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The cancelers are reverse Rumpelstiltskins, spinning problems that merit the gold of complex ideas and nuanced judgments into the straw of slogans.

their education produces only expensively schooled versions of what José Ortega y Gasset called the “mass man.”

In 1932’s “The Revolt of the Masses,” the Spanish philosopher said this creature does not “appeal from his own to any authority outside him. He is satisfied with himself exactly as he is. . . . He will tend to consider and affirm as good everything he finds within himself: opinions, appetites, preferences, tastes.” (Emphasis is Ortega’s.)

The result is barbarism, as Ortega defined it, “the absence of standards to which appeal can be made.” A barbarian is someone whose ideas are “nothing more than appetites in words,” someone exercising “the right not to be reasonable,” who “does not want to give reasons” but simply “to impose his opinions.”ADADThe barbarians are not at America’s gate. There is no gate.

chological context.ADThe good news: Americans are no “crazier” — that is, no more paranoid or predisposed to conspiracy thinking — than in the past

“our political elites are amplifying the fringe more than we’ve seen” in modern times, while a president mounts a “grinding attack on factual evidence.” The result, he says, is “conspiracy theories and misinformation become yoked to partisanship in increasingly powerful ways.”

There has always been what the late historian Richard Hofstadter called the “paranoid style” in U.S. politics: witch hunts, Illuminati, Red Scares. William Jennings Bryan promoted conspiracy theories. Richard Nixon believed in them. But Trump is unique in promoting conspiracy thinking from the bully pulpit, and in building a system in which elites — Republican Party leaders — validate the paranoia.

Americans, by nature, are more distrustful of authority than citizens of other advanced democracies. “You always hear Americans say, ‘I know my rights,’ but you never hear an American say, ‘I know my responsibilities and obligations,’

The distrust is compounded by polarization of the political system: the collapse of local media (replaced by coastal national media); the growing tendency to live, work and worship among people of similar beliefs; the divisive effect of social media; and increased “sorting” of political parties into ideologically homogeneous blocs.

This has encouraged what Eitan Hersh of Tufts University describes as “political hobbyism,” in which partisans embrace political parties as they do hometown sports teams

Hersh explains the thinking: “I care about truth, but I care less about truth than about supporting the Patriots because the stakes are really low. … It’s a catharsis, camaraderie with our partisan peers.

“The science is very clear: People take cues from political leaders,” Nyhan says. Leaders typically rejected conspiracy theories, and the public followed. Now, Trump embraces them, and his followers concur — some out of partisan solidarity, others out of genuine belief.

“Human psychology has not changed,” Nyhan says. What’s changed is we’re discovering that “democratic systems don’t work well when political elites don’t deal in factual information.”

In interviews with The Post, several rally attendees said they didn’t deny the threat of the coronavirus but also didn’t believe they needed to stay home indefinitely. Some noted that they take risks each time they get on their bikes. A number said they wore masks or made other minor concessions but were determined to go on with their lives.

“This motorcycle rally was and is such a big thing that people come from miles and miles away and they come from right next door. And it’s not reported anywhere who they are, where they live,” said Benjamin Aaker, president of the South Dakota State Medical Association.

But other countries offer examples of more robust and coordinated contact-tracing efforts, Michaud said. Japan uses what’s called retrospective contact tracing — working backward to determine where a person was infected and who else may have gotten the virus there, he said. It’s particularly effective in dealing with the coronavirus, which is often transmitted by a small number of people infecting many others in clusters.

It was “fairly obvious” that a gathering the size of the motorcycle rally represented a risk, Michaud said — and more rigorous contact tracing could have revealed the actual impact. It might also have prevented some of the secondary and tertiary spread.

State health officials, who linked 125 cases to Sturgis, have not tied the surge to the rally, however. They note it overlapped with school openings and end-of-summer restlessness.

“Anytime you’re bringing individuals together, you’re going to have times where you’re having covid-19 transmission,” state epidemiologist Joshua Clayton said last month. “That’s a risk whether you’re in South Dakota, or in other states.

Noem, the governor, attributed the rise in cases to increases in testing, echoing President Trump’s explanation of growing U.S. infections. “That’s normal, that’s natural, that’s expected,” she told the Associated Press. She did not explain how extra testing could have accounted for the rise in hospitalizations in the state, which hit record highs in October.

Balcom, whose case was mild, cried in the car, relieved he was coming home. She never said “I told you so,” or got angry with him. She was upset, though, when she found out Cervantes’s case wasn’t included in covid-19 tallies linked to Sturgis.“If we had an accurate representation of what’s going on, then people might say, ‘Maybe it’s not a good idea to go to the concert or go to the gathering,'" she said. “Everyone is just muddling through this because no one knows what the hell is going on.”

Cervantes now looks at things differently. Watching football, he worried how many of the thousands of fans admitted to a recent Kansas City Chiefs game might become infected, even as he noticed they sat apart. He once put on a mask to humor Balcom; now he says he has to resist the urge to yell at strangers to wear them.

After weeks of missed work, his stint in the hospital and a return visit to the ER over a blood clot concern, he’s come to deeply regret his decision.

“I was naive,” he said. “I was dumb, you know? I shouldn’t have went. I did; I can’t change that, so I just got to move forward. But sitting here just the past few days, that’s all I keep thinking about. I’m like, Jesus, look at the hell I’m going through, the hell I put everybody through. It ain’t worth it. It wasn’t. It really wasn’t.”

When the coronavirus death toll approached 100,000, this fact was largely absent from Fox prime-time programming. Now that it’s approaching 150,000, Fox personalities are claiming the original lockdowns were a plot to harm Trump and that things are actually going far better than expected thanks to his towering leadership.

studies suggest misinformation from Fox and other right-wing media outlets might be making audiences more prone to believing coronavirus conspiracy theories. Meanwhile, even as too-rapid reopenings are a big reason the coronavirus is surging again, his Fox propagandists continue to push the idea that hesitation to reopen schools is pure politics.

Yet according to Trump’s own advisers, these failures are now putting his reelection at risk.

Meanwhile, Trump is mainlining from Fox a daily picture of the protests that is highly distorted and narcotically numbing.

This is surely why Trump is sending in law enforcement in the first place — he believes inciting violent civil conflict will help his reelection. As one GOP strategist candidly tells the Times, Republicans are hoping to define Democrats “as being on the side of the anarchists in Portland.”

The crucial point here is that what Trump sees on Fox is surely persuading him that he’s succeeding in doing just that.

Fox personalities are claiming that electing Joe Biden will make civil violence “a staple of American life everywhere.” They are relentlessly doctoring Biden quotes to paint him as anti-police. And they are suggesting that Trump’s Mount Rushmore speech, which conflated protests with “far-left fascism” to justify sending in more law enforcement, represented the greatest oratory since Cicero.

But in the Fox narrative of the protests, there is no room for any acknowledgement that Trump is functioning as a primarily inciting and destructive force, or that this fact might be further alienating the educated white suburban voters who are supposed to find Trump’s authoritarian displays reassuring.

a recent Yahoo News-YouGov poll found that a larger percentage of suburban voters say the country will become less safe if Trump wins (48 percent) than say the same about Biden (37 percent). Among women, it’s even worse for Trump (50 percent and 33 percent, respectively).

Q: Is the white-supremacist mind-set a Trump problem or a GOP problem?A: The roots of the GOP problem go back at least to the toleration and execution of the Southern Strategy to win elections. When such a tactic is deployed for half a century, no one should be surprised when white-supremacist sentiments turn out to be an animating core of group identity. I hope there can be a more honest reckoning, both for the Republican Party and for its White Christian base that has provided theological and moral cover for this strategy.

Trump is most accurately understood as the inevitable end of a road paved brick by brick through 13 presidential election cycles since 1968. By the time the RNC attempted to apologize for the Southern Strategy in 2005 or advocated for a more pragmatic and humane immigration policy in its “autopsy report” after [Mitt] Romney’s 2012 defeat, this runaway freight train simply had too much momentum behind it to be easily derailed.

I do think the clarity of the current moment is calling the moral question in this election like no other in my lifetime. There is an opportunity here, for both the GOP and for White Christians who are a part of its foundation, to rebuild a party of principle that rejects white supremacy and strategies that stoke white racial fears and grievances.

It was only in July, when case counts began soaring in a trio of populous, Republican-leaning states — Arizona, Florida and Texas — and polls showed a majority of Americans disapproving of Trump’s handling of the pandemic, that the president and his top aides renewed their public activity related to the virus.

Trump and many of his top aides talk about the virus not as a contagion that must be controlled through social behavior but rather as a plague that eventually will dissipate on its own. Aides view the coronavirus task force — which includes Fauci, Birx and relevant agency heads — as a burden that has to be managed, officials said.

. An internal model by Trump’s Council on Economic Advisers predicts a looming disaster, with the number of infections projected to rise later in August and into September and October in the Midwest and elsewhere, according to people briefed on the data.

As the nation confronts a once­in-a-century health crisis that has killed at least 158,000 people, infected nearly 5 million and devastated the economy, the atmosphere in the White House is as chaotic as at any other time in Trump’s presidency — “an unmitigated disaster,” in the words of a second former senior administration official.

“It’s extraordinary that a country that helped eradicate smallpox, promoted HIV/AIDS treatment worldwide and suppressed Ebola — we were the world’s leader in public health and medicine, and now we can’t even protect our own people from the most devastating epidemic in decades.”

Asked who was to blame for the pandemic’s dark summer turn, Pelosi said, “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”“The delay, the denial . . . the hoax that it’s going to go away magically, a miracle is going to happen, we’ll be in church together by Easter, caused death,” Pelosi added.

In Trump’s White House, there is little process that guides decision-making on the pandemic. The president has been focused first and foremost on his reelection chances and reacting to the daily or hourly news cycle as opposed to making long-term strategy, with Meadows and other senior aides indulging his impulses rather than striving to impose discipline.

“He sits in the Oval Office and says, ‘Do this,’ or, ‘Do that,’ and there was always a domino blocker. It was John Bolton or H.R. McMaster on national security or John Kelly. Now there are no domino blockers.”

What’s more, with polls showing Trump’s popularity on the decline and widespread disapproval of his management of the viral outbreak, staffers have concocted a positive feedback loop for the boss. They present him with fawning media commentary and craft charts with statistics that back up the president’s claim that the administration has done a great — even historically excellent — job fighting the virus.

“Everyone is busy trying to create a Potemkin village for him every day. You’re not supposed to see this behavior in liberal democracies that are founded on principles of rule of law. Everyone bends over backwards to create this Potemkin village for him and for his inner circle.”

Although Fauci, Birx and other medical professionals sit on the coronavirus task force, many of the more pressing decisions lately have been made by the smaller group that huddles in the morning and mostly prioritizes politics. The cadre includes Meadows, senior adviser Jared Kushner and strategic communications director Alyssa Farah.

The policy process has fallen apart around Meadows, according to four White House officials, with the chief of staff fixated on preventing leaks and therefore unwilling to expand meetings to include experts or to share documents with senior staffers who had been excluded from discussions.

Luciana Borio, a director for medical and biodefense preparedness at the National Security Council during the first two years of the Trump administration, decried “a response in disarray hampered by a lack of clear, consistent public health-oriented guidance to the public.

“It’s very difficult to know who to trust,” Borio said. “To expect the public to sort out the facts in a time of tremendous stress leads to inconsistent and disparate actions, and that really hurts our collective effort to fight the virus.”

What also has frustrated a number of the president’s allies and former aides is that he simply seems uninterested in asserting full leadership over the crisis, instead deferring to state leaders to make the more difficult decisions while using his presidential bully pulpit to critique their performances.

“A suppression-level effort to shrink and not just mitigate the spread of covid requires a national strategy that includes standards and significant federal funding. Such a strategy is lacking right now.”

The Trump administration has resisted devising a national testing program and instead ceded the task to state governments, even as cases of infection average more than 60,000 a day and some people wait 10 days or longer for test results, delays that render the results essentially useless.

While some states have been able to largely meet the needs of their populations, the federal government is the only entity with the power to coordinate testing across state lines, push and enable manufacturers to increase production of test kits and supplies, surge those supplies as needed and ensure fair payment.

Without federal coordination, states, businesses, hospitals — and soon schools and universities — find themselves competing with each other for limited supplies, often overpaying as a result.

Despite repeated calls to invoke the Defense Production Act to help resolve testing-supply shortages, the administration has resisted doing so. Trump and several White House aides have instead continued to think that it is politically advantageous to cede the issue to the states to avoid taking ownership or blame for the issue, even though testing shortages are largely seen as a federal failure.

“Other countries have taken this virus seriously, trusted their public health officials and scientists, and now they’ve flattened the curve,” he said. “Meanwhile, our situation gets worse and worse every day and some Americans think, ‘Oh, that’s just the way it is.’ But that isn’t how it has to be.

He’s just not oriented towards things that even in the short term look like they’re involving something that’s hard or negative or that involves sacrifice or pain,” a former senior administration official explained. “He is always anxious to get to a place of touting achievements and being the messenger for good news.”

Julia Lyons saw an opportunity. Figuring nobody would have time to check her lack of credentials, she signed on at a home-nurse registry under various names. In late 1918, the Tribune chronicled the fake flu nurse’s escapades like a dime detective novel.

The police tapped the phone and learned Julia lived nearby. Detectives trailed Julia. One day she set off to marry Charlie the Greek, who ran the Victory Restaurant on West Madison Avenue. Before vows could be exchanged, Julia was in handcuffs.

Instead of transporting Julia to the courthouse in a patrol wagon, the deputy sheriff took her on a street car. In court, some 50 victims testified against her. She was held under $13,000 bond, the equivalent of more than $190,000 today.Deputy Hickey started back to the county jail with Julia in tow. An hour and a half later he called the police and “excitedly” told them she had jumped from a moving street car and hopped into a waiting automobile. Based on the reported location, one official speculated Hickey and his prisoner had been going to cabarets.

Soon Julia was back at her old tricks. In March 1919, the police traced her through the nurse registry to a home on Fullerton Boulevard. When Julia answered the door, the police nabbed her.

he and other researchers estimated that population heterogeneity shaves the coronavirus herd immunity rate to 43 percent. Others say it might be lower.

Gabriela Gomes, a mathematician at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, has scrutinized European cities overwhelmed by the disease. In a paper she wrote with nine other researchers, which hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed, she arrived at a striking conclusion: Herd immunity could be lower than 20 percent.

many researchers have been reluctant to say whether they believe the worst in some of the hardest-hit cities has already passed. No one knows how long immunity lasts. The virus could mutate.

“I would love that as well. But the reality is that it’s wishful thinking. It’s confirmation bias. We can’t pick evidence we hope is true. We have to be very careful about this because it could blow up in your face very quickly.”

Officials weren’t willing to impose a lockdown. In impoverished Manaus, where many already live on the brink, the mayor said it would lead to social chaos and violence. So Pinheiro Alves spent his off hours trying to jury-rig ventilators.

“There isn’t a concrete explanation,” said Henrique dos Santos Pereira, a scientist at the Federal University of Amazonas. Maybe there’s an unseen biological immunity in the population. Or the city’s relative youth staved off the worst.

“The problem is that we don’t know how many people are susceptible,” dos Santos Pereira said. “In the beginning, we were thinking it was everywhere, but it doesn’t seem like the whole world is susceptible … It is causing us to reconsider the theory of herd immunity.”

Virgílio, the mayor, hopes the scientists are right. The medical system in Manaus has failed once. If a second wave does come, he has little doubt what would happen.“Our capacities would be overwhelmed.”

Unfortunately for Hoover, the stock market crashed a mere seven months into his presidency and while it was certainly not his fault, he didn’t take aggressive action to rescue the economy as the Great Depression got underway.

Eerily reminiscent of President Trump’s declarations that the pandemic was over just as it was beginning, Hoover repeatedly declared that prosperity was around the corner, showing himself to be out of touch with his desperate constituents.

Roosevelt espoused contradictory themes, on one hand calling for bigger government and on another attacking Hoover for failing to balance the budget.

Even his own advisers were left perplexed as to his governing policy. But it didn’t matter in the end, with 25 percent of the country out of work and little hope on the horizon, Roosevelt won easily in a landslide.

Jimmy Carter encountered similar problems and like his fellow engineer Hoover, did not handle them well.

Carter addressed the country via national television in July 1979 to talk not about these bread-and-butter concerns, but rather what he saw as the nation’s dangerous loss of faith in its major institutions.

To some it seemed that he was blaming the American people for the nation’s difficulties and what became known as the “malaise” speech backfired on the former Georgia governor.

George H.W. Bush’s defeat in 1992 seemed far less likely than Hoover’s or Carter’s as his presidency got off to a roaring start. The end of the Cold War in 1989 along with the triumph in the 1991 Persian Gulf War produced record approval ratings for Bush.

Things only got worse for Carter when Iranian radicals seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran a few months later in November, taking 52 Americans hostage.

The crisis, along with a failed attempt to rescue the hostages, made Carter seem like a weak and ineffectual leader.While Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980 is often remembered as an inevitable step in the country’s turn to the right, polls remained close as the candidates’ first and only debate approached a week before the election.

None of this means that covid-19 spells Trump’s defeat for sure in the fall. It just means that Biden’s chances to win will likely be determined by forces beyond his control rather than by how much he’s able to get out on the trail. And It is a reminder that in electoral politics, chance and circumstance often matter more than strategy or political skill.

On July 8, the Dow Jones industrial average had plummeted to 41.22, down nearly 90 percent from its peak before the market crashed on Black Monday in October of 1929. Many of the homeless were living in shacks in “Hoovervilles.”

During his nearly four years in office, Hoover had focused on trying to balance the budget. But as the jobless rate rose to a record 23.6 percent in 1932, he proposed a $1.8 billion relief package

The foundation of both plans was $1 billion to expand loans by the government’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation. But the Garner-Wagner bill also called for up to $1.2 billion for public works to create jobs.

To Hoover this was spending money for “pork” and “unproductive” jobs. Republican Rep. Fiorello La Guardia, the future mayor of New York, shot back that the legislation was a “breadbasket bill” and represented “the first ray of hope that has been cast in a critical situation.”

By early July, it was clear that the House-Senate conference bill was doomed. “Weary leaders looked to the veto message already penned and waiting at the White House as marking the end of the long and bitter controversy over federal aid to the jobless,” the AP reported.On July 11, Congress sent its bill to Hoover. Sure enough, the next day Hoover vetoed the bill, saying it would “bring far more distress than it will cure.” It was a phrase similar to Trump’s declaration last month that “we cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself" as he considered urging Americans to end their coronavirus quarantines.

“In a night session which was astonishing for the swift and decisive action of its nonpartisan coalition,” the Senate passed a revised bill and sent it to the House, the AP reported. There, what was now called “the Hoover bill” passed by a vote of 296 to 46. When the final conference bill came back to the House, members passed it by unanimous consent. Only one lawmaker gave a speech, and he was nearly drowned out by cries of “Vote, vote!”

“Mr. Hoover was an engineer. He knew that water trickles down. … But he didn’t know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night, anyhow. But it will at least have passed through the poor fellows’ hands. They saved the big banks, but the little ones went up the flue.”

“The radical view of American history is a web of lies, all perspective is removed, every virtue is obscured, every motive is twisted, every fact is distorted and every flaw is magnified until the history is purged and the record is disfigured beyond all recognition.”

on.AD“Against every law of society and nature, our children are taught in school to hate their own country and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes but that were villains,”

Over recent years, many state legislators have incorporated this line of thinking into their assault on public education and their funding cuts for public colleges and universities.

Meanwhile, Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, has made clear her disdain for public schools, once calling them “a dead end” and making her No. 1 priority the expansion of alternatives to traditional public schools.

This line of thinking ignores research showing that families have far more impact on the political leanings of young people than do schools and the very mission of schooling is to help young people learn to be independent thinkers who consider evidence before making decisions.

Aviation is safe in large part because it learns from its disasters. Investigators from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board go immediately to accident sites to begin assessing evidence. After months or even years of research, their detailed reports try to lay out the “accident chain” and explain what went wrong

with respect to the coronavirus pandemic, it has suffered by far the largest number of fatalities, about one-quarter of the global total, despite having less than one-20th of the world’s population.

What if the NTSB were brought in to look at the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic? What would its investigation conclude?

This was a journey straight into a mountainside, with countless missed opportunities to turn away. A system was in place to save lives and contain disaster. The people in charge of the system could not be bothered to avoid the doomed course.

Timelines of aviation disasters typically start long before the passengers or even the flight crew knew anything was wrong, with problems in the design of the airplane, the procedures of the maintenance crew, the route, or the conditions into which the captain decided to fly. In the worst cases, those decisions doomed the flight even before it took off. My focus here is similarly on conditions and decisions that may have doomed the country even before the first COVID-19 death had been recorded on U.S. soil.

What happened once the disease began spreading in this country was a federal disaster in its own right: Katrina on a national scale, Chernobyl minus the radiation. It involved the failure to test; the failure to trace; the shortage of equipment; the dismissal of masks; the silencing or sidelining of professional scientists; the stream of conflicting, misleading, callous, and recklessly ignorant statements by those who did speak on the national government’s behalf

As late as February 26, Donald Trump notoriously said of the infection rate, “You have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down close to zero.” What happened after that—when those 15 cases became 15,000, and then more than 2 million, en route to a total no one can foretell—will be a central part of the history of our times.

1. The Flight Plan

the most important event was the H5N1 “bird flu” outbreak, in 2005. It originated in Asia and was mainly confined there, as the SARS outbreak had been two years earlier. Bush-administration officials viewed H5N1 as an extremely close call. “

Shortly before Barack Obama left office, his administration’s Pandemic Prediction and Forecasting Science and Technology Working Group—yes, that was a thing—released a report reflecting the progress that had been made in applying remote-sensing and AI tools since the early days of Global Argus. The report is freely available online and notes pointedly that recent technological advances “provide opportunities to mitigate large-scale outbreaks by predicting more accurately when and where outbreaks are likely to occur, and how they will progress.”

“Absolutely nothing that has happened has been a surprise. We saw it coming. Not only did we see it, we ran the models and the gaming exercises. We had every bit of the structure in place. We’ve been talking about a biohazard risk like this for years. Anyone who says we did not see this coming has their head in the sand, or is lying through their teeth.”

The system the government set up was designed to warn not about improbable “black swan” events but rather about what are sometimes called “gray rhinos.” These are the large, obvious dangers that will sooner or later emerge but whose exact timing is unknown.

other U.S. leaders had dealt with foreign cover-ups, including by China in the early stages of the SARS outbreak in 2002. Washington knew enough, soon enough, in this case to act while there still was time.

During the Obama administration, the U.S. had negotiated to have its observers stationed in many cities across China, through a program called Predict. But the Trump administration did not fill those positions, including in Wuhan. This meant that no one was on site to learn about, for instance, the unexplained closure on January 1 of the city’s main downtown Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a so-called wet market

“It was in the briefings by the beginning of January,” a person involved in preparing the president’s briefing book told me. “On that there is no dispute.” This person went on: “But knowing it is in the briefing book is different from knowing whether the president saw it.” He didn’t need to spell out his point, which was: Of course this president did not.

To sum up: The weather forecast showed a dangerous storm ahead, and the warning came in plenty of time. At the start of January, the total number of people infected with the virus was probably less than 1,000. All or nearly all of them were in China. Not a single case or fatality had been reported in the United States.

2. The Air Traffic Controllers

In cases of disease outbreak, U.S. leadership and coordination of the international response was as well established and taken for granted as the role of air traffic controllers in directing flights through their sectors

in normal circumstances, its location in China would have been a plus. Whatever the ups and downs of political relations over the past two decades, Chinese and American scientists and public-health officials have worked together frequently, and positively, on health crises ranging from SARS during George W. Bush’s administration to the H1N1 and Ebola outbreaks during Barack Obama’s.

One U.S. official recalled the Predict program: “Getting Chinese agreement to American monitors throughout their territory—that was something.” But then the Trump administration zeroed out that program.

“We had cooperated with China on every public-health threat until now,” Susan Shirk, a former State Department official and longtime scholar of Chinese affairs at UC San Diego, told me. “SARS, AIDS, Ebola in Africa, H1N1—no matter what other disputes were going on in the relationship, we managed to carve out health, and work together quite professionally. So this case is just so anomalous and so tragic.” A significant comparison, she said, is the way the United States and the Soviet Union had worked together to eliminate smallpox around the world, despite their Cold War tensions. But now, she said, “people have definitely died because the U.S. and China have been unable to cooperate.”

What did the breakdown in U.S.-Chinese cooperation mean in practice? That the U.S. knew less than it would have otherwise, and knew it later; that its actions brought out the worst (rather than the merely bad) in China’s own approach to the disease, which was essentially to cover it up internally and stall in allowing international access to emerging data; that the Trump administration lost what leverage it might have had over Chinese President Xi Jinping and his officials; and that the chance to keep the disease within the confines of a single country was forever lost.

In addition to America’s destruction of its own advance-warning system, by removing CDC and Predict observers, the Trump administration’s bellicose tone toward China had an effect. Many U.S. officials stressed that a vicious cycle of blame and recrimination made public health an additional source of friction between the countries, rather than a sustained point of cooperation, as it had been for so many years.

“The state of the relationship meant that every U.S. request was met with distrust on the Chinese side, and every Chinese response was seen on the American side as one more attempt to cover up,”

Several officials who had experience with China suggested that other presidents might have called Xi Jinping with a quiet but tough message that would amount to: We both know you have a problem. Why don’t we work on it together, which will let you be the hero? Otherwise it will break out and become a problem for China and the whole world.

“It would have taken diplomatic pressure on the Chinese government to allow us to insert our people” into Wuhan and other disease centers, Klain said. “The question isn’t what leverage we had. The point is that we gave up leverage with China to get the trade deal done. That meant that we didn’t put leverage on China’s government. We took their explanations at face value.”

3. The Emergency Checklist

The president’s advance notice of the partial European ban almost certainly played an important part in bringing the infection to greater New York City. Because of the two-day “warning” Trump gave in his speech, every seat on every airplane from Europe to the U.S. over the next two days was filled. Airport and customs offices at the arrival airports in the U.S. were unprepared and overwhelmed. News footage showed travelers queued for hours, shoulder to shoulder, waiting to be admitted to the U.S. Some of those travelers already were suffering from the disease; they spread it to others. On March 11, New York had slightly more than 220 diagnosed cases. Two weeks later, it had more than 25,000. Genetic testing showed that most of the infection in New York was from the coronavirus variant that had come through Europe to the United States, rather than directly from China (where most of the early cases in Washington State originated).

Aviation is safe because, even after all the advances in forecasting and technology, its culture still imagines emergencies and rehearses steps for dealing with them.

Especially in the post-9/11 era of intensified concern about threats of all sorts, American public-health officials have also imagined a full range of crises, and have prepared ways to limit their worst effects. The resulting official “playbooks” are the equivalent of cockpit emergency checklists

the White House spokesperson, Kayleigh McEnany, then claimed that whatever “thin packet of paper” Obama had left was inferior to a replacement that the Trump administration had supposedly cooked up, but which has never been made public. The 69-page, single-spaced Obama-administration document is officially called “Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents” and is freely available online. It describes exactly what the Trump team was determined not to do.

What I found remarkable was how closely the Obama administration’s recommendations tracked with those set out 10 years earlier by the George W. Bush administration, in response to its chastening experience with bird flu. The Bush-era work, called “National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza” and publicly available here, differs from the Obama-era playbook mainly in the simpler forms of technology on which it could draw

consider the one below, and see how, sentence by sentence, these warnings from 2005 match the headlines of 2020. The topic was the need to divide responsibility among global, national, state, and community jurisdictions in dealing with the next pandemic. The fundamental premise—so widely shared that it barely needed to be spelled out—was that the U.S. federal government would act as the indispensable flywheel, as it had during health emergencies of the past. As noted, it would work with international agencies and with governments in all affected areas to coordinate a global response. Within its own borders it would work with state agencies to detect the potential for the disease’s spread and to contain cases that did arise:

Referring to the detailed pandemic playbooks from the Bush and Obama administrations, John R. Allen told me: “The moment you get confirmation of a problem, you would move right to the timeline. Decisions by the president, actions by the secretary of defense and the CDC, right down the list. You’d start executing.”Or, in the case of the current administration, you would not. Reading these documents now is like discovering a cockpit checklist in the smoking wreckage.

4. The Pilot

a virtue of Sully is the reminder that when everything else fails—the forecasts, the checklists, the triply redundant aircraft systems—the skill, focus, and competence of the person at the controls can make the difference between life and death.

So too in the public response to a public-health crisis. The system was primed to act, but the person at the top of the system had to say, “Go.” And that person was Donald Trump.

n a resigned way, the people I spoke with summed up the situation this way: You have a head of government who doesn’t know anything, and doesn’t read anything, and is at the mercy of what he sees on TV. “And all around him, you have this carnival,”

“There would be some ballast in the relationship,” this person said. “Now all you’ve got is the trade friction”—plus the personal business deals that the president’s elder daughter, Ivanka, has made in China,

5. The Control Systems

The deadliest airline crash in U.S. history occurred in 1979. An American Airlines DC-10 took off from O’Hare Airport, in Chicago—and just as it was leaving the ground, an incorrectly mounted engine ripped away from one of the wings. When the engine’s pylon was pulled off, it cut the hydraulic lines that led from the cockpit to the control surfaces on the wings and tail. From that point on, the most skillful flight crew in the world could not have saved the flight.

By the time the pandemic emerged, it may have already been too late. The hydraulic lines may already have been too damaged to transmit the signals. It was Trump himself who cut them.

The more complex the organization, the more its success or failure turns on the skill of people in its middle layers—the ones who translate a leader’s decision to the rest of the team in order to get results. Doctors depend on nurses; architects depend on contractors and craftsmen; generals depend on lieutenants and sergeants

Because Donald Trump himself had no grasp of this point, and because he and those around him preferred political loyalists and family retainers rather than holdovers from the “deep state,” the whole federal government became like a restaurant with no cooks, or a TV station with stars but no one to turn the cameras on.

“There is still resilience and competence in the working-level bureaucracy,” an intelligence-agency official told me. “But the layers above them have been removed.”

Traditionally, the National Security Council staff has comprised a concentration of highly knowledgeable, talented, and often ambitious younger figures, mainly on their way to diplomatic or academic careers.

“There is nobody now who can play the role of ‘senior China person,’” a former intelligence official told me. “In a normal administration, you’d have a lot of people who had spent time in Asia, spent time in China, knew the goods and bads.” Also in a normal administration, he and others pointed out, China and the United States would have numerous connective strands

The United States still possesses the strongest economy in the world, its military is by far the most powerful, its culture is diverse, and, confronted with the vicissitudes of history, the country has proved resilient. But a veteran of the intelligence world emphasized that the coronavirus era revealed a sobering reality. “Our system has a single point-of-failure: an irrational president.” At least in an airplane cockpit, the first officer can grab the controls from a captain who is steering the aircraft toward doom.

Every president is “surprised” by how hard it is to convert his own wishes into government actions

Presidents cope with this discovery in varying ways. The people I spoke with had served in past administrations as early as the first George Bush’s. George H. W. Bush came to office with broad experience in the federal government—as much as any other president. He had been vice president for eight years, a CIA director, twice an ambassador, and a member of Congress. He served only four years in the Oval Office but began with a running start. Before he became president, Bill Clinton had been a governor for 12 years and had spent decades learning and talking about government policies. A CIA official told me that Clinton would not read his President’s Daily Briefs in the morning, when they arrived, but would pore over them late at night and return them with copious notes. George W. Bush’s evolution from dependence on the well-traveled Dick Cheney, in his first term, to more confident control, in his second, has been well chronicled. As for Obama, Paul Triolo told me: “By the end of his eight years, Obama really understood how to get the bureaucracy to do what he wanted done, and how to get the information he needed to make decisions.” The job is far harder than it seems. Donald Trump has been uninterested in learning the first thing about it.

In a situation like this, some of those in the “regular” government decide to struggle on. Others quit—literally, or in the giving-up sense

The ‘process’ is just so chaotic that it’s not a process at all. There’s no one at the desk. There’s no one to read the memos. No one is there.”

“If this could happen to Fauci, it makes people think that if they push too hard in the wrong direction, they’ll get their heads chopped off. There is no reason in the world something called #FireFauci should even exist. The nation’s leaders should maintain high regard for scientific empiricism, insight, and advice, and must not be professionally or personally risk averse when it comes to understanding and communicating messages about public safety and health.”

Over nearly two decades, the U.S. government had assembled the people, the plans, the connections, and the know-how to spare this nation the worst effects of the next viral mutation that would, someday, arise. That someday came, and every bit of the planning was for naught. The deaths, the devastation, the unforeseeable path ahead—they did not have to occur.

The language of an NTSB report is famously dry and clinical—just the facts. In the case of the pandemic, what it would note is the following: “There was a flight plan. There was accurate information about what lay ahead. The controllers were ready. The checklists were complete. The aircraft was sound. But the person at the controls was tweeting. Even if the person at the controls had been able to give effective orders, he had laid off people that would carry them out. This was a preventable catastrophe.”

Gohmert, who is antiabortion, was not persuaded then. He has repeatedly shown he feels it is exactly his business, as a government bureaucrat, to regulate individuals’ conversations with their doctors. At a House hearing he once said women should carry a brain-dead fetus to term.

In a funhouse-mirror situation, the de facto slogan of the anti-mask crowd has become “My body, my choice,” the chant originally created by women in the abortion rights movement. In that context, the goal was to argue that a woman’s decisions about her health, her family, her morals and her soul were up to her, possibly in consultation with her doctor, her partner or her pastor.

You might believe that abortion is murder, but you cannot say that it is contagious and airborne, something you can catch or transmit unknowingly to others. You cannot argue that, upon choosing to have an abortion, a pregnant person walks into a grocery store and infects 50 other innocent shoppers with abortion.

public health concerns are completely different from individual medical procedures.

But if that’s the comparison that anti-mask folks want to make — fine. Prepare to be judged and harangued the way women are for seeking abortions. And prepare to deserve it, because unlike what goes on inside a Planned Parenthood clinic, public health actually is the business of the public.

I don’t think this is about the ability to enforce mandates. Schools, legislators and workplaces have all found ways to enforce mandates on women’s bodies, or gender nonconforming bodies, for years. This is about a sickness that is far more pervasive than the coronavirus: the belief that one’s comfort is more important than someone else’s life.

The stubborn resistance to science for reasons that often boil down to, “I don’t wanna.”

The refusal to acknowledge that living in a functioning society sometimes means sacrificing a tiny smidgen of personal liberty for the well-being of the group

— and that there are circumstances exceeding the boundaries of taste and discretion, where those sacrifices should be mandated: The presence of a deadly virus in the halls of a school is a better reason to enforce a dress code than the presence of bare shoulders.

On February 13, 1819, Rep. James Tallmadge of New York added a rider to the Missouri Statehood bill that came to consume Congress for almost a year and would ultimately shape the legal history of slavery and constitutional history of the state for the next 45 years. Missouri, Tallmadge suggested, should be admitted to the union only if it outlawed slavery.

In 1820 the threat to the union was allayed, or at least delayed, with the Missouri Compromise, one of the most notorious compromises in the history of the United States: Slavery would be allowed in Missouri. In exchange for Missouri’s admission as a slave state, Maine was admitted as a free state.

n addition to sanctioning slavery, the Missouri Constitution of 1820 directed the legislature of the new state “to prevent free negroes and mulattoes from coming to and settling in this State, under any pretext whatsoever.”

The provision reflected the particular sort of white supremacy that was characteristic of much of the growing population of the state of Missouri and the city of St. Louis. It was consonant with the politics of the American Colonization Society, which had emerged on the East Coast in 1817, and which sought the ethnic cleansing of the North through the removal of free black people to Africa.

Many of these white men were migrants from Virginia, where representation in the state legislature had, like representation in the U.S. Congress, been apportioned on the basis of population rather than suffrage — the three-fifths compromise, most notorious of them all, which provided an enduring political subsidy to slaveholders, who were able to increase their political representation in proportion (3/5) to the number of human beings they owned.

In Missouri things would be different and only “free white male inhabitants” would be counted: The state, under its 1820 Constitution, would be ruled by and for white men rather than slaveholders.

In order for Missouri to be admitted to the union, the state constitution had to be sent back to Washington and approved by the United States Congress. At stake was the question of negro exclusion. Article IV, Section 2 of the United States Constitution provides that “The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.” Termed the principle of “interstate comity,” in practice this clause means (and was in 1820 taken to mean) that individual states are not allowed to discriminate against the citizens of other states.

The Missouri Constitution of 1820’s deliberate exclusion of the free black citizens of other states declared that when it came to free people of color, the state of Missouri was a territory apart.

Under the constitution of 1820, free black people in Missouri were denizens, not citizens. Much like Indians, they fell under the law of the state without the ability to invoke its provided protections. Under an 1835 law, free black children were legally required to be apprenticed to white families. An 1843 revision to the state code restricted the immigration of all free blacks unless they could demonstrate they were citizens of another state — a near impossibility for most, because states did not issue proof-of-citizenship documents.

Rethinking the history of the coming of the Civil War from the West, from the standpoint of imperial expansion, demands we reconsider the racist legacy of the victory of the United States of America over the Confederate States. It helps explain just how deeply ingrained anti-blackness is in American life then, and now.

The first documented burial took place on April 22, 1869, according to Melinda Hunt, director of the Hart Island Project, a nonprofit organization identifying and tracking burials on the island.

This concept of honoring the dead was particularly relevant during the AIDS epidemic of the late ’80s and ’90s, which killed more than 100,000 people in New York. Many AIDS patients were laid to rest at Hart Island in an isolated area from other remains and in deeper individual graves because of the stigma and lack of knowledge about how AIDS spread.

Those epidemics include the yellow fever and tuberculosis outbreaks of the 19th century, when the island was used as a quarantine station for those who were infected. It also proved key in handling the waves of victims associated with the spread of the great flu pandemic of 1918, when over 30,000 deaths were recorded in the city — 20,000 of which came that fall alone.

Mass burials on Hart Island often hold a negative association, most likely because of the way burials have evolved throughout history, as private funerals have become the norm.

Hunt says New York City as a whole has never run out of burial space. “The city is able to recycle graves after 25 years

The burials were long conducted by inmates, most often from Rikers Island. “You hear people who say if you go to Hart’s, you’re going to be haunted the rest of your life,” said Saxon Palmer, a former Rikers inmate, who was on the job for the entirety of his four-month sentence in 2019. “Then most people wouldn’t come back the next week.”

“I’ve often referred to Hart Island as New York City’s family tomb. … There’s something really meaningful about that, to be buried with earlier generations,” Hunt said. “We want for people to be able to stay connected … because that’s what is going to make us feel safe in the end, that the city has honored every life.”

Presidential candidates not only sat home but didn’t even campaign before 1840, when Ohio’s William Henry “Old Tippecanoe” Harrison became the first to give speeches with a campaign of carnival-like rallies. In 1880, Republican James Garfield campaigned from his farm in Mentor, Ohio. In 1888, Republican Benjamin Harrison, William Henry’s grandson, ran from his house in Indianapolis.

Harding’s campaign theme was “a return to normalcy” after the turmoil of World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic.Instead of going to the people, he had the people come to the large, curving front porch of his wood-frame house in Marion, a town of about 30,000 residents.

Meantime, Harding’s Democratic rival, Ohio Gov. James Cox, was campaigning by train in 36 of the 48 states.

Cox said he was “carrying his front porch” to the country, while his opponent continued “his self-isolation in a small Ohio community,”

By October, Harding was far in the lead. His front-porch campaign had drawn more than 600,000 people.

Harding didn’t make it to the end of his first term. In the summer of 1923, after a bout of flu, the president took a cross-country train trip. On Aug. 2 in San Francisco, he died after a heart attack.

Harding’s legacy was tarnished by scandal following his death. In 1927, it was ruled that his interior secretary secretly sold drilling rights to federal oil wells in Teapot Dome, Wyo., to private oil interests.

In 1927, young Nan Britton published a book claiming she was Harding’s mistress and gave birth to his daughter. Decades later, love letters were uncovered showing, in a Stormy Daniels-like moment, the Republican Party in 1920 had paid another Harding high-society mistress to take a long voyage until the election was over.

Also in need of scrutiny are the failures that crippled so many public health agencies, up to and including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization.

Business travel is also due for reconsideration — and without business travelers, the travel industry will collapse.

And how about the nonmedical things we could be doing to control infectious disease?

it’s easy to imagine most office workers getting their collegial fix in a couple of days a week.

we’ve also learned some good things, notably just how fast biomedical innovation can move when we really try

The resulting declines will crush hotels, airlines and their workers, plus the budget of every city with a significant tourism or convention business.

In fact, we should expect big changes in anything that could be filed under “borderless economy.” When the chips were down, governments slammed borders shut, grabbed whatever they could for their own citizens and worried about everyone else later, if at all.

What are the politics of reopening rich-world borders to immigrants from places where covid-19 is still endemic? How many people will want to vacation in those places? How will that impact economic convergence between rich and poor countries?

But Ziblatt and Levitsky missed another important norm: Don’t make unsubstantiated allegations or false accusations.

rtunately.In ancient Greece, Athenian democrats understood that establishing social sanctions against false accusations — and avoiding situations in which people are being asked to prove a negative — was one of the most important pillars of maintaining a healthy democratic culture.

For this reason, they reserved one of their most bitter epithets for people who trafficked in false accusations. They were “sycophants,”

Sycophants were the lowest of the low because they took the best of democracy — the rule of law, process and procedure — and sought to turn it against itself in order to incapacitate opponents and secure power.

For the industry to meet customer demand, restaurants would probably have to draw workers from other industries, but there are indications that the opposite is true. An analysis of job seekers’ search history data by the company review site Glassdoor found that people who used to search for “restaurant server” are now more likely to type in “office assistant,” “data entry” or “Amazon,” for example.

Fast-food wages historically trail those in other service industry jobs, with the typical U.S. worker collecting about $11.80 per hour or $24,540 a year as of May 2020,

Some current and former fast-food workers say labor shortages merely reflect the limited appeal of low-wage work that can be physically demanding and stressful, conditions that existed long before the pandemic.

some economists question the accuracy of the term “labor shortage” in this context, saying businesses are simply offering too low a wage for an hour’s work.

When I go shopping for an Audi and I can’t afford it, I don’t get to declare an Audi shortage,” said Erica Groshen, a labor economist with Cornell University. “At the wage being offered, businesses still aren’t getting as many applicants for work.”

“I think the problem is workers are being paid too little working full time. That’s the real scandal,” he said.

Of the nearly 10 million job openings in the United States, roughly 1 in 6 are in the leisure and hospitality sector that includes food service workers,

Nonsupervisory workers in the accommodations and food service sector made an average of $15.91 per hour as of August, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In February 2020, they made an average of $14.46 per hour.

“The fact that nominal wages have been increasing so rapidly over the last several months is itself pretty strong evidence that businesses really are doing a lot to attract and retain workers. … The labor market is just really competitive,”

McDonald’s announced that it had raised its hourly rate to a range of $11 to $17 for entry-level workers, and $15 to $20 for managers.

one of the company’s locations in Hendersonville, N.C., recently increased its starting hourly wage to $19, for example.

For many fast-food establishments, the pandemic has accelerated a trend toward online and app-based ordering, and drive-through technology.

quarter — momentum that CEO David Gibbs said was underpinned by the Louisville-based company’s digital investments and “ability to serve customers through multiple on- and off-premise channels.”

McDonald’s also reported strong-second quarter gains, boosted by growth in its delivery and digital platforms and higher menu prices. U.S. sales were 25.9 percent higher than the same period in 2020 and 14.9 percent above where they were in a pre-pandemic 2019, the company said.

The average cost to close a restaurant to improve or add an advanced drive-through ranges from $125,000 to $250,000

drive-throughs account for about half of annual sales for all fast-food and fast-casual restaurants, or roughly $169 billion.

“One of other things they have done is turn all of us into the cashiers,” he said, pointing to restaurant apps, and touch-screen kiosks that have taken the place of some food service workers. “We did a study on automation and robotics and found that at least half could be replaced with robots or automation.”

In testimony to U.S. Congress and abroad, whistleblower Frances Haugen has pointed to the algorithm as central to the social network’s problems, arguing that it systematically amplifies and rewards hateful, divisive, misleading and sometimes outright false content by putting it at the top of users’ feeds.

The political push raises an old question for Facebook: Why not just give users the power to turn off their feed ranking algorithms voluntarily? Would letting users opt to see every post from the people they follow, in chronological order, be so bad?

The documents suggest that Facebook’s defense of algorithmic rankings stems not only from its business interests, but from a paternalistic conviction, backed by data, that its sophisticated personalization software knows what users want better than the users themselves

Since 2009, three years after it launched the news feed, Facebook has used software that predicts which posts each user will find most interesting and places those at the top of their feeds while burying others. That system, which has evolved in complexity to take in as many as 10,000 pieces of information about each post, has fueled the news feed’s growth into a dominant information source.

The proliferation of false information, conspiracy theories and partisan propaganda on Facebook and other social networks has led some to wonder whether we wouldn’t all be better off with a simpler, older system: one that simply shows people all the messages, pictures and videos from everyone they follow, in the order they were posted.

That was more or less how Instagram worked until 2016, and Twitter until 2017.

But Facebook has long resisted it.

they appear to have been informed mostly by data on user engagement, at least until recently

That employee, who said they had worked on and studied the news feed for two years, went on to question whether automated ranking might also come with costs that are harder to measure than the benefits. “Even asking this question feels slightly blasphemous at Facebook,” they added.

“Whenever we’ve tried to compare ranked and unranked feeds, ranked feeds just seem better,” wrote an employee in a memo titled, “Is ranking good?”, which was posted to the company’s internal network, Facebook Workplace, in 2018

In 2014, another internal report, titled “Feed ranking is good,” summarized the results of tests that found allowing users to turn off the algorithm led them to spend less time in their news feeds, post less often and interact less.

Without an algorithm deciding which posts to show at the top of users’ feeds, concluded the report’s author, whose name was redacted, “Facebook would probably be shrinking.”

there’s a catch: The setting only applies for as long as you stay logged in. When you leave and come back, the ranking algorithm will be back on.

What many users may not realize is that Facebook actually does offer an option to see a mostly chronological feed, called “most recent,”

The longer Facebook left the user’s feed in chronological order, the less time they spent on it, the less they posted, and the less often they returned to Facebook.

A separate report from 2018, first described by Alex Kantrowitz’s newsletter Big Technology, found that turning off the algorithm unilaterally for a subset of Facebook users, and showing them posts mostly in the order they were posted, led to “massive engagement drops.” Notably, it also found that users saw more low-quality content in their feeds, at least at first, although the company’s researchers were able to mitigate that with more aggressive “integrity” measures.

Nick Clegg, the company’s vice president of global affairs, said in a TV interview last month that if Facebook were to remove the news feed algorithm, “the first thing that would happen is that people would see more, not less, hate speech; more, not less, misinformation; more, not less, harmful content. Why? Because those algorithmic systems precisely are designed like a great sort of giant spam filter to identify and deprecate and downgrade bad content.”

because the algorithm has always been there, Facebook users haven’t been given the time or the tools to curate their feeds for themselves in thoughtful ways. In other words, Facebook has never really given a chronological news feed a fair shot to succeed

Some critics say that’s a straw-man argument. Simply removing automated rankings for a subset of users, on a social network that has been built to rely heavily on those systems, is not the same as designing a service to work well without them,

Ben Grosser, a professor of new media at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Those users’ feeds are no longer curated, but the posts they’re seeing are still influenced by the algorithm’s reward systems. That is, they’re still seeing content from people and publishers who are vying for the likes, shares and comments that drive Facebook’s recommendati

“My experience from watching a chronological feed within a social network that isn’t always trying to optimize for growth is that a lot of these problems” — such as hate speech, trolling and manipulative media — “just don’t exist.”

Facebook has not taken an official stand on the legislation that would require social networks to offer a chronological feed option, but Clegg said in an op-ed last month that the company is open to regulation around algorithms, transparency, and user controls.Twitter, for its part, signaled potential support for the bills.

“I think users have the right to expect social media experiences free of recommendation algorithms,” Maréchal added. “As a user, I want to have as much control over my own experience as possible, and recommendation algorithms take that control away from me.”

“Only companies themselves can do the experiments to find the answers. And as talented as industry researchers are, we can’t trust executives to make decisions in the public interest based on that research, or to let the public and policymakers access that research.”

ns.