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you usually hear liberals sling against the right: That the real estate magnate turned populist is actually a fascist.

The hook for this charge was Trump’s illiberal musings about Muslims and databases and his lies — or, to be charitable, false memories

argued that Trumpism, however ideologically inchoate, manifests at least seven of the hallmarks of fascism identified by the Italian polymath Umberto Eco.

whence Britain’s radicalization? One answer is that respectable nationwide averages mask the tough experiences of subgroups. Between 2010-2011 and 2014-2015, more than a third of Britons suffered a fall in household income of more than 5 percent. Those depending heavily on the state have suffered the effects of harsh cuts in government spending. Young workers, who have provided much of the support for Labour’s lurch leftward, have fared worse than old ones. The shocking price of homes has made it difficult for non-owners to live in regions with good job prospects.

But the larger explanation is cultural. On the left and the right, there is a sense that society is changing rapidly and unfairly. The right-wing version of this insecurity centers on migration. Between 1964 and 1989, the number of migrants arriving to live in Britain never exceeded 250,000 in a year. But in the two years leading up to the Brexit vote, new arrivals exceeded 600,000 annually. When Conservative populists rant xenophobically about “taking back control,” they are exploiting the backlash from that surge in foreign voices.

left-wing cultural insecurity centers on a form of inequality that goes beyond the data on incomes, encompassing ownership of assets and the sense of job stability. The haves can count on a salaried job, a stake in the housing market and perhaps some corporate shares or share options. The have-nots face short-term work contracts, high rents and no prospect of a stake in the profits generated by capitalism.

the biggest story in the Swedish election, as in so many other Western elections lately, was fragmentation and its daughter stalemate — with declining or discredited parties of the center facing off against forces on the right and left that create majorities or near-majorities of opposition, but not of governance.

Meanwhile the left is energized as never in my lifetime, while the center-left seems bankrupt, dazed and paranoid. But the thesis that a populist left can win elections consistently, let alone govern a country that has so far responded to a more ideologically liberal Democratic Party by voting more often for Republicans, has been confirmed only in the imaginations of Jacobin subscribers

The question is how long this situation can last. It might be that the current stalemate is just a transitional phase, a necessary step on the path from one order to another, and that at some point a group of politicians will figure out how to channel populist energy into a program or coalition that can make Western countries governable again.

both conventional polling and conventional wisdom underestimated the potential for white turnout generally and working-class white turnout specifically — and that’s why Trump’s strategy was able to carry him to victory.

The numbers offer a cautionary tale for both emerging-Democratic-majority inevitabilists and for a left whose increasing vehemence about the wickedness of “whiteness” probably encourages the white tribalism that Trump rallied and exploited.

though Trump outperformed pundit expectations, he did not carry a majority, and his Midwestern electoral victory was wide but dangerously shallow.

To prevent factions from distorting public policy and threatening liberty, Madison resolved to exclude the people from a direct role in government. “A pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction,” Madison wrote in “Federalist No. 10.”

The Framers designed the American constitutional system not as a direct democracy but as a representative republic, where enlightened delegates of the people would serve the public good. They also built into the Constitution a series of cooling mechanisms intended to inhibit the formulation of passionate factions, to ensure that reasonable majorities would prevail.

Madison, however, thought Plato’s small-republic thesis was wrong. He believed that the ease of communication in small republics was precisely what had allowed hastily formed majorities to oppress minorities. “Extend the sphere” of a territory, Madison wrote, “and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.” Madison predicted that America’s vast geography and large population would prevent passionate mobs from mobilizing. Their dangerous energy would burn out before it could inflame others.

The book’s starting premise is acknowledging the mid-2000s slowdown in labor productivity growth in the advanced industrialized economies. There are lots of debates about why there was a productivity slowdown and whether it can be reversed.

This volume asked a different question: What happens to the U.S. political economy if the slowdown is the new status quo?

In a polarized political climate, secular stagnation will encourage America’s economic elite to tilt further rightward in the coming decade, even though the Republican Party will continue to drift in a populist direction, supporting new barriers to international trade and migration.

populist parties in Germany and Europe are increasingly campaigning against environmental rules. Such opposition perfectly fits into populist narratives and patterns: skepticism about science, anger over “political correctness” and a libertarian reflex against government regulations in general

The mainstream right is following suit, claiming to try to cut off the far right but in reality taking advantage of a suddenly attractive political target.

Environmental issues produce the same fundamental cleavages as migration. Both migration and environmental policies are aiming at global and moral goals that citizens profit from only in the abstract, while the costs are immediate.

The key result: the 20 most prosperous districts are now held by Democrats, while Republicans represent 16 of the 20 least prosperous, measured by share of G.D.P. The accompanying chart illustrates their analysis.

The authors’ calculation of the contribution to the G.D.P. of every congressional district showed that Democratic districts produce $10.2 trillion of the nation’s goods and services and Republican districts $6.2 trillion.

Candidates on the right do best during hard times and in recent elections, they have gained the most politically in regions experiencing the sharpest downturn. Electorally speaking, in other words, Republicans profit from economic stagnation and decline.

At its inception, “the republic provided a legal and political structure that channeled the individual energies of Romans in ways that benefited the entire Roman commonwealth.”

But over the following centuries, that foundation slowly weakened, and then rapidly collapsed.

Since the founding fathers explicitly modeled the United States on the Roman Republic, a study that investigates the circumstances of its demise promises to hold considerable relevance for our own times

Some liberals and progressives replied that the word was irrelevant

The scatological vulgarity of this comment from a famous germaphobe was part of its racism.

He finds African countries disgusting, and finds people who come from them disgusting, and said so in a way that “poor and unhealthy countries” wouldn’t have captured.

We go on endlessly about how “untrustworthy” she is, while fact checkers rank her as the second-most honest prominent politician in the country. (And her opponent as by far the least.)

History is decidedly unafraid of “the woman card.” It doesn’t care how many people will stand on tables today and swear they’d feel the same if she were a man. It will see us for what we are—a sick society, driven by misogyny and pathetically struggling to come to terms with the fact that women do not exist solely to nurture.

When Mitt Romney wiped servers, sold government hard drives to his closest aides and spent $100,000 in taxpayer money to destroy his administration’s emails, it was barely an issue.

Luigi Di Maio, the leader of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement, indicated on Wednesday that he was willing to compromise on his choice of finance minister – previously the main roadblock to agreeing an administration

President Sergio Mattarella approved Conte's appointment last week -- but the next day rejected the politician's choice of finance minister, forcing Conte, 53, to abandon his attempt to form a government.

Thursday's announcement came a few hours after the right-wing League and anti-establishment Five Star Movement -- the two largest parties after the federal election in March -- said they reached an agreement to form a coalition government, signaling a possible end to the country's months-long political uncertainty.

News of Conte's appointment came soon after Carlo Cottarelli, a former official at the International Monetary Fund who was asked by President Sergio Mattarella to form an interim government earlier this week, relinquished his mandate to make way for Conte.

ccording to the standard account, the 2008–09 economic crisis and the migration crisis of 2015–16 were bound to drive voters into the arms of the far right. Young Europeans were seen by some as easy prey for populists, as they had no memories of the bad old days of nationalism and war in the mid-20th century.

In the European elections held earlier this year, Le Pen’s score among the young nearly halved, and the Greens triumphed, despite the efforts of the renamed National Rally to attract the youth vote by installing the charismatic 23-year-old Jordan Bardella as the lead candidate.

Across the Rhine, Germans ages 30 and under gave the Greens their best-ever result in a national election. At the other end of the ideological spectrum, the right-wing nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD) came in a distant sixth among the young.

If Biden wins the White House but doesn’t deliver real benefits for disaffected working-class Trumpians and disillusioned young Bernie Bros, then the populist uprisings of 2024 will make the populist uprisings of today look genteel by comparison. “The system is rotten to the core,” they’ll say. “It’s time to burn it all down.”

The politics of the last four years have taught us that tens of millions of Americans feel that their institutions have completely failed them. The legitimacy of the whole system is still hanging by a thread. The core truth of a Biden administration would be bring change or reap the whirlwind.

Democrats are not just a party; they’re a community.

The core of the movement was made up of the public intellectuals, political operatives, and once and future political appointees whom the party depends on to run campaigns and to govern after successful ones. Eliot A. Cohen (now an Atlantic contributing writer), Bryan McGrath, and John Bellinger were among the ringleaders of the nearly unanimous resistance by the GOP’s foreign-policy establishment.

Another strong constellation of Never Trumpism was made up of writers such as the venerable columnist George Will and Bill Kristol, a co-founder of The Weekly Standard.

A small but vocal contingent within the Republican political-operative class also joined the effort.

Mr. Stern, who’s worked at the Manhattan Institute for more than two decades, tendered his resignation from its flagship publication, City Journal. “This is very important. It’s about the future of our country. It’s about the degradation of language and ideas,” Mr. Stern insisted. He, along with several others I spoke to, felt the think tank and City Journal were acting like Sweden in the face of the Trump threat.

“This now seems to be the only way for me to protest the magazine’s intellectual abdication on the most urgent crisis facing the nation today: the election of an unfit, dangerous man to the presidency, plus the myriad ways in which the forces of Trumpism and Bannonism are tearing the country apart,” Mr. Stern wrote in a resignation letter

to one journalist previously published by City Journal, that doesn’t justify the way the publication has responded to the Trump presidency. “While City Journal’s desire to sit out the Republican civil war was perfectly understandable, it is not a viable long term option now that Donald Trump is president,” he wrote me. “A political journal in the Trump era” that hardly engages with the president “isn’t like ignoring a 900-pound elephant. It’s like ignoring an invasion from Mars.”

Rebecca J. Rosen: Your new book, The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution, is premised on the idea that the American Constitution is what you call a middle-class constitution. What does that mean?

Ganesh Sitaraman: The idea of the middle-class constitution is that it’s a constitutional system that requires and is conditioned on the assumption that there is a large middle class, and no big differences between rich and poor in a society.

Prior to the American Constitution, most countries and most people who thought about designing governments were very concerned about the problem of inequality, and the fear was that, in a society that was deeply unequal, the rich would oppress the poor and the poor would revolt and confiscate the wealth of the rich.