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Océane’s death was also intended as a kind of detonation, which would “take out” others apart from herself. On their side, the perpetrators of the Paris attacks were also, let us not forget, bent on their own destruction: they, too, were suicidal. All these people were young, and nearly all of them had grown up in the racialised ghettos of Paris and Brussels. All of them felt some kind of despair about the reality they lived in Europe, and all of them, crucially, decided that the only significant asset they had, in their negotiation with it, was their own existence.

If mid-20th-century western societies achieved a startling level of consensus, it was due to their extraordinary expansion of the share in the social surplus – to which the destruction (by war) of previous wealth concentrations, and the transformation of “labour” into “jobs”, were essential

Today, as western societies reverse those advances and drift back towards 19th-century arrangements, it should not be surprising that the malaise of that era is returning, too. This malaise is felt most keenly by the young, who have seen nothing during their lifetimes save the progressive re-exclusion of the majority from society’s wealth, and who embark on adulthood with very little hope that they will be able to “make it” as their parents and grandparents did. They have a strong sense, in fact, that now-ageing generations have taken everything for themselves, bequeathing to the young nothing but the burden of their own sins.

Malaise takes on particularly acute forms in the Parisian suburbs, where work has been informalised and automated almost into nothing; in the most depressed areas, a quarter of young women and nearly half of young men are without jobs. But there too, unemployment is only a symptom of the wider casting-out from French society, whose would-be universalism disguises one of the most consolidated power systems in the western world

militant Islam is spreading among French youth not just through the radicalisation of Muslims, but also through the conversion of non-Muslims, who wish for themselves the activist power it supplies

It was not, in other words, that they were Muslim, and therefore they wanted to destroy reality and themselves; it was rather that they wanted to destroy reality and themselves – and to rediscover, in the process, some kind of chivalry and nobility – and therefore they embraced the trenchant power of radical Islam.

There are many moments in history when young people have dreamed of glamorous self-destruction rather than embarking, drearily, on adulthood. But those who actually die are the exceptions. Far greater numbers are touched by the same current of despair, but are nevertheless held back from the ultimate act by life’s natural defences. These survivors are not left unscathed, however. They live astride the line between life and death, harbouring a kind of sentimental envy for those who have gone.

I saw traits in her common to a lot of people these days – and possibly to myself, even if they are most pronounced in the young: she was subdued, serious, intermittently funny, distracted by constant electronic tics, slightly unavailable to herself. In so many respects, Océane seemed entirely normal, and I sensed that her online exploit, too, would become more customary over time.

But French was a colonial rival of Britain, and while arguably Europe’s most prestigious nation, France had suffered humiliating defeats to the British in the Seven Years War - especially its American theatre, the French-Indian War - only years earlier.

France was looking for any way to boost its own reputation while undermining Britain's, and helping the colonists to independence looked like a perfect way of doing this. The fact that some of the revolutionaries had fought France in the French- Indian war scant years earlier was expediently overlooked.

colonists would soon throw the British out, and then France and Spain had to unite and fight Britain for naval dominance.Covert Assistance

Then news arrived of defeats suffered by Washington and his Continental Army in New York. With Britain seemingly on the rise, Vergennes wavered, hesitating over a full alliance and afraid of pushing the colonies back to Britain, but he sent a secret loan and other aid anyway. Meanwhile, the French entered negotiations with the Spanish, who could also threaten Britain, but who were worried about colonial independence.

In December 1777 news reached France of the British surrender at Saratoga, a victory which convinced the French to make a full alliance with the revolutionaries and to enter the war with troops.

On February 6th, 1778 Franklin and two other American commissioners signed the Treaty of Alliance and a Treaty of Amity and Commerce with France. This contained a clause banning either Congress or France making a separate peace with Britain and a commitment to keep fighting until US independence was recognized. Spain entered the war on the revolutionary side later that year.

France supplied arms, munitions, supplies, and uniforms. French troops and naval power were also sent to America,

The commanders were carefully selected, men who could work effectively with both themselves and US commanders; however, the leader of the French army, Count Rochambeau, didn’t speak English

There were problems in working together at first

But overall the US and French forces co-operated well – although they were often kept separated – and certainly when compared to the incessant problems experienced in the British high command. French forces attempted to buy everything they couldn’t ship in from locals rather than requisition it, and they spent an estimated $4 million worth of precious metal in doing so, further endearing themselves to locals.

Arguably the key French contribution came during the Yorktown campaign

France was now able to threaten British shipping and territory around the globe, preventing their rival from focusing fully on the conflict in the Americas. Part of the impetus behind Britain’s surrender after Yorktown was the need to hold the remainder of their colonial empire from attack by other European nations, such as France

Many in Britain felt that France was their primary enemy, and should be the focus; some even suggested pulling out of the US colonies entirely to focus on their neighbor.

Despite British attempts to divide France and Congress during peace negotiations, the allies remained firm – aided by a further French loan – and peace was reached in the Treaty of Paris in 1783 between Britain, France, and the United States.

The financial pressures France faced were only made worse by the cost of pushing the US into being and victory, and these finances would now spiral out of control and play a large role in the start of the French Revolution in 1789. France thought it was harming Britain by acting in the New World, but the consequences affected the whole of Europe just a few years later.

North America’s oilfield services sector, which producers rely on to drill new wells, has been decimated, he said.“They’re decapitated from being able to grow,” Tahmazian said. “The supply side is broken.”

The pace of output recovery in the United States, the world’s No. 1 oil producer, is forecast to be slow and will not top its 2019 record of 12.25 million barrels per day (bpd) until 2023.

With no deal, Britain and the EU would impose tariffs on each other’s imports for the first time in more than 40 years.

effect of tariffs on final goods prices is diluted by several factors: importers may absorb them rather than pass them on to customers, and they do not apply to rent, transport and other elements of the cost of supplying goods.

Cars exported from Britain to the EU would incur a tariff of 10%; most car parts would be taxed at between 3% and 4.5% (though the EU’s rates reach 8%, for soft-top roofs). That is a blow to an industry that accounts for 14% of British goods exports.

Non-tariff barriers, such as administrative and safety checks, and the requirement to fill in customs forms, also impose costs.

Even with an FTA, some of these barriers would remain. But without one, as The UK in a Changing Europe, an academic think-tank, notes, “the full panoply of checks and formalities [would apply] immediately”.

If they stay away, British shops and factories may find themselves short of supplies.

These include the treatment of pensioners and students caught on either side of the new divide, driving licences and pet passports. Of greatest economic importance is trade in services—in particular, financial services, of which Britain is a big net exporter.

However, companies have been waiting to see how the trade talks go before deciding whether to shift more posts to Frankfurt, Paris and elsewhere. No-deal could mean a further drain.

in general Democrats now enter the political arena as the party of wealth.

Traditionally, “the right,” for better and for worse, is the party of large property holdings, of bosses and managers and cultural guardians, of dominant belief systems (religious and secular), and of elite education institutions that set the boundaries of what knowledge and lore are proper to pass on to tomorrow’s generations. If America has such a party today, it is not the Republicans.

Biden’s most loyal followers by occupation included professors (94 percent), librarians (93 percent), therapists (92 percent), and lawyers (88 percent)

Trump got homemakers (96 percent), welders (84 percent), HVAC professionals (82 percent), farmers (75 percent), and custodians (59 percent)

They are also the party of education and prestige. On the eve of November’s election, Bloomberg News analyzed which employees gave the most to Donald Trump and which the most to Joe Biden. Biden swept the commanding heights of the economy. He got 97 percent of the contributions at Google and Facebook, 96 percent at Harvard, 91 percent at the consultants Deloitte, and (back here on planet Earth) 90 percent at the New York City Department of Education

Krein doubts whether anything that could be described as Trumpism happened at all. The North American Free Trade Agreement of 1993 was renegotiated to American workers’ advantage, but that did not lead to the renaissance of manufacturing that candidate Trump had tirelessly promised in 2016. The wages of the lowest-paid workers went up, but that may be due to minimum-wage hikes enacted in dozens of states and cities.

“It feels to me like the party’s getting pushed into it,” said Julius Krein, an investor who publishes the quarterly review American Affairs, in an interview this winter. “Donors, especially, don’t want it to be a working-class party. And certainly the old guard not only doesn’t think of itself as such, but is quite hostile to that, and to any policy that could possibly lead in that direction. But it’s getting pushed there because all the elite are going to the Democrats.”

Trump’s administration worked out well for American workers, at least up until Covid hit in the spring of 2020. Unemployment was under 4 percent for most of 2018 and 2019. The good times reached even those to whom prosperity had historically been slowest to arrive. Unemployment among Black men, a whisker under 20 percent in March 2010, had fallen to around 5 percent in November 2019. According to The Economist, gains were concentrated in professions where workers had heretofore faced competition from immigrant labor, such as housekeepers and maintenance workers

the economic hand that Trump had to play in last fall’s elections was stronger than almost anyone outside of the working class understood, and the results—at least in terms of the swing-state popular vote—correspondingly closer.

There is a philosophical disagreement about how one gives the working class more power. To boil it down to the basics, Democrats believe in more unions and Republicans believe in less immigration.

Krein is generally skeptical of the Republican Party’s traditional economic policies. “Contrary to the pervasive mythology of entrepreneurialism and creativity,” he writes, “it is glaringly obvious to today’s professional elite that the neoliberal economy is allocating capital, and especially talent, very poorly.

the extraordinary 2017 tax cuts, the only significant piece of domestic legislation passed in Trump’s four years. A supply-side piñata without precedent, it encouraged the corporate “buybacks” that can spur stock prices (padding executive bonuses) but can destabilize corporate finances (increasing the likelihood of layoffs in a downturn)—quite the opposite of what Trump had seemed to promise on the campaign trail.

Now Rubio has a simpler message: These are my people. I will fight for them. It beats the perennial Republican approach of theorizing about incentives and the capital gains tax.

Among Senate Republicans, it is Rubio who has laid the biggest bet on working people. He has a lot of ideas. He has urged fighting stock buybacks, reauthorizing Small Business Administration loan programs, and limiting Covid aid to universities with endowments of more than $10 billion

The core of his agenda, said Rubio, “is the availability of good-paying jobs that allow people to raise families, to retire with dignity, to live in safe and stable communities—that’s where life is lived.”

Hawley does often sound like a throwback. He criticizes the sexual revolution, the “woke mob,” and those who propose to rechristen military bases named after Confederate generals. In this sense, his appeal to the working class is less direct than Rubio’s. He is using, in classic Reagan fashion, the correlation between working-class status and conservative cultural attitudes to win over voters without making class appeals at all.

In 2008, two young thinkers, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, wrote a book called Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream. The authors warn that “Sam’s Club Republicans”—cheekily named after a Walmart-owned chain of cut-price warehouse stores where few urban Democrats had ever set foot—were losing ground. And these voters were beginning to notice that their party wasn’t doing anything for them. The old Republican entrepreneurial rhetoric of unleashing this and untrammeling that was ceasing to resonate. Worse, it now served the other party’s base.If Grand New Party was the first call to arms in the remaking of the party, it went largely unheeded

Until recently, few congressional Democrats have been inclined to do battle with the tech companies, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren being among the conspicuous exceptions.

Tom Cotton, a Harvard-educated Republican lawyer from tiny Yell County, Arkansas, is trying to use China the way Hawley uses Big Tech

When the public compares the two parties on the question of protecting the working class, it is still Democrats who come out on top—but not by a lot.

In early December, Hawley and Bernie Sanders staggered their speeches, swapping floor time back and forth, in hopes of rallying the chamber to deliver Covid aid in $1,200 direct payments to parents. It was eyebrow-raising, Senate staffers said, because such moments require close staff coordination, and each senator pledged solidarity to the other. “I’m proud to yield the floor to him,” said Sanders of Hawley. “I’m delighted to join with Senator Sanders,” Hawley responded, adding: “Working families should be first on our to-do list, not last.”

The most closely attended-to conservative voice on this issue is Oren Cass, a former Mitt Romney adviser who heads American Compass, a conservative think tank that calls for “widely shared economic development.

Nearly all the Republicans loosely aligning themselves with working-class interests listen to Cass, and it’s partly because he has a theory about the economic history of this century and how it led to our present predicament.

As Cass sees it, the weakness of structures has been explained by the work of M.I.T. economist David Autor, who has given us a new understanding of how labor markets work under globalization.

A “China shock” wiped out a good deal of manufacturing employment after China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001, Autor has shown. “Skill-biased technical change” drove college-educated workers’ compensation up and that of the noncollege-educated down

The economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton gathered similar evidence of the collapse of labor markets and the rise of regional inequality in their 2020 book on opioids, suicide, and life expectancy, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism.

J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy, a book that is often read as an X-ray of how eastern Ohio and other parts of Appalachia were struggling as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were vying for the presidency in 2016

the embrace of this coming-of-age saga as an all-purpose explanation of Trump’s new pitch to the working class was misguided, for Vance was already in his thirties when it was published. “The story that he is telling,” Cass insisted, “is of what was going on in the late ’90s, during what we think of as the go-go years, the boom years, the very best years.”

Indeed, an interesting general question arises to challenge Republicans about the 1980s and 1990s—were the policies arrived at outright wrong?

“If you talked to Republicans and gave them truth serum,” one congressional political adviser admitted, “a majority would say we had it wrong for decades on immigration and trade. We were too quick to look just at the lower price of goods and how that ultimately helped people, and didn’t spend enough time looking at people who were directly hurt by factories being closed and lower wages.”

Cass’s central insight is: Tight labor markets are good. That is how unions work to drive up wages, and if conservatives want higher wages, they will need to overcome their “foolish orthodoxy” on the matter.

At the same time, you can’t believe unions are good and say any amount of immigration is fine. Limiting immigration raises wages—which is a key reason that the postwar labor movement supported immigration restrictions

From a supply-and-demand perspective, mass immigration does the same thing as offshoring and de-unionizing: It exposes workers with American labor protections and lifestyle expectations to competition from workers without them

Republicans’ rapport with the working class may turn out to be more natural than it now appears. They won’t have to “come up with” policies for helping the workers, still less to “reinvent” themselves as a working-class party

they will follow the logic of the situation to embrace the sort of policies Democrats followed when they were the party of the workers and the Republicans the party of the bosses.

It worked—there was no fighting in Pavlopil

sporadic shooting continues in eastern Ukraine. Just on October 12th, the day of an EU-Ukraine summit in Kyiv, monitors counted nearly 300 ceasefire violations

Mr Putin wrote an essay in July expanding his argument that Russia and Ukraine are a single nation. Since he has already annexed Crimea, a Ukrainian peninsula, and sponsored the takeover of a big chunk of eastern Ukraine by ethnic Russian separatists, Ukrainians take his threats seriously

Russia will turn off the gas again

In 2009 it shut off the flow of gas through Ukraine for two weeks. This cost Russia a fortune, since its gas needs to pass through Ukraine to reach customers in Europe

Once it opens—which could be soon, though it is subject to legal and diplomatic challenges—Mr Putin will be able to choke off supplies to Ukraine almost at will

Technically Ukraine does not buy gas directly from Russia, but from downstream countries such as Hungary

it takes Russian gas in the east and substitutes its own gas, which is produced in the west of Ukraine, for transmission onwards. So if the flow through Ukraine were to stop, the east of the country would be in trouble

President Volodymyr Zelensky seeks shelter for his country inside NATO and the EU. But this is a non-starter. NATO members do not want to extend their principle of “an attack on one is an attack on all” to a country that Russia has already attacked.

Mr Zelensky’s first taste of geopolitics was when President Donald Trump urged him to supply dirt on Joe Biden, with a veiled threat that American support for Ukraine’s security might depend on his co-operation.

To cement relations with Germany, he waived sanctions that might have blocked Nord Stream 2 in May.

Oligarchs dominate the economy, control two of the bigger political parties and put other lawmakers on retainer. The IMF hesitates to throw money at a state from which billions have been stolen with apparent impunity.

Before the war two-thirds of people in Mariupol supported a pro-Russia political party. That share has halved. Mr Putin’s aggression has alienated the very people he claims to defend

Yet Russia still has a hand on Mariupol’s throat. The amount of cargo processed in its port has halved since 2012, first because of the war, then because Mr Putin made it harder for big ships to reach it from the Black Sea.

critics wonder if it is healthy for a city to depend so much on one tycoon. Mr Akhmetov is thought to be Ukraine’s richest man.

Mr Zelensky, a former comedian, has vowed to cut Ukraine’s oligarchs down to size. He is expected to sign a new law soon, which would allow a panel he appoints to label as “oligarchs” anyone who is very rich, finances a political party and controls media assets. This would make it harder for anyone so labelled to raise capital.

They also worry that the law might give Mr Zelensky too much discretion to cow his enemies and force them to sell their television channels to his friends.

His firms have huge unpaid debts to Naftogaz, the state wholesale supplier. This is money that could have been invested to raise domestic gas production. Meanwhile, a new Naftogaz CEO appointed by Mr Zelensky agreed to pay the state a fat dividend out of the firm’s frosty-day fund. This will help Mr Zelensky build roads, which are popular.

Historically, boom times are the exception, not the norm.

Over the past two centuries, per capita incomes in all advanced economies, from Sweden to Japan, have grown at compound rates of around 1.5% to 2% a year

these distinctly non-euphoric averages mean that most of the time, over the long sweep of history, people’s incomes typically take about 40 years to double.

looking from one year to the next, the improvements in living standards that come from higher incomes are glacial. The data may show that life is getting better, but average families feel no reason to break out the champagne.

that is no longer good enough. Americans expect the economy to be buoyant, not boring. Yet this expectation is shaped not by prosaic economic realities but by a most unusual period in history: the quarter-century that began in the ashes of World War II, when the world economy performed better than at any time before or since.

The Golden Age was the first sustained period of economic growth in most countries since the 1920s. But it was built on far more than just pent-up demand and the stimulus of the postwar baby boom. Unprecedented productivity growth around the world made the Golden Age possible. In the 25 years that ended in 1973, the amount produced in an hour of work roughly doubled in the U.S. and Canada, tripled in Europe and quintupled in Japan.

Many factors played a role in this achievement.

The workforce everywhere became vastly more educated.

As millions of laborers shifted from tending sheep and hoeing potatoes to working in factories and construction sites, they could create far more economic value.

New motorways boosted productivity in the transportation sector by letting truck drivers cover longer distances with larger vehicles. Faster ground transportation made it practical, in turn, for farms and factories to expand to sell not just locally but regionally or nationally, abandoning craft methods in favor of machinery that could produce more goods at lower cost.

Six rounds of tariff reductions brought a massive increase in cross-border trade, putting even stronger competitive pressure on manufacturers to become more efficient.

Above all, technological innovation helped to create new products and offered better ways for workers to do their jobs.

The 1973 oil crisis meant more than just gasoline lines and lowered thermostats. It shocked the world economy.

But it wasn’t the price of gasoline that brought the long run of global prosperity to an end. It just diverted attention from a more fundamental problem: Productivity growth had slowed sharply.

The consequences of the productivity bust were severe. Full employment vanished. It would be 24 years before the U.S. unemployment rate would again reach the low levels of late 1973

and the infinitesimal unemployment rates in France, Germany and Japan would never be reached again. Through the rest of the 20th century, the jobless rate in 28 wealthy economies would average nearly 7%.

the world’s overall economic growth rate dropped from 4.9% a year from 1951 through 1973 to an average of just 3.1% for the balance of the century.

With economic planners and central bankers unable to steady their economies, voters turned sharply to the right

Conservative politicians such as Margaret Thatcher in the U.K., Ronald Reagan in the U.S. and Helmut Kohl in West Germany swept into power, promising that freer markets and smaller government would reverse the decline, spur productivity and restore rapid growth.

But these leaders’ policies—deregulation, privatization, lower tax rates, balanced budgets and rigid rules for monetary policy—proved no more successful at boosting productivity than the statist policies that had preceded them

Some insist that the conservative revolution stimulated an economic renaissance, but the facts say otherwise: Great Britain’s productivity grew far more slowly under Thatcher’s rule than during the miserable 1970s, and Reagan’s supply-side tax cuts brought no productivity improvement at all.

It is tempting to think that we know how to do better, that there is some secret sauce that governments can ladle out to make economies grow faster than the norm. But despite glib talk about “pro-growth” economic policies, productivity growth is something over which governments have very little control

somebody threw a bottle of flammable liquid through the window of Orange County’s GOP headquarters, setting campaign signs, supplies and furniture ablaze before burning itself out.

A swastika and “Nazi Republicans get out of town or else” were spray painted on the side of an adjacent building.

I will use every resource as governor to assist local authorities in this investigation.”

incident took place in Orange County, home of the University of North Carolina in nearby Chapel Hill.

But Clinton’s campaign tweeted, “The attack on the Orange County HQ @NCGOP office is horrific and unacceptable. Very grateful that everyone is safe.”

“Violence has no place in our democracy and can not be tolerated. The culprits must be caught and brought to justice.”

“political terrorism.”

“Whether you are Republican, Democrat or Independent, all Americans should be outraged by this hate-filled and violent attack against our democracy. … Everyone in this country should be free to express their political viewpoints without fear for their own safety.”

“The idea is to intimidate us, to make us crawl back in the shadows,” he said. “But I think it’s going to backfire on them.”

“It always happens that toward the end of the campaign, emotions get both frayed and intensified.”

(An early conclusion: while we were late to understand how angry white voters were, a perhaps even more serious lapse was in failing to recognize how many disaffected Democrats there were who would stay home rather than support their party’s flawed candidate.)

Stories that would have killed any other politician—truly worrisome revelations about everything from the federal taxes Trump dodged to the charitable donations he lied about, the women he insulted and allegedly assaulted, and the mob ties that have long dogged him—did not stop Trump from thriving in this election year

the Oxford Dictionaries announced that “post-truth” had been chosen as the 2016 word of the year, defining it as a condition “in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

Meantime, Trump personally blacklisted news organizations like Politico and The Washington Post when they published articles he didn’t like during the campaign, has openly mused about rolling back press freedoms enshrined by the U.S. Supreme Court, and has now named Stephen Bannon, until recently the executive chairman of Breitbart—a right-wing fringe website with a penchant for conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic tropes—to serve as one of his top White House advisers.

none of this has any modern precedent. And what makes it unique has nothing to do with the outcome of the election. This time, the victor was a right-wing demagogue; next time, it may be a left-wing populist who learns the lessons of Trump’s win.

This is no mere academic argument. The election of 2016 showed us that Americans are increasingly choosing to live in a cloud of like-minded spin, surrounded by the partisan political hackery and fake news that poisons their Facebook feeds.

To help us understand it all, there were choices, but not that many: three TV networks that mattered, ABC, CBS, and NBC; two papers for serious journalism, The New York Times and The Washington Post; and two giant-circulation weekly newsmagazines, Time and Newsweek. That, plus whatever was your local daily newspaper, pretty much constituted the news.

Whether it was Walter Cronkite or The New York Times, they preached journalistic “objectivity” and spoke with authority when they pronounced on the day’s developments—but not always with the depth and expertise that real competition or deep specialization might have provided. They were great—but they were generalists.

Eventually, I came to think of the major media outlets of that era as something very similar to the big suburban shopping malls we flocked to in the age of shoulder pads and supply-side economics: We could choose among Kmart and Macy’s and Saks Fifth Avenue as our budgets and tastes allowed, but in the end the media were all essentially department stores, selling us sports and stock tables and foreign news alongside our politics, whether we wanted them or not. It may not have been a monopoly, but it was something pretty close.

This was still journalism in the scarcity era, and it affected everything from what stories we wrote to how fast we could produce them. Presidents could launch global thermonuclear war with the Russians in a matter of minutes, but news from the American hinterlands often took weeks to reach their sleepy capital. Even information within that capital was virtually unobtainable without a major investment of time and effort. Want to know how much a campaign was raising and spending from the new special-interest PACs that had proliferated? Prepare to spend a day holed up at the Federal Election Commission’s headquarters down on E Street across from the hulking concrete FBI building, and be sure to bring a bunch of quarters for the copy machine.

I am writing this in the immediate, shocking aftermath of a 2016 presidential election in which the Pew Research Center found that a higher percentage of Americans got their information about the campaign from late-night TV comedy shows than from a national newspaper. Don Graham sold the Post three years ago and though its online audience has been skyrocketing with new investments from Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, it will never be what it was in the ‘80s. That same Pew survey reported that a mere 2 percent of Americans today turned to such newspapers as the “most helpful” guides to the presidential campaign.

In 2013, Mark Leibovich wrote a bestselling book called This Town about the party-hopping, lobbyist-enabling nexus between Washington journalists and the political world they cover. A key character was Politico’s Mike Allen, whose morning email newsletter “Playbook” had become a Washington ritual, offering all the news and tidbits a power player might want to read before breakfast—and Politico’s most successful ad franchise to boot. In many ways, even that world of just a few years ago now seems quaint: the notion that anyone could be a single, once-a-day town crier in This Town (or any other) has been utterly exploded by the move to Twitter, Facebook, and all the rest. We are living, as Mark put it to me recently, “in a 24-hour scrolling version of what ‘Playbook’ was.”

These days, Politico has a newsroom of 200-odd journalists, a glossy award-winning magazine, dozens of daily email newsletters, and 16 subscription policy verticals. It’s a major player in coverage not only of Capitol Hill but many other key parts of the capital, and some months during this election year we had well over 30 million unique visitors to our website, a far cry from the controlled congressional circulation of 35,000 that I remember Roll Call touting in our long-ago sales materials.

I remained convinced that reporting would hold its value, especially as our other advantages—like access to information and the expensive means to distribute it—dwindled. It was all well and good to root for your political team, but when it mattered to your business (or the country, for that matter), I reasoned, you wouldn’t want cheerleading but real reporting about real facts. Besides, the new tools might be coming at us with dizzying speed—remember when that radical new video app Meerkat was going to change absolutely everything about how we cover elections?—but we would still need reporters to find a way inside Washington’s closed doors and back rooms, to figure out what was happening when the cameras weren’t rolling.

And if the world was suffering from information overload—well, so much the better for us editors; we would be all the more needed to figure out what to listen to amid the noise.

Trump turned out to be more correct than we editors were: the more relevant point of the Access Hollywood tape was not about the censure Trump would now face but the political reality that he, like Bill Clinton, could survive this—or perhaps any scandal. Yes, we were wrong about the Access Hollywood tape, and so much else.

Fake news is thriving In the final three months of the presidential campaign, the 20 top-performing fake election news stories generated more engagement on Facebook than the top stories from major news outlets such as The New York Times.

, we journalists were still able to cover the public theater of politics while spending more of our time, resources, and mental energy on really original reporting, on digging up stories you couldn’t read anywhere else. Between Trump’s long and checkered business past, his habit of serial lying, his voluminous and contradictory tweets, and his revision of even his own biography, there was lots to work with. No one can say that Trump was elected without the press telling us all about his checkered past.

politics was NEVER more choose-your-own-adventure than in 2016, when entire news ecosystems for partisans existed wholly outside the reach of those who at least aim for truth

Pew found that nearly 50 percent of self-described conservatives now rely on a single news source, Fox, for political information they trust.

As for the liberals, they trust only that they should never watch Fox, and have MSNBC and Media Matters and the remnants of the big boys to confirm their biases.

And then there are the conspiracy-peddling Breitbarts and the overtly fake-news outlets of this overwhelming new world; untethered from even the pretense of fact-based reporting, their version of the campaign got more traffic on Facebook in the race’s final weeks than all the traditional news outlets combined.

When we assigned a team of reporters at Politico during the primary season to listen to every single word of Trump’s speeches, we found that he offered a lie, half-truth, or outright exaggeration approximately once every five minutes—for an entire week. And it didn’t hinder him in the least from winning the Republican presidential nomination.

when we repeated the exercise this fall, in the midst of the general election campaign, Trump had progressed to fibs of various magnitudes just about once every three minutes!

By the time Trump in September issued his half-hearted disavowal of the Obama “birther” whopper he had done so much to create and perpetuate, one national survey found that only 1 in 4 Republicans was sure that Obama was born in the U.S., and various polls found that somewhere between a quarter and a half of Republicans believed he’s Muslim. So not only did Trump think he was entitled to his own facts, so did his supporters. It didn’t stop them at all from voting for him.

in part, it’s not just because they disagree with the facts as reporters have presented them but because there’s so damn many reporters, and from such a wide array of outlets, that it’s often impossible to evaluate their standards and practices, biases and preconceptions. Even we journalists are increasingly overwhelmed.

2016 suggests a different outcome: We’ve achieved a lot more transparency in today’s Washington—without the accountability that was supposed to come with it.

So much terrific reporting and writing and digging over the years and … Trump? What happened to consequences? Reporting that matters? Sunlight, they used to tell us, was the best disinfectant for what ails our politics.

Second, by keeping supply-side economics front and center, Trumponomics satisfies the slice of the donor class for whom all conservative policy goals are secondary to keeping their own tax bill as low as possible.

If this sounds like a cynical view of my fellow citizens’ motivations, a view heretofore advanced mostly by liberal critics of the right — well, look, it’s been a year in which cynical interpretations of the conservative establishment have been vindicated time and time again

“In a lot of ways apps seem played out,”

One answer might be to display a new kind of tech brand: physical products that aren’t so much dominated by new technology, but instead informed by the theories and practices that have ruled the tech business.

hey say they have applied an engineering mind-set to creating ingestible items. Traditional coffee is an inconsistent product, they argue — each cup may have significantly more or less caffeine than the last — and it can have undesirable side effects, like jitteriness.

Go Cubes, which the pair developed after a long prototyping process involving many different ingredients, are meant to address these shortcomings. The cubes are more portable than coffee, they offer a precise measure of caffeine, and because they include some ingredients meant to modulate caffeine’s sharpest effects, they produce a more focused high.

Ministry of Supply, an apparel company started by entrepreneurs who were unsatisfied with business clothing that couldn’t take the punishment that we ladle on athletic clothes, uses engineering techniques to create its products.

“My broader theory is that as the world shifts from TV, movies, magazines and newspapers to the Internet, one of the secondary effects of that is that cultural influence shifts from places like New York and L.A. to the Bay Area,”

Politically it was by no means a crazy strategy. For all his blunders, George W. Bush is still the only Republican candidate for president to win the popular vote in the last 25 years, and the only figure to successfully unite and lead a fractious party. Parts of Bushism look more optimistic, inclusive and economically relevant than either the angrier Tea Party message that Rubio piggybacked on in his 2010 Senate campaign or the generic “Mr. Republican” messages that John McCain and Mitt Romney lost with in 2008 and 2012. And with the Middle East in flames, Russia increasingly aggressive and the Islamic State camped out in Iraq and Syria, you can see why many conservative elites imagined that Americans — and Republican primary voters, especially — might want a more hawkish, even Bushian successor to Barack Obama

These desires don’t add up to a new Republican synthesis, and the candidates who have catered to them more successfully haven’t devised one. Trump’s populist, illiberal Jacksonianism can’t unite the party the way Bush once did, and Cruz’s hard-edge social and economic conservatism probably can’t win the median voter the way Bushism did twice

they do add up to the desire for a new synthesis, and an understanding that whatever the Republican Party needs now, it can’t just be what worked for Bush and Karl Rove until Iraq went sour and Wall Street melted down.

he was also a victim of his own fateful look backward, his assumption that what worked for the last Republican president could be made to work again. It didn’t, it couldn’t, and it probably won’t be tried again: Whoever wins the nomination in 2016, George W. Bush has gone down to defeat.

While Mr. Rubio did initially, as the good opportunist he is, latch on to the rage of the Tea Party to win his Senate seat, he was only pretending to be mad. Based on his reading of the political tea leaves, he needed 1) to win the latino vote (hence his foray into immigration reform 2) he needed to be optimistic in the mold of Reagen.Marco realized too late that the Tea Partiers were not kidding. They were crazy then and they are crazy now - they are just a angrier and more violent. But they were never remotely interested in immigration reform and any Republican that could not see that was simply blind. They also are not interested in solutions or uniting America. If you asked Trump supporters to tell you what the Donald has in store for us in terms of policies, short of having Mexico pay for a big wall and rounding up a bunch of immigrants, I am not sure they could tell you whole lot. Why? They don't care. They are just angry. I guess robots aren't that good at reading emotions.

What Donald Trump has been doing is telling the base that it can order à la carte. He has, in effect, been telling aggrieved white men that they can feed their anger without being forced to swallow supply-side economics, too

If there’s a puzzle here, it’s why this didn’t happen sooner. One possible explanation is the decadence of the G.O.P. establishment, which has become ingrown and lost touch. A

Probably more important, however, is the collision between demography and Obama derangement. The elite knows that the party must broaden its appeal as the electorate grows more diverse — in fact, that was the conclusion of the G.O.P.’s 2013 post-mortem. But the base, its hostility amped up to 11 after seven years of an African-American president (who the establishment has done its best to demonize) is having none of it.

The Republican establishment has been routed because it has been playing a con game on its supporters all along, and they’ve finally had enough.

This segment of the right flipped from insisting on ideological purity to caring nothing about ideology. It’s now about winning, holding power and sneering at anyone not from “real” America.

In the foreign-policy realm, it’s not clear where the party is headed — but President Trump and his ilk seem bent on destroying the international liberal order, throwing their weight behind despots and blowing up international institutions that have existed since the end of World War II.

The economic leg has rotted away as well. Supply-side tax cuts have no sell with the general public (tax cuts for the rich!), and fiscal-discipline/small-government conservatives are nowhere to be found in Congress (which moves ahead on its own national health-care plan, peddles a “border adjustment tax” and looks to splurge on red ink).

Social conservatives lost on same-sex marriage, have lived with decades of Roe v. Wade and threw their lot in with Donald Trump, who embodies every grotesque habit and quality they’ve ranted about for years (e.g., infidelity, dishonesty, crudeness, cruelty). That leg is gone.

In the place of ideas and relevant policy, the right is now drenched in cultural resentment and fixated on keeping out immigrants.

The right’s rejection of all elites, including the entire mainstream media, has morphed into a rejection of objective truth.

Unqualified, ignorant people are preferred over qualified, knowledgeable public servants.

Loyalty to a person is the paramount consideration in staffing.

Only in a party in such dire straits — where resentment toward coastal elites became the defining feature — could Yiannopoulos  have gotten as far as he did.

The conservative movement — neither conservative nor a movement at this point — lies prostrate, reduced to a set of tribal identifiers (climate change denial, cultural resentment, xenophobia).

the strengthening dollar will destroy more of the jobs typically held by Trump’s blue-collar base. The president may have “saved” 1,000 jobs in Indiana by bullying and cajoling the air-conditioner manufacturer Carrier; but the US dollar’s appreciation since the election could destroy almost 400,000 manufacturing jobs over time.

Republicans can rarely resist the temptation to cut corporate, income and other taxes, even when they have no way to make up for the lost revenue and no desire to cut spending. If this happens again under Trump, fiscal deficits will push up interest rates and the dollar even further, and hurt the economy in the long term

The Nobel laureate economist Edmund S Phelps has described Trump’s direct interference in the corporate sector as reminiscent of corporatist Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. Indeed, if Barack Obama had treated the corporate sector in the way that Trump has, he would have been smeared as a communist; but for some reason when Trump does it, corporate America puts its tail between its legs.

Fifth, Trump is questioning US alliances, cosying up to American rivals such as Russia, and antagonizing important global powers such as China. His erratic foreign policies are spooking world leaders, multinational corporations and global markets generally.

To be sure, expectations of stimulus, lower taxes and deregulation could still boost the economy and the market’s performance in the short term. But, as the vacillation in financial markets since Trump’s inauguration indicates, the president’s inconsistent, erratic, and destructive policies will take their toll on domestic and global economic growth in the long run.

There was a documentary several years ago called “The Corporation” that accepted the premise that corporations are persons and then asked what kind of people they are. The answer was, precisely, psychopaths: indifferent to others, incapable of guilt, exclusively devoted to their own interests.

Enormous matters of policy depend on these perceptions: what we’re going to tax, and how much; what we’re going to spend, and on whom. But while “job creators” may be a new term, the adulation it expresses — and the contempt that it so clearly signals — are not. “Poor Americans are urged to hate themselves,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote in “Slaughterhouse-Five.” And so, “they mock themselves and glorify their betters.” Our most destructive lie, he added, “is that it is very easy for any American to make money.” The lie goes on. The poor are lazy, stupid and evil. The rich are brilliant, courageous and good.

Capitalist values are also antithetical to democratic ones. Like Christian ethics, the principles of republican government require us to consider the interests of others. Capitalism, which entails the single-minded pursuit of profit, would have us believe that it’s every man for himself.

To expect morality in the market is to commit a category error. Capitalist values are antithetical to Christian ones.

Mandeville believed the individual pursuit of self-interest could redound to public benefit, but unlike Adam Smith, he didn’t think it did so on its own. Smith’s “hand” was “invisible” — the automatic operation of the market. Mandeville’s involved “the dextrous Management of a skilful Politician” — in modern terms, legislation, regulation and taxation. Or as he versified it, “Vice is beneficial found, / When it’s by Justice lopt, and bound.”

there is an inexhaustible supply of passionate but irreconcilable, and familiar, statements of who is "more to blame" for the escalating violence and who originally wronged whom. 

For us living here, the current military operation and the ongoing drizzle of rockets are neither unbearable nor threatening in an existential way. Iron Dome has enabled Israelis to continue with their normal lives neither terrified nor terrorized.

this video because watching it reminded me, through its absence, of the quality of moral breadth, compassion, and bravery that distinguishes people willing to take risks for peace.

consider this recent CNN exchange between Wolf Blitzer and Israeli Economics Minister Naftali Bennett. I have heard from people in Israel, America, and Europe who say that Bennett is speaking tough, plain, necessary truths. I have heard from others in those same places who think, as I do, that Bennett sounds appallingly callous about other people's loss of life—in this case, the deaths of the four little boys on the beach. Wolf Blitzer himself seems taken aback by what he is hearing. It's worth noting that Bennett features this clip on his own YouTube site. 

When you write that many "vastly more Palestinian families have been killed..because of differences in offensive weaponry and defensive systems and other factors" you might mention that the "other factors" included the Hamas government's refusal to build shelters and defensive systems to protect their people, as well as their use of civilians as shields to hide behind when they shoot rockets at Israeli civilians.

the rabbi grossly exaggerated the impact of Hamas terror on Jerusalem and portrayed it with unduly epic dimensions. In so doing, he distorts the actual power imbalance in this tragic situation, in addition to victimizing me and my fellow Israeli citizens.

As a society, we are a (powerful) side in this conflict, not a helpless victim.

The blinding victimhood embodied in the rabbi's comments is shameful because it points at an abject moral, spiritual and leadership failure.

The rockets are not really scary nor are they a true existential threat. Racism, radicalism, and religious intoxication from brute power has become an imminent danger to our old and beloved peoplehood. When people are accustomed to hearing that they are perpetual innocent victims of Palestinian aggression, they eventually translate they frustration into rage and start seeking justice in revenge. If you continue looking up to the sky, you will not notice that the house is already burning from within. 

what is ALEC? It’s a secretive group, financed by major corporations, that drafts model legislation for conservative state-level politicians. Ed Pilkington of The Guardian, who acquired a number of leaked ALEC documents, describes it as “almost a dating service between politicians at the state level, local elected politicians, and many of America’s biggest companies.” And most of ALEC’s efforts are directed, not surprisingly, at privatization, deregulation, and tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy.

While ALEC supports big income-tax cuts, it calls for increases in the sales tax — which fall most heavily on lower-income households — and reductions in tax-based support for working households. So its agenda involves cutting taxes at the top while actually increasing taxes at the bottom, as well as cutting social services.

But how can you justify enriching the already wealthy while making life harder for those struggling to get by? The answer is, you need an economic theory claiming that such a policy is the key to prosperity for all. So supply-side economics fills a need backed by lots of money, and the fact that it keeps failing doesn’t matter.