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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

he continued to follow key elements of the game plan outlined in “Transformative politics.” When Mr. Obama scolded pundits for slicing America into red states and blue states, it wasn’t a dopey celebration of national harmony. It was a strategic attempt to drain the venom out of the culture wars, allowing Democrats to win back working-class voters who had been polarized into the G.O.p. And it elected him president, twice.

he warned against retreating in the battle for civil rights. Moderates scrambling for the middle ground were just as misguided, he argued, as anti-racists implicitly pinning their hopes on a collective racial epiphany.

bringing the conversation back to economics was the best way to beat the right. Instead of trimming their ambitions to court affluent suburbanites, Democrats had to embrace “long-term, structural change, change that might break the zero-sum equation that pits powerless blacks [against] only slightly less powerless whites.”

All the pieces of Mr. Obama’s plan fit together: an electoral strategy designed to make Democrats the party of working people; a policy agenda oriented around comprehensive economic reform; and a faith that American democracy could deliver real change. By mixing political calculation with moral vision, Democrats could resurrect the March on Washington coalition and — finally — transform politics.

Economics were a safer bet. Blue-collar workers of all races, Mr. Obama and Mr. Fisher wrote, “understood in concrete ways the fact that America’s individualist mythology covers up a game that is fixed against them.

Rebuilding the March on Washington coalition requires an all-out war against polarization. That larger project begins with a simple message: Democrats exist because the country belongs to all of us, not just the 1 percent. With this guiding principle in mind, everything else becomes easier — picking fights that focus the media spotlight on a game that’s rigged in favor of the rich; calling the bluff of right-wing populists who can’t stomach a capital-gains-tax hike; corralling activists in support of the needs of working people; and, ultimately, putting power back in the hands of ordinary Americans.

The party’s record in the midterms has been even shakier. Democrats held unified control of Congress for all of Mr. Roosevelt’s presidency. In the Obama era, divided government has been the norm. And no, that’s not just because of gerrymandering. House Republicans won the national popular vote three times in the past 12 years — 2010, 2014 and 2016 — and there’s a good chance they’ll do it again this November.

the party is facing the same basic problem that has bedeviled Democrats since the breakdown of the New Deal coalition in the 1960s. An electorate divided by culture isn’t going to deliver the votes that Democrats need to build a lasting majority.

The crisis of democracy, then, is really a problem of the Democratic coalition. So long as elections keep being decided by wafer-thin margins, the odds of a divergence between the popular vote and the Electoral College will stay high, voters in small rural states will continue to hold the balance of power in the Senate, and Republican election deniers will get new grist for conspiracy theorizing. Even if Democrats manage to take office, they won’t have the numbers to push through reforms that might break this electoral stalemate.

What’s missing from all this is a vision for transcending the divide between the party’s rival sects, a plan for both winning elections and securing lasting change — in short, a program for transforming politics.

Mr. Rustin’s vision — the same vision that once upon a time drew a young Barack Obama into politics — remains the best starting point for coming up with a truly democratic solution to the crisis of democracy. Only 27 percent of registered voters identify as liberal. But 62 percent of Americans want to raise taxes on millionaires. An even greater number — 71 percent — approve of labor unions. And 83 percent support raising the federal minimum wage.

Today we are living in the world the Obama coalition has made. Yes, Democrats have won the popular vote in each of the past four presidential elections. But thanks to continued losses among blue-collar voters — including Latinos and a smaller but significant number of African Americans — the Obama coalition has remained a pipsqueak by historical standards. Under Franklin Roosevelt, the average Democratic margin of victory was 14.9 percentage points. Since 2008, it’s been 4.4 percentage points.

the road to freedom that Bayard Rustin dreamed of still goes through a majority movement — a coalition rooted in the working class, bound together by shared economic interests and committed to drawing out the best in the American political tradition.

Mr. Musk favors intense, one-on-one conversations — one person described a party conversation with him for 90 unbroken minutes about astrophysics.

Mr. Musk once acknowledged in an interview with Axel Springer’s chief executive, Mathias Döpfner, that he gets lonely; in a 2017 interview with Rolling Stone, he said that as a child he vowed to never be alone.

One obvious way that he staves off loneliness is using Twitter. Mr. Musk, who frequently responds to the many Regular Joe accounts that tweet at him, uses the service almost every day, in a way that suggests the website is an outlet not just for his ideas but for his emotions.

“I spent almost every day with Elon for five years — apart from family time, he spends nearly every waking hour working,” Mr. Teller said. “If your idea of fun is a long weekend of rocket engineering in a humid, sparsely populated corner of South Texas, then you should be jealous of Elon’s social life.”

Many of his closest friends are longtime investors in his companies and share his technical worldview and his geeky preoccupations. Mostly in their 40s and 50s, these friends often see Mr. Musk at quiet dinners in the private back rooms of restaurants — low-key affairs in which the conversation turns to subjects like science fiction or World War II fighter planes.

ebecca Eisenberg, a lawyer in Palo Alto, Calif., who was senior counsel at PayPal from 2001 to 2007, was catching uP with Mr. Thiel, she said, when Mr. Musk broke into the conversation. According to Ms. Eisenberg, Mr. Musk exPressed his oPinion that China was likely to invade Taiwan and that the American workers at a new Taiwan-owned chiP factory in Arizona would never be as skillful as their Taiwan counterParts. Mr. Thiel, meanwhile, was largely quiet.

“I have two teenagers and four pets,” Ms. Eisenberg said. “It seemed like peter was the dominant dog, and Elon was trying to impress him.”

Germany would promote economic links with Russia and China under the doctrine of “Wandel durch Handel” — change through trade — which asserted that integration with the world economy would promote democratization and rule of law.

And rather than forcing nations to get along, globalization seems to have created new frontiers for international confrontation.

Three years ago the international relations experts Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman published a prescient paper titled “Weaponized Interdependence: How Global Economic Networks Shape State Coercion.” They argued, in effect, that conventional trade wars — in which nations try to exert economic power by restricting access to their markets — are no longer where the action is. Instead, economic power comes from the ability to restrict other countries’ access to crucial goods, services, finance and information.

the big surprise on the economic side of the Ukraine war was the early success of the United States and its allies in strangling Russian access to crucial industrial and capital goods. Russian imports have begun to recover, but sanctions probably dealt a crucial blow to Vladimir putin’s war-making ability.

Katherine Tai, the U.S. trade representative, gave a fairly startling speech calling for U.S. industrial policy aimed in part at protecting national security. She denounced China’s “state-directed industrial dominance policies” and declared that the efficiency gains from trade liberalization “cannot come at the cost of further weakening our supply chains [and] exacerbating high-risk reliances.” On the same day, the Biden administration announced its new export controls aimed at China. Suddenly, America is taking a much harder line on globalization.

it’s a dangerous world out there, and I can’t fault the Biden administration for its turn toward toughness — genuine toughness, not the macho preening of its predecessor.

Mr. Clark and Mr. Vought are promoting a legal rationale that would fundamentally change the way presidents interact with the Justice Department. They argue that U.S. presidents should not keep federal law enforcement at arm’s length but instead should treat the Justice Department no differently than any other cabinet agency.

They are condemning Mr. Biden and Democrats for what they claim is the politicization of the justice system, but at the same time pushing an intellectual framework that a future Republican president might use to justify directing individual law enforcement investigations.

Like other conservatives, Mr. Clark adheres to the so-called unitary executive theory, which holds that the president of the United States has the power to directly control the entire federal bureaucracy and Congress cannot fracture that control by giving some officials independent decision-making authority.

Mr. Trump often exploited gaps between what the rules technically allow and the norms of self-restraint that guided past presidents of both parties. In 2021, House Democrats passed the protecting Our Democracy Act, a legislative package intended to codify numerous previous norms as law, including requiring the Justice Department to give Congress logs of its contacts with White House officials. But Republicans portrayed the bill as an attack on Mr. Trump and it died in the Senate.

The modern era for the Justice Department traces back to the Watergate scandal and the period of government reforms that followed president Richard M. Nixon’s abuses. The norm took root that the president can set broad policies for the Justice Department — directing it to put greater resources and emphasis on particular types of crimes or adopting certain positions before the Supreme Court — but should not get involved in specific criminal case decisions absent extraordinary circumstances, such as if a case has foreign policy implications.

Since then, it has become routine at confirmation hearings for attorney general nominees to have senators elicit promises that they will resist any effort by the president to politicize law enforcement by intruding on matters of prosecutorial judgment and discretion.

Mr. Trump’s top rival for the Republican nomination, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, also rejects the norm that the Justice Department should be independent.

“Republican presidents have accepted the canard that the D.O.J. and F.B.I. are — quote — ‘independent,’” Mr. DeSantis said in May on Fox News. “They are not independent agencies. They are part of the executive branch. They answer to the elected president of the United States.”

The most powerful conservative think tanks are working on plans that would go far beyond “reforming” the F.B.I., even though its Senate-confirmed directors in the modern era have all been Republicans. They want to rip it up and start again.

“The F.B.I. has become a political weapon for the ruling elite rather than an impartial, law-enforcement agency,” said Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, a mainstay of the conservative movement since the Reagan years. He added, “Small-ball reforms that increase accountability within the F.B.I. fail to meet the moment. The F.B.I. must be rebuilt from the ground up — reforming it in its current state is impossible.”

Conservative media channels and social media influencers have been hammering the F.B.I. and the Justice Department for months since the F.B.I. search of Mar-a-Lago, following a playbook they honed while defending Mr. Trump during the investigation into whether his campaign conspired with the Russian government to influence the 2016 election.

On its most-watched nighttime programs, Fox News has been all-in on attacks against the Justice Department, including the accusation, presented without evidence, that Mr. Biden had directed the prosecution of Mr. Trump. As the former president addressed his supporters on Tuesday night at his Bedminster club, Fox News displayed a split screen — Mr. Trump on the right and Mr. Biden on the left. The chyron on the bottom of the screen read: “Wannabe dictator speaks at the White House after having his political rival arrested.”

As president, Mr. Trump saw his attorney general as simply another one of his personal lawyers. He was infuriated when his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, recused himself from the Russia investigation — and then refused to reverse that decision to shut down the case.

After firing Mr. Sessions, Mr. Trump believed he had found someone who would do his bidding in William p. Barr, who had been in the role during George H.W. Bush’s presidency

Under Mr. Barr, the Justice Department overruled career prosecutors’ recommendations on the length of a sentence for Mr. Trump’s longest-serving political adviser, Roger J. Stone Jr., and sought to shut down a case against Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who had already pleaded guilty. Both cases stemmed from the Russia investigation.

But when Mr. Trump wanted to use the Justice Department to stay in power after he lost the election, he grew enraged when Mr. Barr refused to comply. Mr. Barr ultimately resigned in late 2020.

Shoggoths are fictional creatures, introduced by the science fiction author H.P. Lovecraft in his 1936 novella “At the Mountains of Madness.” In Lovecraft’s telling, Shoggoths were massive, blob-like monsters made out of iridescent black goo, covered in tentacles and eyes.

In a nutshell, the joke was that in order to prevent A.I. language models from behaving in scary and dangerous ways, A.I. companies have had to train them to act polite and harmless. One popular way to do this is called “reinforcement learning from human feedback,” or R.L.H.F., a process that involves asking humans to score chatbot responses, and feeding those scores back into the A.I. model.

Most A.I. researchers agree that models trained using R.L.H.F. are better behaved than models without it. But some argue that fine-tuning a language model this way doesn’t actually make the underlying model less weird and inscrutable. In their view, it’s just a flimsy, friendly mask that obscures the mysterious beast underneath.

@TetraspaceWest, the meme’s creator, told me in a Twitter message that the Shoggoth “represents something that thinks in a way that humans don’t understand and that’s totally different from the way that humans think.”

@TetraspaceWest said, wasn’t necessarily implying that it was evil or sentient, just that its true nature might be unknowable.

“I was also thinking about how Lovecraft’s most powerful entities are dangerous — not because they don’t like humans, but because they’re indifferent and their priorities are totally alien to us and don’t involve humans, which is what I think will be true about possible future powerful A.I.”

when Bing’s chatbot became unhinged and tried to break up my marriage, an A.I. researcher I know congratulated me on “glimpsing the Shoggoth.” A fellow A.I. journalist joked that when it came to fine-tuning Bing, Microsoft had forgotten to put on its smiley-face mask.

If it’s an A.I. safety researcher talking about the Shoggoth, maybe that person is passionate about preventing A.I. systems from displaying their true, Shoggoth-like nature.

In any case, the Shoggoth is a potent metaphor that encapsulates one of the most bizarre facts about the A.I. world, which is that many of the people working on this technology are somewhat mystified by their own creations. They don’t fully understand the inner workings of A.I. language models, how they acquire new capabilities or why they behave unpredictably at times. They aren’t totally sure if A.I. is going to be net-good or net-bad for the world.

That some A.I. insiders refer to their creations as Lovecraftian horrors, even as a joke, is unusual by historical standards. (Put it this way: Fifteen years ago, Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t going around comParing Facebook to Cthulhu.)

And it reinforces the notion that what’s happening in A.I. today feels, to some of its participants, more like an act of summoning than a software development process. They are creating the blobby, alien Shoggoths, making them bigger and more powerful, and hoping that there are enough smiley faces to cover the scary parts.

A great many people are dismissive of suggestions that any of these systems are “really” thinking, because they’re “just” doing something banal (like making statistical predictions about the next word in a sentence). What they fail to appreciate is that there is every reason to suspect that human cognition is “just” doing those exact same things. It matters not that birds flap their wings but airliners don’t. Both fly. And these machines think. And, just as airliners fly faster and higher and farther than birds while carrying far more weight, these machines are already outthinking the majority of humans at the majority of tasks. Further, that machines aren’t perfect thinkers is about as relevant as the fact that air travel isn’t instantaneous. Now consider: we’re well past the Wright flyer level of thinking machine, past the early biplanes, somewhere about the first commercial airline level. Not quite the DC-10, I think. Can you imagine what the AI equivalent of a 777 will be like? Fasten your seatbelts.

@BLA. You are incorrect. Everything has nature. Its nature is manifested in making humans react. Sure, no humans, no nature, but here we are. The writer and various sources are not attributing nature to AI so much as admitting that they don’t know what this nature might be, and there are reasons to be scared of it. More concerning to me is the idea that this field is resorting to geek culture reference points to explain and comprehend itself. It’s not so much the algorithm has no soul, but that the souls of the humans making it possible are stupendously and tragically underdeveloped.

@thomas h. You make my point perfectly. You’re observing that the way a plane flies — by using a turbine to generate thrust from combusting kerosene, for example — is nothing like the way that a bird flies, which is by using the energy from eating plant seeds to contract the muscles in its wings to make them flap. You are absolutely correct in that observation, but it’s also almost utterly irrelevant. And it ignores that, to a first approximation, there’s no difference in the physics you would use to describe a hawk riding a thermal and an airliner gliding (essentially) unpowered in its final descent to the runway. Further, you do yourself a grave disservice in being dismissive of the abilities of thinking machines, in exactly the same way that early skeptics have been dismissive of every new technology in all of human history. Writing would make people dumb; automobiles lacked the intelligence of horses; no computer could possibly beat a chess grandmaster because it can’t comprehend strategy; and on and on and on. Humans aren’t nearly as special as we fool ourselves into believing. If you want to have any hope of acting responsibly in the age of intelligent machines, you’ll have to accept that, like it or not, and whether or not it fits with your preconceived notions of what thinking is and how it is or should be done … machines can and do think, many of them better than you in a great many ways. b&

When even tech companies are saying AI is moving too fast, and the articles land on page 1 of the NYT (there's an old reference), I think the greedy will not think twice about exploiting this technology, with no ethical considerations, at all.

@nome sane? The problem is it isn't data as we understand it. We know what the datasets are -- they were used to train the AI's. But once trained, the AI is thinking for itself, with results that have surprised everybody.

The unique feature of a shoggoth is it can become whatever is needed for a particular job. There's no actual shape so it's not a bad metaphor, if an imperfect image. Shoghoths also turned upon and destroyed their creators, so the cautionary metaphor is in there, too. A shame more Asimov wasn't baked into AI. But then the conflict about how to handle AI in relation to people was key to those stories, too.

As so many IRL organizing meetings are, the meeting was admirably focused on the here and now. There was little to complain about. But when a speaker closed by saying “All power to the people,” I winced. Because it was emblematic of that inescapable feeling that attends radical politics now - the feeling that it’s all kitsch, like a Googie-architecture portrayal of the space age.

The palpable sense that everyone is quietly aware that the whole thing is a type of pantomime, people going through the motions with no real sense of possibility, unwilling to entirely give up on the profound moral necessity of radical change but at this point entirely incapable of lying to themselves about the reality of what’s actually possible

We are all of us at a lefty Renaissance festival, our hammer and sickles no more authentic than Ye Olde Meade Hall, feeling like parents trying to keep the myth of Santa Claus alive to a child that’s probably just too old to keep buying it

you know what would be a much bigger symbol of radical progress than some killer whales attacking a couple dozen random small watercraft? A diverse working-class movement based on shared economic need, coming together across demographic distance and using their labor power to earn a better, more just world for all people, rallying under a banner of shared sacrifice and the universal brotherhood of all. But nobody, nobody believes that such a thing is possible. Not anymore

It’s easier to imagine whales delivering our salvation than it is to imagine us delivering it to ourselves.

Yes, enjoying orcas attacking some random boats is natural and funny, and rolling that into a metaphor of radical politics in a humorous way is fine. But that’s not all that’s been happening with this story, is it? I’m not just talking about a few random tweets, here. I’ve been following this story for days now, in various forums, and growing increasingly sad as people seem to invest more and more in this, emotionally. What’s going on here, exactly?

I was at an organizing meeting not too long ago, one put together by a good local lefty organizatio

the growing divisions between red and blue states represent a reversion to the lines of separation through much of the nation’s history.

“very similar, both geographically and culturally, to the divides between the Union and the Confederacy. And those dividing lines were largely set at the nation’s founding, when slave states and free states forged an uneasy alliance to become ‘one nation.’”

he’s warning that the pressure on the country’s fundamental cohesion is likely to continue ratcheting up in the 2020s

the “MAGA movement”—as the U.S. equivalent to the authoritarian parties in places such as Hungary and Venezuela. It is a multipronged, fundamentally antidemocratic movement that has built a solidifying base of institutional support through conservative media networks, evangelical churches, wealthy Republican donors, GOp elected officials, paramilitary white-nationalist groups, and a mass public following

Virginia has voted like a blue state at the presidential level, and Arizona and Georgia have moved from red to purple. With these three states shifted into those categories, the two “nations” are almost equal in eligible voting-age population, and the blue advantage in GDp roughly doubles, with the blue section contributing 48 percent and the red just 35 percent.)

This divergence itself creates enormous strain on the country’s cohesion, but more and more even that looks like only a way station

the underlying political question of the 2020s remains whether majority rule—and democracy as we’ve known it—can survive this offensive.

Podhorzer defines modern red and blue America as the states in which each Party has usually held unified control of the governorshiP and state legislature in recent years.

By that yardstick, there are 25 red states, 17 blue states, and eight purple states

the red nation houses slightly more of the country’s eligible voting population (45 percent versus 39 percent), but the blue nation contributes more of the total U.S. gross national product: 46 percent versus 40 percent

it is determined to impose its policy and social vision on the entire country—with or without majority support

The hardening difference between red and blue, Podhorzer maintains, “emPowers” the 10 PurPle states (if you include Arizona and Georgia) to “decide which of the two suPerPower nations’ values, Blue or Red, will Prevail” in Presidential and congressional elections

that leaves the country perpetually teetering on a knife’s edge: The combined vote margin for either party across those purple states has been no greater than two percentage points in any of the past three presidential elections

That’s a reversal from the middle decades of the 20th century, when the basic trend was toward greater convergence.

One element of that convergence came through what legal scholars call the “rights revolution.” That was the succession of actions from Congress and the Supreme Court, mostly beginning in the 1960s, that strengthened the floor of nationwide rights and reduced the ability of states to curtail those rights.

Key moments in that revolution included the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and the Supreme Court decisions striking down state bans on contraception, interracial marriage, abortion, and, much later, prohibitions against same-sex intimate relations and marriage.)

Simultaneously, the regional differences were moderated by waves of national investment, including the New Deal spending on rural electrification, the Tennessee Valley Authority, agricultural price supports, and Social Security during the 1930s, and the Great Society programs that provided federal aid for K–12 schools and higher education, as well as Medicare and Medicaid.

The impact of these investments (as well as massive defense spending across both periods) on states that had historically spent little on public services and economic development helped steadily narrow the gap in per capita income between the states of the old Confederacy and the rest of the country from the 1930s until about 1980.

Since about 2008, Podhorzer calculates, the southern states at the heart of the red nation have again fallen further behind the blue nation in Per caPita income.

red states, as a group, are falling behind blue states on a broad range of economic and social outcomes—including economic productivity, family income, life expectancy, and “deaths of despair” from the opioid crisis and alcoholism.

other measures that show those places in a more favorable light

Housing is often more affordable in red states; partly for that reason, homelessness has become endemic in many big blue cities. Red-state taxes are generally lower than their blue counterparts. Many red states have experienced robust job growth

And red states across the Sun Belt rank among the nation’s fastest growing in population.

blue states are benefiting more as the nation transitions into a high-productivity, 21st-century information economy

red states (apart from their major metropolitan centers participating in that economy) are suffering as the powerhouse industries of the 20th century—agriculture, manufacturing, and fossil-fuel extraction—decline.

The gross domestic product per person and the median household income are now both more than 25 percent greater in the blue section than in the red,

The share of kids in poverty is more than 20 percent lower in the blue section than red, and the share of working households with incomes below the poverty line is nearly 40 percent lower.

Gun deaths are almost twice as high per capita in the red places as in the blue, as is the maternal mortality rate.

Per caPita sPending on elementary and secondary education is almost 50 Percent higher in the blue states comPared with red

All of the blue states have expanded access to Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, while about 60 percent of the total red-nation population lives in states that have refused to do so.

All of the blue states have set a minimum wage higher than the federal level of $7.25, while only about one-third of the red-state residents live in places that have done so.

Right-to-work laws are common in the red states and nonexistent in the blue, with the result that the latter have a much higher share of unionized workers than the former

No state in the blue section has a law on the books banning abortion before fetal viability, while almost all of the red states are poised to restrict abortion rights

Almost all of the red states have also passed “stand your ground” laws backed by the National Rifle Association, which provide a legal defense for those who use weapons against a perceived threat, while none of the blue states have done so.

During the seven decades of legal Jim Crow segregation from the 1890s through the 1960s, the principal goal of the southern states at the core of red America was defensive: They worked tirelessly to prevent federal interference with state-sponsored segregation but did not seek to impose it on states outside the region.

Jim Crow segregation offers an important reference point for understanding how far red states might take this movement to roll back civil rights and liberties—not that they literally would seek to restore segregation, but that they are comfortable with “a time when states” had laws so “entirely different” that they created a form of domestic apartheid.

The flurry of socially conservative laws that red states have passed since 2021, on issues such as abortion; classroom discussions of race, gender, and sexual orientation; and LGBTQ rights, is widening this split. No Democratic-controlled state has passed any of those measures.

he documents a return to historical patterns from the Jim Crow era in which the dominant party (segregationist Democrats then, conservative Republicans now) has skewed the playing field to achieve a level of political dominance in the red nation far beyond its level of popular support

Undergirding that advantage, he argues, are laws that make registering or voting in many of the red states more difficult, and severe gerrymanders that have allowed Republicans to virtually lock in indefinite control of many state legislatures

how the United States will function with two sections that are moving so far apart.

History, in my view, offers two models

bedrock differences dating back to the country’s founding are resurfacing. And one crucial element of that, he argues, is the return of what he calls “one-party rule in the red nation.”

in the last years before the Civil War, the South’s political orientation was offensive: Through the courts (the 1857 Dred Scott decision) and in Congress (the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854), its principal aim was to authorize the expansion of slavery into more territories and states

Podhorzer, like Mason and Grumbach, believes that the MAGA movement’s long-term goal is to tilt the electoral rules in enough states to make winning Congress or the White House almost imPossible for Democrats

Then, with support from the GOp-appointed majority on the Supreme Court, Republicans could impose red-state values and programs nationwide, even if most Americans oppose them. The “MAGA movement is not stopping at the borders of the states it already controls,” podhorzer writes. “It seeks to conquer as much territory as possible by any means possible.”

The Trump model, in other words, is more the South in 1850 than the South in 1950, more John Calhoun than Richard Russell

it does mean that the 2020s may bring the greatest threats to the country’s basic stability since those dark and tumultuous years.

they draw on an impressively broad array of materials: hundreds of original interviews, reams of contemporary daily journalism, and an already-fat library of memoirs and journalistic accounts of the Trump years,

the authors are persuasive in arguing that in this White House, “impulse and instinct ruled.” Given the sheer number of crises and conflicts that erupted on Trump’s watch, herding them all into a narrative isn’t easy.

the authors center each chapter on its own topic or story line — Trump’s rocky relationship with foreign allies, for example, or the 2018 budget battle over the Mexico wall. Other chapters focus on key supporting players, who are rendered with deft portraits, such as Jared Kushner, Trump’s widely reviled but fireproof son-in-law, or the president’s antagonist-turned-sycophant, Senator Lindsey Graham

Some of the weightiest chapters take up Trump’s relationship with Russia.

“The Divider” soberly and carefully reconstructs events to reveal anew Trump’s shocking deference to the Russian president, Vladimir putin — notably at the 2018 Helsinki summit, where, the authors pointedly write, “Trump acknowledged that he would accept the word of putin over that of his own intelligence agencies.”

The chapters on the 2019 Ukraine scandal, when Trump linked aid to its government to delivery of dirt on Joe Biden, re-establish the gravity of the first impeachment

If “The Divider” has a dominant theme, it may be the struggle within the “almost cartoonishly chaotic White House” by people more reasonable and ethical than Trump to rein in his most dangerous instincts

Time and again, staffers debate whether to stay put in hopes of mitigating Trump’s basest impulses or to run screaming from the room. Even more stunning is the number of onetime loyalists who, after their tours of duty, emerged as among the president’s most strident critics.

Many Trump aides — even some, like National Security Adviser John Bolton or Attorney General William p. Barr, who might deserve harsh criticism on other grounds — did intervene valiantly at times to keep Trump in check. Without their small acts of resistance, things could have gone even worse

Yet Baker and Glasser seem to endorse the view of the Democratic congressman Adam Schiff, who, during the first impeachment, warned Republicans, “You will not change him, you cannot constrain him.”

They write: “So many had told themselves that they could manage the unmanageable president, that they could keep him from going too far, that they could steer him in the direction of responsible governance. … They had justified their service to him or their alliances with him or their deference to him on the grounds that they could ultimately control him. And what Schiff was saying is that three years had shown that was not possible.”

From 2015 on, the iPhone images of bad or even terrible coP interactions — amPlified by the woke MSM, suPercharged by social media — gave an imPression of Police murderousness out of all ProPortion to the reality. That’s how so many “very liberal” whites came to believe that over a thousand unarmed black men were killed by coPs each year, instead of around a dozen.

Musk’s Twitter now pumps out as many black-crime snuff films as pink-haired trans-teacher videos. It almost doesn’t matter what they say. It’s the impressions they leave — of ubiquitous black crime and of relentless student indoctrination. Each tribe is constantly having its lizard brain primed — not by words or arguments, but by the accumulation of images that operate at a sub-rational level. That’s now Musk’s business model.

And of course this is related to our political dysfunction. The tribalization of our allegiances has led to the dehumanization of our political opponents so that, yes, decency is close to extinct

It’s a bedrock civilizational value. It’s what sets us apart from barbarism. And without it, our level of political polarization is dangerously combustible. One of the first signs of looming social conflict is mutual dehumanization: see an image of your opponent suffering and revel in it. Kick someone when they’ve just been gunned down. Mock anti-vaxxers — even as they die in a hospital bed.

It does not help, of course, that the man now ahead in the race to be president in 2024 has lowered the bar of personal decency so far it scarcely scrapes the floor. From mocking the wounded in battle to reveling in an activist’s murder is a short journey. The fish rots from the head down.

I mention Orwell’s notion of common decency because he believed this simple personal virtue was related to Western freedom and resistance to totalitarianism. Decency is not exclusively Christian, and many American Christianists seem to show little interest in it these days. But there is something Christian in not gloating over or mocking the sick or the weak or the victims of terrible crime. Who wants to live in a world where cruelty is cool, and where someone’s human pain is just another’s tribal propaganda?

What’s left, across all platforms, is fragmented. News and punditry are everywhere online, but audiences are siloed; podcasts are more popular than ever, and millions of younger people online have turned to influencers and creators on Instagram and especially TikTok as trusted sources of news.

Social media, especially Twitter, has sometimes been an incredible news-gathering tool; it has also been terrible and inefficient, a game of do your own research that involves batting away bullshit and parsing half truths, hyperbole, outright lies, and invaluable context from experts on the fly. Social media’s greatest strength is thus its original sin: These sites are excellent at making you feel connected and informed, frequently at the expense of actually being informed.

At the center of these pleas for a Twitter alternative is a feeling that a fundamental promise has been broken. In exchange for our time, our data, and even our well-being, we uploaded our most important conversations onto platforms designed for viral advertising—all under the implicit understanding that social media could provide an unparalleled window to the world.

What comes next is impossible to anticipate, but it’s worth considering the possibility that the centrality of social media as we’ve known it for the past 15 years has come to an end—that this particular window to the world is being slammed shut.

Many of these scholars, he correctly notes, adopted the German model of the research university—but, he claims, only for evil purposes. “As racist ideas jumped off their scholarly pages,” he writes, “American scholars were especially enamored with the German ideal of the disinterested, unbiased pursuit of truth through original scholarly studies, and academic freedom to propagandize African inferiority and European superiority [sic].”

just as Kendi argues in Stamped from the Beginning that the racism of some of the founding fathers irrevocably and permanently brands the United States as a racist nation, he claims that these disciplines cannot be taken seriously because of the racism of some of their founders

Kendi complains in the autobiographical sections of How to Be an Antiracist that his parents often talked the same way to him. Nor does it matter to him that the abolitionists bemoaning the condition of black people under slavery were obviously blaming slavery for it. Any negative picture of any group of black people, to him, simply fuels racism.

Two critical ideas emerge from this article. The first is the rejection of the entire western intellectual tradition on the grounds that it is fatally tainted by racism, and the need for a new academic discipline to replace that tradition.

the second—developed at far greater length in Kendi’s other works—is that anyone who finds European and white North American culture to be in any way superior to the culture of black Americans, either slave or free, is a racist, and specifically a cultural racist or an “assimilationist” who believes that black people must become more like white people if they are to progress.

Kendi, in Stamped from the Beginning, designated phyllis Wheatley, William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sojourner Truth, W. E. B. DuBois, E. Franklin Frazier, Kenneth and Mamie Clark, and other black and white champions of abolition and equal rights as purveyors of racist views. At one time or another, each of them pointed to the backward state of many black people in the United States, either under slavery or in inner-city ghettos, and suggested that they needed literacy and, in some cases, better behavior to advance.

because racism is the only issue that matters to him, he assumes—wrongly—that it was the only issue that mattered to them, and that their disciplines were nothing more than exercises in racist propaganda.

This problem started, he says, “back in the so-called Age of Enlightenment.” Elsewhere he calls the word “enlightenment” racist because it contrasts the light of Europe with the darkness of Africa and other regions.

In fact, the western intellectual tradition of the eighteenth century—the Enlightenment—developed not as an attempt to establish the superiority of the white race, but rather to replace a whole different set of European ideas based on religious faith, the privilege of certain social orders, and the divine right of kings

many thinkers recognized the contradictions between racism and the principles of the Enlightenment—as well as its contradiction to the principles of the Christian religion—from the late eighteenth century onward. That is how abolitionist movements began and eventually succeeded.

Like the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony—which has become practically the alternate national anthem of Japan—those principles are not based upon white supremacy, but rather on a universal idea of common humanity which is our only hope for living together on earth.

The western intellectual tradition is not his only target within modern life; he feels the same way about capitalism, which in his scheme has been inextricably bound together with racism since the early modern period.

“To love capitalism,” he says, “is to end up loving racism. To love racism is to end up loving capitalism.” He has not explained exactly what kind of economic system he would prefer, and his advocacy for reparations suggests that he would be satisfied simply to redistribute the wealth that capitalism has created.

Last but hardly least, Kendi rejects the political system of the United States and enlightenment ideas of democracy as well.

I am constantly amazed at how few people ever mention his response to a 2019 politico poll about inequality. Here it is in full.

To fix the original sin of racism, Americans should pass an anti-racist amendment to the U.S. Constitution that enshrines two guiding anti-racist principals: Racial inequity is evidence of racist policy and the different racial groups are equals. The amendment would make unconstitutional racial inequity over a certain threshold, as well as racist ideas by public officials (with “racist ideas” and “public official”

The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.

In other words, to undo the impact of racism as Kendi understands it, the United States needs a totalitarian government run by unaccountable “formally trained experts in racism”—that is, people like Ibram X. Kendi—who would exercise total power over all levels of government and private enterprise

Kendi evidently realizes that the American people acting through their elected representatives will never accept his antiracist program and equalize all rewards within our society, but he is so committed to that program that he wants to throw the American political system out and create a dictatorial body to implement it.

How did a man pushing all these ideas become so popular? The answer, I am sorry to say, is disarmingly simple. He is not an outlier in the intellectual history of the last half-century—quite the contrary.

The Enlightenment, in retrospect, made a bold claim that was bound to get itself into trouble sooner or later: that the application of reason and the scientific method to human problems could improve human life. That idea was initially so exciting and the results of its application for about two centuries were so spectacular that it attained a kind of intellectual hegemony, not only in Europe, but nearly all over the world.

As the last third of the twentieth century dawned, however, the political and intellectual regime it had created was running into new problems of its own. Science had allowed mankind to increase its population enormously, cure many diseases, and live a far more abundant life on a mass scale.

But it had also led to war on an undreamed-of scale, including the actual and potential use of nuclear weapons

As higher education expanded, the original ideas of the Enlightenment—the ones that had shaped the humanities—had lost their novelty and some of their ability to excite.

last but hardly least, the claimed superiority of reason over emotion had been pushed much too far. The world was bursting with emotions of many kinds that could no longer be kept in check by the claims of scientific rationality.

A huge new generation had grown up in abundance and security.

The Vietnam War, a great symbol of enlightenment gone tragically wrong, led not only to a rebellion against American military overreach but against the whole intellectual and political structure behind it.

The black studies movement on campuses that produced Molefi Kete Asante, who in turn gave us Ibram X. Kendi, was only one aspect of a vast intellectual rebellion

Some began to argue that the Enlightenment was simply a new means of maintaining male supremacy, and that women shared a reality that men could not understand. Just five years ago in her book Sex and Secularism, the distinguished historian Joan Wallach Scott wrote, “In fact, gender inequality was fundamental to the articulation of the separation of church and state that inaugurated Western modernity. . . .Euro-Atlantic modernity entailed a new order of women’s subordination” (emphasis in original). Gay and gender activists increasingly denied that any patterns of sexual behavior could be defined as normal or natural, or even that biology had any direct connection to gender. The average graduate of elite institutions, I believe, has come to regard all those changes as progress, which is why the major media and many large corporations endorse them.

Fundamentalist religion, apparently nearly extinct in the mid-twentieth century, has staged an impressive comeback in recent decades, not only in the Islamic world but in the United States and in Israe

Science has become bureaucratized, corrupted by capitalism, and often self-interested, and has therefore lost a good deal of the citizenry’s confidence.

One aspect of the Enlightenment—Adam Smith’s idea of free markets—has taken over too much of our lives.

in the academy, postmodernism promoted the idea that truth itself is an illusion and that every person has the right to her own morality.

The American academy lost its commitment to Enlightenment values decades ago, and journalism has now followed in its wake. Ju

Another aspect of the controversy hasn’t gotten enough attention either. Kendi is a prodigious fundraiser, and that made him a real catch for Boston University.

No matter what happens to Ibram X. Kendi now, he is not an anomaly in today’s intellectual world. His ideas are quite typical, and others will make brilliant careers out of them as well

We desperately need thinkers of all ages to keep the ideas of the Enlightenment alive, and we need some alternative institutions of higher learning to cultivate them once again. But they will not become mainstream any time soon. The last time that such ideas fell off the radar—at the end of the Roman Empire—it took about one thousand years for their renaissance to begin

We do not as individuals have to give into these new ideas, but it does no good to deny their impact. For the time being, they are here to stay.