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The result, Fred T. March noted in his 1934 review in The Times, “is addressed to the German people, who will not be allowed to read it, urging them to open their eyes. And it is addressed to the world outside bearing the message, ‘Wake up! The barbarians are upon us.’

“How do you know when to sound the alarm?” asked Cohen, who also wrote an introduction to the new edition, when I reached him by phone on book tour in Italy. It’s easy to slam someone for overreacting, he explained. But we would do well to remember the instances in which a strong reaction is justified: “There’s an enormous bravery that comes with writing about the present, an enormous risk and an enormous thrill. You have to ask yourself: ‘What if I’m wrong?’ And also: ‘What if I’m right?’”

the story follows the declining fortunes and trials of a family, the German Jewish Oppermanns, prosperous merchants and professionals, as they scramble to hold on while fascism takes hold of their country. It’s a book that fairly trembles with foreboding and almost aches with sorrow.

Populist ignorance cannot prevail in an enlightened world. Just as New Yorkers scoffed at the idea that Donald Trump, lead buffoon of the tabloid ’80s, could be taken seriously as a presidential candidate, so do the bourgeois intelligentsia of “The Oppermanns” chortle over “Mein Kampf,” a work they find impossible to reckon with in the land of Goethe: “A nation that had concerned itself for centuries so intensively with books, such as those they saw around them, could never allow itself to be deceived by the nonsense in the ‘Protocols’ and in ‘Mein Kampf.’”

Consider the misbegotten assumptions Feuchtwanger took on then that continue to threaten today:

Direct engagement confers legitimacy. When Edgar Oppermann, a doctor, faces antisemitic attacks in the newspapers, his boss advises silence. “The whole of politics is nothing but a pigsty. Unless one cannot help doing otherwise, one should simply ignore them. That’s what annoys the pigsty crowd most.” To confront the forces of illiberalism is only to sully oneself, Edgar believes. Those in the press who propagate such lies “ought to be put into an asylum, not brought before a court of law.”

Technology will out disinformation. At each turn, the Oppermanns and their milieu have trouble believing that propaganda will take hold. “How could they expect to get away with such a monstrous, clumsy lie?” Gustav Oppermann, the central figure in the novel, asks himself after the Nazis blame the burning of the Reichstag on communists. “Nero might have put over such cheap stuff in burning Rome. But things like that were impossible today, in the era of the telephone and printing press.” Of course, the era of Twitter and TikTok has shown that advances in technology still amplify falsehoods

If you ignore it, it will go away. In the novel, two bourgeois Germans foresee a grim future but fall back on complacency. One describes the first world war as “only a curtain-raiser” with “a century of destruction” to follow, predicting, as he puts it, “a military power beyond conception, a judiciary power with severe, restrictive laws and a school system to educate senseless brutes in the ecstasy of self-sacrifice.” His companion merely replies: “All right, if that’s your opinion. But perhaps you’ll have another cognac and a cigar before it happens.”

It’s up to the next generation. The novel’s most tragic figure is the teenage Berthold Oppermann, a student guilty only by ethnicity and familial association. Berated by a Nazi schoolteacher for delivering an allegedly anti-German paper, Berthold says he is “a good German” and refuses to apologize. “You are a good German, are you?” his Nazi teacher sneers. “Well, will you be so good as to leave it to others to decide who is a good German and who is not?”

While classrooms today are a far cry from those in Nazi-era Germany, one needn’t reach far for contemporary parallels, with students increasingly operating in an atmosphere of fear and conformity — of their peers, depending on location, on the right or the left — while the adults too often abdicate responsibility, whether out of complicity or fear.

The situation was inevitable. In the Oppermanns’ world, escalating problems are viewed as uniquely German, unique to their time and to a particular regime. “Our opponents have one tremendous advantage over us; their absolute lack of fairness,” explains a lawyer at one point. “That is the very reason why they are in power today. They have always employed such primitive methods that the rest of us simply did not believe them possible, for they would not have been possible in any other country.”

The Chinese are “watching the war in Ukraine closely and will likely use nuclear coercion to their advantage” in future conflicts, the commander, Adm. Charles A. Richard, told Congress.

Others are learning their own lessons. North Korea, which President Donald J. Trump boasted he would disarm with one-on-one diplomacy, is building new weapons.

What is fast approaching, experts say, is a second nuclear age full of new dangers and uncertainties, less predictable than during the Cold War, with established restraints giving way to more naked threats to reach for such weapons — and a need for new strategies to keep the atomic peace.

the dawning era would feature “both a greater risk of a nuclear arms race and heightened incentives for states to resort to nuclear weapons in a crisis.”

They are designed by the Russians to blur the distinction between conventional and nuclear weapons, which strategists fear makes their use more thinkable.

In the years leading up to the Ukraine invasion, Mr. Putin regularly punctuated his speeches with nuclear propaganda videos, including one that showed a swarm of warheads descending on Florida.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia opened the Ukraine war with a declaration that he was putting his nuclear abilities on some kind of heightened alert — a clear message to Washington to back off.

escalate to de-escalate.”

“There are a lot of things that he would do in the context of escalation before he would get to nuclear weapons,” Ms. Haines said.

The White House, the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies are examining the implications of any potential Russian claim that it is conducting a nuclear test or the use by its forces of a relatively small, battlefield nuclear weapon to demonstrate its ability.

The idea would be to “signal immediate de-escalation” followed by international condemnation, said one administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to provide insight into classified topics.

Henry Kissinger noted in a recent interview with The Financial Times that “there’s almost no discussion internationally about what would happen if the weapons actually became used.” He added: “We are now living in a totally new era.”

The simplest theory is that if China is going to be a superpower, it needs a superpower-sized arsenal. But another is that Beijing recognizes that all the familiar theories of nuclear balance of power are eroding.

“China is heralding a paradigm shift to something much less stable,” Mr. Krepinevich wrote, “a tripolar nuclear system.”

“They’re up to something,” Mr. Albright said of Saudi Arabia, “and they’re rich.”

Some historians, however, believe that such grim depictions of the Middle Ages were greatly exaggerated,

Among its many principles, humanism promoted the idea that man was the center of his own universe, and people should embrace human achievements in education, classical arts, literature and science.

In 1450, the invention of the Gutenberg printing press allowed for improved communication throughout Europe and for ideas to spread more quickly.

Great Italian writers, artists, politicians and others declared that they were participating in an intellectual and artistic revolution that would be much different from what they experienced during the Dark Ages.

Although other European countries experienced their Renaissance later than Italy, the impacts were still revolutionary.

Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519): Italian painter, architect, inventor, and “Renaissance man” responsible for painting “The Mona Lisa” and “The Last Supper.

Galieo (1564-1642): Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer whose pioneering work with telescopes enabled him to describes the moons of Jupiter and rings of Saturn. Placed under house arrest for his views of a heliocentric universe.

Donatello (1386–1466): Italian sculptor celebrated for lifelike sculptures like “David,” commissioned by the Medici family.

Raphael (1483–1520): Italian painter who learned from da Vinci and Michelangelo. Best known for his paintings of the Madonna and “The School of Athens.”

Michelangelo (1483–1520): Italian sculptor, painter, and architect who carved “David” and painted The Sistine Chapel in Rome.

Art, architecture and science were closely linked during the Renaissance.

For instance, artists like da Vinci incorporated scientific principles, such as anatomy into their work, so they could recreate the human body with extraordinary precision.

Renaissance art was characterized by realism and naturalism. Artists strived to depict people and objects in a true-to-life way.

Some of the most famous artistic works that were produced during the Renaissance include:The Mona Lisa (Da Vinci)The Last Supper (Da Vinci)Statue of David (Michelangelo)The Birth of Venus (Botticelli)The Creation of Adam (Michelangelo)

Also, changing trade routes led to a period of economic decline and limited the amount of money that wealthy contributors could spend on the arts.

By the early 17th century, the Renaissance movement had died out, giving way to the Age of Enlightenment.

While many scholars view the Renaissance as a unique and exciting time in European history, others argue that the period wasn’t much different from the Middle Ages and that both eras overlapped more than traditional accounts suggest.

I have some fond memories of my trips to the pre-collapse Soviet Union (I made four from 1983 to 1991). It was a weird and fascinating place. But it was also every inch the “evil empire” that President Ronald Reagan described, a place of fear and daily low-grade paranoia where any form of social attachment, whether religion or simple hobbies, was discouraged if it fell outside the control of the party-state.

the idea that anyone in Moscow would be stupid or deranged enough to want to reassemble the Soviet Union seemed to me a laughable fantasy. Even Putin himself—at least in public—often dismissed the idea.

I was wrong. I underestimated the power of Soviet imperial nostalgia. And so today, I grieve.

It was never designed, however, to function with one of its permanent members running amok as a nuclear-armed rogue state, and so today the front line of freedom is in Ukraine

I have lived through two eras, one an age of undeclared war between two ideological foes that threatened instant destruction, the next a time of increasing freedom and global integration. This second world was full of chaos, but it was also grounded in hope

I was convinced that everything I knew was more than likely destined to end in flames. Peace seemed impossible; war felt imminent.

Now I live in a new era, one in which the world order created in 1945 is collapsing.

The United Nations, as I once wrote, is a squalid and dysfunctional organization, but it is still one of the greatest achievements of humanity.

The Soviet collapse did not mean the end of war or of dictatorships, but after 1991, time seemed to be on the side of peace and democracy, if only we could summon the will and find the leadership to build on our heroic triumphs over Nazism and Communism.

But democracy is under attack everywhere, including here in the United States

I will celebrate the courage of Ukraine, the wisdom of NATO, and the steadfastness of the world’s democracies

But I also hear the quiet rustling of a shroud that is settling over the dreams—and perhaps, illusions—of a better world that for a moment seemed only inches from our grasp.

I do not know how this third era of my life will end, or if I will be alive to see it end. All I know is that I feel now as I did that night in Red Square, when I knew that democracy was in the fight of its life, that we might be facing a catastrophe, and that we must never waver.

This is a delayed but inescapable consequence of China’s birth trends from the era of the notorious one-child policy (1980-2015)

Beijing thus far has ignored this looming crisis because planners don’t prepare for things they don’t track. Officials don’t regard data on the family as relevant to statecraft or security. So statistics tally males and females—not uncles, sisters, cousins, widows.

We estimate past patterns and project trends through demographic modeling—simulations replicating China’s available population numbers—while “building” family trees consistent with those figures. We can approximate nationwide changes in China’s extended family networks in the past with reasonable validity and describe what lies ahead with fair confidence.

we are only now living through the era of “peak kin” in China. In terms of sheer numbers, Chinese networks of blood relatives were never nearly as thick as at the start of the 21st century.

Because of dramatic postwar improvements in health and mortality, men and women in their 40s today have on average five times as many living cousins as in 1960.

China’s “kin explosion” may be an important, heretofore unobserved factor in China’s remarkable economic performance since Mao Zedong’s death in 1976.

China is now on the cusp of a severe and unavoidable “kin crash,” driven by prolonged subreplacement fertility

China’s rising generations will likely have fewer living relatives than ever before in Chinese history.

A “kin famine” will thus unfold unforgivingly over the next 30 years—starting now. As it intensifies, the Chinese family—the most important institution protecting Chinese people against adversity in bad times and helping them seize opportunity in good times—will increasingly falter in both these crucial functions.

China’s withering of the family is set to collide with a tsunami of new social need from the country’s huge elderly population, whose ranks will more than double between 2020 and 2050

By 2050 living parents and in-laws will outnumber children for middle-aged Chinese men and women. Thus exigency may overturn basic familial arrangements that have long been taken for granted. The focus of the family in China will necessarily turn from the rearing of the young to the care of the old.

The reliability and durability of familial bonds of duty will be an increasingly critical question—perhaps even a matter of life and death for many, including frail and impecunious elders in the Chinese hinterlands

growing numbers of men in decades ahead will enter old age without spouses or children—the traditional sources of support for the elderly.

by 2050, 18% of China’s men in their 60s will have no living descendants, twice the fraction today.

who will look after these unfortunates?

Still worse than the macroeconomic implications of old-age dependency may be the effect of China’s family crisis on the so-called micro-foundations of the national economy—the little things that make markets work.

Since earliest recorded history, China’s guanxi networks, a distinctive form of special relationships and professional connections, have helped get business done by reducing uncertainty and transaction costs. The proliferation of blood relatives was likely a powerful stimulant for growth during the era of China’s phenomenal upswing.

the kin dearth may prove an economic depressant well beyond what current “head count” projections suggest.

China’s coming family revolution could easily conduce to a rise in personal risk aversion. Risk aversion may in turn dampen mobility, including migration.

Less migration means less urbanization, which means less growth—and possibly still more pessimism and risk aversion.

If the waning of the family requires China to build a huge social welfare state over the coming generation, as we surmise it will, Beijing would have that much less wherewithal for influencing events abroad through economic diplomacy and defense policy.

by 2050 at least half of China’s overall pool of male military-age manpower will be made up of only children. Any encounter by China’s security forces involving significant loss of life will presage lineage extinction for many Chinese families.

Autocracies are typically tolerant of casualties—but maybe not in the only-child China of today and the decades ahead.

Failure to contemplate the implications of the coming changes in Chinese family structure could prove a costly blind spot for the Communist Party. Blind spots expose governments to the risk of strategic surprise. The consequences of social, economic and political risks tend to be greatest when states aren’t prepared for them.

Japan's Meiji Restoration of 1868 and Turkey's Kemalist Reforms that followed the establishment of the republic in 1923 are both models of modernization adopted by lagging countries in the periphery of the West. Both ushered in new eras for their respective countries and both involved great risks, often implementing drastic measures and facing hostile opposition

"Humanity is in need of a great restoration; our region is in need of a great restoration, and right in the center of all this great restoration, our very nation is striving for its own great restoration within itself." One does not repeat with such fervor the "need to restore greatly" unless they are making a point about the distinction between restoration and reform

The Ottoman Empire had already tried, and failed at, something similar in 1839 with the Tanzimat Reorganization, so by the time Ataturk's Kemalist Reforms rolled around 50 years after the Meiji Restoration, modernity and tradition seemed irreconcilable: modernization could not occur without Westernization. Almost everything was brought in line with the West; clothing was Europeanized, the alphabet was Latinized, numerals were - rather ironically - Arabized, and women could now not only display their hair but also vote and pursue professional careers, just to name a few

Erdoğan doesn't seek a return to pre-revolutionary Turkey. His actions aren't those of an overzealous Ottoman romantic but rather of a Meiji restorer, re-appropriating the republican revolution by redefining its spirit and essence to one that blends Western innovation with local culture, tradition and historic bonds -- "Western technique, Ottoman spirit"

the fundamental divergence between the two paradigms was in their disagreement over the role of culture. Adopting the slogan "Western technique, Japanese spirit," the Meiji Restoration involved taking the technological, scientific, industrial and military advancements of the West but retaining Japanese values. Japanese culture needed not be sacrificed in adopting modern economic and military techniques and would in fact be the glue that kept a revolutionary society together.

synthesizing the best of the West and the best of the East in order to strengthen his hand.

If your country has spent the past nine decades claiming to be a copy of the West, then the West has no reason to see you as anything more than an inferior copy of itself.

Roughly 72 percent of likely Trump voters believe the American way of life has changed for the worse since the 1950s, but 70 percent of likely Clinton voters say things have changed for the better.

“Does the future look bright? Are we going to reach back for something in the past? Or are we going to lean into the cultural and demographic changes that are happening in the country and even celebrate those changes?”

the winner, Jones says, will face a daunting challenge: unifying a country that’s divided on partisan lines, including political correctness and whether the election itself will be legitimate.

nearly half think the era of Beyonce, Islamic State group and Black Lives Matter is so bad that the country needs an authoritarian leader “who is willing to break some rules in order to set things right.”

vangelical Protestants had the most pessimistic view of any group: Nearly three-quarters of them – 74 percent – say American culture has changed for the worse since the 1950s

Left-right partisanship, along with class, race and education levels, divides Americans on nearly every issue:

Democrats overwhelmingly believe immigrants make America stronger, while Republicans clearly believe they’re detrimental to the national character;

a wide margin of Democrats worry about wealth and inequality, while less than a third of Republicans think it’s a concern.

“To the sense that there’s this vertigo among many, particularly those who are on the losing side of this change, and feeling left behind, is not so surprising, I think

This vision involves “a mix of dependence on others and obligations to them,” Levin writes, “and so a connection with specific people with whom you share some meaningful portion of the actual experience of life.”

Levin understands the allure of nostalgia; indeed, he believes that almost all contemporary politics is based on it

These competing nostalgias, though more sophisticated than Trump’s, are no less misguided, and lead to bad politics and policy.

Sure, there is plenty to long for, Levin says. In the early decades of the post-World War II era, the United States enjoyed “relative cultural cohesion, low economic inequality, high confidence in national institutions, and widespread optimism about the nation’s prospects” (especially if you were white and male). But that was a unique pivot point in U.S. history, a time when the country was straddling two opposing forces that would define the American century: consolidation and diffusion.

The first half of the 20th century, Levin contends, was an age of consolidation, with a peerless industrial economy, a strong centralized government and a relatively uniform cultural identity shaped by a powerful mass media.

In the century’s second half, by contrast, the U.S. economy became more diversified and deregulated, while cultural conformity broke down in favor of individualism and the politics of personal identity.

for a fleeting moment at midcentury, it enjoyed the best of both. “The social, political, and economic forms of American life at midcentury made possible a degree of prosperity and cohesion that in turn enabled many Americans to flourish,”

“Democrats talk about public policy as though it were always 1965 and the model of the Great Society welfare state will answer our every concern,”

Republicans talk as though it were always 1981 and a repetition of the Reagan Revolution is the cure for what ails us.”

This stale — and stalemated — debate leaves people discouraged with politicians who don’t seem engaged with their current struggles. “In the absence of relief from their own resulting frustration, a growing number of voters opt for leaders who simply embody or articulate that frustration,”

the nostalgia of the traditional political class is also pernicious and “blinding,” Levin argues, because it keeps us from grappling with the real problems assaulting us in the age of diffusion

“In liberating many individuals from oppressive social constraints, we have also estranged many from their families and unmoored them from their communities, work, and faith,”

“Rather than decrying the collapse of moral order, we must draw people’s eyes and hearts to the alternative.” Their incessant focus on religious liberty, for example, while important, may be counterproductive, “a fundamentally plaintive and inward-looking minority asking to protect what it has and in essence to be left alone,”

In unleashing markets to meet the needs and wants of consumers, we have freed them also to treat workers as dispensable and interchangeable.

In pursuing meritocracy, we have magnified inequality.”

“In loosening the reins of cultural conformity and national identity we have weakened the roots of mutual trust.

he worries that the price of this new freedom has been high. “We have set loose a scourge of loneliness and isolation that we are still afraid to acknowledge as the distinct social dysfunction of our age of individualism, just as crushing conformity was the characteristic scourge of an era of cohesion and national unity,”

The answer to all this is the pursuit of what Levin describes as a “modernized politics of subsidiarity — that is, of putting power, authority and significance as close to the level of interpersonal community as reasonably possible.”

He is most concerned with the thicket of institutions in the middle — families, schools, religious organizations, all the things usually lumped together as civil society.

“we should see it as an effort to open up the space between them — the space where a free society can genuinely thrive.” Our objective should be to “channel power and resources to the mediating institutions of society and allow for bottom-up problem solving that takes a variety of specialized, adapted forms.”

It is a very Tocquevillian vision, with a dash of Catholic social teaching thrown in. No doubt, to yearn for the renewal of these traditional institutions is its own kind of nostalgia.

So how do we go about strengthening families, religious organizations, schools and all those mediating institutions?

He calls for a “mobility agenda,” with economic growth spurred by tax and regulatory reform

a more competitive and low-cost health-care system, lower budget deficits — all part of a standard conservative recipe.

He proposes education reform that includes more professional certificates, apprenticeships “and other ways of gaining the skills for well-paid employment that do not require a college degree.”

Levin’s intention here is less to offer detailed proposals than to shift the locus of policymaking itself — and to infuse it with greater humility. “There is not much that public policy can do,” he admits, “to create communities that do a better job of encouraging constructive behavior: it could, however, do less harm, and it could leave room for such communities to form, and protect the space in which they take root and grow.”

The result is a bifurcated America, torn between wealth and poverty, order and disorder. “Increasingly, society consists of individuals and a national state, while the mediating institutions — family, community, church, unions, and others — fade and falter.”

Instead, social and religious conservatives should “assert themselves by offering living models of their alternative to the moral culture of our hyper-individualist age.”

In other words, less hectoring and lecturing, less trying to remake the culture at large, and more strengthening one’s “near-at-hand community,” Levin writes. He calls this approach “subcultural traditionalism

he sees it in “civic groups that channel their energies into making neighborhoods safe and attractive, or into helping the poor, or protecting the vulnerable, or assimilating immigrants, or helping fight addiction

in schools that build character and inculcate the values parents think are most important; in religious congregations that mold themselves into living communities of like-minded families, and that turn their faiths into works to improve the lives of others;

in the work of teachers and students who are committed to liberal learning and engagement with the deepest questions.”

Such a localized focus, Levin maintains, is not “an alternative to fighting for the soul of the larger society, but a most effective means of doing so.”

I suspect the fulfillment of Levin’s vision would require a party and a movement that grasp the exhaustion of their current approach. A November defeat, especially a landslide, might accomplish that

race — what Dew calls “the absolute belief in white supremacy — unquestioned white superiority/unquestioned black inferiority” — only deepens the question. What does that mean? Where does that belief come from? What sustains it?

It survives, I think, largely because after all these years we cannot imagine ourselves without it, because we are emotionally invested in the intellectually lazy notion that eye shape, hair texture or melanin content can somehow be correlated to individual destiny, honesty, athleticism, musicality, intelligence and worth.

As Martin Luther King Jr. once put it: “If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the Southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow. And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man.

“I don’t know where my head or heart was,” he said. “I don’t know where my parents’ heads and hearts were, or my teachers’. . . . We were blind to the reality of racism and afraid, I guess, of change.”

alt-right websites will continue to spew misinformation that undermines tolerance and democracy. I find them particularly loathsome because they do their best to magnify prejudice against blacks, Muslims and Latinos, tearing our social fabric.

A BuzzFeed investigation found that of the Facebook posts it examined from three major right-wing websites, 38 percent were either false or a mixture of truth and falsehood.

More discouraging, it was the lies that readers were particularly eager to share and thus profitable to publish.

Freedom Daily had the most inaccurate Facebook page reviewed, and also produced the right-wing content most likely to go viral.

Alt-right and fake news sites for some reason have emerged in particular in Macedonia, in the former Yugoslavia. BuzzFeed found more than 100 sites about U.S. politics from a single town, Veles, population 45,000, in Macedonia. “I started the site for a easy way to make money,” a 17-year-old Macedonian who runs DailyNewsPolitics.com told BuzzFeed.

Facebook has been a powerful platform to disseminate these lies. If people see many articles on their Facebook feed, shared by numerous conservative friends, all indicating that Hillary Clinton is about to be indicted for crimes she committed, they may believe it.

These sites were dubbed “alt-right” because they originally were an alternative to mainstream conservatism. Today they have morphed into the mainstream: After all, Steve Bannon, the head of Breitbart, one of these sites full of misinformation, ran Trump’s campaign.

alt-right sites agitate for racial hatred. Freedom Daily lately has had “trending now” headlines like “Black Lives Thug Rapes/Kills 69 y/o White Woman.

There are also hyperpartisan left-wing websites with inaccuracies, but they are less prone to fabrication than the right-wing sites. Indeed, the Macedonian entrepreneurs originally came up with leftist websites targeting Bernie Sanders supporters but didn’t find much reader interest in them.

The landscape ahead looks grim to me. While the business model for mainstream journalism is in crisis, these alt-right websites expand as they monetize false “news” that promotes racism and undermines democracy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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