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In practice, though, this Republican notion is an awfully peculiar kind of freedom. It requires most Americans to spend not just money, but also time and energy agonizing over the bewildering logistics of coverage and treatment — confusing plans, exorbitant premiums and deductibles, exclusive networks, mysterious tests, outrageous drug prices.

I never had to worry whether I was covered. All Finns are covered for all essential medical care automatically, regardless of employment or income.

If you can’t afford it, not buying it is hardly a choice.

in Finland I never worried about where my medical care came from or whether I could afford it. I paid my income taxes — which, again despite the stereotypes, were about the same as what I pay in federal, state and local income taxes in New York City — and if I needed to see a doctor, I had several options.

And more often than not, individual choices are severely restricted by decisions made by employers, insurers, doctors, pharmaceutical companies and other private players. Those interest groups, not the consumer, decide which plans are available, what those plans cover, which doctors patients can see and how much it will cost.

And when it comes to cervical cancer, American women are at a significant disadvantage: The United States comes in only 22nd

According to the latest report of the O.E.C.D. — an organization of mostly wealthy nations — the United States as a whole does not actually outshine other countries in the quality of care.

In fact, the United States has shorter life expectancy, higher infant mortality and fewer doctors per capita than most other developed countries.

When it comes to outcomes in some illnesses, including cancer, the United States does have some of the best survival rates in the world — but that’s barely ahead of, or even slightly behind, the equivalent survival rates in other developed countries.

the United States are South Korea, Israel, Australia, Sweden and Finland, all with some form of government-managed universal health care.

Meanwhile, life expectancy at age 65 is higher in 24 other developed nations, including Canada, Britain and most European nations.

It’s true that in countries with universal health care the cost of hiring a new employee can be significant, especially for a small employer. Yet these countries still have plenty of thriving businesses, with lower administrative burdens. It can be done.

Americans might still assume that long waits for care are inevitable in a health care system run by the government. But that’s not necessarily the case either.

A report in 2014 by the Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation specializing in health care research, ranked the United States third in the world in access to specialists. That’s a great achievement. But the Netherlands and Switzerland did better

When it comes to nonemergency and elective surgery, patients in several countries, including the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland, all of which have universal, government-guided health care systems, have faster access than the United States.

in fact Americans who are getting a raw deal. Americans pay much more than people in other countries but do not get significantly better results.

The trouble with a free-market approach is that health care is an immensely complicated and expensive industry, in which the individual rarely has much actual market power

It is not like buying a consumer product, where choosing not to buy will not endanger one’s life. It’s also not like buying some other service tailored to individual demands, because for the most part we can’t predict our future health care needs.

The point of universal coverage is to pool risk, for the maximum benefit of the individual when he or she needs care

And the point of having the government manage this complicated service is not to take freedom away from the individual

The point is the opposite: to give people more freedom. Arranging health care is an overwhelming task, and having a specialized entity do the negotiating, regulating and perhaps even much of the providing is just vastly more efficient than forcing everyone to go it alone

What passes for an American health care system today certainly has not made me feel freer. Having to arrange so many aspects of care myself, while also having to navigate the ever-changing maze of plans, prices and the scarcity of appointments available with good doctors in my network, has thrown me, along with huge numbers of Americans, into a state of constant stress. And I haven’t even been seriously sick or injured yet.

As a United States citizen now, I wish Americans could experience the freedom of knowing that the health care system will always be there for us regardless of our employment status. I wish we were free to assume that our doctors get paid a salary to look after our best interests, not to profit by generating billable tests and procedures. I want the freedom to know that the system will automatically take me and my family in, without my having to battle for care in my moment of weakness and need. That is real freedom.

So is the freedom of knowing that none of it will bankrupt us. That is the freedom I had back in Finland.

According to the Republican orthodoxy, government always takes away not only people’s freedom to choose their doctor, but also their doctor’s ability to choose the correct care for patients. People are at the mercy of bureaucrats. Waiting times are long. Quality of care is dismal.

in a nation that purports to champion freedom, the outdated disaster that is the United States health care system is taking that freedom away.

Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe in their Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing (2010) state that such wisdom is greatly needed

The authors quote Aristotle and give the example of a man practicing practical wisdom and mention that “he had the self-control—the emotion-regulating skills—to choose rightly.”

Psychologist, futurist, and editor of The Wisdom Page Tom Lombardo also stresses the importance of temperance and self-control. In his new book on Future Consciousness

he includes a whole chapter (of 45 pages) on “Self-Control and Self-Responsibility.” In it he cites favorably two authors who claim that “most human problems are due to a lack of self-control.” He also states that “we cannot flourish without self-responsibility, self-control, and . . . . one of the most unethical forms of thinking and behavior in life . . . is to abdicate self-responsibility and self-control in ourselves.”

In Inside Obama’s Brain (2009), journalist Sasha Abramsky talked to over a hundred people who knew Obama and reported that “during the election campaign Obama almost never got upset, or panicked, by day-to-day shifts in momentum, by the ups and downs of opinion polls.” Almost a year into his presidency, Abramsky refered to the president as “a voice of moderation in a corrosively shrill, partisan political milieu.”

Up until the end of his presidency, Obama maintained his self-control and temperance. As a Huffington Post piece noted in 2016, he “has been the model of temperance in office on all fronts.”

Just as many individuals have commented on Obama’s self-discipline and temperance, so too have many remarked on Trump’s lack of these virtues

In May 2017, Brooks stated: “At base, Trump is an infantalist. There are three tasks that most mature adults have sort of figured out by the time they hit 25. Trump has mastered none of them. Immaturity is becoming the dominant note of his presidency, lack of self-control his leitmotif.”

Two months later, Douthat opined about Trump: “He is nonetheless clearly impaired, gravely deficient somewhere at the intersection of reason and judgment and conscience and self-control. . . . This president should not be the president, and the sooner he is not, the better.”

Karl Rove, a former senior adviser to President George W. Bush, insisted that Trump “lacks the focus or self-discipline to do the basic work required of a president.”

At about the same time former Republican senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) declared “The question is, does he have the self-discipline and some control over his ego to be able to say ‘I’m wrong’ every now and then? I haven’t seen that.

it is Trump’s narcissism and lack of humility that are his chief faults and hinder him most from being even a mediocre president.

Trump did not so much decide as capitulate. Much the same can be said about LBJ a half-century earlier when he signed off on committing US combat troops to Vietnam.

Burns and Novick barely touch on the factors leading to Johnson’s capitulation, even though, in present-day Washington, those factors persist: a brain-dead national-security establishment unable to conceive of political alternatives to escalation; a fear that admitting military failure will exact unacceptable political costs, whereas the costs of perpetuating an unwinnable war are likely to be tolerable; and, perhaps above all, the iron law of American exceptionalism, centered on the conviction that Providence summons the United States to exercise global leadership always and everywhere, leadership having long since become synonymous with a willingness to use force.

According to Burns and Novick, the American war in Vietnam was “begun in good faith, by decent people.” It comes closer to the truth to say that the war was begun—and then prolonged past all reason—by people who lacked wisdom and, when it was most needed, courage.

“He is surely a rogue and a gangster fond of playing with fire, rather than a politician,” Mr. Kim said.

Mr. Kim’s foreign minister, Ri Yong-ho, who arrived in New York on Wednesday to attend the General Assembly, also called Mr. Trump “a dog barking.”

Asked by reporters in New York what Mr. Kim might have meant by the “highest level of hard-line countermeasure,” Mr. Ri said that only Mr. Kim would know, but that he thought the North might be considering the largest test of a hydrogen bomb ever in the Pacific Ocean, according to the South Korean news agency Yonhap.

“The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea,” he said.

In his United Nations speech on Tuesday, Mr. Trump called North Korea’s autocracy a “band of criminals” and Mr. Kim a “Rocket Man” on “a suicide mission.”

Mr. Trump on Friday responded with some name-calling of his own. On Twitter, the president called Mr. Kim “obviously a madman.”

Although Mr. Kim is often quoted by official North Korean news media, it is highly unusual for him to issue a statement in his name. In North Korea, the supreme leader’s statement carries a weight that surpasses any other formal document.

Mr. Kim, who has been accelerating his country’s development of nuclear weapons and long-range ballistic missiles in defiance of the United Nations, Washington and its allies, said Mr. Trump’s remarks had convinced him that “the path I chose is correct and that it is the one I have to follow to the last.”

“Now that Trump has denied the existence of and insulted me and my country in front of the eyes of the world and made the most ferocious declaration of a war in history that he would destroy” North Korea, Mr. Kim said, “we will consider with seriousness exercising of a corresponding, highest level of hard-line countermeasure in history.”

Extensive survey data show that Republicans are much more right-leaning than they were twenty years ago, Democrats much more left-leaning, and both sides much more likely to see the other as a mortal threat to the nation’s welfare.

The polarization is personal: Fully 50 percent of Republicans would not want their child to marry a Democrat, and nearly a third of Democrats return the sentiment. Interparty marriage has taken the place of interracial marriage as a family taboo.

Finally the polarization is electronic and digital, as Americans increasingly inhabit the filter bubbles of news and social media that correspond to their ideological affinities. We no longer just have our own opinions. We also have our separate “facts,” often the result of what different media outlets consider newsworthy

the more we do it, the worse we’re at it. Our disagreements may frequently hoarsen our voices, but they rarely sharpen our thinking, much less change our minds.

“The Closing of the American Mind.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story

Most importantly, they are never based on a misunderstanding. On the contrary, the disagreements arise from perfect comprehension; from having chewed over the ideas of your intellectual opponent so thoroughly that you can properly spit them out.

What was it that one learned through a great books curriculum?

As I think about it, I’m not sure we were taught anything at all. What we did was read books that raised serious questions about the human condition, and which invited us to attempt to ask serious questions of our own. Education, in this sense, wasn’t a “teaching” with any fixed lesson. It was an exercise in interrogation.

To listen and understand; to question and disagree; to treat no proposition as sacred and no objection as impious; to be willing to entertain unpopular ideas and cultivate the habits of an open mind — this is what I was encouraged to do by my teachers at the University of Chicago.

It’s what used to be called a liberal education.

The University of Chicago showed us something else: that every great idea is really just a spectacular disagreement with some other great idea.

These quarrels are never personal. Nor are they particularly political, at least in the ordinary sense of politics. Sometimes they take place over the distance of decades, even centuries.

I got the gist — and the gist was that I’d better enroll in the University of Chicago and read the great books. That is what I did.

Since the 1960s it had been the vogue in American universities to treat the so-called “Dead White European Males” of the Western canon as agents of social and political oppression. Allan Bloom insisted that, to the contrary, they were the best possible instruments of spiritual liberation.

In other words, to disagree well you must first understand well. You have to read deeply, listen carefully, watch closely. You need to grant your adversary moral respect; give him the intellectual benefit of doubt; have sympathy for his motives and participate empathically with his line of reasoning. And you need to allow for the possibility that you might yet be persuaded of what he has to say.

He also insisted that to sustain liberal democracy you needed liberally educated people.

According to a new survey from the Brookings Institution, a plurality of college students today — fully 44 percent — do not believe the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects so-called “hate speech,” when of course it absolutely does.

Journalism is not just any other business, like trucking or food services. Nations can have lousy food and exemplary government, as Great Britain demonstrated for most of the last century. They can also have great food and lousy government, as France has always demonstrated.

Then we get to college, where the dominant mode of politics is identity politics, and in which the primary test of an argument isn’t the quality of the thinking but the cultural, racial, or sexual standing of the person making it.

In recent years, identity politics have become the moated castles from which we safeguard our feelings from hurt and our opinions from challenge. It is our “safe space.” But it is a safe space of a uniquely pernicious kind — a safe space from thought, rather than a safe space for thought, to borrow a line I recently heard from Salman Rushdie.

Another consequence of identity politics is that it has made the distance between making an argument and causing offense terrifyingly short. Any argument that can be cast as insensitive or offensive to a given group of people isn’t treated as being merely wrong. Instead it is seen as immoral, and therefore unworthy of discussion or rebuttal.

The result is that the disagreements we need to have — and to have vigorously — are banished from the public square before they’re settled.

One final point about identity politics: It’s a game at which two can play.

One of the more dismaying features of last year’s election was the extent to which “white working class” became a catchall identity for people whose travails we were supposed to pity but whose habits or beliefs we were not supposed to criticize. The result was to give the Trump base a moral pass it did little to earn.

So here’s where we stand: Intelligent disagreement is the lifeblood of any thriving society. Yet we in the United States are raising a younger generation who have never been taught either the how or the why of disagreement, and who seem to think that free speech is a one-way right: Namely, their right to disinvite, shout down or abuse anyone they dislike, lest they run the risk of listening to that person — or even allowing someone else to listen. The results are evident in the parlous state of our universities, and the frayed edges of our democracies.

Yes, we disagree constantly. But what makes our disagreements so toxic is that we refuse to make eye contact with our opponents, or try to see things as they might, or find some middle ground.

Instead, we fight each other from the safe distance of our separate islands of ideology and identity and listen intently to echoes of ourselves

The crucial prerequisite of intelligent disagreement — namely: shut up; listen up; pause and reconsider; and only then speak — is absent.

Perhaps the reason for this is that we have few obvious models for disagreeing well, and those we do have — such as the Intelligence Squared debates in New York and London or Fareed Zakaria’s show on CNN — cater to a sliver of elite tastes, like classical music.

Fox News and other partisan networks have demonstrated that the quickest route to huge profitability is to serve up a steady diet of high-carb, low-protein populist pap. Reasoned disagreement of the kind that could serve democracy well fails the market test

I do think there’s such a thing as private ownership in the public interest, and of fiduciary duties not only to shareholders but also to citizens

What’s clear is that the mis-education begins early. I was raised on the old-fashioned view that sticks and stones could break my bones but words would never hurt me. But today there’s a belief that since words can cause stress, and stress can have physiological effects, stressful words are tantamount to a form of violence. This is the age of protected feelings purchased at the cost of permanent infantilization.

But no country can have good government, or a healthy public square, without high-quality journalism — journalism that can distinguish a fact from a belief and again from an opinion; that understands that the purpose of opinion isn’t to depart from facts but to use them as a bridge to a larger idea called “truth”; and that appreciates that truth is a large enough destination that, like Manhattan, it can be reached by many bridges of radically different designs.

In other words, journalism that is grounded in facts while abounding in disagreements.

that requires proprietors and publishers who understand that their role ought not to be to push a party line, or be a slave to Google hits and Facebook ads, or provide a titillating kind of news entertainment, or help out a president or prime minister who they favor or who’s in trouble.

Their role is to clarify the terms of debate by championing aggressive and objective news reporting, and improve the quality of debate with commentary that opens minds and challenges assumptions rather than merely confirming them.

This is journalism in defense of liberalism

Trump proudly invoked Harry S. Truman, a fine role model. But Truman was the antithesis of Trump’s us-above-everybody-always talk. The 33rd president understood that American power was more effective when exercised in cooperation with other nations, and he pioneered the creation of multilateral organizations that have endured for decades.

pulling punches about the many outlandish elements of Trump’s approach means throwing out every standard we have upheld to this point about how presidents of the United States should behave. It requires giving up on the idea that presidents should be eloquent, persuasive, responsible and thoughtful.

Anton’s critique was that I was half-right and half-wrong. I was right to see democracy degenerating into tyranny but wrong to see any way to avoid it. What he calls “Caesarism” is already here, as Obama’s abuse of executive power proved. Therefore: “If we must have Caesar, who do you want him to be? One of theirs? Or one of yours (ours)?”

he writes a reactionary blog, Unqualified Reservations, under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug and has earned a cult following among the alt-right. His magnum opus — “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives” — is an alternately chilling and entertaining assault on almost everything educated Westerners hold to be self-evidently true.

Yarvin believes that the Western mind became corrupted during the Enlightenment itself. The very idea of democracy, allied with reason and constitutionalism, is bunk: “Washington has failed. The Constitution has failed. Democracy has failed.” His golden era: the age of monarchs. (“It is hard not to imagine that world as happier, wealthier, freer, more civilized, and more pleasant.”) His solution: “It is time for restoration, for national salvation, for a full reboot. We need a new government, a clean slate, a fresh hand which is smart, strong and fair.”

The assumption that all of history has led inexorably to today’s glorious and democratic present is, he argues, a smug and self-serving delusion. It’s what used to be called Whig History, the idea that all of human history led up to the democratic institutions and civilizational achievements of liberal Britain, the model for the entire world.

Why do so many of us assume that progress is inevitable, if never complete? Yarvin, like the Claremonters and American Greatness brigade, blames an elite that he calls by the inspired name “the Cathedral,” an amalgam of established universities and the mainstream press. It works like this: “The universities make decisions, for which the press manufactures consent.

for Yarvin, the consent is manufactured not by capitalism, advertising, and corporations but by liberal academics, pundits, and journalists. They simply assume that left liberalism is the only rational response to the world. Democracy, he contends, “no longer means that the public’s elected representatives control the government. It means that the government implements scientific public policy in the public interest.”

His solution is not just a tyrannical president who hates all that the Cathedral stands for but something even more radical: “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law, and the transfer of absolute power to a mysterious figure known only as the Receiver, who in the process of converting Washington into a heavily armed, ultra-profitable corporation will abolish the press, smash the universities, sell the public schools, and transfer ‘decivilized populations’ to ‘secure relocation facilities’ where they will be assigned to ‘mandatory apprenticeships.’ ”

This is 21st-century fascism, except that Yarvin’s Receiver would allow complete freedom of speech and association and would exercise no control over economic life. Foreign policy? Yarvin calls for “a total shutdown of international relations, including security guarantees, foreign aid, and mass immigration.” All social policy also disappears: “I believe that government should take no notice whatsoever of race — no racial policy. I believe it should separate itself completely from the question of what its citizens should or should not think — separation of education and state.”

I never doubted the cogency of many reactionary insights — and I still admire minds that have not succumbed to the comfortable assumption that the future is always brighter. I read the Christian traditionalist Rod Dreher with affection. His evocation of Christian life and thought over the centuries and his panic at its disappearance from our world are poignant. We are losing a vast civilization that honed answers to the deepest questions that human beings can ask, replacing it with vapid pseudo-religions, pills, therapy, and reality TV

Because in some key respects, reactionaries are right. Great leaps forward in history are often, in fact, giant leaps back. The Reformation did initiate brutal sectarian warfare. The French Revolution did degenerate into barbarous tyranny. Communist utopias — allegedly the wave of an Elysian future — turned into murderous nightmares. Modern neoliberalism has, for its part, created a global capitalist machine that is seemingly beyond anyone’s control, fast destroying the planet’s climate, wiping out vast tracts of life on Earth while consigning millions of Americans to economic stagnation and cultural despair.

And at an even deeper level, the more we discover about human evolution, the more illusory certain ideas of progress become. In his book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari points out that hunter-gatherers were actually up to six inches taller than their more “civilized” successors; their diets were much healthier; infectious disease was much rarer; they worked less and goofed off more than we do.

Harari notes another paradox: Over hundreds of millennia, we have overcome starvation … but now are more likely to die of obesity than hunger. Happiness? Globally, suicide rates keep rising.

We are tribal creatures in our very DNA; we have an instinctive preference for our own over others, for “in-groups” over “out-groups”; for hunter-gatherers, recognizing strangers as threats was a matter of life and death

We also invent myths and stories to give meaning to our common lives. Among those myths is the nation — stretching from the past into the future, providing meaning to our common lives in a way nothing else can. Strip those narratives away, or transform them too quickly, and humans will become disoriented. Most of us respond to radical changes in our lives, especially changes we haven’t chosen, with more fear than hope

If we ignore these deeper facts about ourselves, we run the risk of fatal errors. It’s vital to remember that multicultural, multiracial, post-national societies are extremely new for the human species, and keeping them viable and stable is a massive challenge.

Globally, social trust is highest in the homogeneous Nordic countries, and in America, Pew has found it higher in rural areas than cities. The political scientist Robert Putnam has found that “people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down,’ that is, to pull in like a turtle.” Not very encouraging about human nature — but something we can’t wish away, either

In fact, the American elite’s dismissal of these truths, its reduction of all resistance to cultural and demographic change as crude “racism” or “xenophobia,” only deepens the sense of siege many other Americans feel.

When this velocity of cultural change combines with a deepening — and accurate — sense of economic anxiety, is it shocking that human beings want to retreat into a past, to resuscitate the nation-state, and to reach backward for a more primeval and instinctual group identity? Or that they doubt the promise of “progress” and seek scapegoats in the governing classes that have encouraged all of this to happen?

The tragedy of our time, of course, is that President Obama tried to follow Lincoln’s advice. He reached out to those who voted against him as often as he could. His policies, like Obamacare, were aimed at helping the very working poor who gave Trump the White House. He pledged to transcend the red-blue divide. He acknowledged both the necessity of law enforcement and the legitimate African-American fear of hostile cops

A black man brought up by white people, he gave speech after speech attempting to provide a new narrative for America: one of slowly integrating moral progress, where racial and class divides could be overcome. He criticized the reductive divisiveness of identity politics. And yet he failed

he couldn’t stem the reactionary tide that now washes ever closer ashore. If a man that talented, with that biography, found himself spitting into the wind, a powerful storm is indeed upon us.

how can you seriously regard our political system and culture as worse than ever before in history? How self-centered do you have to be to dismiss the unprecedented freedom for women, racial minorities, and homosexuals? Or the increased security for the elderly and unemployed, and the greater access to health care by the poor and now the working poor? Compare the air we breathe today with that of the 1950s. Contrast the religious tolerance we take for granted today with the enmities of the past.

Over the very long haul, too, scholars such as Steven Pinker have found convincing evidence that violence among humans is at the lowest levels since the species first emerged.

It is also one thing to be vigilant about the power of the administrative state and to attempt to reform and modernize it; it is quite another to favor its abolition. The more complex modern society has become, the more expertise is needed to govern it — and where else is that expertise going to come from if not a professional elite?

the liberal media has nothing like the monopoly it once enjoyed. There are two “Cathedrals” in the 21st century — and only one has helped produce a conservative Supreme Court, a Republican Congress, a Republican president, and near-record Republican majorities in statehouses around the country

Beyond all that, neo-reactionaries have a glaring problem, which is that their proposed solutions are so radical they have no chance whatsoever of coming into existence — and would be deeply reckless to attempt.

There is, perhaps, a way to use reactionary insights and still construct a feasible center-right agenda. Such a program would junk Reaganite economics as outdated but keep revenue-neutral tax reform, it could even favor redistribution to counter the deep risk to democracy that soaring inequality fosters, and it could fix Obamacare’s technical problems. You could add to this mix stronger border control, a reduction in legal immigration, a pause in free-trade expansion, a technological overhaul of the government bureaucracy, and a reassertion of Americanism over multiculturalism.

The left, for its part, must, it seems to me, escape its own bubble and confront the accelerating extremism of its identity politics and its disdain for millions of “deplorable” white Americans. You will not arrest the reactionary momentum by ignoring it or dismissing it entirely as a function of bigotry or stupidity. You’ll only defuse it by appreciating its insights and co-opting its appeal.

In essence, Chait is saying that this change in the definition of ‘white supremacy’ makes having Donald Trump as President no different from having David Duke as President.

Serwer responds by pressing Chait on just what his definition of ‘white supremacy’ actually is and I think suggests that Chait’s is a largely meaningless distinction between people who support white supremacy and say so openly and people who support white supremacy while denying that they do.

The real definition has to be something like Serwer’s who suggests a “general definition of white supremacist is someone who believes white people are entitled to political and cultural hegemony.”

The changing demography post-1970 has brought the issue of white supremacy far more acutely and unavoidably to the fore than it was in the pas

Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions are definitely different from David Duke. But – and I say this slightly jokingly but mainly in earnest – maybe we should call Sessions and Trump moderate white supremacists and Duke a white supremacist extremist.

Many people have not fully thought through how today’s dramatically different demography changes the very meaning of ‘white supremacy’. In 1970 a white person could fully support civil rights for African-Americans, oppose every sort of formal and informal bigotry and prejudice. But whites still made up almost 90% of the population. The political, social and cultural dominance of white people was a given regardless of whether you fully dismantled every aspect of white supremacy or not. The simple fact of overwhelming numerical superiority made that so

Accepting or even supporting equal political rights for a small minority of the population – which is frequently referred to precisely by their numerical minority status – is quite different from imagining a world where whites are not a majority at all.

at least as we define it today, whites will no longer be a majority at all in the relatively near future. Certainly, they won’t be the overwhelming majority able to define and dictate cultural, economic and political power more or less as they choose.

By the definitions that Americans use to define race, the 1970 census found that 89.5% of Americans were white and 10% were black. Hispanics, which under the Census definition can be either white or black, made up 4.5% of the population. In other words, the country was overwhelmingly white and the only numerically significant racial minority was African-Americans. Asians and Hispanics made up a minuscule part of the population and were heavily concentrated in the Pacific West and Southwest.

If being white is a major part of your political and cultural identity, how you think about who you are, there really is a lot to worry about. That’s because being white isn’t really a biological reality, it’s a category in America that means being the dominant and powerful group.

So this is not just a rhetorical or taxonomic question, whether you say you’re a white supremacist or not while you’re supporting white supremacy. Trump exists and the question of white supremacy is right at the surface today because of the demographic tipping point that country stands at.

Whether Trump hates people of color or would take away their rights if he could is a mind-reading exercise we could talk about forever. But the fact that he believes in and wants to preserve a country where white people call the shots goes without saying. So maybe it’s not simply that we’re pulling David Duke and Donald Trump into the same definition. Maybe it is that the changes in the country have made the functional difference between the two much less relevant.

The study analyzed the effect of industrial robots in local labor markets in the United States. Robots are to blame for up to 670,000 lost manufacturing jobs between 1990 and 2007, it concluded, and that number will rise because industrial robots are expected to quadruple.

The paper adds to the evidence that automation, more than other factors like trade and offshoring that President Trump campaigned on, has been the bigger long-term threat to blue-collar jobs. The researchers said the findings — “large and robust negative effects of robots on employment and wages” — remained strong even after controlling for imports, offshoring, software that displaces jobs, worker demographics and the type of industry.

Robots affected both men’s and women’s jobs, the researchers found, but the effect on male employment was up to twice as big.

The data doesn’t explain why, but Mr. Acemoglu had a guess: Women are more willing than men to take a pay cut to work in a lower-status field.

The findings fuel the debate about whether technology will help people do their jobs more efficiently and create new ones, as it has in the past, or eventually displace humans.

Mr. Restrepo said the problem might be that the new jobs created by technology are not in the places that are losing jobs, like the Rust Belt. “I still believe there will be jobs in the years to come, though probably not as many as we have today,” he said. “But the data have made me worried about the communities directly exposed to robots

The next question is whether the coming wave of technologies — like machine learning, drones and driverless cars — will have similar effects, but on many more people.

The problem, he suggested, is Trump’s tweets and other statements implying that there is no deal to be made with North Korea and that Tillerson “is wasting his time,” as one tweet put it. Such comments are causing the Chinese to back away from what has been an incipient willingness to bring serious pressure to bear on Pyongyang.

“When you jack the legs out from under your chief diplomat, you cause all that to fall apart,” Corker said. “Us working with [Beijing] effectively is the key to not getting to a binary choice. When you publicly castrate your secretary of state, you take that off the table.”

In context, Corker’s assertion that “we could be heading towards World War III” was a more pungent way of conveying Trump’s undermining of diplomacy. Trump “isn’t necessarily a warmonger,” he told the New York Times. The point was that the combination of exaggerated statements and the undercutting of Tillerson could corner the White House.

In the years leading up to 1914, prohibitions on sexual relations between European women and black men (though not between European men and African women) were enforced across European colonies in Africa. The presence of the “dirty Negroes” in Europe after 1914 seemed to be violating a firm taboo.

“These savages are a terrible danger,” a joint declaration of the German national assembly warned in 1920, to “German women”. Writing Mein Kampf in the 1920s, Adolf Hitler would describe African soldiers on German soil as a Jewish conspiracy aimed to topple white people “from their cultural and political heights”. The Nazis, who were inspired by American innovations in racial hygiene, would in 1937 forcibly sterilise hundreds of children fathered by African soldiers. Fear and hatred of armed “niggers” (as Weber called them) on German soil was not confined to Germany, or the political right. The pope protested against their presence, and an editorial in the Daily Herald, a British socialist newspaper, in 1920 was titled “Black Scourge in Europe”.

The first world war, in fact, marked the moment when the violent legacies of imperialism in Asia and Africa returned home, exploding into self-destructive carnage in Europe. And it seems ominously significant on this particular Remembrance Day: the potential for large-scale mayhem in the west today is greater than at any

In one predominant but highly ideological version of European history – popularised since the cold war – the world wars, together with fascism and communism, are simply monstrous aberrations in the universal advance of liberal democracy and freedom.

In many ways, however, it is the decades after 1945 – when Europe, deprived of its colonies, emerged from the ruins of two cataclysmic wars – that increasingly seem exceptional. Amid a general exhaustion with militant and collectivist ideologies in western Europe, the virtues of democracy – above all, the respect for individual liberties – seemed clear. The practical advantages of a reworked social contract, and a welfare state, were also obvious.

But neither these decades of relative stability, nor the collapse of communist regimes in 1989, were a reason to assume that human rights and democracy were rooted in European soil.

debasing hierarchy of races was established because the promise of equality and liberty at home required imperial expansion abroad in order to be even partially fulfilled. We tend to forget that imperialism, with its promise of land, food and raw materials, was widely seen in the late 19th century as crucial to national progress and prosperity. Racism was – and is – more than an ugly prejudice, something to be eradicated through legal and social proscription. It involved real attempts to solve, through exclusion and degradation, the problems of establishing political order, and pacifying the disaffected, in societies roiled by rapid social and economic change.

In this new history, Europe’s long peace is revealed as a time of unlimited wars in Asia, Africa and the Americas. These colonies emerge as the crucible where the sinister tactics of Europe’s brutal 20th-century wars – racial extermination, forced population transfers, contempt for civilian lives – were first forged

Whiteness became “the new religion”, as Du Bois witnessed, offering security amid disorienting economic and technological shifts, and a promise of power and authority over a majority of the human population.

The resurgence of these supremacist views today in the west – alongside the far more widespread stigmatisation of entire populations as culturally incompatible with white western peoples – should suggest that the first world war was not, in fact, a profound rupture with Europe’s own history.

Our complex task during the war’s centenary is to identify the ways in which that past has infiltrated our present, and how it threatens to shape the future: how the terminal weakening of white civilisation’s domination, and the assertiveness of previously sullen peoples, has released some very old tendencies and traits in the west.

Relatively little is known about how the war accelerated political struggles across Asia and Africa; how Arab and Turkish nationalists, Indian and Vietnamese anti-colonial activists found new opportunities in it; or how, while destroying old empires in Europe, the war turned Japan into a menacing imperialist power in Asia

A broad account of the war that is attentive to political conflicts outside Europe can clarify the hyper-nationalism today of many Asian and African ruling elites, most conspicuously the Chinese regime, which presents itself as avengers of China’s century-long humiliation by the west.

in order to grasp the current homecoming of white supremacism in the west, we need an even deeper history – one that shows how whiteness became in the late 19th century the assurance of individual identity and dignity, as well as the basis of military and diplomatic alliances.

Such a history would show that the global racial order in the century preceding 1914 was one in which it was entirely natural for “uncivilised” peoples to be exterminated, terrorised, imprisoned, ostracised or radically re-engineered.

At the time of the first world war, all western powers upheld a racial hierarchy built around a shared project of territorial expansion. In 1917, the US president, Woodrow Wilson, baldly stated his intention, “to keep the white race strong against the yellow” and to preserve “white civilisation and its domination of the planet”

this entrenched system was not something incidental to the first world war, with no connections to the vicious way it was fought or to the brutalisation that made possible the horrors of the Holocaust. Rather, the extreme, lawless and often gratuitous violence of modern imperialism eventually boomeranged on its originators.

it is too easy to conclude, especially from an Anglo-American perspective, that Germany broke from the norms of civilisation to set a new standard of barbarity, strong-arming the rest of the world into an age of extremes. For there were deep continuities in the imperialist practices and racial assumptions of European and American powers.

Rhodes’ scramble for Africa’s gold fields helped trigger the second Boer war, during which the British, interning Afrikaner women and children, brought the term “concentration camp” into ordinary parlance. By the end of the war in 1902, it had become a “commonplace of history”, JA Hobson wrote, that “governments use national animosities, foreign wars and the glamour of empire-making in order to bemuse the popular mind and divert rising resentment against domestic abuses”

With imperialism opening up a “panorama of vulgar pride and crude sensationalism”, ruling classes everywhere tried harder to “imperialise the nation”, as Arendt wrote. This project to “organise the nation for the looting of foreign territories and the permanent degradation of alien peoples” was quickly advanced through the newly established tabloid press.

In 1920, a year after condemning Germany for its crimes against Africans, the British devised aerial bombing as routine policy in their new Iraqi possession – the forerunner to today’s decade-long bombing and drone campaigns in west and south Asia. “The Arab and Kurd now know what real bombing means,” a 1924 report by a Royal Air Force officer put it. “They now know that within 45 minutes a full-sized village … can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured.” This officer was Arthur “Bomber” Harris, who in the second world war unleashed the firestorms of Hamburg and Dresden, and whose pioneering efforts in Iraq helped German theorising in the 1930s about der totale krieg (the total war).

the frenzy of jingoism with which Europe plunged into a bloodbath in 1914 speaks of a belligerent culture of imperial domination, a macho language of racial superiority, that had come to bolster national and individual self-esteem.

One of the volunteers for the disciplinary force was Lt Gen Lothar von Trotha, who had made his reputation in Africa by slaughtering natives and incinerating villages. He called his policy “terrorism”, adding that it “can only help” to subdue the natives.

his real work lay ahead, in German South-West Africa (contemporary Namibia) where an anti-colonial uprising broke out in January 1904. In October of that year, Von Trotha ordered that members of the Herero community, including women and children, who had already been defeated militarily, were to be shot on sight and those escaping death were to be driven into the Omaheke Desert, where they would be left to die from exposure. An estimated 60,000-70,000 Herero people, out of a total of approximately 80,000, were eventually killed, and many more died in the desert from starvation. A second revolt against German rule in south-west Africa by the Nama people led to the demise, by 1908, of roughly half of their population.

Such proto-genocides became routine during the last years of European peace. Running the Congo Free State as his personal fief from 1885 to 1908, King Leopold II of Belgium reduced the local population by half, sending as many as eight million Africans to an early death. The American conquest of the Philippines between 1898 and 1902, to which Kipling dedicated The White Man’s Burden, took the lives of more than 200,000 civilians.

In light of this shared history of racial violence, it seems odd that we continue to portray the first world war as a battle between democracy and authoritarianism, as a seminal and unexpected calamity. The Indian writer Aurobindo Ghose was one among many anticolonial thinkers who predicted, even before the outbreak of war, that “vaunting, aggressive, dominant Europe” was already under “a sentence of death”, awaiting “annihilation”

These shrewd assessments were not Oriental wisdom or African clairvoyance. Many subordinate peoples simply realised, well before Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, that peace in the metropolitan west depended too much on outsourcing war to the colonies.

The experience of mass death and destruction, suffered by most Europeans only after 1914, was first widely known in Asia and Africa, where land and resources were forcefully usurped, economic and cultural infrastructure systematically destroyed, and entire populations eliminated with the help of up-to-date bureaucracies and technologies. Europe’s equilibrium was parasitic for too long on disequilibrium elsewhere.

Populations in Europe eventually suffered the great violence that had long been inflicted on Asians and Africans. As Arendt warned, violence administered for the sake of power “turns into a destructive principle that will not stop until there is nothing left to violate”.

nothing better demonstrates this ruinous logic of lawless violence, which corrupts both public and private morality, than the heavily racialised war on terror. It presumes a sub-human enemy who must be “smoked out” at home and abroad – and it has licensed the use of torture and extrajudicial execution, even against western citizens.

It was always an illusion to suppose that “civilised” peoples could remain immune, at home, to the destruction of morality and law in their wars against barbarians abroad. But that illusion, long cherished by the self-styled defenders of western civilisation, has now been shattered, with racist movements ascendant in Europe and the US,

This is also why whiteness, first turned into a religion during the economic and social uncertainty that preceded the violence of 1914, is the world’s most dangerous cult today. Racial supremacy has been historically exercised through colonialism, slavery, segregation, ghettoisation, militarised border controls and mass incarceration. It has now entered its last and most desperate phase with Trump in power.

We can no longer discount the “terrible probability” James Baldwin once described: that the winners of history, “struggling to hold on to what they have stolen from their captives, and unable to look into their mirror, will precipitate a chaos throughout the world which, if it does not bring life on this planet to an end, will bring about a racial war such as the world has never seen”.

Certainly the risk of not confronting our true history has never been as clear as on this Remembrance Day. If we continue to evade it, historians a century from now may once again wonder why the west sleepwalked, after a long peace, into its biggest calamity yet.

But that’s obviously not the point of what the 45th president of the United States was trying to do. Stirring up racial and religious hatred for political ends has become known as “populism” among the pundit class. It’s considered impolite to call it what it is: fascism. But we are long past the point of giving Trump the benefit of the doubt, or respecting voters who exercise their democratic rights for racist causes. There’s something more going on here that demands an honest response. Trump is a particularly stupid neo-Nazi sympathizer.

By now, most rightwing politicians have figured out how to flirt with the neo-Nazis without getting burned by their torch-wielding mobs and burning crosses. They stir hatred for immigrants and preach about the sanctity of national culture and family values. But they generally stop short of circulating fascist propaganda. It’s just too offensively obvious.

That low-inflation, slow-growth context prevailed under Obama; to a lesser extent it still prevails today. There will doubtless come a time when deficit scolds make essential arguments, but of late they haven’t — and when I was one of them, I now believe, I was making a mistake.

a persistent theme is that Donald Trump not only sometimes breaks the law but has no familiarity or experience following it. The idea of limits is simply alien to him.

This sounds very much like the mindset of Donald Trump and his family. Who would be a fool enough to become President of the United States and not use the power for legal invulnerability?

Tony Soprano and Vito Corleone aren’t against the law. It’s just something like the weather that you deal with and work around and maybe even use sometimes but all and only in the service of personal and family power and wealth. The key theme of all mob drama – and presumably to some degree the reality of mob culture – is that the law is for chumps, a crutch for those who aren’t man enough, powerful enough to get what they want without it.

We see this repeated pattern of aides scurrying around, plotting amongst themselves, all trying to prevent him from doing things that are not only clearly illegal or even unconstitutional but wildly self-destructive. The months’ long effort by even the most transgressive and aggressive aides – folks like Steve Bannon, for example – to stop Trump from firing James Comey is the most vivid and high-octane example.

Very notably, the biggest advocates for firing Comey were not Trump’s wildest advisors but members of his family – Jared Kushner and, now it seems, Ivanka Trump too. It’s the immediate family members and the lickspittles and retainers he brought with him from his private sector fiefdom, The Trump Organization – Dan Scavino, Hope Hicks, et al. It’s a Family in every sense. They have no experience following the law, all reared in a culture of inter-generational criminality.

As his top advisors and aides seem to realize as clearly as anyone, Trump is wholly unable to follow the law. He needs to be monitored closely to prevent him from breaking the law. And don’t get me wrong. Many of these folks are not at all the best people. They’ll break the law. But they’re also acculturated into law-abiding society. So they have a sense of how to do it sparingly or at least discreetly so as to at least avoid getting caught. Trump seems to have no such experience.

President Joe Biden has expressed his support for repealing the Hyde Amendment, giving abortion rights advocates hope that the policy could be reversed under the new administration.

“Although they might have the right to an abortion on paper, they certainly cannot exercise it,” Murray said of low-income women affected by the Hyde Amendment. “A right on paper but not in practice doesn’t do you much good. And the consequences can be devastating.”

In addition to revamping voting laws, the bill also takes aim at "dark money" in politics by requiring organizations to disclose large donors and creates a matching system for small donations.

"Our democracy is in a state of deep disrepair. During the 2020 election, Americans had to overcome rampant voter suppression, gerrymandering and a torrent of special interest dark money just to exercise their right to vote.

In a second-degree murder case like the Chauvin trial, the defendant ordinarily has five peremptory strikes and the prosecutor has three; here, however, the judge has exercised his discretion to grant the defense up to 15 peremptory strikes, and the prosecution up to nine.

Division among Republicans allowed Democrats to take the initiative. They delayed debate on the bill until after the November midterm elections, where Democrats won control of the House. When, in December, Republicans moved to open debate, Democrats objected again. “We are acting in a great deal of haste to propose at this time repressive measures for the passage of a repressive and coercive force bill for the people,” said Senator John Reagan of Texas.