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Cave painting represents one of the most concrete examples of symbolic behavior, but experts have struggled to establish ages for these important prehistoric creations.

To calculate more accurate dates, the researchers tested a variety of abstract images from Spanish cave walls, including hand stencils and red disks at the El Castillo site.

The Neanderthal authorship theory is sure to raise a few eyebrows, Zilhão admitted, but it supports a growing body of evidence that the species was no less modern or human than modern humans.

“It’s a project for a generation; it’s going to take till 2040 or 2050, and it’s hard,” said Gerd Rosenkranz, a former journalist at Der Spiegel who’s now an analyst at Agora Energiewende, a Berlin think tank. “It’s making electricity more expensive for individual consumers. And still, if you ask people in a poll, Do you want the energiewende? then 90 percent say yes.”

The Germans have an origin myth: It says they came from the dark and impenetrable heart of the forest

. The forest became the place where Germans go to restore their souls—a habit that predisposed them to care about the environment.

So in the late 1970s, when fossil fuel emissions were blamed for killing German forests with acid rain, the outrage was nationwide. The oil embargo of 1973 had already made Germans, who have very little oil and gas of their own, think about energy. The threat ofwaldsterben, or forest death, made them think harder.

I came away thinking there would have been no energiewende at all without antinuclear sentiment—the fear of meltdown is a much more powerful and immediate motive than the fear of slowly rising temperatures and seas.

energy researcher Volker Quaschning put it this way: “Nuclear power affects me personally. Climate change affects my kids. That’s the difference.”

NG STAFF; EVAN APP

Demonstrators in the 1970s and ’80s were protesting not just nuclear reactors but plans to deploy American nuclear missiles in West Germany. The two didn’t seem separable. When the German Green Party was founded in 1980, pacifism and opposition to nuclear power were both central tenets.

Chernobyl was a watershed.

The environmental movement’s biggest mistake has been to say, ‘Do less. Tighten your belts. Consume less,’ ” Fell said. “People associate that with a lower quality of life. ‘Do things differently, with cheap, renewable electricity’—that’s the message.”

It was 1990, the year Germany was officially reunified—and while the country was preoccupied with that monumental task, a bill boosting the energiewende made its way through the Bundestag without much public notice. Just two pages long, it enshrined a crucial principle: Producers of renewable electricity had the right to feed into the grid, and utilities had to pay them a “feed-in tariff.” Wind turbines began to sprout in the windy north.

The biogas, the solar panels that cover many roofs, and especially the wind turbines allow Wildpoldsried to produce nearly five times as much electricity as it consumes.

In a recent essay William Nordhaus, a Yale economist who has spent decades studying the problem of addressing climate change, identified what he considers its essence: free riders. Because it’s a global problem, and doing something is costly, every country has an incentive to do nothing and hope that others will act. While most countries have been free riders, Germany has behaved differently: It has ridden out ahead. And in so doing, it has made the journey easier for the rest of us.

At the peak of the boom, in 2012, 7.6 gigawatts of PV panels were installed in Germany in a single year—the equivalent, when the sun is shining, of seven nuclear plants. A German solar-panel industry blossomed, until it was undercut by lower-cost manufacturers in China—which took the boom worldwide

Germans paid for this success not through taxes but through a renewable-energy surcharge on their electricity bills. This year the surcharge is 6.17 euro cents per kilowatt-hour, which for the average customer amounts to about 18 euros a month—a hardship for some

The German economy as a whole devotes about as much of its gross national product to electricity as it did in 1991.

Ideally, to reduce emissions, Germany should replace lignite with gas. But as renewables have flooded the grid, something else has happened: On the wholesale market where contracts to deliver electricity are bought and sold, the price of electricity has plummeted, such that gas-fired power plants and sometimes even plants burning hard coal are priced out of the market.

Old lignite-fired power plants are rattling along at full steam, 24/7, while modern gas-fired plants with half the emissions are standing idle.

“Of course we have to find a track to get rid of our coal—it’s very obvious,” said Jochen Flasbarth, state secretary in the environment ministry. “But it’s quite difficult. We are not a very resource-rich country, and the one resource we have is lignite.”

Vattenfall formally inaugurated its first German North Sea wind park, an 80-turbine project called DanTysk that lies some 50 miles offshore. The ceremony in a Hamburg ballroom was a happy occasion for the city of Munich too. Its municipal utility, Stadtwerke München, owns 49 percent of the project. As a result Munich now produces enough renewable electricity to supply its households, subway, and tram lines. By 2025 it plans to meet all of its demand with renewables.

Last spring Gabriel proposed a special emissions levy on old, inefficient coal plants; he soon had 15,000 miners and power plant workers, encouraged by their employers, demonstrating outside his ministry. In July the government backed down. Instead of taxing the utilities, it said it would pay them to shut down a few coal plants—achieving only half the planned emissions savings. For the energiewende to succeed, Germany will have to do much more.

The government’s goal is to have a million electric cars on the road by 2020; so far there are about 40,000. The basic problem is that the cars are still too expensive for most Germans, and the government hasn’t offered serious incentives to buy them—it hasn’t done for transportation what Fell’s law did for electricity.

“The strategy has always been to modernize old buildings in such a way that they use almost no energy and cover what they do use with renewables,” said Matthias Sandrock, a researcher at the Hamburg Institute. “That’s the strategy, but it’s not working. A lot is being done, but not enough.”

All over Germany, old buildings are being wrapped in six inches of foam insulation and refitted with modern windows. Low-interest loans from the bank that helped rebuild the war-torn west with Marshall Plan funds pay for many projects. Just one percent of the stock is being renovated every year, though

For all buildings to be nearly climate neutral by 2050—the official goal—the rate would need to double at least.

here’s the thing about the Germans: They knew the energiewende was never going to be a walk in the forest, and yet they set out on it. What can we learn from them? We can’t transplant their desire to reject nuclear power. We can’t appropriate their experience of two great nation-changing projects—rebuilding their country when it seemed impossible, 70 years ago, and reunifying their country when it seemed forever divided, 25 years ago. But we can be inspired to think that the energiewende might be possible for other countries too.

Fell’s law, then, helped drive down the cost of solar and wind, making them competitive in many regions with fossil fuels. One sign of that: Germany’s tariff for large new solar facilities has fallen from 50 euro cents a kilowatt-hour to less than 10. “We’ve created a completely new situation in 15 years

Curtailing its use is made harder by the fact that Germany’s big utilities have been losing money lately—because of the energiewende, they say; because of their failure to adapt to the energiewende, say their critics. E.ON, the largest utility, which owns Grafenrheinfeld and many other plants, declared a loss of more than three billion euros last year.

“The utilities in Germany had one strategy,” Flasbarth said, “and that was to defend their track—nuclear plus fossil. They didn’t have a strategy B.”

In a conference room, Olaf Adermann, asset manager for Vattenfall’s lignite operations, explained that Vattenfall and other utilities had never expected renewables to take off so fast. Even with the looming shutdown of more nuclear reactors, Germany has too much generating capacity.

His own other publications included a biography of Mussolini (1982), and further, separate studies of Garibaldi and Cavour were joined in 1994 by a biography of Giuseppe Mazzini, the other leading figure of the Risorgimento. Denis also edited The Making of Italy, 1796-1866 (1988), and co-authored A History of Sicily (1986) with Moses Finley and Christopher Duggan.

Denis’s success set in train a whole host of British scholars working on modern and contemporary Italy. The Association for the Study of modern Italy, which organises an annual conference and publishes the journal modern Italy, was set up in 1982, and Denis followed Christopher Seton-Watson as its chair. He was made a fellow of the British Academy (1976), a Grande Ufficiale dell’Ordine di Merito della Repubblica Italiana (1984) and a CBE (1990).

a provocative 2009 paper titled “Conspiracy Theories.” As always, they begin with a genuine problem: in this case, the spread of harmful untruths like birtherism or trutherism. Their basic idea is that government agencies should be allowed to pursue a project of “cognitive infiltration,” anonymously mucking about in conspiracy circles in order to sow doubt and confusion

Who, in the end, has the capacity to employ the awesome powers of the modern state?

Schmitt showed, they believe, that the executive branch is the proper locus of sovereignty and the one that is most legitimately linked with the people. It is also the only one with the capacity and speed to act in times of emergency.

Vermeule and Posner published two books, Terror in the Balance (2007) and Executive Unbound (2009), that brought Schmitt’s insights into the context of contemporary America and its global War on Terror. The books mount a robust defense of executive leeway, including the right to use “enhanced interrogation”—or, in layman’s terms, torture.

it is hard not to place him into a recognizable genealogy of liberal Protestants, ensconced in the mainstream intellectual culture of their day, who found their way to Rome. Jacques Maritain belongs in this camp, as do G.K. Chesterton and Alasdair MacIntyre. Like Vermeule, they brought the zeal of the convert with them, and were often more radical than cradle Catholics

one can find quite similar trajectories: deep engagement in mainstream, non-Catholic schools, which brought them to unresolvable contradictions. The Church offered them answers to questions they already had.

His scholarship with Sunstein and Posner labored mightily to persuade us that shreds of paper, be they constitutions or laws, were irrational guides to social betterment. And yet what was to take their place?

How can the state make decisions about ethical matters, which it must do, and why ought those decisions be viewed as legitimate? What, in the end, do citizens share with one another? These are first-order questions

Liberal individualism had always relied upon, and was even a relic of, constitutional legalism. The whole idea had been that law could structure social relations, allowing different cultures and religions to live in relative harmony. By depriving the law of this sort of social function, the law and economics circle opened up a vast new set of questions about how the social order might cohere.

Vermeule’s co-authors looked to the individual and her preferences, as stewarded by a free market and enlightened administrative agencies

Vermeule, however, came to see liberalism as purely destructive: as a set of tools and procedures whose primary purpose was to reshape social reality in its own image, steamrolling the virtues of the people in the name of individualism and science

he has begun to entertain dark visions about how the administrative state might coerce the unruly people toward virtue. He positively cites Joseph de Maistre, a Catholic critic of the French Revolution and fellow defender of torture. Vermeule dreams of a world in which we will “sear the liberal faith with hot irons” in order “to defeat and capture the hearts and minds of liberal agents.” A less honest thinker would be sure to remind readers that this is all meant metaphorically. Vermeule does no such thing and goes out of his way to assert that “coercion” ought to be on the table. There is only one way to read this: he is arguing that actual violence could legitimately be used to convert hearts and minds.

Vermeule’s theory, in Law’s Abnegation and elsewhere, has been that the modern state is not actually governed by law or courts but by administrative agencies like the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Education. And his proposal in his more radical writings is that those agencies ought to be staffed by integralists who would bend the powers of the state in his desired direction.

“We have learned from behavioral economics,” he reminds us, that administrative agents can “nudge whole populations in desirable directions.” The theory that the state might “nudge” citizens toward more optimal outcomes, as defined by technocrats, is the famous theory developed by Sunstein

Vermeule is saying, if we are going to grant the administrative state the right to mold citizen behavior, why stop there? We might be nudged, he thinks, with hot irons; we might be nudged right back to the Inquisition.

He is not exactly a “populist” and is more committed to the reign of the Church than he is to that of the Republican Party. And yet, given his apologetics for the Eastern European regimes that are currently committed to gutting judiciaries and human rights protections, there is no doubt which side he will be on if or when the true moment of crisis arrives in our imperiled republic

Vermeule’s story shows us just how easily technocracy, by evacuating the moral center of our politics, can tip toward a moralizing authoritarianism that promises to restore one—how easily, in other words, Bloomberg might tip into Bonaparte.

Anti-Semitism in America declined after World War II. But as Leo Ribuffo points out, the underlying narrative — of a diabolical transnational cabal of aliens plotting to undermine the very foundations of Christian civilization — survived in the anti-Communist diatribes of Joseph McCarthy. The alien narrative continues today in the work of National Review writers like Andrew McCarthy (“How Obama Embraces Islam’s Sharia Agenda”) and Lisa Schiffren

When Trump vowed on the campaign trail to Make America Great Again, he was generally unclear about when exactly it stopped being great. The Vanderbilt University historian Jefferson Cowie tells a story that points to a possible answer.

In his book “The Great Exception,” he suggests that what historians considered the main event in 20th century American political development — the rise and consolidation of the “New Deal order” — was in fact an anomaly, made politically possible by a convergence of political factors. One of those was immigration. At the beginning of the 20th century, millions of impoverished immigrants, mostly Catholic and Jewish, entered an overwhelmingly Protestant country. It was only when that demographic transformation was suspended by the 1924 Immigration Act that majorities of Americans proved willing to vote for many liberal policies.

Future historians won’t find all that much of a foundation for Trumpism in the grim essays of William F. Buckley, the scrupulous constitutionalist principles of Barry Goldwater or the bright-eyed optimism of Ronald Reagan. They’ll need instead to study conservative history’s political surrealists and intellectual embarrassments, its con artists and tribunes of white rage.

In their 1987 book, “Right Turn,” the political scientists Joel Rogers and Thomas Ferguson presented public-opinion data demonstrating that Reagan’s crusade against activist government, which was widely understood to be the source of his popularity, was not, in fact, particularly popular. For example, when Reagan was re-elected in 1984, only 35 percent of voters favored significant cuts in social programs to reduce the deficit

Much excellent scholarship, well worth revisiting in the age of Trump, suggests an explanation for Reagan’s subsequent success at cutting back social programs in the face of hostile public opinion: It was business leaders, not the general public, who moved to the right, and they became increasingly aggressive and skilled in manipulating the political process behind the scenes.

another answer hides in plain sight. The often-cynical negotiation between populist electioneering and plutocratic governance on the right has long been not so much a matter of policy as it has been a matter of show business.

It is a short leap from advertising and reality TV to darker forms of manipulation. Consider the parallels since the 1970s between conservative activism and the traditional techniques of con men. Direct-mail pioneers like Richard Viguerie created hair-on-fire campaign-fund-raising letters about civilization on the verge of collapse.

In 1965, Congress once more allowed large-scale immigration to the United States — and it is no accident that this date coincides with the increasing conservative backlash against liberalism itself, now that its spoils would be more widely distributed among nonwhites.

Why Is There So Much Scholarship on ‘Conservatism,’ and Why Has It Left the Historical Profession So Obtuse About Trumpism?” One reason, as Ribuffo argues, is the conceptual error of identifying a discrete “modern conservative movement” in the first place. Another reason, though, is that historians of conservatism, like historians in general, tend to be liberal, and are prone to liberalism’s traditions of politesse. It’s no surprise that we are attracted to polite subjects like “colorblind conservatism” or William F. Buckley.

Ribuffo argued that America’s anti-liberal traditions were far more deeply rooted in the past, and far angrier, than most historians would acknowledge, citing a long list of examples from “regional suspicions of various metropolitan centers and the snobs who lived there” to “white racism institutionalized in slavery and segregation.”

Until the 1990s, the most influential writer on the subject of the American right was Richard Hofstadter, a colleague of Trilling’s at Columbia University in the postwar years. Hofstadter was the leader of the “consensus” school of historians; the “consensus” being Americans’ supposed agreement upon moderate liberalism as the nation’s natural governing philosophy.

He didn’t take the self-identified conservatives of his own time at all seriously. He called them “pseudoconservatives” and described, for instance, followers of the red-baiting Republican senator Joseph McCarthy as cranks who salved their “status anxiety” with conspiracy theories and bizarre panaceas. He named this attitude “the paranoid style in American politics”

in 1994, the scholar Alan Brinkley published an essay called “The Problem of American Conservatism” in The American Historical Review. American conservatism, Brinkley argued, “had been something of an orphan in historical scholarship,” and that was “coming to seem an ever-more-curious omission.” The article inaugurated the boom in scholarship that brought us the story, now widely accepted, of conservatism’s triumphant rise

American historians’ relationship to conservatism itself has a troubled history. Even after Ronald Reagan’s electoral-college landslide in 1980, we paid little attention to the right: The central narrative of America’s political development was still believed to be the rise of the liberal state.

If Donald Trump is the latest chapter of conservatism’s story, might historians have been telling that story wrong?

The professional guardians of America’s past, in short, had made a mistake. We advanced a narrative of the American right that was far too constricted to anticipate the rise of a man like Trump

But if Hofstadter was overly dismissive of how conservatives understood themselves, the new breed of historians at times proved too credulous. McGirr diligently played down the sheer bloodcurdling hysteria of conservatives during the period she was studyin

Lisa McGirr, now of Harvard University, whose 2001 book, “Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right,” became a cornerstone of the new literature. Instead of pronouncing upon conservatism from on high, as Hofstadter had, McGirr, a social historian, studied it from the ground up, attending respectfully to what activists understood themselves to be doing. What she found was “a highly educated and thoroughly modern group of men and women,” normal participants in the “bureaucratized world of post-World War II America.” They built a “vibrant and remarkable political mobilization,

I sometimes made the same mistake. Writing about the movement that led to Goldwater’s 1964 Republican nomination, for instance, it never occurred to me to pay much attention to McCarthyism, even though McCarthy helped Goldwater win his Senate seat in 1952, and Goldwater supported McCarthy to the end. (As did William F. Buckley.) I was writing about the modern conservative movement, the one that led to Reagan, not about the brutish relics of a more gothic, ill-formed and supposedly incoherent reactionary era that preceded it.

A few historians have provocatively followed a different intellectual path, avoiding both the bloodlessness of the new social historians and the psychologizing condescension of the old Hofstadter school. Foremost among them is Leo Ribuffo, a professor at George Washington University.

Modern Egyptians, by comparison, share much more DNA with sub-Saharan populations.

The findings have turned years of theory on its head

Heat and high humidity in tombs, paired with some of the chemicals involved in mummification, all contribute to DNA degradation

They found that the sample set showed a strong connection with a cluster of ancient non-African populations based east of the Mediterranean Sea

This is not just the DNA of one person. It's the DNA of the parents, grandparents, grandparents' parents, grand-grand-grandparents' parents and so forth

Strict social structures and legal incentives to marry along ethnic lines within these communities may have played a part in the Egyptians' genetic stasis

A lot of people has assumed foreign invaders ... brought a lot of genetic ancestry into the region," Krause said. "People expected that through time, Egypt would become more European, but we see the exact opposite

Modern Egyptians were found to "inherit 8% more ancestry from African ancestors" than the mummies studied. The paper cites increased mobility along the Nile, increased long-distance commerce and the era of the trans-Saharan slave trade as potential reasons why

The team's findings do come with one obvious caveat: "All our genetic data (was) obtained from a single site in Middle Egypt and may not be representative for all of ancient Egypt

Anton’s critique was that I was half-right and half-wrong. I was right to see democracy degenerating into tyranny but wrong to see any way to avoid it. What he calls “Caesarism” is already here, as Obama’s abuse of executive power proved. Therefore: “If we must have Caesar, who do you want him to be? One of theirs? Or one of yours (ours)?”

he writes a reactionary blog, Unqualified Reservations, under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug and has earned a cult following among the alt-right. His magnum opus — “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives” — is an alternately chilling and entertaining assault on almost everything educated Westerners hold to be self-evidently true.

Yarvin believes that the Western mind became corrupted during the Enlightenment itself. The very idea of democracy, allied with reason and constitutionalism, is bunk: “Washington has failed. The Constitution has failed. Democracy has failed.” His golden era: the age of monarchs. (“It is hard not to imagine that world as happier, wealthier, freer, more civilized, and more pleasant.”) His solution: “It is time for restoration, for national salvation, for a full reboot. We need a new government, a clean slate, a fresh hand which is smart, strong and fair.”

The assumption that all of history has led inexorably to today’s glorious and democratic present is, he argues, a smug and self-serving delusion. It’s what used to be called Whig History, the idea that all of human history led up to the democratic institutions and civilizational achievements of liberal Britain, the model for the entire world.

Why do so many of us assume that progress is inevitable, if never complete? Yarvin, like the Claremonters and American Greatness brigade, blames an elite that he calls by the inspired name “the Cathedral,” an amalgam of established universities and the mainstream press. It works like this: “The universities make decisions, for which the press manufactures consent.

for Yarvin, the consent is manufactured not by capitalism, advertising, and corporations but by liberal academics, pundits, and journalists. They simply assume that left liberalism is the only rational response to the world. Democracy, he contends, “no longer means that the public’s elected representatives control the government. It means that the government implements scientific public policy in the public interest.”

His solution is not just a tyrannical president who hates all that the Cathedral stands for but something even more radical: “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law, and the transfer of absolute power to a mysterious figure known only as the Receiver, who in the process of converting Washington into a heavily armed, ultra-profitable corporation will abolish the press, smash the universities, sell the public schools, and transfer ‘decivilized populations’ to ‘secure relocation facilities’ where they will be assigned to ‘mandatory apprenticeships.’ ”

This is 21st-century fascism, except that Yarvin’s Receiver would allow complete freedom of speech and association and would exercise no control over economic life. Foreign policy? Yarvin calls for “a total shutdown of international relations, including security guarantees, foreign aid, and mass immigration.” All social policy also disappears: “I believe that government should take no notice whatsoever of race — no racial policy. I believe it should separate itself completely from the question of what its citizens should or should not think — separation of education and state.”

I never doubted the cogency of many reactionary insights — and I still admire minds that have not succumbed to the comfortable assumption that the future is always brighter. I read the Christian traditionalist Rod Dreher with affection. His evocation of Christian life and thought over the centuries and his panic at its disappearance from our world are poignant. We are losing a vast civilization that honed answers to the deepest questions that human beings can ask, replacing it with vapid pseudo-religions, pills, therapy, and reality TV

Because in some key respects, reactionaries are right. Great leaps forward in history are often, in fact, giant leaps back. The Reformation did initiate brutal sectarian warfare. The French Revolution did degenerate into barbarous tyranny. Communist utopias — allegedly the wave of an Elysian future — turned into murderous nightmares. Modern neoliberalism has, for its part, created a global capitalist machine that is seemingly beyond anyone’s control, fast destroying the planet’s climate, wiping out vast tracts of life on Earth while consigning millions of Americans to economic stagnation and cultural despair.

And at an even deeper level, the more we discover about human evolution, the more illusory certain ideas of progress become. In his book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari points out that hunter-gatherers were actually up to six inches taller than their more “civilized” successors; their diets were much healthier; infectious disease was much rarer; they worked less and goofed off more than we do.

Harari notes another paradox: Over hundreds of millennia, we have overcome starvation … but now are more likely to die of obesity than hunger. Happiness? Globally, suicide rates keep rising.

We are tribal creatures in our very DNA; we have an instinctive preference for our own over others, for “in-groups” over “out-groups”; for hunter-gatherers, recognizing strangers as threats was a matter of life and death

We also invent myths and stories to give meaning to our common lives. Among those myths is the nation — stretching from the past into the future, providing meaning to our common lives in a way nothing else can. Strip those narratives away, or transform them too quickly, and humans will become disoriented. Most of us respond to radical changes in our lives, especially changes we haven’t chosen, with more fear than hope

If we ignore these deeper facts about ourselves, we run the risk of fatal errors. It’s vital to remember that multicultural, multiracial, post-national societies are extremely new for the human species, and keeping them viable and stable is a massive challenge.

Globally, social trust is highest in the homogeneous Nordic countries, and in America, Pew has found it higher in rural areas than cities. The political scientist Robert Putnam has found that “people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down,’ that is, to pull in like a turtle.” Not very encouraging about human nature — but something we can’t wish away, either

In fact, the American elite’s dismissal of these truths, its reduction of all resistance to cultural and demographic change as crude “racism” or “xenophobia,” only deepens the sense of siege many other Americans feel.

When this velocity of cultural change combines with a deepening — and accurate — sense of economic anxiety, is it shocking that human beings want to retreat into a past, to resuscitate the nation-state, and to reach backward for a more primeval and instinctual group identity? Or that they doubt the promise of “progress” and seek scapegoats in the governing classes that have encouraged all of this to happen?

The tragedy of our time, of course, is that President Obama tried to follow Lincoln’s advice. He reached out to those who voted against him as often as he could. His policies, like Obamacare, were aimed at helping the very working poor who gave Trump the White House. He pledged to transcend the red-blue divide. He acknowledged both the necessity of law enforcement and the legitimate African-American fear of hostile cops

A black man brought up by white people, he gave speech after speech attempting to provide a new narrative for America: one of slowly integrating moral progress, where racial and class divides could be overcome. He criticized the reductive divisiveness of identity politics. And yet he failed

he couldn’t stem the reactionary tide that now washes ever closer ashore. If a man that talented, with that biography, found himself spitting into the wind, a powerful storm is indeed upon us.

how can you seriously regard our political system and culture as worse than ever before in history? How self-centered do you have to be to dismiss the unprecedented freedom for women, racial minorities, and homosexuals? Or the increased security for the elderly and unemployed, and the greater access to health care by the poor and now the working poor? Compare the air we breathe today with that of the 1950s. Contrast the religious tolerance we take for granted today with the enmities of the past.

Over the very long haul, too, scholars such as Steven Pinker have found convincing evidence that violence among humans is at the lowest levels since the species first emerged.

It is also one thing to be vigilant about the power of the administrative state and to attempt to reform and modernize it; it is quite another to favor its abolition. The more complex modern society has become, the more expertise is needed to govern it — and where else is that expertise going to come from if not a professional elite?

the liberal media has nothing like the monopoly it once enjoyed. There are two “Cathedrals” in the 21st century — and only one has helped produce a conservative Supreme Court, a Republican Congress, a Republican president, and near-record Republican majorities in statehouses around the country

Beyond all that, neo-reactionaries have a glaring problem, which is that their proposed solutions are so radical they have no chance whatsoever of coming into existence — and would be deeply reckless to attempt.

There is, perhaps, a way to use reactionary insights and still construct a feasible center-right agenda. Such a program would junk Reaganite economics as outdated but keep revenue-neutral tax reform, it could even favor redistribution to counter the deep risk to democracy that soaring inequality fosters, and it could fix Obamacare’s technical problems. You could add to this mix stronger border control, a reduction in legal immigration, a pause in free-trade expansion, a technological overhaul of the government bureaucracy, and a reassertion of Americanism over multiculturalism.

The left, for its part, must, it seems to me, escape its own bubble and confront the accelerating extremism of its identity politics and its disdain for millions of “deplorable” white Americans. You will not arrest the reactionary momentum by ignoring it or dismissing it entirely as a function of bigotry or stupidity. You’ll only defuse it by appreciating its insights and co-opting its appeal.

A system like our ideal liberal democracy, which does not place any constraints on critiques of leaders, authorities and institutions; and does not allow any suppression of ideas no matter how dangerous to the system or objectionable to its citizens; and does not permit itself to select who can come in, or stay, based on their acceptance/rejection of fundamental liberal democratic values, has both: (1) guaranteed perpetual generation of conditions of normative threat, and all the activation, polarization, and conflict that that produces, and (2) disallowed all means for protecting itself against that “authoritarian dynamic,” which otherwise might have included allowing: some selectivity in regard to the fundamental values of those who are allowed to come, and to stay; constraints on certain kinds of critiques of leaders, authorities and institutions;

constraints on free speech that exclude racist or intolerant speech; some ability to write moral strictures into public policy to reflect traditional beliefs where the majority “draws the line.” If a liberal democracy were to allow those things, it would no longer be a liberal democracy. But if it does not allow those things, it is extremely difficult to protect itself from fundamental threats to its continued existence

“Both sides of this increasingly polarized divide see the other as trying to extirpate their way of life — and not inaccurately,” Schnurer wrote in “War on the Blue States” in U.S. News and World Report earlier this month:

Blue America spent the last eight years dictating both economic and cultural changes invalidating virtually every aspect of Red America. Liberals see all that as both righteous and benevolent — we’re both promoting better values and willing to help train them to be more like us.

The prototypical Trump voter sees a changing America leaving him behind; part of this is economic, part of it demographic, part cultural. I think liberals tend to see this as a thin cover for racism, a reflection of troglodyte viewpoints, and in any event unwarranted as the world these folks are resisting would be better even for them if only they’d let it, by giving up their benighted religious views, accepting job training in the new technologies, and preferably moving to one or the other coasts or at least the closest major city.

I don’t think there’s much argument that the modern economy is killing off small towns, US-based manufacturing, the interior of the US generally, etc. There is, or could be, an argument as to whether that’s just the necessary functioning of larger economic forces, or whether there are political choices that have produced, or at least aided and abetted, those outcomes

This is a classic political problem of general benefit at the cost of specific individual harm. At a minimum, “we” — as a country but also as a self-styled progressive subset of that country — have given inadequate thought to those harms and how to ameliorate them; but I think you can also make the argument that we have exacerbated them.

Schnurer, himself a liberal, argues that blue America has over the last decade declared war on the “red way of life.”

The political, economic, and cultural triumph nationwide of a set of principles and realities essentially alien to large numbers of Americans is viewed as (a) being imposed upon them, and (b) overturning much of what they take for granted in their lives — and I don’t think they’re wrong about that. I think they’ve risen in angry revolt, and now intend to give back to the “elite” in the same terms that they’ve been given to.

Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, observes that “believers in liberal democracy have unilaterally disarmed in the defense of the institution” by agreeing in many cases with the premise of the Trump campaign: “that the country is a hopeless swamp.” This left Democrats “defenseless when he proposed to drain it.”

Where, Pinker asks,are the liberals who are willing to say that liberal democracy has worked? That environmental regulations have slashed air pollutants while allowing Americans to drive more miles and burn more fuel? That social transfers have reduced poverty rates fivefold? That globalization has allowed Americans to afford more food, clothing, TVs, cars, and air-conditioners? That international organizations have prevented nuclear war, and reduced the rate of death in warfare by 90 percent? That environmental treaties are healing the hole in the ozone layer?

Pinker continues:Over the longer run, I think the forces of modernity prevail — affluence, education, mobility, communication, and generational replacement. Trumpism, like Brexit and European populism, are old men’s movements: support drops off sharply with age.

The problem is that even if Pinker is right, his analysis does not preclude a sustained period in which the anti-democratic right dominates American politics. There is no telling how long it will be before the movement Trump has mobilized will have run its course. Nor can we anticipate — if and when Trumpism does implode — how extensive the damage will be that Pinker’s “forces of modernity” will have to repair.

The second category of risk concerns the future potential for runaway climate change, which will take hold at that hard-to-call moment when the world falls prey to ruinous feedback mechanisms

A general recognition of climate change as a threat to national security in the short term and national existence in the long term would allow the mobilisation of the only modern ideological force that retains wide enough popularity to inspire collective sacrifice: nationalism (or patriotism,

If the last few years have taught us anything, it is that the combination of material disappointment with national insecurity and decline is a potent one. Climate change threatens both things, and so could translate into a politics of rage that though it rises through the ballot box, goes on to destroy democracy.

Clear-eyed national establishments will need to make a radical shift in focus and resources away from traditional great power threats (which, though real, are minor by comparison), and towards a new understanding of national security in a much wider sense, requiring new forms of national mobilisation in response.

In Europe, the most dramatic direct effects will be seen in the Mediterranean states, where the summer is predicted to last for an additional month, heatwaves (with temperatures over 35 degrees) to be extended by more than a month, and rainfall to decrease by up to 20 per cent.

The when and even the if of truly runaway climate change taking hold are uncertain, but should we slide down this slipway it would be so catastrophic—involving the destruction of the nations which militaries are sworn to defend—that even a remote possibility should be enough to mobilise militaries in response

In the decades to come, the most important single branch of the US armed forces will become not the Marines or the special forces but the Army Corps of Engineers.

But the need for western security establishments to prioritise climate change is not just about such practical reallocation of resources; an even more important impact could be about political persuasion.

The Greens’ blindness to the political importance of stable and rooted national communities risks driving voters into the arms of the chauvinists, while their contempt for the nation state leads to an overwhelming focus on international agreements demanded and driven by global movements.

Nationalism therefore helps address one of the greatest obstacles to action against climate change: namely, that considerable sacrifices will have to be made by present generations, but the most terrible results of refusal to make these sacrifices will only affect generations yet unborn.

It was only when I began to read how mainstream economists thought about climate change that I came fully to understand our moral decadence as a culture.

They look at things from a standpoint that deems that the interests of future generations matter little, or even not at all. One “discount rate” which has been used by economists when it comes to valuing future benefits is 6 per cent.

While the existential threat to humanity as a whole from runaway climate change would probably only appear in the next century, the threat to many individual states—and to western democracy—will appear in the next decades.

“To assume such a rate comes close to saying ‘forget about issues concerning 100 years or more from now.’” Such an attitude is antithetical not just to nationalism, but to the very idea of a nation (or of a family, for that matter).

The idea of a nation thinking of itself as living for only one generation is a contradiction in terms

Above all, with communism gone and religion in abeyance in the west, a sense of nationalism is essential to motivate sacrifice

We should not be surprised that individualistic and materialist cultures struggle with the most collective of all collective action problems. Even where these cultures are liberal and rational, they can do nothing to challenge the mindset of the individual who looks at the potentially big sacrifice being asked of them, and rationally judges that it will on its own make no difference to the big picture. Real change will need a new political dispensation.

Appealing to nationalism in the fight against climate change is abhorrent to most environmentalists, coming as they do from liberal and socialist internationalist traditions. Indeed, in many cases this hostility extends to the nation state itself,

 this is no innocuous technicality. It implies that a “unit of benefit” in 50 years is being valued 18 times lower than it would be today, and in 100 years, 339 times lower:

The language of “empowerment” that permeates much left-wing environmentalist discourse misses an absolutely central point. If you really want to act for the climate, then you need powerful allies, not powerless ones whom you have to expend energy empowering. This means state elites, state institutions, and, in the democracies, sweeping electoral majorities who can push through the painful changes required.

The centrality of states and nationalism also applies to very important proposals in the US and elsewhere for “Green New Deals” combining different goals: to support a new industrial revolution based on alternative energy and thereby convince dubious voters that climate change action is not an enemy of economic progress and prosperity; to build social solidarity by providing jobs and social welfare to the population, and especially workers in fossil fuel industries; and to legitimise the necessary sacrifices by ensuring that they will be shared through progressive taxation.

Any Green New Deal and the new bonds of social solidarity that it can engender will inevitably be national, not internationa

The alternative idea of massive transfers of resources from wealthy countries through systems of international solidarity has long been proved a complete fantasy, and will remain so

The fundamental issue at stake has been well expressed by the development economist Paul Collier: “The brute fact is that the domain of public policy is inevitably spatial… elections generate representatives with authority over a territory… The non-spatial political unit is a fantasy

So nationalism is indispensable, even though we also know it can often be dangerous. Thankfully, it does not have to be nationalism of an ethnic chauvinist variety.

Looking back at us from the perspective of a hundred years hence what may strike historians most (assuming for the moment that civilisation remains vigorous enough for historians still to exist) is the extent to which our institutions and political classes have become trapped by their own traditions

Military establishments amass huge arsenals at huge cost, though the existence of nuclear weapons has long banished any serious risk of direct war between the great powers; conservatives adhere blindly to a free-market ideology that has long been proved to be inadequate to the management of great modern states; and progressives remain fixated on dreams of an internationalist utopia that stand no chance whatsoever of being realised

Back in Stalin’s day, social discipline was so drastic. You had to stage a show trial (so expensive!), send somebody to the gulag or organize a purge. Now your tyranny can be small, subtle and omnipresent. It’s like the broken windows theory of despotism. By punishing the small deviations, you prevent the big ones from ever happening.

Third, thanks to big data, today’s Stalin would be able to build a massive Social Credit System to score and rank citizens, like the systems the Chinese are now using. Governments, banks and online dating sites gather data on, well, everybody. Do you pay your debts? How many hours do you spend playing video games? Do you jaywalk?

some of the best minds in the world have spent tens of billions of dollars improving tools that predict personal consumption. This technology, too, has got to come in handy for any modern-day Stalin.

One Chinese firm, Yitu, installed a system that keeps a record of employees’ movements as they walk to the break room or rest room. It records them with blue dotted lines on a monitor. That would be so helpful for your thoroughly modern dictator.

this is not even to mention the facial recognition technology the Chinese are using to keep track of their own citizens. In Beijing, facial recognition is used in apartment buildings to prevent renters from subletting their apartments.

I feel bad for Joseph Stalin. He dreamed of creating a totalitarian society where every individual’s behavior could be predicted and controlled. But he was born a century too early. He lived before the technology that would have made being a dictator so much easier!

The internet of things means that our refrigerators, watches, glasses, phones and security cameras will soon be recording every move we make.

In the second place, thanks to artificial intelligence, Uncle Joe would have much better tools for predicting how his subjects are about to behave.

f your score is too low, you can get put on a blacklist. You may not be able to visit a museum. You may not be able to fly on a plane, check into a hotel, visit the mall or graduate from high school. Your daughter gets rejected by her favorite university.

The culture accelerated with the appearance of Homo erectus (1.9 million years ago), whose larger brain and shorter digestive system reflected the increased consumption of meat

the Neanderthals (400,000 to 40,000 years ago), who developed more sophisticated technology.

It also spanned most of the existence of Homo sapiens, dating from the first anatomically modern humans 200,000 years ago, to the transition to permanent agricultural communities around 10,000 B.C.

sharpened stones were used for cutting before hand-axes were developed, marking the onset of Acheulean technology about 1.6 million years ago.

Use of hearths dates back almost 800,000 years ago, and other findings point to controlled heating as far back as 1 million years ago.

Fire enabled hunter-gatherers to stay warm in colder temperatures, cook their food (preventing some diseases caused by consumption of raw foods like meat), and scare wild animals that might otherwise take their food or attack their camps.

These more specialized tools enabled them to widen their diet and create more effective clothing and shelter as they moved about in search of food.

From their earliest days, the hunter-gatherer diet included various grasses, tubers, fruits, seeds and nuts. Lacking the means to kill larger animals, they procured meat from smaller game or through scavenging.

Modern humans were cooking shellfish by 160,000 years ago, and by 90,000 years ago they were developing the specialized fishing tools that enabled them to haul in larger aquatic life.

With limited resources, these groups were egalitarian by nature, scraping up enough food to survive and fashioning basic shelter for all.

Physiological evolution also led to changes, with the bigger brains of more recent ancestors leading to longer periods of childhood and adolescence.

By the time of the Neanderthals, hunter-gatherers were displaying such “human” characteristics as burying their dead and creating ornamental objects

By 50,000 years ago, huts made from wood, rock and bone were becoming more common,

Modern-day hunter-gatherers endure in various pockets around the globe. Among the more famous groups are the San, a.k.a. the Bushmen, of southern Africa,

An icon of the Industrial Revolution broke onto the scene in the early 1700s, when Thomas Newcomen designed the prototype for the first modern steam engine. Called the “atmospheric steam engine,” Newcomen’s invention was originally applied to power the machines used to pump water out of mine shafts. 

Just as steam engines needed coal, steam power allowed miners to go deeper and extract more of this relatively cheap energy source. The demand for coal skyrocketed throughout the Industrial Revolution and beyond, as it would be needed to run not only the factories used to produce manufactured goods, but also the railroads and steamships used for transporting them.

In the early 1800s, Richard Trevithick debuted a steam-powered locomotive, and in 1830 similar locomotives started transporting freight (and passengers) between the industrial hubs of Manchester and Liverpool. By that time, steam-powered boats and ships were already in wide use, carrying goods along Britain’s rivers and canals as well as across the Atlantic.

The latter part of the Industrial Revolution also saw key advances in communication methods, as people increasingly saw the need to communicate efficiently over long distances. In 1837, British inventors William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone patented the first commercial telegraphy system, even as Samuel Morse and other inventors worked on their own versions in the United States. Cooke and Wheatstone’s system would be used for railroad signalling, as the speed of the new trains had created a need for more sophisticated means of communication.

Though many people in Britain had begun moving to the cities from rural areas before the Industrial Revolution, this process accelerated dramatically with industrialization, as the rise of large factories turned smaller towns into major cities over the span of decades. This rapid urbanization brought significant challenges, as overcrowded cities suffered from pollution, inadequate sanitation and a lack of clean drinking water.

The beginning of industrialization in the United States is usually pegged to the opening of a textile mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1793 by the recent English immigrant Samuel Slater. Slater had worked at one of the mills opened by Richard Arkwright (inventor of the water frame) mills, and despite laws prohibiting the emigration of textile workers, he brought Arkwright’s designs across the Atlantic. He later built several other cotton mills in New England, and became known as the “Father of the American Industrial Revolution.”

By the end of the 19th century, with the so-called Second Industrial Revolution underway, the United States would also transition from a largely agrarian society to an increasingly urbanized one, with all the attendant problems. By the mid-19th century, industrialization was well-established throughout the western part of Europe and America’s northeastern region. By the early 20th century, the U.S. had become the world’s leading industrial nation.

Why are so many Americans consistently missing in action on Election Day?

For many, it’s a choice. They are disillusioned with government, or they feel their vote doesn’t matter because politicians don’t listen to them anyway.

This strategy has become a central pillar of the G.O.P. platform. It is behind the party’s relentless push for certain state laws and practices — like strict voter-identification requirements and targeted voter purges — that claim to be about preserving electoral integrity but are in fact about suppressing turnout and voting among groups that lean Democratic.

Just in the past four years, tens of thousands of absentee ballots have been sent to the wrong addresses, and hundreds of thousands of voters have been wrongly purged from the rolls.

But across the country, the group most responsible for making voting harder, if not impossible, for millions of Americans is the Republican Party.

“As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

For many more, the main obstacle is bureaucratic inertia.

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has greenlit the Republicans’ anti-democratic power grabs. In 2013, by a 5-to-4 vote, the court struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act, giving free rein to states with long histories of racial discrimination in voting.

The strategy also is behind the partisan gerrymandering that Republican state lawmakers have mastered over the past decade

Republicans are battling from coast to coast to ensure that casting a ballot is as hard as it can be.

In Nevada, the Trump campaign and the state Republican Party have sued to stop counting mail-in ballots until observers can more closely monitor the signature-matching process.

The effort has been turbocharged by President Trump, who has spent the past year falsely attacking the integrity of mail-in ballots.

That’s why, if either of these laws is going to pass, it will require, at a minimum, voting out Republicans at every level who insist on suppressing the vote.

Representative democracy works only when a large majority of people participate in choosing their representatives. That can happen only when those in power agree that voting should be as easy and widely available as possible. Yet today, one of the two major political parties is convinced it cannot win on a level playing field — and will not even try.

What would a level playing field look like? For starters, it would have more polling places, more early-voting days and shorter voting lines.

Black neighborhoods wait 29 percent longer to cast ballots than voters in white neighborhoods.

A fair election would mean giving all states the necessary funds to implement automatic voter registration and to upgrade old voting machines.

To help ensure that voting is easier for everybody, the federal government needs to take action. Currently, there are two comprehensive voting-rights bills in Congress, the Voting Rights Amendment Act and H.R. 1, also known as the For the People Act.

The second bill would, among other things, create a national voter-registration program; make it harder for states to purge voting rolls; and take gerrymandering away from self-interested state legislatures, putting the redistricting process in the hands of nonpartisan commissions.

When that tactic fails, Republicans turn to another tried-and-true one: voter intimidation. Frightening people, particularly Black people, away from the ballot box has a long history in the United States. Modern Republicans have done it so consistently that in 1982 a federal court barred the national party from engaging in any so-called anti-voter-fraud operations.

That’s about two-thirds of the total number of people who voted in 2016, and there are still two days until Election Day.

That’s about two-thirds of the total number of people who voted in 2016, and there are still two days until Election Day.

Republicans have been saying it themselves for ages. “I don’t want everybody to vote,” Paul Weyrich, a leader of the modern conservative movement, told a gathering of religious leaders in 1980.

Last year, the court, again by a 5-to-4 vote, refused to block even the most brazenly partisan gerrymanders, no matter how much they disenfranchised voters.

2020 is the first election in which Republicans can intimidate with abandon.

All the while, Mr. Trump happily plays the part of intimidator in chief. He has urged his supporters to enlist in an “Army for Trump,” monitoring polls. “A lot of strange things happening in Philadelphia,” Mr. Trump said during a recent campaign stop in Pennsylvania. “We’re watching you, Philadelphia. We’re watching at the highest level.”

He is only repeating what most Republicans have believed for decades: When more people vote, Republicans lose.

There are not many countries as steeped in their own history as Britain appears to be, yet which are so ignorant about it.

We look to history as a source of national self-justification rather than to learn.

The potent idea that history might offer a warning rather than cause for self-congratulation – the idea that runs through the approach to history in modern Germany, for example – is nonexistent here.

British history continues to be a political battleground between those who insist that our historic greatness is self-evident and empowering, and those who cannot bring themselves to see much in our history beyond lies about crimes.

When history waves a national flag, it always tells a partisan story not a true one.

We thus react to the inherited celebrations of British greatness either by embracing or by rejecting them, but always too emphatically.

There is too little shared imaginative space, not enough humility and tolerance within civil society, and therefore a less generous approach than there should be to the task of evolving a shared culture

The absence of a national museum of British history, underpinned by a better history curriculum, disables the country.

The net result is a void where a mature and modern relationship with Britain’s history should be.

The Brexit decision and the premiership of Boris Johnson are the catastrophic incarnations of all this ascendancy.

Only a nation that is intoxicated with the need to be “great” would have cut itself off from its neighbours as we did. One that wanted simply to do its best would want to learn from neighbours, not ostracise them

The dark star behind Brexit, without which it cannot be understood, remains the British people’s unreconciled relationship with the experience of empire.

The empire is a huge and complicated subject that, to our enduring collective detriment, is barely taught and is thus also barely known and absorbed into public discourse

We have too many statues in Britain. We don’t need more. Rather than purging them in the pretence that we inhabit a Robespierrean republic of virtue, it would make more sense to surround some of the more controversial ones with information that encourages people to think about why they were put there

please let’s not trivialise the general denial and oblivion about empire by obsessing over statues

The failure to look the history of empire in the eye is not the only neglected issue in Britain’s enduringly delusional relationship with its past. But it is the one that more than any other impoverishes modern Britain’s understanding of itself and the world of 2020. It was always a disabling failure. Brexit has now turned it into an epochal self-inflicted wound.

Race, Stevens writes,has defined the modern Republican Party. After Goldwater carried only southern states and received a record low of 7 percent of the black vote, the party faced a basic choice: do what was necessary to appeal to more nonwhite voters, or build a party to win with white voters. It chose the latter, and when most successfully executed, a race-based strategy was the foundation of many of the Republican Party’s biggest victories, from Nixon to Trump.

In fact, Stevens told me, “race is the original sin of the modern Republican Party:”With Trump, the Party has grown comfortable as a white grievance party. Is that racist? Yes, I think it is. Are 63 million plus people who supported Trump racist? No, absolutely not. But to support Trump is to make peace with white grievance and hate.

Stevens’s comment demonstrates the difficulty many analysts have pinning down the meaning of racism and the distinction — if there is one — between being a racist and voting for a racist

To further examine this complexity, I questioned a range of experts.

Ashley Jardina, a political scientist at Duke and the author of “White Identity Politics,” put it this way:The use of these terms is complicated, messy, and without consensus. There are a number of important distinctions we can make. We think of ‘racial prejudice’ as an individual-level sense of hostility, animus, set of negative stereotypes, or other negative attitudes that one person has toward members of a group by way of their race. We refer to a person as racist when they have some degree of racial prejudice. For most Americans, this is generally what they think of when they hear the term racism or racist. A racist is a person who uses racial slurs directed at racial out-groups and thinks their own racial group is superior.

Davis argues that the debate has become clouded, that even though individual and group motives may not be racist, the outcomes achieved can be identical to the ones that racists would seek:My overall point is that we have forgotten what racism means. In doing so, we have focused attention on bigots and white nationalists and not held ordinary citizens accountable for beliefs that achieve the same ends.

Chloe Thurston, in turn, cited as specific examplesPresident Trump’s or Steve King’s comments about certain types of immigrants being unassimilable or not sufficiently American and suggesting that other (e.g. white) immigrants do not have those characteristics.

While both Trump and King, an anti-immigrant congressman from Iowa, “balk at the label ‘racist,’ she continued, “it is descriptively accurate and necessary from the standpoint of keeping track of the role and uses of racism in American society and politics.”

Like Davis, Thurston sought to address “the more difficult question” of “when it is legitimate to use that label for everyday behaviors.”Her answer:People can participate in and perpetuate racist systems without necessarily subscribing to those beliefs. People can recognize something they participate in or contribute to as racist but decide it’s not disqualifying. And people can design racist policies and systems. These are distinctive manifestations of racism but not all of them require us to know whether a person is expressly motivated by racism.

here are huge racial, partisan, gender and religious differences: whites say Trump is not racist 50-46; blacks say he is racist 80-11; Democrats 86-9 say yes, Republicans 91-8 say no; men 55-41 say no, women 59-36 say yes; white evangelicals say no 76-21, Catholics 50-48 say no; the unaffiliated say yes, 63-30.

Kam notes that she worries “about excessive use of these labels” because describing someone or some action as racist “can easily escalate conflict beyond the point of return.”

Eric Kaufmann voiced similar caution, noting that racism and racist are highly charged words, the deployment of which can in some cases prove damaging to liberals and the left. He cited the “unwillingness to talk about immigration for fear of being labeled racist,” giving free rein to populists who do address immigration “and thus get elected. Trump’s election is exhibit A.”

In addition, according to Kaufmann, thefear of being labeled racist may be pushing left parties toward immigration policies, or policies on affirmative action, reparations, etc., that make them unelectable. Finally, overuse of the word “racist” may lead to a “cry wolf” effect whereby real racists can hide due to exhaustion of public with norm over-policing.

None of the examples I cited, in Kaufmann’s view, “are racist” unless it could be explicitly demonstrated “in a survey that those espousing the policies were mainly motivated by racism.” If not, he said, the “principle of charity should apply.”

many whites see accusations of racism as disingenuous. They believe that Democrats in particular “play the race card” by calling people or beliefs racist as a political strategy, rather than as a sincere effort to combat racism.There is, in fact, a huge partisan divide over what is considered racist and what is not.

Three Harvard political scientists — Meredith Dost, Enos and Jennifer L. Hochschild — conducted a survey in September 2017 that asked 2,296 American adults to rank, on a five point scale ranging from racist to not racist, 10 statements. These statements included “wanting to wave the Confederate flag,” “saying immigrants commit too many crimes,” “agreeing that welfare recipients should have to take a job to receive benefits,” and “voting for Donald Trump.”

As the accompanying chart shows, the gulf between Democrats and Republicans was 20 percentage points or more on seven out of ten questions. At the extreme, 82 percent of “strong Republicans” said it was “not racist” to vote for Trump, compared with 22 percent of “strong Democrats.” who said it was, a 60-point difference.

With the 2020 election approaching, one of the most relevant questions before the electorate is whether voters agree with Stuart Stevens on whether Donald Trump is a racist.

The answer to that question, according to a July 2019 Quinnipiac University national poll, is that 51 percent say Trump is a racist; 45 percent say he is not.

Because of the wide variety of possible motivations, Kam wrote in her email, she “would hesitate to label an action as ‘racist’ — unless racial considerations seem to be the only or the massively determinative consideration at play, based upon statistical modeling or carefully calibrated experiments.”

What this boils down to is that racism is detected, determined and observed through partisan and ideological lenses.

Is the modern Republican Party built on race prejudice, otherwise known as racism?

whenever anyone is brave enough to suggest that the government itself should provide useful services to Americans — whether big-ticket items like health care, child care and college education, or smaller things like an upgraded electric grid or a national broadband service — the first reaction from many on the right and the left is one of defeat and resignation. “How will you pay for it?” they ask. And, often, the whole conversation stops right there, because with a $26.5 trillion national debt, America looks hopelessly broke.

t is not. Kelton argues that our government’s inability to provide for citizens isn’t due to a lack for money; instead, our leaders lack political will.

Modern Monetary Theory, or M.M.T. The theory argues that because the government is in charge of its own currency, it cannot “run out” of money the way a household or a business can, and it therefore does not need to raise taxes to fund government spending.

Instead of being constrained by deficits, Kelton and other M.M.T.ers argue, policymakers should care about “real” measures of economic activity: unemployment and inflation.

Whatever the deficit, if unemployment is rife, it’s an indication that aggregate demand is low; to boost demand, the government can freely spend, spend, spend — and should stop spending only when there is a danger that it will lead to a rise in prices — that is, inflation

In practice, Kelton and other M.M.T.ers propose a federal jobs guarantee, in which the government would hire anyone who needs a job for a set wage. The policy, she argues, would promote full employment while keeping inflation stable.

in the 40 years since Ronald Reagan won the White House, both the left and the right have been unnecessarily obsessed with deficits, to the detriment of the well-being of citizens.

The cruelest example of this mind-set occurred after the Great Recession in 2008. At the time, many experts suggested that an adequate response to the downturn would require the government to spend a trillion dollars or more to boost demand. Instead, Obama and his aides, worried about sticker shock, lowballed their stimulus, and millions of people remained unemployed.

Keynesianism “is not so much a school of economic thought as a spirit of radical optimism, unjustified by most of human history and extremely difficult to conjure up precisely when it is most needed: during the depths of a depression or amid the fevers of war.”

Racism is the original sin of the modern Republican Party. While many Republicans today like to mourn the absence of an intellectual voice like William Buckley, it is often overlooked that Mr. Buckley began his career as a racist defending segregation.

That strategy has worked so well that it was copied by the Russians in their 2016 efforts to help elect Mr. Trump.

In the 2000 George W. Bush campaign, on which I worked, we acknowledged the failures of Republicans to attract significant nonwhite support. When Mr. Bush called himself a “compassionate conservative,” some on the right attacked him, calling it an admission that conservatism had not been compassionate. That was true; it had not been. Many of us believed we could steer the party to that “kinder, gentler” place his father described. We were wrong.

There is a collective blame to be shared by those of us who have created the modern Republican Party that has so egregiously betrayed the principles it claimed to represent. My j’accuse is against us all, not a few individuals who were the most egregious.

How did this happen? How do you abandon deeply held beliefs about character, personal responsibility, foreign policy and the national debt in a matter of months? You don’t. The obvious answer is those beliefs weren’t deeply held.

This collapse of a major political party as a moral governing force is unlike anything we have seen in modern American politics. The closest parallel is the demise of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, when the dissonance between what the party said it stood for and what citizens actually experienced was so great that it was unsustainable.

I’ve given up hope that there are any lines of decency or normalcy that once crossed would move Republican leaders to act as if they took their oath of office more seriously than their allegiance to party

I’d like to say I’m hopeful. But that would be a lie and there have been too many lies for too long.

There is a collective blame to be shared by those of us who have created the modern Republican Party that has so egregiously betrayed the principles it claimed to represent.

How did this happen? How do you abandon deeply held beliefs about character, personal responsibility, foreign policy and the national debt in a matter of months?

What is most telling is that the Republican Party actively embraced, supported, defended and now enthusiastically identifies with a man who eagerly exploits the nation’s racial tensions.

A party rooted in decency and values does not embrace the anger that Mr. Trump peddles as patriotism.

This collapse of a major political party as a moral governing force is unlike anything we have seen in modern American politics. The closest parallel is the demise of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, when the dissonance between what the party said it stood for and what citizens actually experienced was so great that it was unsustainable.

I’ve given up hope that there are any lines of decency or normalcy that once crossed would move Republican leaders to act as if they took their oath of office more seriously than their allegiance to party. Only fear will motivate the party to change — the cold fear only defeat can bring.

That defeat is looming. Will it bring desperately needed change to the Republican Party? I’d like to say I’m hopeful. But that would be a lie and there have been too many lies for too long.

The great shame is not that Mr. Trump brought an anachronistic masculinity into the Oval Office, but that he used the Oval Office to market a very modern brand of compensatory manhood — with a twist.

The gender gap in this election can be simply explained. Most women are turned off by the toxic displays of chest-beating that many male voters — notably but not exclusively white — find exciting.

Women were trapped in their ornamental cage because they were locked out of productive work and economic self-sufficiency

If he wins the election, Mr. Biden’s success, but, more important, the nation’s success, will depend in part on his ability to re-enlist Mr. Trump’s foot soldiers into what all of us want — a meaningful role in a mutual effort that serves the greater good.