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The Washington Post ran an op-ed this weekend urging that the name of America’s first President be struck from Washington and Lee University.

together with literally thousands of others around the country they represent precisely what Mr. Trump describes—a left-wing cultural revolution against traditional American values of free speech and political tolerance

“We must demand that our children are taught once again to see America as did Reverend Martin Luther King, when he said that the Founders had signed ‘a promissory note’ to every future generation. Dr. King saw that the mission of justice required us to fully embrace our founding ideals. . . . He called on his fellow citizens not to rip down their heritage, but to live up to their heritage.”

Contrast that with the New York Times’s 1619 project, which derides America’s founding in 1776 and replaces it with a history that distills the country into a slave-owning enterprise that remains racist to the core. Who is really stoking division and a culture war?

liberal elites have created this opening for him by failing to stand up against the radicals who are using the justified anger at the killing of George Floyd as a cudgel to hijack America’s liberal institutions and impose their intolerant political views on everyone else.

whatever the result in November, Mr. Trump’s Mount Rushmore theme isn’t going away. Progressive elites are courting a backlash that will have more than one champion.

In other words, AOC can win in NY-14 but AOC-type candidates are no solution at all to the Democrats’ working class problems in most areas of the country. The grim fact is that as education polarization has played out geographically, Democratic votes are now distributed so inefficiently that the translation of these votes into political power has been severely undercut

As a result, Democrats’ hold on political power is ever on a knife’s edge even when their last election was a good one (as it is today).

Consistent with other recent research, the study finds that:

Working-class voters prefer progressive candidates who focus primarily on bread-and-butter economic issues, and who frame those issues in universal terms.

Candidates whose campaigns focused primarily on universalist policy issues such as jobs, health care, and the economy performed better than those who focused on group-specific policies, such as racial justice or immigration.

In addition, woke messaging decreased the appeal of other candidate characteristics. For example, candidates employing woke messaging who championed either centrist or progressive economic, health care, or civil rights policy priorities were viewed less favorably than their counterparts who championed the same priorities but opted for universalist messaging.

easier said than done given Democrats’ recent evolution away from universalist messaging and toward foregrounding the equity effects of unambiguously universal programs and deferring to group specific concerns around race, gender and sexuality, even where they are clearly unpopular and dubious as policy. The result has a been a shift in the Democratic party “brand” that has created barriers to Democratic party voting among broad swathes of the working class.

The grim prospects for the Democrats in 2022 and the gut-wrenching prospect of losing the White House to Donald Trump (again) in 2024 make clear the stakes.

A Democratic brand reset is clearly in order to stop the bleeding among working class voters, along the lines suggested by the Jacobin study. A good way to start would be to embrace widely-held American views and values that are particularly strong among the multiracial working class.

Equality of opportunity is a fundamental American principle; equality of outcome is not.America is not perfect but it is good to be patriotic and proud of the country.

Discrimination and racism are bad but they are not the cause of all disparities in American society.No one is completely without bias but calling all white people racists who benefit from white privilege and American society a white supremacist society is not right or fair.

America benefits from the presence of immigrants and no immigrant, even if illegal, should be mistreated. But border security is still important, as is an enforceable system that fairly decides who can enter the country.Police misconduct and brutality against people of any race is wrong and we need to reform police conduct and recruitment. But crime is a real problem so more and better policing is needed for public safety. That cannot be provided by “defunding the police”.

There are underlying differences between men and women but discrimination on the basis of gender is wrong.There are basically two genders but people who want to live as a gender different from their biological sex should have that right and not be discriminated against. However, there are issues around child consent to transitioning and participation in women’s sports that are complicated and not settled.

Racial achievement gaps are bad and we should seek to close them. However, they are not due just to racism and standards of high achievement should be maintained for people of all races.Language policing has gone too far; by and large, people should be able to express their views without fear of sanction by employer, school, institution or government. Good faith should be assumed, not bad faith.

Besides positively embracing these views it is necessary for major Democratic officeholders and candidates to actively dissociate themselves and their party from the woke stances that contradict these views and tarnish their brand among working class voters. That entails not just saying that one does not endorse now-familiar strands of cultural leftism but in some well-chosen places directly criticizing by name some who hold extreme views that are associated with the Democrats. That will be of great assistance in getting the message through to average working class voters.

these views are entirely consistent with a very progressive Democratic program in the areas of health care, education, social programs, jobs and the economy that would disproportionately benefit the poor and working class, and therefore blacks and Hispanics.

In that sense, one might respond to the inevitable accusation that a universalist, mainstream approach is tantamount to throwing loyal Democratic constituencies in need of help “under the bus”: who is throwing whom under the bus? Perhaps it is those who stand in the way of a Democratic approach that could plausibly generate the widest possible support that are throwing those who need help the most under the bus.

And this approach, unlike the Democrats’ current default setting, has the potential to make the Democrats and their progressive policies consistent winners

compared with the citizens of these nations, American infants are less likely to turn 5, American teenagers are less likely to turn 30, and American 30-somethings are less likely to survive to retirement.

I called the U.S. the rich death trap of the modern world. The “rich” part is important to observe and hard to overstate. The typical American spends almost 50 percent more each year than the typical Brit, and a trucker in Oklahoma earns more than a doctor in Portugal.

A series about big problems and big solutions

the typical American is 100 percent more likely to die than the typical Western European at almost every age from birth until retirement.

magine I offered you a pill and told you that taking this mystery medication would have two effects. First, it would increase your disposable income by almost half. Second, it would double your odds of dying in the next 365 days. To be an average American is to fill a lifetime prescription of that medication and take the pill nightly.

A series about big problems and big solutions

1.8 figure as “the U.S. death ratio”—the annual mortality rate in the U.S., as a multiple of similarly rich countries.

By the time an American turns 18, the U.S. death ratio surges to 2.8. By 29, the U.S. death ratio rockets to its peak of 4.22, meaning that the typical American is more than four times more likely to die than the average resident in our basket of high-income nations.

The average American my age, in his mid-to-late 30s, is roughly six times more likely to die in the next year than his counterpart in Switzerland.

The average U.S. death ratio stays higher than three for practically the entire period between ages 30 and 50, meaning that the typical middle-aged American is roughly three times more likely to die within the year than his counterpart in Western Europe or Australia.

One could tell a similar story about drug

America suffers not from a monopoly on despair and aggression, but from an oversupply of instruments of death. We have more drug-overdose deaths than any other high-income country because we have so much more fentanyl, even per capita

Americans drive more than other countries, leading to our higher-than-average death rate from road accidents

I expected that these three culprits—guns, drugs, and cars—would explain most of our death ratio

he argued that Americans’ health (and access to health care) seems to be the most important factor. America’s prevalence of cardiovascular and metabolic disease is so high that it accounts for more of our early mortality than guns, drugs, and cars combined.

Disentangling America’s health issues is complicated, but I can offer three data points

First, American obesity is unusually high, which likely leads to a larger number of early and middle-aged death

Second, Americans are unusually sedentary. We take at least 30 percent fewer steps a day than people do in Australia, Switzerland, and Japan

Finally, U.S. access to care is unusually unequal—and our health-care outcomes are unusually tied to income.

voters and politicians in the U.S. care so much about freedom in that old-fashioned ’Merica-lovin’ kind of way that we’re unwilling to promote public safety if those rules constrict individual choice. That’s how you get a country with infamously laissez-faire firearms laws, more guns than people, lax and poorly enforced driving laws, and a conservative movement that has repeatedly tried to block, overturn, or limit the expansion of universal health insurance on the grounds that it impedes consumer choice.

Among the rich, this hyper-individualistic mindset can manifest as a smash-and-grab attitude toward life, with surprising consequences for the less fortunate. For example, childhood obesity is on the rise at the same time that youth-sports participation is in decline among low-income kids

What seems to be happening at the national level is that rich families, seeking to burnish their child’s résumé for college, are pulling their kids out of local leagues so that they can participate in prestigious pay-to-play travel teams. At scale, these decisions devastate the local youth-sports leagues for the benefit of increasing by half a percentage point the odds of a wealthy kid getting into an Ivy League school.

The problem with the Freedom and Individualism Theory of Everything is that, in many cases, America’s problem isn’t freedom-worship, but actually something quite like its opposite: overregulation

In medicine, excessive regulation and risk aversion on the part of the FDA and Institutional Review Boards have very likely slowed the development and adoption of new lifesaving treatments.

Are Americans unusually sedentary because they love freedom so very much? It’s possible, I guess. But the more likely explanation is that restrictive housing policies have made it too hard for middle- and low-income families to live near downtown business districts, which forces many of them to drive more than they would like, thus reducing everyday walking and exercise.

America is caught in a lurch between oversight and overkill, sometimes promoting individual freedom, with luridly fatal consequences, and sometimes blocking policies and products, with subtly fatal consequences.

Stephen Budiansky sets out to revive Holmes’s reputation and relevance as a model of intellectual humility for our polarized age

Holmes learned from his service in the Civil War that moralism leads to intolerance — “when you know that you know, persecution comes easy,”

More than most judges, Holmes managed to set aside his prejudices and partisan loyalties because of his philosophical skepticism about the impossibility of ever being confident that one is right. “To have doubted one’s own first principles,” as he put it, “is a mark of a civilized man.”

This philosophical skepticism led him to uphold most laws against constitutional challenges; as he put it in his most famous dissenting opinion, “A constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory . . . it is made for people of fundamentally differing views.”

Holmes achieved both ambitions, writing a book, “The Common Law,” that revolutionized legal thinking by arguing that judges made policy rather than simply applying the law, and that rather than embodying absolute moral principles, law reflected changing social norms.

Holmes took from his service in the Army, which Budiansky describes in vivid detail, the idea that fighting for ideals was senseless; as Louis Menand famously wrote, the war “made him lose his belief in beliefs.”

“I don’t care to boss my neighbors and to require them to want something different from what they do,” he told Harold Laski, “even when, as frequently, I think their wishes more or less suicidal.”

Holmes came to believe that life is a struggle and the only thing that can redeem it is ceaseless hard work — mastery of a subject, a discipline or a job for its own sake, without being able to control the result.

The subject Holmes chose to master was law, and he worked harder at it than anyone else of his generation

He told a cousin that he had resolved to write a classic work on the law before the age of 40 and that he hoped after that to become a Supreme Court justice

The same philosophical skepticism, however, eventually persuaded him to write some of the greatest defenses of free speech of his time, on the grounds that a functioning democracy needs broad tolerance for what he famously called “the thought we hate.”

This view, which conservatives today denounce as sociological jurisprudence, led Holmes to a constitutional philosophy not of judicial activism but of radical judicial restraint.

A constitution, he wrote, “is a frame of government for men of opposite opinions and for the future, and therefore [we should] not hastily import into it our own views, or unexpressed limitations derived merely from the practices of the past.”

He followed the same philosophy on the U.S. Supreme Court, asking not whether the Constitution specifically authorized the federal or state governments to act but whether it specifically forbade them from doing so

He rejected the idea of the conservative textualists and originalists of his day, who argued that the Constitution should be strictly enforced according to its original public meaning. In his view, they were simply substituting their own political preferences and ascribing them to the Constitution’s framers.

Holmes’s radical devotion to judicial restraint led him to vote to uphold not only progressive economic legislation but also some of the most illiberal laws of his day, including mandatory-sterilization laws and laws disenfranchising African American voters in the Jim Crow South.

he was not indifferent to all violations of constitutional rights. In 1914, he began to write the dissents that would define his judicial legacy, and they included cases where Holmes was outraged by what he viewed as clear violations of the rule of law by racist mobs.

While Brandeis emphasized his faith that truth would emerge from thoughtful deliberation, Holmes emphasized what Budiansky calls “the importance of tolerance for opposing views, not just as a bedrock foundation of democracy but as a reflection of fundamental skepticism about certainty.”

“Certitude is not the test of certainty,” Holmes wrote in developing his mature view on free speech. “We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.”

The most inspiring sign of Holmes’s intellectual humility was that, throughout his long life, from his 20s through his 90s, he never stopped cultivating his faculties of reason and set aside time every day for learning.

At age 21, he began keeping a list of every book he read for pleasure and self-improvement. At the time of his death, the range was inspiring — more than 4,000 books, ranging from philosophy, sociology, religion, economics and science to murder mysteries. In the course of reading more than a book a week, he had a rule that a book had to be finished once started, no matter how arduous.

at a time when progressives and conservatives alike are so sure of their own premises that America is more polarized than at any time since the Civil War, the “skeptical humility,” as Budiansky puts it, that Holmes took from the war seems more elusive, and more urgently needed, than ever.

the decreasing importance of the printed word, over the past decades, in favour of visual and hyper-concise forms of media, from TV to TikTok. Televised debates require fast reaction times, whereas scientists are used to studying issues at length and only talking about them after thinking.

a successful visual performance is not just about being correct but evoking sympathy in the viewer – about performing. This doesn’t always come easy to scientists.

Whereas once it was thought that the future would necessarily be better than the present, faith in progress – in the magnificent and progressive fortunes of humans – has been eroded

And just as science used to get the credit for progress, so now it receives the blame for decline (real or just perceived, it doesn’t matter). Science is sometimes felt to be a bad teacher who has led us in the wrong direction, and changing this perception is not easy.

In a nutshell, scientists are thought to be part of the elite and, therefore, not trustworthy. And the increasing interest by a fraction of scientists in patenting knowledge and making individual financial gains from discoveries reinforces this identification with the elite

a fundamental reality: science makes fair predictions that become reliable after the gradual formation of a scientific consensus. The construction of consensus is the process that makes the real difference – it involves the whole scientific community and that cannot be manipulated.

this lack of trust can have disastrous effects: if citizens do not trust science, we will not be able to fight global warming, infectious diseases, poverty and hunger, and the depletion of the planet’s natural resources.

A great coordinated effort is needed, and this will only be possible if there is a full understanding of the dramatic nature of the problem

A part of the human and financial resources devoted to the advancement of science must be used to discuss with citizens, through education and media and outreach programmes, what science really is: the most reliable and honest tool for understanding the world and predicting the future.

It is also important that we scientists talk about not just our successes, but our mistakes, doubts and hesitations. Often there is no trace, in the public scientific discourse, of the toil of the scientific process and the doubts that accompany it.

— giving the next generation of Republican officeholders, senior advisers, judges and appointees explicit permission and encouragement to believe that the country is on the verge of collapse.

The list of people making these arguments includes former officials in the Trump administration, some of whom are likely to be considered for top jobs in the event of a Trump restoration in 2024.

The ideas about the threat of an all-powerful totalitarian left and the dismal state of the country — even the most outlandish of them — are taken seriously by conservative politicians as well as prominent influencers on the right.

If Mr. Trump manages to win the presidency again in 2024, many of these intellectual catastrophists could be ready and willing to justify deeds that could well bring American liberal democracy to its knees.

Mr. Anton’s “Flight 93” essay originally appeared on a website with modest traffic, but two days later Rush Limbaugh was reading it aloud in its entirety on his radio show. The essay set the tone of life-or-death struggle (and related imagery) that is common among catastrophists.

Mr. Anton updated and amplified the argument in a 2021 book, “The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return.”

The prospect of Mr. Biden’s becoming president constituted an “existential threat,” Mr. Eastman said, to the survivability of the country. Would we “completely repudiate every one of our founding principles” and allow ourselves to be “eradicated”? Those were the stakes, as he viewed them.

Once a thinker begins to conceive of politics as a pitched battle between the righteous and those who seek the country’s outright annihilation, extraordinary possibilities open up.

in May 2021, Mr. Anton came to conduct a two-hour podcast with a far-right Silicon Valley tech guru and self-described “monarchist,” Curtis Yarvin, in which the two agreed that the American “regime” is today most accurately described as a “theocratic oligarchy.” In that arrangement, an elite class of progressive “priests” ensconced in executive branch agencies, the universities, elite media and other leading institutions of civil society promulgate and enforce a distorted and self-serving version of reality that illegitimately justifies their rule.

It culminated in Mr. Yarvin sketching a scenario in which a would-be dictator he alternatively describes as “Caesar” and “Trump” defies the laws and norms of democratic transition and uses a “Trump app” to direct throngs of his supporters on the streets of the nation’s capital to do his bidding, insulating the would-be dictator from harm and the consequences of his democracy-defying acts.

Mr. Anton described Caesarism as one-man rule that emerges “after the decay of a republican order, when it can no longer function.”

he would prefer the country to embrace the principles of “1787 forever.” But if that is no longer possible, he said, the rule of a Caesar can be a necessary method to restore order.)

Those on the right primarily concerned about the fate of traditionalist Christian morals and worship in the United States insist that we already live in a regime that oppresses and brutalizes religious believers and conservatives. And they make those charges in a theologically inflected idiom that’s meant to address and amplify the right’s intense worries about persecution by progressives.

Among the most extreme catastrophists writing in this vein is Stephen Wolfe, whose book “The Case for Christian Nationalism” calls for a “just revolution” against America’s “gynocracy” (rule by women) that emasculates men, persuading them to affirm “feminine virtues, such as empathy, fairness and equality.” In its place, Mr. Wolfe proposes the installation of a “Christian prince,” or a form of “theocratic Caesarism.”

Other authors aspire to greater nuance by calling the dictatorship weighing down on religious believers soft totalitarianism, usually under the rule of social-justice progressivism. These writers often draw direct parallels between the fate of devout Christians in the contemporary United States and the struggles of Eastern Europeans who sought to practice their faith but were harshly persecuted by Soviet tyranny

the most recent book by the writer Rod Dreher, “Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents.”

Patrick Deneen of the University of Notre Dame offers the most elaborate and intellectually sophisticated response in his recent book, “Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future.”

“Regime Change” is a much darker book that goes well beyond diagnosing America’s ills to propose what sounds, in certain passages, like a radical cure.

Mr. Deneen and other discontented intellectuals of the religious right can perhaps be most accurately described as political reactionaries looking to undertake a revolutionary act in reverse.

Growing numbers of Americans supposedly reject this outlook, demanding a postliberal government and social, cultural and economic order — basically, hard-right policies on religious and moral issues and hard left on economics. But the forces of liberalism are entrenched on the center left and center right, using every power at their disposal to prevent regime change.

In some passages, he advocates a “peaceful but vigorous overthrow of a corrupt and corrupting liberal ruling class” and proposes modest reforms to replace i

in other passages, Mr. Deneen goes much further, describing the separation of church and state as a “totalitarian undertaking” that must be reversed so that American public life can be fully integrated with conservative forms of Christianit

He even affirmatively quotes a passage from Machiavelli in which he talks of the need to use “extralegal and almost bestial” forms of resistance, including “mobs running through the streets,” in order to topple the powers that be.

The source of these maladies, Mr. Deneen claims, is liberalism, which until recently has dominated both political parties in the United States, imposing an ideology of individual rights and historical progress on the country from above. This ideology, he says, denigrates tradition, faith, authority and community.

Costin Alamariu, the person generally understood to be writing under the pseudonym Bronze Age Pervert.

He self-published a book in 2018, “Bronze Age Mindset,” which follows Friedrich Nietzsche and other authors beloved by the European far right in proclaiming that Western civilization itself is on the verge of collapse, its greatest achievements far in the past, its present a “garbage world” in an advanced state of decay.

All around us, Mr. Alamariu declares, greatness and beauty are under assault. Who are its enemies? Women, for one. (“It took 100 years of women in public life for them to almost totally destroy a civilization.”) Then there’s belief in democratic equality. (“I believe that democracy is the final cause of all the political problems I describe.”)

But blame must most of all be laid at the feet of the creature Mr. Alamariu calls the “bugman,” a term he uses to describe a majority of human beings alive today. This insectlike infestation venerates mediocrity and is “motivated by a titanic hatred of the well-turned-out and beautiful.”

Mr. Alamariu proposes breeding great men of strength who model themselves on pirates, disregarding laws and norms, plundering and taking anything they want and ultimately installing themselves as absolute rulers over the rest of us.

“Now imagine a man of Trump’s charisma, but who is not merely beholden to the generals, but one of them, and able to rule and intimidate them as well as seduce the many. … Caesars and Napoleons are sure to follow.”

In a recent essay, Mr. Alamariu wrote: “I believe in fascism or ‘something worse’ …. I believe in rule by a military caste of men who would be able to guide society toward a morality of eugenics.”

Mr. Alamariu’s recently self-published doctoral dissertation reached No. 23 on Amazon sitewide in mid-September. Among those on the right treating the author as a friend, ally or interlocutor worthy of respectful engagement are the prominent activist Christopher Rufo, the author Richard Hanania and the economist-blogger Tyler Cowen.

These writers are giving Republican elites permission and encouragement to do things that just a few years ago would have been considered unthinkable.

In a second term, Mr. Trump’s ambition is to fire tens of thousands of career civil servants throughout the federal bureaucracy and replace them with loyalists. He also reportedly plans to staff the executive branch with more aggressive right-wing lawyers. These would surely be people unwaveringly devoted to the president and his agenda as well as the danger the Democratic Party supposedly poses to the survival of the United States.

These writers also exercise a powerful influence on media personalities with large audiences. Tucker Carlson has interviewed Curtis Yarvin and declared that with regard to the 2024 election, “everything is at stake. What wouldn’t they do? What haven’t they done? How will you prepare yourself?”

Other right-wing influencers with large followings assert more bluntly that if conservatives lose in 2024, they will be hunted down and murdered by the regime.

It’s important that we respond to such statements by pointing out there is literally no evidence to support them. Other intellectual catastrophists are likewise wrong to suggest the country is ruled by a progressive tyranny, and we can know this because people on the right increasingly say such things while facing no legal consequences at all.

The question, then, is why the intellectual catastrophists have gotten to this point — and why others on the right are listening to them. The answer, I think, is an intense dislike of what America has become, combined with panic about the right’s ability to win sufficient power in the democratic arena to force a decisive change.

In refusing to accept that deal, many of the right’s most prominent writers are ceasing to behave like citizens, who must be willing to share rule with others, in favor of thinking and acting like commissars eager to serve a strongman.

In 2019, the Conservatives captured areas like Burnley, in Britain’s postindustrial “red wall,” and Labour polled poorly in Scotland, once another heartland, losing out to the Scottish National Party.

And while the Conservatives lost badly in recent local elections, Labour has made only limited progress, with smaller parties doing well.

He promptly promised that he would resign if he were fined by the police — in contrast to Mr. Johnson, who suffered that fate in April but refused to quit.

In the 2019 general election, parts of England that for decades had voted for Labour switched en masse to the Conservatives, allowing Mr. Johnson to recast the political map just as Donald J. Trump did in the United States in 2016.

Even he accepts that Labour is not yet in a solid, election-winning position.

“It looks like modest progress because it is modest progress,” said Mr. McTernan, while adding that it was still a “massive rebalancing” after the 2019 defeat.

So Labour is hosting a series of town-hall meetings where uncommitted voters are asked what would lure them back to the party.

“It broke my heart in 2019 when I watched communities where I grew up and that I call home turning blue for the first time in history,” said Ms. Nandy, referring to the campaign color used by the Conservatives.

The reason, she thinks, is that politicians spend too much time in London and too little “on people’s own territory having conversations with them about things that matter to them.”

“I don’t think anyone is expecting full policy across the board until the time of the next election,” she said. “A lot of what we need to do is about rebuilding our relationship with the country and setting out our values, and people need to get to know the Labour Party again.”

“I know so many progressives who think that politics is like a football game: If you have a 10-point plan on health and your opponents only have a five-point plan you win 10 to 5,” Mr. McTernan said. “You don’t.”

To succeed, the party needs to convince people like Ged Ennis, the director of a renewable energy company that equipped Burnley College with solar panels. He has voted for Labour and the Conservatives over the years, but opted for the centrist Liberal Democrats in 2019.

“I think what he needs to do is to be brave and to be really clear about what he wants to deliver,

a “builder class”—a brains trust of youngish idealists, which includes Patrick Collison, co-founder of Stripe, a payments firm valued at $74bn, and other (mostly white and male) techies, who are posing questions that go far beyond the usual interests of Silicon Valley’s titans. They include the future of man and machine, the constraints on economic growth, and the nature of government.

They share other similarities. Business provided them with their clout, but doesn’t seem to satisfy their ambition

The number of techno-billionaires in America (Mr Collison included) has more than doubled in a decade.

ome of them, like the Medicis in medieval Florence, are keen to use their money to bankroll the intellectual ferment

The other is Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, a startup accelerator, whose essays on everything from cities to politics are considered required reading on tech campuses.

Mr Altman puts it more optimistically: “The iPhone and cloud computing enabled a Cambrian explosion of new technology. Some things went right and some went wrong. But one thing that went weirdly right is a lot of people got rich and said ‘OK, now what?’”

A belief that with money and brains they can reboot social progress is the essence of this new mindset, making it resolutely upbeat

The question is: are the rest of them further evidence of the tech industry’s hubristic decadence? Or do they reflect the start of a welcome capacity for renewal?

Two well-known entrepreneurs from that era provided the intellectual seed capital for some of today’s techno nerds.

Mr Thiel, a would-be libertarian philosopher and investor

This cohort of eggheads starts from common ground: frustration with what they see as sluggish progress in the world around them.

Yet the impact could ultimately be positive. Frustrations with a sluggish society have encouraged them to put their money and brains to work on problems from science funding and the redistribution of wealth to entirely new universities. Their exaltation of science may encourage a greater focus on hard tech

the rationalist movement has hit the mainstream. The result is a fascination with big ideas that its advocates believe goes beyond simply rose-tinted tech utopianism

A burgeoning example of this is “progress studies”, a movement that Mr Collison and Tyler Cowen, an economist and seer of the tech set, advocated for in an article in the Atlantic in 2019

Progress, they think, is a combination of economic, technological and cultural advancement—and deserves its own field of study

There are other examples of this expansive worldview. In an essay in 2021 Mr Altman set out a vision that he called “Moore’s Law for Everything”, based on similar logic to the semiconductor revolution. In it, he predicted that smart machines, building ever smarter replacements, would in the coming decades outcompete humans for work. This would create phenomenal wealth for some, obliterate wages for others, and require a vast overhaul of taxation and redistribution

His two bets, on OpenAI and nuclear fusion, have become fashionable of late—the former’s chatbot, ChatGPT, is all the rage. He has invested $375m in Helion, a company that aims to build a fusion reactor.

Mr Lonsdale, who shares a libertarian streak with Mr Thiel, has focused attention on trying to fix the shortcomings of society and government. In an essay this year called “In Defence of Us”, he argues against “historical nihilism”, or an excessive focus on the failures of the West.

With a soft spot for Roman philosophy, he has created the Cicero Institute in Austin that aims to inject free-market principles such as competition and transparency into public policy.

He is also bringing the startup culture to academia, backing a new place of learning called the University of Austin, which emphasises free speech.

All three have business ties to their mentors. As a teen, Mr Altman was part of the first cohort of founders in Mr Graham’s Y Combinator, which went on to back successes such as Airbnb and Dropbox. In 2014 he replaced him as its president, and for a while counted Mr Thiel as a partner (Mr Altman keeps an original manuscript of Mr Thiel’s book “Zero to One” in his library). Mr Thiel was also an early backer of Stripe, founded by Mr Collison and his brother, John. Mr Graham saw promise in Patrick Collison while the latter was still at school. He was soon invited to join Y Combinator. Mr Graham remains a fan: “If you dropped Patrick on a desert island, he would figure out how to reproduce the Industrial Revolution,”

While at university, Mr Lonsdale edited the Stanford Review, a contrarian publication co-founded by Mr Thiel. He went on to work for his mentor and the two men eventually helped found Palantir. He still calls Mr Thiel “a genius”—though he claims these days to be less “cynical” than his guru.

“The tech industry has always told these grand stories about itself,” says Adrian Daub of Stanford University and author of the book, “What Tech Calls Thinking”. Mr Daub sees it as a way of convincing recruits and investors to bet on their risky projects. “It’s incredibly convenient for their business models.”

In the 2000s Mr Thiel supported the emergence of a small community of online bloggers, self-named the “rationalists”, who were focused on removing cognitive biases from thinking (Mr Thiel has since distanced himself). That intellectual heritage dates even further back, to “cypherpunks”, who noodled about cryptography, as well as “extropians”, who believed in improving the human condition through life extensions

Silicon Valley has shown an uncanny ability to reinvent itself in the past.

The changes mirror what is happening inside many large companies, where “performance management” reflects the conviction that a sharpened focus on creating a high-performing workforce is a vital tool to generate revenue and profit.

Performance management shifts companies away from backward-looking, once-a-year reviews framed largely as compliance requirements—a paper trail for potential job cuts and salary decisions—to a process that is real-time, continuous and focused on helping people meet ambitious goals, or move out of the company faster.

The last recession led many employers to rethink the nearly automatic merit raises they had been doling out, forcing them to do a better job identifying high and low performers when giving raises and bonuses. Millennial workers, meanwhile, demand more feedback, more coaching and a stronger sense of their career path.

systems let managers track workers’ progress via dashboards that display their goals, accomplishments, attendance, peer feedback and other data.

Executives’ use of phrases like “performance culture” in conference calls with analysts and investors has doubled in the past five years, according to a review of transcripts in the Factiva news database. Firms that set goals and hold workers accountable “clearly outperform,” said Nicholas Bloom, an economist at Stanford University and co-author of a recent paper that used Census data to examine more than 32,000 U.S. manufacturing plants. He said they have faster growth, higher profitability and are less likely to go bankrupt.

Some academics say constant monitoring can feel intrusive and threatening to workers, especially those who value stability. But human-resources experts largely agree that the traditional review process is a waste of time and needs an overhaul.

Remaining employees are expected to work “smarter” and meet regularly raised targets. “We have to routinely shuffle the resources and say, what’s the most important thing we need to do today, this week, this month, to drive this objective?”

Using the Workday tool, Kimberly-Clark’s salaried employees set goals and report their progress, record accomplishments or mistakes, and solicit and send feedback

The system collects and archives feedback, which can be seen by employees’ managers. It also holds data on staffers’ strengths and development needs, their performance ratings and the risk they might leave the company.

“It’s certainly more challenging” for employees, said Mr. Herbert, the retired sales director. “If you really don’t have the mettle, you’re asked to get on with your life’s work [elsewhere].”

In 2015, Kimberly-Clark retained 95% of its top performers. Among the employees whose work was rated “unacceptable” or “inconsistent,” 44% left the company voluntarily or were let go. Ms. Gottung said she is “pretty pleased” that low-performer turnover has been rising.

Mr. Falk, the CEO, reviews 100 senior managers’ performance plans every year to make sure their goals are ambitious and reflect company priorities. Managers are instructed to begin every meeting with a story about how someone demonstrated one of the six behaviors the company promotes, such as “build trust” or “think customer.”

Regular “culture of accountability” sessions train employees in giving and receiving difficult feedback. When a colleague suggests improvements, “the proper response was ‘thank you for the feedback,’ not defensiveness,” Mr. Luettgen said. Employees also practice reinforcing positive behaviors, such as praising a colleague who had given up a weekend to solve a customer complaint.

More than 10,000 of Kimberly-Clark’s workers used the feedback feature in Workday in 2014, and about 25% of the comments were considered “constructive,” while the rest were positive or neutral, said Sandy Allred, a senior director on the talent management team. Staffers can send feedback to peers or workers above or below them

That gives me some feeling we are moving in the right direction.”

The question is not so much about his results but his methods. He has a reputation for being merciless and brutal, and as the accolades have stacked up, he has cracked down on his own people and covertly supported murderous rebel groups in neighboring Congo

Though Rwanda has made tremendous strides, the country is still a demographic time bomb. It’s already one of the most densely populated in Africa — its 11 million people squeezed into a space smaller than Maryland — and despite a recent free vasectomy program, Rwanda still has an alarmingly high birthrate. Most Rwandans are peasants, their lives inexorably yoked to the land, and just about every inch of that land, from the papyrus swamps to the cloud-shrouded mountaintops, is spoken for.

In some areas of the country, there are rules, enforced by village commissars, banning people from dressing in dirty clothes or sharing straws when drinking from a traditional pot of beer, even in their own homes, because the government considers it unhygienic. Many Rwandans told me that they feel as if their president is personally watching them. “It’s like there’s an invisible eye everywhere,” said Alice Muhirwa, a member of an opposition political party. “Kagame’s eye.”

Kagame has become a rare symbol of progress on a continent that has an abundance of failed states and a record of paralyzing corruption. Kagame was burnishing the image of the entire billion-dollar aid industry. “You put your money in, and you get results out,” said the diplomat, who insisted he could not talk candidly if he was identified. Yes, Kagame was “utterly ruthless,” the diplomat said, but there was a mutual interest in supporting him, because Kagame was proving that aid to Africa was not a hopeless waste and that poor and broken countries could be fixed with the right leadership.

why has the West — and the United States in particular — been so eager to embrace Kagame, despite his authoritarian tendencies?

much has improved under his stewardship. Rwandan life expectancy, for instance, has increased to 56 years, from 36 in 1994. Malaria used to be a huge killer, but Kagame’s government has embarked on a wide-scale spraying campaign and has distributed millions of nets to protect people when they are sleeping — malarial mosquitoes tend to feed at night — and malaria-related deaths plummeted 85 percent between 2005 and 2011.

Kagame hopes to make more money from coffee, tea and gorillas — Rwanda is home to some of the last remaining mountain gorillas, and each year throngs of Western tourists pay thousands of dollars to see them.

aid flows to Rwanda because Kagame is a celebrated manager. He’s a hands-on chief executive who is less interested in ideology than in making things work. He loves new technology — he’s an avid tweeter — and is very good at breaking sprawling, ambitious projects into manageable chunks. Rwanda jumped to 52nd last year, from 158th in 2005, on the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business annual rating, precisely because Kagame set up a special unit within his government, which broke down the World Bank’s ratings system, category by category, and figured out exactly what was needed to improve on each criterion.

modern nationalist historians who criticize the Confucian school as taking an overly Sino-centric view of Korean history, reflecting the Chinese bia

colonial historiography, or singmin sahak, is of a fundamentally geopolitical nature and is the direct consequence of Korea's colonial experience under Japanese rule(1910-1945

This school points to geographic determinism as the leading factor in Korean history and argues that given Korea's geographic position, international interaction with surrounding powers, especially China, Japan, Russia, and more recently, the United States, is inevitable

the influence (or interference) of foreign "actors" has resulted in the inability of Koreans to chart an independent course in making policy, leading to a subservient national character and the predominance of acute factionalism in Korean politic

retarded or stunted nature of Korean historical development, as reflected in the continued existence of slavery up to the end of the Choson dynasty and the lack of a feudalist stage in Korea's historical development

not only that historical development in Korea is distinguished by its lack of indigenous progress, but also that what progress that has occurred has been the direct result of foreign influence and/or pressure

the nationalist school, emerged as a reaction against Japanese colonialism

for minjung theorists, Korean history is one of suffering -- of the masses subjugated socially, politically, and economically, whether it be in the form of Chinese cultural hegemony, the domination of the yangban class, Japanese colonialization, the "neo-colonial" influence of post-liberation superpowers (Japan and the United States in the South; China and Russia in the North), authoritarian government rule, or, most recently, international pressure on trade issues

Korea was on the verge of a cultural, political and social renaissance, led by a number of enlightened intellectuals (e.g. the Kapsin and Kabo reform movements and the Independence Club) who saw the decay of the Choson dynasty and recognized the need to bring Korea out of its self-imposed isolation.

Korea was the proverbial "shrimp caught between fighting whales," and the ensuing 35-year-long Japanese colonial period, coupled with Korea's subsequent national division and a devastating civil war, essentially wiped out any possibility of an indigenous movement building a modern, civil society independent of outside interference.

the nationalist school was divided over how to interpret the historical legacy of the "practical learning"(silhak) movement of the late Choson period

By the end of the 1970s, Korea's economic success seemed to confirm the nationalist model: Korean development, far from being dependent on outside factors (e.g. Chinese suzerainty, Japanese colonialism, etc.), had in fact undergone its own, unique evolution

Success in the economic field was matched by discoveries in Korean archaeology, which added a timeless dimension to the debate. The discovery of paleolithic artifacts and the widespread existence of bronze culture in ancient Korea were combined with the existence of private landholding during the Three Kingdoms period and the slow emergence of an upwardly-mobile class system during the Choson dynasty to argue that, far from being stagnant, traditional Korean society, while not exactly dynamic, was at the very least much more fluid

Korean history is one of slow but steady indigenous progress toward modern, civil society.

minjung, (populist, grassroots, "the masses," etc.) school of historical interpretation. This school emerged out of Korea's rapid economic development, with its uneven distribution of wealth and the rising class-consciousness of Korean workers, combined with popular resentment against continued authoritarian rule and the widely perceived illegitimacy of the Chun Doo-hwan government in the aftermath of the Kwangju Pro-Democracy Uprising in 1980

there is no single, encompassing minjung theory, and minjung theorists themselves have had mixed success in gaining widespread respect for their views, possibly in part by a reluctance by more conservative academics to give credibility to a movement admittedly inspired by Marxist ideology

Korean development as a modern civil society was thwarted just as it was emerging from the long, slow decline of the Choson dynasty

with the election of former pro-democracy opposition leader Kim Young-sam as president in 1992 following his party's merger with Korea's two leading conservative parties, the rise of a dominant Korean middle class and its concomitant influence on policy making, the emergence of a new generation of Koreans unfamiliar with past hardships, and the rise of globalization (and the decline of nationalism) as a defining influence, mainstream Korean society has all but rejected minjung theory.

where is a minjung historian to go when his erstwhile victims have gone mainstream and have adopted many of the perspectives of their newfound (middle) class?

no single theory is all-encompassing: each explains a part of a much greater whole.

colonial historiography explains Korea's relations in an unfriendly international setting, but it does not explain why Korea was unable to better adapt to an admittedly hostile environment.

nationalist historiography is also unable to adequately explain why Korea was unable to register impressive economic and political development until after its liberation from 35 years of Japanese colonial rule, and even then only in the context of U.S. liberation and protection during the Korean and Cold Wars, and without addressing the roles played by Japanese capital and a receptive U.S. market for Korea's export-led growth

it might benefit the would-be scholar to take a multifaceted approach to Korean historiography. At the very least, a comprehensive understanding of these historical schools is in order for any significant understanding of modern Korean history.

First, there’s ideology.  Since the late nineteenth century most intellectuals have identified progress with the advance of the bureaucratic, redistributionist and administrative state.

Most American intellectuals today are still shaped by this worldview and genuinely cannot imagine an alternative vision of progress.  It is extremely difficult for such people to understand the economic forces that are making this model unsustainable and to see why so many Americans are in rebellion against this kind of state and society – but if our society is going to develop we have to move beyond the ideas and the institutions of twentieth century progressivism.  The promises of the administrative state can no longer be kept and its premises no longer hold.

This doesn’t mean that government becomes insignificant.  The state will survive and as social life becomes more complex it will inevitably acquire new responsibilities – but it will look and act less like the administrative, bureaucratic entity of the past. 

Second, there are the related questions of interest and class.  Most intellectuals today still live in a guild economy.  The learned professions – lawyers, doctors, university professors, the clergy of most mainline denominations, and (aspirationally anyway) school teachers and journalists – are organized in modern day versions of the medieval guilds.  Membership in the guilds is restricted, and the self-regulated guilds do their best to uphold an ideal of service and fairness and also to defend the economic interests of the members.

Just as the industrial revolution broke up the manufacturing guilds, the information revolution today is breaking up the knowledge guilds. 

Ultimately one suspects that services once reserved for elites will be available for the masses, just as the industrial revolution enabled mass ownership of goods that had once been the preserve of small elites.  The effect will not only be to raise living standards for most people by improving their access to useful services.  It will also be to transfer power and authority from the provider of such services to the consumer.

Third, there’s training.  America today has many technical intellectuals – people like doctors, engineers, and others who are able to carry out complex tasks – and we are extraordinarily rich in specialist intellectuals who have a deep knowledge of a particular subject. 

We are much less effective at teaching and supporting people who are able to master the essentials of many complex subjects, integrate the insights from this kind of study into a coherent social or political vision, and communicate what they have learned to a broad general lay audience.  The more complex a society and the more rapidly it is changing, the more need it has for multi-disciplinary, synthesizing intellectuals who are focused on communicating serious ideas to a large audience.

In most of our learned professions and knowledge guilds today, promotion is linked to the needs and aspirations of the guild rather than to society at large.  Promotion in the academy is almost universally linked to the production of ever more specialized, theory-rich (and, outside the natural sciences, too often application-poor) texts, pulling the discourse in one discipline after another into increasingly self-referential black holes.  We suffer from ‘runaway guilds’: costs skyrocket in medicine, the civil service, education and the law in part because the imperatives of the guilds and the interests of their members too often triumph over the needs and interests of the wider society.

Right now, too many intellectuals try to turn this into a left/right debate rather than one about the past and the future.

She created two sets of rules for her game: an anti-monopolist set in which all were rewarded when wealth was created, and a monopolist set in which the goal was to create monopolies and crush opponents. Her dualistic approach was a teaching tool meant to demonstrate that the first set of rules was morally superior.

Elizabeth Magie was born in Macomb, Ill., in 1866, the year after the Civil War ended and Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. Her father, James Magie, was a newspaper publisher and an abolitionist who accompanied Lincoln as he traveled around Illinois in the late 1850s debating politics with Stephen Douglas.

On some level, Lizzie understood that the game provided a context — it was just a game, after all — in which players could lash out at friends and family in a way that they often couldn’t in daily life. She understood the power of drama and the potency of assuming roles outside of one’s everyday identity. Her game spread, becoming a folk favorite among left-wing intellectuals, particularly in the Northeast.

When she applied for a patent for her game in 1903, Magie was in her 30s. She represented the less than 1 percent of all patent applicants at the time who were women. (Magie also dabbled in engineering; in her 20s, she invented a gadget that allowed paper to pass through typewriter rollers with more ease.)

Several years after she obtained the patent for her game, and finding it difficult to support herself on the $10 a week she was earning as a stenographer, Magie staged an audacious stunt mocking marriage as the only option for women; it made national headlines. Purchasing an advertisement, she offered herself for sale as a “young woman American slave” to the highest bidder. Her ad said that she was “not beautiful, but very attractive,” and that she had “features full of character and strength, yet truly feminine.”Continue reading the main story The ad quickly became the subject of news stories and gossip columns in newspapers around the country. The goal of the stunt, Magie told reporters, was to make a statement about the dismal position of women. “We are not machines,” Magie said. “Girls have minds, desires, hopes and ambition.”

“It is a practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences,” Magie said of her game in a 1902 issue of The Single Tax Review. “It might well have been called the ‘Game of Life,’ as it contains all the elements of success and failure in the real world, and the object is the same as the human race in general seem to have, i.e., the accumulation of wealth.”

As an anti-monopolist, James Magie drew from the theories of George, a charismatic politician and economist who believed that individuals should own 100 percent of what they made or created, but that everything found in nature, particularly land, should belong to everyone. George was a proponent of the “land value tax,” also known as the “single tax.” The general idea was to tax land, and only land, shifting the tax burden to wealthy landlords. His message resonated with many Americans in the late 1800s, when poverty and squalor were on full display in the country’s urban centers.

In its efforts to seize total control of Monopoly and other related games, the company struck a deal with Magie to purchase her Landlord’s Game patent and two more of her game ideas not long after it made its deal with Darrow.

Magie’s identity as Monopoly’s inventor was uncovered by accident. In 1973, Ralph Anspach, an economics professor, began a decade-long legal battle against Parker Brothers over the creation of his Anti-Monopoly game. In researching his case, he uncovered Magie’s patents and Monopoly’s folk-game roots. He became consumed with telling the truth of what he calls “the Monopoly lie.”

Roughly 40 years have passed since the truth about Monopoly began to appear publicly, yet the Darrow myth persists as an inspirational parable of American innovation. It’s hard not to wonder how many other buried histories are still out there — stories belonging to lost Lizzie Magies who quietly chip away at creating pieces of the world, their contributions so seamless that few of us ever stop to think about the person or people behind the idea.

According to the World Health Organization, “lead affects children’s brain development resulting in reduced intelligence quotient (IQ), behavioral changes such as shortening of attention span and increased antisocial behavior, and reduced educational attainment. Lead exposure also causes anemia, hypertension, renal impairment, immunotoxicity and toxicity to the reproductive organs. The neurological and behavioral effects of lead are believed to be irreversible.”

The Hurley Medical Center, in Flint, released a study in September that confirmed what many Flint parents had feared for over a year: The proportion of infants and children with above-average levels of lead in their blood has nearly doubled since the city switched from the Detroit water system to using the Flint River as its water source, in 2014.

The crisis reached a nadir Monday night, when Flint Mayor Karen Weaver declared a state of emergency. “The City of Flint has experienced a Manmade disaster,” Weaver said in a declaratory statement. 1 of 11 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × fa fa

The mayor — elected after her predecessor, Dayne Walling, experienced fallout from his administration’s handling of the water problems — said in the statement that she was seeking support from the federal government to deal with the “irreversible” effects of lead exposure on the city’s children. Weaver thinks that these health consequences will lead to a greater need for special education and mental health services, as well as developments in the juvenile justice system.

To those living in Flint, the announcement may feel as if it has been a long time coming. Almost immediately after the city started drawing from the Flint River in April 2014, residents began complaining about the water, which they said was cloudy in appearance and emitted a foul odor.

Since then, complications from the water coming from the Flint River have only piled up. Although city and state officials initially denied that the water was unsafe, the state issued a notice informing Flint residents that their water contained unlawful levels of trihalomethanes, a chlorine byproduct linked to cancer and other diseases.

Protesters marched to City Hall in the fierce Michigan cold, calling for officials to reconnect Flint’s water to the Detroit system. The use of the Flint River was supposed to be temporary, set to end in 2016 after a pipeline to Lake Huron’s Karegnondi Water Authority is finished.

Through continued demonstrations by Flint residents and mounting scientific evidence of the water’s toxins, city and state officials offered various solutions — from asking residents to boil their water to providing them with water filters — in an attempt to work around the need to reconnect to the Detroit system.

That call was finally made by Snyder (R) on Oct. 8. He announced that he had a plan for coming up with the $12 million to switch Flint back to the Detroit system. On Oct. 16, water started flowing again from Detroit to Flint.

The study found that nearly half of the Exhausted Majority say they have not been politically active in the past year, compared with just 1 percent of the Progressive Activists and Devoted Conservatives, the two least flexible and most ideological of the seven political tribes identified in the study. Forty-one percent said they did not vote in 2016.

The study shows that most Americans have political tastes that are not uniform: They may lean toward one party, but they see things they like in both. Its findings suggest a deep hunger for political leaders who are practical and not tribal — who do not cast the world in starkly moral terms, but in bread-and-butter policy terms.

It concluded that four in five Americans believe that the country has a problem with “political correctness,” which many said made them feel bad but also bewildered — a set of rules they had not learned to decode

“I guess I would have to say that I’m completely confused as to who is lying and who is telling the truth,” Ms. Vetter said. “I just feel helpless.”

The study found that members of the Exhausted Majority are more likely than those on the far ends of the political spectrum to be women, less likely to have a college or graduate degree, less likely to be white and more likely to be young

Fatigue with the noise of politics is so deep, he said, that it might strengthen the chances of candidates offering to be less nakedly partisan.

I think you can win in 2020 by promising that if you become president, people can go back to talking about football.”

The study describes a Democratic base that looks far less like the progressive left and more like the American mainstream. Elizabeth Damon, 54, a veterinarian in Eagle Point, Ore., is a registered Democrat because “I really don’t think anybody should be able to tell me what to do with my own body.” But she also thinks the party has drifted too far left, and in 2016 she voted for Donald Trump

on immigration, Mr. Baltimore prefers Mr. Trump. The Democrats “are just willing to accept anything, anybody and anyone, and that doesn’t fly good with me,” he said.

“The progressives, they just shut you down,” said Mr. Bell, who works on electrical systems of semitrucks. “You are a complete idiot, you don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t have a college degree to even have an opinion on the matter.”

while it is fun to scoff at her hokey spiritual woo and self-help bromides, it is easy to forget that hokey spiritual woo and self-help bromides are extremely powerful and popular among a massive subset of Americans, many of whom represent the exact sort of voters who decide Democratic primaries.

hey can also fall into war with one another, over differences more significant than the debate over Medicare for All.

because the mix of hard scientific materialism and well-meaning liberal humanitarianism has always been somewhat incoherent, the cult of reason necessarily shares space in liberal circles — especially liberal circles outside the innermost ring of the meritocracy — with other cults, other commitments, of the sort associated with “A Course in Miracles.”

in the long run her fusion of spiritual celebrity and political activism might be imitated and amplified, even as her distance from the technocratic norm points to a potential schism in the mind of liberalism

you might usefully describe certain potential intra-liberal conflicts as left-romanticism versus left-technocracy, or “Waldorf versus STEM.”

within the new progressive world there is a tension between a desire to claim the mantle of science and a yearning to fuse the political and mystical — what Tara Isabella Burton has described as the “progressive occultism” of astrological charts and anti-Kavanaugh séances and “Trump-era how-to spellbooks that blend folk magic with activist practice.

t’s also not a coincidence that perhaps the most popular of the Intellectual Dark Webbers, Jordan Peterson, talks about Enlightenment values in one breath while offering Jungian wisdom and invoking biblical archetypes in the next. Chase religious ideas out one door and they inevitably come in another — because the human mind naturally rebels against a worldview as incomplete, as manifestly threadbare, as pure materialism.

her warnings of spiritual crisis are at least as relevant to an America beset by addiction, suicide and atomization as any of Elizabeth Warren’s white papers.

It would take the entire course in miracles to put Williamson in the White House, but she’s right about one big thing: There’s more to heaven and earth, and even to national politics, than is dreamed of in the liberal technocrat’s philosophy.

Like his boss, the campaign manager believed that this was solely about the establishment’s determination to install a protector of the status quo. He insisted to me that Team Bernie was in fact delighted to see it come down to their boss versus Biden — “a perfect foil,” he maintained.

now the Sanders campaign was confronting the judgment of voters: Biden had a center-left coalition (including the allegiance of the party’s crucial black constituency) that seemed capable of prevailing in a general election, while the Sanders movement relied on young voters who weren’t coming out all that abundantly in February and March and therefore couldn’t be counted on to produce a record turnout in November

the gale force of the post-Super Tuesday “Stop Bernie” movement felt, to Bernie and Jane Sanders, far more brutal than it did during the previous cycle. This was not really about wanting to unseat Trump, in the Sanderses’ view. This was about shutting down Sanders’s anti-establishment critique.

In defeat, Sanders has prompted a reckoning within the Democratic Party. He has forced upon it an airing of ideological differences, compelling progressives and moderates to choose their leader and then make the case in public.

The notion that political change and electoral victory were often two different things — that the former could and did occur without the latter — has been an essential tenet of Sanders’s underdog career.

He observed that many politicians “fade away” as their losing campaigns do. This would not be Warren’s fate, he said. Then he explained why: “She has changed political consciousness in America — which, at the end of the day, is the most important thing that any candidate could do.”