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And that is why the only choice in this election is Joe Biden. The Democrats are not blameless when it comes to playing politics, but there is no equivalence to the Republicans. The Democratic Party sorted through all the choices, and, led by older Black men and women in South Carolina, rejected the Democratic socialist candidate and said they wanted a moderate unifier named Joe Biden.

They have fallen in line lock step behind a man who is the most dishonest, dangerous, meanspirited, divisive and corrupt person to ever occupy the Oval Office. And they know it. Four more years of Trump’s divide and rule will destroy our institutions and rip the country apart.

To get back a semblance of unity and sanity, Biden has to win. And that is why I have only one answer to every question now: Vote for Biden

They seek refuge in “a man-made pattern of relative consistency” that bears little relation to reality

his followers abandoned common sense and found their guide to the world in him. Defeat won’t change that.

Trump damaged the rest of us, too. He got as far as he did by appealing to the perennial hostility of popular masses toward elites.

Monopoly of public policy by experts—trade negotiators, government bureaucrats, think tankers, professors, journalists—helped create the populist backlash that empowered Trump

His reign of lies drove educated Americans to place their faith, and even their identity, all the more certainly in experts, who didn’t always deserve i

The war between populists and experts relieved both sides of the democratic imperative to persuade. The standoff turned them into caricatures.

Trump’s legacy includes an extremist Republican Party that tries to hold on to power by flagrantly undemocratic means, and an opposition pushed toward its own version of extremism.

Many of his policies can be reversed or mitigated. It will be much harder to clear our minds of his lies and restore the shared understanding of reality—the agreement, however inconvenient, that A is A and not B—on which a democracy depends.

There’s a notion that the social web was once useful, or at least that it could have been good, if only we had pulled a few levers: some moderation and fact-checking here, a bit of regulation there, perhaps a federal antitrust lawsuit. But that’s far too sunny and shortsighted a view.

Today’s social networks, Facebook chief among them, were built to encourage the things that make them so harmful. It is in their very architecture.

I realized only recently that I’ve been thinking far too narrowly about the problem.

Megascale is nearly the existential threat that megadeath is. No single machine should be able to control the fate of the world’s population—and that’s what both the Doomsday Machine and Facebook are built to do.

Facebook does not exist to seek truth and report it, or to improve civic health, or to hold the powerful to account, or to represent the interests of its users, though these phenomena may be occasional by-products of its existence.

The company’s early mission was to “give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” Instead, it took the concept of “community” and sapped it of all moral meaning.

Facebook—along with Google and YouTube—is perfect for amplifying and spreading disinformation at lightning speed to global audiences.

Facebook decided that it needed not just a very large user base, but a tremendous one, unprecedented in size. That decision set Facebook on a path to escape velocity, to a tipping point where it can harm society just by existing.

No one, not even Mark Zuckerberg, can control the product he made. I’ve come to realize that Facebook is not a media company. It’s a Doomsday Machine.

Scale and engagement are valuable to Facebook because they’re valuable to advertisers. These incentives lead to design choices such as reaction buttons that encourage users to engage easily and often, which in turn encourage users to share ideas that will provoke a strong response.

Every time you click a reaction button on Facebook, an algorithm records it, and sharpens its portrait of who you are.

The hyper-targeting of users, made possible by reams of their personal data, creates the perfect environment for manipulation—by advertisers, by political campaigns, by emissaries of disinformation, and of course by Facebook itself, which ultimately controls what you see and what you don’t see on the site.

there aren’t enough moderators speaking enough languages, working enough hours, to stop the biblical flood of shit that Facebook unleashes on the world, because 10 times out of 10, the algorithm is faster and more powerful than a person.

At megascale, this algorithmically warped personalized informational environment is extraordinarily difficult to moderate in a meaningful way, and extraordinarily dangerous as a result.

These dangers are not theoretical, and they’re exacerbated by megascale, which makes the platform a tantalizing place to experiment on people

Even after U.S. intelligence agencies identified Facebook as a main battleground for information warfare and foreign interference in the 2016 election, the company has failed to stop the spread of extremism, hate speech, propaganda, disinformation, and conspiracy theories on its site.

it wasn’t until October of this year, for instance, that Facebook announced it would remove groups, pages, and Instragram accounts devoted to QAnon, as well as any posts denying the Holocaust.

In the days after the 2020 presidential election, Zuckerberg authorized a tweak to the Facebook algorithm so that high-accuracy news sources such as NPR would receive preferential visibility in people’s feeds, and hyper-partisan pages such as Breitbart News’s and Occupy Democrats’ would be buried, according to The New York Times, offering proof that Facebook could, if it wanted to, turn a dial to reduce disinformation—and offering a reminder that Facebook has the power to flip a switch and change what billions of people see online.

reducing the prevalence of content that Facebook calls “bad for the world” also reduces people’s engagement with the site. In its experiments with human intervention, the Times reported, Facebook calibrated the dial so that just enough harmful content stayed in users’ news feeds to keep them coming back for more.

Facebook’s stated mission—to make the world more open and connected—has always seemed, to me, phony at best, and imperialist at worst.

Facebook is a borderless nation-state, with a population of users nearly as big as China and India combined, and it is governed largely by secret algorithms

How much real-world violence would never have happened if Facebook didn’t exist? One of the people I’ve asked is Joshua Geltzer, a former White House counterterrorism official who is now teaching at Georgetown Law. In counterterrorism circles, he told me, people are fond of pointing out how good the United States has been at keeping terrorists out since 9/11. That’s wrong, he said. In fact, “terrorists are entering every single day, every single hour, every single minute” through Facebook.

Evidence of real-world violence can be easily traced back to both Facebook and 8kun. But 8kun doesn’t manipulate its users or the informational environment they’re in. Both sites are harmful. But Facebook might actually be worse for humanity.

In previous eras, U.S. officials could at least study, say, Nazi propaganda during World War II, and fully grasp what the Nazis wanted people to believe. Today, “it’s not a filter bubble; it’s a filter shroud,” Geltzer said. “I don’t even know what others with personalized experiences are seeing.”

Mary McCord, the legal director at the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law, told me that she thinks 8kun may be more blatant in terms of promoting violence but that Facebook is “in some ways way worse” because of its reach. “There’s no barrier to entry with Facebook,” she said. “In every situation of extremist violence we’ve looked into, we’ve found Facebook postings. And that reaches tons of people. The broad reach is what brings people into the fold and normalizes extremism and makes it mainstream.” In other words, it’s the megascale that makes Facebook so dangerous.

Facebook’s megascale gives Zuckerberg an unprecedented degree of influence over the global population. If he isn’t the most powerful person on the planet, he’s very near the top.

“The thing he oversees has such an effect on cognition and people’s beliefs, which can change what they do with their nuclear weapons or their dollars.”

Facebook’s new oversight board, formed in response to backlash against the platform and tasked with making decisions concerning moderation and free expression, is an extension of that power. “The first 10 decisions they make will have more effect on speech in the country and the world than the next 10 decisions rendered by the U.S. Supreme Court,” Geltzer said. “That’s power. That’s real power.”

Facebook is also a business, and a place where people spend time with one another. Put it this way: If you owned a store and someone walked in and started shouting Nazi propaganda or recruiting terrorists near the cash register, would you, as the shop owner, tell all of the other customers you couldn’t possibly intervene?

In 2004, Zuckerberg said Facebook ran advertisements only to cover server costs. But over the next two years Facebook completely upended and redefined the entire advertising industry. The pre-social web destroyed classified ads, but the one-two punch of Facebook and Google decimated local news and most of the magazine industry—publications fought in earnest for digital pennies, which had replaced print dollars, and social giants scooped them all up anyway.

In other words, if the Dunbar number for running a company or maintaining a cohesive social life is 150 people; the magic number for a functional social platform is maybe 20,000 people. Facebook now has 2.7 billion monthly users.

in 2007, Zuckerberg said something in an interview with the Los Angeles Times that now takes on a much darker meaning: “The things that are most powerful aren’t the things that people would have done otherwise if they didn’t do them on Facebook. Instead, it’s the things that would never have happened otherwise.”

We’re still in the infancy of this century’s triple digital revolution of the internet, smartphones, and the social web, and we find ourselves in a dangerous and unstable informational environment, powerless to resist forces of manipulation and exploitation that we know are exerted on us but remain mostly invisible

The Doomsday Machine offers a lesson: We should not accept this current arrangement. No single machine should be able to control so many people.

we need a new philosophical and moral framework for living with the social web—a new Enlightenment for the information age, and one that will carry us back to shared reality and empiricism.

localized approach is part of what made megascale possible. Early constraints around membership—the requirement at first that users attended Harvard, and then that they attended any Ivy League school, and then that they had an email address ending in .edu—offered a sense of cohesiveness and community. It made people feel more comfortable sharing more of themselves. And more sharing among clearly defined demographics was good for business.

we need to adopt a broader view of what it will take to fix the brokenness of the social web. That will require challenging the logic of today’s platforms—and first and foremost challenging the very concept of megascale as a way that humans gather.

The web’s existing logic tells us that social platforms are free in exchange for a feast of user data; that major networks are necessarily global and centralized; that moderators make the rules. None of that need be the case.

We need people who dismantle these notions by building alternatives. And we need enough people to care about these other alternatives to break the spell of venture capital and mass attention that fuels megascale and creates fatalism about the web as it is now.

We must also find ways to repair the aspects of our society and culture that the social web has badly damaged. This will require intellectual independence, respectful debate, and the same rebellious streak that helped establish Enlightenment values centuries ago.

Right now, too many people are allowing algorithms and tech giants to manipulate them, and reality is slipping from our grasp as a result. This century’s Doomsday Machine is here, and humming along.

Some of us were killed.”

President Muhammadu Buhari won election in 2015 vowing to clamp down on Boko Haram and other militant and bandit groups in northern Nigeria.

But despite the government’s claims, Boko Haram and other militant groups still pose a potent threat. And these latest attacks, coming on the heels of a countrywide uprising against police violence, insecurity and bad governance, have exposed the public’s growing discontent with a Nigerian government unable to protect its people.

“We said yes to science. We said yes to vaccines. We said yes to ending this pandemic. We said yes to people’s right to vote without fear of fake fraud and voter suppression

“As a health care worker, it was important to me to have a governor who follows science,” said Marc Martino, 26, who was dressed in blue scrubs as he dropped off his ballot in Irvine.

it was the politicization of the pandemic that propelled it onto the ballot as Californians became impatient with shutdowns of businesses and classrooms

We said yes to women’s fundamental constitutional right to decide for herself what she does with her body, her fate, her future. We said yes to diversity.”

Though polls showed that the recall was consistently opposed by some 60 percent of Californians, surveys over the summer suggested that likely voters were unenthusiastic about Mr. Newsom.

President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota traveled to California to campaign for Mr. Newsom, while Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and former President Barack Obama appeared in his commercials

The governor charged that far-right extremists and supporters of former President Donald J. Trump were attempting a hostile takeover in a state where they could never hope to attain majority support in a regular election.

Democrats outnumber Republicans two to one in California, and pandemic voting rules encouraged high turnout, allowing ballots to be mailed to each of the state’s 22 million registered, active voters with prepaid postage. More than 40 percent of those Californians voted early.

Recall attempts are common in California, where direct democracy has long been part of the political culture.

Initially, Mr. Heatlie’s petition had difficulty gaining traction. But it gathered steam as the pandemic swept California and Mr. Newsom struggled to contain it

Californians who at first were supportive of the governor’s health orders wearied of shutdowns in businesses and classrooms, and public dissatisfaction boiled over in November when Mr. Newsom was spotted mask-free at the French Laundry, an exclusive wine country restaurant,

The recall campaign, the two men said, had expanded the small cadre that began the effort into a statewide coalition of 400,000 members who are already helping to push ballot proposals to fund school vouchers, forbid vaccine mandates in schools, and abolish public employee unions, which have been a longstanding Democratic force in California.

About one-quarter of the state’s registered voters are Republicans, and their numbers have been dwindling since the 1990s,

He took note of the voter fraud accusations that some in his party began to make well before the polls closed, echoing Mr. Trump, who claimed without evidence that Democrats had “rigged” the recall election.

Some Democratic observers were circumspect, warning that the disruption caused by the recall effort hinted at deeper problems.

And until the issues that created it get dealt with, people in power are in trouble. There’s a lot of anger and fear and frustration out there.

the governor moved aggressively to demonstrate that the state could both protect its economy and curb the virus. In recent months, he has rolled out vaccinations, cleaned up trash in neighborhoods neglected by pandemic-worn Californians, thrown motel rooms open to homeless Californians, announced stimulus checks and rent assistance for poor and middle-class Californians and stood repeatedly in front of a gold lamé curtain to host one of the nation’s largest vaccine lotteries.

Mr. Newsom and his team quickly cleared the field of potential Democratic alternatives.

Mr. Newsom painted the recall effort in national, partisan terms and rejected a defensive posture. His strategy galvanized major donors and his base.

Millions of voters chose not to answer the ballot’s second question, with Mr. Elder receiving about 44 percent of the vote from those who did. Kevin Paffrath, a Democrat, and Kevin Faulconer, a Republican and former mayor of San Diego, each had about 10 percent of the vote as of 10 p.m. Pacific time.

California has no limits on donations to committees for and against recalls, but the state caps contributions to candidates from individual donors.

Mr. Newsom capitalized on the rules, raising more than $50 million just in donations of more than $100,000 to oppose the recall.

Had the votes been counted fairly, however, the tally would have been quite different. Golos, an election monitoring group, reported thousands of violations at polling stations.

Videos of ballot-stuffing circulated widely on social media.

an unusually high number of turnout and vote-share results were multiples of five (eg, 50%, 55%, 60%), a tell-tale sign of manipulation.

Mr Putin’s United Russia party had won decisively, retaining a two-thirds majority in parliament, enough to make changes to the country’s constitution.

the researchers estimate that such fraudulent results may have boosted United Russia’s vote share by nearly 20 percentage points

Messrs Kobak and Shpilkin estimate that 1,700 polling stations returned statistically anomalous results in the Russian presidential election in 2018; 3,600 did so in the constitutional referendum in 2020.

When all 11 Russian federal elections since 2000 are shown on a scatter plot, with turnout on the x-axis and the vote share of the ruling United Russia party on the y-axis, the fraud is visible to the naked eye.

many expect the current voting system, which is conducted mainly by paper ballot, to be replaced by an all-electronic format. But fraud is likely to persist. In several races last month in Moscow, where nearly 2m votes were cast online, Kremlin-backed candidates were losing until online votes were included, at which point they surged ahead.

This is yet another wake-up call illustrating the risks that new digital technologies can pose when they end up in the wrong hands, and for the development community.

It reminds those working on digital identity and digital public infrastructure for development, that the benefits of ID systems – enshrined in the sustainable development goal 16.9, right to legal identity – should never be at the expense of individual safety.

For example, we must embrace the “data minimisation principle” – the idea that only necessary personal data should be collected and retained. We also need an approach that minimises centralised data collection, and gives more control to individuals.

Countries such as Germany, Spain and the Netherlands are developing digital wallet-based ID systems – that decentralise data storage and control – while the EU’s Covid vaccine passport uses a similar model.

Reading or rereading a collection of such books today is like watching an old movie that feels more anguishing and frustrating than you remember. The anguish comes from knowing how the tale will unfold; the frustration from realizing that this was hardly the only possible outcome.

This conclusion is laid bare in the sprawling literature to emerge from 9/11 over the past two decades

Whatever individual stories the 9/11 books tell, too many describe the repudiation of U.S. values, not by extremist outsiders but by our own hand.

In these works, indifference to the growing terrorist threat gives way to bloodlust and vengeance after the attacks. Official dissembling justifies wars, then prolongs them. In the name of counterterrorism, security is politicized, savagery legalized and patriotism weaponized.

that state of exception became our new American exceptionalism.

The latest works on the legacy of 9/11 show how war-on-terror tactics were turned on religious groups, immigrants and protesters in the United States. The war on terror came home, and it walked in like it owned the place.

It happened fast. By 2004, when the 9/11 Commission urged America to “engage the struggle of ideas,” it was already too late; the Justice Department’s initial torture memos were already signed, the Abu Ghraib images had already eviscerated U.S. claims to moral authority.

“It is for now far easier for a researcher to explain how and why September 11 happened than it is to explain the aftermath,” Steve Coll writes in “Ghost Wars,” his 2004 account of the CIA’s pre-9/11 involvement in Afghanistan. Throughout that aftermath, Washington fantasized about remaking the world in its image, only to reveal an ugly image of itself to the world.

“We anticipate a black future for America,” bin Laden told ABC News more than three years before the 9/11 attacks. “Instead of remaining United States, it shall end up separated states and shall have to carry the bodies of its sons back to America.”

bin Laden also came to grasp, perhaps self-servingly, the benefits of luring Washington into imperial overreach, of “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy,” as he put it in 2004, through endless military expansionism, thus beating back its global sway and undermining its internal unity.

To an unnerving degree, the United States moved toward the enemy’s fantasies of what it might become — a nation divided in its sense of itself, exposed in its moral and political compromises, conflicted over wars it did not want but would not end.

“The most frightening aspect of this new threat . . . was the fact that almost no one took it seriously. It was too bizarre, too primitive and exotic.” That is how Lawrence Wright depicts the early impressions of bin Laden and his terrorist network among U.S. officials

The books traveling that road to 9/11 have an inexorable, almost suffocating feel to them, as though every turn invariably leads to the first crush of steel and glass.

With the system “blinking red,” as CIA Director George Tenet later told the 9/11 Commission, why were all these warnings not enough? Wright lingers on bureaucratic failings

Clarke’s conclusion is simple, and it highlights America’s we-know-better swagger, a national trait that often masquerades as courage or wisdom. “America, alas, seems only to respond well to disasters, to be undistracted by warnings,” he writes. “Our country seems unable to do all that must be done until there has been some awful calamity.”

The problem with responding only to calamity is that underestimation is usually replaced by overreaction. And we tell ourselves it is the right thing, maybe the only thing, to do.

A last-minute flight change. A new job at the Pentagon. A retirement from the fire station. The final tilt of a plane’s wings before impact. If the books about the lead-up to 9/11 are packed with unbearable inevitability, the volumes on the day itself highlight how randomness separated survival from death.

Had the World Trade Center, built in the late 1960s and early 1970s, been erected according to the city building code in effect since 1938, Dwyer and Flynn explain, “it is likely that a very different world trade center would have been built.

Instead, it was constructed according to a new code that the real estate industry had avidly promoted, a code that made it cheaper and more lucrative to build and own skyscrapers. “It increased the floor space available for rent . . . by cutting back on the areas that had been devoted, under the earlier law, to evacuation and exit,” the authors write. The result: Getting everybody out on 9/11 was virtually impossible.

The towers embodied the power of American capitalism, but their design embodied the folly of American greed. On that day, both conditions proved fatal.

Garrett Graff quotes Defense Department officials marveling at how American Airlines Flight 77 struck a part of the Pentagon that, because of new anti-terrorism standards, had recently been reinforced and renovated

“In any other wedge of the Pentagon, there would have been 5,000 people, and the plane would have flown right through the middle of the building.” Instead, fewer than 200 people were killed in the attack on the Pentagon, including the passengers on the hijacked jet. Chance and preparedness came together.

The bravery of police and firefighters is the subject of countless 9/11 retrospectives, but these books also emphasize the selflessness of civilians who morphed into first responders

The passengers had made phone calls when the hijacking began and had learned the fate of other aircraft that day. “According to one call, they voted on whether to rush the terrorists in an attempt to retake the plane,” the commission report states. “They decided, and acted.”

The civilians aboard United Airlines Flight 93, whose resistance forced the plane to crash into a Pennsylvania field rather than the U.S. Capitol, were later lionized as emblems of swashbuckling Americana

Such episodes, led by ordinary civilians, embodied values that the 9/11 Commission called on the nation to display. Except those values would soon be dismantled, in the name of security, by those entrusted to uphold them.

Lawyering to death.The phrase appears in multiple 9/11 volumes, usually uttered by top officials adamant that they were going to get things done, laws and rules be damned

“I had to show the American people the resolve of a commander in chief that was going to do whatever it took to win,” Bush explains. “No yielding. No equivocation. No, you know, lawyering this thing to death.” In “Against All Enemies,” Clarke recalls the evening of Sept. 11, 2001, when Bush snapped at an official who suggested that international law looked askance at military force as a tool of revenge. “I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass,” the president retorted.

The message was unmistakable: The law is an obstacle to effective counterterrorism

Except, they did lawyer this thing to death. Instead of disregarding the law, the Bush administration enlisted it. “Beginning almost immediately after September 11, 2001, [Vice President Dick] Cheney saw to it that some of the sharpest and best-trained lawyers in the country, working in secret in the White House and the United States Department of Justice, came up with legal justifications for a vast expansion of the government’s power in waging war on terror,

Through public declarations and secret memos, the administration sought to remove limits on the president’s conduct of warfare and to deny terrorism suspects the protections of the Geneva Conventions by redefining them as unlawful enemy combatants. Nothing, Mayer argues of the latter effort, “more directly cleared the way for torture than this.”

Tactics such as cramped confinement, sleep deprivation and waterboarding were rebranded as “enhanced interrogation techniques,” legally and linguistically contorted to avoid the label of torture. Though the techniques could be cruel and inhuman, the OLC acknowledged in an August 2002 memo, they would constitute torture only if they produced pain equivalent to organ failure or death, and if the individual inflicting such pain really really meant to do so: “Even if the defendant knows that severe pain will result from his actions, if causing such harm is not his objective, he lacks the requisite specific intent.” It’s quite the sleight of hand, with torture moving from the body of the interrogated to the mind of the interrogator.

the memo concludes that none of it actually matters. Even if a particular interrogation method would cross some legal line, the relevant statute would be considered unconstitutional because it “impermissibly encroached” on the commander in chief’s authority to conduct warfare

You have informed us. Experts you have consulted. Based on your research. You do not anticipate. Such hand-washing words appear throughout the memos. The Justice Department relies on information provided by the CIA to reach its conclusions; the CIA then has the cover of the Justice Department to proceed with its interrogations. It’s a perfect circle of trust.

In these documents, lawyers enable lawlessness. Another May 2005 memo concludes that, because the Convention Against Torture applies only to actions occurring under U.S. jurisdiction, the CIA’s creation of detention sites in other countries renders the convention “inapplicable.”

avid Cole describes the documents as “bad-faith lawyering,” which might be generous. It is another kind of lawyering to death, one in which the rule of law that the 9/11 Commission urged us to abide by becomes the victim.

Similarly, because the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment is meant to protect people convicted of crimes, it should not apply to terrorism detainees — because they have not been officially convicted of anything. The lack of due process conveniently eliminates constitutional protections

Years later, the Senate Intelligence Committee would investigate the CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation program. Its massive report — the executive summary of which appeared as a 549-page book in 2014 — found that torture did not produce useful intelligence, that the interrogations were more brutal than the CIA let on, that the Justice Department did not independently verify the CIA’s information, and that the spy agency impeded oversight by Congress and the CIA inspector general.

“The CIA’s effectiveness representations were almost entirely inaccurate,” the Senate report concluded. It is one of the few lies of the war on terror unmasked by an official government investigation and public report, but just one of the many documented in the 9/11 literature.

Officials in the war on terror didn’t deceive or dissemble just with lawmakers or the public. In the recurring tragedy of war, they lied just as often to themselves.

“The decision to invade Iraq was one made, finally and exclusively, by the president of the United States, George W. Bush,” he writes.

n Woodward’s “Bush at War,” the president admitted that before 9/11, “I didn’t feel that sense of urgency [about al-Qaeda], and my blood was not nearly as boiling.”

A president initially concerned about defending and preserving the nation’s moral goodness against terrorism found himself driven by darker impulses. “I’m having difficulty controlling my bloodlust,” Bush confessed to religious leaders in the Oval Office on Sept. 20, 2001,

Bloodlust, moral certainty and sudden vulnerability make a dangerous combination. The belief that you are defending good against evil can lead to the belief that whatever you do to that end is good, too.

Draper distills Bush’s worldview: “The terrorists’ primary objective was to destroy America’s freedom. Saddam hated America. Therefore, he hated freedom. Therefore, Saddam was himself a terrorist, bent on destroying America and its freedom.”

The president assumed the worst about what Hussein had done or might do, yet embraced best-case scenarios of how an American invasion would proceed.

“Iraqis would rejoice at the sight of their Western liberators,” Draper recaps. “Their newly shared sense of national purpose would overcome any sectarian allegiances. Their native cleverness would make up for their inexperience with self-government. They would welcome the stewardship of Iraqi expatriates who had not set foot in Baghdad in decades. And their oil would pay for everything.”

It did not seem to occur to Bush and his advisers that Iraqis could simultaneously hate Hussein and resent the Americans — feelings that could have been discovered by speaking to Iraqis and hearing their concerns.

few books on the war that gets deep inside Iraqis’ aversion to the Americans in their midst. “What gives them the right to change something that’s not theirs in the first place?” a woman in a middle-class Baghdad neighborhood asks him. “I don’t like your house, so I’m going to bomb it and you can rebuild it again the way I want it, with your money?

The occupation did not dissuade such impressions when it turned the former dictator’s seat of government into its own luxurious Green Zone, or when it retrofitted the Abu Ghraib prison (“the worst of Saddam’s hellholes,” Shadid calls it) into its own chamber of horrors.

Shadid hears early talk of the Americans as “kuffar” (heathens), a 51-year-old former teacher complains that “we’ve exchanged a tyrant for an occupier.”

Shadid understood that governmental legitimacy — who gets to rule, and by what right — was a matter of overriding importance for Iraqis. “The Americans never understood the question,” he writes; “Iraqis never agreed on the answer.

When the United States so quickly shifted from liberation to occupation, it lost whatever legitimacy it enjoyed. “Bush handed that enemy precisely what it wanted and needed, proof that America was at war with Islam, that we were the new Crusaders come to occupy Muslim land,” Clarke writes. “It was as if Usama bin Laden, hidden in some high mountain redoubt, were engaging in long-range mind control of George Bush, chanting ‘invade Iraq, you must invade Iraq.’ ”

The foolishness and arrogance of the American occupation didn’t help. In “Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone,” Rajiv Chandrasekaran explains how, even as daily security was Iraqis’ overwhelming concern, viceroy L. Paul Bremer, Bush’s man in Baghdad, was determined to turn the country into a model free-market economy, complete with new investment laws, bankruptcy courts and a state-of-the-art stock exchange.

a U.S. Army general, when asked by local journalists why American helicopters must fly so low at night, thus scaring Iraqi children, replied that the kids were simply hearing “the sound of freedom.”Message: Freedom sounds terrifying.

For some Americans, inflicting that terror became part of the job, one more tool in the arsenal. In “The Forever War” by Dexter Filkins, a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel in Iraq assures the author that “with a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them.”

Chandrasekaran recalls the response of a top communications official under Bremer, when reporters asked about waves of violence hitting Baghdad in the spring of 2004. “Off the record: Paris is burning,” the official told the journalists. “On the record: Security and stability are returning to Iraq.”

the Iraq War, conjured in part on the false connections between Iraq and al-Qaeda, ended up helping the terrorist network: It pulled resources from the war in Afghanistan, gave space for bin Laden’s men to regroup and spurred a new generation of terrorists in the Middle East. “A bigger gift to bin Laden was hard to imagine,” Bergen writes.

“U.S. officials had no need to lie or spin to justify the war,” Washington Post reporter Craig Whitlock writes in “The Afghanistan Papers,” a damning contrast of the war’s reality vs. its rhetoric. “Yet leaders at the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department soon began to make false assurances and to paper over setbacks on the battlefield.” As the years passed, the deceit became entrenched, what Whitlock calls “an unspoken conspiracy” to hide the truth.

Afghanistan was where al-Qaeda, supported by the Taliban, had made its base — it was supposed to be the good war, the right war, the war of necessity and not choice, the war endorsed at home and abroad.

If Iraq was the war born of lies, Afghanistan was the one nurtured by them

Whitlock finds commanding generals privately admitting that they long fought the war “without a functional strategy.” That, two years into the conflict, Rumsfeld complained that he had “no visibility into who the bad guys are.”

That Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, a former coordinator of Iraq and Afghanistan policy, acknowledged that “we didn’t have the foggiest idea of what we were undertaking.”

That U.S. officials long wanted to withdraw American forces but feared — correctly so, it turns out — that the Afghan government might collapse. “Bin Laden had hoped for this exact scenario,” Whitlock observes. “To lure the U.S. superpower into an unwinnable guerrilla conflict that would deplete its national treasury and diminish its global influence.”

All along, top officials publicly contradicted these internal views, issuing favorable accounts of steady progress

Bad news was twisted into good: Rising suicide attacks in Kabul meant the Taliban was too weak for direct combat, for instance, while increased U.S. casualties meant America was taking the fight to the enemy.

deceptions transpired across U.S. presidents, but the Obama administration, eager to show that its first-term troop surge was working, “took it to a new level, hyping figures that were misleading, spurious or downright false,” Whitlock writes. And then under President Donald Trump, he adds, the generals felt pressure to “speak more forcefully and boast that his war strategy was destined to succeed.”

in public, almost no senior government officials had the courage to admit that the United States was slowly losing,” Whitlock writes. “With their complicit silence, military and political leaders avoided accountability and dodged reappraisals that could have changed the outcome or shortened the conflict.”

Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage traveled to Moscow shortly after 9/11 to give officials a heads up about the coming hostilities in Afghanistan. The Russians, recent visitors to the graveyard of empires, cautioned that Afghanistan was an “ambush heaven” and that, in the words of one of them, “you’re really going to get the hell kicked out of you.”

a war should not be measured only by the timing and the competence of its end. We still face an equally consequential appraisal: How good was this good war if it could be sustained only by lies?

In the two decades since the 9/11 attacks, the United States has often attempted to reconsider its response

They are written as though intending to solve problems. But they can be read as proof that the problems have no realistic solution, or that the only solution is to never have created them.

the report sets the bar for staying so high that an exit strategy appears to be its primary purpose.

he counterinsurgency manual is an extraordinary document. Implicitly repudiating notions such as “shock and awe” and “overwhelming force,” it argues that the key to battling an insurgency in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan is to provide security for the local population and to win its support through effective governance

It also attempts to grasp the nature of America’s foes. “Most enemies either do not try to defeat the United States with conventional operations or do not limit themselves to purely military means,” the manual states. “They know that they cannot compete with U.S. forces on those terms. Instead, they try to exhaust U.S. national will.” Exhausting America’s will is an objective that al-Qaeda understood well.

“Counterinsurgents should prepare for a long-term commitment,” the manual states. Yet, just a few pages later, it admits that “eventually all foreign armies are seen as interlopers or occupiers.” How to accomplish the former without descending into the latter? No wonder so many of the historical examples of counterinsurgency that the manual highlights, including accounts from the Vietnam War, are stories of failure.

“Soldiers and Marines are expected to be nation builders as well as warriors,” the manual proclaims, but the arduous tasks involved — reestablishing government institutions, rebuilding infrastructure, strengthening local security forces, enforcing the rule of law — reveal the tension at the heart of the new doctrine

In his foreword, Army Lt. Col. John Nagl writes that the document’s most lasting impact may be as a catalyst not for remaking Iraq or Afghanistan, but for transforming the Army and Marine Corps into “more effective learning organizations,” better able to adapt to changing warfare. And in her introduction, Sarah Sewall, then director of Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, concludes that its “ultimate value” may be in warning civilian officials to think hard before engaging in a counterinsurgency campaign.

“The thing that got to everyone,” Finkel explains in the latter book, “was not having a defined front line. It was a war in 360 degrees, no front to advance toward, no enemy in uniform, no predictable patterns, no relief.” It’s a powerful summation of battling an insurgency.

Hitting the wrong house is what counterinsurgency doctrine is supposed to avoid. Even successfully capturing or killing a high-value target can be counterproductive if in the process you terrorize a community and create more enemies. In Iraq, the whole country was the wrong house. America’s leaders knew it was the wrong house. They hit it anyway.

Another returning soldier, Nic DeNinno, struggles to tell his wife about the time he and his fellow soldiers burst into an Iraqi home in search of a high-value target. He threw a man down the stairs and held another by the throat. After they left, the lieutenant told him it was the wrong house. “The wrong f---ing house,” Nic says to his wife. “One of the things I want to remember is how many times we hit the wrong house.”

“As time passes, more documents become available, and the bare facts of what happened become still clearer,” the report states. “Yet the picture of how those things happened becomes harder to reimagine, as that past world, with its preoccupations and uncertainty, recedes.” Before making definitive judgments, then, they ask themselves “whether the insights that seem apparent now would really have been meaningful at the time.”

Two of the latest additions to the canon, “Reign of Terror” by Spencer Ackerman and “Subtle Tools” by Karen Greenberg, draw straight, stark lines between the earliest days of the war on terror and its mutations in our current time, between conflicts abroad and divisions at home. These works show how 9/11 remains with us, and how we are still living in the ruins.

When Trump declared that “we don’t have victories anymore” in his 2015 speech announcing his presidential candidacy, he was both belittling the legacy of 9/11 and harnessing it to his ends. “His great insight was that the jingoistic politics of the War on Terror did not have to be tied to the War on Terror itself,” Ackerman writes. “That enabled him to tell a tale of lost greatness.” And if greatness is lost, someone must have taken it.

“Trump had learned the foremost lesson of 9/11,” Ackerman writes, “that the terrorists were whomever you said they were.”

The backlash against Muslims, against immigrants crossing the southern border and against protesters rallying for racial justice was strengthened by the open-ended nature of the global war on terror.

the war is not just far away in Iraq or Afghanistan, in Yemen or Syria, but it’s happening here, with mass surveillance, militarized law enforcement and the rebranding of immigration as a threat to the nation’s security rather than a cornerstone of its identity

the Authorization for Use of Military Force, drafted by administration lawyers and approved by Congress just days after the attacks, as the moment when America’s response began to go awry. The brief joint resolution allowed the president to use “all necessary and appropriate force” against any nation, organization or person who committed the attacks, and to prevent any future ones.

It was the “Ur document in the war on terror and its legacy,” Greenberg writes. “Riddled with imprecision, its terminology was geared to codify expansive powers.” Where the battlefield, the enemy and the definition of victory all remain vague, war becomes endlessly expansive, “with neither temporal nor geographical boundaries.”

This was the moment the war on terror was “conceptually doomed,” Ackerman concludes. This is how you get a forever war.

There were moments when an off-ramp was visible. The killing of bin Laden in 2011 was one such instance, Ackerman argues, but “Obama squandered the best chance anyone could ever have to end the 9/11 era.”

The author assails Obama for making the war on terror more “sustainable” through a veneer of legality — banning torture yet failing to close the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay and relying on drone strikes that “perversely incentivized the military and the CIA to kill instead of capture.”

There would always be more targets, more battlefields, regardless of president or party. Failures became the reason to double down, never wind down.

The longer the war went on, the more that what Ackerman calls its “grotesque subtext” of nativism and racism would move to the foreground of American politics

Absent the war on terror, it is harder to imagine a presidential candidate decrying a sitting commander in chief as foreign, Muslim, illegitimate — and using that lie as a successful political platform.

Absent the war on terror, it is harder to imagine a travel ban against people from Muslim-majority countries. Absent the war on terror, it is harder to imagine American protesters labeled terrorists, or a secretary of defense describing the nation’s urban streets as a “battle space” to be dominated

In his latest book on bin Laden, Bergen argues that 9/11 was a major tactical success but a long-term strategic failure for the terrorist leader. Yes, he struck a vicious blow against “the head of the snake,” as he called the United States, but “rather than ending American influence in the Muslim world, the 9/11 attacks greatly amplified it,” with two lengthy, large-scale invasions and new bases established throughout the region.

“A vastly different America has taken root” in the two decades since 9/11, Greenberg writes. “In the name of retaliation, ‘justice,’ and prevention, fundamental values have been cast aside.”

the legacy of the 9/11 era is found not just in Afghanistan or Iraq, but also in an America that drew out and heightened some of its ugliest impulses — a nation that is deeply divided (like those “separated states” bin Laden imagined); that bypasses inconvenient facts and embraces conspiracy theories; that demonizes outsiders; and that, after failing to spread freedom and democracy around the world, seems less inclined to uphold them here

Seventeen years after the 9/11 Commission called on the United States to offer moral leadership to the world and to be generous and caring to our neighbors, our moral leadership is in question, and we can barely be generous and caring to ourselves.

Still reeling from an attack that dropped out of a blue sky, America is suffering from a sort of post-traumatic stress democracy. It remains in recovery, still a good country, even if a broken good country.

9/11 was a test. Thebooks of the lasttwo decades showhow America failed.

Deep within the catalogue of regrets that is the 9/11 Commission report

Stanley McChrystal: If you go back, Covid-19 was not that formidable a threat. We knew that it was coming. Not Covid-19 particularly but we knew that kind of viral threat came on a periodic basis and that a pandemic level was inevitable. And then we knew what to do about it because our experience in public health is really pretty rich. And then, with this pandemic, we had the extraordinary medical miracle where we produced vaccines faster than any time in history. 

If you line those factors up, we should have had a win. Instead, we lost hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions more around the world. Some percentage probably could not have been saved. But the reality was that, from the outset, we didn’t communicate clearly and we therefore undermined our credibility on what the threat was and what we needed to do about it. 

The responsibility of leadership is to move rapidly and effectively, and we just didn’t do that. We’d better go to school on this because, if we can get punished this badly by a pandemic like this, imagine how much worse it would have been with a virus like smallpox. Society’s very existence could have been threatened.

MW: Let’s shift to another frontier of vulnerabilities. How do you view a company like Facebook, which has been criticized for enabling global terrorist groups to recruit while also allowing domestic extremists to promote hateful views?

I would use an analogy to nuclear weapons at the end of the Second World War. We developed this horrific technology and we really hadn’t figured out how we were going to control it. That was OK for the first couple of years because we had a monopoly. But once global proliferation began then we suddenly had a very complicated world. There was a need for a number of protocols pertaining to holding countries responsible for having that kind of power.  

The problem with social media is that we developed tools of equivalent danger because of the ability to pass information faster than we can think. I don’t think we’ve yet matured enough as a society to know how to control and deal with it. 

MW: Given these risks, could the next American battlefield be online? 

McChrystal: Yes, I think we will see war play out digitally. What if, on the Sunday afternoon before a Tuesday election, the Russians planted a semi-believable story about a candidate? And then there wasn’t time to gain clarity between Sunday afternoon and Tuesday morning before people started voting? The public would go into voting booths affected by that attack. 

We are all extraordinarily brittle given this exposure, and our society is no longer capable of operating without the information technology that connects us all.  

MW: With these types of dangers in mind, is the United States appropriately weighing the possibility of a major conflict with China? 

McChrystal: In my personal opinion, we are not. I am not advocating for the resumption of the Cold War, but our competition with China is going to be a very hard-edged, long-term, economic competition. There is also a military competition as the Chinese have been on a breakneck development of military capacity over the last decade or so, which now makes it much harder for the U.S. to credibly limit the risk they pose. 

We also have to recognize that we don’t have to be at war with China for there to be serious risks. We need to explore new policies that will increase protection for private investments, our national interests, our intellectual property, and our supply chains. In a peaceful environment, it makes sense for our supply chains to be built in low-cost areas of production. However, if they’re in a country like China that can then use that as leverage over us, then we’ve got to address that and find a different solution. 

No matter what, we have to make the appropriate investments so that our military effectiveness against the Chinese remains a viable option. We’ve got to be able to do what we need to do in that region, which may include defending Taiwan. 

MW: Do current global supply chains—and America’s dependence on single nations for various types of production—pose a risk to the U.S. economy? 

McChrystal: Consider our ability to produce batteries and that production for cobalt largely comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the product is then mostly processed in China. Items that are going to be central to our switch to electric vehicles and to different storage systems are dependent on a free flow of goods from China. 

We’ve got so many things that are part of our vital supply lines that are at risk. We’ve got to step back and we’ve got to make some national decisions on which items need to be sourced within the United States. We at least need that capability so we’re not completely dependent. If somebody gets their hand around our windpipe and squeezes, then the nation suffocates. 

of the show’s stars have disappeared into a vast new gulag in which more than 1m people, most of them Uyghurs, have been locked up.

Officials say the camps offer “vocational education” to help Uyghurs find better jobs and to curb their “extremist” tendencies.

shown no more sign of extremism than simply being devout Muslims.

their crime has been to show too much enthusiasm for Uyghur culture, not necessarily just Islam.

Uyghur groups in the West reckon the four are among nearly 400 intellectuals and cultural figures who have been detained in the new camps, sent to regular prisons or who have otherwise disappeared since the clampdown began.

Others associated with Uyghur culture have been paraded on state television praising the virtues of the Communist Party or singing patriotic songs.

Mr Tohti had maintained a website that hosted writing by Uyghur intellectuals on social and cultural issues.

In September 2014 Ilham Tohti, a revered academic with moderate political views, was sentenced to life in prison for separatism.

conforming to a stereotype endorsed by the party such as smiling Uyghurs wearing brightly coloured traditional costume, dancing in public squares and singing, often in Mandarin

Uyghurs in exile have been waging a parallel campaign to keep their culture alive

There are still underground artists in Xinjiang, she says. As repression has tightened, their works have become increasingly suffused with lament and despair.

Mr Tursun’s writings and links with other cultural personalities in Xinjiang may have led to his detention in 2018 and his reported jail term of 16 years.

But displays of loyalty to the party are no longer enough to keep people safe.

It includes fawning lyrics such as: “You put light into the hearts of the people.” Uyghurs in exile were dismayed to hear a much-loved performer crooning for the regime.

It returned last year, with changes. Introducing the new series, the host made approving remarks about building socialism in Xinjiang and loving the party.

In the show’s early days, this would have been “unimaginable”, says Elise Anderson of the Uyghur Human Rights Project in Washington, an American ethnomusicologist who competed in the inaugural series of “The Voice of the Silk Road” in 2014.

Any depolarizing event would need to be one where the causes are transparently external in a way that makes it hard for social groups to blame each other

Of the episodes since 1950 where democracies polarized, all of those aside from the United States involved less wealthy, less longstanding democracies, many of which had democratized quite recently.

A series of recent analyses reveals the destructive power of polarization across the American political system.

The United States is quite alone among the ranks of perniciously polarized democracies in terms of its wealth and democratic experience

It is increasingly hard to see what sort of event has that feature these days.

None of the wealthy, consolidated democracies of East Asia, Oceania or Western Europe, for example, have faced similar levels of polarization for such an extended period.

“the United States is the only advanced Western democracy to have faced such intense polarization for such an extended period. The United States is in uncharted and very dangerous territory.”

there are “a number of features that make the United States both especially susceptible to polarization and especially impervious to efforts to reduce it.”

The authors point to a number of causes, including “the durability of identity politics in a racially and ethnically diverse democracy.”

the United States has “a unique combination of a majoritarian electoral system with strong minoritarian institutions.”

An additional cause, the authors write, is thatbinary choice is deeply embedded in the U.S. electoral system, creating a rigid two-party system that facilitates binary divisions of society. For example, only five of twenty-six wealthy consolidated democracies elect representatives to their national legislatures in single-member districts.

The United States is perhaps alone in experiencing a demographic shift that poses a threat to the white population that has historically been the dominant group in all arenas of power, allowing political leaders to exploit insecurities surrounding this loss of status.

“The Senate is highly disproportionate in its representation,” they add, “with two senators per state regardless of population, from Wyoming’s 580,000 to California’s 39,500,000 persons,” which, in turn, “translates to disproportionality in the Electoral College — whose indirect election of the president is again exceptional among presidential democracies.”

finally, there is the three-decade trend of partisan sorting, in whichthe two parties reinforce urban-rural, religious-secular and racial-ethnic cleavages rather than promote crosscutting cleavages. With partisanship now increasingly tied to other kinds of social identity, affective polarization is on the rise, with voters perceiving the opposing party in negative terms and as a growing threat to the nation.

Two related studies — “Inequality, Identity and Partisanship: How Redistribution Can Stem the Tide of Mass Polarization” by Alexander J. Stewart, Joshua B. Plotkin and McCarty and “Polarization Under Rising Inequality and Economic Decline” by Stewart, McCarty and Joanna Bryson — argue that aggressive redistribution policies designed to lessen inequality must be initiated before polarization becomes further entrenched

“once polarization sets in, it typically remains stable under individual-level evolutionary dynamics, even when the economic environment improves or inequality is reversed.”

Interactions with more diverse out-group members pool greater knowledge, applicable to a wider variety of situations. These interactions, when successful, generate better solutions and greater benefits. However, we also assume that the risk of failure is higher for out-group interactions

At the same time, the spread of polarization goes far beyond politics, permeating the culture and economic structure of the broader society.

economic scarcity acts as a strong disincentive to cooperative relations between disparate racial and ethnic groups, in large part because such cooperation may produce more benefits but at higher risk:

In other words, a deeply polarized electorate is highly unlikely to support redistribution that would benefit their adversaries as well as themselves.

In times of prosperity, people are more willing to risk failure, they write, but that willingness disappears when populations arefaced with economic decline. We show that such group polarization can be contagious, and a subpopulation facing economic hardship in an otherwise strong economy can tip the whole population into a state of polarization.

A key finding in our studies is that it really matters when redistributive policies are put in place. Redistribution functions far better as a prevention than a cure for polarization in part for the reason your question suggests: If polarization is already high, redistribution itself becomes the target of polarized attitudes.

Using “data from Amazon, 82.5 million reviews of 9.5 million products and category metadata from 1996-2014,” the authors determined which “product categories are most politically relevant, aligned and polarized.”

While the processes Zmigrod describes characterize the extremes, the electorate as a whole is moving farther and farther apart into two mutually loathing camps.

even small categories like automotive parts have notable political alignment indicative of lifestyle politics. These results indicate that lifestyle politics spread deep and wide across markets.

political psychologists dispute the argument that only “conservatism is associated with prejudice” and that “the types of dispositional characteristics associated with conservatism (e.g., low cognitive ability, low openness) explain this relationship.”

“when researchers use a more heterogeneous array of targets, people across the political spectrum express prejudice against groups with dissimilar values and beliefs.”

Earlier research has correctly found greater levels of prejudice among conservatives, they write, but these studies have focused on prejudice toward liberal-associated groups: minorities, the poor, gay people and other marginalized constituencies.

when the targets of prejudice are expanded to include “conservative-associated groups such as Christian fundamentalists, military personnel and ‘rich people,’” similar levels of prejudice emerge.

Caughey and his co-authors showa surprisingly close correspondence between mass and elite trends.

“people high in cognitive ability are prejudiced against more conservative and conventional groups,” while “people low in cognitive ability are prejudiced against more liberal and unconventional groups.”

he “rigidity-of-the-right hypotheses” should be expanded in recognition of the fact that “cognitive rigidity is linked to ideological extremism, partisanship and dogmatism across political and nonpolitical ideologies.”

“extreme right-wing partisans are characterized by specific psychological traits including cognitive rigidity and impulsivity. This is also true of extreme left-wing partisans.”

a clear inverted-U shaped curve emerged such that those on the extreme right and extreme left exhibited cognitive rigidity on neuropsychological tasks, in comparison to moderates.

“Low openness to experience is associated with prejudice against groups seen as socially unconventional (e.g., atheists, gay men and lesbians),” they write, whereas high openness is “associated with prejudice against groups seen as socially conventional (e.g., military personnel, evangelical Christians).

Analyzing these “pervasive lifestyle politics,” Ruch, Decter-Frain and Batra find that “cultural products are four times more polarized than any other segment.”

1) ideological divergence between Democrats and Republicans has widened dramatically within each domain, just as it has in Congress;

(2) ideological variation across senators’ partisan subconstituencies is now explained almost completely by party rather than state, closely tracking trends in the Senate

(3) economic, racial and social liberalism have become highly correlated across partisan subconstituencies, just as they have across members of Congress

Caughey, Dunham and Warshaw describe the growing partisan salience of racial and social issues since the 1950s:The explanatory power of party on racial issues increased hugely over this period and that of state correspondingly declined. We refer to this process as the “ideological nationalization” of partisan subconstituencies.

In the late 1950s, they continue,party explained almost no variance in racial conservatism in either arena. Over the next half century, the Senate and public time series rise in tandem.

Contrary to the claim that racial realignment had run its course by 1980, they add, “our data indicate that differences between the parties continued to widen through the end of the 20th century, in the Senate as well as in the mass public. By the 2000s, party explained about 80 percent of the variance in senators’ racial conservatism and nearly 100 percent of the variance in the mass public.

“it has limited the two parties’ abilities to tailor their positions to local conditions. Moreover, it has led to greater geographic concentration of the parties’ respective support coalitions.”

Today, across all offices, conservative states are largely dominated by Republicans, whereas the opposite is true of liberal states. The ideological nationalization of the party system thus seems to have undermined party competition at the state level.

this will continue to give ideological extremists an advantage in both parties’ primaries. It also means that the pool of people that run for office is increasingly extreme.

It will probably reduce partisans’ willingness to vote for the out-party. This could dampen voters’ willingness to hold candidates accountable for poor performance and to vote across party lines to select higher-quality candidates. This will probably further increase the importance of primaries as a mechanism for candidate selection.

Looking over the contemporary political landscape, there appear to be no major or effective movements to counter polarization.

As the McCoy-Press report shows, only 16 of the 52 countries that reached levels of pernicious polarization succeeded in achieving depolarization and in “a significant number of instances later repolarized to pernicious levels. The progress toward depolarization in seven of 16 episodes was later undone.”

That does not suggest a favorable prognosis for the United States.

Andy Stone, a spokesperson for Meta, responded in a statement saying, "As Chairman Thompson said recently, 'Facebook is working with [the committee] to provide the necessary information we requested.'

"To this day, YouTube is a platform on which user video spreads misinformation about the election," the committee said.

In a statement, Google said: “We’ve been actively cooperating with the Select Committee since they started their investigation, responding substantively to their requests for documents, and are committed to working with Congress through this process.

A Reddit spokesperson said, "We received the subpoena and will continue to work with the committee on their requests."Twitter declined to comment.

The panel first sought records from the four companies and others in August, asking for information related to "the spread of misinformation

The committee is seeking information dating to the spring of 2020.

FBI officials have acknowledged that there were calls for violence at the Jan. 6 "Stop the Steal" rally by Trump supporters, which was held just before the Capitol attack, but they have said the calls did not add up to specific, credible intelligence.

Testifying before a Senate committee in March, FBI Director Christopher Wray suggested that the amount of vitriol online makes it difficult to sort out.

The road also services a major police academy and a compound where United Nations and foreign government staff members and officials live.

The bombing, part of a string of attacks blamed on the Qaeda-linked Al Shabab extremist group that have gripped Somalia in recent months, comes as the country’s leaders struggle to resolve a political crisis that has distracted the government from the deteriorating security situation.

Mohamed Ibrahim Moalimuu, a government spokesman, condemned what he described as a suicide attack, calling it “cowardly.”

“Such acts of terrorism will not derail the peace & the ongoing development in the country,” he wrote on Twitter. “We must unite in the fight against terrorism.”

Witnesses said the explosion could be heard in many of the city’s districts.

The United Nations Assistance Mission in Somalia condemned the attack, and said none of its “personnel or contractors” were in the targeted convoy.

The explosion has hit the country as it undergoes a tense election period that has seen growing infighting among its political leaders.

The political struggle has threatened to tip the country into violent conflict, like the clashes that broke out in April, and reverse the modicum of peace and stability Somalia has achieved in recent years.

As disagreements over the elections have persisted, Al Shabab have stepped up their attacks, particularly in the capital. Over the past two months, the group has carried out car bomb explosions, assassinated government officials and attacked election centers — efforts analysts say are aimed at undermining the electoral process.

The security situation in Somalia is deteriorating, and parts of the country are facing their driest season in around four decades. An estimated 3.8 million people are experiencing acute food insecurity, according to the United Nations, with almost three million displaced within the country.

“As long as the election cycle and current tensions drag on, the attention of the political elite will be more inwardly focused, while other priorities lag behind,”

“This unfortunately creates greater space for Al Shabab to operate.”

“It’s disappointing that after months of engagement, we still do not have the documents and information necessary to answer those basic questions,”

In the days after the attack, Reddit banned a discussion forum dedicated to former President Donald J. Trump, where tens of thousands of Mr. Trump’s supporters regularly convened to express solidarity with him.

In the year since the events of Jan. 6, social media companies have been heavily scrutinized for whether their sites played an instrumental role in organizing the attack.

In the months surrounding the 2020 election, employees inside Meta raised warning signs that Facebook posts and comments containing “combustible election misinformation” were spreading quickly across the social network, according to a cache of documents and photos reviewed by The New York Times.

Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee turned whistle-blower, said the company relaxed its safeguards too quickly after the election, which then led it to be used in the storming of the Capitol.

On Twitter, many of Mr. Trump’s followers used the site to amplify and spread false allegations of election fraud, while connecting with other Trump supporters and conspiracy theorists using the site. And on YouTube, some users broadcast the events of Jan. 6 using the platform’s video streaming technology.

Meta said that it had “produced documents to the committee on a schedule committee staff requested — and we will continue to do so.”

The committee said letters to the four firms accompanied the subpoenas.The panel said YouTube served as a platform for “significant communications by its users that were relevant to the planning and execution of Jan. 6 attack on the United States Capitol,” including livestreams of the attack as it was taking place.

The panel said Facebook and other Meta platforms were used to share messages of “hate, violence and incitement; to spread misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories around the election; and to coordinate or attempt to coordinate the Stop the Steal movement.”

“Meta has declined to commit to a deadline for producing or even identifying these materials,” Mr. Thompson wrote to Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive.

The panel said it was focused on Reddit because the platform hosted the r/The_Donald subreddit community that grew significantly before migrating in 2020 to the website TheDonald.win, which ultimately hosted significant discussion and planning related to the Jan. 6 attack.

“Unfortunately, the select committee believes Twitter has failed to disclose critical information,” the panel stated.

In recent years, Big Tech and Washington have had a history of butting heads. Some Republicans have accused sites including Facebook, Instagram and Twitter of silencing conservative voices.

The Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether a number of tech companies have grown too big, and in the process abused their market power to stifle competition. And a bipartisan group of senators and representatives continues to say sites like Facebook and YouTube are not doing enough to curb the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories.

After months of discussions with the companies, only the four large corporations were issued subpoenas on Thursday, because the committee said the firms were “unwilling to commit to voluntarily and expeditiously” cooperating with its work.

The panel has interviewed more than 340 witnesses and issued dozens of subpoenas, including for bank and phone records.

These newcomers, especially Muslims, are said to be fundamentally opposed to both France and French values. Unless the country turns back the clock, and puts “real” Frenchmen in charge again, it is supposedly doomed. Islamism, Le Pen has argued, is a “totalitarianism” that aims to “subjugate France.”

France’s left rightly rejects both conspiracy theories about a “great replacement” and attempts to blame immigrants for the concentrated poverty that does persist in some French suburbs. But even as it has contested who is to blame for the current malaise, it has, in its own way, mirrored the relentless pessimism of the right.

Many of the loudest left-wing voices in France also depict life in the banlieues as bleak and dystopian.

they, too, give the impression that most immigrants and their descendants are perpetually stuck at the very lowest rungs of society.

American reality is much more hopeful than the pessimistic narratives that are now so fashionable suggest.

This pessimism could not have become so dominant if it did not have roots in reality.

yet, life in contemporary France is much better than the dominant discourse on either the right or the left now seems to suggest. Indeed, France has successfully managed to integrate the majority of its immigrants over the course of the past decades

Far from being stuck in poverty or welfare dependency, most immigrants are experiencing rapid social, economic, and educational mobility. According to one large study by European economists, for example, the children and grandchildren of immigrants are more likely to improve their living conditions than the children and grandchildren of similarly positioned “natives.”

Because of the failure of the French mainstream to contest the pessimistic narrative of the far right, these facts are barely known in the country

Under those circumstances, it is hardly surprising that so many voters are choosing to seek fault with outsiders rather than themselves.M

he difference lies in who is blamed for these dystopian conditions: The real culprits, according to more progressive pessimists, are the incessant discrimination and racism that define contemporary France.

The majority of African Americans are middle-class. Most have completed high school and about half have, if they are below the age of 40, spent some time at a community college or research university. Black Americans are more likely to work in white-collar jobs than in blue-collar ones. They are more likely to get their health insurance from their employers than to either have to purchase it on an open marketplace or be uninsured.

Black Americans are actually more likely than their white fellow citizens to “believe in the American dream” or to say that the country’s best days still lie ahead.

Immigrants fared very well, rapidly boosting their incomes from one generation to the next. And this turned out to be true irrespective of their ethnic or geographical origin. “Children of immigrants from nearly every sending country,” the economists write, “have higher rates of upward mobility than the children of the US-born.”

In Russia in March, the four most-downloaded apps for both MacOS and Android were VPNs.

But the fifth most in-demand app was the encrypted messenger Telegram, probably the best available source of uncensored news about the war. I, for one, am using Telegram to access news from a wealth of Russian and Ukrainian sources. 

According to a poll taken in March, TV is the main source of information for 50% of Russians, and 45% trust it. But then that’s just what people living under an autocratic regime tell pollsters — not necessarily what they actually think.

even if the poll data reflect reality, there is a large age gap in TV viewing: Younger people watch little TV, and more than a quarter of adult Russians don’t watch it at all, instead relying on the internet for news. They are the ones who use VPNs to access independent news sources and subscribe to unfiltered Telegram channels. They also know that Google is a better search engine than Yandex.

Even Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, openly admits using a VPN to access the banned Western social networks: The official policy is that such use is not punishable. And indeed there have been no reprisals so far for using Facebook or Instagram, both declared “extremist” organizations. It’s extremely difficult for the secret police to track such use on a grand scale while VPNs remain legal.

And even if one assumes that a TV-only audience of older, technology-shy people really exists, it cannot be isolated from direct communication with other people whose horizons aren’t as limited.

older Russians are extremely cautious on the phone (and now also on Skype, WhatsApp, Telegram or any other means of remote communication). They will not endanger themselves by blabbing heresy — too many people suffered for it in the Soviet Union, a country that modern Russia increasingly resembles.

The surviving Soviets may not have their children’s technology smarts, but they beat them hands down in the kind of street smarts required for survival in a police state. They also have plenty of experience reading between propaganda lines. The assumption that these people, who laughed privately at the Soviet ideological fodder, have suddenly lost their ability to take state discourse with a bucketful of salt, seems less plausible to me than the idea that they’re reverting to oyster mode as their familiar environment returns.

Ordinary Germans did know what the Nazis were up to, research has shown. Even with that era’s relatively limited media and communications, the Nazis’ crimes were impossible to miss, no matter how one might have tried. They could, however, refuse to fess up to their knowledge; they could even convince themselves of their own ignorance. 

That, too, takes quite an effort, I realize as I read some fellow Russians’ social network posts or listen to Moscow acquaintances say things like “Not everything is black and white” or “We will never know the whole truth.” I have a sense that, if I press them, some might burst into tears or lash out at me in anger. The strain is ever-present, and I’m not sure whether it’s rooted in fear or an instinct for self-preservation: My own family struggles to cope with knowing that the Russian atrocities are being committed in our name, too.

It’s a burden we have to bear — probably for the rest of our lives. Those who will insist they’d been fooled by propaganda won’t be free of it. In these brutal weeks, only the openly, actively complicit are able to avoid the weight that’s bending Russians to the ground. 

Without the counterforces that once balanced Europe’s unstable societies — such as the strong left-wing parties and unions that were defeated in the 1970s and ’80s — European rulers lost discipline. Under their watch, inequality rose, economies malfunctioned, and public services began to wither. In this parlous setting, the far right gradually managed to position itself as the only credible challenger to the system. After gathering support on the sidelines, its time has come.

Europe’s far-right drift inevitably invites historical comparisons. A prominent one has been that the continent is experiencing a return to the 1930s, a high tide for extremist forces.

Hitler and Mussolini prevailed after labor movements tried to instigate revolutions. A muscular proletariat is conspicuously absent from the European scene today, fatally weakened by deindustrialization and loose labor markets.

In contrast to the 1930s, when fascist street violence flourished, the contemporary far right thrives on demobilization. Ms. Meloni’s party won a majority of votes in an election in which nearly four out of 10 Italians stayed home, with turnout down by almost 10 percent from the country’s previous vote.

In France, Ms. Le Pen’s National Rally has long received its best tallies in parts of the country that have the highest voter abstention rates.

Hitler and Mussolini promised their national elites the equivalents of the colonial empires that their French and British competitors had long ago acquired. Today’s far right has an alternative worldview. Rather than expand outward, their main desire is to shield Europe from the rest of the world

While Hitler tried to break an Anglo-American order and made a bid for global domination, Europe’s new authoritarians are happy to occupy a niche within the existing power structure. The goal is adaptation to decline, not its reversal.

it is also a recipe for zero-sum conflict between different groups. For example, when teachers at a private school in Manhattan tell white middle schoolers to “own” their “European ancestry,” they are more likely to create racists than anti-racists.

According to Mr. Bell, the Constitution — and even key Supreme Court rulings like Brown v. Board of Education — cloaked the reality of racial discrimination. The only remedy, he claimed, is to create a society in which the way that the state treats citizens would, whether it comes to the benefits they can access or the school they might attend, explicitly turn on the identity groups to which they belong.