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It’s time to acknowledge what black history really reveals — not individual heroism or the endurance of democratic ideals, but their opposites. Time to examine what black history has always shown us: how hundreds of years of codified oppression, groupthink, hypocrisy, lies and political cowardice have made possible, and palatable, the political oppression and moral corruption of the current moment that threatens to wipe out democracy for everybody.

Black history rooted in slavery means that the country was always going to have to make ugly compromises with its own ideals, a process that became normalized. The longevity of slavery meant that business and the pursuit of profit, not justice, would be the dominant force in American life and the real energy driving even the most optimistic notions of American exceptionalism.

in this context, the cult of Trump is not new, just another compromise with our ideals, albeit a far-reaching one that looks particularly bad in the supposedly enlightened post-civil rights era of the 21st century.

A new poll from NPR, PBS News Hour and Marist finds that only 37 percent of Americans have a good deal of trust in the information Trump tells them about coronavirus. By contrast, 60 percent have little to no trust.

Meanwhile, the poll also finds that 50 percent have a good deal of trust in the news media’s information about the disease, versus 47 percent who lack trust

a great deal is at stake here. Our national response to a crisis with extraordinarily far-reaching destructive potential is more or less under the control of a megalomaniac who, with the eager backing of his media allies, vastly prioritizes protecting his reelection chances over protecting the country.

“You did not come back from hell with empty hands,” said André Malraux to Whittaker Chambers after reading the galleys of “Witness.” None of us want to come back from this time without having gained some insight, some wisdom that we can use to gain greater purchase on reality.

A good resource in looking for societal wisdom is Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business and author, among other books, of “The Righteous Mind.”

“This is a time for us to reflect,” he said by phone, “and choose a better story. Right now stories are being rewritten all around us, nationally, individually, and we all get a chance to do some of the rewriting.”

When we worry about democratic decline in the United States, it’s important to be clear what we are worrying about: corrosion, not crisis. In a crisis, of course we’ll all be heroes—or so we assure ourselves. But in the muddy complexity of the slow misappropriation of the state for self-interested purposes, occasions for heroism do not present themselves. On the contrary, the rhetoric of “resistance” comes to seem disproportionate, strident, cranky.

Yet the unacceptable does not become more acceptable if it is accepted by increments. If you flow with the current, you’ll be surprised where you end up.

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world,” George Bernard Shaw observed a century ago. The saying is true, but it was not meant as a compliment.  It will take a strong dose of unreasonableness to save the country from the destination to which it is tending. 

Like you, I’m sure, I love America, but the love has changed. I started out with the child version: America is the greatest and most powerful country on earth.

It draws from a cerebral root. We’re a people of texts. We tend to study and restudy just a few key texts, including the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address and Letter from a Birmingham Jail. These texts contain ideas we assent to, but also ideals that warm our hearts.

This conflict takes place not only in marches but also in school boards, in the humdrum daily acts of civic participation. Wartime heroism is not the high-water mark of American patriotism. Writing a dissenting comment about this column is.

.“While America has never been able to right every wrong, America has made the world a more secure and prosperous place,” Obama declared at the time. “And our leadership is necessary to underwrite the global security and prosperity that our children and our grandchildren will depend upon.”Contrast Obama’s move, successfully working with allies to avert a genocide, with President Trump’s betrayal this month of those same Kurdish partners in a way that handed a victory to the Islamic State, Turkey, Syria, Iran — and, of course, Russia, because almost everything Trump does seems to end up benefiting Moscow.

Given the Kurdish heroism in arresting genocide against the Yazidi in 2014, it is savagely ironic that Trump’s betrayal has now put the Kurds themselves at risk of war crimes and ethnic cleansing by Turkey.

So we’re sending more troops to Saudi Arabia to help a misogynist dictatorship that kills a journalist for an American newspaper, even as we betray the Kurds who have been trying to build a democratic enclave that empowers women; we’re sending troops to Saudi Arabia to confront Iran, even as we give Iran a helping hand in Syria.This is where incoherence and inhumanity converge

President Trump on Sunday took a potshot at Michael Bloomberg over the former New York mayor and presidential candidate’s remarks about a gun-toting Texas churchgoer who killed a would-be mass-shooter.

“Now Mini Mike Bloomberg is critical of Jack Wilson, who saved perhaps hundreds of people in a Church because he was carrying a gu

“Jack quickly killed the shooter, who was beginning a rampage,”

“It’s lonely being a European today,” Delattre mused. Russia is hostile. China is hostile. Emerging powers view the postwar multilateral organizations which Europe prizes as relics of a world made by and for Western powers — and want to change them. As for the United States, it’s absent.

Increasingly, Europeans speak of the need for “containment” of the United States if Trump is re-elected, the term coined by the U.S. diplomat George Kennan to define America’s Cold War policy toward the Communist Soviet Union. That would be a shocking development, except that nothing is shocking any longer.

Not after Trump set the scene for a demolition of American democracy by saying on the convention’s opening day that “the only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election.”

Over the past eight years, the Russian government has promoted the idea that the motherland is surrounded by enemies, filtering the concept through national institutions like schools, the military, the news media and the Orthodox Church. It has even raised the possibility that the country might again have to defend itself as it did against the Nazis in World War II.

And all are united by the near-sacred memory of Soviet victory in World War II — one that the state has seized upon to shape an identity of a triumphal Russia that must be ready to take up arms once more.

This year, the share of Russians saying they feared a world war hit the highest level recorded in surveys dating to 1994 — 62 percent.

Here is a nation and a leader willing to sacrifice so much for the principle of independence and the right to join the Western world. And yet, much of the West is jaded and cynical, apparently devoid of any such mission, cause, or sense of idealism anymore.

De Gaulle was not unique in articulating and fighting for an idea of his country. Many Western leaders during the Cold War had a certain idea of the West: Margaret Thatcher believed in a Europe whole and free; Ronald Reagan in a struggle between tyranny and freedom

A senior European defense official told me recently that the West needed to find a way to reimagine itself and its role in the world, to avoid slipping into the trap of either pretending that nothing has changed or concluding that nothing can be done about it—that, Merkel- or Obama-style, leaders must simply manage the fallout and avoid becoming entangled in it.