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In a true “compact of contribution,” Sperling asserts, an activist state would “support and give every opportunity to every American to experience the sense of dignity that comes from adding value and pursuing purpose.” The state must help the market provide employment for all, and that employment must be “meaningful.”

Frank would tell Sperling that his ambitious agenda cannot be enacted without directly challenging entrenched interests. The movement to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, for example, succeeded through street activism and strikes. Since Sperling praises the movement, I suspect he would agree.

the pandemic increasingly looks like one of the defining events of our time. The best-case scenarios are now out of reach

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if a vaccine remains out of reach for years, the long-term changes could be truly profound. Any industry that depends on close human contact would be at risk.

Large swaths of the cruise-ship and theme-park industries might go away. So could many movie theaters and minor-league baseball teams. The long-predicted demise of the traditional department store would finally come to pass. Thousands of restaurants would be wiped out

In this scenario, a vaccine will arrive sometime in 2021. Until then, the world will endure waves of sickness, death and uncertainty.

is a loss of the gains we’ve made over the past 20 years in the access for first-generation and minority students.”

“It’s only when the tide goes out,” Warren Buffett likes to say, “that you learn who’s been swimming naked.”

Local newspapers will be one casualty. They were already struggling

Traditional department stores are another example. In recent years, they have lost significant business to online retailers and quietly lost even more to big-box stores

If they do, they will create spillover victims — the hundreds of malls that rely on department stores for rent and foot traffic

enrollment and tuition revenue are likely to drop sharply, creating existential crises for many less selective private colleges and smaller public universities.

“The biggest danger that we face as a sector

It could easily be the most important global experience since World War II and the Great Depression

for many white-collar workers, the remote-work experiment shows no sign of ending — a trend that could depress the commercial real-estate market and business travel long after a vaccine is available.

Consolidation, in turn, tends to increase income and wealth inequality, in part because the largest companies are run by highly paid executives, typically based in major metro areas, and the companies’ stock is disproportionately owned by the affluent.

“My basic fear,” Heather Boushey, a leading progressive economist, said, “is that it leads to a rule by the oligarchs.”

“Even Republicans — younger Republicans — have recognized that the center of gravity is shifting on the relationship between the state and the market.” The virus, he added, “will only accelerate that.”

That agenda is shaping up to have two defining features

The first is reducing inequality — through higher taxes on the rich, greater scrutiny of big companies, new efforts to reduce racial injustice and more investments and programs for the middle class and poor, including health care, education and paid leave

The second is acting on climate change, which could cause even more global misery than the coronavirus. “Climate change cannot be solved by the private sector,”

while Mr. Obama’s team had only a couple of months to plan for taking office amid a national crisis, Mr. Biden’s team would have almost a year. “There is a whole vision that I think is ready,” Ms. Boushey added. “And there is a lot more runway.”

If there is a single lesson of the current era of American politics, it’s that change can happen more quickly than we imagined.

China’s top-down, state-led political system allows the party to drive its vast bureaucracy in pursuit of a single target — an approach that would be nearly impossible anywhere else in the world.

In the United States, where the pandemic is still raging, discussions about how and when to resume in-person classes have been fraught.

An absence of a national strategy has left school districts to craft their own approach. Coronavirus tests can be hard to come by. Parents have expressed misgivings about sending their children back to classrooms. Teachers’ unions have threatened to strike, while college students have flouted rules against gatherings.

In China, where the virus has largely been under control for months, there is no such debate.

The opening of schools has given Mr. Xi a propaganda win in a time of slowing economic growth and international criticism over his government’s early cover-up and mishandling of the outbreak.

Education officials have urged students to avoid “unnecessary outings” aside from going to school, though the rule is unlikely to be enforced. Students are also discouraged from speaking while eating or taking public transportation.

China still faces the possibility of fresh outbreaks, epidemiologists say, especially in the fall and winter months. But so far, the measures appear to be effective, with no outbreaks or school closures reported.

The party controls the courts and the news media and quashes any perceived threats to its agenda. Local bureaucracies have little choice but to obey the orders of the all-powerful central government. Independent labor unions are banned and activism is discouraged, making it difficult for the country’s more than 12 million teachers to organize. Administrators have corralled college students inside campuses, forbidding them to leave school grounds to eat or meet friends.

The state-run news media has closely covered America’s difficulties in resuming classes, while highlighting China’s progress in getting parents back to work — key to the country’s attempts to drive an economic recovery.

“When parents start a new day at work knowing that their children are well-protected at school,” read a recent commentary by Xinhua, the official news agency, “they will be filled with a sense of assurance living in this land where life is a top priority.”

Many schools are already short on staff and resources, and educators say they are struggling to keep up with long lists of virus-control tasks. Some teachers are rising at 4 a.m. just to review protocols.

In Georgia, Mr. Biden’s lead with women essentially matched Mrs. Clinton’s final advantage in the 2016 race. But where Mr. Trump carried Georgia men by 23 points four years ago, he was ahead by about half that margin with men in the state in the Times poll.

Mr. Trump’s tenuous hold on some of the largest red states in the country has presented Mr. Biden with unexpected political opportunities and stirred debate among Democrats about how aggressively to contest states far outside the traditional presidential battleground.

The president’s approval rating is in positive territory in Texas, and voters are almost evenly split in Iowa and Georgia. That is markedly stronger than Mr. Trump’s standing in core swing states like Wisconsin and Arizona.

Mr. Biden still holds a sizable advantage on the issue in Iowa.

Mr. Secora, 63, an independent, said he had voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 but had grown fed up. He said he had reservations about Mr. Biden but preferred his “honesty and integrity” to the president’s character.

One of those voters is Casey Andre-Lindsay, 41, of Roswell, who said she planned to vote for Mr. Biden. Ms. Andre-Lindsay, who lost her job this year, said she saw Mr. Trump’s agenda as defined by turning back progress. Of Republicans, she said, “It doesn’t seem like they want it to be a democracy where people speak up anymore.”

A significant danger looming for Texas Republicans is that Mr. Trump’s hard-line immigration policies are increasingly out of step with where the state is today, and where it is heading.

He and his supporters shouldn’t feel defeated after Super Tuesday. They should take a bow.

In the context of previous presidential elections, Biden isn’t so very moderate. Nor are Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg or other Democratic aspirants lumped in that category. They have carved out positions to the left of the party’s nominees over the past two decades, including the most recent three: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Kerry.

And you know who gets the most credit for that? Sanders.

While Sanders’s fellow candidates didn’t parrot his vocabulary and denounce “oligarchs” and “oligarchy,” they spoke expansively about gross income inequality and the need to tackle it. That largely reflected how wealth had been concentrated over recent decades. But it owed something, too, to Sanders’s right and righteous demand that America have this conversation.

Biden’s proposed tax increases of about $3.4 trillion over a decade are more than double what Clinton was advocating in 2016, while Buttigieg’s were more than quadruple. How is that moderate?

Although there is scant evidence in recent elections that a Democrat running on Sanders’s platform can win anywhere but in decidedly blue districts and states, that platform colored the Democratic primary in a bold and indelible way. Candidates disrespected it at their peril.

Klobuchar asserted herself — and was frequently characterized as — a sort of common-sense centrist. But her actual positions and proposals told a different story. As my fellow Times Op-Ed columnist David Leonhardt recently wrote: “She wants to raise taxes on the rich, break up monopolies, vastly expand Medicare, fight climate change, admit more refugees, allow undocumented immigrants to become citizens, ban assault weapons and require universal background checks. A Klobuchar administration would probably be well to the left of the Obama administration.” It would be closer to Sanders territory.

“All the lead contenders are running on the most progressive agendas to ever dominate a Democratic primary,” wrote Vox’s Ezra Klein and Roge Karma late last year. They noted that this primary’s moderates would have been considered leftists in the recent past. “As a result,” they added, “if Biden or Buttigieg actually win the nomination, they will be running on the most progressive platform of any Democratic nominee in history.”

Biden was designated a moderate despite declaring that the Equality Act, which would offer sweeping federal protection against discrimination for L.G.B.T.Q. people, didn’t merely have his support; it would be his top legislative priority. He was designated a moderate despite being among the 10 candidates at a Democratic debate early on who all raised their hands when asked if they supported extending health care benefits to undocumented immigrants.

Sanders’s grilling was a long time coming. The wonder of most of the debates was how carefully his competitors tiptoed around him, acutely conscious of the moral force that he had come to wield in the party and the passion of his supporters, whom they didn’t want to alienate. He became the enemy that no Democrat wanted to have.

Biden’s backing extends well beyond corporations. His proposals demonstrate concern for those working families. And his goals echo Sanders’s goals, for one reason above all others. Sanders already won.

Also, the Biden plan—or some version of it—is likely to advance in Congress only if Democrats keep a majority in the House and take control of the Senate

they only want to repeal parts of the law and that they would focus those changes on corporations and households making more than $400,000.

For corporations, he would raise the tax rate to 28% from 21%, impose a new minimum tax and raise taxes on foreign income. For individuals, he would raise the top rate to 39.6% from 37%, create new limits on deductions and impose the 12.4% Social Security payroll tax on wages above $400,000. High-income owners of pass-through businesses that don’t pay the corporate tax would lose a break they got in 2017.

The middle 20% of households would get a tax cut worth 1% of after-tax income, or an average of $620.

But there are two main ways in which middle-income families could pay more. One is through Mr. Biden’s proposed reinstatement of the individual mandate to buy health insurance. The campaign, citing Trump administration language, describes that as a fee, not a tax. The payments are required by the tax code, and the Supreme Court has ruled that the penalty for failing to purchase health insurance is a tax.

So anyone owning stocks could be affected and eventually, companies may raise wages less than they otherwise would.

He would temporarily expand the child tax credit to $3,000 from $2,000 and add another $600 for children under age 6

“Obviously, the effort to question and undermine vote by mail has worked very well,” said Justin Lee, Utah’s director of elections, faulting the “national discussion” for what he and others described as an unprecedented level of confusion threatening to derail a well-functioning system in a Republican-controlled state.

a powerful feedback loop has made it impossible to tune out these national controversies. One-off incidents documented by local media are flowing to partisan voices, who use their online megaphones to reframe the details as indictments of the entire balloting process.

The misleading narrative applied at the national level then filters back down to voters, causing them to distrust a system they have used for years.

Bongino, an influential conservative pundit closely aligned with Trump, shared the piece on Twitter to his nearly 2.5 million followers. “It’s only going to get worse,” he wrote on Facebook

The transformation of the Utah story — from a small-town technical mishap into purported proof of widespread voter fraud — illustrated to some experts the extent to which mainstream news reporting collides with the reach of social media sites and the agenda of influential political figures to stoke fear and reinforce the misconceptions of nervous voters.

A study released this month by Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society offered fresh evidence of the dangers posed by homegrown misinformation. For months, Trump has generated entire news cycles that serve to cast doubt about mail-in voting, which mainstream outlets have at times covered uncritically, the report found. The president’s influential allies have eagerly shared these and other stories with their vast online audiences, enhancing their reach and fomenting fresh doubt about the legitimacy of the 2020 vote.

“With respect to mail-in voter fraud, the driver of the disinformation campaign has been Trump, as president, supported by his campaign and Republican elites,” said Yochai Benkler, who leads the center and co-wrote the report.

In these and other cases, Benkler said, misconceptions and hoaxes that take root in the White House come to frame reporting in mainstream and partisan news sources alike. Any development related to the process of voting becomes fodder in a competition for narrative control.

In the bid to lock in new rules before Jan. 20, Mr. Trump’s team is limiting or sidestepping requirements for public comment on some of the changes and swatting aside critics who say the administration has failed to carry out sufficiently rigorous analysis.

Every administration pushes to complete as much of its agenda as possible when a president’s term is coming to an end, seeking not just to secure its own legacy but also to tie the hands of any successor who tries to undo its work.

If Democrats take control of Congress, they will have the power to reconsider some of these last-minute regulations, through a law last used at the start of Mr. Trump’s tenure by Republicans to repeal certain rules enacted at the end of the Obama administration.

Two main hallmarks of a good regulation is sound analysis to support the alternatives chosen and extensive public comment to get broader opinion

Administration officials said they were simply completing work on issues they have targeted since Mr. Trump took office in 2017 promising to curtail the reach of federal regulation.

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But the Trump administration is also working to fill key vacancies on scientific advisory boards with members who will hold their seats far into the next presidential term, committees that play an important role in shaping federal rule making

almost

Workers across the country deserve a chance to fully examine and properly respond to these potentially radical changes,

The Departments of Labor and Homeland Security are using a tactic known as an interim final rule, more typically reserved for emergencies, to skip the public comment period entirely and to immediately enact two regulations that put much tougher restrictions on work visas for immigrants with special skills. The rule change is part of the administration’s longstanding goal of limiting immigration.

The Homeland Security Department is also moving, again with an unusually short 30-day comment period, to adopt a rule that will allow it to collect much more extensive biometric data from individuals applying for citizenship, including voice, iris and facial recognition scans, instead of just the traditional fingerprint scan.

A third proposed new Homeland Security rule would require sponsors of immigrants to do more to prove they have the financial means to support the individual they are backing, including three years’ worth of credit reports, credit scores, income tax returns and bank records.

Unlike most of the efforts the administration has pushed, the rules intended to tighten immigration standards would expand federal regulations, instead of narrowing them

The Environmental Protection Agency, which since the start of the Trump administration has been moving at a high speed to rewrite federal regulations, is expected to complete work in the weeks that remain in Mr. Trump’s term on two of the nation’s most important air pollution rules: standards that regulate particulates and ozone emitted by factories, power plants, car exhaust and other sources.

But it is nonetheless pushing to have the rule finished before the end of Mr. Trump’s first term, limiting the period of public comment to 30 days, half the amount of time that agencies are supposed to offer.

Mr. Trump signed an executive order last year directing the Transportation Department to enact the rule within 13 months — even before it had been formally proposed.

The change was backed by the railroad and natural gas industry, which has donated millions of dollars to Mr. Trump, after construction of pipelines had been blocked or slowed after protests by environmentalists.

the proposal provoked an intense backlash from a diverse array of prominent public safety officials.

Biden suggested making masks and vaccines mandatory.

Mr. Trump minimized the danger of the virus, despite having been hospitalized after falling ill with it. He has poked fun at Mr. Biden for wearing a mask and has resisted the idea of making masks mandatory. Mr. Trump has theatrically removed his mask at his campaign rallies; Mr. Biden disclosed that before walking onstage, he had been wearing two masks, a preventive measure that some doctors say is effective.

Trump clung to an unpopular posture on masks and the pandemic.

He tried to twist the position of Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s foremost infectious disease expert, on masks. And he dismissed the scientific consensus.

Biden finally addressed court packing — sort of.

Election Day whether he supports expanding the number of seats on the Supreme Court. But he said he wanted to wait until after the Senate had acted on the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Mr. Biden has made it clear in the past that he did not support the idea. He has avoided the question during the campaign by saying he didn’t want to play into Mr. Trump’s hands and turn attention away from what Republicans were doing with the Ginsburg vacancy. But he agreed with the moderator, George Stephanopoulos, that voters had a right to know his views, and he set out a schedule for disclosing them.

“So, he says that the voters should know his position on this issue, but not until the confirmation process has concluded. By that time, a majority of voters will have already voted, including this voter.”

Still M.I.A.: a second-term Trump agenda.

But the lack of a vision for the next four years — and for navigating the remaining months and years of the pandemic — is a glaring and unaddressed weakness for Mr. Trump. When Ms. Guthrie gave him a chance to make his closing pitch for another four years, he began, “Because I’ve done a great job.” There were few other specifics beyond the classic Trumpian boast. “Next year,” he promised, “is going to be better than ever before.”

What if Biden loses?

Zakaria lays out the road from the pandemic to the transcendence of America the Dysfunctional. The to-do list is long

Upward mobility is down, inequality is up. The universities of the United States lead the global pack, but a B.A. at one of those top schools comes with a price tag upward of a quarter-million dollars. The country boasts the best medical establishment, but health care for the masses might just as well dwell on the moon.

We should adopt the best practices of northern Europe, Zakaria counsels

The world’s troubles are not just Made in U.S.A., Zakaria rightly notes. They are rooted in ultramodernity: globalization, automation, alienation, mass migration, the lure and decay of the world’s sprawling metropolises

The gist of Zakaria’s program is revealed by a recent editorial in The Financial Times, which he quotes approvingly. That newspaper was once a cheerleader of global capitalism. Now it argues that “many rich societies” do not honor “a social contract that benefits everyone.

So, the neoliberalism of decades past must yield to “radical reforms.” Governments “will have to accept a more active role in the economy. They must see public services as investments. … Redistribution will again be on the agenda; the privileges of the … wealthy in question.” Now is the time for “basic income and wealth taxes.”

Both The Financial Times and Zakaria’s book urge a revolution already upon us, and probably represent today’s zeitgeist and reality.

These days, Covid-19 is merely accelerating the mental turn engendered by the 2008 financial crisis. We are all social democrats now.

Government in the West is back with industrial policy and trillions in cash. It is not a radical, but a consensual project

Taxation, a tool of redistribution, will rise along with border walls. For the more perfect welfare state can flourish only in a well-fenced world that brakes the influx of competing people and products.

Republicans frequently accused Democrats of maligning Judge Barrett because of her personal values and religion, even though Democrats determinedly avoided discussion of either topic.

Others have minimal legal experience, but were selected to share personal stories that committee members believe relate to cases currently being litigated that Judge Barrett, if confirmed, could eventually rule on.

Judge Barrett’s nomination on Oct. 22. A vote on confirmation by the full Senate is expected the following week, as early as Oct. 26.

Given that Democrats have few, if any, means to push the confirmation schedule back,

two members of the American Bar Association’

as “well qualified” and has historically been supportive of the vast majority of nominees.

nominees, rating 10 as “not qualified”

The second panel will feature a more diverse selection of experts whose stories will be far more personal and pointed.

Crystal Good, who is expected to speak about her experience having an abortion after being granted a judicial bypass, which allows minors to have the procedure without seeking consent from parents or guardians.

Republicans have called one of her former clerks and a former student at Notre Dame. They have also called a retired federal judge who recently wrote an opinion article arguing that Judge Barrett’s Catholic faith would not color her opinions as a justice.

development of her legal philosophy of originalism, the view that judges must adhere closely to the written text of the Constitution and the plain meaning of language used in statutes at the time they were enacted.

Barrett, an acolyte of Justice Antonin Scalia, often expressed disdain for injecting policy preferences into judicial rulings. 

“wit, wisdom and a dose of terror.”

“Not having a philosophy is a philosophy. If your approach is grab-bag, that’s your theory,”

 “can’t answer about specific cases, but questions about judicial philosophy should be on the table. ... You have a right to know what yardstick you’re using to make those decisions.” 

"If you think the judge will be imposing their policy preferences, it leads to an all-in takedown.”

Barrett has used that metaphor for those who might surrender to temptation to disregard the Constitution.

“Is the Constitution a straitjacket? No, the Constitution itself leaves plenty of room for change – political, legal, social and otherwise.

The Constitution is less than 6,000 words and makes no attempt to regulate every aspect of American life.” 

“The fact that we weren’t alive or didn’t have the ability to participate doesn’t render the law illegitimate,” Barrett said. “We accept the law as we find it, until we lawfully change it.”

“I would not be surprised if opponents misrepresent or caricature originalism on incendiary topics,”

“A primary way that the Supreme Court contributes to stability is not to grant cert (accept a case for review) when the question presented is ‘Do you want to overturn a precedent?’"

“We shouldn’t be putting people on the court who share our policy preferences,” she said. “We should be putting people on the court who want to apply the Constitution.” 

The publication this month of a book critical of racial studies by two veteran social scientists, Stéphane Beaud and Gérard Noiriel, fueled criticism from younger scholars — and has received extensive news coverage

“I was pleasantly astonished,’’ said Nathalie Heinich, a sociologist who last month helped create an organization against “decolonialism and identity politics.’’ Made up of established figures, many retired, the group has issued warnings about American-inspired social theories in major publications like Le Point and Le Figaro.

With its echoes of the American culture wars, the battle began inside French universities but is being played out increasingly in the media

Politicians have been weighing in more and more, especially following a turbulent year during which a series of events called into question tenets of French society.

In some ways, it is a proxy fight over some of the most combustible issues in French society, including national identity and the sharing of power. In a nation where intellectuals still hold sway, the stakes are high.

last year’s developments came on top of activism that brought foreign disputes over cultural appropriation and blackface to French universities. At the Sorbonne, activists prevented the staging of a play by Aeschylus to protest the wearing of masks and dark makeup by white actors; elsewhere, some well-known speakers were disinvited following student pressure.

“It was a series of incidents that was extremely traumatic to our community and that all fell under what is called cancel culture,’’

“It’s the sign of a small, frightened republic, declining, provincializing, but which in the past and to this day believes in its universal mission and which thus seeks those responsible for its decline,’

France has long laid claim to a national identity, based on a common culture, fundamental rights and core values like equality and liberty, rejecting diversity and multiculturalism. The French often see the United States as a fractious society at war with itself.

“It’s an entire global world of ideas that circulates,’’ she said. “It just happens that campuses that are the most cosmopolitan and most globalized at this point in history are the American ones.’’

Three Islamist attacks last fall served as a reminder that terrorism remains a threat in France. They also focused attention on another hot-button field of research: Islamophobia, which examines how hostility toward Islam in France, rooted in its colonial experience in the Muslim world, continues to shape the lives of French Muslims.

Abdellali Hajjat, an expert on Islamophobia, said that it became increasingly difficult to focus on his subject after 2015, when devastating terror attacks hit Paris. Government funding for research dried up. Researchers on the subject were accused of being apologists for Islamists and even terrorists.

A signatory, Gilles Kepel, an expert on Islam, said that American influence had led to “a sort of prohibition in universities to think about the phenomenon of political Islam in the name of a leftist ideology that considers it the religion of the underprivileged.’’

Mr. Taguieff said in an email that researchers of race, Islamophobia and post-colonialism were motivated by a “hatred of the West, as a white civilization.’’

“The common agenda of these enemies of European civilization can be summed up in three words: decolonize, demasculate, de-Europeanize,’’ Mr. Taguieff said. “Straight white male — that’s the culprit to condemn and the enemy to eliminate.”

Behind the attacks on American universities — led by aging white male intellectuals — lie the tensions in a society where power appears to be up for grabs, said Éric Fassin, a sociologist who was one of the first scholars to focus on race and racism in France, about 15 years ago.

the emergence of young intellectuals — some Black or Muslim — has fueled the assault on what Mr. Fassin calls the “American boogeyman.’’

“That’s what has turned things upside down,’’ he said. “They’re not just the objects we speak of, but they’re also the subjects who are talking.’’

The Senate was initially going to recess, but now the trial will not break for the Sabbath and is expected to continue Friday evening and Saturday.

Democrats, including President Joe Biden, see acquittal as the assured outcome and don't want the trial to further impede the new President's agenda.

Trump himself, who has revolved through multiple legal teams as he prepares for the trial, is more concerned about the effect the trial may have on his public image, according to one person who has discussed the matter with him, rather than the potential outcome

The former president has kept a low profile since making a dramatic exit from Washington in the hours before Biden was sworn in and has been eager for his trial to end so he can start his post-presidency life, which people close to him have said is likely to include paid speeches overseas and domestic rallies targeting those who crossed him politically

His defense team was assembled a little more than a week ago after the five attorneys initially brought on to represent him all left days before legal briefs were due, which one person described as a mutual decision while another said it was over a difference in strategy.

The two attorneys arrived in Washington with their staffs Monday to conduct a walkthrough on the Senate floor where they will make their client's case. The walkthrough was almost identical to the one that happened a year ago, although instead of working out of the vice president's Senate office, Trump's team will set up shop in a sizable room next door to it for this trial.

Like he did during his first impeachment, Trump is expected to watch his attorneys on television from his private quarters at Mar-a-Lago

Trump watched nearly every minute of the first trial, becoming so consumed with his team's performance that aides later used the impeachment proceedings as an excuse for why he was distracted at the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

The former president has not been as closely involved with the defense as he was the last time around. He was been more "checked out" than expected because he's confident he will be acquitted, one person told CNN.

And while wealthy nations have allocated over $11 trillion for domestic Covid-19 responses, the UNs' Global Covid Humanitarian Response Plan -- meant to coordinate and rally support for crisis -- and conflict-affected countries -- is currently less than 40% funded.

Analysis by the International Chamber of Commerce found that the global economy could lose as much as $9.2 trillion if vaccines are not equitably distributed to low-income countries, with wealthy nations bearing half that loss. Unmanaged instability, insecurity, migration and climate change have similar consequences for US interests.

Women and girls bear the greatest brunt of humanitarian crises and are critical to resolving them and rebuilding their communities. With women representing 70% of the global care workforce and producing as much as 70% of the food in some low-income nations, there is a double dividend in prioritizing them.

Of the nearly $4 trillion has allocated to combat the pandemic, just less than 0.2% has been allocated to support the international Covid-19 response, including $4 billion for the global vaccine effort. The ICC study indicates that the $27.2 billion needed to close the gap on global vaccine distribution could deliver a return "as high as 166 times the investment."

Sustained improvement in these destabilizing displacement crises will deliver humanitarian and strategic benefit -- but it will take aid, diplomacy, sustained engagement and coordination with donors, UN agencies and international financial institutions.

The Institute for Economics and Peace estimates that for every $1 the US spends on conflict prevention, it saves $16 in response costs.

America's absence during the previous administration created a spiral of disengagement that has left the world leaderless at this crucial time. And while the US cannot resolve these challenges alone, US leadership can encourage others to share the burden.

The US cannot lead without getting its own house in order -- keeping President Biden's commitment to resettle 125,000 refugees in his first year; building a humane, credible, efficient US asylum system that protects those in need of safety; reinvigorating humanitarian diplomacy, engagement with the UN and the multilateral financing institutions to leverage US resettlement and aid into global action. 2021 celebrates the 70th anniversary of the Refugee Convention.

With the US presidency of the UN Security Council in March, the Biden administration can lead the world in reinvigorating the laws of war and rally other democratic nations to hold violators accountable.

Large-scale shocks — natural disasters, economic collapse, terrorist attacks — become ideal moments to smuggle in unpopular free-market policies that tend to enrich elites at everyone else’s expense. Crucially, the shock doctrine is not about solving underlying drivers of crises: It’s about exploiting those crises to ram through your wish list even if it exacerbates the crisis.

“We’ve become increasingly fragile as a society,” Burchell continues. “The hypertension surrounding race these days is totally unnecessary. And what’s being ignored is that you can be marginalized in ways beyond race. There are people who’ve been here for generations, and they’re working two jobs and just getting by.”

She moved here in 1983, a decade after undergoing a turbulent identity struggle. Her great-grandmother was a Mi’kmaq Indian, and when she was 16 she read “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” Dee Brown’s unsparing account of White people’s mistreatment of Indians in the 19th-century American West. When her history teacher delivered a different rendition of what happened — “it was just ‘the Indians scalped everyone,’ ” as she remembers it — Cote initiated a heated argument and then abruptly quit school for good. “I slammed the door and broke the glass on the way out,” she says. “They were lying to me. I was done.”

“I can understand that people are a product of where they come from,” she says, “and the inner city, where drugs are available left and right — it’s a lot like an Indian reservation. But the question is, ‘How do you pull yourself up out of it?’ Charles Payne” — she’s referring to a Fox Business Network host who is Black — “he went to school carrying a briefcase when he was a kid. He got picked on, but he didn’t let that stop him. Look, white privilege exists only if you let it exist.”

Great conversations are rooted in courage and trust. We need them to keep our nation civil and stable, and during the past few weeks I’ve seen just how difficult it is to make them happen. Over and over, I’ve been stonewalled and reminded that a lot of people would rather say cruel things online than talk in person.

At the time, Mr. Trump described his action as a way to protect Americans, millions of whom lost their jobs as the threat of the coronavirus shut down the economy.

“By pausing immigration, we will help put unemployed Americans first in line for jobs as America reopens. So important,” Mr. Trump said. “It would be wrong and unjust for Americans laid off by the virus to be replaced with new immigrant labor flown in from abroad. We must first take care of the American worker.”

Critics of Mr. Trump accused him of using the pandemic as an excuse to further advance his agenda of severely restricting immigration.

An analysis by the Migration Policy Institute at the time estimated that the policy could affect as many as 660,000 people.

In his legislation, the president would provide an eight-year path to citizenship for most of the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States.

Disseminators of online disinformation had taken advantage of such pre-existing communities – such as church groups – and used them as a powerful mechanism through which to spread their lies.

“Videos that promote this kind of ‘cure’ get thousands of views and the people who make them earn a lot of money,” said Córdova who said such producers could easily earn up to 7,000 reais (£1,050) per month. “It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not – what matters is the number of views.”

Others used falsehoods for political purposes. Córdova said that some far-right politicians in Brazil were engaged in a permanent “race to remain relevant” using bombastic and bizarre “news” to stay in the public consciousness.

The misguided belief that 5G telecom towers spread the coronavirus via radio waves prompted villagers in Huancavelica in the Peruvian Andes to detain eight telecoms engineers for more than a day. Ginger consumption in Peru has rocketed and exports nearly tripled because of the belief it can treat or cure Covid-19. At least 10 cases of chlorine dioxide poisoning have been reported in Bolivia in recent days.

The justice system needs to find a way to hold people responsible for the content they share – so they feel less comfortable distributing and sharing this kind of news,” she said.

“This will only stop when there is a counter-attack, when the justice system understands they must hold these people to account” by forcing those who alleged, for example, that Covid-19 was a Chinese experiment to prove such claims in court.