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“Now … I can’t imagine what the region would be like if we didn’t have the level of trade we have [today].”

Donald Trump insists that trade and immigration are undermining wages and devouring jobs

has also refused to defend the North American Free Trade Agreement that her husband Bill Clinton signed—an agreement Trump routinely calls “the single worst trade deal ever approved in this country.”

But her resistance to expanded trade reflects outdated assumptions about the Democratic coalition

Clinton may rely even more than previous Democratic nominees on these pro-trade groups

Democratic partisans are now much more likely than Republicans to view globalization and trade as a positive force on all those fronts

the movement of blue-collar whites largely skeptical of trade into the GOP, and their replacement in the Democratic coalition by minorities,

international trade specifically as beneficial for the U.S. economy, consumers and their own living standards,

voters from all parties worry that trade can eliminate domestic jobs.

NAFTA has likely saved many U.S. jobs that might otherwise have migrated elsewhere

“If you are able to produce parts of your finished product in Mexico and lower your cost, you can increase your share of the market,”

creates an undeniable need for fresh thinking on how to connect those displaced workers with the economy’s new opportunities.

her conditional early support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership that President Obama negotiated with 11 Asian nations, but has also refused to defend the North American Free Trade Agreement that her husband Bill Clinton signed—an agreement Trump routinely calls “the single worst trade deal ever approved in this country.”

Kelley works with about a dozen cities across six countries, with a special concentration in Asia. “Portland,” Kelley said, “has become responsible for setting the frame for how China will look at urbanism for the next 50 years.”

Threatening tariffs and walls, Donald Trump insists that trade and immigration are undermining wages and devouring jobs (while also presenting migration from Mexico and the Middle East as a security threat). Clinton has defended immigration, but effectively surrendered to Trump on trade.

“We Build Green Cities,” a loose consortium of Portland-based engineering, architectural, and environmental science firms that consult with cities around the world to develop sustainable communities through everything from promoting renewable energy to opening bike lanes.

While Trump has never appeared more confident than when he’s denouncing TPP or NAFTA, Clinton has been tongue-tied.

Clinton’s suspicion of trade isn’t just a tactical maneuver: Veterans of the Bill Clinton administration say that internally she was always dubious about pursuing NAFTA. But her resistance to expanded trade reflects outdated assumptions about the Democratic coalition.

But the latest Chicago Council survey, released last month, shows that Democratic partisans are now much more likely than Republicans to view globalization and trade as a positive force on all those fronts. (Over two-thirds of Democrats now say trade benefits both the overall U.S. economy and their own living standards.)

With Trump centering his campaign on mobilizing working-class whites, Clinton may rely even more than previous Democratic nominees on these pro-trade groups—even as she further sublimates their views.

The reason: It’s encouraged an integrated North American supply chain that allows American firms to produce autos and other products at less cost overall by shifting some manufacturing to Mexico.

Wood acknowledges that U.S. manufacturing workers who lose jobs in this exchange often are not equipped to compete for the new positions that the integration process creates. That creates an undeniable need for fresh thinking on how to connect those displaced workers with the economy’s new opportunities.

If she wins, she’ll eventually need to acknowledge the same about economic globalization

“The one thing I've said to him directly, and I would advise my Republican friends in Congress and supporters around the country, is just make sure that, as we go forward, certain norms, certain institutional traditions, don't get eroded, because there's a reason they're in place.”

Obama is also clearly still frustrated with how Republicans handled his Supreme Court nominee. “The fact that Mitch McConnell--the leader of the Republicans--was able to just stop a nomination almost a year before the next election and really not pay a political price for it,” Obama said. “That's a sign that the incentives for politicians in this town to be so sharply partisan have gotten so out of hand that we're weakening ourselves.”

What “disturbed me the most,” Obama said, about the intelligence finding that Russia tried to undermine the U.S. election was the response by some Republicans and, implicitly, Trump.

“In some circles, you've seen people suggest that Vladimir Putin has more credibility than the U.S. government. I think that's something new,” Obama said. “And I think it's a measure of how the partisan divide has gotten so severe that people forget we're on the same team.”

“Don't underestimate the guy,” Obama said. “Because he's going to be 45th president of the United States.”

“However important it was for an individual to win fame and add to his and his family’s reputation, this should always be subordinated to the good of the Republic … no disappointed Roman politician sought the aid of a foreign power.”

now we have a president-elect who openly asked Russia to help smear his opponent, and all indications are that the bulk of his party was and is just fine with that. (A new poll shows that Republican approval of Vladimir Putin has surged even though — or, more likely, precisely because — it has become clear that Russian intervention played an important role in the U.S. election.) Winning domestic political struggles is all that matters, the good of the republic be damned.

Famously, on paper the transformation of Rome from republic to empire never happened. Officially, imperial Rome was still ruled by a Senate that just happened to defer to the emperor, whose title originally just meant “commander,” on everything that mattered.

For such people, toeing the party line and defending the party’s rule are all that matters. And if they sometimes seem consumed with rage at anyone who challenges their actions, well, that’s how hacks always respond when called on their hackery.

Consider what just happened in North Carolina.

Combine this sort of thing with continuing efforts to disenfranchise or at least discourage voting by minority groups, and you have the potential making of a de facto one-party state: one that maintains the fiction of democracy, but has rigged the game so that the other side can never win.

My question, instead, is why one party’s politicians and officials no longer seem to care about what we used to think were essential American values. And let’s be clear: This is a Republican story, not a case of “both sides do it.”

what directly drives the attack on democracy, I’d argue, is simple careerism on the part of people who are apparatchiks within a system insulated from outside pressures by gerrymandered districts, unshakable partisan loyalty, and lots and lots of plutocratic financial support.

the process of destroying democratic substance while preserving forms is already underway.

One thing all of this makes clear is that the sickness of American politics didn’t begin with Donald Trump, any more than the sickness of the Roman Republic began with Caesar. The erosion of democratic foundations has been underway for decades, and there’s no guarantee that we will ever be able to recover.

But if there is any hope of redemption, it will have to begin with a clear recognition of how bad things are. American democracy is very much on the edge.

The back-and-forth highlights the extent to which Facebook has now muscled its way into America’s political conversation — and the risks that the company faces as it becomes a central force in news consumption and production.

63 percent of Facebook’s users considered the service a news source.

In April, Facebook embraced this role openly, releasing a video to implore people to search Facebook to discover “the other side of the story.” Politicians have increasingly shared their messages through the social network.

Facebook’s data scientists analyzed how 10.1 million of the most partisan American users on the social network navigated the site over a six-month period. They found that people’s networks of friends and the articles they saw were skewed toward their ideological preferences — but that the effect was more limited than the worst case some theorists had predicted, in which people would see almost no information from the other side.

While Facebook has pledged to sponsor both the Democratic and Republican national conventions, the company’s top executives have not been shy about expressing where their political sympathies lie.

Facebook has long described its trending feature as largely automatic. “The topics you see are based on a number of factors including engagement, timeliness, pages you’ve liked and your location,” according to a description on Facebook’s site.

The trending feature is curated by a team of contract employees,

Any “suppression,” the former employees said, was based on perceived credibility — any articles judged by curators to be unreliable or poorly sourced, whether left-leaning or right-leaning, were avoided, though this was a personal judgment call.

According to a report last year by Pew, only 17 percent surveyed said that technology companies had a negative influence on the country. For the news media, that number was 65 percent — and rising.

in the immediate aftermath of the attacks of September 11, Democrats effusively praised George Bush for doing nothing more than making a couple of serviceable statements about our collective resolve. The news media immediately filled with paeans to his wise and steadfast leadership, and his approval ratings rocketed past 90 percent, all before he had actually done much of anything. Could you imagine the same thing happening today? Does anyone believe that there is some combination of words Obama could speak now that would cause the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Donald Trump to say, “That was really terrific; I’ve had my disagreements with him in the past, but today my hat’s off to him”? The very idea is laughable.

The second and related reason that it is impossible for Obama to unify us after this tragedy is that it is tied up with race, and there are significant numbers of white people who will always believe that on issues of race, Obama is intentionally trying to set Americans against each other, no matter what he actually does or says.

Republicans have told themselves a story in which the nation was moving toward racial harmony until Barack Obama came into office and immediately began dividing us over race, pitting blacks against whites and tearing the country asunder. And they have been telling their constituents this from the moment he took office.

Republicans have come to believe that they’re the real victims of racial discrimination — or as Bill O’Reilly, the highest-rated host on cable news, puts it, “If you’re a Christian or a white man in the USA, it’s open season on you.” According to a recent poll from the Public Religion Research Institute, 72 percent of Republicans and 81 percent of Trump supporters say that discrimination against whites is as big a problem in America today as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.

The final reason that President Obama can’t bring us all together is that today’s complex media environment makes it so difficult.

There was a time in which something important or tragic would happen, people would gather around their televisions, and everyone in the country would watch as the president (or maybe Walter Cronkite) told us how to interpret what had just occurred. We had only a few streams of information about national affairs, and that created a common text out of which we could come to understand what had happened.

One such assumption, that voters follow the signals sent by party elites and officeholders, is the basis of the famous “party decides” thesis in political science, which was invoked early and often to explain why Trump couldn’t possibly end up as the Republican nominee.

While his progress has undercut that thesis, it hasn’t been fully disproved, since the “party decides” conceit doesn’t tell us about what happens when the party simply can’t decide. Whether you look at endorsements or fund-raising or any other metric, that’s what happened this time

before the Trump experience it was reasonable to assume that there was a consistent logic to primary voting — that regardless of what party elites decided, a kind of “wisdom of crowds” thesis could suffice to explain why major political parties don’t nominate people like, well, Donald Trump.

They are engaged partisans, a more distinct group. They often have to be registered with their party, they have to care enough to vote on a random Tuesday in February, March or April, in some cases they have to set aside the time to show up and caucus. By definition, they tend to be more interested in both policy and politics than the average citizen

On the evidence of past campaigns, this engagement inclines them (in the aggregate) to balance ideology and electability when they vote

there was also a fair amount of political-science evidence that the Republicans really were a more ideological party than the Democrats, less inclined to view compromise in favorable terms, more inclined to regard politics through a philosophical rather than an interest-group service lens.

Yes, Trump has adopted conservative positions on various issues, but he’s done so in a transparently cynical fashion, constantly signaling that he doesn’t really believe in or understand the stance that he’s taking, constantly suggesting a willingness to bargain any principle away

Until Donald Trump blew this model up

Except for immigration hawks, practically every ideological faction in the party regards Trump with mistrust, disgust, suspicion, fear. Pro-lifers, foreign-policy hawks, the Club for Growth, libertarians — nobody thinks Trump is really on their side. And yet he’s winning anyway.

perhaps Trumpism can be understood as a coup by the G.O.P.’s ideologically flexible minority against the conservative movement’s litmus tests; indeed to some extent that’s clearly what’s been happening.

he’s untrustworthy and unelectable — a combination that you’d normally expect engaged partisans to consider and reject. And yet he’s winning anyway.

But here the model isn’t completely broken, because a majority of Republican voters don’t actually believe that Trump faces long odds,

Instead, since last fall Republican voters have consistently told pollsters that they think Trump is the candidate most likely to win in November. So the party’s voters are choosing electability — as they see it — over ideology; they’re just in the grip of a strong delusion about Trump’s actual chances against Hillary Clinton.

The reason for this delusion might be the key unresolved question of Trump’s strange ascent. Is it the fruit of Trump’s unparalleled media domination — does he seem more electable than all his rivals because he’s always on TV

Is it a case of his victor’s image carrying all before it — if you win enough primary contests, even with 35 percent of the vote, people assume that your winning streak can be extended into November? Is this just how a personality cult rooted in identity politics works — people believe in the Great Leader’s capacity to crush their tribe’s enemies and disregard all contrary evidence?

Or is it somehow the pundits’ doing? Did the misplaced certainty that Trump couldn’t win the nomination create an impression that all projections are bunk, that he’ll always prove his doubters wrong?

While a smaller share of Republicans found Democrats especially rigid, larger proportions — between 45 percent and 47 percent for each category — said Democrats stood out for their immorality, laziness or dishonesty.

xactly half of Republicans and 46 percent of Democrats said they find talking politics with a member of the opposing party to be “stressful and frustratin

But perhaps the most salient challenge for Democrats all across the partisan spectrum will be whether they can accept political reality—whatever that may be—and what it dictates about the future of the political left, even if it contradicts their own vision of what the party should look like.

Perry was accused of using his veto power to threaten a public official and overstepping his authority, but the judges ruled that courts can't undermine the veto power of a governor.

"Come at the king, you best not miss," Republican Judge David Newell wrote in his concurring opinion, quoting a popular line from the HBO series "The Wire."

Perry has been campaigning for Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz since becoming the first major GOP candidate to drop out of the race last year.

"I've always known the actions I took were not only lawful and legal, they were right," said Perry, who spoke at the headquarters of an influential Texas conservative think tank, which has previously christened its balcony overlooking downtown as the "Gov. Rick Perry Liberty Balcony."

The court said veto power can't be restricted by the courts and the prosecution of a veto "violates separations of powers." A lower appeals court had dismissed the other charge, coercion by a public servant, in July.

Perry had rebuked the charges as a partisan attack from the start, calling it a "political witch hunt," but the dismissal brought accusations of Republican judges doing a favor for a party stalwart.

Texans for Public Justice, a left-leaning watchdog group that filed the original criminal complaint that led to the indictment, said Perry was handed a "gift" based on his stature.

Even a Republican judge who dissented in the ruling said the decision could leave the public with an uneasy perception that the system went out of its way to clear a famous politician with deep connections.

Perry, the longest-serving governor in Texas history, made just one court appearance in the case and was defiant from the start — he went out for ice cream after turning himself in for booking at an Austin jail, and smiled wide for his mug shot.

Legal scholars across the political spectrum raised objections about the case. Still, the Republican judge overseeing it repeatedly refused to throw it out on constitutional grounds, prompting Perry's appeals.

Michael McCrum, the special prosecutor who secured Perry's indictment, maintained that the matter was built on evidence — not politics — and deserved to go to trial. He can appeal, but that would be a lengthy process. Combined, the original charges carried a potential maximum of 109 years in prison.

Perry had formally announced he was running for president in June, hoping to convince GOP primary voters he deserved another chance after his 2012 bid was undone by a series of public gaffes. But his second campaign lasted barely three months, and he dropped out of the race in September.

The former governor spent more than $2 million on top defense lawyers. His latest White House campaign raised barely half that much in its first month, and Perry blamed the indictment for his sluggish fundraising. But polls showed he was badly trailing despite visits to Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. He was the first candidate to leave a GOP field jammed with 17 presidential hopefuls at the time.

The challenge for Obama — and virtually every politician today — is breaking through in a climate defined more by alienation, frustration and anger than differences on policy. Policies can be modified or changed. But how does a president persuade an angry and mistrustful nation to actually listen to each other?

A major focus for Obama during his final year in office is to blunt those divisions by trying to remind Americans of the values that they share. “It will be core to what you hear from us this year,” said David Simas, the White House director of political strategy. “You can expect to hear it in every setting, in every place, around any topic and speech, because it is that important to the president.”

“Once we lose the ability to talk to each other, we lose the ability to reach consensus, which is at the core of politics in Washington and every town hall around the nation.”

Away from the national level, the commitment of conservative donors to support a power shift in state government illustrates the determination of the right to eliminate regulatory and legal constraints on markets where their money has proven most productive.

Attempts to control the White House have become far more risky with the rise of a strong Democratic presidential coalition. In 2012, conservative groups put $700 million in a bid to win the presidency, two and a half times as much as liberal groups, but Obama still won decisively.

The willingness of conservatives to weather difficulty and to endure prolonged delay has been demonstrated repeatedly over the past decades.

the result for conservatives is thatyour volunteers and paid activists come out of a values-based institution, which is essentially not a political institution. People are there because of their values. If you come to politics from a club or church or veterans hall, it reinforces the stickiness of your work, your willingness to keep at it even if you are tired.

When the State Policy Network was founded in 1986, it had 12 affiliated state-based groups and a goal of creating an “interstate freedom network” to spread “the growth of freedom across America until a permanent freedom majority is built.” Today, there are one or more affiliated organizations in every state.

An examination of IRS reports from all of these conservative groups shows total spending in just one year, 2013, of $142.2 million, with the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s $8.9 million the largest expenditure.

The complex transactions between the foundations in the Koch Brothers network obscure the dollar amount of their investments in state and local organizations. But the Koch Companies’ June Quarterly Newsletter notes that the Koch brothers “hope to raise $889 million by the end of 2016, about two-thirds of which will help support research and education programs, scholarships and other efforts designed to change policies and promote a culture of freedom in the United States.”

the right can tap into an embeddedstructure of community-based cultural, religious, social organizations — churches, Elks, veterans halls, gun groups, local business organizations, etc. — that are gathering places with offices, meeting halls, phones and computers that can be used by activist troops for logistical and operational support.

In 1973, as the Watergate scandal was closing in on the Nixon administration, conservatives financed the creation of two institutions: the Heritage Foundation to counter the left on national policy, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to foster state-based conservative lobbies, interest groups and foundations.

“progressives don’t have these community based, indigenous resources to educate, organize and mobilize troops anymore.” With the exception of unions, “we have fewer local places to gather and belong.”

In 2004, major liberal donors financed two new national groups created specifically for the 2004 presidential election — Americans Coming Together ($79,795,487) and the Joint Victory Committee ($71,811,666).

Despite the investment, the Democratic nominee, John Kerry, lost. At that point, the liberal donor community came to general agreement that the left needed a secure a permanent infrastructure at the national level to compete with such conservative institutions as the Chamber of Commerce, the American Enterprise Institute, Americans for Tax Reform and Heritage.

A year later, Democracy Alliance established its goal of building a “progressive infrastructure that could help counter the well-funded and sophisticated conservative apparatus in the areas of civic engagement, leadership, media, and ideas.”At a national level, the alliance has played a significant role in the development of such groups as the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank; Catalist, which builds and maintains voter lists; and Media Matters, which seeks to document and discredit “conservative misinformation throughout the media.”

It has begun to appear that the twenty-first century progressive brain is not as interested in clubs, communities and cultural sharing as the conservative brain is.

How, Stein asked, “could we have lost that? How does a communitarian world view lose its communitarian sense of self?”

the nature of political liberalism has changed.

The liberalism of the 1930s and 1940s was shaped by the Great Depression, and the response was, in many respects, communitarian: the strengthening of unions, the provision of jobs and government benefits to the poor and unemployed and the creation of a safety net to provide a modicum of security.

The left has, in part, shifted focus, with more stress on the values of self-expression and self-fulfillment, on individual liberation from the constraints of traditional morality, especially sexual morality — what my colleague Ross Douthat calls “The Liberalism of Adult Autonomy” or “the morality of rights.” Economic liberalism – despite progress on the minimum wage - has lost salience.

Instead of communitarian principles, the contemporary progressive movement — despite its advocacy of local issues like community policing — has produced a counterpart to conservative advocacy of free markets: the advocacy of personal freedom.

Insofar as liberals continue to leave the state-level organization to conservatives, they are conceding the most productive policy arenas in the country.

As left interests are being cut out of this process, the groundbreaking work is being done on the right. The losses for the Democratic Party and its allies include broken unions, defunded Planned Parenthood, lost wetlands and forests, restrictive abortion regulations and the proliferation of open-carry gun laws.

conservatives have overseen the drawing of legislative and congressional districts that will keep Republicans in power over the next decade. In this way, through the most effective gerrymandering of legislative and congressional districts in the nation’s history, the right has institutionalized a dangerous power vacuum on the left.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Polarization put cracks in that confidence. And once people no longer believed the other side would observe the norm, the norm collapsed remarkably quickly.

here’s the problem: The breakdown of the norms that have traditionally induced restraint in the judicial-confirmation process will not end with the creation of polarized judicial nominations and confirmations. It will run deeper. A highly polarized Senate in interaction with a winner-take-all presidency picking judges on the basis of raw power alone and creating party factions on every court in the country is a contagion that will spread.

In the world that I argued for, liberal senators would support Kavanaugh. They would do so because he is qualified, because the decision to give President Trump the authority to select judges was made when the electorate chose Trump over Hillary Clinton, and because the cost of opposing Kavanaugh—that Republican senators would oppose similarly qualified judges when the presidency is in Democratic hands—exceeds the possible benefits of opposition. This set of assumptions was driven by norms: not by law, not by the Constitution, not even by Senate rules. It was just the way things worked, because everything worked better if everyone behaved that way. And everyone behaved that way because everyone had confidence that those on the other side would behave that way as well.

Why not break up courts that routinely do things that political majorities don’t like?

Even the Supreme Court is not immune from a much more activist Congress. We tend to think of the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction as vast, but it’s only vast because Congress makes it so.

If Congress doesn’t want the Supreme Court to hear abortion cases, it could strip it of appellate jurisdiction over them—or at least, it could try.

In a world of polarized partisan control over the gateways to courts and thus partisan factions on the courts themselves, I can see no reason why these things won’t eventually happen. And I won’t even be able to make a principled argument that they shouldn’t happen.

through persuasive insistence. On issues as diverse as the alleged dangers of immigration and the nature of truth, Trump’s words have the power to cleave public opinion, turning nonpolitical issues into partisan maelstroms and turning partisan attitudes on their head.

Years ago (even months ago) it would have been absurd to imagine “law and order” Republicans souring on the FBI; or that the party of Reagan and Bush would turn on the NFL, America’s most orgiastically patriotic sport.

In 2014, about 60 percent of both Republicans and Democrats said the FBI was doing an "excellent" or "good" job. Last year, their views forked: Republican approval of the agency fell by about 10 points, while Democratic opinion improved by a similar margin.

And yet, because Democrats have become more pro-immigrant under Trump, a record-high share of Americans now say "immigrants strengthen the country.”

Trump evinces not a Midas touch, but a Moses touch—an extraordinary talent for planting a stake in the ground and dividing the landscape before him.

In mid-2016, 20 percent of both Republicans and Democrats considered Russia an “ally” or “friendly.” One year later, Republicans were more than twice as likely as Democrats to say the same.

Immigration had for years been a marginal political topic, especially when compared with issues like jobs and terrorism. But Trump effectively recast immigration as a question of American identity and national security.

The construction of a wall along the Mexican border, once a fringey scheme, became the centerpiece of the GOP presidential candidate’s agenda. Today, three-quarters of Trump supporters say that “building the wall” should be the highest priority of his presidency

Less than 20 percent of Republicans said they had unfavorable views of the NFL in the summer of 2017. But their disapproval had more than tripled by October, after Trump blasted players for kneeling to protest police violence during the national anthem

Trump’s “mere” words could starve his party of moderate legislators, while encouraging Democratic candidates to embrace more liberal positions to distinguish themselves as distinctly anti-Trump.

It's tempting to downplay the power of Trump's words by saying their influence is “merely” shifting public opinion. But that's not quite right. First, there’s nothing subtle about Republican voters clutching nativism, the far-right right clutching Nazism, or Democratic voters radicalizing in defiance of the president.

Second, Trump’s rhetorical posture has some real policy implications. Though he hasn’t yet signed any major legislation on immigration, his harsh stance on undocumented workers empowered the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to increase arrests by 40 percent in his first year, often to shocking effect

And his constant disparagement of experts who refuse to parrot his policies has sucked the talent out of several government agencies, notably the State Department.

Trump’s refusal to accept critical information as true—from his denial of Russian interference in the 2016 election to the “alternative facts” about his inauguration size—has demolished the right’s faith and trust in a free press. Three-quarters of the GOP now say that news organizations make up anti-Trump stories.

Even worse, a January study found that nearly half of Republicans believe that accurate stories that “cast a politician or political group in a negative light” are “always” fake news. Trump, along with Fox News, has given his supporters the license to self-deport from reality.

Trump’s obsession with building and broadcasting an alternative ledger of facts has made epistemology the fundamental crisis of his term

In its first month, the administration invented or mainstreamed a new vocabulary of mendacity—e.g., fake news, alternative facts—and within 10 months, Trump made more than 1,500 false or misleading claims, according to The Washington Post. That’s roughly six lies, exaggerations, or omissions per day

No legislation, no executive order, and no official speech has caused this shift. It is the president’s words, delivered often via Twitter and amplified on Fox News, that have exploded the very notion of a shared political truth.

The insistence that Trump’s words don’t matter isn’t incidental to the GOP’s broader strategy. It is the strategy—to quarantine Trump’s most noxious rhetoric and proceed apace with traditional Republican governance.

The idea that a president’s words don’t matter is a deeply ahistorical position. And that’s particularly true for the GOP

Perhaps Republicans don’t treat Trump as a typical Republican president because, in a very real sense, Trump is not really the president. Instead, he has become a kind of nationalist identity guru for the new American right.

an anonymous White House source all but acknowledged this strategy, telling Axios that the president would spend 2018 seeking “unexpected cultural flashpoints,” like the NFL’s kneeling controversy. The White House sees Trump’s principle talent as the ability to activate cultural resentment among his supporters, encouraging them to redefine their identity and values around a nativist anger.

Politics is downstream from persuasion, and law is downstream from language.

In February 2017, less than a month into Trump's presidency, Conway responded to the news of retailers cutting ties with Ivanka Trump's clothing line by saying on Fox News, "Go buy Ivanka's stuff is what I would tell you. It's a wonderful line. I own some of it. I'm going to give a free commercial here. Go buy it today, everybody."

“The Republican Party has failed to have a coherent strategy for climate change,” said Kiera O’Brien, a 19-year-old government major and the president of the Harvard Republican Club. She is also a vice president of the Students for Carbon Dividends.

Students for Carbon Dividends has also succeeded in recruiting six College Democratic groups and several environmental-advocacy organizations to the cause. “This solution is not necessarily perfect, but it’s a good one that we can work with Republicans on, and it’s an improvement on the status quo,” said Jordan Cozby, the president of the Yale College Democrats and a 20-year-old history major from Huntsville, Alabama.

And Republicans may not need young votes to win. Roughly a quarter of all young Republicans left the party between December 2015 and March 2017, according to the Pew Research Center. (Democrats did not experience a generational exodus during the same period.) Yet this hemorrhage has not yet seemed to hurt them. Republicans won Congress and the White House in 2016 despite losing among Millennials, Gen Xers, and college-educated whites.

“The Republican party has a clear climate-change problem,” he told me. “Being on the wrong side of the scientific facts is bad for the party, bad for the country, and bad for the world. When College Republicans come out in large numbers in support of a revenue-neutral price on carbon, it will speak loudly to Republican members of Congress who are going to need the support of those voters at the next election, and the next, and so on.”

“Thankfully, young voters will be around for a long time,” he added. “It’s best to earn their support now.”

But Obama has largely remained silent. That should not come as surprise. His reticence reflects one of the problems that constrained his presidency—his hesitation and resistance to getting down and dirty in the muck of partisan politics. He aimed high, but American politics went low.

But when it came to partisan politics, Obama declined to enter into bare-knuckled combat with Tea Party Republicans. He bowed out of the fight at the exact time that he was requiring congressional Democrats to vote on a series of highly controversial issues.

Obama’s strategy of trying to deflate his opposition by downplaying or hiding the impact of his programs posed political problems for his political supporters. Democrats wanted Obama to wave the flag of victory, but the president believed that avoiding drama was a better approach. As the president expanded the federal government with a hidden hand, refusing to boast of the effects of the stimulus or downplaying discussions about what his regulatory changes achieved (a sharp contrast from President Trump), Democrats didn’t have as much to work with on the campaign trail.

When Obama became president in 2009, Republicans could afford to have former President George W. Bush sit on the sidelines as they rebuilt their strength. Unlike Obama, Bush was hugely unpopular. But more importantly, the right had its institutions as a solid base for revival. The grassroots energy of the Tea Party was connected to these entrenched institutions, from Fox News to Dick Army’s FreedomWorks. But the Democratic Party can’t afford to wait; it needs Obama to learn from one of the great mistakes of his own presidency: his failure to take seriously enough the grave political threat his party was facing.

The last time Obama was too timid, the Republicans roared. His party can’t afford to see Obama make that same mistake once again.

Ultimately, however, the market might not support some forms of journalism. For example, the number of local reporters today is at its lowest point since the 1970s, despite the fact that the U.S. population has grown by 50 percent. Research has shown a direct connection between declining local journalism and less civic engagement. If local news is a public good, it may deserve public support—perhaps in the form of government subsidies. But asking for public assistance might seem like an act of pure desperation.

Those nostalgic for the lucrative old days might curl their toes at the mention of a Medici-esque sponsorship model. But billionaire-supported investigative reporting is surely better than no investigative reporting at all. So what’s the matter with patronage?

A patron is a person. A person can change his or her mind—and often does. Chris Hughes junked The New Republic when losses eclipsed his idealism. Phil Anschutz snuffed out The Weekly Standard

It seems safe to say that, going forward, media organizations will get by on some combination of subscription, patronage, and auxiliary revenue from sources such as events and licensed content. Whatever happens, advertising will almost certainly play a lesser role

During a period of the early 19th century known as the “party press” era, newspapers relied on patrons. Those patrons were political parties (hence “party press”) that handed out printing contracts to their favorite editors or directly paid writers to publish vicious attacks against rivals.

That era’s journalism was hyper-political and deeply biased

The number of newspapers in the United States grew from several dozen in the late 1700s to more than 1,200 in the 1830s. These newspapers experimented with a variety of journalistic styles and appeals to the public. As Gerald J. Baldasty, a professor at the University of Washington, has argued, these newspapers treated readers as a group to engage and galvanize. Perhaps as a result, voting rates soared in the middle of the 19th century to record highs.

As the news business shifts back from advertisers to patrons and readers (that is to say, subscribers), journalism might escape that “view from nowhere” purgatory and speak straightforwardly about the worl

The New York Times’ revenue has shifted from more than 60 percent advertising to more than 60 percent reader payments. As its business model has changed, so has its coverage. “Look at The New York Times in 1960 vs. 2010; the reportage is more interpretive,” observed the late James L. Baughma

Every once in a while, somebody asks me whether we’ll ever get back to a place where the country can agree on a “single set of facts.” Those asking the question tend to be nostalgic for the 1950s, when they could count the number of television channels on one hand and rely on Walter Cronkite and a local media monopoly to control the flow of information.

That past is dead and irrecoverable

Descriptive sociology is a fairly new discipline. One of its earliest practitioners was Emile Durkheim, who in 1897 published his famous statistical analysis of the causes of suicide in France.

Along with Glazer, one of the leaders of the field a half-century ago was the University of Chicago’s James Coleman

At first, Coleman’s findings were considered descriptive conclusions rather than justifications for this or that policy. Soon that changed. Proponents of busing to reduce educational inequality believed his findings about the better educational achievement of black children in predominantly white classrooms justified their preferred policy. Opponents of busing pointed to his finding that family background was the main determinant of educational achievement. Both sides portrayed the report polemically, rather than as descriptive sociology.

In 1975, however, Coleman’s research found that busing caused families to move out of central-city neighborhoods into the suburbs or transfer their children to private or parochial schools. He inferred that busing programs, meant to reduce educational segregation, increased it by encouraging white flight. Though he still abhorred racial segregation in schools, he could no longer recommend busing as a solution

Like Coleman, who died in 1995, Nathan Glazer changed his mind about an important public-policy issue because new information persuaded him that he had been wrong. He famously argued in the 1997 book, “We Are All Multiculturalists Now,” that a colorblind approach in educational and employment for black Americans would not be sufficient to bring them into the mainstream of society.

Today sociology is a partisan field. It asks “Whose side are we on?” rather than “Is this the most truthful account we can give.” Many sociologists are less devoted to scholarship than to righting wrongs like racism and sex discrimination

There are still descriptive sociologists working to discover truths about our social world, but their numbers are dwindling.

Not surprisingly, the current ASA president chose “Engaging Social Justice for a Better World” as the theme of the organization’s 2019 summer meeting. Nathan Glazer was never president of the ASA, though he deserved to be by virtue of scholarly eminence. If he were, he probably would not have chosen an agenda about “social justice.” Instead, he would have emphasized the scholarly mission Durkheim invented: telling the truth about social reality.