescue Plan was appropriately sized and absolutely necessary — and those who think it was too big and had collateral effects that were quite damaging,” said Bill Galston, a policy analyst at the D.C.-based Brookings Institution who served in the Clinton administration. “This is a moral question, but it’s also a political question. If Joe Biden loses the election principally because of economic discontent over inflation and high prices, then a lot of Democrats will conclude it was not worth it.”

Summers has also made predictions that still do not appear to have been borne out, at least not yet. In a June 2022 speech at the London School of Economics, when inflation was at its 9.1 percent peak, Summers said the nation would “need” substantially higher levels of unemployment for inflation to come down.

“We need five years of unemployment above 5 percent to contain inflation — in other words, we need two years of 7.5 percent unemployment or five years of 6 percent unemployment or one year of 10 percent unemployment,

That same month, Summers and a co-author wrote that reducing job vacancies by 20 percent “requires, on average” a three percentage point increase in the unemployment rate. The number of job openings has fallen about 16 percent with no discernible jump in unemployment

In September 2022, Summers reiterated the point to Fortune: “I’m not sure you’re restraining inflation until you get the unemployment rate close to 5 percent, and to significantly restrain inflation you’re likely to need unemployment for some period at 6 percent.” The unemployment rate was 3.5 percent then and is the same level now.

In more recent interviews, Summers has defended his estimates by pointing out that inflation remains above the Fed’s 2 percent target. In particular, Summers emphasizes that it was always the case that transitory factors — such as soaring gas prices — pushed inflation up higher, to closer to 8 percent, but that the more stable “underlying” inflation was closer to 4.5 percent.

Even with lower overall inflation, Summers argues, underlying inflation remains largely unchanged — though the decline in transitory prices makes the problem appear to be going away.

“I think it’s fair to say — given how hot the economy is — the inflation performance at this point is better than I think many standard models would have predicted,” Summers said. “But I don’t think that all establishes we’re on a confident glide path to 2 percent with current rates of unemployment.”

More liberal economists argued that Summers misdiagnosed the cause of higher inflation, and therefore missed the cure. These economists contend that price spikes were overwhelmingly caused by supply chain disruptions, including lingering shocks from the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, not by too much government stimulus. As supply chains have normalized, so too has inflation.

Skanda Amarnath, executive director of the left-leaning think tank Employ America, emphasized that inflation is “now broadly decelerating,” not just in some idiosyncratic or transitory factors such as energy and used cars but across a large range of categories — household furnishings, technological equipment, wages, legal and professional services, and more.

“Remember when the experts said that to get inflation under control we needed to lower wages, and drive up unemployment? I never bought that,” Biden tweeted on July 20. “Instead, I focused on getting more Americans into the workforce, fixing our broken supply chains, and lowering costs.

Summers remains unconvinced about the rescue plan, pointing to substantial “unhappiness in the middle class about the state of the economy” over the last two years, mostly driven by inflation.

In earlier cultural epochs, many people derived their self-worth from their relationship with God, or from their ability to be a winner in the commercial marketplace

As Lasch wrote in his 1979 book, “The Culture of Narcissism,” such people are plagued by an insecurity that can be “overcome only by seeing his ‘grandiose self’ reflected in the attentions of others.”

“Plagued by anxiety, depression, vague discontents, a sense of inner emptiness, the ‘psychological man’ of the 20th century seeks neither individual self-aggrandizement nor spiritual transcendence but peace of mind, under conditions that increasingly militate against it.”

Fast forward a few decades, and the sense of lostness and insecurity, which Lasch and many others had seen in nascent form, had transmogrified into a roaring epidemic of psychic pain. By, say, 2010, it began to be clear that we were in the middle of a mental health crisis, with rising depression and suicide rates, an epidemic of hopelessness and despair among the young.

Before long, safetyism was on the march. This is the assumption that people are so fragile they need to be protected from social harm. Slate magazine proclaimed 2013 “the year of the trigger warning.” Concepts like “microaggression” and “safe spaces” couldn’t have lagged far behind.

Social media became a place where people went begging for attention, validation and affirmation — even if they often found rejection instead.

the elephantiasis of trauma

Once, the word “trauma” referred to brutal physical wounding one might endure in war or through abuse. But usage of the word spread so that it was applied across a range of upsetting experiences.

A mega-best-selling book about trauma, “The Body Keeps the Score,” by Bessel van der Kolk, became the defining cultural artifact of the era. Parul Sehgal wrote a perceptive piece in The New Yorker called “The Case Against the Trauma Plot,” noting how many characters in novels, memoirs and TV shows are trying to recover from psychological trauma — from Ted Lasso on down. In January 2022, Vox declared that “trauma” had become “the word of the decade,” noting that there were over 5,500 podcasts with the word in the title.

For many people, trauma became their source of identity. People began defining themselves by the way they had been hurt.

a culture war, and that’s what happened to the psychological crisis. In one camp, there were the coddlers.

They sought to alter behavior and reform institutions so that no one would feel emotionally unsafe

the first bad idea in “The Coddling of the American Mind.” It was the notion that “what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker,” inducing people to look at the wounds in their past and feel debilitated, not stronger.

the coddling approach turned out to be counterproductive. It was based on a series of false ideas that ended up hurting the people it was trying to help.

People on all sides genuinely come to believe they are powerless, unwilling to assume any responsibility for their plight — another classic symptom of immaturity.

The third bad idea is, “If I keep you safe, you will be strong.”

But overprotective parenting and overprotective school administration don’t produce more resilient children; they produce less resilient ones.

The counterreaction to the coddlers came from what you might call the anti-fragile coalition. This was led by Jordan Peterson and thousands of his lesser imitators

they merely represented the flip side of the fragile victim mind-set.

The right-wing victimologists feel beset by hidden forces trying to oppress them, by a culture that conspires to unman them, dark shadowy conspiracies all around

recent right-wing narratives, even J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy,” often follow the trauma formula: “Take the lamentations about atrophying manhood and falling sperm counts. Call it what you want, but the core idea is always shaped like trauma. Once, we were whole, but now we’re not; now we suffer from a sickness we struggle to grasp or name.”

The instability of the self has created an immature public culture — impulsive, dramatic, erratic and cruel. In institution after institution, from churches to schools to nonprofits, the least mature voices dominate and hurl accusations, while the most mature lie low, trying to get through the day.

They are considerate to and gracious toward others because they can see situations from multiple perspectives

The founders of the therapeutic ethos thought they were creating autonomous individualists who would feel good about themselves. But, as Lasch forecast: “The narcissist depends on others to validate his self-esteem. He cannot live without an admiring audience. His apparent freedom from family ties and institutional constraints does not free him to stand alone or to glory in his individuality. On the contrary, it contributes to his insecurity.”

Maturity, now as ever, is understanding that you’re not the center of the universe. The world isn’t a giant story about me.

In a nontherapeutic ethos, people don’t build secure identities on their own. They weave their stable selves out of their commitments to and attachments with others. Their identities are forged as they fulfill their responsibilities as friends, family members, employees, neighbors and citizens. The process is social and other-absorbed; not therapeutic.

Maturity in this alternative ethos is achieved by getting out of your own selfish point of view and developing the ability to absorb, understand and inhabit the views of others.

Mature people are calm amid the storm because their perception lets them see the present challenges from a long-term vantage.

The second false idea was, “I am a thing to whom things happen.” The traumatized person is cast as a passive victim unable to control his own life. He is defined by suffering and

They can withstand the setbacks because they have pointed their life toward some concrete moral goal.

“one of the greatest indicators of our own spiritual maturity is revealed in how we respond to the weaknesses, the inexperience and the potentially offensive actions of others.”

a sign of maturity is the ability to respond with understanding when other people have done something stupid and given you the opportunity to feel superior.

I’ve described it as a romantic narrative, one that’s about unities in the process of becoming, a calling together of Americans to transcend racial division and come together in a unifying way, a more perfect union, as a transcendence of essential American goodness over transitory American evils.

when we tell the story that way, unfortunately, not only is it mythic, but it trains us to treat King as the kind of person who’s not doing any original political thinking. What he’s doing is calling us to be true to who we always already were

And when you treat him like that, the thing that becomes most interesting about him is not his thought. It’s not the way he challenged us to think about violence. It’s not the way he challenges us to think about segregation, both de facto and de jure. It’s not how he challenges us to think about economic justice.

The thing that’s interesting about him starts to be his rhetoric or his tactics, the way in which he pushes people or frames arguments to call us to be true to who we always already were. That’s a real problem because it evades the most incisive, challenging and generative contributions that his public philosophy makes for our era.

it gets conscripted into a story that’s ultimately affirming about the adequacy of our constitutional order, the trajectory of our institutions, the essential goodness of our national character. You often hear politicians use this rhetoric of, this is not who we are.

it’s partly related to how we tell the story of the civil rights movement and particularly, how we tell King’s role in the civil rights movement.

There’s a way in which the philosophy of nonviolence gets painted, even in King’s time, as a kind of extreme, purist pacifism. And part of that is the connection with Gandhi, although I think it’s a radical misunderstanding of Gandhi, as well.

it’s a way of imagining the commitment to nonviolence as related to passivity, as related to the performance of suffering for pity. These are things that King never endures. For him, the idea of passive resistance was a misnomer. He helped coin the phrase “direct action” — he and other members of the civil-rights generation — that nonviolence is aggressive.

It’s an aggressive attack on injustice, an aggressive form of noncooperation with domination. It’s about trying to wedge yourself into the machinery of domination, to prevent its adequate functioning, to try to force or coerce your fellow citizens to stop and take stock of what kind of injustices are being unfurled in their name.

And it does so on the presumption that politics involves coercion, especially for King, who had a pretty tragic sense of human nature, that politics is going to involve confrontation with great evil, that it’s not a Pollyannaish view about what we’re all capable of if we just turn our eye toward God in the right way.

We’re owe it to them to live with evil. And we always are going to be called to confront it. We just need to do it in ways that won’t unleash a further chain of social evil and bitterness and revenge and retaliation. And King thought nonviolence was the only weapon that could cut and heal at the same time.

So when you hear King talk about love, when you hear King talk about nonviolence, these things actually require not just an enormous discipline around the acceptance of suffering, as if it’s some kind of passive practice, but they require really creative, dedicated thinking around how exactly to push and prod your neighbors into addressing the forms of injustice that structure the polity and how to do it in a way that doesn’t leave a perpetual midnight of bitterness when the conflict is done.

He says that the really interesting question, however, is how to organize a sustained, successful challenge to structural injustice. And for King, that requires something that blends militant resistance and a higher-order ethical practice that can point the way toward peaceful reconciliation over the long term.

Gandhi has this line where he says, if you can’t practice nonviolence, it quote, “retaliation or resistance unto death is the second best, though a long way off from the first. Cowardice is impotence, worse than violence.” So this idea that if you can’t be nonviolent, it’s better to be violent than to be a coward, doing nothing — I think gets at something important. Can you help unpack that?

to raise the question of strategy, as if we can evaluate means without some kind of ethical reflection or without some kind of underlying ethical commitments, for King, is already a confusion. He thinks that the ends are prefigured in any means.

Gandhi, in “Hind Swaraj,” has this great passage where he talks about how could come to acquire a piece of property. You could buy it. You could steal it. You could kill somebody in pursuit of it. You could ask for it as a gift.At the end of the day, you still have the same property. But the thing, itself, has changed. In one scenario, it’s a piece of stolen property. It’s a theft. In another, it’s a gift, which is different than something you’ve purchased.

So in the course of acquiring the thing, even though the thing is the same, the means have transformed it in a really, really important way. And King wants to say something similar — that in all political practice, the ends are prefigured in the means

nonviolence has to be — if it’s going to be true nonviolence for King — informed by a philosophy of love that really wants and desires and wills goodwill for the enemy at present and is committed, at the fundamental level, to going on together in peace, going on together, sharing the polity in perpetuity.

I think for King, imperative to nonviolent resistance turns, in large part, on the question of your own dignity and self-respect. So it is a justice question. He’s concerned with structural justice as a matter of the kinds of arrangements that prevail in the larger American society. That’s obviously true.

So there’s the person or group you’re in conversation or conflict with. I’m a liberal, and I’m arguing with a conservative. And I think that’s the most common target to think about: How do I beat or convince this person or group on the other side?

Then there’s the broader community polity — the voters, of the country, people who are bystanders, maybe interested, maybe not, but a broader community that is in some way watching or can be brought in to watch. And then there’s you, the person taking the action, and how it affects you and your group to take a particular action.

something that seems present in King’s thought is much, much, much, much more concern and focus than I think most political thinkers have today on how political action affects you, the person taking it, and affects the broader community that might be watching it

— that ends up with you being turned away from the good and toward things like hatred, resentment, violence, which he thinks, ultimately, will corrode your soul and take you further away from flourishing.

But he’s also concerned with how you relate to your own sense of equality, equal standing, worth, as he would say, somebodiness, we might say dignity — he also says that a lot — and that for King, to acquiesce in the face of oppression and domination, without protest, is to abdicate your own self-respect and dignity.

for him, dignity also required a certain kind of excellence of character, a certain kind of comportment and practice toward others.

So it is about trying to defend your dignity, defend yourself respect against insult and humiliation, oppression. But it’s also about doing so in a way that doesn’t degrade your character in the long term, that doesn’t cause you to end up being turned away from the good, which, again, for him, is going to be a religiously-inflected category

When you think about somebody’s political philosophy or their theory of political action, you can maybe think of there being a couple agents they’re thinking about.

It has fallen out of favor to say that there are certain ways of acting, politically, that are better and worse, from a virtue perspective, because it often is seen not as really a question of you and your relationship to some baseline or ideal but is some kind of concession you’re making to people who don’t deserve

I am a person who believes those questions are still legitimate, that they can’t all be reduced to strategy or will to power or psychic drives. I think that there’s something like an ethical life that requires us to argue about it and requires us to think really hard about how we discipline ourselves to achieve it.

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, wrote a phenomenal book, many years ago, called “Righteous Discontent.” And that’s what introduces the phrase, “the politics of respectability.” It’s a study of turn of the century Black Baptist women and their organizing efforts through the church.

It’s this idea that, in confronting a system of social stigma, the response that you need to have to it is to try to adjust your behavior, comportment, your self fashioning, in line with the dominant norms so that you can, over time, undermine the stigma and become a full participant in society.

there are all sorts of questions, legitimate questions, that are raised against that. Are we losing something valuable about alternative forms of life, about alternative cultural practices, when we take the existing, dominant norms as unassailable or something to aspire to?

what’s really fascinating is that he talks a lot about how he sympathizes with all those criticisms. He agrees with them

here’s the other part of Evelyn Higginbotham’s formulation — there’s a deeper question, one with thousands of years of moral reflection built up into it, which is about virtue ethics — that there are some things that people are appealing to you about that aren’t about their effect in the polity that aren’t about trying to manipulate white, racial attitudes. They’re about your own flourishing and character. They’re deep questions about how to live a good life, how to achieve excellence and the crafting of your soul.

as King would say, our reason sometimes can become subordinate to our passions. It can just be a legitimizing power or rationalizing power to the point where we lose track of what we really want to achieve, the kind of character we really want to have.

And for King, many of the appeals he made in that vocabulary are really about that. They’re really about virtue. They’re really about what hatred does to your life, what anger does to your life, what violence does to your life

there is a question for him, at the core of his life, which is, what makes this worth doing? That’s a virtue question. It’s not just a strategic or tactical one, in the narrow sense.

he describes nonviolence, I think really importantly, as also being about a nonviolence of spirit.

the example that he often gives is about humiliation — that there’s a way in which the desire to humiliate others, to diminish their status in front of other people for your own pleasure, the desire to subject them to standards of evaluation that they probably themselves don’t hold or don’t understand, in order to enable mockery. There’s a way in which, if we’re reflexive about where that desire comes from, we will find that it comes from a place that’s irrational, indefensible and, likely, cruel, and that if we were to imagine a way of life built around those feelings, those desires, those practices, it would be one that would make it really hard for us to have healthy social ties, stable institutions, flourishing social relationships.

So part of what he’s up to is asking us, at all times, to be self-reflexive about the desires and needs and fantasies that drive us in politics

the concession.

So what nonviolence does is, it builds in a check on those kinds of rationalizations, those kinds of emotional drives, by teaching us to avoid forms of humiliation and forms of physical violence that make it hard to come back from. So that’s the first point.

The second point — and it goes more to your sense of revenge and retaliation — is again, forcing us to acknowledge the legitimacy of anger.

He uses the phrase, “legitimate anger” in the late ’60s — but to be reflective about it and understand that, even in a case where someone kills a loved one of yours, revenge, violence, retaliation, that doesn’t bring back the loved one that you’ve lost.

The only thing that can do that is a kind of forward-looking, constructive practice of politics and social ethics.

so what he’s trying to do is raise the question of, can we channel our legitimate rage, our legitimate anger, into a practice that allows us to maintain our self respect?

here’s this man who is both making this public argument and trying to get people to follow him in it and put themselves at risk over it, and is also living it himself, and talks about this unbelievably difficult thing, which is not feel righteous anger, but to not feel hatred, to internally reflect the world you want externally.

he does falter. He does fail. And I think when we read biographies of King, when you read the last parts of David Garrow’s biography, when you read Cornel West’s essay, from “To Shape a New World,” which talks a lot about the despair at the end of King’s life, if you watch HBO’S great documentary, “King in the Wilderness,” you see a person faltering and failing under the pressure.

He’s not able, for example, to bring himself to a kind of reconciliation with Malcolm X

How imaginable is King’s philosophy, is this practice, without his deep Christianity, without a belief in redemption, in salvation, in the possibility of a next life?

I think King, himself, thinks that the practice of nonviolent politics does the kind of work that you’re describing. And I think he would be worried about the fact that, in our time, so much of these questions about the management of emotion, the building of character, has become a privatized practice.

So I think he does think that that’s one way that this really does happen. And we have lots of evidence from the Civil Rights Movement, personal testimony, and personal reflection, where this seems to be the case.

the last thing I’ll say is that in order to do that work, in order to do some of the work you’re describing, he also is building an alternative community

So one way that I read that famous final speech, “I’ve seen the promised land” — there’s obviously a prophetic reading of it, but there’s also one where he’s describing the prefiguration of the promised land in the kind of politics and social life he’s participated in over his career, that the promised land is seen in the union politics in Memphis, it’s seen in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, gathering to do Mississippi Freedom Summer. It’s seen in the people walking for 350-plus days in Montgomery, Alabama, and banding together to help each other out, that is the promised land.

And when you are in a community that’s constantly talking with each other and lifting each other up and engaging in practices like song, prayer, other communal rituals, to try to affirm this alternative set of ethical and political commitments against the whole rest of the culture, that’s the only way it can be done, is that you have to have an alternative form of social life that can sustain you in that work. The private practice isn’t going to do it.

When you look at the principles of nonviolence on Stanford’s King Institute, I think a bunch of them would be familiar to people. You can resist evil without resorting to violence. You seek to win the friendship and understanding of the opponent, not to humiliate.

He thinks that we learn a lot about how to love other people by confronting them in public, by forcing ourselves into uncomfortable situations where we have to endure the look of the other, back and forth, where we train ourselves to extend these interactions of contentious politics until they can alter or change the people that we’ve put our bodies in close contact with on the field of politics.

I go back to the sermon he gave — and it’s collected in “Strength to Love,” and it’s called shattered dreams — where he confronts a problem that is all over the Black tradition, which is that the struggle we’re engaged in has gone on, in some form or another, for hundreds of years. At the moments of its greatest promise, you can look over the course of history and see, just years later, we find ourselves in situations that are unimaginably awful.

King is not naive. He’s a student of history. He’s somebody who asks himself hard questions like this. And he gives two different kinds of answers. And one is the answer that you’ve mentioned here, which is a theological answer. It’s conventional theodicy story, that look, at the end of the day, God is at work in the world. And God is on the side of justice.

There’s another way that he goes at it, however. And for me, I read it as rooted in a different kind of project, one that combines what used to be called philosophical anthropology, which is just a way of saying philosophical reflections on what kind of beings we are. It’s rooted in that, and it’s rooted in politics. And I think those things can find lots of overlapping consensus from people outside of the Christian tradition.

What you have to be committed to, in the last instance, is that evil is not the totality of who we are as persons, that people have the capacity, emotionally and rationally, to reflect on their life plans, their practices, their commitments, and change them, maybe not all of them, maybe not all at once, but that those things can be changed, and that politics is really a field where contingency is the key word, that although there are structural constraints and everything can’t be done at every moment, that the unprecedented, the new, the unexpected, happens in this realm.

And the only way that we can confirm that nothing new will happen, that oppression will last forever, that the future bears no hope, is if we don’t act. That’s the only way we can confirm that it’s true for all time, is by failing to act in pursuit of justice.

that’s King’s view, I think. And to me, that’s the persuasive one, that in our action, we might be able to see some measure of justice from a complicated, complex swirl of contingencies, and to move the ball forward — we will inevitably fail — but to look back on that failure with maturity and try to do better the next time.

How do you think about the question of the weaponization of nonviolence and then the applicability of its principles to the powerful and to what they might, we might, the state might learn from it.

there were many people — Harold Cruse famously wrote this, but others even closer to King — who said, you’re not the leader of Vietnam. You’re the leader of the African American civil rights movement. You should not speak out on this war because you’ll lose your relationship with Johnson.

King says that the people who are advising him in this way, they just don’t know him, his commitment or his calling. They don’t understand that if he’s going to raise his voice against violence in Watts or Detroit, that he’s got to raise it against what he called, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” his own government.

for him, the question was really one about militarism and the way that gets imagined as this hardheaded, realistic, hyper-rational response to international disputes and social problems abroad, when in actuality, if we take stock of what he called the casualties of war, the spiritual ones and the material ones, we would realize that most of the violence we engage in at the foreign-policy level is counterproductive. It’s created more problems and more harms than it ever has seemed to solve.

This is one of the powerful interventions that you see in Lionel McPherson’s essay, in “To Shape a New World.” It’s just this idea that this is about hardheaded realism is mythic. King says it’s about an immature image that we are nurturing for ourselves, that we’re trying to shore up this idea of ourselves as some kind of crusading hero or all-powerful world power, while not taking stock of all of the things about our freedoms, about our way of life, about our connectedness as a society, about our social divisions, that war has exacerbated, not to mention the violence that’s prosecuted abroad.

And he says similar things about domestic policy, the ways in which our politics toward poor families, single-parent households, is punitive for reasons that aren’t justified, that our response to what he calls “the derivative crimes of the ghetto” are wildly out of proportion and unjust compared to how we treat the systematic crimes of exploitation, segregation, disenfranchisement, that structure much of ghetto life.

So I’m in total agreement with Coates on that question

it just seems — I don’t want to call it axiomatic, but a repeated d that the more willing you become to use violence as a state, the more it corrupts you, and the more violent you become as a state, and to some degree, the more violent the people you are policing, the people you are occupying, become.

I’m not a pacifist. I don’t believe you can fully eradicate violence. But we don’t weigh how violent we make others, in our actions, very well, and then how violent we become in response, how much we enter into that escalatory dynamic.

But then the other thing is this question of this broader community, of changing hearts, of changing minds, of acting upon people, not through punishment, but through our belief that they can alter. And I’d be curious to hear you reflect on that question of community a little bit, because I think one of the central debates of our time is who’s actually in the community.

What would it mean to have a bit more of King’s view, of trying to create community at the center of what the state is attempting to do, as it fashions and helps govern the country?

BRANDON TERRY: So one underappreciated feature from King’s famous Riverside Church speech against Vietnam, is he goes on this whole riff about America lacking maturity. And it’s a weird thing to have in a foreign-policy speech. You’re used to — you’re a policy person. You don’t usually hear the word “maturity” bandied about in these kinds of debates.

But what he’s getting at is that something really tightly linked to violence, that violence always exceeds the original justification you have for it. It’s not precise. It’s not able to be easily targeted, as we think. It spirals out. It produces retaliation. And then we retaliate again.

And all the while, it’s expanding its justifications to the point of absurdity. And King describes that as adding cynicism to the process of death. And he says that maturity is one of the only ways out here, that the maturity to be able to stand up and say, we were wrong, we want to make amends, we want to repair evils committed in our name, those are questions that are essentially nonstarters in American politics right now, certainly about foreign policy, but even in some places in domestic policy.

that feature of King’s thinking is something that I always want to draw attention to because I think it’s something we ignore. So that’s the first point I want to make.

The second thing — and this is also really deeply-seeded in that Vietnam speech — one of the reasons that people hated it so much — he was attacked in The New York Times, basically every editorial page in the country — one of the reasons people hated that speech so much is that he spent so much time expressing solidarity and sympathy with Ho Chi Minh and the North Vietnamese forces.

How could you express sympathy or some kind of solidarity with the enemy? And it’s very instructive, how King went about it. He wasn’t one of these people — you’ve seen these images of people waving the North Vietnamese flag at counterculture protests. It wasn’t like that.

It was him really spending a lot of time meditating on the reasons why we had ended up in this conflict, narrating the whole history of our failure to support Ho Chi Minh and the struggle against French colonialism, against Chinese colonialism, and how that had led to the situation we were in by 1967. King is narrating this history. He’s also trying to get people to think about what it must feel like to be on the ground in Vietnam and witness these bombings, witnessed this imposition of terror.

And he’s doing that because at bottom, he’s inspired by a vision really rooted in a parable the Good Samaritan, from the Bible, that everyone is our neighbor, that there are no sectional loyalties that should eviscerate our moral obligations to others, our obligation to show them respect, to go on in community with them, and that most of what goes on in foreign policy and particularly war making, is a bad-faith evasion of the fact that we’re all interconnected.

he understood that there’s a fundamental interconnectedness amongst humanity at the ethical level and at the material, structural level, and that war making is an evasion of that fact. We’re going to have to live together. So the chief question that should organize it is, how can we do so in peace?

He has a line where he says, quote, “the dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the assurance that his income is stable and certain and when he knows that he has a means to seek self-improvement. Personal conflicts between husband, wife and children will diminish when the unjust measurement of human worth, on a scale of dollars, is eliminated.” Tell me a bit about the spiritual and psychological dimensions of King’s economic philosophy and organizing.

BRANDON TERRY: Well, for King, the question of poverty and the question of economic inequality are both questions of dignity and democracy, and the questions of dignity because when you live without the adequate means to really enjoy the fair value of your basic rights, when you live in a society — and this is a really important point for King — when you live in a society of profound affluence, like the United States, and you live in severe poverty, it expresses a kind of contempt from your fellow citizens about your standing as an equal member of the polity.

So separate from the plain, material fact of hunger or health care, there’s this additional spiritual concern with the way in which living with nothing, living on a lonely island amidst an ocean of prosperity, as he would put it, diminishes your dignity.

then another piece — this is bridging of the dignity and democracy question — is that when people don’t have a say in the core, vital interest of their life, when they have no decision-making power over the processes which determine how their life is going to go, that too is a diminishment of their dignity. And King, who was operating in a long tradition of social democracy, wants to expand democratic practices to the broader economic realm.

Without expanding democracy into that economic realm, for King, we’re both making a mockery of democracy and we’re diminishing the dignity of citizens who live in search of a real standing as free and equal.

as somebody who spends a lot of my time in debates about economic policy, I think it is fair to say that the ends of economics are taken as the economy, typically. People hopefully shouldn’t starve. But a lot of debates about what we should do, even for the poor, become these recursive, well, how can they better participate in the economy and how are they going to be able to invest in themselves and how they’ll be economic opportunity for their children.

And the idea that the economy is subservient to the community, that the point of the economy is the community, that it should be measured— our policy should be measured by what they do for democratic participation, for the dignity of individuals, is pretty lost. If anything, I see it more now, on the post-liberal right, as people call it, than I even do among mainline Democrats.

it has fallen out of favor as a way to frame and think about these conversations.

BRANDON TERRY: Yeah, I think it’s rooted in some really complicated things. I think there’s a kind of liberal anxiety about speaking forthrightly about the fact that living in areas of severe, concentrated disadvantage and racial segregation that we call ghettos, diminishes the dignity of the people who live there.

That feels uncomfortable for people to say forthrightly, in the way that King would.

so we try to get around it by speaking about opportunity and the wealth gap and unemployment statistics. But really what people are feeling is an existential assault on dignity.

one way to read that book is to say that she’s telling a tragic story about the loss of a particular ideal that guided great society politics. And that’s the principle of maximum feasible participation.

That was a really social-democratic idea, this idea that, well, we need to empower all sorts of people to participate in policy making and democratic deliberation, and that part of where people will find self-respect and dignity is through engagement in politics and their community

I think it gets to something that is very present, towards the end of King’s life, which is his sense that there is something important for the civil rights movement in the labor movement. And unions, on some level, they are mechanisms of democracy. One of the most important functions they have is workplace democracy

King is, in this tradition, in many ways inspired by a mentor of his. And one of the most important figures in American history but one of the most severely neglected was A. Philip Randolph, the great labor leader, former organizer of the Pullman Porters, the architect of both the March on Washington that gets canceled, which was going to target the Roosevelt administration during World War II, and the 1963 famous March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

they’ve got a certain set of commitments. So one is the idea that because most African Americans are working class or poor, anything that advances the interests of working-class people and their ability to exercise democratic control over the economy is going to advance the interests of African Americans.

for King labor unions are also, as you described, important laboratories of democracy. So they’re one of the few places where people from all walks of life can get together, deliberate about strategy, deliberate about social ends, social goods, put money behind things that they value, that aren’t only their own material interest.

today, of course, there’s this ongoing — always is this ongoing argument — of should you have race-based politics or is that unusable, doesn’t work, creates too much backlash? Or you should have class-based politics that are looking for commonalities, and because you’ve had so much economic disadvantage for Black Americans, that’ll work through the mechanism of class just fine.

BRANDON TERRY: So King often invokes the philosopher Hegel, because he’s constantly describing his mode of thinking as a dialectical one, where he’s trying to reconcile seeming opposites and produce a new synthesis, which helps you transcend certain intractable problems.

Now as a reading of Hegel, that has much to be desired. But as a description of Martin Luther King’s thought, I think that’s always a good way to understand what he’s up to. And so I think what he’s always trying to do is transcend that opposition.

there’s a way in which we sometimes will say class-based politics works to lift African Americans because they’re disproportionately poor. And what’s tricky about that is that it doesn’t really theorize what to do about the African American middle class and the African American elite.

So a thing that King was thinking a lot about when he wrote “Stride Toward Freedom” and the Montgomery bus boycott, is there are areas where racial solidarity is going to be really effective and probably indispensable.

where questions of anti-Black racism emerge, where questions of racial humiliation, stigma that really affects the larger group, things that all Black people feel vulnerable to, those are going to be areas — like the segregation laws on the buses — those are going to be areas where you actually can generate a lot of racial solidarity and do a lot of important work with it, especially as a defensive posture.

When you start to get into questions of political economy, however, you have to be careful because the appeal of racial solidarity can actually obscure the fact that Black people don’t all share the same material interest in lots of ways.

King’s primary principle always is, is that he’s dedicated to the group that William Julius Wilson called the truly disadvantaged, the least of these, that at the end of the day, he’s going to give everything to the people who are in the most desperate situation, the poor. And that’s going to guide his politics.

where that is enabled by a race-based solidarity, so in questions of policing, perhaps, or questions of social stigma and media discourse, that’s where he’ll turn. But in other cases, I think he’d really be trying to experiment with a form of politics that empowers the poor to take leadership on their ow

How does being more aware of the distinctions he drew and the decisions he made help you look at some of the paths we should be walking down today and are not, in these conversations, or are walking down and shouldn’t be?

n order for us to understand why so many African Americans are located in the realm of the most disadvantaged, in the strata of the most disadvantaged, you have to understand the history of racial domination in this country. You have to understand the persistence of racial discrimination, especially in labor markets. And you have to understand the ways that racial ideology allows us to obscure the nature of our economy.

So the most classic example is that structural unemployment gets reframed, in part by racism, as questions of laziness or pathology or criminality instead of as a feature of the economy as such. So King always talks about the critique of racism as part of the diagnosis of the disease in order to cure it.

So even in the privileging the least well off and being concerned with poor people of all races, he wants to say that the critique of racism helps us see through the kinds of blindnesses that obscure the nature of our economy and the commonalities across race and the things that we need to address the questions of economic justice precisely

The second thing is that, in his critique of Black power, one of the things he says is that he worries that Black power gives priority to the question of race in a way that confuses our analysis of social reality. So what does he mean by that?

if you think that all Black disadvantage is primarily about anti-Black racism, you can start to miss the fact that there are broader economic dislocations that need to be addressed, that there are structural features of the American constitutional order, the ways in which municipal boundaries are structured, ways that funding decisions are made, that aren’t primarily driven by racial animus, that need to be addressed.

You can lose sight of those things and start to think that the real battle is in something like a totality of anti-Black racial ideology that can be battled in Hollywood movies and comic books and school curricula and legislation and political rhetoric

it’s not to say that those things don’t exist. It’s just to say that there’s a confusion about what’s going to make the biggest impact in improving the life circumstances of the least well off.

King really calls us to constantly be very precise about what the causal mechanisms are for Black disadvantage and to not be confused by the fact that there’s discrimination and injustice and cruelty in these other realms but which might not have as much causal impact as some of these other things.

King was very adamant that Black pride, that a concern with representation, that thinking in expansive ways about how do you affirm the somebodiness of Black youth, that those things are really, really important and that they’re not to be dismissed.

So it is a question of justice if people in Hollywood just constantly demean or diminish the talent of nonwhite actors. That is a question of justice. It’s just that we have to be honest about what the import of those struggles will be for the broader group. And the only way we can do that is by being attentive to the class differences within the group.

there’s a way in which — and King diagnoses this very incisively — there’s a way in which some genres of Black nationalism are so pessimistic about the possibility for multiracial democracy in the United States, for any kind of Black flourishing in the United States that they essentially foreclose real interest in political organizing and social movements

But the energy they still managed to generate — the outrage, the sentiment, the sociality — they find their outlet, instead, in a practice of humiliation, counter humiliation. So that there may not be hope that we can actually change the country, but at the very least, we can enjoy a feeling of retaliation, a kind of self-respecting sense of resistance, by engaging in a practice of trying to humiliate our opponents in the public spher

there’s a titillation to that. There’s a catharsis in watching someone — at that point, it would have been called stick it to whitey. Now it would be stick it to the libs or own the libs.

this is a significant amount of people that could cause real damage in the places where they don’t face many countervailing forms of power. And they can exercise a much more toxic impact on the broader state of American politics in a time where the media environment is way more fragmented

I see those elements. And I think that we need more people operating, in the kind of mode that King did, in his critique of Black power, to try to turn people away from their understandable feelings of hostility and resentment, toward more productive forms of political engagement.

the word, “emotion,” which is a neglected part of politics, maybe of King’s thought in particular is that he understood — I think he understood part of the goal of politics and political action as creating a particular structure of political emotion.

, what structure of emotion, of political emotion, we’re actually living in.

BRANDON TERRY: My mentor and friend, Karuna Mantena, at Columbia, political theorist, a brilliant political theorist working on a book on Gandhi — I learned this from her, thinking a lot about how nonviolence is a kind of realism, in part because it doesn’t engage in of fiction that politics is operating on, in the model of rational discussion. It takes very, very, very seriously the problem of emotion.

for King, thinking about the history of racial oppression in America, they’re key emotions that you have to think about. One of the most important ones is fear

If that fear is a longstanding, deeply-structuring feature of American culture and political life, if it’s something that animates our comedy movies, our stand-up routines, our political discourse, you can’t operate as if it’s not there. You have to do things that will somehow disarm, disrupt, dispel those fears, in order to make progress on the political questions you want to pursue. That was one of King’s deepest, deepest commitments.

He’s thinking a lot about anger, which we’ve talked at great length about. And one of the disappointments I’ve had with radical politics in the present, as sympathetic as I am to most of the aims, is that I just don’t think the emotion question has been adequately considered

people often defend their politics as like, King was unpopular. And the things we’re saying are unpopular. So we’re operating in that tradition.

it’s not enough to just say, I’ve started a conversation, I’ve provoked something toxic in the culture. He’s not trying to do that, necessarily. He’s trying to elicit reactions that bring forward certain emotions but not let those emotions unravel the society itself. He’s trying to channel them into other forms of political affect that are much more congenial to reconciliation and justice.

what we’ve unfortunately ended up with is that the sophistication of mobilization strategists, the depth of the polarization, has made anger the principal affect of American politics at this moment.

a King-inspired political philosophy, both at the state level and the activist level, has to do, is think about how do we transform the recalcitrant nature of today’s political anger and channel it into forms of constructive politics that might point toward a more just future and that might dissolve the forms of anger that are illegitimate and ill founded, in part, by doing the kind of work sometimes described as a moral jujitsu, turning those affects against themselves, in part, to try to transform them into something different.

maybe it’ll be easier to use myself as an example, here.

When I started out in blogging and political writing and journalism, particularly blogging, I think I thought a lot about politics in terms of winning and losing, and in my corner of it, winning and losing intellectually, that I was involved in political arguments, and arguments could be won or lost in front of some kind of audience.

One is having been in a lot of arguments. And I think I’m a reasonably good arguer. And so I’ve done, by my own likes, well, and then noticed it didn’t have it all the effect I wanted it to have, which is, if anything, it usually — if you really beat somebody in an argument and they feel humiliated, they go further into views they already held

And two things have begun to corrode, for me, that sense

so you lose by winning.

then the second is, particularly in the Trump era, the sense that if you met something awful with an equal and opposite energetic force, that in some weird way, you just added energy to what was now an awful system and conversation.

What do you do to not create a sense that this is a right conversation to be having? And I don’t the answers to it. And I’m not saying like I’ve ascended to some higher plane and don’t argue or any of that. I have all the same intuitions and senses I’ve always had.

that’s why I find King so interesting and challenging in this way, because it’s just really, really, really different to ask the question, how do I reshape the emotional politics and the emotional structure of myself, of the people I’m in conflict with and then of the people who are bystanders or watchers of that conflict, for the better

It’s just a really different goal to be targeting, and just unimaginably harder than, can I come up with an argument that I think is a winning argument.

I think you see it — when he’s assassinated, the leading figures of the Black-Power generation, they’re heartbroken. They mourn his loss. They grieve for him, in part because — and you can read any of these memoirs, particularly Stokely Carmichael’s — they felt like he never — that even when he disagreed with them, he loved them, and not just because they were friendly, but because he loved in the sense that he always invoked, of agape love, that he wanted goodwill for them, and that his arguments weren’t from a place of trying to humiliate them or embarrass them or expose them as ridiculous.

He wanted to affirm their right to make the arguments they were making, to affirm their intelligence and judgment and to enter into their mind, to try to reconstruct a position with sympathy, but then show why it falls short for the sake of goals that he was forthright about, about justice, about reconciliation, about love

we are in a moment of extraordinary cynicism. And cynicism can take advantage of your intellectual honesty, your practice of agape love. But I think that’s in the short term.

In my better moments, I’m of the view that the only way to start to turn the tide against the cynicism that has so corroded and corrupted our political culture is to try to have these demonstrations of humility and authenticity that cause us to put ourselves at some risk, the way that King did

So always our final question: What are three books you would recommend to the audience? And if I can put one spin on that, you mentioned the many books King wrote. If people want to start with one thing he actually wrote to read, one book, which one should they start with?

I think you get the best sense of his mature thought from his 1967 book, “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community,” which is still our question. So I would definitely recommend that. I also really love “A Trumpet of Conscience,” his Canadian Broadcasting Corporation lectures that were published posthumously.