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Officials once boastful about their preparedness were frantically trying to secure protective gear and materials for tests, as death rates soared in Britain, France, Spain, Italy and Belgium.

Many European leaders felt so secure after the last pandemic — the 2009 swine flu — that they scaled back stockpiles of equipment and faulted medical experts for overreacting.

But that confidence would prove their undoing. Their pandemic plans were built on a litany of miscalculations and false assumptions

European leaders boasted of the superiority of their world-class health systems but had weakened them with a decade of cutbacks. When Covid-19 arrived, those systems were unable to test widely enough to see the peak coming — or to guarantee the safety of health care workers after it hit.

Accountability mechanisms proved toothless. Thousands of pages of national pandemic planning turned out to be little more than exercises in bureaucratic busy work

Officials in some countries barely consulted their plans; in other countries, leaders ignored warnings about how quickly a virus could spread.

Mathematical models used to predict pandemic spreads — and to shape government policy — fed a false sense of security.

National stockpiles of medical supplies were revealed to exist mostly on paper, consisting in large part of “just in time” contracts with manufacturers in China. European planners overlooked the risk that a pandemic, by its global nature, could disrupt those supply chains

Now South Korea, with a death toll below 300, is a paragon of success against the pandemic. Many epidemiologists there are dumbfounded at the mess made by their mentors.

Europe is grappling with how a continent considered among the most advanced failed so miserably.

Dr. Whitty, 54, initially praised in British newspapers as the reassuring “geek-in-chief,” has declined to speak publicly about his role in those decisions. His friends say the government has set him up to take the blame.

Sir David King, a former British chief science officer, said, “The word ‘arrogance’ comes to mind, I am afraid.” He added: “What hubris.”

when swine flu emerged, British leaders again turned to Professor Ferguson and the large modeling department he had built at Imperial College. He projected that swine flu, in a reasonable worst case, could kill nearly 70,000.

But the modelers’ “reasonable worst case” was wildly off. Swine flu ended up killing fewer than 500 people in Britain, less than in a seasonal flu.

For Mr. Johnson, the swine flu episode reinforced instincts not to impose restrictions in the name of public health.

Some experts now say Europe learned the wrong lesson from the swine flu.

“It created some kind of complacency,” said Prof. Steven Van Gucht, a virologist involved in the Belgian response. “Oh, a pandemic again? We have a good health system. We can cope with this.”

It also coincided with Europe’s worst economic slump in decades. French legislators were furious at the cost of buying millions of doses of vaccines and faulted the government for needlessly stockpiling more than 1.7 billion protective masks.

The idea of a government warehousing medical supplies came to seem outdated,” said Francis Delattre, a French senator who raised alarms about dependence on China. “Our fate was put into the hands of a foreign dictatorship.”

“France has a superiority complex,” Mr. Delattre added, “especially when it comes to the health sector.”

“It’s pretty difficult to build a stockpile for something you’ve not seen before,” said Dr. Ben Killingley, an infectious disease expert who advises the government on what to stockpile. “It depends how much you want to spend on your insurance.”

National governments barred the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control from setting benchmarks or pointing out deficiencies. So the agency’s public remarks were almost unfailingly positive

“We couldn’t say, ‘You should have this,’” said Arthur Bosman, a former agency trainer. “The advice and the assessment had to be phrased in an observation.”

the European Union in 2016 solicited bids to build a continent-wide repository. But the initiative fizzled because Britain, France and other large countries thought they had the situation covered

European and global health officials had thoroughly reviewed Belgium’s pandemic plan over the years. But when Covid-19 hit, Belgian officials did not even consult it.

“It has never been used,” said Dr. Emmanuel André, who was drafted to help lead the country’s coronavirus response

“I don’t understand why we were not prepared,” said Dr. Matthieu Lafaurie, of the Saint-Louis hospital in Paris. “It was very surprising that every country had to realize itself what was going on, as if they didn’t have the examples of other countries.

He insisted that he had warned privately in early March that Britain’s insufficient testing meant the scientists did not have enough information to track the epidemic.Across Europe, he said, more testing “would have been the single thing which would have made the biggest difference.”

there is another lesson to learn, said Dr. André, who spent years fighting epidemics in Africa before advising Belgium on the coronavirus.“They keep on telling countries what they should do, very clearly. But all these experts, when it happens in your own countries? There’s nothing,” he said.“One lesson to learn is humility.”

Cooper wants the GOP to continue discussing a scaled-back convention, while Republicans are seeking assurances that more than 10 people will be allowed in a room.

Dory MacMillan, a spokeswoman for Cooper, said in a statement that the governor "has been clear that the convention could be held with more than 10 people but that plans need to be in place for a scaled down convention with safety precautions

Republican governors in Georgia, Florida and Tennessee have called on Trump to move the convention to their states, and the RNC is scheduled to visit Nashville on Thursday.

Michael Bitzer, a political scientist at Catawba College, noted former President Barack Obama held his 2012 convention in Charlotte but lost the state to former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney in 2012.

"Conventions don't really have as great of an impact as people think," Bitzer said. "The Democrats had a convention in Charlotte, and the state went for Romney by two points in 2012."

“Not only is it a terrible tactic and unsafe ... it also is sending a tone as if this is the president that has ordered this,” said Ronald Davis, who headed the Justice Department’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services under Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama.

Davis oversaw a task force that in 2015 released new federal guidelines for improving police practices after demonstrations that turned violent over the 2014 police killing of a young black man named Michael Brown

That approach appears to have been seldom used in protests that have engulfed many U.S. cities since Floyd’s death after a white police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes during his arrest.

For example, police in New York City have used pepper spray on protesters, hit people with batons and in one case drove two cruisers into a crowd. In New York and some other cities police themselves have been the target of violence.

“If we were dealing with traditional, peaceful protest, everything would have been different,” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio told reporters on Monday.

Candace McCoy, a professor at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, noted police face a complicated task.

Frank M. Snowden, a Yale historian who studies pandemics, wrote in his book “Epidemics and Society” that definitive accounts of this plague have largely vanished.

History Today, a monthly magazine of historical writing published in London, calls this pandemic “the greatest catastrophe ever.” The number of deaths — 200 million — is just astounding. Put it this way: That would be like wiping out roughly 65 percent of the current U.S. population. (Covid-19 disease modeling predicts U.S. deaths to potentially reach 240,000.)

Like the Plague of Justinian, the Black Death was caused by the bubonic plague.

Explorers arrived to the New World bearing more than just turnips and grapes. They also brought smallpox, measles and other viruses for which New World inhabitants had no immunity.

it is estimated that upwards of 80–95 percent of the Native American population was decimated within the first 100–150 years following 1492

Again, blame the rats with those pesky fleas on their backs: “They were attracted by city streets filled with rubbish and waste, especially in the poorest areas,” according to the National Archives in England. While doctors, lawyers and royalty fled town, the poor were ravaged by the disease

There were no treatments. If you caught it, you had roughly two weeks to live. This caused people to become desperate.

The epidemic that swept London in 1854 spawned the sort of epidemiological investigations that take place in disease outbreaks today. That’s thanks to John Snow, an English physician who almost single-handedly took on the bacteria. While some scientists suspected cholera was transmitted through the air, Snow thought otherwise. “Through carefully mapping the outbreak, he finds that everyone affected has a single connection in common: they have all retrieved water from the local Broad Street pump,”

according to a CDC history. He ordered the pump-handle turned off, and people stopped getting sick.

In 1793, yellow fever swept through Philadelphia, then the nation’s capital, killing roughly 10 percent of the population. President George Washington and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson high-tailed it out of town, ultimately settling on Washington as the nation’s capital.

It wasn’t until 1900 that U.S. Army researchers “pinpointed mosquitoes as the transmission vector for the disease,” according to a vaccine history project at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.

The covid-19 pandemic has inspired lots of comparisons to the 1918 flu, sometimes called the Spanish flu, which got its name not because it originated in Spain but because it was World War I, and Spain was the only country being honest about the toll the pandemic took on the country.

The flu came in two waves, starting in 1918 and ending in 1920. The number of infected is staggering —as many as 500 million, with estimates of 50 million deaths worldwide, according to the CDC.

One man saw it coming: Maurice Hilleman. The doctor later regarded as the godfather of vaccines was working at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in 1957 when he read a New York Times article about a nasty flu outbreak in Hong Kong that mentioned glassy-eyed children at a clinic.

Hilleman requested samples of the virus be shipped to U.S. drugmakers right away so they could get a vaccine ready. Though 70,000 people in the United States ultimately died, “some predicted that the U.S. death toll would have reached 1 million without the vaccine that Hilleman called for,” according to the Philadelphia vaccine history project. “Health officials widely credited that vaccine with saving many lives.”

Before covid-19, this was the world’s most recent pandemic, infecting as much as 21 percent of the world’s population. Swine flu was a hodgepodge of several different flu strains that had never been collectively seen together

Today, in the case of COVID-19, “all states face the same essential threat, and each government’s response is a kind of laboratory experiment,” Tierney said.

“The United States had the advantage of being struck relatively late by the virus, and this gave [us] a priceless chance to copy best practices and avoid the mistakes of others,” he noted.

When China began confining millions of people to their homes in January, the U.S. government should have gotten the message that the Chinese were grappling with a grave threat to the wider world, the Yale sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis told me in March.

We lost six weeks” in the United States to prepare—“to build ventilators, get protective equipment, organize our ICUs, get tests ready, prepare the public for what was going to happen so that our economy didn’t tank as badly. None of this was done adequately by our leaders.”

By one estimate, from the epidemiologists Britta L. Jewell and Nicholas P. Jewell, if social-distancing policies had been implemented just two weeks earlier in March, 90 percent of the cumulative coronavirus deaths in the United States during the first wave of the pandemic might have been prevented.

Rather than using diagnostic tests that the World Health Organization had distributed to other countries early in the global outbreak, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention insisted on developing its own, only to botch the rollout of those tests.

Even now, as a number of countries have swum feverishly toward safer ground, the United States has spent the past couple of months of near-nationwide lockdown merely treading water. It has yet to roll out robust testing across the country

It has also failed to develop proper contact-tracing systems, as other nations have, and to meaningfully flatten the curve outside New York.

Amid all this, Trump has exhibited more hubris than humility. The president has repeatedly claimed that the United States is leading the world in testing, which in part is an unflattering reflection of the U.S. outbreak’s huge scale and also is not true on a per-capita basis

As an example of ideas the United States could borrow from other countries, Tierney cited the fact that 750,000 people in Britain, which would be equivalent to nearly 4 million Americans, responded to the British government’s request to enlist in a “volunteer army” to help deliver food to vulnerable populations and provide other assistance.

A number of countries that have had more success against the coronavirus have demonstrated greater open-mindedness about learning from their peers. Taiwanese officials are watching Iceland’s mass-testing efforts, while the German government is explicitly modeling its response after South Korea’s “trace, test, and treat” campaign.

“Things have moved so quickly that there hasn't been much time for considered lesson-drawing,” he noted. Some countries were slow to institute strict lockdowns, despite witnessing the horrifying spread of the virus in Italy, while others “embraced approaches that broke with the broader consensus,” including “Sweden’s proposal

New Zealand’s record of learning

His colleague at the University of Otago, Michael Baker, told me that as a government adviser on the nation’s coronavirus taskforce, he was personally very influenced by a February 2020 WHO-China Joint Mission report, which suggested that the pandemic could be contained, and led him to advocate for New Zealand’s current strategy of eliminating the virus entirely from the country.

Yet Wilson added that New Zealand has lagged behind Asian countries in encouraging mass mask wearing, in rigorously quarantining incoming travelers, and in using digital technologies for contact tracing

In the United States too, even before the virus hit, attitudes toward learning from other countries were beginning to change

“The No. 1 place to live out the American Dream right now is Denmark,” Pete Buttigieg stated during one debate.

as a senator, Romney is urging the U.S. government to follow South Korea’s lead and “learn from those countries that were successful” in dealing with their outbreaks. Conservatives are championing Sweden’s laissez-faire approach as a blueprint for how to mitigate public-health damage while preserving freedom and the economy.

with the exception of the U.S. Paycheck Protection Program, “most of our economic-policy response has ignored useful lessons from abroad, explaining why our unemployment rate is skyrocketing above those in many other affected countries.”

Kelemen noted that the coronavirus crisis has led to a surge in interest among the American public and U.S. policy makers in harvesting lessons from other countries, most evident in the fact that everyone is following “the comparative charts of how countries are doing over time on infection rates or changes in year-on-year death counts.

"Our acquisition of JUMP was a direct investment in the idea that the best way to get around a city is sometimes not in a car at all," Khosrowshahi said in a Sept. 2018 blog post. By 2019, Uber users were taking six times as many trips on Jump's vehicles compared with the year before.

Shared bikes like Jump's are generally made with proprietary parts, which better protects them from theft and vandalism, but makes it all but impossible for a local bike shop to perform maintenance.

Bikeshare companies have donated bikes in the past, and some groups told CNN Business they would have been interested in such an offer.

Unlike Spin and Ofo bicycles, Jump's bikes have the additional wrinkle of an electric battery, which wasn't designed to be charged in someone's home. The battery could be removed, but the bikes weigh about 75 pounds, making them difficult to pedal.

Cris Moffitt, who posted online videos of Jump bikes being scrapped, said he hoped to spur the company to donate any remaining bikes to a non-profit. Moffitt said he depended on a bike in college to get to work and school after he wrecked his car.

But for those hoping that 25 percent represents a true ceiling for pandemic spread in a given community, well, it almost certainly does not, considering that recent serological surveys have shown that perhaps 93 percent of the population of Iquitos, Peru, has contracted the disease; as have more than half of those living in Indian slums; and as many as 68 percent in particular neighborhoods of New York City

overshoot of that scale would seem unlikely if the “true” threshold were as low as 20 or 25 percent.

But, of course, that threshold may not be the same in all places, across all populations, and is surely affected, to some degree, by the social behavior taken to protect against the spread of the disease.

we probably err when we conceive of group immunity in simplistically binary terms. While herd immunity is a technical term referring to a particular threshold at which point the disease can no longer spread, some amount of community protection against that spread begins almost as soon as the first people are exposed, with each case reducing the number of unexposed and vulnerable potential cases in the community by one

you would not expect a disease to spread in a purely exponential way until the point of herd immunity, at which time the spread would suddenly stop. Instead, you would expect that growth to slow as more people in the community were exposed to the disease, with most of them emerging relatively quickly with some immune response. Add to that the effects of even modest, commonplace protections — intuitive social distancing, some amount of mask-wearing — and you could expect to get an infection curve that tapers off well shy of 60 percent exposure.

Looking at the data, we see that transmissions in many severely impacted states began to slow down in July, despite limited interventions. This is especially notable in states like Arizona, Florida, and Texas. While we believe that changes in human behavior and changes in policy (such as mask mandates and closing of bars/nightclubs) certainly contributed to the decrease in transmission, it seems unlikely that these were the primary drivers behind the decrease. We believe that many regions obtained a certain degree of temporary herd immunity after reaching 10-35 percent prevalence under the current conditions. We call this 10-35 percent threshold the effective herd immunity threshold.

Indeed, that is more or less what was recently found by Youyang Gu, to date the best modeler of pandemic spread in the U.S

he cautioned again that he did not mean to imply that the natural herd-immunity level was as low as 10 percent, or even 35 percent. Instead, he suggested it was a plateau determined in part by better collective understanding of the disease and what precautions to take

Gu estimates national prevalence as just below 20 percent (i.e., right in the middle of his range of effective herd immunity), it still counts, I think, as encouraging — even if people in hard-hit communities won’t truly breathe a sigh of relief until vaccines arrive.

If you can get real protection starting at 35 percent, it means that even a mediocre vaccine, administered much more haphazardly to a population with some meaningful share of vaccination skeptics, could still achieve community protection pretty quickly. And that is really significant — making both the total lack of national coordination on rollout and the likely “vaccine wars” much less consequential.

At least 20 percent of the public, and perhaps 50 percent, had some preexisting, cross-protective T-cell response to SARS-CoV-2, according to one much-discussed recent paper. An earlier paper had put the figure at between 40 and 60 percent. And a third had found an even higher prevalence: 81 percent.

The T-cell story is similarly encouraging in its big-picture implications without being necessarily paradigm-changing

These numbers suggest their own heterogeneity — that different populations, with different demographics, would likely exhibit different levels of cross-reactive T-cell immune response

The most optimistic interpretation of the data was given to me by Francois Balloux, a somewhat contrarian disease geneticist and the director of the University College of London’s Genetics Institute

According to him, a cross-reactive T-cell response wouldn’t prevent infection, but would probably mean a faster immune response, a shorter period of infection, and a “massively” reduced risk of severe illness — meaning, he guessed, that somewhere between a third and three-quarters of the population carried into the epidemic significant protection against its scariest outcomes

the distribution of this T-cell response could explain at least some, and perhaps quite a lot, of COVID-19’s age skew when it comes to disease severity and mortality, since the young are the most exposed to other coronaviruses, and the protection tapers as you get older and spend less time in environments, like schools, where these viruses spread so promiscuously.

Balloux told me he believed it was also possible that the heterogeneous distribution of T-cell protection also explains some amount of the apparent decline in disease severity over time within countries on different pandemic timelines — a phenomenon that is more conventionally attributed to infection spreading more among the young, better treatment, and more effective protection of the most vulnerable (especially the old).

Going back to Youyang Gu’s analysis, what he calls the “implied infection fatality rate” — essentially an estimated ratio based on his modeling of untested cases — has fallen for the country as a whole from about one percent in March to about 0.8 percent in mid-April, 0.6 percent in May, and down to about 0.25 percent today.

even as we have seemed to reach a second peak of coronavirus deaths, the rate of death from COVID-19 infection has continued to decline — total deaths have gone up, but much less than the number of cases

In other words, at the population level, the lethality of the disease in America has fallen by about three-quarters since its peak. This is, despite everything that is genuinely horrible about the pandemic and the American response to it, rather fantastic.

there may be some possible “mortality displacement,” whereby the most severe cases show up first, in the most susceptible people, leaving behind a relatively protected population whose experience overall would be more mild, and that T-cell response may play a significant role in determining that susceptibility.

That, again, is Balloux’s interpretation — the most expansive assessment of the T-cell data offered to me

The most conservative assessment came from Sarah Fortune, the chair of Harvard’s Department of Immunology

Fortune cautioned not to assume that cross-protection was playing a significant role in determining severity of illness in a given patient. Those with such a T-cell response, she told me, would likely see a faster onset of robust response, yes, but that may or may not yield a shorter period of infection and viral shedding

Most of the scientists, doctors, epidemiologists, and immunologists I spoke to fell between those two poles, suggesting the T-cell cross-immunity findings were significant without necessarily being determinative — that they may help explain some of the shape of pandemic spread through particular populations, but only some of the dynamics of that spread.

he told me he believed, in the absence of that data, that T-cell cross-immunity from exposure to previous coronaviruses “might explain different disease severity in different people,” and “could certainly be part of the explanation for the age skew, especially for why the very young fare so well.”

the headline finding was quite clear and explicitly stated: that preexisting T-cell response came primarily via the variety of T-cells called CD4 T-cells, and that this dynamic was consistent with the hypothesis that the mechanism was inherited from previous exposure to a few different “common cold” coronaviruses

“This potential preexisting cross-reactive T-cell immunity to SARS-CoV-2 has broad implications,” the authors wrote, “as it could explain aspects of differential COVID-19 clinical outcomes, influence epidemiological models of herd immunity, or affect the performance of COVID-19 candidate vaccines.”

“This is at present highly speculative,” they cautioned.

I decided to call Frank Luntz. Perhaps no person alive has spent more time polling Republican voters and counseling Republican politicians than Luntz, the 58-year-old focus group guru. His research on policy and messaging has informed a generation of GOP lawmakers. His ability to translate between D.C. and the provinces—connecting the concerns of everyday people to their representatives in power—has been unsurpassed. If anyone had an answer, it would be Luntz.

“You know, I don’t have a history of dodging questions. But I don’t know how to answer that. There is no consistent philosophy,” Luntz responded. “You can’t say it’s about making America great again at a time of Covid and economic distress and social unrest. It’s just not credible.”

Luntz thought for a moment. “I think it’s about promoting—” he stopped suddenly. “But I can’t, I don’t—” he took a pause. “That’s the best I can do.”

“Look, I’m the one guy who’s going to give you a straight answer. I don’t give a shit—I had a stroke in January, so there’s nothing anyone can do to me to make my life suck,” he said. “I’ve tried to give you an answer and I can’t do it. You can ask it any different way. But I don’t know the answer. For the first time in my life, I don’t know the answer.”

Every fourth summer, a presidential nominating convention gives occasion to appraise a party for its ideas, its principles, its vision for governing

Ronald Reagan’s party wanted to end the scourge of communism and slay the bureaucratic dragons of Big Government.

George W. Bush’s party aimed to project compassion and fortitude, educating poor Americans and treating AIDS-stricken Africans, while simultaneously confronting the advance of Islamic terrorism.

However flawed the policies, however unsuccessful their execution, a tone was set in these parties from the top-down.

Parties were supposed to be about ideas,” said Mark Sanford, the former South Carolina governor and congressman

“John Adams was an ornery guy, but he believed in his ideas. On the other side, Thomas Jefferson, he certainly didn’t live up to the ideas he espoused, but shoot, at least he talked about them. Nowadays, it’s just regression to the lowest common denominator on everything.

It can now safely be said, as his first term in the White House draws toward closure, that Donald Trump’s party is the very definition of a cult of personality. It stands for no special ideal. It possesses no organizing principle. It represents no detailed vision for governing. Filling the vacuum is a lazy, identity-based populism that draws from that lowest common denominator Sanford alluded to

“Owning the libs and pissing off the media,” shrugs Brendan Buck, a longtime senior congressional aide and imperturbable party veteran if ever there was one. “That’s what we believe in now. There’s really not much more to it.”

Everyone understands that Trump is a big-picture sloganeer—“Build the wall!” “Make America Great Again!”—rather than a policy aficionado. Even so, it’s astonishing how conceptually lifeless the party has become on his watch. There is no blueprint to fix what is understood to be a broken immigration system. There is no grand design to modernize the nation’s infrastructure. There is no creative thinking about a conservative, market-based solution to climate change. There is no meaningful effort to address the cost of housing or childcare or college tuition

None of the erstwhile bold ideas proposed by the likes of Newt Gingrich and Paul Ryan—term limits, a balanced budget amendment, reforms to Social Security and Medicare, anti-poverty programs—have survived as serious proposals. Heck, even after a decade spent trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Republicans still have no plan to replace it. (Trust me: If they did, you’d hear about it.)

When I called one party elder, he joked that it’s a good thing Republicans decided not to write a new platform for the 2020 convention—because they have produced nothing novel since the last one was written

The party is now defined primarily by its appetite for conflict, even when that conflict serves no obvious policy goal.

Even some of the president’s staunchest supporters concede Buck’s point in this regard

The result is political anarchy. Traditionally, the run-up to a convention sees a party attempting to tame rival factions and unite around a dynamic vision for the future. Instead, Republicans have spent the summer in a self-immolating downward spiral.

This is not a party struggling to find its identity. This is a party in the middle of a meltdown.

The verdict I’m rendering here is both observable in plain sight and breathtakingly obvious to anyone who has experienced the carnage up close.

Most of the party’s governing class sees perfectly well what is going on. They know exactly how bad t

hings are and how much worse they could yet be

these Republicans rue their predicament but see no way out of it. Like riders on a derailing roller coaster, they brace for a crash but dare not get off.

Having written the book on the making of the modern Republican Party, having spent hundreds of hours with its most powerful officials in public and private settings, I cannot possibly exaggerate the number of party leaders who have told me they worry both about Trump’s instability and its long-term implication for the GOP

There’s a reason Lindsey Graham called Trump “crazy,” a “bigot” and a “kook” who’s “unfit for office.” There’s a reason Ted Cruz called Trump “a pathological liar” and “a narcissist at a level I don’t think this country’s ever seen.” There’s a reason Marco Rubio observed that, “Every movement in human history that has been built on a foundation of anger and fear has been cataclysmic,” and warned of Trump’s rise, “This isn’t going to end well.”

To be a Republican today requires you to exist in a constant state of moral relativism, turning every chance at self-analysis into an assault on the other side, pretending the petting zoo next door is comparable to the three-ring circus on your front lawn.

The rest of the right-wing universe—conservative media, think tanks, activist organizations, financial networks, civic groups, voters themselves—has largely gone along for the ride, and for the same reason: “What about the Democrats?”

What all of these incidents and so many more have in common is that not a single American’s life has been improved; not a single little guy has been helped. Just as with the forceful dispersing of peaceful protesters in Lafayette Park—done so he could hold up a prop Bible for flashing cameras—Trump and his allies continue to wage symbolic battles whose principal casualties are ordinary people.

The spectacle is unceasing

Unsavory fringe characters have always looked for ways to penetrate the mainstream of major parties—and mostly, they have failed. What would result from a fringe character leading a party always remained an open question. It has now been asked and answered:

Some in the party have embraced the extreme, others in the party have blushed at it, but all of them have subjugated themselves to it. The same way a hothead coach stirs indiscipline in his players, the same way a renegade commander invites misconduct from his troops, a kamikaze president inspires his party to pursue martyrdom.

That is precisely what will be on display at this week’s Republican convention—martyrdom, grievance, victimhood.

It’s not that America won’t hear from serious Republicans who have real substance to offer, people like Senator Tim Scott and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley. It’s that these two, along with the remnant of other sober-minded Republicans, are the new sideshow at a time when the old sideshow has moved to center stage.

Similarly, the problem for the party isn’t that the aforementioned complaints are entirely without merit. It’s that they form no part of a broader construct on which voters can be sold. This continues to be the bane of the GOP’s existence: The party is so obsessed with fighting that it has lost sight of what it’s fighting for.

“I think I have brought tremendous strength back to the party,” the president told me last year, arguing that previous GOP leaders lacked the stomach for gruesome political combat. There is no denying Trump has transformed the party from a country club debater into a barroom brawler. But to what end?

“Our central mission is to stand up for America. It’s to say loudly and proudly that we choose America. When I go around talking to Texans every single day, what I hear is that they’re proud of this country. And they want us to fight for this country. That’s what ties it all together for Republicans,” Roy said. “The people I talk to—even the ones who maybe get a little frustrated with the president—they look at him as someone who fights for this country.”

Roy is as close to a plainspoken conservative Republican as there is in Congress. I was curious to know how he would define today’s GOP.

The problem for Republicans is that most of the fights they’re picking nowadays are futile at best and foolhardy at worst. NASCAR? Confederate flags? Goya beans? Face masks? To the degree any of these issues move the needle politically, Republicans are on the wrong side of them. What’s worse, there is no connective tissue. There is no focus to the GOP’s incessant appetite for fighting. That’s how they wound up with Trump in the first place

“The GOP has been here before with John Birchers and it didn’t end well,” said Ben Sasse, the Nebraska senator who has been a vocal if terribly inconsistent Trump critic. “The party of Lincoln and Reagan ought to have something big and bold to offer the country, but it’s got way too many grifters selling grievance politics.”

To be clear, these grifters aren’t just shady party operatives and obscure congressional candidates. They are some of the president’s closest allies, people like Matt Gaetz,

If there is one principle driving Republican politicians today, it is that traditional American values—faith, patriotism, modesty, the nuclear family—are under siege

what’s fascinating to observe is the shift in priorities and proportionality. What was once a source of annoyance and frustration for one sect of the party, social conservatives, has turned into the dominant life force for the GOP

The good news for Republicans is that “grievance politics,” as Sasse describes it, continues to be highly effective in motivating their base. The bad news? It has diminishing returns when it comes to the many millions of persuadable voters in the middle. It’s also especially difficult for an incumbent party to sell grievance to the masses, as it amounts to a tacit acknowledgment of powerlessness.

Instead of downplaying the social upheaval, treating it as a fleeting phenomenon that will pass with time and promising better days ahead, they are highlighting it at every turn, claiming it’s a sneak preview of Biden’s America when it is, factually speaking, the feature presentation of Trump’s America.

The pressure is now entirely on Trump. And he won’t have much help

leading Republicans won’t be speaking on behalf of their party this week. Kasich already defected, endorsing Biden during a dramatic speech to the Democratic convention. And neither Romney nor Boehner nor either of the Bushes would speak even if asked. From what I’ve been told, none of them plan to vote for Trump this fall, and the chief reason they won’t say so publicly is they fear it would diminish their influence over the party moving forward.

A Republican collapse this fall—Biden wins the White House, Democrats flip the Senate and hold the House—would trigger a reckoning within the GOP every bit as sharp as the one associated with Obama’s takeover of Washington in 2008. If that occurs, much of the party’s pent-up irritation with Trump (which often masks long-simmering disgust with themselves) will spill over, and the efforts to expunge this ugly chapter of GOP history could commence with stunning ferocity.

There is no guarantee of this, however. Trump claims an intensity among his following that stacks up against any leader in American history. (“We’ve never seen anything like it,” Luntz said. “It’s like Elvis and the Beatles wrapped up in one.”

Overlooked is the real possibility that Trump could win. That Biden has not built a runaway lead despite enormous advantages—chief among them, the president’s poor playing of a terrible election-year hand—speaks to the effectiveness of Trump’s slash-and-burn mentality

“I actually find it kind of reassuring. With [George] McGovern in 1972, it was a colossal wipeout with a hugely mistaken candidate who was completely out of step with mainstream public opinion. Then in 1976, Jimmy Carter, an honest-to-goodness progressive, wins,” Brooks said. “I mean, Richard Nixon gets tossed out of office for blatant corruption. Everybody’s heading for the hills saying, ‘I never voted for him! I’m not a Republican!’ And six years later, Ronald Reagan wins and then gets reelected in one of the biggest landslides in history. These things can heal really, really fast.”

owever long Trump remains in office, whatever damage he does to the GOP, Brooks believes it will be temporary. It’s the “fundamental truth” of a two-party system, he said, that coalitions are constantly shifting, parties are continually renewing, politicians are eternally looking for ways to adapt and survive.

“Healthy parties need to build coalitions around a shared vision that speaks to all Americans,” Sasse told me. “Our current course is unsustainable. We’ve got a hell of a rebuilding ahead of us, whatever happens in November.”

The calamity we're now all living through offers the professional class an opportunity to reconsider assessments of the national condition issued so confidently pre-pandemic: Economists focus on material living standards partly for ease of quantification, but also because that is what free markets most reliably produce

But “material living standards,” measured in dollars of consumption (or inches of flat-screen TV), are not the same thing as “quality of life.” They say little about relationships, dignity, agency, or life satisfaction.

Ask yourself what matters to you right now. Consider whether new apps on your smartphone compensate for the loss of control, sense of powerlessness, and strain of unpredictability.

Speaking in March at the Heritage Foundation, Senator Pat Toomey, a Republican said, “many nuclear families are struggling, that families don’t have the community support that they once had, extended families live apart,” and “civil society” is in “decline.” Still, he argued, “the standard of living of middle-class and working class Americans has improved,” citing larger houses, better computers, and cars that are not only safer but also equipped with satellite radio and seat warmers.

Weighing these competing factors, he concluded, “For all the problems that we undoubtedly have, the fact is life is better today than it has ever been for the vast majority of the American people.”

What good does G.D.P. do, if people we love are falling seriously ill and dying in unprecedented numbers; if the rhythms of daily life vital to our happiness have gone haywire and our social connections have atrophied?

How much of that technology would you trade to erase the coronavirus? Put another way, how far back in history would you have to travel to find a time when Americans’ true quality of life was lower than today’s?

That this is even a question serves as damning refutation of Senator Toomey’s confidence that an improved standard of living more than compensates for weakened family bonds and waning community support.

While the right-of-center often dismisses working-class frustration with claims of economic prosperity, the left-of-center tends to dismiss their frustration as backward or racist.

America could slow, or partially reverse, elements of globalization that have most disrupted working-class lives, if that were our priority.

We could reorient our education system toward serving the majority of young people who still don’t earn even a community-college degree.

We could reform our system of organized labor to provide workers a genuine seat at the table and an institution in the community.

We could emphasize geography when we talk about diversity, aiming to distribute talent and investment more widely.

These are forms of social redistribution. The task is not to write a larger check but to relinquish power and realign institutions on behalf of those who have been left behind for decades.

She likens the feeling to survivor’s guilt, when there is a sense of injustice. She recommends a positive action to correct that feeling and to express gratitude.

guilt doesn’t have to be destructive, some philosophers argue—in fact, properly understood, it can motivate people to address some of the inequities that the virus is revealing.

Guilt is pervasive now because the coronavirus crisis has opened up a very real class division in the country between those whose jobs allow them to stay home and those whose lives and livelihoods are in the process of being destroyed,

Guilt tends to promote reparative action, such as helping those in need, says Patricia Greenspan, a professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park, and author of “Practical Guilt.” She says those benefiting from the crisis have an ethical responsibility to contribute to efforts to alleviate others’ suffering.

Catherine Wilson, author of “Moral Animals: Ideals and Constraints in Moral Theory,” thinks that someone who feels guilty should think instead about what kind of world would be an improvement on the one we are living in now. If people don’t feel bad about enjoying themselves but see that they can make life better for others, they can use their energy and talent to activate moral leadership, sparking innovations to make society more just and fair, she says

All of this demonstrates how difficult it is to run as a Republican incumbent almost anywhere in 2020. Strategists who spoke to CNN worry that Trump has become a liability for Republicans needing to expand their coalition beyond the President's core base of supporters.

"Republican candidates need something more like Romney in '12 and less like McCain in '08," said Liam Donovan, a GOP strategist in Washington.

That one-two punch could knock the GOP out of power in Washington-- and it's what has strategists hoping the President's reelection team can successfully transform the race to a choice between Trump and an unpalatable Biden.

"This is the one thing he (Trump) cannot change the subject on," said a Republican strategist. "This is not a political opponent, this is not going way and he has never had to deal with something like this."

Trump overall has a 45% approval rating. While only 42% approve of how he's handled the pandemic, 50% still said they approve of Trump's handling of the economy.

"The economic message resonates strongly, particularly in a time like this," said Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh. "President Trump is clearly the one to restore us to that position. He did it once, he will do it again."

"Absent some sort of V-shaped recovery many people think he is dead in the water," said the Republican strategist.

Trump has solidified his position within the party. That has made it harder for Republicans in Congress to distance themselves from him without antagonizing his base. That, say Republican operatives, risks keeping away voters who may consider the GOP but don't like the President.

"It's a very, very tough environment. If you have a college degree and you live in suburbia, you don't want to vote for us,

The task requires Senate candidates to make appeals to suburban voters who flipped to Democrats in the 2018 midterm elections as a reaction against Trump.

Scott Reed, the political director at the US Chamber of Commerce and a veteran of Republican campaigns, said that a presidential reelection campaign is "always" a referendum on the incumbent and his party.

Congress, he noted is, having a relative boom in popularity -- 31% support in the latest Gallup poll, the highest in over a decade -- thanks in part to the passage of economic relief.

The line aims to combat the most consistent line of criticism from Democrats -- that Collins has voted in line with the Trump administration on everything from judicial appointments to health care to the President's acquittal on impeachment -- without having to disavow Trump himself.

"The truth is despite being massively outspent by liberal dark money groups, Republicans are still well-positioned to hold the Senate majority in the fall," said Jesse Hunt, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

"When he does it right three days in a row, it really bumps his numbers," said Reed. "We need command performance on message discipline."

“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.

About 82 percent of the Zillionaire Giveaway goes to those earning more than $1 million a year, according to Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation. Of those beneficiaries earning more than $1 million annually, the average benefit is $1.6 million.

In other words, a single mom juggling two jobs gets a maximum $1,200 stimulus check — and then pays taxes so that a real estate mogul can receive $1.6 million.

polls suggest that they don’t appreciate the degree to which Trump and Congress also bungled the economic response — or manipulated it to benefit those who least need help.

The United States simply accepted that the pandemic would cause vast numbers of workers to be laid off — and then it provided unemployment benefits. But Germany, France, Britain, Denmark and other countries took the smarter path of paying companies to keep workers on their payrolls, thus preventing layoffs in the first place

So the unemployment rate in Germany and Denmark is forecast to reach about 5 percent while in the United States it may already be about 20 percent, depending on how you count it.

The United States did a little bit of this, but far less than Europe — yet the United States in some cases spent a larger share of G.D.P. on the bailout than Europe did.

t’s not fair to viruses to blame our unemployment crisis simply on the pandemic. It’s also our national choice.

At the same time, it has become increasingly clear that money intended to rescue small businesses has often gone not to those with the greatest need but rather to those with the most shameless lawyers.

For-profit colleges, which are better known for exploiting students than educating them, have raked in $1.1 billion.

AutoNation, a Fortune 500 company, received $77 million in small business funds

One provision in the rescue package provides a tax break that benefits only companies with more than $25 million in gross receipts

A new study determined that in the two months since March 18, roughly the start of the economic crisis, America’s billionaires saw their wealth collectively grow by 15 percent. And another 16 Americans became billionaires in that period.

“We are at the brink of a technological revolution that promises not just to fundamentally alter the structure of our economy, but also to reshape the social fabric more broadly. History tells us anxiety tends to accompany rapid technological change, especially when technology takes the form of capital which threatens people’s jobs.” 

Over the past two centuries we’ve learned that there’s a significant time lag, between the broad acceptance of major new transformative technologies and their long-term economic and productivity growth.

In their initial phase, transformative technologies require massive complementary investments, such as business process redesign, co-invention of new products and business models, and the re-skilling of the workforce.  The more transformative the technologies, the longer it takes them to reach the harvesting phase

The time lags between the investment and harvesting phases are typically quite long.

While James Watt’s steam engine ushered the Industrial Revolution in the 1780s, “British factories were for the most part powered by water up until the 1840.”

Similarly, productivity growth did not increase until 40 years after the introduction of electric power in the early 1880s.  

In their early stages, the extensive investments required to embrace a GPT like AI will generally reduce productivity growth.

“the short run consequences of rapid technological change can be devastating for working people, especially when technology takes the form of capital which substitutes for labor.

In the long run, the Industrial Revolution led to a rising standard of living, improved health, and many other benefits.  “Yet in the short run, the lives of working people got nastier, more brutish, and shorter. And what economists regard as ‘the short run’ was a lifetime, for some,”

A 2017 McKinsey study concluded that while a growing technology-based economy will create a significant number of new occupations, as has been the case in the past, “the transitions will be very challenging - matching or even exceeding the scale of shifts out of agriculture and manufacturing we have seen in the past.” 

The US and other industrial economies have seen a remarkable rise in the polarization of job opportunities and wage inequality by educational attainment, with the earnings of the most-educated increasing, and the earnings of the least-educated falling in real terms

Since the 1980s, the earnings of those with a four year college degree have risen by 40% to 60%, while the earnings of those with a high school education or less have fallen among men and barely changed among women.

When upskilling is lagging behind, entire social groups might end up being excluded from the growth engine.”

That’s because the PCR (or “have-you-got-it”) test is based on detecting genetic material from the virus – on its own it does not reveal whether that virus is active, and infectious, or not.

Experts say it is unlikely. “I know some have discussed ‘reactivation’ of virus, but this seems unhelpful and unsupported to me,” said Altmann. “It’s a term that’s borrowed from other viruses, especially the herpes virus family, that can hide in the body in a latent state to reactivate years later. [There is] no evidence of that at all for coronaviruses.”

“[We are] at the beginning of describing what may be a complex picture of chronic disease that may ensue from the initial infection – coming and going in relapsing waves, sometimes almost like a kind of chronic fatigue syndrome,” he said. “[These cases] may reflect examples of virus not fully cleared, or alternatively, some kind of damaging post-hoc disturbance to immune or inflammatory function,” he said.

“In some persons they begin to feel well again and signs and symptoms including fever decrease, but some then go on to develop respiratory distress and must be provided oxygen in hospital,” said David Heymann, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. “It appears to be a delayed immune response that is more serious in some persons and that reacts to remaining virus in various organs.”

How long are people with Covid-19 infectious for? A recent study of 60 coronavirus patients in China showed 10 patients tested positive for Covid-19 after discharge from hospital. However, once again, experts say this could be down to the test picking up genetic material from inactive virus, with other studies, including work in South Korea, suggesting those who test positive with Covid-19 after recovering from the disease are not infectious.

“It’s not uncommon to find virus in the nose or throat for up to four weeks after initial infection, but tests to establish whether this is live infectious virus – as opposed to just genetic material detection – are not normally positive for much longer than a week,” said Killingley, adding: “I haven’t come across relapse cases whereby the initial infection acquired weeks ago reignites itself into an infectious case.”

Wilson was raised in Augusta, Georgia during the Civil War, the son of Joseph Ruggles Wilson, leading light of the Presbyterian Church of the Confederacy who made his name through the publication of his popular sermon arguing for the Biblical sanction of slavery.

Wilson’s father enrolled him at another Presbyterian, Southern-friendly college in Princeton, New Jersey which, unlike Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, or Brown, refused to admit African-Americans. Two thirds of Princeton’s students came from the former Confederacy, but Wilson was confronted with non-Southerners for the first time, an experience that bolstered his reactionary politics and Southern identity. He took up the secessionist side in debates with classmates, and nearly came to blows with some Northern students during the contested 1876 election.

He condemned Reconstruction — the effort to enforce the civil and political emancipation of African-Americans in the occupied South — and said allowing Blacks to vote was a “carnival of public crime.”

The mass slaughter of Black people by white terrorists in Hamburg, Vicksburg, Colfax, New Orleans and other cities went unmentioned, as did attacks occurring in dozens of South Carolina towns right under Wilson’s nose the whole time he was coming of age.

“A History of the American People,” a poorly written and shoddily researched five-volume, illustrated tome published in 1902.

It furthered the white supremacist arguments in “Division and Reunion,” calling freed slaves “dupes” and the KKK a group formed “for the mere pleasure of association [and] private amusement” whose members accidentally discovered they could create “comic fear” in the Blacks they descended on. Immigrants were a problem because they were no longer “of the sturdy stocks of the North of Europe” but contained “multitudes of men of the lowest classes from the South of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and Poland” and Chinese people, “with their yellow skin and strange, debasing habits of life,” who seemed “hardly fellow men at all, but evil spirits” and who provoked understandable mass killings by white mobs.

Wilson won the 1912 election with less than 42 percent of the vote, becoming the first Deep Southerner to hold the presidency.

It’s said that the South lost the war, but won the peace, but it was Wilson’s presidency that sealed the victory. Wilson presided over the segregation of the federal government, with Black civil servants directed to use only certain bathrooms and to eat their lunches there too so as to not sully the cafeterias

The president famously ejected Black civil rights leader William Monroe Trotter from the Oval Office for having temerity to tell him that his delegation came to him not as “wards” but as “full-fledged American citizens” demanding equality of citizenship.

Threatened with bankruptcy, Dixon turned to his old friend to intervene. Wilson screened the film in the White House for his Cabinet, and the following day Supreme Court Justice Edward Douglass White — whose statues in Louisiana and the U.S. Capitol are also subject of current protests — agreed to show it to the other justices and congressional leaders because he himself had been in the Klan and loved the film’s message. These tacit endorsements from the highest levels of power turned the tide and the film went on to be a massive financial success and was until very recently celebrated as a great work of art.

his plans for the world order presided over by the League of Nations paralleled his vision of the United States. He promoted the principles of democracy and national self-determination, but only for European nations and Anglo-Saxon settler countries like the U.S., Canada, and Australia. Czechs, Romanians, and Serbs deserved their own national states, African, Arab, Indian, and Pacific Island peoples did not

Japan, an allied power in the war, introduced a measure to include the principle of racial equality in the League’s mandate. Wilson opposed it because it would have compelled the U.S. to ensure equal treatment to Japanese, Haitian, or Liberian citizens in hotels, restaurants, and transport across the Jim Crow South. The measure passed anyway, 11-5, but Wilson, who chaired the proceedings, unilaterally and arbitrarily declared the measure had failed because it was not unanimous

The Tyranny of Merit is Sandel’s response to Brexit and the election of Donald Trump

By championing an “age of merit” as the solution to the challenges of globalisation, inequality and deindustrialisation, the Democratic party and its European equivalents, Sandel argues, hung the western working-class and its values out to dry – with disastrous consequences for the common good.

Sandel charts the rise of what he sees as a corrosive leftwing individualism: “The solution to problems of globalisation and inequality – and we heard this on both sides of the Atlantic – was that those who work hard and play by the rules should be able to rise as far as their effort and talents will take them

It became an article of faith, a seemingly uncontroversial trope

We will make a truly level playing field, it was said by the centre-left, so that everyone has an equal chance. And if we do, and so far as we do, then those who rise by dint of effort, talent, hard work will deserve their place, will have earned it.”

The recommended way to “rise” has been to get a higher education. Or, as the Blair mantra had it: “Education, education, education.

For those willing to make the requisite effort, there was the promise that: “This country will always be a place where you can make it if you try.”

First, and most obvious, the fabled “level playing field” remains a chimera. Although he says more and more of his own Harvard students are now convinced that their success is a result of their own effort, two-thirds of them come from the top fifth of the income scale.

social mobility has been stalled for decades. “Americans born to poor parents tend to stay poor as adults.”

Even a perfect meritocracy, he says, would be a bad thing. “The book tries to show that there is a dark side, a demoralising side to that,” he says. “The implication is that those who do not rise will have no one to blame but themselves.

A relentless success ethic permeated the culture: “Those at the top deserved their place but so too did those who were left behind. They hadn’t striven as effectively.

“On globalisation,” says Sandel, “these parties said the choice was no longer between left and right, but between ‘open’ and ‘closed’. Open meant free flow of capital, goods and people across borders.” Not only was this state of affairs seen as irreversible, it was also presented as laudable. “To object in any way to that was to be closed-minded, prejudiced and hostile to cosmopolitan identities.”

Centre-left elites abandoned old class loyalties and took on a new role as moralising life-coaches, dedicated to helping working-class individuals shape up to a world in which they were on their own.

As centre-left parties and their representatives became more and more middle-class, the focus on upward mobility intensified. “They became reliant on the professional classes as their constituency, and in the US as a source of campaign finance.

Blue-collar workers were in effect given a double-edged invitation to “better” themselves or carry the burden of their own failure

Many took their votes elsewhere, nursing a sense of betrayal. “The populist backlash of recent years has been a revolt against the tyranny of merit, as it has been experienced by those who feel humiliated by meritocracy and by this entire political project.”

Does he empathise, then, with Trumpism?

my book conveys a sympathetic understanding of the people who voted for him. For all the thousands and thousands of lies Trump tells, the one authentic thing about him is his deep sense of insecurity and resentment against elites

A new respect and status for the non-credentialed, he says, should be accompanied by a belated humility on the part of the winners in the supposedly meritocratic race

the Democratic party will not succeed unless it redefines its mission to be more attentive to legitimate grievances and resentment, to which progressive politics contributed during the era of globalisation.”

The only way out of the crisis, Sandel believes, is to dismantle the meritocratic assumptions that have morally rubber-stamped a society of winners and losers

“This is a moment to begin a debate about the dignity of work; about the rewards of work both in terms of pay but also in terms of esteem.

There must be a radical re-evaluation of how contributions to the common good are judged and rewarded.

The money to be earned in the City or on Wall Street, for example, is out of all proportion with the contribution of speculative finance to the real economy. A financial transactions tax would allow funds to be channelled more equably.

the word “honour” is as important as the question of pay. There needs to be a redistribution of esteem as well as money, and more of it needs to go to the millions doing work that does not require a college degree.

“We need to rethink the role of universities as arbiters of opportunity,” he says, “which is something we have come to take for granted. Credentialism has become the last acceptable prejudice

Greater investment is important not only to support the ability of people without an advanced degree to make a living. The public recognition it conveys can help shift attitudes towards a better appreciation of the contribution to the common good made by people who haven’t been to university.”

Am I tough on the Democrats? Yes, because it was their uncritical embrace of market assumptions and meritocracy that prepared the way for Trump.

To those who, like many of his Harvard students, believe that they are simply the deserving recipients of their own success, Sandel offers the wisdom of Ecclesiastes: “I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift

“Humility is a civic virtue essential to this moment,” he says, “because it’s a necessary antidote to the meritocratic hubris that has driven us apart.”

The Tyranny of Merit is the latest salvo in Sandel’s lifelong intellectual struggle against a creeping individualism that, since the Reagan and Thatcher era, has become pervasive in western democracies

“To regard oneself as self-made and self-sufficient. This picture of the self exerts a powerful attraction because it seems on the face of it to be empowering – we can make it on our own, we can make it if we try.

It’s a certain picture of freedom but it’s flawed. It leads to a competitive market meritocracy that deepens divides and corrodes solidarity.”

Sandel draws on a vocabulary that challenges liberal notions of autonomy in a way that has been unfashionable for decades. Words such as “dependency”, “indebtedness”, “mystery”, “humility” and “luck” recur in his book.

vulnerability and mutual recognition can become the basis of a renewed sense of belonging and community. It is a vision of society that is the very opposite of what came to be known as Thatcherism, with its emphasis on self-reliance as a principal virtue.

There are, he believes, optimistic sign

“The Black Lives Matter movement has given moral energy to progressive politics. It has become a multiracial, multigenerational movement and is opening up space for a public reckoning with injustice. It shows that the remedy for inequality is not simply to remove barriers to meritocratic achievement.”

“The moral of Henry Aaron’s story is not that we should love meritocracy but that we should despise a system of racial injustice that can only be escaped by hitting home runs.”

“Tawney argued that equality of opportunity was at best a partial ideal. His alternative was not an oppressive equality of results. It was a broad, democratic ‘equality of condition’ that enables citizens of all walks of life to hold their heads up high and to consider themselves participants in a common venture.

“It’s one thing to think that you don’t trust the guys in Washington because they’re not your party,” said Lonna Atkeson, a political scientist at the University of New Mexico. “But it’s a whole other thing if you think, ‘Well, gee, they didn’t even get there legitimately.’”

“There’s a set of people who are true believers that Donald Trump won the election and is going to be inaugurated, but that’s a relatively small set,” he said. “There’s also a small set of people who acknowledge Joe Biden won, but not nearly as many as you would hope.

Still, only about 20 percent of Republicans said they considered a Biden victory the “true result.” And 49 percent said they expected Mr. Trump to be inaugurated on Jan. 20 — a belief that’s “unreasonably optimistic” at this point,

For other voters, what they sincerely believe and what they want to be true may well be the same thing. And politics can be inseparable from that reasoning.

“In 2000, people had the sense that there was an unfairness in the process that had to do with technology; it wasn’t driven by partisan politics,” said Betsy Sinclair, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis. And there was a sense that we could fix that problem, she said, with updated voting machines and new legislation.

About 40 percent wanted him to take the latter option if he lost in the Electoral College and lost the national popular vote by only a percentage point or two. But roughly the same share wanted the president to contest the election even if he lost the popular vote by 10 to 12 points. That suggests, Mr. Schaffner said, that a significant share of the president’s supporters don’t necessarily believe the election was fraudulent. Rather, they were prepared to support the president’s contesting of the election no matter what.

They probably have more faith in their local election workers and precinct offices than these surveys suggest they have for the country.