Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

A group of European powers opposed to these developments was now working as the First Coalition, the start of seven such groups formed to fight France before the end of 1815. Austria, Prussia, Spain, Britain and the United Provinces (Netherlands)

effectively mobilizing the whole of France into the army. A new chapter in warfare had been reached, and army sizes now began to rise greatly.

Napoleon was then given a chance to pursue a dream: attack in the Middle East, even on into threatening the British in India

Britain and France were briefly at peace but soon argued, the former wielding a superior navy and great wealth.

The relationship between Napoleon and Russia began to fall apart, and Napoleon resolved to act quickly to overawe the Russian tsar and bring him to heel. To this end, Napoleon gathered what was probably the largest army ever assembled in Europe, and certainly a force too big to adequately support. Looking for a quick, dominant victory, Napoleon pursued a retreating Russian army deep into Russia, before winning the carnage that was the Battle of Borodino and then taking Moscow.

But it was a pyrrhic victory, as Moscow was set alight and Napoleon was forced to retreat through the bitter Russian winter, damaging his army and ruining the French cavalry.

With Napoleon on the back foot and obviously vulnerable, a new Sixth Coalition was organized in 1813, and pushed across Europe, advancing where Napoleon was absent, and retreating where he was present.

He was sent to the island of Elba in exile.

With time to think while exiled in Elba, Napoleon resolved to try again, and in 1815 he returned to Europe. Amassing an army as he marched to Paris, turning those sent against him to his service, Napoleon attempted to rally support by making liberal concessions. He soon found himself faced by another coalition, the Seventh of the French Revolutionary and Napoleon Wars, which included Austria, Britain, Prussia and Russia.

Napoleon was defeated, retreated, and forced to abdicate once more.

The monarchy was restored in France, and the heads of Europe gathered at the Congress of Vienna to redraw the map of Europe.

Europe would not be so disrupted again until World War 1 in 1914.

In both cases, the U.S. intervened with the initial prospect, perhaps naïvely, of restoring stability after a flashpoint—the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, in 1982, or the rise of ISIS, in Syria and Iraq, in 2014—and of then building on it in broader efforts toward peace. When the going got tough, however, the U.S. retreated from both countries. And chaos erupted.

During the past week, Trump has scornfully dismissed the Middle East—a region with “a lot of sand”—for its endless wars. “They’ve been fighting for a thousand years. Let them fight their own wars,” he said in a joint press conference with the Italian President last week. “That’s the way it is.”

The twin retreats have also included feelings of betrayal—both the betrayal by the Commander-in-Chief of his own military on the ground and the betrayal by those forces of the people they had been deployed to help.

In both cases, the winners were the same—Russia, Iran, Syria, and extremist movements, Geraghty said.

Both U.S. withdrawals also enhanced prospects for jihadism generally. After the U.S. pullout in Lebanon, Hezbollah gained ever wider ground, launching attacks from Israel to Kuwait. It has since become the most powerful militia in the region, with tentacles in Iraq, Yemen, and Syria, where its forces have fought alongside the Assad regime for the past eight years. With the U.S. withdrawal from Syria, the Kurds have lost their partners in the five-year war against ISIS. They alone don’t have the bandwidth to deal with the aftermath, with twenty thousand to thirty thousand ISIS fighters still waging an insurgency across Syria and Iraq.

Similar waves of protests in the past successfully halted a government plan to cut the French pension system in an effort to curb its spending deficit.

In addition to fuel shortages, which that have created huge lines at gas stations, the unions have also called for nationwide strikes in the public transportation sector, including air traffic controllers and at many of the 19 nuclear plants that provide electricity for much of the country.

With approval ratings below 20 percent, Hollande is the least popular president in modern French history.

The tumult raises the possibility that Hollande may not be chosen to run for re-election in 2017, which would be the first time in more than 50 years that a first-term incumbent was not tapped to pursue a second term.

Protests could grow until then, when France will have already begun hosting the Euro 2016 soccer tournament.

Many are concerned that the disruptions to fuel supplies — and possibly even electricity — could affect the tournament, a major sporting event with millions of viewers that will place France, yet again, in the international spotlight.

During this time, eight American presidents assumed, or hoped, that China would eventually bend to what were considered the established rules of modernization: Prosperity would fuel popular demands for political freedom and bring China into the fold of democratic nations. Or the Chinese economy would falter under the weight of authoritarian rule and bureaucratic rot.

China’s Communist leaders have defied expectations again and again. They embraced capitalism even as they continued to call themselves Marxists. They used repression to maintain power but without stifling entrepreneurship or innovation. Surrounded by foes and rivals, they avoided war, with one brief exception, even as they fanned nationalist sentiment at home. And they presided over 40 years of uninterrupted growth, often with unorthodox policies the textbooks said would fail.

There is no simple explanation for how China’s leaders pulled this off. There was foresight and luck, skill and violent resolve, but perhaps most important was the fear — a sense of crisis among Mao’s successors that they never shook, and that intensified after the Tiananmen Square massacre and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

China’s Communists studied and obsessed over the fate of their old ideological allies in Moscow, determined to learn from their mistakes. They drew two lessons: The party needed to embrace “reform” to survive — but “reform” must never include democratization.

China has veered between these competing impulses ever since, between opening up and clamping down, between experimenting with change and resisting it, always pulling back before going too far in either direction for fear of running aground.

The careers of these men from Moganshan highlight an important aspect of China’s success: It turned its apparatchiks into capitalists.

Party leaders called this go-slow, experimental approach “crossing the river by feeling the stones” — allowing farmers to grow and sell their own crops, for example, while retaining state ownership of the land; lifting investment restrictions in “special economic zones,” while leaving them in place in the rest of the country; or introducing privatization by selling only minority stakes in state firms at first.

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, tried to break the hold of these bureaucrats on the economy by opening up the political system. Decades later, Chinese officials still take classes on why that was a mistake. The party even produced a documentary series on the subject in 2006, distributing it on classified DVDs for officials at all levels to watch.

Afraid to open up politically but unwilling to stand still, the party found another way. It moved gradually and followed the pattern of the compromise at Moganshan, which left the planned economy intact while allowing a market economy to flourish and outgrow it.

American economists were skeptical. Market forces needed to be introduced quickly, they argued; otherwise, the bureaucracy would mobilize to block necessary changes. After a visit to China in 1988, the Nobel laureate Milton Friedman called the party’s strategy “an open invitation to corruption and inefficiency.”

The United States and Japan, both routinely vilified by party propagandists, became major trading partners and were important sources of aid, investment and expertise

At the same time, the party invested in education, expanding access to schools and universities, and all but eliminating illiteracy

mainland China now produces more graduates in science and engineering every year than the United States, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan combined.

In cities like Shanghai, Chinese schoolchildren outperform peers around the world. For many parents, though, even that is not enough. Because of new wealth, a traditional emphasis on education as a path to social mobility and the state’s hypercompetitive college entrance exam, most students also enroll in after-school tutoring programs — a market worth $125 billion, according to one study, or as much as half the government’s annual military budget.

party made changes after Mao’s death that fell short of free elections or independent courts yet were nevertheless significant

The party introduced term limits and mandatory retirement ages, for example, making it easier to flush out incompetent officials. And it revamped the internal report cards it used to evaluate local leaders for promotions and bonuses, focusing them almost exclusively on concrete economic targets.

These seemingly minor adjustments had an outsize impact, injecting a dose of accountability — and competition — into the political system, said Yuen Yuen Ang, a political scientist at the University of Michigan. “China created a unique hybrid,” she said, “an autocracy with democratic characteristics.”

They were rewarded with soaring tax revenues and opportunities to enrich their friends, their relatives and themselves. A wave of officials abandoned the state and went into business. Over time, the party elite amassed great wealth, which cemented its support for the privatization of much of the economy it once controlled.

The private sector now produces more than 60 percent of the nation’s economic output, employs over 80 percent of workers in cities and towns, and generates 90 percent of new jobs

the bureaucrats stay out of the way. “I basically don’t see them even once a year,” said James Ni, chairman and founder of Mlily, a mattress manufacturer in eastern China. “I’m creating jobs, generating tax revenue. Why should they bother me?”

even as he wraps himself in Deng’s legacy, Mr. Xi has set himself apart in an important way: Deng encouraged the party to seek help and expertise overseas, but Mr. Xi preaches self-reliance and warns of the threats posed by “hostile foreign forces.

China tapped into a wave of globalization sweeping the world and emerged as the world’s factory. China’s embrace of the internet, within limits, helped make it a leader in technology. And foreign advice helped China reshape its banks, build a legal system and create modern corporations.

It was a remarkable act of reinvention, one that eluded the Soviets. In both China and the Soviet Union, vast Stalinist bureaucracies had smothered economic growth, with officials who wielded unchecked power resisting change that threatened their privileges.

Mr. Lin was part of a torrent of investment from ethnic Chinese enclaves in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and beyond that washed over China — and gave it a leg up on other developing countries

The timing worked out for China, which opened up just as Taiwan was outgrowing its place in the global manufacturing chain. China benefited from Taiwan’s money, but also its managerial experience, technology and relationships with customers around the world. In effect, Taiwan jump-started capitalism in China and plugged it into the global economy.

Before long, the government in Taiwan began to worry about relying so much on its onetime enemy and tried to shift investment elsewhere. But the mainland was too cheap, too close and, with a common language and heritage, too familiar.

Now Taiwan finds itself increasingly dependent on a much more powerful China, which is pushing ever harder for unification, and the island’s future is uncertain

Many in Washington predicted that trade would bring political change. It did, but not in China. “Opening up” ended up strengthening the party’s hold on power rather than weakening it. The shock of China’s rise as an export colossus, however, was felt in factory towns around the world.

In the United States, economists say at least two million jobs disappeared as a result, many in districts that ended up voting for President Trump.

The pro-democracy movement in 1989 was the closest the party ever came to political liberalization after Mao’s death, and the crackdown that followed was the furthest it went in the other direction, toward repression and control. After the massacre, the economy stalled and retrenchment seemed certain. Yet three years later, Deng used a tour of southern China to wrestle the party back to “reform and opening up” once more. Many who had left the government, like Mr. Feng, suddenly found themselves leading the nation’s transformation from the outside, as its first generation of private entrepreneurs.

The fear is that Mr. Xi is attempting to rewrite the recipe behind China’s rise, replacing selective repression with something more severe.

The internet is an example of how it has benefited by striking a balance. The party let the nation go online with barely an inkling of what that might mean, then reaped the economic benefits while controlling the spread of information that could hurt it.

“The basic problem is, who is growth for?” said Mr. Xu, the retired official who wrote the Moganshan report. “We haven’t solved this problem.”

“The cost of censorship is quite limited compared to the great value created by the internet,” said Chen Tong, an industry pioneer. “We still get the information we need for economic progress.”

China is not the only country that has squared the demands of authoritarian rule with the needs of free markets. But it has done so for longer, at greater scale and with more convincing results than any other.

Washington is maneuvering to counter Beijing’s growing influence around the world, warning that a Chinese spending spree on global infrastructure comes with strings attached.

both left and right in America have portrayed China as the champion of an alternative global order, one that embraces autocratic values and undermines fair competition. It is a rare consensus for the United States, which is deeply divided about so much else, including how it has wielded power abroad in recent decades — and how it should do so now.

Mr. Xi, on the other hand, has shown no sign of abandoning what he calls “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” Some in his corner have been itching to take on the United States since the 2008 financial crisis and see the Trump administration’s policies as proof of what they have always suspected — that America is determined to keep China down.

there is also widespread anxiety over the new acrimony, because the United States has long inspired admiration and envy in China, and because of a gnawing sense that the party’s formula for success may be faltering.

Prosperity has brought rising expectations in China; the public wants more than just economic growth. It wants cleaner air, safer food and medicine, better health care and schools, less corruption and greater equality. The party is struggling to deliver, and tweaks to the report cards it uses to measure the performance of officials hardly seem enough.

Now, many companies assign hundreds of employees to censorship duties — and China has become a giant on the global internet landscape.

Mr. Xi himself has acknowledged that the party must adapt, declaring that the nation is entering a “new era” requiring new methods. But his prescription has largely been a throwback to repression, including vast internment camps targeting Muslim ethnic minorities. “Opening up” has been replaced by an outward push, with huge loans that critics describe as predatory and other efforts to gain influence — or interfere — in the politics of other countries. At home, experimentation is out while political orthodoxy and discipline are in.

n effect, Mr. Xi seems to believe that China has been so successful that the party can return to a more conventional authoritarian posture — and that to survive and surpass the United States it must

Certainly, the momentum is still with the party. Over the past four decades, economic growth in China has been 10 times faster than in the United States, and it is still more than twice as fast. The party appears to enjoy broad public support, and many around the world are convinced that Mr. Trump’s America is in retreat while China’s moment is just beginning

The world thought it could change China, and in many ways it has. But China’s success has been so spectacular that it has just as often changed the world — and the American understanding of how the world works.

There is no simple explanation for how China’s leaders pulled this off. There was foresight and luck, skill and violent resolve, but perhaps most important was the fear — a sense of crisis among Mao’s successors that they never shook, and that intensified after the Tiananmen Square massacre and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But China had a strange advantage in battling bureaucratic resistance. The nation’s long economic boom followed one of the darkest chapters of its history, the Cultural Revolution, which decimated the party apparatus and left it in shambles. In effect, autocratic excess set the stage for Mao’s eventual successor, Deng Xiaoping, to lead the party in a radically more open direction.

In other words, he appears to have less use for the “opening up” part of Deng’s slogan.

Now Mr. Xi is steering the party toward repression again, tightening its grip on society, concentrating power in his own hands and setting himself up to rule for life by abolishing the presidential term limit. Will the party loosen up again, as it did a few years after Tiananmen, or is this a more permanent shift? If it is, what will it mean for the Chinese economic miracle?

The question now is whether it can sustain this model with the United States as an adversary rather than a partner.

Ukrainians are aware of their new superiority in conventional arms and want to press their advantage to the maximum.

Nuclear escalation seems to be a joker that Putin wants to keep in play. What will he do if more retreat and humiliation come his way? The discussion tends to go in circles, focusing on Putin’s megalomania and his habit of surprising people. All of which leaves a room for a disconcerting level of uncertainty. Clearly, Putin intends to keep it that way. So far, the Russian ruler links the preservation of Russia’s “sovereignty” not to successful diplomacy but to nuclear deterrence and, if need be, brinkmanship.

In Moscow, the environment is quite the opposite. Putin, his propagandists and top military no longer say “nuclear war must not be waged”. Instead, they seem to be stoking fears of nuclear conflict. The story of Khrushchev’s gamble and retreat is rarely discussed, and its details have not been digested by the current cohort of decision-makers. Many crucial files still remain secret and forgotten, gathering dust in archives

The Ukrainian offensive, backed by US weapons and intelligence, has become part of a precarious web of international security. Will the Ukrainians push to regain all their lost territory or stop at the border of Crimea? Will they start shelling Sevastopol with US-provided missile launchers? If they do, the pressure on Putin to escalate would increase enormously

Imagine what Kennedy would have done in October 1962 had the Cubans been given the opportunity to shell cities in Florida. If the Kremlin has no more conventional ways to escalate, the temptation to use a tactical nuclear device will grow.

As his delusional gamble in Ukraine produces one military retreat after another, Putin has to find an exit. We simply have no means of knowing what kind of an exit he will choose, and whether it will come with a bang.

it should be easy to see that Obama’s America is not retreating and will not retreat from the world

Obama’s record shows that he recognizes America’s capacity to project military power around the world is its unique strength and an underpinning to the global order.

The “rebalancing” to Asia has manifested itself in numerous military and nonmilitary measures that have certainly gotten China’s attention, among its other effects.

He has therefore used American military forces repeatedly in such diverse locales as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and Uganda, among others

But Obama also sees an America that is weary of war, fiscally constrained and in the view of many sometimes reckless in its use of force. Whatever one’s views on the latter point, there is little doubt in the eyes of most Americans that the wars of the past dozen years have been very difficult and costly — and that they are not to be repeated.

This reflects a sense that American power is not enhanced by unnecessary wars that waste resources and erode American will. He also talks about ending the major wars in Iraq and Afghanistan even while continuing to prosecute military operations on several fronts.

Obama’s priorities are clear: maintaining great-power peace, preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and combating Al Qaeda and related groups — on these matters, very little retrenchment is visible in U.S. policy.

has Congress, especially in its willingness to tolerate sequestration and even a government shutdown and a debt default — blunders that could pose far greater threats to American internationalism than anything emanating from the White House.

The Taliban also appeared to have freed hundreds of inmates from the city’s prison

But witness accounts and videos posted to social media showed some scenes of chaos. The insurgents had set fire to police buildings, and witnesses reported that jewelry shops were being looted, though by whom was unclear.

the Taliban issued a statement saying that the group “has no intention” of looting or carrying out extrajudicial killings.

One video showed a crowd gathered around the city’s main traffic circle, responding to the chants of a Taliban fighter. “Death to America! Death to the slaves of America!” the fighter shouted into a megaphone, as the crowd responded: “Death to Mir Alam! Death to Nabi Gechi!” Both of those men are local militia commanders fighting on the side of the government

for most of human history, men worked in really nasty jobs that damaged their health for three reasons: to support themselves, to support their families, and because that was what manliness required.

we have simply failed to replenish what we inherited from the Greatest Generation of these sources of identity for the Americans who cannot pat themselves on the back because they’ve made it to Harvard

: religion, patriotism, community, and yes, pro-social masculinity.

For most of humanity’s history, masculinity was something achieved, not given, and it pointed men in directions that their society defined as pro-social

Above all, in modern times, to work and marriage. The connections between work, marriage, fatherhood, and manhood unleashed enormous social energy

Being a husband and a father was a socially and sexually reinforced masculine identity. It wasn’t just being a parent or a caretaker

A good husband and father worked. The guy who didn’t was not just a deadbeat, not just a social menace, but a failure as a man.

The redefinition of masculinity into personhood has not produced a generation of men who act like women. The deep sources of motivation are not the same for both genders.

Today we’ve defined men as the enemy unless they pretend to conform to the idea that gender doesn’t matter.

Adult men are now retreating to the world of video games where their aggressive impulses are valorized, not despised — without risk and without real reward.

If the future of work isn’t quite biased against men, it certainly seemed biased against the traditional idea of manliness. Construction and manufacturing, two male-dominated industries, are down 3 million jobs since 2008. Most of those jobs are dead, forever.

Meanwhile, the only occupations expected to add more than 100,000 jobs in the next decade are personal care aides, home health aides, medical secretaries, and marketing specialists, all of which are currently majority female.

What are these young men doing?

“The hours that they are not working have been replaced almost one for one with leisure time. Seventy-five percent of this new leisure time falls into one category: video games.” And, so far, they like it pretty well this way: “Happiness surveys actually indicate that they [are] quite content compared to their peers,”

this situation is largely voluntary: Not only are these men not looking for work, “only a minority report that they’ve left the labor force because they cannot find a job.”

“Ever-greater numbers of working-age men simply have dropped out — some for a while and some forever — from the competition for jobs. These men have established a new and alternative lifestyle to the age-old male quest for a paying job.”

Almost 40 percent of all Americans without work are now male.

Between 1948 and 2015, the proportion of women between 25 and 64 in the workforce doubled from 34 percent to 70 percent, masking the continuing retreat of men from work.

By the late 1990s, women’s workforce participation stopped rising. “Only then did the overall work rate for U.S. adults begin to register a decline,” he writes. “For two full generations, the upsurge of employment for women disguised the steady decline in work for men.”

the number of working-age men without work is still almost 10 million, or about 10 percent of the working-age male population.

Between 1965 and 2015, the share of working-age men who are jobless more than doubled, from 10 percent to 22 percent. Among “prime age” men, the percentage without jobs shot from 6 percent to nearly 16 percent

It is undeniable that crises like a pandemic demand radical solutions. There is nothing wrong with pointing out the failures in the systems that led to so many dire consequences, or even being angry about them — as many are — and pushing for change

the subcultural aspects of the internet — the communities we go to for support, or to talk to people going through similar things, can make us feel less lonely in the short term but often end up entrenching us further into certain fatalistic and misanthropic ways of thinking.

the best thing we can probably do at this time is seek to better understand how digital radicalization and the far right works, so that we can be better prepared to counter it.

We tend to overestimate our own ability to scan through, comprehend and categorize information we read online. The human brain is remarkable for its ability to adapt to new technologies, but not all of these adaptations are beneficial, either for us as individuals or collectively.

As we retreat to online enclaves and obsessively check the news, our vision of reality is bound to become distorted

Some psychologists have theorized that when reminded of our own mortality, we retreat to familiar institutions and more vehemently reject what we perceive as different and strange

it’s worth noting that secular societies struggle with providing mechanisms to resolve feelings of guilt. The contemporary radical right has been particularly successful in encouraging its followers to redirect any societal guilt they might feel about past historical wrongs or current states of injustice into rage at those groups who would make them feel guilty: women, people of color, Jews.

What could happen as a result is our being bombarded with tempting offers to rechannel our guilt into anger at those who were most affected, who serve as a reminder of our relative good luck: undocumented immigrants, the elderly, the poor, the disabled, even the dead.

These ideas could even be promoted by those in power, who will no doubt be grateful for the transference of accountability.

we can already see these forces mobilizing — see, for instance, arguments on the far right that discussions of Chinese culpability for the virus are being suppressed in the name of “political correctness,”

To understand how such a spiral of anger and guilt might work, we desperately need to update our understanding of how internet subcultures function.

we often think of radicalization as something the radicalized passively fell into and got swept up in.

In fact, the internet — for good and for ill — is a collaborative and imaginative space, rather than somewhere one group of people talks and another listens. We can be both influencer and influenced

“audiences often demand ” increasingly radical content from their preferred creators. Then, as far-right content continues to get enormous engagement, we see the numbers, and our understanding of this content as beyond the pale naturally decreases.

before we have even made the decision to watch a video or read an article, our perception of it has already been altered almost imperceptibly by the various tiny signals surrounding it. Whatever social media platform you use to engage with the world, your timeline is almost certainly the greatest source of unchecked and frequently subconscious influence.

In this age of isolation, we need to be aware of how far-right actors will attempt to exploit this unprecedented situation — and we need to be prepared for the fact that it may very well work.

This rainbow-flag polity, Plato argues, is, for many people, the fairest of regimes. The freedom in that democracy has to be experienced to be believed — with shame and privilege in particular emerging over time as anathema. But it is inherently unstable. As the authority of elites fades, as Establishment values cede to popular ones, views and identities can become so magnificently diverse as to be mutually uncomprehendin

when all the barriers to equality, formal and informal, have been removed; when everyone is equal; when elites are despised and full license is established to do “whatever one wants,” you arrive at what might be called late-stage democracy

The very rich come under attack, as inequality becomes increasingly intolerable. Patriarchy is also dismantled: “We almost forgot to mention the extent of the law of equality and of freedom in the relations of women with men and men with women.” Family hierarchies are inverted: “A father habituates himself to be like his child and fear his sons, and a son habituates himself to be like his father and to have no shame before or fear of his parents.” In classrooms, “as the teacher ... is frightened of the pupils and fawns on them, so the students make light of their teachers.” Animals are regarded as equal to humans; the rich mingle freely with the poor in the streets and try to blend in. The foreigner is equal to the citizen.

when a democracy has ripened as fully as this, Plato argues, that a would-be tyrant will often seize his moment.

He is usually of the elite but has a nature in tune with the time — given over to random pleasures and whims, feasting on plenty of food and sex, and reveling in the nonjudgment that is democracy’s civil religion. He makes his move by “taking over a particularly obedient mob” and attacking his wealthy peers as corrupt

If not stopped quickly, his appetite for attacking the rich on behalf of the people swells further. He is a traitor to his class — and soon, his elite enemies, shorn of popular legitimacy, find a way to appease him or are forced to flee

Eventually, he stands alone, promising to cut through the paralysis of democratic incoherence. It’s as if he were offering the addled, distracted, and self-indulgent citizens a kind of relief from democracy’s endless choices and insecurities

He rides a backlash to excess—“too much freedom seems to change into nothing but too much slavery” — and offers himself as the personified answer to the internal conflicts of the democratic mess. He pledges, above all, to take on the increasingly despised elites. And as the people thrill to him as a kind of solution, a democracy willingly, even impetuously, repeals itself.

Part of American democracy’s stability is owed to the fact that the Founding Fathers had read their Plato. To guard our democracy from the tyranny of the majority and the passions of the mob, they constructed large, hefty barriers between the popular will and the exercise of power.

Over the centuries, however, many of these undemocratic rules have been weakened or abolished

The franchise has been extended far beyond propertied white men. The presidency is now effectively elected through popular vote, with the Electoral College almost always reflecting the national democratic will. And these formal democratic advances were accompanied by informal ones

Direct democracy didn’t just elect Congress and the president anymore; it expanded the notion of who might be qualified for public office. Once, candidates built a career through experience in elected or Cabinet positions or as military commanders; they were effectively selected by peer review. That elitist sorting mechanism has slowly imploded

further widening of our democracy — our increased openness to being led by anyone; indeed, our accelerating preference for outsiders — is now almost complete.

“It is usually those whose poverty is relatively recent, the ‘new poor,’ who throb with the ferment of frustration,”

Many contend, of course, that American democracy is actually in retreat, close to being destroyed by the vastly more unequal economy of the last quarter-century and the ability of the very rich to purchase political influence. This is Bernie Sanders’s core critique. But the past few presidential elections have demonstrated that, in fact, money from the ultrarich has been mostly a dud.

it is precisely because of the great accomplishments of our democracy that we should be vigilant about its specific, unique vulnerability: its susceptibility, in stressful times, to the appeal of a shameless demagogue.

What the 21st century added to this picture, it’s now blindingly obvious, was media democracy — in a truly revolutionary form. If late-stage political democracy has taken two centuries to ripen, the media equivalent took around two decades, swiftly erasing almost any elite moderation or control of our democratic discourse

The rise of the internet — an event so swift and pervasive its political effect is only now beginning to be understood — further democratized every source of information, dramatically expanded each outlet’s readership, and gave everyone a platform. All the old barriers to entry — the cost of print and paper and distribution — crumbled.

Political organizing — calling a meeting, fomenting a rally to advance a cause — used to be extremely laborious. Now you could bring together a virtual mass movement with a single webpage. It would take you a few seconds.

The web was also uniquely capable of absorbing other forms of media, conflating genres and categories in ways never seen before. The distinction between politics and entertainment became fuzzier; election coverage became even more modeled on sportscasting

The web’s algorithms all but removed any editorial judgment, and the effect soon had cable news abandoning even the pretense of asking “Is this relevant?” or “Do we really need to cover this live?” in the rush toward ratings bonanzas. In the end, all these categories were reduced to one thing: traffic, measured far more accurately than any other medium had ever done before

what mainly fuels this is precisely what the Founders feared about democratic culture: feeling, emotion, and narcissism, rather than reason, empiricism, and public-spiritedness

Online debates become personal, emotional, and irresolvable almost as soon as they begin

Godwin’s Law — it’s only a matter of time before a comments section brings up Hitler — is a reflection of the collapse of the reasoned deliberation the Founders saw as indispensable to a functioning republic.

Yes, occasional rational points still fly back and forth, but there are dramatically fewer elite arbiters to establish which of those points is actually true or valid or relevant. We have lost authoritative sources for even a common set of facts. And without such common empirical ground, the emotional component of politics becomes inflamed and reason retreats even further. The more emotive the candidate, the more supporters he or she will get.

The climate Obama thrived in, however, was also ripe for far less restrained opportunists. In 2008, Sarah Palin emerged as proof that an ardent Republican, branded as an outsider, tailor-made for reality TV, proud of her own ignorance about the world, and reaching an audience directly through online media, could also triumph in this new era. She was, it turned out, a John the Baptist for the true messiah of conservative populism, waiting patiently and strategically for his time to come.

Trump assiduously cultivated this image and took to reality television as a natural. Each week, for 14 seasons of The Apprentice, he would look someone in the eye and tell them, “You’re fired!” The conversation most humane bosses fear to have with an employee was something Trump clearly relished, and the cruelty became entertainment. In retrospect, it is clear he was training — both himself and his viewers. If you want to understand why a figure so widely disliked nonetheless powers toward the election as if he were approaching a reality-TV-show finale, look no further. His television tactics, as applied to presidential debates, wiped out rivals used to a different game. And all our reality-TV training has conditioned us to hope he’ll win — or at least stay in the game till the final round. In such a shame-free media environment, the assholes often win. In the end, you support them because they’re assholes.

The deeper, long-term reasons for today’s rage are not hard to find, although many of us elites have shamefully found ourselves able to ignore them. The jobs available to the working class no longer contain the kind of craftsmanship or satisfaction or meaning that can take the sting out of their low and stagnant wages. The once-familiar avenues for socialization — the church, the union hall, the VFW — have become less vibrant and social isolation more common. Global economic forces have pummeled blue-collar workers more relentlessly than almost any other segment of society, forcing them to compete against hundreds of millions of equally skilled workers throughout the planet. No one asked them in the 1990s if this was the future they wanted. And the impact has been more brutal than many economists predicted. No wonder suicide and mortality rates among the white working poor are spiking dramatically.

The barriers to the popular will, especially when it comes to choosing our president, are now almost nonexisten

Fundamentalist religion long provided some emotional support for those left behind (for one thing, it invites practitioners to defy the elites as unholy), but its influence has waned as modernity has penetrated almost everything and the great culture wars of the 1990s and 2000s have ended in a rout. The result has been a more diverse mainstream culture — but also, simultaneously, a subculture that is even more alienated and despised, and ever more infuriated and bloody-minded

It’s a period in which we have become far more aware of the historic injustices that still haunt African-Americans and yet we treat the desperate plight of today’s white working ­class as an afterthought. And so late-stage capitalism is creating a righteous, revolutionary anger that late-stage democracy has precious little ability to moderate or constrain — and has actually helped exacerbate.

For the white working class, having had their morals roundly mocked, their religion deemed primitive, and their economic prospects decimated, now find their very gender and race, indeed the very way they talk about reality, described as a kind of problem for the nation to overcome

Much of the newly energized left has come to see the white working class not as allies but primarily as bigots, misogynists, racists, and homophobes, thereby condemning those often at the near-bottom rung of the economy to the bottom rung of the culture as well.

Mass movements, Hoffer argues, are distinguished by a “facility for make-believe … credulity, a readiness to attempt the impossible.” What, one wonders, could be more impossible than suddenly vetting every single visitor to the U.S. for traces of Islamic belief? What could be more make-believe than a big, beautiful wall stretching across the entire Mexican border, paid for by the Mexican government? What could be more credulous than arguing that we could pay off our national debt through a global trade war?

In a conventional political party, and in a rational political discourse, such ideas would be laughed out of contention, their self-evident impossibility disqualifying them from serious consideration. In the emotional fervor of a democratic mass movement, however, these impossibilities become icons of hope, symbols of a new way of conducting politics. Their very impossibility is their appeal.

But the most powerful engine for such a movement — the thing that gets it off the ground, shapes and solidifies and entrenches it — is always the evocation of hatred. It is, as Hoffer put it, “the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying elements.”

what makes Trump uniquely dangerous in the history of American politics — with far broader national appeal than, say, Huey Long or George Wallace — is his response to all three enemies. It’s the threat of blunt coercion and dominance.

Fascism had, in some measure, an ideology and occasional coherence that Trump utterly lacks. But his movement is clearly fascistic in its demonization of foreigners, its hyping of a threat by a domestic minority (Muslims and Mexicans are the new Jews), its focus on a single supreme leader of what can only be called a cult, and its deep belief in violence and coercion in a democracy that has heretofore relied on debate and persuasion

what’s notable about Trump’s supporters is precisely what one would expect from members of a mass movement: their intense loyalty. Trump is their man, however inarticulate they are when explaining why. He’s tough, he’s real, and they’ve got his back, especially when he is attacked by all the people they have come to despise: liberal Democrats and traditional Republicans

Trump tells the crowd he’d like to punch a protester in the face or have him carried out on a stretcher. No modern politician who has come this close to the presidency has championed violence in this way. It would be disqualifying if our hyper­democracy hadn’t already abolished disqualifications.

Trump celebrates torture — the one true love of tyrants everywhere — not because it allegedly produces intelligence but because it has a demonstration effect.

Fuck political correctness. As one of his supporters told an obtuse reporter at a rally when asked if he supported Trump: “Hell yeah! He’s no-bullshit. All balls. Fuck you all balls. That’s what I’m about.” And therein lies the appeal of tyrants from the beginning of time. Fuck you all balls. Irrationality with muscle.

The racial aspect of this is also unmissable. When the enemy within is Mexican or Muslim, and your ranks are extremely white, you set up a rubric for a racial conflict. And what’s truly terrifying about Trump is that he does not seem to shrink from such a prospect; he relishes it.

“I’ve got to keep remembering … that Windrip is only the lightest cork on the whirlpool. He didn’t plot all this thing. With all the justified discontent there is against the smart politicians and the Plush Horses of Plutocracy — oh, if it hadn’t been one Windrip, it’d been another … We had it coming, we Respectables.”

Those who believe that Trump’s ugly, thuggish populism has no chance of ever making it to the White House seem to me to be missing this dynamic. Neo-fascist movements do not advance gradually by persuasion; they first transform the terms of the debate, create a new movement based on untrammeled emotion, take over existing institutions, and then ruthlessly exploit events.

I have no doubt, for example, that Trump is sincere in his desire to “cut the head off” ISIS, whatever that can possibly mean. But it remains a fact that the interests of ISIS and the Trump campaign are now perfectly aligned. Fear is always the would-be tyrant’s greatest ally.

His proposition is a simple one. Remember James Carville’s core question in the 1992 election: Change versus more of the same? That sentiment once elected Clinton’s husband; it could also elect her opponent this fall. If you like America as it is, vote Clinton

the more she campaigns, the higher her unfavorables go (including in her own party). She has a Gore problem. The idea of welcoming her into your living room for the next four years can seem, at times, positively masochistic

All Trump needs is a sliver of minority votes inspired by the new energy of his campaign and the alleged dominance of the Obama coalition could crac

like all tyrants, he is utterly lacking in self-control. Sleeping a handful of hours a night, impulsively tweeting in the early hours, improvising madly on subjects he knows nothing about, Trump rants and raves as he surfs an entirely reactive media landscape

And, 81 years later, many of us did. An American elite that has presided over massive and increasing public debt, that failed to prevent 9/11, that chose a disastrous war in the Middle East, that allowed financial markets to nearly destroy the global economy, and that is now so bitterly divided the Congress is effectively moot in a constitutional democracy: “We Respectables” deserve a comeuppance

The vital and valid lesson of the Trump phenomenon is that if the elites cannot govern by compromise, someone outside will eventually try to govern by popular passion and brute force.

But elites still matter in a democracy. They matter not because they are democracy’s enemy but because they provide the critical ingredient to save democracy from itself.

Democrats who are gleefully predicting a Clinton landslide in November need to both check their complacency and understand that the Trump question really isn’t a cause for partisan Schadenfreude anymore. It’s much more dangerous than that.

Those still backing the demagogue of the left, Bernie Sanders, might want to reflect that their critique of Clinton’s experience and expertise — and their facile conflation of that with corruption — is only playing into Trump’s hands

Republicans desperately trying to use the long-standing rules of their own nominating process to thwart this monster deserve our passionate suppor

e. They should resist any temptation to loyally back the nominee or to sit this election out. They must take the fight to Trump at every opportunity, unite with Democrats and Independents against him, and be prepared to sacrifice one election in order to save their party and their country.

Trump is not just a wacky politician of the far right, or a riveting television spectacle, or a Twitter phenom and bizarre working-class hero. He is not just another candidate to be parsed and analyzed by TV pundits in the same breath as all the others. In terms of our liberal democracy and constitutional order, Trump is an extinction-level event. It’s long past time we started treating him as such.

"Joe Biden has always been the guy who goes home to Delaware," said another person who has worked with the President. "The White House isn't going to change that."

Biden's instinct -- sometimes last-minute, say those familiar with his schedule -- is to get away from it for a weekly breather.

Tension is building between White House staff tasked with delivering the news of a weekend away and the logistical apparatus that allows it, said another person familiar with operations.

"President Biden is deeply proud of his roots and his family and it has been a staple of his time in public life to never lose touch with either," White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates said in a statement to CNN.

And as all Americans can agree, it's important for leaders to avoid becoming ensconced in Washington, DC."

It's not wholly unusual for presidents to feel the urge to escape the confines of the White House campus, and many before Biden have taken hearty advantage of doing so.

Visiting retreats or second homes, most of which were personal touchpoints for a president, doesn't make a commander in chief immune to the demands of the job. "He's always working, no matter where he is," said one administration official of Biden's habits, noting he spends a good deal of time on the weekend prepping for the week ahead, or thinking on larger ideological conundrums. "He is by no means 'checked out' just because he isn't in the Oval (Office.)"

Another person familiar with the mood of the Biden residence noted the first couple is well-liked by the White House staff, but their frequent absences make it difficult to get to know them.

The Bidens have not overtly personalized the residence yet, instead making small changes and adding special touches, said one person familiar. (A recent Biden addition is the building of a green lattice fence around the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden on the east side of the building, erected to create a daytime dog-run for the first couple's two German Shepherds Champ and Major.)

speculates it's possible Biden might still think of the White House as the spot where his former boss, Obama, lived and worked. "It's sort of like moving into your ex's place," said the source.

"You know, I don't know what I ever expected it to be," Biden said during the town hall about actually residing in the White House. "I said when I was running, I wanted to be President not to live in the White House but to be able to make the decisions about the future of the country. And so living in the White House, as you've heard other presidents who have been extremely flattered to live there, has -- it's a little like a gilded cage in terms of being able to walk outside and do things."

The Chinese dictator has repeatedly proclaimed his confidence in "a China solution to humanity's search for better social systems." By that, he presumably meant an authoritarian model replicating Beijing's blend of capitalism, state control and barely-existent political rights.

Strengthening American democracy for the sake of protecting democracy around the world is the kind of mission that should unify the country -- it's not a Democrats versus Republicans goal. But in the current venomous environment, it's hard to persuade American politicians to come together, and even harder to convince many Republicans to align behind this major goal of the Biden administration.

The scope of U.S. intelligence activity in the region has drawn renewed interest in recent days, in the wake of a U.S. raid on Saturday that killed ISIS Leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The CIA, as well as Iraqi and Kurdish intelligence officers, tracked the ISIS chief by interviewing the wife of an al-Baghdadi aide and one of his couriers, and by recruiting local spies along the Syrian-Iraqi border.

“The oil fields are small, we blasted them after Daesh [ISIS] seized them, and they will take years to rebuild,” said one official. So why leave forces there to protect them? “Talking about oil was the only way we could talk the President into keeping any U.S. military force in the area,” the official says. On Friday, after the plan to protect the oilfields was unveiled, Trump tweeted, “Oil is secured.”

U.S. officials are worried that a humanitarian crisis and renewed fighting in the region will invite a resurgence of ISIS, which operates best in chaotic situations. Many captured ISIS fighters remain in Kurdish custody in northern Syria. Trump appeared to dismiss the danger of a renewed terrorist threat Friday, when he tweeted, “ISIS SECURED”. Esper told reporters at NATO that the U.S. mission remains preventing a resurgence of ISIS.

U.S. intelligence officials aren’t the only ones seeing evidence of war crimes. The human rights group Amnesty International reported on Friday that Turkish-backed Syrian forces have committed war crimes, including executions of Kurdish civilians.

On April 6, 1814, Napoleon, then in his mid-40s, was forced to abdicate the throne. With the Treaty of Fontainebleau, he was exiled to Elba, a Mediterranean island off the coast of Italy.

The new king, Louis XVIII, fled, and Napoleon embarked on what came to be known as his Hundred Days campaign.

Upon Napoleon’s return to France, a coalition of allies—the Austrians, British, Prussians and Russians—who considered the French emperor an enemy began to prepare for war. Napoleon raised a new army and planned to strike preemptively, defeating the allied forces one by one before they could launch a united attack against him.

Two days later, on June 18, Napoleon led his army of some 72,000 troops against the 68,000-man British army, which had taken up a position south of Brussels near the village of Waterloo.

Although Napoleon’s troops mounted a strong attack against the British, the arrival of the Prussians turned the tide against the French. The French emperor’s outnumbered army retreated in chaos.

Ultimately, the Battle of Waterloo marked the end of Napoleon’s storied military career. He reportedly rode away from the battle in tears.

Did you know? Today, the expression that someone has “met his Waterloo” means the person has suffered a decisive or final defeat or setback.

On June 22, 1815, Napoleon once again abdicated. That October, he was exiled to the remote, British-held island of Saint Helena, in the South Atlantic Ocean. He died there on May 5, 1821, at age 51, most likely from stomach cancer.

The study reveals, for the first time, the genetic sequence of the virus that may have infected Mr. Trump and dozens of others, researchers said.

In a study released on Thursday, the C.D.C. cited genetic sequencing and intensive contact tracing that documented an super-spreading event at a high school retreat in Wisconsin.

The genomes believed by these researchers to be connected to the White House outbreak do not identify a recent geographic source, in part because they are unusual.

The results show that even weeks after it was identified, the White House outbreak would be better understood by sequencing samples of more people who were infected.

Viruses constantly mutate, picking up tiny, accidental alterations to their genetic material as they reproduce. Few mutations alter how a virus functions. But by comparing patterns of mutations across many genetic sequences, scientists can construct family trees of a virus, illuminating how it spreads.

But the Trump administration is not known to have conducted its own genetic analysis of people infected in the outbreak. The White House declined to respond to questions on genetic sequencing of Mr. Trump and the cluster of aides and officials who tested positive or became ill.

Scientists not involved in the research who reviewed the results agreed with the conclusion that the two samples sharing rare mutations strongly suggested they are part of the same outbreak.

“These genomes are probably going to be identical or nearly identical to the genome that infected the president,” said Michael Worobey, head of the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona.

For months, the White House minimized the threat of the virus and eschewed basic safety precautions at official events, like wearing a mask or keeping people six feet apart.

At least 11 people who attended a Rose Garden celebration on Sept. 26 for Judge Barrett, which included an indoor event without masks, became infected with the coronavirus, including Mr. Trump.

The work is convincing, and it is the best way to piece together the progression of such an outbreak, said David Engelthaler, head of the infectious disease branch of the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Arizona, where he and colleagues have sequenced thousands of genomes to track the spread of the coronavirus, including devastating outbreaks at Native American reservations in the state.

Crushing the curve isn’t easy, but it’s very possible. In fact, many other countries, from South Korea to New Zealand to, believe it or not, Greece have already done it.

Bringing the infection rate way down was a lot easier for countries that acted quickly to contain the coronavirus, while the rate was still low, rather than spending many weeks in denial.

even places with severe outbreaks can bring their numbers down if they stay the course. Consider New York City

Trump is a quitter. Faced with the need to actually do his job and do what it takes to crush the pandemic, he just gave up.

And this retreat from responsibility won’t just kill thousands. It might also turn the Covid slump into a depression.

Here’s how it would work:

it becomes clear that Covid-19 is spiraling out of control. People retreat back into their homes, whatever Trump and Republican governors may say.

So we’re back where we started in economic terms, and in worse shape than ever in epidemiological terms. As a result, the period of double-digit unemployment, which might have lasted only a few months, goes on and on.

In other words, Trump’s search for an easy way out, his lack of patience for the hard work of containing a pandemic, may be precisely what turns a severe but temporary slump into a full-blown depression.