Culture war games: the revolt of the elites

The Revolt of the Elites
By Christopher Lasch

The radical movements that disturbed the peace of the twentieth century have failed one by one, and no successors have appeared on the horizon. The industrial working class, once the mainstay of the socialist movement, has become a pitiful remnant of itself. The hope that “new social movements” would take its place in the struggle against capitalism, which briefly sustained the left in the late Seventies and early Eighties, has come to nothing. Not only do the new social movements–feminism, gay rights, welfare rights, agitation against racial discrimination–have nothing in common; their only coherent demand aims at inclusion in the dominant structures rather than at a revolutionary transformation of social relations.

The masses today have lost interest in revolution. Indeed, their political instincts are demonstrably more conservative than those of their self-appointed spokesmen and would-be liberators. It is the working and lower middle classes, after all, who favor limits on abortion, cling to the two-parent family as a source of stability in a turbulent world, resist experiments with “alternative lifestyles,” and harbor deep reservations about affirmative action and other ventures in large-scale social engineering.

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When confronted with resistance to these initiatives, members of today’s elite betray the venomous hatred that lies not far beneath the smiling face of upper-middle-class benevolence. They find it hard to understand why their hygienic conception of life fails to command universal enthusiasm. In the United States, “Middle America”–a term that has both geographical and social implications–has come to symbolize everything that stands in the way of progress: “family values,” mindless patriotism, religious fundamentalism, racism, homophobia, retrograde views of women. Middle Americans, as they appear to the makers of educated opinion, are hopelessly dowdy, unfashionable, and provincial. They are at once absurd and vaguely menacing–not because they wish to overthrow the old order but precisely because their defense of it appears so deeply irrational that it expresses itself, at the higher reaches of its intensity, in fanatical religiosity, in a repressive sexuality that occasionally erupts into violence against women and gays, and in a patriotism that supports imperialist wars and a national ethic of aggressive masculinity. Simultaneously arrogant and insecure, the new elites regard the masses with mingled scorn and apprehension.

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The upper middle class, the heart of the new professional and managerial elites, is defined, apart from its rapidly rising income, not so much by its ideology as by a way of life that distinguishes it, more and more unmistakably, from the rest of the population. This way of life is glamorous, gaudy, sometimes indecently lavish. The prosperity enjoyed by the professional and managerial classes, which make up most of the upper 20 percent of the income structure, derives in large part from the emerging marital pattern inelegantly known as “assortative mating”–the tendency of men to marry women who can be relied on to bring in income more or less equivalent to their own.

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How should this new social elite be described? Their investment in education and information, as opposed to property, distinguishes them from the rich bourgeoisie, the ascendancy of which characterized an earlier stage of capitalism, and from the old proprietary class–the middle class, in the strict sense of the term–that once made up the bulk of the population. These groups constitute a “new class” only in the sense that their livelihood rests not so much on the ownership of property as on the manipulation of information and professional expertise.

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Old-fashioned intellectuals tend to work by themselves and to be jealous and possessive about their ideas. By contrast, the new brain workers–producers of high-quality “insights” in a variety of fields ranging from marketing and finance to art and entertainment–operate best in teams. Their “capacity to collaborate” promotes “system thinking”–the ability to see problems in their totality, to absorb the fruits of collective experimentation, and to “discern larger causes, consequences, and relationships.” Since their work depends so heavily on “networking,” they settle in “specialized geographic pockets” populated by people like themselves.

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Although hereditary advantages play an important part in the attainment of professional or managerial status, the new class has to maintain the fiction that its power rests on intelligence alone. Hence it has little sense of ancestral gratitude or of an obligation to live up to responsibilities inherited from the past. It thinks of itself as a self-made elite owing its privileges exclusively to its own efforts.

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Social mobility does not undermine the influence of elites; if anything, it helps to solidify their influence by supporting the illusion that it rests solely on merit. Furthering upward mobility merely strengthens the likelihood that elites will exercise power irresponsibly, precisely because they recognize so few obligations to their predecessors or to the communities they profess to lead.

Their lack of gratitude disqualifies meritocratic elites from the burden of leadership, and, in any case, they are less interested in leadership than in escaping from the common lot–the very definition of meritocratic success.

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An aristocracy of talent is superficially an attractive ideal, which appears to distinguish democracies from societies based on hereditary privilege. Meritocracy, however, turns out to be a contradiction in terms: the talented retain many of the vices of aristocracy without its virtues. Their snobbery lacks any acknowledgment of reciprocal obligations between the favored few and the multitude. Although they are full of “compassion” for the poor, they cannot be said to subscribe to a theory of noblesse oblige, which would imply a willingness to make a direct and personal contribution to the public good. Obligation, like everything else, has been depersonalized; exercised through the agency of the state, the burden of supporting it falls not on the professional and managerial class but, disproportionately, on the lower middle and working classes. The policies advanced by new-class liberals on behalf of the downtrodden and oppressed–racial integration of the public schools, for example–require sacrifices from the ethnic minorities who share the inner cities with the poor, seldom from the suburban liberals who design and support those policies.

To an alarming extent, the privileged classes–by an expansive definition, the top 20 percent–have made themselves independent not only of crumbling industrial cities but of public services in general. They send their children to private schools, insure themselves against medical emergencies by enrolling in company-supported plans, and hire private security guards to protect themselves against the mounting violence. It is not just that they see no point in paying for public services they no longer use; many of them have ceased to think of themselves as Americans in any important sense, implicated in America’s destiny for better or worse. Their ties to an international culture of work and leisure–of business, entertainment, information, and “information retrieval”–make many members of the elite deeply indifferent to the prospect of national decline.

The market in which the new elites operate is now international in scope. Their fortunes are tied to enterprises that operate across national boundaries. They are more concerned with the smooth functioning of the system as a whole than with any of its parts. Their loyalties–if the term is not itself anachronistic in this context–are international rather than regional, national, or local. They have more in common with their counterparts in Brussels or Hong Kong than with the masses of Americans not yet plugged in to the network of global communications.

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The world of the late twentieth century thus presents a curious spectacle. On the one hand it is now united, through the agency of the market, as it never was before. Capital and labor flow freely across political boundaries that seem increasingly artificial and unenforceable. Popular culture follows in their wake. On the other hand, tribal loyalties have seldom been so aggressively promoted. Religious and ethnic warfare breaks out in one country after another …

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It is the weakening of the nation-state that underlies both these developments–the movement toward unification and the seemingly contradictory movement toward fragmentation. The state can no longer contain ethnic conflicts; nor can it contain the forces leading to globalization. Ideologically, nationalism comes under attack from both sides: from advocates of ethnic and racial particularism and also from those who argue that the only hope of peace lies in the internationalization of everything from weights and measures to the artistic imagination.

Fears that the international language of money will speak more loudly than local dialects inspire the reassertion of ethnic particularism in Europe, while the decline of the nation-state weakens the only authority capable of holding ethnic rivalries in check. The revival of tribalism, in turn, reinforces a reactive cosmopolitanism among elites.

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But the cosmopolitanism of the favored few, because it is uninformed by the practice of citizenship, turns out to be a higher form of parochialism. Instead of supporting public services, the new elites put their money into the improvement of their own self-enclosed enclaves. They gladly pay for private and suburban schools, private police, and private systems of garbage collection; but they have managed to relieve themselves, to a remarkable extent, of the obligation to contribute to the national treasury. Their acknowledgment of civic obligations does not extend beyond their own immediate neighborhoods.

This Maverick Thinker Is the Karl Marx of Our Time
By Christopher Caldwell

What the proponents of neoliberalism mean by a free market is a deregulated market. But getting to deregulation is trickier than it looks because in free societies, regulations are the result of people’s sovereign right to make their own rules. The more democratic the world’s societies are, the more idiosyncratic they will be, and the more their economic rules will diverge. But that is exactly what businesses cannot tolerate — at least not under globalization. Money and goods must be able to move frictionlessly and efficiently across borders. This requires a uniform set of laws. Somehow, democracy is going to have to give way.

A uniform set of laws also requires a single international norm. Which norm? That’s another problem, as Mr. Streeck sees it: The global regime we have is a reliable copy of the American one. This brings order and efficiency but also tilts the playing field in favor of American corporations, banks and investors.

Perhaps that is what blighted the West’s relations with Russia, where the transition to global capitalism “was tightly controlled by American government agencies, foundations and N.G.O.s,” Mr. Streeck says, and the oligarchs who emerged to run the government in the 1990s were “received with open arms by American corporations and, not least, the London real estate market.” To an Indian or a Chinese person, “free markets” established on these terms might carry the threat of imperial highhandedness and lost self-determination.

This insight gives us a context for understanding the persistent grievances of movements like Mr. Trump’s, and their equally persistent popularity. What happens on the imperial level also happens at the local level, within the United States and the Western European societies that make the rules of globalization. Non-technocrats, whether they are the resentful members of the old working class or just people wisecracking about the progressive pieties of corporate human resource managers, are not going to be permitted to tangle up the system with their demands.

As we no longer have an economic policy that is managed democratically, it should not be surprising that it produces unfair outcomes.

How the Clintons Revolutionized U.S. Politics… Twice
By Musa al-Gharbi

In the quarter-century between 1968 and 1992, Democrats only managed to hold the White House four years — narrowly squeaking out a 1976 win in the immediate aftermath of Watergate. Republicans, meanwhile, won landslide victories in 1972, 1980, 1984 and 1988. And then Bill Clinton changed the game.

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In his 1996 State of the Union address, Clinton formally announced the death of the Democrats’ earlier New Deal coalition, declaring, “The era of big government is over.” And over the course of his administration, the Democratic Party radically shifted to reflect not just the values, but also the economic priorities, of symbolic capitalists.

Four planks were central to Clinton’s vision of reorienting America around the knowledge economy: social investment in skills, infrastructure and research, enhancing market dynamism (through tax cuts, deregulation, privatization), international openness (through trade deals and immigration reform), and macroeconomic stability (including by using U.S. forces to uphold the global international order) – a platform now referred to as “neoliberalism.” Although versions of these ideas date back to the 1940s, and were first piloted under Democrat Jimmy Carter (accelerated under Reagan), Clinton brought the vision full circle by aggressively reorienting the Democratic Party around this vision – giving rise to what is now derisively referred to as the “neoliberal consensus” in Washington, and generating many of the faultlines that continue to define U.S. politics to the present.

For instance, the urban-rural divide first took off in the early 90s, corresponding to the Democratic Party’s reorientation around the knowledge economy (and contemporaneous moves by many left parties in Europe).

With respect to the “urban” side of that divide, under Clinton’s tenure, the Democratic Party dedicated itself to bringing cities ‘under control’ through tough-on-crime policies — despite significant concerns from the NAACP and the Congressional Black Caucus about the disproportionate and adverse effects these policies would likely have (and indeed, did have) on African Americans and other minorities. Simultaneously, his party committed itself to globalization and free trade, culminating in a series of international agreements that radically expanded China’s economic and geopolitical clout, despite the Clinton Administration’s own forecast that these moves would come at the expense of key U.S. industries and manufacturing workers.

Fulfilling Clinton’s campaign commitment to ‘end welfare as we know it,’ Democrats restructured aid programs, forcing millions of Americans, mostly women, into dead-end and unstable jobs with low pay or benefits in order to continue qualifying for government assistance. Pushing low-income mothers out of the home and into the workforce led to significant increases in child mistreatment incidents and children being dumped into ‘the system.’ However, it also helped expand the pool of workers in the service economy and kept their wages low as a result of the increased labor supply. Simultaneously, the levels, quality and accessibility of government benefits were significantly reduced, as Clinton pushed to ‘downsize’ the federal government (and privatize its functions) in order to balance the budget. As a result of these reforms many low-income Americans ended up with smaller household incomes despite working more, and the share of Americans in deep poverty increased substantially. But in the new and enlightened Democratic Party, it was much better to balance the budget by squeezing the poor than taxing the relatively affluent.

Rather than worrying about the prospects of the working class, the party aligned itself firmly with the tech and finance sectors. The Clinton Administration cut many regulations on these industries, and reduced enforcement of those rules that remained. These moves contributed significantly to the dot-com bubble that burst in 2000, and the housing and financial crisis that came to a head in 2008 (the latter of which had a particularly pernicious and enduring impact on the wealth of black families). Indeed, virtually all of the policies described above advanced the interests and priorities of those affiliated with the symbolic economy at the expense of most others, especially those who were already desperate or vulnerable.

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The GOP saw significant declines among college-educated whites, but this was offset by gains among non-white voters, ultimately leading to non-college educated whites comprising roughly the same share of the party over the last 30 years. Given that both parties have been seeing significant growth with non-white voters (although Republicans have been making progress in overall electoral voteshare for many non-white groups since 2010), the political struggles in the U.S. are increasingly revolve around issues that divide college educated whites from non-college educated whites. Cultural issues have played an especially important role in these struggles.

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It was Hillary Clinton who mainstreamed “wokeness” in the Democratic establishment during her 2016 presidential run.

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In one striking case, Hillary Clinton rhetorically asked, “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow… would that end racism? Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community? Would that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight?” To each of these questions, her supporters roared back, “No!” And, of course, she is right.

Nonetheless, Hillary and her supporters faced a big problem, namely, the inconvenient views of non-elites. Excepting some folks who took theorists from their college classes a little too seriously, most Black and Hispanic Americans consistently rate things like “ending racism” near the bottom of their political priorities, while issues like economics and public safety top their list of concerns. Even if a given measure wouldn’t “end racism,” most non-whites would prefer their elected officials to pursue policies that would improve their material prospects and conditions instead of waging cosmic wars against abstractions that liberals, themselves, often argue have been with this country from its outset and will likely never be overcome. Perhaps it should have been unsurprising, then, that despite Democrats’ increasingly “woke” gesturing, the party saw exceptionally low turnout and unusually weak support in 2016 from the very people they proclaimed themselves as champions of: women and non-whites.

However, Clinton’s defeat proved insufficient to show Democrats the error of their ways. Instead, they doubled down on “social justice” gesturing in the years that followed. After Trump was sworn into office, symbolic capitalists held protests across the country wearing pink “pussyhats” in reference to the President’s history of misogynistic words and behaviors, while female Democratic lawmakers started wearing white to evoke the suffragist movement. Erstwhile law-and-order Democrats like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris started talking about “systemic racism.” Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and current Senate Majority Leader Chuck Shumer knelt in kente-cloth stoles when announcing a criminal justice reform bill they ultimately failed to pass through Congress.

This woke symbolism and rhetoric has not resonated any better with the genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged over the last eight years than it did in 2016. Quite the opposite. As the Democrats have leaned into the culture wars at the expense of kitchen-table issues, they’ve seen accelerated losses among non-white, working class, and low-income voters, as well as religious minorities.

Contextualizing the 2024 Election: It’s the (Knowledge) Economy, Stupid
By Musa al-Gharbi

Developments that tend to be good for elites are often bad for everyone else, and vice-versa.

As an example, professionals tend to be far more supportive of immigration, globalization, automation and AI than most Americans because they make our lives more convenient and significantly lower the costs of the premium goods and services we are inclined towards. That is, those in the knowledge professions primarily see upsides with respect to these phenomena because our lifestyles and livelihoods are much less at risk (we instead capture a disproportionate share of any resultant GDP increases), and because our culture and values are being affirmed rather than threatened thereby (e.g. our embrace of demographic diversity, cultural cosmopolitanism, scientific progress). Others experience these developments quite differently.

Likewise, most in the U.S. skew ‘operationally’ left (i.e. favoring robust social safety nets, government benefits and infrastructure investment via progressive taxation) but trend more conservative on culture and symbolism. For instance, they tend to support patriotism, religiosity, national security and public order. Although they are sympathetic to many left-aligned policies, they tend to prefer policies and messages that are universal and appeal to superordinate identities over ones oriented around specific identity groups (e.g. LGBTQ people, women, Hispanics, Muslims). They tend to be alienated by political correctness and prefer candidates and messages that are direct, concise and plainspoken. Knowledge economy professionals tend to have preferences that are diametrically opposed to those of most other Americans, especially working-class voters.

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Perhaps counterintuitively, highly-educated Americans tend to be less aware of our own socio-political preferences than most others in society. Typically, we describe ourselves as more left-wing than we actually seem to be. Studies consistently find that relatively affluent, highly-educated and cognitively sophisticated voters tend to gravitate towards a marriage of cultural liberalism and economic conservativism. However, we regularly understand ourselves as down-the-line leftists. As economist James Rockey put it, “How does education affect ideology? It would seem that the better educated, if anything, are less accurate in how they perceive their ideology. Higher levels of education are associated with being less likely to believe oneself to be right-wing, whilst simultaneously associated with being in favour of increased inequality.”

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Due to the growing divergence between us and everyone else, as the Democratic Party has drawn itself closer to knowledge economy professionals, it has grown increasingly divorced from the values, concerns and priorities of most other Americans. As knowledge economy professionals have grown increasingly dominant politically and economically, we’ve likewise grown increasingly out of touch with the values, perspectives and priorities of ordinary Americans.

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Today, more than 1 in 3 Americans 25+ has a college degree, and they’re increasingly consolidated alongside the wealthy into a small number of hubs, with tight networks of institutions that reinforce one-another (such as academia, the mainstream media, advocacy orgs, and left-aligned foundations). Under circumstances like these, degree-holders no longer have to engage much with the rest of the country. Knowledge economy enterprises can likewise easily sustain themselves by focusing only on superelites, other knowledge economy professionals, and the communities and institutions they inhabit in the U.S. and around the world. Academics, journalists, entertainment companies and other cultural producers can focus exclusively on the culture, values, and priorities of people like themselves and their superelite patrons with little concern (or even outright disdain) for being accessible, compelling, or useful to others.

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The rise of a new major donor class has exacerbated these divides. As David Callahan notes, the transition to the knowledge economy has led to the rise of a new constellation of millionaires and billionaires who retain most of the wealthy’s traditional aversion to regulation, taxes, trade protectionism and labor unions (and the aversion to focusing on issues like poverty and class per se), but who skew far ‘left’ on issues like environmentalism, gender, sexuality, race, immigration, criminal justice reform, and aggressively leveraging the state to address perceived social problems. These new millionaires and billionaires (and their families) comprise a growing share of the superelite.

Critically, these new knowledge economy oligarchs are not just to the left of the median voter, they are frequently to the left of Democratic activists on these issues (who, themselves, tend to be far to the left of the typical Democrat voter on ‘culture’ matters). And these superelites have poured immense sums of money into non-profit organizations, political campaigns, journalistic organizations and institutions of higher learning to move knowledge economy professionals and their preferred political party further in their preferred direction. Quite successfully. As economist Thomas Piketty and colleagues have demonstrated, the new ‘Brahmin Left’ has more-or-less fully ‘captured’ contemporary the Democratic Party and sets its agenda.

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The Democratic Party is far from the only organization wrestling with the consequences of these shifts. Many traditionally class-oriented leftist organizations, from labor unions to the Democratic Socialists of America, have leaned increasingly heavily into ‘identarian’ conceptions of social justice and ‘woke’ symbolic politics as a result of being administered by knowledge economy professionals who have never worked ‘normie’ jobs. In turn, knowledge economy professionals have increasingly embraced these ostensibly class-based organizations. There has been dramatic growth in unionization and union action within higher ed, journalism, tech, gaming, television and movies – even finance! Membership in the Democratic Socialists of America has exploded, driven heavily by young professionals (although despite this growth its membership remains nearly 90% white and overwhelmingly male).

But as knowledge economy professionals have gravitated towards these organizations, many others have fled. Union membership in the U.S. is now at a record low. Unions are perceived as increasingly divorced from the rank-and-file workers, and more focused on pushing niche agendas of the college-educated folks that administer them rather than protecting jobs or improving pay and working conditions for members.

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Non-white and less affluent or educated voters are not just willing to cross party lines due to their growing alienation with the Democratic Party, they’ve actually been doing it, in ever-growing numbers, over the course of the last decade – all the way through the 2022 midterms. The fact that labor is now a genuinely contested constituency between Biden and Trump says everything about the current political moment, and it’s nothing good.

The Democrats’ Historic Successes and Contemporary Failures
By Timothy Noah

Franklin Roosevelt enacted labor protections early in his administration and created an army of supporters; union membership ballooned from three million in 1933 to 15 million in 1945. Kazin’s New Deal chapter is titled, fittingly, “An American Labor Party?”

It didn’t last. The two-time presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson of the 1950s was bafflingly indifferent to labor, and George Meany, who took control of the newly merged A.F.L.-C.I.O. in 1955, was at best a complacent mediocrity. Global trade took its toll. But the heaviest blow fell in 1947 when Republicans and Southern Democrats passed, over Harry Truman’s veto, the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act, which sharply restricted union recruiting. The percent of private-sector workers who belonged to unions started shrinking in the 1950s and it never stopped.

Eventually, the Democrats lost interest in labor and started courting Silicon Valley and college-educated urbanites. “The New Democrats deliberately aimed to constrain the power and influence of the labor movement,” Geismer writes. The enormity of this error became evident in 2016 when Donald Trump showed the Democrats that there weren’t enough college-educated urbanites to elect Hillary Clinton. Four years later the Democrats elected their first genuinely pro-labor president since Truman.

Sherrod Brown Has Some Advice for His Reeling Party
By Eugene Daniels

You talked about the national brand of the Democratic Party looking like it turned its back on workers. But then you also mentioned a bunch of different policies and laws that you guys have done — specifically under President Biden — that seem more tailored toward workers. Is it a messaging problem or is it an actual policy problem that the Democrats are dealing with here?

Certainly we’ve had major, major accomplishments. It’s what my career was about and will continue to be about. I don’t think we talk to workers enough, though. When we pass a bill that helps workers, I think we move on to the next bill without talking about them. The president should have done that more. All of us should have done that more. But having worked at the table — I mean, one of the things I prided myself on is I go to picket lines regularly if there’s a strike —

President Biden was the first president to do something similar.

Yes. And I was glad he did. I talked to him about that ahead of time.

Did you convince him to do it?

I didn’t. I don’t claim convincing anybody of anything. I know that I weighed in. I can only say that. But it also means when there’s an organizing drive, weighing in, if the union wants us to weigh in. Sometimes it’s calling the CEO, asking him to back down. Other times, to be neutral. Sometimes it’s walking a picket line with those workers that are trying to organize or signing a letter. But I’ve worked with workers trying to organize at a Starbucks. Understanding the law is tilted against union organizing.

I was in Cincinnati one day at an AFL-CIO dinner and I met the half-dozen women sitting at one table. So I said “What brings you here?” And they said, “We represent 1,200 custodial workers in downtown Cincinnati.” Probably two-thirds African American and Latino, one-third white, but a very diverse workforce. They’re the ones that work all night at low wages to clean the offices for people that look like me coming in to work the next day.

And she said, “We signed our first union contract.”

I said, “What’s that mean?”

She said, “I’m 51 years old. It’s the first time I’ll have a paid one-week vacation.”

I spoke to our Democratic caucus yesterday. They had the candidates who were in cycle speak. And I told that story and I said, “We’ve got to tell stories like that. We’ve got to talk about victories like that. We’ve got to show a better relationship, solidarity with those workers.” My wife was a daughter of a utility worker — 35 years, carried a utility worker card in Ashtabula, Ohio. And she said when she was 16, she almost died from an asthma attack. She said, “My dad’s union card saved my life because I could get health insurance.”

We’ve got to tell stories like that. We’ve got to talk to workers more. We’ve got to spend more time at union halls. We’ve got to side with them on organizing drives. We’ve got to side with them in labor management, not stand back and say, “Well, we’re going to be neutral.” Because neutrality in this means that the wages continue to be flat while executive compensation and profits skyrocket.

President-elect Trump and the leadership of the Republican Party haven’t exactly been on picket lines. What is it that the voters in this election saw about the Republican Party and Donald Trump that made them think that they are better for them?

Trump said the economy was so much better under him and so much worse under Biden. They just don’t tell the truth on a whole lot of things. You know the top priority for Trump and Republicans are going to be more tax cuts for rich people. That will probably come first in the things they do. I’m not an expert in psychoanalyzing how voters get to Donald Trump, but I know that we’ve let them get to Donald Trump by not focusing on them and listening to them and showing we’re on the side of workers all the time.

The Elites Had It Coming
By Thomas Frank

It may seem like a distant memory, but not long ago, the left was not a movement of college professors, bankers or high-ranking officers at Uber or Amazon. Working people: That’s what parties of the left were very largely about. The same folks who just expressed such remarkable support for Donald Trump.

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At the Republican convention in July, JD Vance described the ruination visited on his working-class town in Ohio by NAFTA and trade with China, both of which he blamed at least in part on Mr. Biden, and also the human toll taken by the Iraq War, which he also contrived to blame on Mr. Biden. Today Mr. Vance is the vice president-elect, and what I hope you will understand, what I want you to mull over and take to heart and remember for the rest of your life, is that he got there by mimicking the language that Americans used to associate with labor, with liberals, with Democrats.

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What the Biden administration did on antitrust and manufacturing and union organizing was never really completed but it was inspiring. Framed the right way, it might have formed the nucleus of a strong appeal to the voters Mr. Trump has stolen away.

How Democrats Lost Their Base and Their Message
By Nate Cohn

For a century, Democrats had been seen as the “party of the people” — the party against powerful interests and for change.

When Mr. Obama pursued the presidency, he staked his campaigns on these themes. In 2008, he ran against Washington and promised to take on lobbyists and special interests — a top concern of voters. In 2012, he won by attacking Mitt Romney as a corporate plutocrat who would outsource jobs and help the wealthy, not the middle class. He said Americans needed to focus on “nation building here at home.”

These arguments had been central to Democratic campaigns for decades — evident in a half-century of Democratic slogans: “Middle Class First,” “Change We Can Believe In,” “Putting People First,” “On Your Side,” “A Leader, for a Change.” They’re the arguments that brought millions of working-class voters to the Democrats. Indeed, it was what the Democratic Party meant.

Mr. Trump flipped all of it around. His populist pitch deprived Democrats of their traditional role in American politics, gradually weakening their bonds with working-class voters, as well as nonwhite and young ones.

He ran against the establishment and promised to “drain the swamp.” He said he would take on a “rigged system,” and said a global elite privileged its values and interests over ordinary Americans. He pledged to put America First and protect American jobs. This year’s Republican platform was dedicated to the “Forgotten Men and Women of America,” something you would see in speeches from Franklin D. Roosevelt, not George W. Bush or Mitt Romney.

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Democrats became the party of institutions, the national security apparatus, norms and, ultimately, the status quo — not change.

This transformation culminated during the pandemic, when Mr. Trump’s response to the coronavirus and the protests after George Floyd’s murder alarmed and outraged Democrats. The party already saw itself as the defender of civil rights and science, but Mr. Trump galvanized an even more vigilant and righteous reaction. Activists, academics and experts — often opposed to Mr. Trump — pushed a sweeping response, from school shutdowns and mask mandates to diversity statements in hiring.

For a time, none of this obviously hurt the Democrats. Joe Biden, after all, won the 2020 election. But once Mr. Trump left office and the pandemic continued, this brand of activist politics became a political liability.

The Progressive Moment Is Over
By Ruy Teixeira

In recent years, huge swathes of the Democratic Party, egged on by progressives, have become infected with an ideology that judges actions or arguments not by their content but rather by the identity of those engaging in them. Those identities in turn are defined by an intersectional web of oppressed and oppressors, of the powerful and powerless, of the dominant and marginalized. With this approach, one judges an action not by whether it’s effective or an argument by whether it’s true but rather by whether the people involved are in the oppressed/powerless/marginalized group or not. If they are, the actions or arguments should be supported; if not, they should be opposed.

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Voters generally embrace instead the universalistic principles that are embedded in traditional American values. They believe, unlike Kendi, that racial preferences in rewards and decision-making are not fair and fairness is a fundamental part of their world outlook. They believe, with Martin Luther King Jr., that people should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” In a 2022 University of Southern California Dornsife survey, this classic statement of colorblind equality was posed to respondents: “Our goal as a society should be to treat all people the same without regard to the color of their skin.” That view elicited sky-high (92 percent) agreement from the public, despite the assaults on this idea from sectors of the left.

Similarly, a 2023 Public Agenda Hidden Common Ground survey found 91 percent agreement with the statement: “All people deserve an equal opportunity to succeed, no matter their race or ethnicity.” This is what people deeply believe in: equal opportunity not, unlike the intersectional ideology promoted by progressives, equal outcomes.

A Graveyard of Bad Election Narratives
By Musa al-Gharbi

It was dramatic shifts among white men that allowed Biden and Harris to win in 2020 even as they underperformed Hillary Clinton with black, Hispanic and Asian voters, and women of all racial blocs.

In 2024, white men voted for Harris/ Walz the same levels they voted for Biden / Harris in 2020. And this cycle, white women also moved towards the Democratic Party …

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If whites across gender lines shifted towards the Democrats this cycle (compared to last), and if Democrats’ performance with whites was objectively solid (compared to every other year on record), then why did Harris lose so decisively? Because Democrats’ gains with whites in 2024 were more than offset by losses among non-whites — men and women alike.

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… in 2024, Democrats had their lowest performance with black voters in roughly a half-century. Much attention has been paid to black men in generating this outcome. However, Harris didn’t do particularly well with black women either. She underperformed Hillary Clinton with these constituents who, herself, underperformed Barack Obama. Put another way, going back 16 years and five elections, the only ticket that did worse with black women than Harris/ Walz in 2024 was Biden/ Harris in 2020.

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For Hispanics, a similar picture holds. It’s been more than 50 years since Democrats performed as poorly with Hispanics as they did in 2024. There has been a lot of focus on Hispanic men in driving this outcome, but the trend was very strong among Hispanic women as well. Latinas shifted 17 percentage points towards the GOP this cycle relative to 2020. As compared to 2016, Democrats’ margin with Hispanic women has been halved over the last two elections.

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Non-whites across gender lines were cooler on Harris than virtually any other Democratic candidate in modern political history.

…

Between 2016 and 2024, men shifted 2 percentage points towards the GOP. Women shifted 5 percentage points away from the Democratic Party over that same period – more than twice as much! Yet, the post-election focus has been overwhelmingly on men for some reason.

So let me put it bluntly: Democrats lost in 2024 because Harris performed extremely poorly with women. Going all the way back to 1996 (when the partisan gender divide kicked into high gear), there has been only one Democrat who performed worse with women than Kamala did: John Kerry in 2004.

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Why did Americans vote the way they did? It demonstrably wasn’t because U.S. voters are hesitant about women in leadership. They’re not.

In fact, even as Kamala’s candidacy went down in flames, women did pretty well at the ballot box this year. For example, as a result of this election cycle, there will be a record number of female governors in the U.S. in 2025. So far, 17 non-incumbent women won House seats; 105 female House incumbents won reelection. 3 non-incumbent women won Senate seats. There were many firsts this cycle as well, including the first transgender woman elected to U.S. Congress.

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In terms of total dollars raised and spent over the course of this cycle, it wasn’t even close… because the Democrats brought in much more money than the GOP – largely through millionaires, billionaires, multinational corporation, and “dark money” PACs. As OpenSecrets reports, this was the most expensive election in American history (adjusted for inflation). And at both the presidential or Congressional levels, it was Democrat-aligned PACs that dominated in terms of fundraising and spending. This held in the last cycle as well: Democrats more than twice as much “dark money” as Trump in 2020.

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In the months after Joe Biden dropped out, Democrats raised more than $1 billion – more than three times as much as Republicans brought in over the same period – largely thanks to enthusiastic support for Kamala Harris within Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Big Law.

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With respect to advertising, for instance, Democrats outspent Republicans in nearly every swing state (excepting Ohio, Florida and Texas) – often by huge margins — and they still lost every single one of these contests.

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When we shift our gaze away from donations to look at how people across class lines cast their votes, the picture is much the same. Wealthy voters shifted even further towards Democrats this cycle than they did in 2020 – a significant feat given how heavily these voters were consolidated into the Democratic Party over the course of the last decade.

Harris was the clear choice for voters with six-figure salaries or higher, while Trump won with people earning less than $50,00 per year. In fact, Democrats performed better with affluent Americans than with any other income bloc.

When we look at education and income simultaneously, it becomes even clearer that Democrats have become the party of elites.

…

All said, if we understand this election to be a contest between “elites” and everyone else, we would have to conclude two things:

1. The Democrats are the “elite” party (they had more billionaires and raised far more money overall, including more “dark money” ; they were the preferred party of affluent voters; they were the preferred party of highly-educated voters; they were the preferred party of professionals and their employers), and
2. Despite throwing unprecedented amounts of money into the election to support their preferred candidate, the dominant “elite” faction in the U.S. lost. Right or wrong, voters overruled the lion’s share of American elites in order to reinstall Trump to the White House.

The ‘Landslide’ That Wasn’t: Trump and Allies Pump Up His Narrow Victory
By Peter Baker

Mr. Trump would not be the first newly elected or re-elected president to assume his victory gave him more political latitude than it really did. Bill Clinton tried to turn his 5.6-point win in 1992 into a mandate to completely overhaul the nation’s health care system, a project that blew up in his face and cost his party both houses of Congress in the next midterm elections.

George W. Bush likewise thought his 2.4-point win in 2004 would empower him to revise the Social Security system, only to fail and lose Congress two years later. And President Biden interpreted his 4.5-point win over Mr. Trump in 2020 as a mission to push through some of the most expansive social programs since the Great Society, then saw Republicans take control of the House in 2022 and the White House and Senate two years after that.

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Real landslides have been unmistakable, including Lyndon B. Johnson’s in 1964 by 22.6 points, Richard M. Nixon’s in 1972 by 23.2 points and Ronald Reagan’s in 1984 by 18.2 points. In the 40 years since that Reagan victory, no president has won the popular vote by double digits.

…

Mr. Trump’s 1.6-point victory is smaller than that of every winning president since 1888 other than two: John F. Kennedy in 1960 and Richard M. Nixon in 1968. In addition, two presidents won the Electoral College while losing the popular vote: the second Mr. Bush in 2000 and Mr. Trump in 2016.

How Trump Won, Again
By Nate Cohn

CNN’s exit poll found that just 44 percent of voters had a favorable view of him, compared with 54 percent who had an unfavorable view. A majority of voters, 55 percent, said his views are too extreme. Obviously, there are many aspects of Mr. Trump’s appeal that these simple questions do not easily measure. But Mr. Trump’s victory may say more about the Democrats and the public’s desire for change than it does about the president-elect himself.

After all, on paper, Democrats weren’t in a sound position to win this election. No party has ever retained the White House when the president’s approval rating was as low as it is today and when so many Americans thought the country was on the wrong track.

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None of this is what Democrats would have imagined a decade ago, when many of them assumed that demographic and generational change would bring a new Democratic majority. Instead, many of the voters whom Democrats viewed as the bedrock of their coalition grew so frustrated with the status quo that they decided to back Mr. Trump instead.

Trump Called His Win a ‘Historic Realignment’ of American Politics. We Have Our Doubts.
By John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira

Mr. Trump’s and the Republican Party’s coalition consists of the working class (primarily but not exclusively white); traditionally Republican small-business people, including farmers; upper-level private-sector white-collar workers; and a wealthy donor class drawn from finance and real estate, fossil fuels and most recently, high technology. The donor class is important. In Mr. Trump’s campaign this year, according to Open Secrets, about 70 percent of his contributions came from large donors.

As a candidate, Mr. Trump possessed a striking ability as a shape-shifter, able to take several positions at once on a variety of topics and still inspire aspirations from a range of people. In the context of a campaign, he is a highly talented political entertainer, a sort of conjurer.

But stepping into the White House and governing is a very different context. What Mr. Trump is promising for his second term — the actual choices he will have to make about policy — and the makeup of that coalition do not appear to be the building blocks of a durable majority coalition. Combined, they appear to have great potential for a crackup.

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The final obstacle to a strong realignment is Mr. Trump himself, who is consumed with the quest for power and self-aggrandizement, and appears eager to seek revenge against his detractors. Many of his difficulties during his first term stemmed from his own misbehavior, and he continues to revel in division and divisiveness.

It’s worth recalling what happened in Britain to Boris Johnson and the Tories. After nearly a decade in power, they won an overwhelming victory in 2019 by detonating Labour’s “red wall” of working-class support. It looked as if the Tories were on the verge of realigning British politics. Five years later, it’s Labour that enjoyed an overwhelming victory, and Mr. Johnson himself, primarily because of his own misbehavior, is out of politics.

‘Trump’s America’: Comeback Victory Signals a Different Kind of Country
By Peter Baker

Populist disenchantment with the nation’s direction and resentment against elites proved to be deeper and more profound than many in both parties had recognized.

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As a result, for the first time in history, Americans have elected a convicted criminal as president. They handed power back to a leader who tried to overturn a previous election, called for the “termination” of the Constitution to reclaim his office, aspired to be a dictator on Day 1 and vowed to exact “retribution” against his adversaries.

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Marc Short, who was chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence and might have reasons to worry given Mr. Trump’s anger at him and his former boss, said he was not concerned about a wave of retaliation.

“I don’t believe in that,” he said. “I think there’s a lot of theater around that more than there is real sort of retribution.”

But Mr. Short predicted another four years of chaos and uncertainty. “I would anticipate a lot of volatility — personnel but also significant boomerangs on policy,” he said. “Not boomerang from Biden-Harris but boomerang from himself. You’ll have one position one day and another the next.”

On Populism, the Working Class and Partisan Politics
By Musa al-Gharbi

On the Republican side, constituents tend to be significantly more culturally conservative than fiscally conservative. In principle, this creates a strong opportunity for GOP candidates to position themselves as cultural and economic populists without losing much support from the existing base.

In practice, however, the party orthodoxy from Reagan through the present has been to marry cultural conservativism with tax cuts, deregulation, privatization and austerity in spite of the economic preferences of ordinary voters.

…

Trump advocated for an “America first” foreign policy. He championed trade and immigration protectionism. He vowed to safeguard entitlements and restore domestic manufacturing. He pledged to make massive investments in infrastructure. He was completely unconcerned about deficit spending. Meanwhile, Republican aspirants who emphasized austerity, privatization and internationalism, such as former Govs. Jeb Bush and Rick Perry, failed to find a significant following.

Upon taking office, however, Trump prioritized a conventional Republican economic agenda: tax cuts, deregulation and repealing Obamacare. The infrastructure plans he proposed largely failed to materialize. Despite Trump’s campaign promises not to protect Medicare and Social Security, as president he expressed openness to cutting entitlements as well.

In short, Trump is far from an economic populist …

How Trump Can Avoid Learning the Wrong Lessons From His Victory
By Oren Cass

Rather than prepare to govern on behalf of the electorate that put them in power — especially the independent swing voters who by definition provide the margin of victory in a two-party system — new presidents, themselves typically members of the donor and activist communities, convince themselves that their personal preferences are the people’s as well. Two years later, their political capital expended and their agendas in shambles, their parties often suffer crushing defeats in midterm elections.

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A promise to secure the border has long been a central aspect of Mr. Trump’s appeal, and Democrats are now clambering to get on his side of the issue. A Trump administration serving American voters would stanch the flow of migrants with tough border enforcement and asylum restrictions, reverse the Biden administration’s lawlessness by removing recent arrivals and protect American workers and businesses by mandating that employers use the E-Verify program to confirm the legal status of the people who work for them. That program, which strikes at the harm that illegal immigration does to American workers, is wildly popular. A recent survey of 2,000 adults conducted by my organization, American Compass, in partnership with YouGov, found 78 percent support overall and 68 percent support even among Democrats. Law-abiding businesses tend to like it, too — they’re tired of getting undercut by competitors that get away with breaking the rules.

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In the American Compass survey, “a national investment bank that helps fund activities like manufacturing computer chips and mining critical minerals” got 74 percent support. Perhaps most important, these policies work and are already spurring huge investments and the creation of high-quality jobs. When the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company announced last month that its first plant in Arizona is already achieving production yields better than those of factories in Taiwan, the free-market message began shifting from decrying the policy to denying that it deserved credit for the success.

Real investment in factories has more than doubled since President Biden took office; for the electronics industry, it has nearly quadrupled since the beginning of 2022. By comparison, Mr. Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers tried to show that his 2017 tax cut spurred investment but instead found an effect of zero, though other research has since suggested some limited gains. What the tax cut did produce was lower corporate tax bills, and C.E.O.s will push for a repeat. A golden age for America does not depend upon high stock prices and C.E.O. bonuses. It depends upon real investment. If Mr. Trump wants to deliver for the average American, his policies must focus on the latter — including effective policies that were initiated by his political opponents.

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Republicans as well as independents express overwhelmingly negative views of the federal government. But ask what they want the government to do, and the answer by huge margins is always more or the same — even when it comes to “support for the poor, disabled, needy” and “medical care for those who need help affording insurance.”

Likewise, while many Americans complain about overregulation, their idea of a “free market” is not the laissez-faire model so often promoted by Republican leaders. For instance, 65 percent of Republicans prefer a vision of free markets where “workers have protections ensuring fair wages and working conditions” to one where “workers have the freedom to leave if they don’t like their treatment.” If Mr. Trump brings business executives into the government to improve customer service and create greater space for private-sector innovation, he will earn well-deserved praise. If he unleashes them, as they are asking, to shut down agencies, eliminate programs on which people rely and role-play scenes from Ayn Rand novels, even his own party’s savvier politicians will turn on him quickly.

Focus on making it easier to speculate in cryptocurrency or on providing non-college pathways to building a decent life? Focus on whatever harebrained scheme Robert Kennedy Jr. or Vivek Ramaswamy might mention over lunch or on creating a more generous benefit for working families raising kids, as JD Vance and others have proposed? Any president finds himself surrounded by advisers pushing their personal and ideological agendas. There is a reason most lose sight of what matters to the people outside that bubble.

How Resilient Is the Emerging Trump Coalition?
By Thomas B. Edsall

Republican success or failure in building a more durable coalition will depend in large part on how the public reacts to the policies adopted during Trump’s second term. Aaron Blake of The Washington Post, in a Nov. 11 article, “Americans Elected Trump. They Might Not Like What Comes Next,” examined poll data on Trump’s announced plans.

Take Trump’s pledge to deport 11 million or more undocumented immigrants. Surveys have revealed considerable ambivalence among voters, Blake reported:

Polls showed Americans were about evenly split — and sometimes leaning in favor — of deporting most or all undocumented immigrants, of using the military to do it and even of putting people in detention camps while they awaited their deportation hearings. An October ABC News/Ipsos poll showed Americans supported deporting all undocumented immigrants 56 percent to 43 percent.

But few proposals better demonstrate how Americans often hold contradictory feelings about policies. For example, polls have shown that many people who say they favor mass deportation also say they favor allowing undocumented immigrants to have a path to legal status — with the latter polling much better. A recent CNN poll asked people to choose between the two, and registered voters chose a path to legal status over deporting all undocumented immigrants by a 2-to-1 margin.

Blake pointed to the potential of Trump’s proposal to impose 10 to 20 percent across-the-board tariffs and a specific 60 to 100 percent tariff on Chinese imports:

A September Reuters/Ipsos poll showed that Americans said they were more likely to back a candidate who supported the lower numbers in those ranges (10 percent on all imports and 60 percent on Chinese ones) than one who didn’t, 53 to 42. But a February poll from YouGov showed just 61 percent of people who said they wanted increased tariffs stood by that support when tariffs were attached to higher prices for American consumers. Tariffs can protect American industry, but they generally do lead to inflation — possibly high inflation — depending on the scale of what Trump does.

Blake added that “Americans tend to balk more when you dig into the details,” but if there is one thing Trump dislikes doing, it’s digging into the details — a weakness that could prove to be a major liability, given the extremity of his agenda and the uncertainty of the consequences of his proposals.

Maybe Now Democrats Will Address Working-Class Pain
By Nicholas Kristof

I think Democrats have far better policies for working-class Americans than Republicans do. It was Democrats who backed labor unions, who raised minimum wages, and who under President Biden crafted a strategy to create manufacturing jobs and slash child poverty.

Trump talks a good game about manufacturing, but his administration presided over the loss of nearly 200,000 factory jobs (because of the pandemic) while Biden so far has seen an increase of nearly 700,000 manufacturing jobs.

Similarly, Trump promised restaurant workers during the campaign that they wouldn’t have to pay taxes on tips, but in 2017 his administration proposed a rule that would have allowed businesses to steal workers’ tips.

It’s not enough for liberals to proclaim that they have better policies, because Democrats increasingly are the party of university-educated elites, and they have an unfortunate knack for coming across as remote and patronizing scolds. This is compounded by the tendency of some on the educated left to scorn religion, which to many voters is a pillar of reassurance in difficult times.

Given that 74 percent of Americans believe in God, according to Gallup, while only 38 percent of those over the age of 25 have a B.A., condescension is a disastrous strategy.

To those who doubt this condescension, you should have seen my mail when I warned in August that we shouldn’t demean Trump voters. So many liberals responded with a variant of: But they deserve to be demeaned.

Francis Fukuyama: what Trump unleashed means for America
By Francis Fukuyama

Classical liberalism is a doctrine built around respect for the equal dignity of individuals through a rule of law that protects their rights, and through constitutional checks on the state’s ability to interfere with those rights. But over the past half century that basic impulse underwent two great distortions. The first was the rise of “neoliberalism”, an economic doctrine that sanctified markets and reduced the ability of governments to protect those hurt by economic change. The world got a lot richer in the aggregate, while the working class lost jobs and opportunity. Power shifted away from the places that hosted the original industrial revolution to Asia and other parts of the developing world.

The second distortion was the rise of identity politics or what one might call “woke liberalism”, in which progressive concern for the working class was replaced by targeted protections for a narrower set of marginalised groups: racial minorities, immigrants, sexual minorities and the like. State power was increasingly used not in the service of impartial justice, but rather to promote specific social outcomes for these groups.

In the meantime, labour markets were shifting into an information economy. In a world in which most workers sat in front of a computer screen rather than lifted heavy objects off factory floors, women experienced a more equal footing. This transformed power within households and led to the perception of a seemingly constant celebration of female achievement.

The rise of these distorted understandings of liberalism drove a major shift in the social basis of political power. The working class felt that leftwing political parties were no longer defending their interests, and began voting for parties of the right. Thus the Democrats lost touch with their working-class base and became a party dominated by educated urban professionals. The former chose to vote Republican. In Europe, Communist party voters in France and Italy defected to Marine Le Pen and Giorgia Meloni.

All of these groups were unhappy with a free-trade system that eliminated their livelihoods even as it created a new class of super-rich, and were unhappy as well with progressive parties that seemingly cared more for foreigners and the environment than their own condition.

When Will Democrats Learn to Say No?
By Adam Jentleson

Whereas Mr. Trump has crafted an image as a different kind of Republican by routinely making claims that break with the party line on issues ranging from protecting Social Security and Medicare to mandating insurance coverage of in vitro fertilization, Democrats remain stuck trying to please all of their interest groups while watching voters of all races desert them over the very stances that these groups impose on the party.

Achieving a supermajority means declaring independence from liberal and progressive interest groups that prevent Democrats from thinking clearly about how to win. Collectively, these groups impose the rigid mores and vocabulary of college-educated elites, placing a hard ceiling on Democrats’ appeal and fatally wounding them in the places they need to win not just to take back the White House, but to have a prayer in the Senate.

Interest groups tend to be nonprofit organizations dedicated to advancing a single issue or set of related issues that they often hope to get on the Democrats’ agenda. At their best, these groups can be productive partners in building power and legislating. But many have grown too big, adopted overly expansive mandates and become disastrously cavalier about the basic realities of American politics in ways that end up undermining their own goals.

To cite a few examples, when Kamala Harris was running for the Democratic nomination in 2019, the A.C.L.U. pushed her to articulate a position on surgeries for transgender prisoners, needlessly elevating an obscure issue into the public debate as a purity test, despite the fact that current law already gave prisoners access to gender-affirming care. This became a major line of attack for Mr. Trump in the closing weeks of this year’s election. Now, with the G.O.P.’s ascent to dominance, transgender Americans are unquestionably going to be worse off.

Democrats and the Case of Mistaken Identity Politics
By Maureen Dowd

Democratic candidates have often been avatars of elitism — Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and second-term Barack Obama. The party embraced a worldview of hyper-political correctness, condescension and cancellation, and it supported diversity statements for job applicants and faculty lounge terminology like “Latinx,” and “BIPOC” (Black, Indigenous, People of Color).

This alienated half the country, or more. And the chaos and antisemitism at many college campuses certainly didn’t help.

“When the woke police come at you,” Rahm Emanuel told me, “you don’t even get your Miranda rights read to you.”

…

A revealing chart that ran in The Financial Times showed that white progressives hold views far to the left of the minorities they champion. White progressives think at higher rates than Hispanic and Black Americans that “racism is built into our society.” Many more Black and Hispanic Americans surveyed, compared with white progressives, responded that “America is the greatest country in the world.”

Why Harris Is Struggling With Blue-Collar Voters in Detroit
By Farah Stockman

Many blue-collar residents of Detroit went to prison at some point in their lives, instead of college. In the aftermath of mass incarceration, there are more than 100,000 adults in Detroit who have been convicted of a felony, and some 19 million around the country. That’s a lot of people, in a state that Trump won by less than 11,000 votes in 2016.

Last year Michigan became the first state in the nation to pass a law that automatically registers people who emerge from prison to vote, and a fair amount of grass-roots effort goes on in Detroit to make sure they do. These former inmates — who often struggle to get jobs and housing because of long-ago convictions — don’t love the idea of electing a prosecutor. Every time Harris calls Trump a felon, that’s a “a reminder of what she thinks of us,” one man who is trying to rebuild his life after a prison sentence told me.

In Pardoning His Son, Biden Echoes Some of Trump’s Complaints
By Peter Baker

President Biden and President-elect Donald J. Trump now agree on one thing: The Biden Justice Department has been politicized.

In pardoning his son Hunter Biden on Sunday night, the incumbent president sounded a lot like his successor by complaining about selective prosecution and political pressure, questioning the fairness of a system that Mr. Biden had until now long defended.

“No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong,” Mr. Biden said in a statement announcing the pardon. “Here’s the truth,” he added. “I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice.”

Mr. Biden’s decision to use the extraordinary power of executive clemency to wipe out his son’s convictions on gun and tax charges came despite repeated statements by him and his aides that he would not do so. Just this past summer, after his son was convicted at trial, the president rejected the idea of a pardon and said that “I will accept the outcome of this case and will continue to respect the judicial process.” The statement he issued on Sunday night made clear he did not accept the outcome or respect the process.

The power of choosing your words wisely
By Rana Foroohar

Republicans talk a lot about the freedom to do things, such as worship or carry guns or not wear masks in a pandemic. But there is also freedom from something — like poverty, pollution or crime. The economist Joseph Stiglitz makes this point in his recent book, The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society, which argues not for only a rebranding of the word, but a more progressive political economy.

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Words matter not only in politics but in markets, particularly given how the US view of basic factual data has become polarised. Stanford-New York University research found that the partisan divide in perceptions of the same economic data between Democrats and Republicans roughly doubled between 1999 and 2020, with recoveries tending to be the most divided periods. One person may see inflation declining quarter on quarter as good news, while another is focused on the negative by looking at how much it has risen over three years.

In such an environment, language has the power to start or stall ideas. Maslansky and Partners, a consultancy specialising in language strategy, has done research on why, for example, Democrats and Republicans have such different views on ESG investing. Aside from the fact that few Americans actually know what the acronym means (people were more likely to say it stood for “eggs, sausage and grits” rather than environmental, social and governance), the term itself is incredibly polarising. For conservatives, it is associated with a kind of forced morality.

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This gets at a core point, which is, as chief executive Michael Maslansky puts it, “it’s not what you say, it’s what your audience hears”. More than 70 per cent of investors polled across political lines believe that clean energy will outperform the market over the next 10 years. But when investing, they are more receptive to terms such as “climate opportunity” and “climate risk” as something that businesses should mitigate than they are interested in, say, “environmental justice”.

The difference between words can be huge in financial terms. As Roy Swan, the head of the Ford Foundation’s mission investments team, told me, “my first big ‘aha’ moment about word choice came 15 years ago when a white CEO of a non-profit shared with me that, during a tour of the heartland, she learnt that terms like ‘social equity’ and ‘equality’ made white people uneasy. She believed this was why the non-profit had trouble raising money from donors in certain parts of the country.”

Swan has started to push a new term, “patriotic capitalism”, to describe a blueprint for businesses that put country, democracy and the common good first. That’s a pretty broad mandate, but in practice it might mean investing in companies that enable employee ownership, or pay a fair living wage or increase affordable housing.

Column: At the cafe that inspired Taco Bell, ‘I’m afraid to talk politics. … It’s so divisive now’
By Gustavo Arellano

The cousins feel that favoring national brands over local business is emblematic of today’s partisan politics and its disregard for what really matters — something they experienced after Gov. Gavin Newsom stopped by Mitla Cafe in 2022.

Over chips, salsa and guacamole, the cousins grilled Newsom about the Mount Vernon bridge project. The governor immediately told a staffer to look into why a large mound of dirt that was polluting the neighborhood was still there, according to Montaño.

A day later, the mound was gone.

“Newsom sat down and asked real questions and just was great,” Montaño said. “No media, no press.”

Then, the cousins posted photos of Newsom’s visit on Instagram.

Soon, longtime customers accused them of being Newsom stooges, even though neither Montaño nor Oquendo is a Democrat. Many vowed to never return. Other politicians have visited Mitla since, but the cousins have learned their lesson.

“That’s why I’m afraid to talk politics” publicly, Oquendo confessed. “Because it’s so divisive now that it’s unbelievable.”

“Everything’s a national issue now,” Montaño replied. “Some of the things that people talk about nationally are the first topics out of people’s mouths, not like, ‘Oh, did you see what’s going on in the 5th Ward of San Bernardino? Do you see what’s going on in the 3rd Ward?’”

“And when it affects people locally, they blame the national side,” Oquendo added. “I never knew if the mayor was Republican or not, or the City Council. Now, they put that at forefront, because they need to be identified with that to get that audience.”

“I want people to hear the local voice and apply that to the local condition,” Montaño said, “versus applying everything to the national narrative.”

The easiest way for me to shut someone up about the presidential race is by asking them to name all their City Council members. Few can. I then challenge them to care about local politics, which I tell them affects their day-to-day lives far more than Beltway bull.

This House Democrat Keeps Winning in Trump Country. Here’s What She Knows.
By Michelle Goldberg

What do you think Democrats can learn from your re-election?

I think people like me, people in rural communities, we don’t want people to talk for us. We want to speak for ourselves. We want to have our values and priorities reflected in D.C. We don’t want to see D.C. keep inflicting and replacing our culture and priorities.

…

Given that you won in a Trump district, you must have won some percentage of Trump voters. When you talk to people who voted for both you and Donald Trump, what do they tell you? Where is the center of that Venn diagram?

Probably cost of living and border security.

Was it just that they felt like you both cared about those issues? Or did they feel like you both had solutions?

It has been a priority for me. The world I’m living in, I’m going to the grocery store and seeing people take stuff out of their cart. Fentanyl is just running rampant. A lot of us felt like Joe Biden’s administration did not take it seriously, and there was a very, very late pivot on the border.

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I hear what you’re saying about Biden’s late pivot on the border. But what should he have been doing differently in terms of inflation, given that it spiked globally in response to the pandemic?

A lot of people were trying to talk people out of their lived experience. Like, there’s no spreadsheet that’s going to talk somebody out of watching the cost of eggs go up. And I had people asking me, “How do we explain to these people that the economy is great?” I’m like, why would they do that?

‘It’s simple, really’ – why Latinos flocked to Trump
By BBC News

“It’s simple, really. We liked the way things were four years ago,” said Samuel Negron, a Pennsylvania state constable and member of the large Puerto Rican community in the city of Allentown.

Mr Negron, and other Trump supporters in the now majority-Latino city, listed other reasons that their community was drifting towards Trump, including social issues and a perception that their family values now align more with the Republican Party.

The most common factor, however, was the economy – specifically, inflation.

“Out here, you pay $5 for a dozen eggs. It used to be $1, or even 99 cents,” Mr Negron added. “A lot of us have woken up, in my opinion, from Democratic lies that things have been better. We realised things were better then.”

Ahead of the election, polls also suggested that many Latinos – across the US and in Pennsylvania specifically – were drawn to Trump’s proposals to block migrants at the US-Mexico border and enact much stricter immigration laws.

Daniel Campo, a Venezuelan-American, said that Trump’s claims of creeping “socialism” reminded him of the situation he left in his home country.

“I understand what [migrants] are leaving. But you have to do it the right way. I came the right way,” he said. “Things have to be done legally. Many of us were worried that the borders were just open” under the Biden-Harris administration, he said.

Voters Were Fed Up Over Immigration. They Voted for Trump.
By Miriam Jordan

“There is no constituency left in this country that favors large-scale immigration,” said Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow with the Migration Policy Institute.

During President Biden’s term, political turmoil, criminal violence, climate change and the economic ruin wrought by the coronavirus pandemic in many countries fueled migration at a scale not seen since World War II. Beyond the factors driving migrants out of their home countries, the U.S. job market was a powerful draw, with unemployment at its lowest level in decades.

“Changes in the global migration system made it inevitable that there would be increased pressure on the U.S. border,” said Wayne Cornelius, an immigration scholar and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego.

…

Anti-immigrant sentiment historically increases when people worry about the economy, and inflation was a major concern this election cycle.

Democrats are in shock at their collapse among Hispanic voters. They shouldn’t be
By Michael Lind

The warning signs were there before the election. A Marist poll of September 24, on behalf of National Public Radio, asked respondents if they agreed with the statement that all illegal immigrants should be deported. Sixty per cent of whites agreed with the statement – and so did 57 per cent of Hispanics.

For years Democrats have claimed that voter ID laws, which require voters to show government-approved photo IDs to deter voting by illegal immigrants, are motivated by anti-Hispanic racism. And yet according to Pew Research Center, 75 per cent of black voters, 81 per cent of whites, 84 per cent of Asians, and 85 per cent of Hispanics approve of voter ID laws. You read that correctly: Hispanics are more likely than any other group to approve of voter ID laws designed to deter illegal immigration.

The opposition to illegal immigration of many Mexican-Americans, particularly those along the US-Mexican border, is also nothing new. Many Hispanic residents of American border communities, even some with relatives in Mexico, have long resented being forced to compete for jobs and public services with Mexican and other Latin American immigrants, both legal and illegal, and have often favoured federal crackdowns on this form of labour trafficking.

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A professor of Latino/a/x studies at a university, or an activist at a nonprofit like Unidos (formerly La Raza Unida), may have as little knowledge of the Hispanic working class as a white Ivy League academic does of the white working class. These “spokespeople” are not elected or chosen in other ways by fellow members of their racial/ethnic communities. Instead, they are designated by university officials, foundation executives, and magazine editors to speak for an entire race to an audience that is overwhelmingly white and elite. It is no surprise that non-white intellectuals of all kinds tell their donors what the donors want to hear, whether it corresponds to the beliefs of most Hispanic, black, and Asian-Americans or not.

Why Democrats Lost Latinos
By Jack Herrera

Just as there are hundreds of different reasons white people vote for Trump, there are hundreds of different reasons individual Latinos choose to vote for him. However, there’s one powerful variable that explains Latinos’ embrace of Trump more than any other: class. Over 80 percent of Latinos are working class, and an enormous number of them are strivers working manual labor, like Cardenas and Lira. Trump’s appeal in a Latino meatpacking town, then, looks a lot like his appeal in white factory towns in Michigan and Pennsylvania. The real estate billionaire is channeling working class grievances. In Iowa, Cardenas and Lira believed his core message: That Democrats are out-of-touch elites, who neither understand nor care about workers like them.

The Democrats’ Hispanic Voter Crash
By Ruy Teixeira

But consider further that, as the Census documents, the biggest single driver of the increased nonwhite population is the growth of the Hispanic population. They are by far the largest group within the Census-designated nonwhite population (19 percent vs. 12 percent for blacks). While their representation among voters considerably lags their representation in the overall population, it is fair to say that voting trends among this group will decisively shape voting trends among nonwhites in the future since their share of voters will continue to increase while black voter share is expected to remain roughly constant.

How to Win Latino Voters
By Jennifer Medina and Kellen Browning

There’s all this debate in the Democratic circles about whether the party leaned too much on identity politics, and we’re wondering how you’re making sense of that.

For some reason, people are putting on me that I didn’t run on identity politics. I did, but it was not just on identity. It was this idea of working-class Latinos. But also it had a far-reaching message across all other groups. If you just solely rely on identity but not the actual work and policy behind it, then you will lose. Because at some point these voters are like, OK, what are you offering me? What have you been offering me and what have you not? You’ve been delivering nothing for me the last couple of times, but great, I get to support you because you’re brown. But then I still can’t pay my rent. I’m still living at home.

You want to know why there’s a lot of young men voting for Trump? Because most of them are still living at home, and a lot of them don’t want to be doing that. I was holding campaign events like a rodeo, but I was also talking about work and the dignity of work. I was at the lowrider shows and talking about increasing wages. You could use identity politics to connect, but you got to deliver an economic message at the end.

It’s still ‘the economy, stupid’? How the rich moved to Harris, the rest elected Trump
By Alexander Panetta

Kamala Harris did well — historically well — with the richest voters: households earning over $100,000 US, who, unlike the rest of the electorate, shifted left.

The problem for her? They barely comprise one-third of the electorate. Trump gained among the rest, surfing to a staggering 20-point improvement among households earning $50,000 US to $100,000 US versus the last election.

It barely seemed to matter that macroeconomic indicators are good: Wages are up, inflation is down, interest rates are coming down, and the U.S. has achieved the elusive soft landing economists dreamed of.

Americans’ view of the economy remains weak. Housing remains historically unaffordable, and until last year people’s purchasing power had been declining or had flattened.

And that’s where economics intersects with demographics.

It so happens that Latinos are disproportionately working class, and, at an average age of 30, entering prime home-buying years in an era of eye-watering prices.

Democrats lament they didn’t listen to working class well enough
By Mia McCarthy

Exit polls and voter surveys show Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris among voters with lower incomes and lower levels of educational attainment. Among voters who never attended college, Trump won, 59 percent to 40 percent, according to AP Votecast. College graduates voted for Harris, 56 percent to 42 percent.

How the ‘diploma divide’ helped steer Trump back to the White House
By Zachary Schermele

“The diploma divide continued and extended a bit from previous elections,” said Matt Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State University who has studied the trend.

Going to college is a privilege. Not everyone can go, and perhaps more importantly, not everyone wants to go. Yet, in recent decades, a degree has arguably become more of an economic necessity than ever.

As having a college education became a standard expectation among many employers around the turn of the century, the cost of college rose. Student loan debt ballooned. Students accused some schools of knowingly ripping them off. Then came student loan forgiveness, which has been highly politicized and criticized by Americans who don’t want to be left unfairly footing the bill for other people’s financial risks.

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For decades, Republicans have accused colleges of “liberal indoctrination.” But experts say college-educated voters weren’t always a left-leaning majority.

Throughout the 20th century, Americans with bachelor’s degrees were more likely to align with the GOP. Historically, higher education was disproportionately available to young people from richer families, and those families were often Republicans, according to Grossmann, who co-authored the book “Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics.”

The presidency of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s started to lure white voters without college degrees away from the Democrats.

Both parties have a chance to appeal to American workers — but will they take it?
By Oren Cass

Reduced to simplest terms, most Americans have not earned a college degree, and Republicans have tended to represent their social and cultural views while ignoring their economic concerns. Democrats have tended to do the opposite. Either party, by attending more closely to the interests of working-class voters, has had a path to a durable governing majority. Yet Republican elites continue to demand economic policies that primarily benefit Wall Street. Democratic elites continue to push the progressive priorities of campus activists.

A Democratic and a Republican Pollster Agree: This Is the Fault Line That Decides the Election
By Celinda Lake and Amanda Iovino

According to a recent poll by Pew research, the gender gap is 17 points, with Mr. Trump ahead 8 points among men and Ms. Harris up 9 points among women.

The gap by education is 29 points, with Mr. Trump ahead 10 points among people without a college degree and Ms. Harris ahead 19 points among those with one.

But broken up by gender and education, we see that the gaps are driven particularly by men without a college degree and women with a college degree, with an overall difference of 43 points.

We are truly looking at two different Americas when we dig into the views of men without college degrees and women with college degrees. They are at opposite ends of the spectrum politically and experience essentially separate economies, and therefore give priority to distinct sets of character traits and issues.

Let’s take a closer look. Women with college degrees, who are generally more financially secure than other women, name abortion as one of the key issues deciding their vote, while both women and men without degrees tend to focus more on issues affecting their day-to-day finances or safety. While inflation affects everyone, it hits non-college-educated voters who feel they are falling behind hardest, especially now that the unemployment rate has been rising among those with less than a high school diploma.

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These two groups also consume media in entirely different ways, which affects what they see and hear. Men — including those without college degrees — often spend time on X and Reddit, and many listen to podcasts and YouTube personalities concentrating on gaming, sports and politics. Women are more likely to frequent TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. Many seem more focused on content about personal growth, true crime and style.

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Years ago, Democrats could count on support from male union workers, but Mr. Trump is increasingly winning over those voters — not only because of his direct, emotional appeals to their anxiety and values, but also because Democrats have struggled to establish a compelling enough populist economic message or break into the media ecosystem that non-college-educated men consume.

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While it might seem impossible for a candidate to appeal to both non-college-educated men and college-educated women, there are areas where policies and messaging could bridge the gap.

A populist message, for example, could win more men without college degrees without alienating college-educated women, as anti-corporate sentiment is common among voters across the political spectrum and can play into concerns about both economic issues and freedom from control. Either party could leverage this sentiment.

Both groups seem to want investments in public education and job skills training. Many in both groups are worried the next generation will not be as well off as the one before. Many want clean air and water and worry about pollution. Non-college-educated men tend to want to preserve natural areas for recreation like hunting, our data indicates, while college-educated women are particularly concerned about climate change.

The Blue-Collar Democrat Who Wants to Fix the Party’s Other Big Problem
By Jason Zengerle

Today the greatest fault line in American politics is not race, gender or geography — it is educational attainment. In 1960, John F. Kennedy won 52 percent of voters with only high-school diplomas, but lost college-educated voters with only 39 percent. By the time Joe Biden ran for president 60 years later, that trend had reversed: Biden won 56 percent of voters with college degrees, and lost voters with only high-school educations with just 41 percent. “There’s a point at which that inversion becomes so great that Democrats can no longer win national majorities,” says Jonathan Cowan, the president of Third Way, a center-left policy institute. (In 2020, Americans without college degrees made up three out of five voters.) “So that means that Democrats as a whole need to be constantly on the lookout for people who can break the faculty-lounge stranglehold.”

Democrats have been working through the stages of grief about their loss of working-class voters for the past two decades. When George W. Bush was in the White House and Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter With Kansas” sat on every Georgetown bookshelf, the Democrats were in denial, complaining that right-wing Svengalis had hoodwinked the working class into voting against their own interests by plying them with contrived cultural grievances. Next came anger, the purest form of which was Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and her “basket of deplorables” label for Donald Trump supporters. After Clinton’s defeat came Democrats’ bargaining phase, as they tried to accommodate the rise of Senator Bernie Sanders and the belief that he, and politicians like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, signified a latent interest in socialism among working-class voters. But in trying to defang Sanders and his fellow insurgents, the Democratic establishment tended to adopt only the most performative socially liberal policies while rejecting ones that might actually threaten or change the neoliberal economic regime. In the process, Democrats seem to have only alienated working-class voters even more, and not just white ones. Black and Latino working-class voters are beginning to move to the Republican Party as well.

The left is losing its grip on ethnic minority voters
By John Burn-Murdoch

These patterns are consistent with the idea that post-materialist politics have become increasingly common among those who have already reached a comfortable position in society, but those still climbing their way up — ethnic minorities among them — often still have primarily material concerns.

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Politicians of all stripes would be wise to start listening to what different ethnic minority voters actually want, instead of relying on increasingly erroneous stereotypes or painting highly heterogeneous groups with one broad brush.

Political Unrest Worldwide Is Fueled by High Prices and Huge Debts
By Patricia Cohen and Jack Nicas

Like a globe-spanning tornado that touches down with little predictability, deep economic anxieties are leaving a trail of political turmoil and violence across poor and rich countries alike.

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The causes, context and conditions underlying these disruptions vary widely from country to country. But a common thread is clear: rising inequality, diminished purchasing power and growing anxiety that the next generation will be worse off than this one.

The result is that citizens in many countries who face a grim economic outlook have lost faith in the ability of their governments to cope — and are striking back.

The backlash has often targeted liberal democracy and democratic capitalism, with populist movements springing up on both the left and right. “An economic malaise and a political malaise are feeding each other,” said Nouriel Roubini, an economist at New York University.

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Even in the United States, where the economy has proved resilient, economic anxieties are partly behind the potential return of Donald J. Trump, who has frequently adopted authoritarian rhetoric. In a recent poll, the largest share of American voters said the economy was the election’s most important issue.

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The economic anxieties are adding to divisions between rural and urban dwellers, unskilled and college educated workers, religious traditionalists and secularists.

The Cost-of-Living Crisis Explains Everything
By Annie Lowrey

The Biden administration passed $3 trillion of legislation aimed at revitalizing the American economy and fostering green, equitable, “middle-out” growth. It sent checks to voters, canceled student-loan debt, made direct deposits to parents, showered the country in tax credits, and financed the construction of roads, transmission lines, and bridges. Kamala Harris ran as Joe Biden’s successor in the midst of what some financial analysts described as the greatest economy ever, characterized by strong wage growth, low unemployment, falling inequality, and world-beating GDP.

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If you look at the headline economic statistics, Donald Trump’s broad-based and definitive win makes little sense. The jobless rate has been below 4.5 percent for three years. The inflation rate has been subdued for more than a year. Real wages—meaning wages adjusted for inflation—are climbing for all workers, and particularly the lowest-income workers. Inequality is easing. The stock market is on fire. Productivity is strong, and start-ups are booming. The United States’ GDP growth rate is double that of the European Union.

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During the Biden-Harris years, more granular data pointed to considerable strain. Real median household income fell relative to its pre-COVID peak. The poverty rate ticked up, as did the jobless rate. The number of Americans spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent climbed. The delinquency rate on credit cards surged, as did the share of families struggling to afford enough nutritious food, as did the rate of homelessness.

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The mortgage rate more than doubled during the Biden-Harris years, making credit-card balances, car payments, and homes unaffordable. A family purchasing a $400,000 apartment with 20 percent down would pay roughly $2,500 a month today versus $1,800 three years ago.

Indeed, the biggest problem, one that voters talked about at any given opportunity, was the unaffordability of American life. The giant run-up in inflation during the Biden administration made everything feel expensive, and the sudden jump in the cost of small-ticket, common purchases (such as fast food and groceries) highlighted how bad the country’s long-standing large-ticket, sticky costs (health care, child care, and housing) had gotten. The cost-of-living crisis became the defining issue of the campaign, and one where the incumbent Democrats’ messaging felt false and weak.

Rather than acknowledging the pain and the trade-offs and the complexity—and rather than running a candidate who could have criticized Biden’s economic plans—Democrats dissembled. They noted that inflation was a global phenomenon, as if that mattered to moms in Ohio and machinists in the Central Valley. They pushed the headline numbers. They insisted that working-class voters were better off, and ran on the threat Trump posed to democracy and rights. But were working-class voters really better off? Why wasn’t anyone listening when they said they weren’t?

The Trump inflation shock could be worse than the last inflation crisis, Larry Summers warns
By Matt Egan

Consumer prices started increasing rapidly in the spring of 2021, with inflation eventually peaking at a four-decade high of 9.1% in June 2022. Many Americans had never experienced anything like it, and the shockwaves are still being felt today in the nation’s economy and political system.

Although the rate of inflation has eased substantially, the level of prices has not. And deep frustrations with the high cost of living helped return Trump to the White House.

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Summers, who has argued the Biden administration invited inflation by over-stimulating the economy in 2021, said today’s situation bears similarities to the period after the last election.

“The large checks that were sent out in 2021 were what people wanted. They just didn’t want the consequences that came with it in terms of increased inflation,” Summers said.

That burst of inflation was also related to supply chain troubles caused by the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that sent oil and gasoline prices skyrocketing.

Biden’s Chief Economist Processes the Election With ‘Confusion, Guilt’
By Talmon Joseph Smith

You told me three years ago that one goal of the American Rescue Plan was to intentionally “run the economy with a little bit more heat.” We’ve seen benefits of that, but in light of ensuing inflation, do you regret the size and the scope of the American Rescue Plan?

Twenty-twenty hindsight is an analytical luxury — certainly one we didn’t have in January of 2021. Back then, we had millions of unemployed people. We had Covid deaths peaking. The economy was improving, but it was far from reopened. And vaccinations hadn’t been anywhere near adequately distributed. So the extent of uncertainty regarding the impact of Covid on the economy warranted a very strong rescue plan. And I don’t regret the plan. We certainly got more heat than I envisioned at the time, no question, but we also got a lot more growth, less child poverty, fewer evictions, more business survivals, and a much quicker return to full employment and very little economic scarring.

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Donald Trump convinced enough working-class Americans, across all demographics, that he’s in their corner. How did that happen to your party, which says it still sees itself as a party for workers?

The short answer is I don’t know. I’m still an economist, not a political pundit. I’ve been intensely upset about that development. You may have heard us say, “We get up every day and try to realize the president’s vision of helping the working class.” That sounds like a typical political talking point, but it was basically our agenda for four years.

And the idea that that went so unrecognized, perhaps because the price level ended up being so high when the election came along, is an intensely dissonant set of issues for me.

You could argue that economists and economics reporters should have seen this frustration with the price level — rather than just inflation — coming from a mile away, but you all spent a lot of time touting falling inflation. Was that a mistake?

I understand that disinflation is less satisfying to people when they want their old prices back. I get that, and I’m going to have to deal with that, but at the same time, I do not regret talking about the sharp disinflation, or the strong G.D.P. growth or the historically low unemployment rate. And, you know, the Trump administration is inheriting them in such a way that you’ll probably start hearing about what a great economy this is in a matter of weeks.

What Sherrod Brown says went wrong in his Senate race — and for Democrats
By Manu Raju and Clare Foran

Early on in his administration, President Joe Biden attempted to reassure Americans by arguing that price hikes would be temporary, with some administration officials describing the issue as “transitory.” The president later turned away from that messaging, but high consumer costs continued to dog Democrats through November.

“That’s the mistake we made,” Brown said when asked about the “transitory” messaging.

CNN exit poll data shows Trump won voters without a college degree by 14 points over Harris, 56% to 42%. Four years earlier, he won the group by only 2 points over Biden.

Brown says Democrats consistently miss clear opportunities to appeal to those voters.

A federal judge in Texas recently struck down a Biden administration rule that would have expanded overtime eligibility for about 4 million workers. Brown said it’s an issue that Democrats should hammer Republicans over, especially since the judge was nominated by Trump.

“I’m pretty angry about it,” Brown said. “As you can see, one judge denied 4 million workers in this country their overtime. We ought to be talking about that. … And I know that very few Democrats have talked about it. And Trump and his crowd, his corporate crowd, they’re always looking out for their rich friends, hope it goes away and hope it gets ignored.

The Haves and Have-Nots at the Center of America’s Inflation Fight
By David Uberti

The stock market is soaring, household wealth is at record levels and investment income has never been greater. At the same time, some families’ pandemic-era savings are running dry, and delinquencies on credit card and auto-loan payments have jumped.

Warning signals are flashing for more low- and middle-income Americans, exposing a division between people whose gains are being whittled down by elevated inflation and borrowing costs and those who are benefiting from high asset prices and bond returns. The crosscurrents are scrambling the outlook for the U.S. consumer—a bedrock of economic growth, corporate business plans and Wall Street investments.

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“This is the most money we’ve ever made and this is the brokest we’ve ever felt,” said Nicole Lewis, a mother of three who lives north of Flint, Mich.

Pay raises since the pandemic helped Lewis and her husband, now a city manager, double their earnings to what had previously seemed unattainable: more than $90,000 a year. But price hikes for everything from groceries to auto insurance still forced the couple to siphon funds from savings.

The 35-year-old Lewis now buys many basics on credit, juggling cards to protect her credit score without letting outstanding debt snowball. Trips to the beach and bowling alley are out. Shopping at thrift stores is in. She is now leaving her job as a medical assistant to become a teaching aide, a gig that will come with a $1 an hour pay bump while helping her cut back on child care.

“The top whatever-percent has all this money,” Lewis said. “Those people don’t live like most Americans.”

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A UBS analysis of federal data showed excess savings accumulated during the pandemic have been fully depleted for the bottom 40% of earners. Now, delinquency rates for credit cards are higher than at any point since the aftermath of the Great Recession in 2010, according to BCA Research. The unemployment rate then was more than double its level now.

This Is What Elite Failure Looks Like
By Oren Cass

Wages for the typical worker have stagnated for decades, and research I conducted at American Compass, the think tank where I work, has found that the typical worker no longer earns enough to provide middle-class security for a family.

We also found that only around one in five young Americans makes the transition smoothly from high school to college to career, and for young men the figure is lower still. The anti-poverty scholar Scott Winship has shown that for men ages 25 to 29, inflation-adjusted median earnings and compensation were lower in 2020 than they were 50 years earlier. The years leading up to Mr. Trump’s election coincided with the first time on record that Americans ages 18 to 34 were more likely to be living at home with their parents than independently with a significant other.

Measured in flat-screen televisions owned, health-care treatments received and calories consumed, Americans have been on an upward trajectory. But while popular media often translates the American dream as being better off than your parents in materialistic terms, polling conducted by American Compass in partnership with YouGov indicates that Americans between 18 and 50 were more than twice as likely to say “earning enough to support a family” is what’s most important. Related, our polling has found that the vast majority of American parents consider “being able to support your family on one parent’s income” to be an important or essential marker of middle-class life. For all the talk of “upward mobility,” more than 90 percent of Americans chose “financial stability” as more important in a 2014 Pew survey.

Note the contrast with the small cohort of upper-class Americans with college degrees and the highest incomes, who see the American dream more in terms of going as far as their talents and hard work take them than as either supporting a family or even getting married and raising children. They prefer having both parents work full-time and using paid child care full-time, and regard the chance for their children to pursue postsecondary education that would offer “the best possible career options but was far from home” as more desirable than one that would offer “good career options close to home.” All other groups said they preferred the latter.

They Used to Be Ahead in the American Economy. Now They’ve Fallen Behind.
By Emily Badger, Robert Gebeloff and Aatish Bhatia

As the American economy has shifted over the past 40 years away from manufacturing and toward services and “knowledge” work, this less visible hierarchy within the economy has shifted, too. Jobs that helped build the nation, like the machinists and metalworkers who were mostly white men without college degrees, today make a shrinking share of what the average American worker does. Newer kinds of work, like financial analysis and software development, have come to pay much more.

The economy has effectively devalued the work and skills of some Americans, while delivering mounting rewards to others — reordering the status of workers along lines that increasingly shape the country’s politics too.

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“In this country, we convey value through money,” said Kathy Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin. If your income is declining in relative terms, so is your sense of worth. “People don’t have these trends in front of them. But they feel them.”

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In the data, men working without a college degree of every racial group have fallen well below the average full-time worker (women without a degree have long been at the bottom in income, and college-educated men have consistently been at the top). Workers in coastal states have seen the highest growth, while steep declines have been concentrated in parts of the Midwest that are also likely to decide the election this November.

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“There was a clear division between winners and losers in the economy, and the losers were blue-collar white men largely,” said Tom Kochan, who has studied union work at M.I.T. He grew up in Manitowoc County, Wis., in the 1960s, when workers there made appliances, cranes and aluminum products. Most of that work has disappeared, and the manufacturing jobs that remain in Wisconsin are today less likely to be unionized and more likely to be contract work — lesser versions of the same occupations.

Because unionization rates were highest historically in the Midwest — with union workers earning a pay premium — manufacturing occupations have fallen the farthest there in relative incomes, especially compared with Southeastern states with right-to-work laws.

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The decline of jobs like that has brought all kinds of loss that are distinct from losing money, said Arlie Hochschild, a sociologist at Berkeley. ​​“What happens economically has such ramifications — there’s a whole other story,” she said. She describes in a new book how the shifting economy also undermined the pride of blue-collar men that they could be of use, to their families, their communities and the country.

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Since defeating Mr. Trump in 2020, President Biden has prominently stood beside unions and been more successful reviving American production. But he (and Kamala Harris in turn) has seldom talked in such raw terms about that downward mobility or offered such a tidy story to explain it.

“If you feel like you’re declining, you have this tendency to now start seeing the world in zero-sum terms,” said Stefanie Stantcheva, an economist at Harvard. You might agree that if immigrants do better economically, it must come at the expense of U.S. citizens, or that if some ethnic or racial groups or nations do better, others inevitably do worse — views Ms. Stantcheva and colleagues have tested in a large-scale survey.

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Economists and politicians often counter that it’s possible to have an economy where everyone rises together, where relative position matters less than everyone’s absolute growth. But that is not how many voters see it today.

Donald Trump Will Do Nothing to Bring Back Our Dying American Dream
By Steven Rattner

It’s becoming increasingly apparent that the fruits of the economy’s steady expansion are not reaching most Americans. A growing share of our overall prosperity continues to accrue to the wealthy and to corporate shareholders (as evidenced in part by the extraordinary upward march of stock prices).

On the other end: the young and people who didn’t attend college — including white, working-class men who voted for Mr. Trump in large numbers. For many, the American dream increasingly feels like a mirage.

Start with people who didn’t attend college. While the median earning for all Americans has risen modestly (after adjusting for inflation) over the past 45 years, pay for men with only a high school education has fallen to $1,006 per week before Covid from $1,293 in 1979. A machinist went from earning roughly an average wage to an income less than 80 percent of a typical American’s. Some of these workers have been forced into lower-paying jobs or have never worked since the pandemic. Others have even ended up suffering deaths of despair such as suicides and overdoses.

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While inflation has moderated, prices remain higher than younger Americans can remember — and electing Mr. Trump will not return them to where they were.

By placing significant tariffs on imports, Mr. Trump is likely to increase prices even more. When prices rise further, Americans will be forced to buy less, reducing sales for vendors, causing them to slow hiring or reduce employee rolls. This is how tariffs cost our economy more jobs than they create or save.

Mass deportation of immigrants would quickly create labor shortages, particularly in critical areas like construction, farming and food production and health care. While that could theoretically cause wages to rise in the short run, it would also lead to higher costs in all these areas, cutting into economic growth and ultimately leaving many worse off.

Nor should we root for an extension of Mr. Trump’s signature Tax Cut and Jobs Act, which shoveled approximately 85 percent of its largess into the hands of corporations and those making over $75,000 a year.

And nothing good will come for the average American by rewarding self-interested plutocrats who are pushing him to pull back on a wide range of regulatory policies, from cryptocurrencies to government control of the housing finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. For example, abandoning antitrust enforcement could allow anticompetitive mergers, resulting again in higher prices for consumers.

America Inc’s new CEO
By Rana Foroohar

Years ago, a well-known Silicon Valley billionaire told me something I’ll never forget: “China is an autocracy, Europe is a technocracy and America is a company.” That statement has never felt truer to me than since Donald Trump was re-elected president of the US last week.

You can start with the obvious points, which are that Trump is a particularly rapacious businessman, and that leadership in America is an asset to be bought and sold.

That has been particularly so since the Supreme Court opened the doors to unlimited corporate spending on campaigns with its 2010 ruling on the case of the non-profit corporation Citizens United vs the Federal Election Commission. But during this election, more of the remaining rules that separate candidates and their super-PACs were overturned. The result is that of the nearly $16bn reportedly spent in the electoral cycle, a record amount, tens if not hundreds of millions were from unknown donors. It’s not just money that rules US politics, but dark money.

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A recent Gallup poll found that money, more than patriotism, religion, family or community, is the defining American value.

Plutocratic Power and Its Perils
By Paul Krugman

People on the right often insist that expressing any concern about highly concentrated wealth is “un-American.” The truth, however, is that worrying about the dangers great wealth poses for democracy is very much part of the American tradition. And our nation basically invented progressive taxation, which was traditionally seen not just as a source of revenue but also as a way to limit excessive wealth.

In fact, if you read what prominent figures said during the Progressive Era, many expressed views that would be hysterically denounced as class warfare today. Theodore Roosevelt warned against “a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power.” Woodrow Wilson declared, “If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it.”

How does great wealth translate into great power? Campaign finance is dominated by a tiny number of extremely rich donors. But there are several other channels of influence.

Until recently I would have said that outright corruption — direct purchase of favors from policymakers — was rare. ProPublica’s revelation that Justice Thomas enjoyed many lavish, undisclosed vacations at Crow’s expense suggests that I may have been insufficiently cynical.

Beyond that, there’s the revolving door: Former politicians and officials who supported the interests of the wealthy find comfortable sinecures at billionaire-supported lobbying firms, think tanks and media organizations. These organizations also help shape what military analysts call the “information space,” defining public discourse in ways that favor the interests of the superrich.

Despite all that, however, there’s only so much you can achieve in America, imperfect and gerrymandered as our democracy may be, unless you can win over large numbers of voters who don’t support a pro-billionaire economic agenda.

Elon Musk Backed Trump With Over $250 Million, Fueling the Unusual ‘RBG PAC’
By Theodore Schleifer and Maggie Haberman

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, spent over a quarter of a billion dollars in the final months of this year’s election to help Donald J. Trump win the presidency, federal filings revealed on Thursday.

The sum is a fraction of Mr. Musk’s wealth. But it is nonetheless a staggering amount from a single donor, who poured the cash into allied groups and is now playing a role in helping shape the next administration.

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Mr. Musk’s total spending on the election is not yet known — and may never be. He cut other political checks to conservative down-ballot groups this cycle, including $12 million to two groups trying to elect Republican senators, the Senate Leadership Fund and the Sentinel Action Fund. Mr. Musk, who originally wanted to keep his support for Mr. Trump quiet, may have also funded dark-money entities that will never disclose his involvement or donations.

How did Kamala Harris’s campaign rack up a debt after record fundraising?
By Dwayne Oxford

According to Open Secrets, the transparency nonprofit, the Harris war chest of more than $1bn dramatically dwarfed the approximately $382m that the Trump team pulled in during the same timeframe.

…

The lion’s share of the campaign’s spend was on advertisements — roughly $654m, according to data from Adimpact, a company that provides advertising intelligence and data solutions.

But FEC filings show that the campaign also spent $20m — an amount almost identical to its reported debt — on concerts and celebrity appearances in the final days before the election.

A cadre of celebrities like Jon Bon Jovi, Christina Aguilera, Katy Perry, Megan thee Stallion and Lady Gaga performed at rallies in battleground states on the eve of Election Day. That may not have been the wisest investment, say some experts.

“Celebrity endorsements are highly overrated. Just because you like someone’s music doesn’t mean that that person has political clout with you,” Louis Perron, political strategist and author of Beat the Incumbent: Proven Strategies and Tactics to Win Elections, told Al Jazeera. “On top of that, young voters are notoriously unreliable to turn out and vote.”

And “if it were a payment for the endorsement per se, it would of course further devalue the endorsement”.

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Village Marketing Agency, which reportedly received $3.9m for its services, was among the companies that secured a substantial payout. The firm’s primary task was to mobilise thousands of social media influencers in support of Harris, aiming to increase her appeal among younger voters.

…

Although the Trump campaign raised $382m in the period that Harris raised more than $1bn, outside groups like Super PACs (political action committees) contributed roughly $711m, according to data from Open Secrets in an October 26 report. Outside groups similarly contributed more than $600m to Harris — including that, her war chest amounted to more than $1.6bn.

…

The 2024 US presidential campaign was not the costliest general election in the nation’s history. According to Open Secrets, the 2020 US presidential race between Joe Biden and Trump saw $7.7bn spent.

This year’s election saw a total spend of $5.5bn.

Still, these massive sums — more than the gross domestic products (GDPs) of many small nations — in campaign spending are driven by several factors, including the proliferation of Super PACs, the growing importance of digital marketing strategies, and the record-breaking fundraising efforts of each political party.

Inside the Secretive $700 Million Ad-Testing Factory for Kamala Harris
By Theodore Schleifer and Shane Goldmacher

The biggest super PAC in American politics is in the middle of an unparalleled spending spree, unleashing more money on television advertising in the closing weeks of the 2024 race than the campaigns of Donald J. Trump and Kamala Harris combined.

The group, known as Future Forward, has ascended to the pinnacle of the Democratic political universe with remarkable speed, winning over some of the world’s richest people with grand promises of a “Moneyball” method to political advertising that it has pitched as the most sophisticated ever undertaken.

The group is, in some ways, an ad-making laboratory masquerading as a super PAC, testing thousands of messages, social media posts and ads in the 2024 race, ranking them in order of effectiveness and approving only those that resonate with voters. Ad makers produce roughly 20 potential commercials for every spot that ever airs. And Future Forward has conducted nearly four million voter surveys since Ms. Harris entered the race — and more than 10 million since January.

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Founded by a group of wonkish Obama campaign veterans, Future Forward is animated by the idea that a blend of data science, political science and testing can usher in a new era of rigor in advertising. The group’s ads were widely praised in 2020, and Future Forward earned the coveted designation as the official super PAC first for President Biden and then for Ms. Harris.

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When Future Forward first began reserving huge volumes of television airtime four years ago, Mr. Biden’s presidential campaign team was alarmed. “We were concerned they were a new pro-Trump super PAC,” recalled Anita Dunn, a senior Biden adviser at the time.

It turned out to be just the opposite.

A collection of Democratic megadonors, mostly from Silicon Valley, had plotted with a handful of number-crunching strategists to surprise Mr. Biden’s team with more than $100 million in supportive ads.

Leading the group was Chauncey McLean, who sits at the center of a close-knit network of Ph.D.s who have ascended in the party by displaying encyclopedic knowledge of randomized-controlled trials and political science literature more than working the Washington cocktail circuit.

…

The group prizes secrecy, conducting much business on the encrypted app Signal and keeping information siloed even from people and groups it works with. The super PAC has shielded from disclosure the source of over $130 million in contributions, nearly 40 percent of what it has raised. It has done so by receiving money in a secret-money nonprofit arm and then transferring those undisclosed donations to the super PAC.

…

Future Forward’s advertising strategy can be summed up in four words: Reserve early, spend late.

The group began booking fall ads in January to secure the best prices. The most intense spending is occurring now, guided by an unswerving belief that the persuasive effect of ads decays quickly.

The strategy sounds simple enough. In practice it meant sitting on the sidelines over the summer as Mr. Biden was drowning politically after his disastrous debate with Mr. Trump. Mr. McLean told donors that Mr. Biden faced a problem advertising could not solve.

Harris’s Main Allied Group Raised Over $900 Million to Aid Her Bid
By Theodore Schleifer

Vice President Kamala Harris’s main allied group, Future Forward, raised over $900 million to support her White House bid, a staggering sum that is far more than any outside political organization has ever brought in during an election cycle.

The group’s fund-raising success during an unsuccessful election for Democrats has already made it a target for those in the party looking to assign blame. Future Forward sold some of the richest people in the world, including Bill Gates, on a failed path to victory. But Ms. Harris’s defeat was decisive enough in the seven battleground states that other Democrats have questioned whether different spending or other tactics would have in fact produced a different outcome.

…

Ms. Harris’s own campaign raised over $1 billion itself during her 107-day sprint. The vast scale of liberal spending on the race, which well outstripped that of Donald J. Trump and his Republican allies, has led Democrats to question the true value of money in a presidential campaign.

Silicon Valley’s Richest Woman Hosts a Day of Innovation. Just Don’t Say Trump.
By Heather Knight

Ms. Powell Jobs, whose late husband was the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, controls a fortune worth $11 billion and has an array of interests in which she invests.

In 2017, she purchased the majority of The Atlantic magazine. Through her company, Emerson Collective, she both supports nonprofits and makes venture capital investments in private companies. Her interests, which are largely liberal, include gun control, prison reform, ending racism and curbing pollution. Her goal, she explains, is to fund people who are “taking big swings” to improve the world.

She took a big swing herself during the election. A top aide of hers circulated polling data to help nudge President Biden out of the race, and Ms. Powell Jobs quietly contributed millions to an organization backing Ms. Harris.

What Trump means for Silicon Valley
By Reid Hoffman

I put significant effort into electing vice-president Kamala Harris. Nevertheless, I am hopeful that president-elect Trump will build upon Biden’s work and reduce inflation, enable high-tech innovation and increase investment in US business.

Some of my peers in Silicon Valley who supported Trump in this election did so in the belief that his administration will strike a pronounced innovation-friendly stance. If they’re right, and I hope they are, then we should see more competition, faster improvement and fewer efforts to dictate goals and outcomes in complex, fast-evolving high-tech industries.

…

More broadly, though, I very much hope that Trump succeeds wildly in enabling US entrepreneurship and innovation, increasing wages for workers and creating a country where every American is free to pursue their ambitions with dignity, purpose and a sense of belonging.

The Left’s “Capital Arm of the Resistance”: LinkedIn Founder Reid Hoffman Is Spending Hundreds of Millions to Growth-Hack Democracy
By Tina Nguyen

Billionaire Reid Hoffman’s venture capital–fueled crusade to save democracy had a bit of a bumpy start. In early 2017, Hoffman joined forces with political strategist Dmitri Mehlhorn, among others, investing some $3 million in Democratic candidates and groups in Virginia with the goal of flipping the state’s Republican-held legislature. For Hoffman, an early employee at PayPal and the co-founder of LinkedIn, the off-cycle Virginia race was the perfect laboratory for their fund, Investing in US, to test-drive disruptive new electoral strategies. But where Hoffman and Mehlhorn saw a political sandbox, Democratic Party officials saw a Bay Area interloper. Rumors circulated that Hoffman was using his money to pay politicos who might one day help his business interests, or, perhaps more generously, that Hoffman was being scammed by political grifters who knew nothing about winning local elections.

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Venture capitalists, by nature, are trained to zig where others zag—who else would invest millions of dollars in, say, an app where people rent out their couches to strangers? But while their Democratic-establishment counterparts welcome their funding blitz, there’s a worry that efforts like Investing in US may have a massive blind spot to more long-lasting political risk, a factor that can’t be measured by cash flow and market share.

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In one effort to combat misogyny by studying how young men are radicalized online, the company Investing in US funded ended up creating their own misogynistic content, ignoring Hoffman’s request to not spread hate speech. (The Keg Bros, for instance, churned out posts that blatantly sexualized Tulsi Gabbard, while another project went after Rebekah Mercer for being a divorcee.) After Hoffman and Mehlhorn started funding Crowdpac—a crowd-funding site for small political candidates that they hoped would support centrist politics—they belatedly learned that its founder, Steve Hilton, was building a career as a pro-Trump pundit, only realizing the full extent of his Trumpism after an online uproar.

Reid Hoffman apologizes for unknowingly backing Alabama disinformation campaign
By Michelle Meyers

LinkedIn founder and Silicon Valley billionaire Reid Hoffman on Wednesday acknowledged that a group he funded was linked to an effort that reportedly misled voters in Alabama’s special Senate election last year, but said he knew nothing about it and is sorry for missing it.

In a post on Medium.com, Hoffman, currently a partner at the venture capital firm Greylock Partners, said he regrets that American Engagement Technologies (AET), one of the groups he funded as part of a broader ambition to expand civic engagement, gave money to a group that reportedly conducted a campaign to mislead voters. The New York Times detailed the alleged campaign in a story last week.

“I find the tactics that have been recently reported highly disturbing,” Hoffman wrote. “For that reason, I am embarrassed by my failure to track AET – the organization I did support —  more diligently as it made its own decisions to perhaps fund projects that I would reject.”

The Times reported on a secret project that used Russian-style disinformation tactics carried out on Facebook and Twitter designed to help Democrat Doug Jones, who edged out Republican Roy Moore in the Senate race. It was reportedly led by New Knowledge, a small digital research firm that The Washington Post says was a lead author of one of the reports presented last week at the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing about Russia’s own influence campaigns.

Exclusive: Reid Hoffman apologizes for role in Epstein-linked donations to MIT
By Felix Salmon

Hoffman invited both former MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito and Epstein to an August 2015 dinner in Palo Alto with Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel. He tells Axios that he invited Epstein at Ito’s behest, and only because Ito vouched for the convicted criminal, saying that he had successfully cleared MIT’s vetting process.

1. Hoffman funded the Media Lab’s Disobedience Award, given to “individuals and groups who engage in responsible, ethical disobedience aimed at challenging norms, rules, or laws that sustain society’s injustices.” Last year the award went to #MeToo leaders.
2. The Disobedience Award takes the form of a glass orb fabricated by star MIT professor Neri Oxman. Hoffman received a similar orb. So did Epstein. Sources say that Oxman, who did not respond to requests for comment, received a significant amount of MIT’s Epstein-linked money.

LinkedIn’s Co-Founder Helped Fund the Suit Accusing Trump of Rape
By Benjamin Weiser and Charlie Savage

Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn and a harsh critic of former President Donald J. Trump, has helped pay for a lawsuit by E. Jean Carroll, the New York magazine writer who sued Mr. Trump for rape and defamation, according to newly filed court papers in the case.

…

Mr. Hoffman is part of the so-called PayPal Mafia, a network of well-connected tech executives and investors who got their start at the payments company in the late 1990s. That crew includes the tech mogul Peter Thiel, who is a prominent Republican donor and has secretly funded lawsuits. In 2016 Mr. Thiel paid $10 million for the wrestler Hulk Hogan to sue the media outlet Gawker Media for an invasion of privacy, ultimately leading to Gawker’s bankruptcy.

In New York and elsewhere, there is a well-established financial industry in which outsiders invest in lawsuits, whether involving car accidents, contract claims or mere slip-and-fall cases, said Anthony Sebok, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and expert on litigation finance and legal ethics.

Professor Sebok added that there was nothing wrong, legally or ethically, with an outsider who has no connection to a plaintiff providing funding to a lawsuit after it is filed, “either to make money or just because they have a rooting interest in the outcome.”

Billionaire Orders Kamala Harris to Fire Lina Khan
By Matt Stoller

This morning, Hoffman went on CNN and issued demands. Harris must end Biden’s tariff and antitrust regimes, he said, and fire Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan.

…

This appearance was followed by reporting that there’s a Silicon Valley fundraising tour for Harris being planned by none other than… Reid Hoffman. Ok, so it’s pretty stunning for an oligarch like Hoffman, with a net worth of a couple billion dollars, to publicly make such a demand. So why is he doing it? One reason is that there’s a lot of money involved. As the Lever reported, Hoffman is on the board of Microsoft, which is right now being sued and investigated by the FTC. It’s a pretty good gig, if you get to fire the law enforcer investigating your misdeeds.

Still, there’s another reason. Hoffman is a sophisticated operator who wants to be a kingmaker in politics. The money is real enough, but he’s likely leaking the fundraising tour as a means of forcing Harris to be seen to do his bidding. Hoffman wants Harris to get rid of Biden policies which protect workers through trade and antitrust so that big business can do what they want. And he’s going to supply the financing for Harris’ campaign if she does what she’s told.

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Hoffman laid out his political philosophy in 2018 in what seems like a business book, one titled Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies.

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Hoffman believes the goal of any entrepreneur is to ignore everything except growing so quickly that a business elevates itself to sovereign levels of global power. He even uses the terms “Nation” and “City” to describe such a corporation.

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Hoffman is also explicit that corporate leaders, when they acquire such market power, become politicians. “Like it or not,” he writes, “when your company is a City or a Nation, you need to start thinking like a mayor or a president and set rules for the good of humanity as a whole rather than just for the good of your profits.” Combined with his outspoken disdain for public regulation, and his arrogant public comments pairing large donations with specific political demands involving his own self-interest, it’s a powerful statement that his politics is not about Republicans or Democrats, but instead about ensuring that a small number of corporate and financial leaders make the core decisions in our society.

What’s a Democratic Billionaire to Do Now?
By Theodore Schleifer

In the weeks after Election Day, one of the biggest donors in the Democratic Party, the LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, has considered what would once have been unthinkable for a billionaire who often talks about his patriotism.

Leaving the United States.

Mr. Hoffman, who has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on politics over the last few years, has told friends and allies that he is weighing a move overseas, according to three people with knowledge of the talks who insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations.

Mr. Hoffman, who declined to comment through a spokeswoman, has helped pay for some of the most aggressive private litigation against Donald J. Trump, and he is worried about retribution from a president who has promised to go after his political opponents, including major Democratic donors.

The vast majority of tech entrepreneurs are Democrats — but a different kind of Democrat
By Dylan Matthews

By and large, tech entrepreneurs are liberals who voted for Hillary Clinton, identify as Democrats, and support same-sex marriage and higher taxes on the rich. But they differ from rank-and-file Democratic voters on at least a couple issues, most importantly over whether regulation is effective and whether unions are a good influence on the economy.

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On social issues, the group is very liberal, more so than Democratic voters as a whole: 96 percent of tech entrepreneurs support same-sex marriage, 79 percent view abortion as a matter of personal choice, 82 percent favor gun control, and 67 percent oppose the death penalty.

Perhaps surprisingly given their wealth, the tech entrepreneurs strongly support taxation and redistribution: 83 percent support higher taxes on people making $1 million or more per year (76 percent support higher taxes on those making at least $250,000), while 59 percent support increasing spending on federal programs for the poor; only 6 percent support cutting them. And 82 percent say they support universal healthcare even if it requires raising taxes.

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Tech entrepreneurs are about as globalist as Democratic donors, and far more globalist than other groups:

1. 44 percent say trade policy should prioritize the well-being of those abroad instead of Americans, and 87 percent support free trade agreements.
2. 56 percent favor increasing levels of immigration, which is 15 percentage points higher than Democratic voters as a whole.
3. 53 percent disagree with the idea that the United States should pay less attention to problems overseas.

These are all, the authors note, policy positions that would substantially reduce inequality at a global scale, while arguably increasing it domestically, especially in the case of trade. There’s something of a tension, on trade, between what’s best for the domestic working class and what’s best for the global working class, and tech entrepreneurs and Democratic donors tend to side with the latter.

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82 percent of tech entrepreneurs think it’s too difficult to fire workers and want the government to make it easier to do so, very similar to the views expressed by Republican donors and voters. 74 percent want labor unions’ influence to decrease (Democratic donors, despite their economic status, are by contrast the most pro-union group surveyed). 70 percent oppose regulating Uber-like taxi companies, while most Democratic citizens and donors disagree.

What explains this? Part of the story might be simple self-interest. Sure enough, the authors find that while tech entrepreneurs are very likely to say that “government regulation of the technology industry does more harm than good,” they’re much less likely to say the same thing about regulation targeting banks, the financial sector, or the pharmaceutical industry.

How billionaire Charles Koch’s network won a 40-year war to curb regulation
By Justin Jouvenal, Jon Swaine and Ann Marimow

Koch and his brother David, who died in 2019, have worked since the early 1970s to create a constellation of foundations, political action groups and legal organizations that reflect their libertarian beliefs, aimed influencing public policy, elections and law.

“We have confiscatory taxation, wage and price controls, commodity allocations programs, trade barriers, restrictions on foreign investments, so-called equal opportunity requirements, safety and health regulations, land use controls, licensing laws, outright government ownership of businesses and industries and many more interventions,” Charles Koch once said, in a 1974 speech. “No advocate of free enterprise should confuse all of this with a free, capitalistic economy!”

Christopher Leonard, whose book “Kochland” explores the business empire, said those views were deeply held, but also served the bottom line of Koch’s holdings in oil, timber, agriculture and other sectors. Koch Industries has faced tens of millions in fines and has repeatedly tangled with regulators over the decades. It is the nation’s second-largest privately held company.

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Donald Trump’s surprise 2016 victory prompted intense speculation about the future of Roe v. Wade, the landmark case that guaranteed a federal right to abortion, as well as how the new president might fill the Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of Antonin Scalia months earlier.

Far less noticed was another priority for Trump officials. Donald McGahn, the White House counsel, told a Federalist Society gathering in 2017 that regulatory reform and judicial selection were “the two greatest legal issues that this administration will address.”

“The greatest threat to the rule of law in our modern society is the ever expanding regulatory state,” McGahn, who did not respond to requests for an interview for this article, said in that speech. “The most effective bulwark against that threat is a strong judiciary.”

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Koch had famously declined to support Trump in 2016, and the future president had railed against the Koch brothers in campaign appearances as enemies of his populist agenda. But Koch network alumni took key roles in the new administration, and their philosophy permeated the White House.

“Koch played a very nimble game with Trump,” Leonard said. “I called it block and tackle. They tried to block the stuff they didn’t like or not participate. … But for the stuff the Kochs liked about MAGA, they did everything they could to support the agenda.”

The Billionaire Kingmaker (Still) Dividing the Nation
By Nancy MacLean and Lisa Graves

In November 2020, just two weeks after the most divisive U.S. election of our lifetimes, billionaire Charles Koch published a book called Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions for a Top-Down World. A few days before that, on November 13, The Wall Street Journal published a story with the headline “Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake.” Koch, the article noted, wanted a “final act building bridges across political divides.”

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In August, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) reported that Koch-funded organizations spent over $1.1 billion in the 2020 election cycle. At the same time his book claiming to have changed course was in press, Koch spent almost 50 percent more than the record amount the Koch network had raised in the 2016 cycle: $750 million.

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With the connivance of Trump, the generalship of Federalist Society leader Leonard Leo, and the well-funded campaigning of Leo’s Judicial Crisis Network, the arch-right billionaire succeeded in capturing a supermajority in the U.S. Supreme Court. Koch had told his allied billionaire backers that this was one of his top priorities for the Trump Administration—along with the dramatic tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy that he also secured.

The Billionaires Who Are Threatening Democracy
By Adam M. Lowenstein

As Crack-Up Capitalism shows, what unites market radicals is the conviction that societies should be designed to prioritize capital, not people. The book illustrates the profound fatalism about democracy—and sometimes outright contempt for it—that sits at the core of many market radicals’ beliefs. As Slobodian writes, they believe that democracy—self-government characterized by citizen participation, civil and political freedoms and protections, and representatives responsive and even beholden to the people’s demands—does not provide an adequate environment for maximal profit-making.

This opposition to democracy, however, doesn’t imply an opposition to government. As reflected in the desperate demands of venture capitalists and other wealthy investors for a bailout of Silicon Valley Bank, market radicals are enthusiastic about state power and resources—as long as that power prioritizes their ability to do business. “Their goal,” Slobodian writes, is “not to take a wrecking ball to the state but to hijack, disassemble, and rebuild it under their own private ownership.” Crack-Up Capitalism argues that market radicals aspire, above all, to use the authority of government to serve their interests: to eliminate taxes, unions, workers’ and citizens’ rights, political uncertainty, and barriers to capital flows, and to put the resources of the state—whether labor, land, or the legal system—at their disposal. They believe that this approach will, in turn, result in a more prosperous society with benefits eventually accruing to all.

…

Many of the market radicals Slobodian writes about say they are fighting to liberate humanity and unleash markets from the tyranny of government and bureaucracy. Thinkers and investors emanating from Silicon Valley, in particular, claim to be hacking the state to make it more efficient and effective. But Slobodian argues that many of these self-proclaimed advocates for disruption actually just want to disrupt the norms—such as civil and political freedom—that might threaten their interests.

Some of Silicon Valley’s Most Prominent Investors Are Turning Against Biden
By Erin Griffith

Some investors said they were frustrated that his pick for chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan, has aggressively moved to block acquisitions, one of the main ways venture capitalists make money. They said they were also unhappy that Mr. Biden’s pick for head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, had been hostile to cryptocurrency companies.

The start-up industry has also been in a downturn since 2022, with higher interest rates sending capital fleeing from risky bets and a dismal market for initial public offerings crimping opportunities for investors to cash in on their valuable investments.

Some also said they disliked Mr. Biden’s proposal in March to raise taxes, including a 25 percent “billionaire tax” on certain holdings that could include start-up stock, as well as a higher tax rate on profits from successful investments.

How Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg, and Andreessen—Four Billionaire Techno-Oligarchs—Are Creating an Alternate, Autocratic Reality
By Jonathan Taplin

Four very powerful billionaires—Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Marc Andreessen—are creating a world where “nothing is true and all is spectacle.” If we are to inquire how we got to a place of radical income inequality, post-truth reality, and the looming potential for a second American Civil War, we need look no further than these four—“the biggest wallets,” to paraphrase historian Timothy Snyder, “paying for the most blinding lights.”

I call them the Technocrats, in recognition of the influence of the technocracy movement, founded in the 1930s by Elon Musk’s grandfather, Joshua Haldeman. The Technocrats make up a kind of interlocking directorate of Silicon Valley, each investing in or sitting on the boards of the others’ companies. Their vast digital domain controls your personal information; affects how billions of people live, work, and love; and sows online chaos, inciting mob violence and sparking runs on stocks. These four men have long been regarded as technologically progressive heroes, but they are actually part of a broader antidemocratic, authoritarian turn within the tech world, deeply invested in preserving the status quo and in keeping their market-leadership positions or near-monopolies—and their multi-billion-dollar fortunes secure from higher taxes. (“Competition is for suckers,” Thiel once posited.)

Indeed, they are American oligarchs, controlling online access for billions of users on Facebook, Twitter, Threads, Instagram, and WhatsApp, including 80 percent of the US population. Moreover, from the outside, they appear to be more interested in replacing our current reality—and our economic system, imperfect as it is—with something far more opaque, concentrated, and unaccountable, which, if it comes to pass, they will control.

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The Technocrats do not hide the fact that they plan to feed at the government trough to finance some of their more outrageous schemes.

What to know about Elon Musk’s contracts with the federal government
By Laurence Darmiento and Queenie Wong

Elon Musk is easily the world’s wealthiest man, with a net worth topping $300 billion.

But even he stands to make more money from his association with the federal government after placing a winning bet on Donald Trump’s election to the presidency.

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Trump has named Musk to co-head a new Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE — a nod to the cryptocurrency Musk adores. However, federal law bars executive branch employees, which can include unpaid consultants from participating in government matters that will affect their financial interests, unless they divest of their interests or recuse themselves.

Trump’s transition team has sought a work-around, saying he would “provide advice and guidance from outside of Government” with the work concluding by July 2026, according to a news release.

Why Running the Government Like a Business Would Be a Disaster
By Ray Fisman

Businesses and government do fundamentally different jobs, and efforts at remaking government with an eye to cost-cutting can end in disaster. That’s because a lot of what the government does is hard to quantify and involves complicated tasks that inevitably require bureaucratic coordination and, yes, inefficiency.

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The problem, though, is that business appears more efficient in large part because what it does is usually simpler than what the government does. Take auto glass installation, a classic example among economists because it was well studied by Edward Lazear in the 1990s. It’s a solitary and easy to evaluate activity: A single installer takes care of the job, and it quickly becomes obvious to the car’s owner if the installation is defective. It’s easy, then, to write a contract that compensates an installer based on how many windshields he takes care of each day, without worrying too much about the ill effects of the installer doing shoddy work.

Contrast this with, say, the job of preventing terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. Catching terrorists is a lot more complex a task than installing a windshield, of course, or even assembling a Tesla automobile. It involves cooperation among many agencies: F.B.I. field offices around the country, local law enforcement, the C.I.A. and other agencies across the Department of Justice and the intelligence community. They need to share information and deploy a range of skills, such as surveilling social media and tracking down and capturing criminals.

And if everything is done just right, nothing happens at all. It’s an elaborate job that’s measured by an absence of results, which could be because enforcement authorities are great at what they do or because there wasn’t much risk of attack in the first place.

Suppose that, to run the government like a business, the Department of Government Efficiency, which Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy will lead, decides to import some high-powered incentives from the auto glass installation business and, say, reward F.B.I. field offices based on how much intelligence they produce on potential threats. We’d surely get bloated, uninformative reports that nonetheless fill agents’ word count quotas. (If this sounds like parody, it’s not so different from the approach the military often took in evaluating success in Vietnam: What mattered were easy-to-measure enemy body counts, which turned out to be very different from the harder to quantify metric of winning the war, especially when civilian bodies were easily mislabeled combatants.)

Even worse, because there haven’t been any major terrorist attacks for a while, the masters of DOGE might be inclined to trim the F.B.I.’s budget.

…

But as Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy wield their axes, it may be hard to tell whether they are aimed at red tape or more like D.I.Y. home renovators taking a swing at a load-bearing wall. The problem is that we won’t know what they’ve done until the house has already collapsed.

Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule
By Ronan Farrow

The meddling of oligarchs and other monied interests in the fate of nations is not new. During the First World War, J. P. Morgan lent vast sums to the Allied powers; afterward, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., poured money into the fledgling League of Nations. The investor George Soros’s Open Society Foundations underwrote civil-society reform in post-Soviet Europe, and the casino mogul Sheldon Adelson funded right-wing media in Israel, as part of his support of Benjamin Netanyahu.

But Musk’s influence is more brazen and expansive.

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Musk was born in 1971 in Pretoria, the country’s administrative capital, and he and his younger brother, Kimbal, and his younger sister, Tosca, grew up under apartheid. Musk’s mother, Maye, a Canadian model and dietitian, and his father, Errol, an engineer, divorced when he was young, and the children initially stayed with Maye. She has said that Errol was physically abusive toward her. “He would hit me when the kids were around,” she wrote in her memoir. “I remember that Tosca and Kimbal, who were two and four, respectively, would cry in the corner, and Elon, who was five, would hit him on the backs of his knees to try to stop him.” By the mid-eighties, Musk had moved in with his father—a decision that he has said was motivated by concern for his father’s loneliness, and which he came to regret. Musk, usually impassive in interviews, cried openly when he told Rolling Stone about the years that followed, in which, he said, his father psychologically tortured him, in ways that he declined to specify. “You have no idea about how bad,” he said. “Almost every crime you can possibly think of, he has done. Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done.”

Elon Musk publicized the names of government employees he wants to cut. It’s terrifying federal workers
By Hadas Gold and Rene Marsh

Last week, in the midst of the flurry of his daily missives, Musk reposted two X posts that revealed the names and titles of people holding four relatively obscure climate-related government positions. Each post has been viewed tens of millions of times, and the individuals named have been subjected to a barrage of negative attention. At least one of the four women named has deleted her social media accounts.

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“These tactics are aimed at sowing terror and fear at federal employees,” said Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents more than 800,000 of the 2.3 million civilian federal employees. “It’s intended to make them fearful that they will become afraid to speak up.”

This isn’t new behavior for Musk, who has often singled out individuals who he claims have made mistakes or stand in his way. One former federal employee, previously targeted by Musk, said she experienced something very similar.

“It’s his way of intimidating people to either quit or also send a signal to all the other agencies that ‘you’re next’,” said Mary “Missy” Cummings, an engineering and computer science professor at George Mason University, who drew Musk’s ire because of her criticisms of Tesla when she was at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Big Tech Billionaires’ Utopian Dreams Are Actually Dystopian Nightmares
By Matt Lewis

These Technocrats (as Taplin collectively calls them) come to their worldviews based, in part, on their similarities: They were introverted nerds who lacked social skills and were bullied.

As a result, they escaped their reality by delving into fantasy and science fiction. (Think this is a coincidence? It’s worth noting that the aforementioned Jan Sramek, the man behind the secretive plan to build a new city in northern California, was, as The New York Times described him, a “science fiction-obsessed teenager.”)

When it comes to electoral politics Musk, Andreessen, and Zuckerberg were once considered Obama progressives (Andreessen backed Obama in 2008, but switched to Mitt Romney in 2012). Taplin tells me (you can listen to our podcast conversation here) that the desire for lower taxes and less regulation helped push them rightward.

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Free market conservatives ostensibly believe in competition; Thiel believes that “Competition is for losers.” The Technocrats don’t want a free market. They want a rigged market.

According to Taplin, “the internet tends always toward monopoly” due to Metcalf’s law, which essentially says that once a social network reaches a critical mass in a certain area, users have too much to lose to flee it, and so it skews toward a winner-take-all paradigm. What is more, many of the old rules and regulations that formerly prevented terrestrial media consolidation went out the window with the internet age.

Shiny New Technology, Same Old Funny Business
By Binyamin Appelbaum

Illegal price fixing used to require a lot of work. In the mid-1990s, to fix the price of the animal feed additive lysine, executives of some of the world’s biggest agribusinesses had to spend hours on airplanes flying to resorts where they spent days in conference rooms determining how much lysine each company could sell, and at what price.

Now there’s an app for things like that.

The Justice Department alleged in a civil antitrust lawsuit filed Aug. 23 that a Texas company called RealPage is orchestrating what amounts to a nationwide apartment cartel by persuading major landlords to use its software to set prices for millions of apartments across the country. RealPage markets its software by boasting that it increases rents by 3 percent to 7 percent.

The case is important because it highlights the growing use of algorithms to set prices — and the potential for companies that are supposed to be competing to instead coordinate at the expense of their customers by using the same price-setting formulas. The suit is part of a broader effort by the nation’s antitrust enforcers to catch up with the methods that modern corporations are using to squeeze their customers — in this case, by increasing the price of housing, the most expensive part of American life.

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Algorithms are changing enforcement, too. In the 1990s, the government needed an informant — or, in Hollywood’s retelling, “The Informant!” — to break up the lysine cartel. The RealPage complaint, by contrast, is substantially based on the work of a recently created team of Justice Department computer analysts who teased out the workings of the company’s algorithms by painstakingly examining its code.

What the team found, the government says, is that RealPage calculates target prices for individual apartments by using proprietary data from its clients and then urges clients to use those prices by arguing that if everyone cooperates, everyone wins.

The complaint quotes a RealPage executive explaining, “There is greater good in everybody succeeding versus essentially trying to compete against one another in a way that actually keeps the entire industry down.” This may be true, insofar as one is interested in the greater good of landlords. Society as a whole, however, benefits more when companies are forced to participate in vigorous competition.

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The tech industry has made a lot of money in recent decades by convincing courts and regulators that business conducted by algorithm should not be subject to established rules and restrictions.

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In a 2017 speech, Maureen Ohlhausen, then the acting chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission, proposed that antitrust regulators should evaluate the use of computer formulas by replacing the word “algorithm” with “Bob.”

“Is it OK for a guy named Bob to collect confidential price strategy information from all the participants in a market, and then tell everybody how they should price? If it isn’t OK for a guy named Bob to do it, then it probably isn’t OK for an algorithm to do it either,” she said.

The rise of algorithms also hasn’t changed the basic reality that it’s easier to fix prices in concentrated markets. RealPage can orchestrate pricing because the ownership of large apartment buildings in major markets is increasingly dominated by the same handful of big national landlords. The District of Columbia, which has filed its own antitrust suit against RealPage, estimates 60 percent of the units in large apartment buildings in the city are managed by RealPage clients — and an astonishing 90 percent of such units in the metro area are.

One reason cartels historically are hard to maintain is that new companies can enter the market by underpricing the collaborators. But RealPage and its clients are sheltered from competition by the difficulty of building housing in big cities.

Big Tech’s Coup
By Marietje Schaake

On August 30, the Brazilian Supreme Court banned X—the social media platform formerly known as Twitter—from its country’s Internet. The ban was the culmination of a months-long fight between Elon Musk, the platform’s owner and the world’s richest man, and Alexandre de Moraes, one of the court’s justices. Moraes was tasked with investigating the role of online disinformation in attempts to keep former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro in power, despite losing the election. As part of these duties, Moraes had ordered X to take down hundreds of accounts spreading disinformation. In response, the platform accused the justice of censorship. Musk withdrew the representatives X legally needed to operate in Brazil, which eventually led the justice to prevent Brazilians from accessing the platform altogether.

Musk did not take kindly to the decision, comparing Moraes to an “evil tyrant.” But Musk did not confine his anger to harsh denunciations. According to reporting by The New York Times, he actively worked around the order. First, Musk encouraged Brazilians to use virtual private networks (VPNs) to evade the blockage. Then, his Starlink satellite network, which provides Internet service to subscribers directly from space, continued providing access to the site. Finally, X rerouted its Internet traffic through new servers, allowing it to circumvent Brazil’s telecommunication controls altogether.

Under mounting pressure from authorities in a country with a significant number of X users (and asset seizures), the company eventually agreed to block the disinformation accounts and pay off its fines. But the brazenness with which a tech mogul was able to defy a state’s decision makes a stark and scary fact very tangible: democratic governments have lost their primacy in the digital world. Instead, companies and their executives are increasingly in charge.

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Private firms are constantly producing new technological inventions, but policymakers have failed to keep pace. In the United States, two key tech regulations, the Communication Decency Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, were passed decades ago—in 1996 and 1998, respectively—long before Steve Jobs had even thought of the iPhone. In the years since, tech companies have progressed from developing products to operating entire systems that affect domains previously exclusively governed by states, such as digital infrastructure and its security guarantees. By unleashing their powerful tools and services into a world without proper guardrails, tech companies have become the de facto governors for technologies of great geopolitical significance, including facial recognition systems, satellite Internet connections, and some facets of intelligence collection. Microsoft has a Threat Intelligence Center that gathers insights as if it were the National Security Agency. Cryptocurrency companies mint their own money like the Federal Reserve. Amazon’s clean energy portfolio surpasses that of some countries, even as it builds power-hungry data centers.

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As a result, tech firms large and small now exercise unprecedented power over even the most critical infrastructure. For example, they dominate undersea data cables, which serve as the transportation system for almost all the world’s Internet traffic. Nearly 99 percent of the world’s data travels through them, including $10 trillion in daily financial transactions and highly sensitive government information. Without the cables, all kinds of essential activity would become impossible. They should therefore be governed and secured by states or intergovernmental bodies. But instead, companies build, use, and maintain them as policymakers stand on the sidelines.

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Confrontations increasingly take place in cyberspace, and so states increasingly depend on private companies for defense. Consider what happened when Colonial Pipeline’s networks were struck by a ransomware attack in 2021. The company is one of the biggest energy providers in the United States, and so the strike halted the flow of oil across much of the U.S. East Coast. Several U.S. states declared states of emergency as lines formed at gas stations. Flights had to be rerouted. At a meeting with tech CEOs in the aftermath of the attack, U.S. President Joe Biden conceded that “the reality is most of our critical infrastructure is owned and operated by the private sector.” He continued: “The federal government can’t meet this challenge alone.” It was a rare, open admission that the government had lost power when it comes to protecting the country in the digital realm.

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In the midst of all this legal and political ambiguity, companies have become more comfortable acting as mercenaries. Spyware firms are for hire and sell sophisticated intelligence tools to dictatorships and democracies alike. Companies also play key roles in crucial nodes online: Amazon Web Services uses machine learning algorithms to go after state-sponsored threats, and Google’s Threat Analysis Group takes YouTube channels offline for running coordinated influence operations. These kinds of operations shift the domain of conflict to nonstate actors who have radically different motives—and levels of accountability—than governments.

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Companies such as Palantir Technologies are now trusted to perform critical data analyses when it comes to matters of defense, health care, and border control. They are doing so even though they lack the democratic authority, accountability, and experience needed to make these calls. “Saving lives and on occasion taking lives is super interesting,” Alex Karp, Palantir’s CEO, said in an interview with The New York Times in the summer of 2024—as if life-and-death decisions were a computer game.

Tech CEO jokes about drone-striking rivals in MAGA-tinged Hill summit
By Brendan Bordelon

Karp was a featured speaker at the invite-only event, held in the heart of Capitol Hill. It included appearances from a number of sitting lawmakers and tech executives, most of whom made far blander pronouncements about national security, artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies.

It was organized by Jacob Helberg, a senior Karp adviser and key driver of last week’s passage of a bill that could lead to a TikTok ban in the United States.

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Karp’s talk, a one-on-one with Helberg, was billed as an early look at how defense software and AI are impacting the Ukraine and Israel conflicts, but veered in some unexpected directions. He said some students protesting the Israeli response to the Oct. 7 attacks have also praised North Korea, and perhaps should be sent there for reeducation.

“We’re gonna do an exchange program sponsored by Karp,” he said. “A couple months in North Korea, nice-tasting flavored bark. See how you feel about that.”

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Karp has been an outspoken supporter of the Israeli response to last year’s Oct. 7 attack — and on Wednesday, he spent much of his 30-minute appearance railing against the anti-Israel protests that have rocked Columbia University and other campuses.

“Look at Columbia,” Karp said. “There is literally no way to explain the investment in our elite schools, and the output is a pagan religion — a pagan religion of mediocrity, and discrimination, and intolerance, and violence.”

The Palantir CEO called the protests “unforgivable” and “incomprehensible,” and claimed that progressive students have bought into “an architecture of anti-discrimination while dressing in masks and excluding the population that’s been most discriminated [against] for the last 3,000 years.”

In an earlier aside, Karp also mused about his traditional animosity toward some venture capitalists.

“I historically have been one that would rage against Silicon Valley venture people,” Karp said. “And I had all sorts of fantasies of using drone-enabled technology to exact revenge — especially targeted — in violation of all norms.”

In an interview with POLITICO after Karp’s comments, Helberg said Karp “has a background and a Ph.D. in philosophy, so he cares about philosophical issues in general.”

How Technology Ruined Democracy
By Rishi Iyengar

Drawing on her decade of experience as a member of the European Parliament until 2019 and her post-political career as a fellow at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center and the Institute for Human-Centered AI, Schaake argues that the rapid digitization of our lives has left private companies as purveyors of rights and services traditionally guaranteed by governments, but without the requisite accountability.

Governments, she writes, have willingly “outsourced” those key functions to a handful of powerful CEOs.

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Although she welcomes the antitrust conversations around tech monopolies that have gained momentum on both sides of the Atlantic in recent years, she believes that a better way for governments to deal with these companies would be to think about the harms that they pose to democracy itself rather than just economic harms.

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Regardless of the election results, Schaake said that the world needs a broader rethink of the relationship between governments and technology companies.

“My criticism of democratic governments is that they have not used their legitimacy and their primacy to create a comprehensive—or even noncomprehensive—framework around governing technologies,” she said. “If authorities choose to slam their fists on the table, they [can] still hold a lot of power.”

On the Democratic Party’s Cult of Powerlessness
By Matt Stoller

From local field organizers to the most prestigious people in the Democratic Party, like Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama, all seem to feel powerless. For instance, most insiders felt Joe Biden was far too old to win reelection, but did not feel able to act or say anything when it mattered. Similarly, Nancy Pelosi and Obama indicated they knew Harris was a bad candidate, but holding an open process to find a new one was, in Pelosi’s words, “impossible.”

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In late 2008, many of us were eager to see what we could do to fix the banking system and the country, as Obama and the Democrats had immense political capital to reshape the economy. But over the next year, during the crafting of the Dodd-Frank legislation, it became clear that our political leaders didn’t really think solving anything was possible. Fellow Congressional staff would sometimes point out various problems we hadn’t addressed. After awhile, a friend of mine started to cynically joke, “yeah someone should do something about that.”

Everyone knew, even close advisors to Barney Frank, that our financial reform law, Dodd-Frank, didn’t fix much. It didn’t stop the gruesome foreclosure crisis. It certainly didn’t block bailouts, which was the point of the law. There was 15 years of busywork and compliance nonsense imposed by Dodd-Frank to ensure the banking system was strong enough to stand without bailouts, but of course, in 2023, the Fed immediately bailed out Silicon Valley Bank.

And yet, what was astonishing is no one felt they had any choice but to pass Dodd-Frank and declare victory. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and a small circle of populists made a critique of this approach. But it wasn’t a lefty argument, though it was characterized that way, it was mostly an argument “hey you can do more stuff, you should.” Columnist Ezra Klein, among others, provided the justification for doing nothing, saying that those who thought the President was powerful fell prey to the “Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency,” imagining Obama unrealistically as an superhero who could implement a domestic agenda. It still shocks me that people argued, with a straight face, that Obama’s just the President, what can he do anyway? But that was key to Trump’s appeal, he just appeared to to do stuff when no one else can.

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In the 1960s, a set of disillusioning arguments prevailed on the left, particularly in academia. The idea that the American republic was committed to the “political program of the Enlightenment” seemed fraudulent. But dissidents didn’t renounce egalitarianism or elements like liberty for all. Instead, they “disconnected Lincoln’s proposition from the idea of America and reattached it to the aspirations of those subordinate groups of Americans—women, African Americans, the working class—oppressed, victimized, or excluded by an irremediably corrupt nation.”

By 1999, the incoming president of the American Studies Association suggested the organization delete “American” from its name. Leading “Americanists” had come to write with a visceral disdain for the idea of the nation-state itself. Studying American corporate structures, markets, and governance with an eye to reform, or with some larger ideal in mind, seemed absurd.

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If you don’t believe in the state, or if you don’t associate enlightenment notions with the American project, then rolling back democratic protections for working people simply doesn’t matter. If America itself is immoral, then who cares what the governing apparatus looks like? If all commerce is driven by forces out of our hands, then there’s nothing we can do anyway.

Politics, which is fundamentally the forming of a society, itself becomes immoral. The wielding of authority, which is essential to a democratic polity, is indistinguishable from authoritarian abuse. The New Democrat project of the 1980s, which turned human choices into Gods we called “technology and globalization,” succeeded wildly, because we had been conditioned to believe in them. Markets became monopolies, economists became priests, and cultural attitudes are the only real stakes in elections.

Opinion: Silicon Valley is maximizing profit at everyone’s expense. It doesn’t have to be this way
By Hans Taparia and Bruce Buchanan

The root of the problem is that the United States and Silicon Valley in particular are dominated by what we call an “investor monoculture.” Modern corporations are designed to serve investors and no one else. About 80% of public company stock in the United States is owned by institutional investors, most of which have one objective: to maximize profits, largely in the short term and without regard to the costs for society. In 1980, their share of stocks was just 29%.

Venture capital firms, the biggest funders of Silicon Valley startups, have grown from under $400 billion in assets in 2010 to nearly $4 trillion today. Their performance is measured by “multiples on invested capital,” or “MOIC,” as insiders call it.

Suicide rates among young people are up more than 60% since 2007, and U.S. democracy is in danger. But these are not investors’ concerns.

Regulation and advocacy can certainly make a difference. But Big Tech is cash-rich, lawyered up and capable of running circles around regulators.

The Silicon Valley Billionaires Steering Trump’s Transition
By Theodore Schleifer, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan

The tech leaders in Mr. Trump’s orbit are pushing for deregulation of their industries and more innovative use of private sector technologies in the federal government, especially the defense industry. About a dozen Musk allies took breaks from their businesses to serve as unofficial advisers to the Trump transition effort.

Broadly, the group is pushing for less onerous regulation of industries like cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence, a weaker Federal Trade Commission to allow for more deal-making and the privatization of some government services to make government more efficient. Mr. Musk himself has called some executives at major public companies and asked how the government is thwarting their business — and what he can do to help.

These tech leaders have played a far broader role than simply contributing to the nascent Department of Government Efficiency — the Musk-led effort, abbreviated as DOGE, that is intended to effectively audit the entire government and cut $2 trillion out of federal spending. Mr. Musk’s friends are also influencing hiring decisions at some of the most important government agencies.

Inside the Trump transition team’s headquarters in West Palm Beach, Fla., the billionaire Marc Andreessen, a tech investor who decades ago founded one of the first popular internet browsers, has interviewed candidates for senior roles at the State Department, the Pentagon and the Department of Health and Human Services.

Jared Birchall, the head of Mr. Musk’s family office with no experience in foreign affairs, has interviewed a few candidates for jobs at the State Department. Mr. Birchall has been involved in advising the Trump transition team on space policy and artificial intelligence, helping to put together councils for A.I. development and crypto policy.

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Many of the tech executives involved in the hiring process are unwilling to sacrifice earnings in the prime of their career, and so are eyeing part-time roles, such as those externally advising the Department of Government Efficiency. Full-time roles there may require divestment.

Column: Trump-friendly billionaires are taking aim at the federal agencies that protect workers and consumers
By Michael Hiltzik

… If pounding the table and yelling won’t succeed, then get your adversary declared unconstitutional.

That’s the weapon being wielded at this moment against the National Labor Relations Board and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The first was created by Congress in 1935 to protect workers’ organizing and bargaining rights, the second in 2010 to protect consumers from ripoffs by financial service firms.

Those agencies are under assault by two of the richest men in the world: Elon Musk, who controls Tesla and SpaceX, among other enterprises, and Jeff Bezos, the founder and executive chair of Amazon. To put it succinctly, these are agencies devoted to serving the little guy by fighting battles against Big Business. Is there any mystery about why they’re targeted by billionaires?

I reported in January on the effort by SpaceX to persuade a federal judge to declare the NLRB unconstitutional.

Amazon is pursuing the same goal in its own fight with the NLRB, in which it’s trying to stave off an order that it enter into contract negotiations with 8,000 workers at a warehouse in Staten Island, N.Y. Amazon is also trying to overturn the victory in the workers’ 2022 vote by a union that subsequently affiliated with the Teamsters.

As for the CFPB, Musk on Nov. 26 tweeted, “Delete CFPB…. There are too many duplicative regulatory agencies.” He was responding to a fatuous spiel by venture investor Marc Andreessen, who in an appearance on Joe Rogan’s webcast called the CFPB “Elizabeth Warren’s personal agency, which she gets to control.” Sen. Warren (D-Mass.) conceived of the agency and pushed for its creation after the recession of 2008, but she has zero “control” over it.

As Helaine Olen of the American Economic Liberties Project has observed, what really sticks in Andreessen’s craw about the CFPB is that it has worked to protect consumers from financial services outfits, including fintech firms in which Andreessen, along with other Silicon Valley bros, has invested.

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In its more than 13 years of existence, the bureau has secured more than $17.5 billion in compensation and other relief for consumers mulcted by the financial services industry and built up a victims relief fund worth more than $4 billion.

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Amazon is seeking an injunction blocking the NLRB from “pursuing unconstitutional administrative proceedings,” asserting that the board members are “insulated from removal in contravention of Article II of the Constitution.” The NLRB’s structure, the company argues, “violates the constitutionally mandated separation of powers and Amazon’s due process rights.”

The Teamsters, which represents the Staten Island workers, sees the quest for an injunction as nothing but an effort to use the courts to delay the company’s obligation to meet the workers at the bargaining table.

To Understand Amazon, We Must Understand Jeff Bezos
By Ben Smith

“Amazon Unbound” shows how the company increasingly wields its enormous scale against potential rivals. After acquiring a key robot manufacturer, for instance, it stopped shipping the machines to competitors. And it used its vast trove of data from third-party Amazon vendors to make competing “private label” products, then simply lied about it.

Significantly, the book is also very much a biography of Bezos. And that makes it timely at a moment when our economy is dominated by giant firms headed by a small handful of men, whose personalities and whims we need to understand whether we like it or not. Amazon in the 2010s was an intensely personal venture, run by one of the wealthiest men in the world according to his own desires and reflecting his own personality.

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… Amazon as a company seems to embody some of Bezos’ best personal qualities (his relentless drive to get you that package on time) and his worst (an “informal cruelty” that defines his company’s culture and requires that his factory workers and executives make personal sacrifices for corporate needs).

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Bezos himself once hated helicopters, but all of a sudden they were cropping up everywhere. And it was during this period that he’d grown close to a former actress named Lauren Sanchez, a charismatic pilot who now ran an aviation company.

Bezos is at his most human in the sections where Stone describes how he fell for Sanchez, throwing caution to the wind and courting her so publicly that he was sure to get caught. Stone has the incredible emails between a National Enquirer reporter and her source, who first promised to expose the relationship between a “B-list married actress” and a “Bill Gates type.” The source turned out to be Sanchez’ own brother, a true piece of work who played all angles and insisted to the last that he’d “never sell out anyone.”

So it’s hard not to root for Bezos when, trapped by The Enquirer, he lures the publication into sending him a menacing letter — then cheekily publishes it and exposes the minor scandal himself.

But Bezos isn’t just your average victim of tabloid extortion.

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Bezos’ wealth and power will always protect him, but there’s a flip side, too: They can also taint anything he touches.

The Untold Story of How Jeff Bezos Beat the Tabloids
By Brad Stone

Over the summer of 2018, as the romance between Bezos and Sanchez intensified, the Enquirer was coming off a catastrophic few years. Newsstand sales were slipping, and the paper’s publisher, David Pecker, had been accused of buying the rights to stories about his friend Donald Trump’s marital infidelities and then declining to publish them, a practice known as “catch and kill.” This had brought the Enquirer’s parent company, American Media Inc., or AMI, to the attention of federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, who were investigating potential violations of campaign finance laws.

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Inside AMI’s drab offices at the southern tip of Manhattan, the Bezos story was met with both excitement and anxiety. The company had filed for bankruptcy protection in 2010 and was loaded with debt from acquiring magazines such as In Touch and Life & Style. An effort to secure an investment from Saudi Arabia to finance a bid to buy Time wasn’t panning out, and Anthony Melchiorre, the seldom-photographed managing partner of the company’s majority owner, New Jersey hedge fund Chatham Asset Management, was anxious about anything that might land AMI in fresh legal peril.

That September, AMI had signed a nonprosecution agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice over allegations that it had tried to bury negative stories about Trump. The deal required its executives to cooperate with the federal investigation of Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and to operate in the future with unimpeachable honesty. It ensured the company would remain under prosecutors’ watchful eyes for years. Breaking the agreement could mean financial ruin for AMI.

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The Enquirer published on Mondays, but Howard, reacting quickly, persuaded Pecker to authorize a special 11-page print run and posted the paper’s first story online that evening, a Wednesday. “Married Amazon Boss Jeff Bezos Getting Divorced Over Fling With Movie Mogul’s Wife,” screamed the headline. During the next five days, the Enquirer published additional stories with more details about Bezos and Sanchez and their private text exchanges.

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On Feb. 6, AMI’s deputy general counsel sent the proposed terms of an agreement via email to Bezos’ team. AMI would agree not to publish or share any of the unpublished photos or texts if Bezos and his reps joined the company in publicly rejecting the notion that the Enquirer’s reporting was politically motivated.

Bezos viewed the email as blatantly extortive. On Feb. 7 he told his advisers that he knew exactly what he was going to do. He wrote a 1,000-word-plus essay titled “No Thank You, Mr. Pecker” …

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In it, Bezos included the emails from AMI’s attorney and top editor in their humiliating entirety. But, however embarrassing it was to have his sexts described in detail, Bezos knew they were also damning for AMI. “Something unusual happened to me yesterday,” he wrote in the swaggering tone of someone supremely confident in his position. “I was made an offer I couldn’t refuse. Or at least that’s what the top people at the National Enquirer thought. I’m glad they thought that, because it emboldened them to put it all in writing.” He neglected to mention that they had only done so after being pressed by a lawyer working on his behalf. Bezos, it seemed, had manipulated his adversaries into creating an incriminating paper trail.

Bezos then made explicit what de Becker had only implied: He suggested AMI was attacking him on behalf of the Trump administration and the government of Saudi Arabia. His ownership of the Washington Post, Bezos wrote, “is a complexifier for me. It’s unavoidable that certain powerful people who experience Washington Post news coverage will wrongly conclude I am their enemy.” He also added that he didn’t regret owning the paper. It was, he wrote, “something I will be most proud of when I’m 90 and reviewing my life, if I’m lucky enough to live that long.”

This noble sentiment, of course, had little to do with his extramarital relationship, or the scheming of his girlfriend’s brother, or the desperate attempts of AMI to escape a cloud of political suspicion. It was, in other words, a public-relations masterstroke. Bezos cast himself as a sympathetic defender of the press and an opponent of “AMI’s long-earned reputation for weaponizing journalistic privileges, hiding behind important protections, and ignoring the tenets and purpose of true journalism.”

Ronan Farrow: ‘Catch And Kill’ Tactics Protected Both Weinstein And Trump
By Terry Gross

On how AMI’s catch-and-kill efforts relate to the Weinstein story

[AMI] had what’s called a “kill file,” which they have for various celebrities containing all of the dirt that they haven’t published on someone. … There’s various reasons why AMI doesn’t publish things. … In a number of cases they don’t publish things because of an arrangement they broker with a powerful person. … [Chief Content Officer and Vice President] Dylan Howard develops a very close relationship with Harvey Weinstein. We have all of his statements saying, “This was purely a professional relationship,” but we document [that their relationship] extended to secretly recording people who might be used to impeach Harvey Weinstein’s accusers, really going after accusers in collaboration with Harvey Weinstein.

On AMI’s kill file on Donald Trump

AMI did indeed purchase the rights to [Playboy model] Karen McDougal’s story in order to bury it. Another story that I broke … is about a case in which they purchased the rights to a claim by a Trump Tower doorman that he was aware of a relationship Trump had had that had produced a “love child.” …

Like many of these catch-and-kill stories, it’s unclear whether the underlying claim has any veracity. The love child story … may or may not be spurious, and also on some level, who cares, right? … The thing that is absolutely worth caring about is the transaction, the fact that there was a potential violation of campaign finance law here and a media outlet acting as an arm of a political candidate. Here again there is an example of collaboration between the candidate and the news outlet, The National Enquirer, to try to go after a story, and here again, the underlying claim in that lawsuit raises a lot of question marks. … But the fact that AMI went after it has not been disputed by them — they’ve confirmed it — and is yet another interesting data point in this unfolding saga which is still a subject of serious criminal investigation.

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On what AMI got in return for killing unflattering stories about Trump

They have now admitted that there was a quid pro quo and that there were meetings in which a deal was struck to collaborate in this way. … You saw things like [AMI CEO] David Pecker getting a lot of access to the White House, suddenly getting a lot of access to potential Saudi donors at a time when the Enquirer was on its last legs and suffering from declining circulation numbers and a lot of debt. So we’re very careful not to say anything speculative, but certainly there are ways in which David Pecker, the head of the National Enquirer, the head of AMI and others at the Enquirer benefited from this. And we talk about Dylan Howard … the editor of the National Enquirer, who worked under David Pecker, sending friends pictures from inaugural events, really having access and being in the corridors of power. So there was an exchange of access and largesse for killing these stories, it appears.

The Washington Post’s Publisher Is Stepping Down as Jeff Bezos Takes a More Hands-On Approach
By Charlotte Klein

The news comes as Bezos has been getting a lot more involved in the inner workings of the company. Of course, Bezos owns the place and has always been engaged, at some level, with the staff. But for the most part, only the highest ranks—particularly Ryan—had been privy to it. Recently, however, his involvement had been “reaching beyond Fred,” said a source familiar with the matter.

In the past few months, Bezos has participated in several Zoom meetings with top leaders like Ryan and executive editor Sally Buzbee, as well as managing editor Justin Bank, chief financial officer Steve Gibson, and editorial page editor David Shipley, according to two sources familiar. The meetings, which have occurred on roughly a biweekly basis, have largely focused on the Post’s business and technology: things like digital strategy, audience, and product, the sources said. Bezos, I’m told, has brought refreshing candor to the discussions, in which he’s asked about things like the Post’s paywall strategy and, notably, plan for growing subscriptions. At times, he sharply questioned Ryan, one of the sources said. Bezos has been providing management feedback outside of meetings too, said the other source. (The Post declined to comment.)

Will Lewis Named C.E.O. of The Washington Post
By Katie Robertson and Benjamin Mullin

In the statement, Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and owner of The Post, reaffirmed his commitment to the publication, calling Mr. Lewis an “exceptional, tenacious industry executive.”

Mr. Bezos sent an email to The Post’s newsroom on Saturday evening, a copy of which was shared with The Times, saying that he had been drawn to Mr. Lewis’s “love of journalism and passion for driving financial success.”

…

Formerly a reporter for The Financial Times, Mr. Lewis rose through the editing ranks to become editor in chief of the Telegraph Media Group, owner of The Daily Telegraph. In 2010, Mr. Lewis joined News UK, part of the empire founded by the media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

There, he was part of the executive team charged with cleaning up a phone-hacking and police bribery scandal that led to the closing of Mr. Murdoch’s News of the World tabloid.

The Prince Harry hacking verdict exposes a nauseating catalogue of intrusion and lies
By Alan Rusbridger

In a world of information chaos, we need honest witnesses to shine a light into darkness. Instead of which, piece by painful piece, the murky truth about influential sections of the British newspaper industry has been revealed. And the truth is, they don’t much care about the truth—at least when it comes to themselves.

We now know beyond any doubt that a vast number of people in the public eye for two decades were unlawfully tracked, trailed, blagged, hacked and spied on.

We now know that a sizeable industry of private investigators was employed by at least two newspaper groups to do the dirty work. Deniability was all.

We know the dark arts didn’t stop when the Information Commissioner exposed it more than 20 years ago. They didn’t even stop when a News of the World journalist was arrested in 2006. They didn’t stop when the Guardian revealed a Murdoch Inc boardroom cover-up over payments to victims in 2009. They didn’t even stop with the Leveson Inquiry in 2011.

We know that newspaper managements at two of our biggest media companies have consistently concealed and denied the truth about what went on. They have issued dishonest statements and have lied to parliament, the stock exchange, to other journalists, to regulators and even the Leveson Inquiry, set up to establish the truth. And now some have been caught telling porkies in court.

Two companies—Murdoch Inc and the Mirror Group—have shelled out more than £1bn in costs and damages, while continuing to deny or admit the truth of what went on. Sadly, millions of emails and documents that might have cast light on the truth have gone missing.

Washington Post Publisher Says He Aided Hack Inquiry. Scotland Yard Had Doubts.
By Jo Becker and Justin Scheck

Will Lewis, now the publisher of the Washington Post, was in full crisis mode in 2011. Then an executive at a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, he was an intermediary to the police detectives investigating a British phone-hacking scandal that had placed the company’s journalists and top leaders in legal peril.

For years, reporters at News Corporation’s best-selling British tabloid had landed scoops by paying public officials and illegally listening to the voice mail messages of royals, politicians, celebrities and even a murdered girl. Mr. Lewis was supposed to cooperate with the police, identify wrongdoing and help steer the company through the crisis.

His role, he would later say, was as a force for good. He was “draining the swamp.”

But confidential documents obtained by The New York Times and interviews with people involved in the criminal investigation show that, almost from the beginning, investigators with London’s Metropolitan Police were suspicious of the company’s intentions, and came to view Mr. Lewis as an impediment.

The police suspected that the company was trying to “steer the investigation into a very narrow remit” by pointing the finger at a few journalists “while steering the investigation away from other journalists and editors,” one of the lead detectives wrote in a previously undisclosed internal summary of events.

Scotland Yard detectives were shocked to learn that the company had deleted millions of internal emails, despite notices from a lawyer for an alleged phone hacking victim and the police explicitly asking that any documents related to the investigation be preserved, according to police records and interviews with investigators.

…

One person now demanding a new investigation is Gordon Brown, a former prime minister of Britain, who had been the target of hacking and other surreptitious reporting methods.

When the police confronted Mr. Lewis about why certain emails had been removed from the servers, Mr. Lewis offered a startling response: He pointed the finger at Mr. Brown, according to police records reviewed by The Times.

The company removed the emails, Mr. Lewis told police, after receiving an unsubstantiated tip that Mr. Brown, a member of Parliament at the time, was plotting with his allies to steal emails of a top company executive.

…

Mr. Lewis added that one of the company’s top executives, Rebekah Brooks, had been the target. And he told them that Mr. Brown’s ally Tom Watson, a member of Parliament who was an early critic of News Corporation over phone hacking, had been the intermediary.

“We got a warning from a source that a current member of staff had got access to Rebekah’s emails,” he said. He met with the source, he added, who said that “emails had definitely been passed and that it was controlled by Gordon Brown.”

“We apologize for hiding this piece of work from you,” Mr. Lewis said.

When the investigators kept pressing, eventually Mr. Lewis acknowledged that the story was unsubstantiated: “We have our suspicions,” he said, “but we don’t have any evidence.”

Over 200,000 subscribers flee ‘Washington Post’ after Bezos blocks Harris endorsement
By David Folkenflik

Chief Executive and Publisher Will Lewis on Friday explained the decision not to endorse in this year’s presidential race or in future elections as a return to the Post’s roots: It has for years styled itself an “independent paper.”

Few people inside the paper credit that rationale given the timing, however, just days before a neck-and-neck race between Harris and former President Donald Trump.

Former Executive Editor Marty Baron voiced that skepticism in an interview with NPR’s Morning Edition on Monday.

“If this decision had been made three years ago, two years ago, maybe even a year ago, that would’ve been fine,” Baron said. “It’s a certainly reasonable decision. But this was made within a couple of weeks of the election, and there was no substantive serious deliberation with the editorial board of the paper. It was clearly made for other reasons, not for reasons of high principle.”

Indeed, in his own opinion piece published by the Post Monday evening, Bezos acknowledged that the timing was not ideal.

“That was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy,” he wrote.

Post reporters have revealed repeated instances of wrongdoing and allegations of illegality by Trump and his associates. The editorial page, which operates separately, has characterized Trump as a threat to the American democratic experiment. Several Post journalists say their relatives are among those canceling subscriptions.

…

In the days since, two columnists have resigned from the paper and writers have stepped down from the editorial board.

…

Former columnist Robert Kagan, an editor-at-large, explained his decision on CNN Friday night to resign from the paper.

“We are in fact bending the knee to Donald Trump because we’re afraid of what he will do,” Kagan said, noting that officials from Bezos’ Blue Origin aerospace company met with Trump a few hours after the decision became public.

Blue Origin has a multi-billion dollar contract with NASA. During the Trump administration, Amazon sued the government after alleging it had blocked a $10 billion cloud-computing-services contract with the Pentagon over the then-president’s ire about coverage in the Post, which Bezos owns personally.

Yet Bezos resolutely supported the staff’s coverage during the Trump presidency (and has not interfered with reporting on his own business interests or personal life).

Bezos publicly broke his own silence late Monday. In his opinion piece, he characterized his decision to end presidential endorsements as an attempt to avoid a “perception of bias” and “non-independence.” He rejected assertions that he was attempting to placate Trump or protect his other business interests.

…

Bezos said he did not know about the meeting between Blue Origin executives and Trump on Friday — the same day as the paper announced its decision.

Ben Bradlee’s Posthumous Advice to Jeff Bezos: You Need to Sell The Washington Post.
By John Harris

Anyone following Bezos in recent years knows what his preoccupations have been. In addition to Amazon, where he is no longer CEO, it has been with space trips, the breakup of his first marriage and the gossip-pages romance that is now leading to his second, with the fitness routine that has left him surprisingly buff at age 60, with his Mediterranean cruises, and so on.

It’s hardly my concern, but among those who have the right to wonder about the founder’s priorities would be Amazon shareholders. Whatever one thinks of Bezos’ motivations, it does not seem farfetched to believe that Trump might wish to punish his companies if he was mad at the Post.

Bradlee, the Watergate editor who died ten years ago, once said, “The older I get the more finely tuned my sense of conflict of interest seems to become.” He believed journalists should have no outside affiliations with companies, civic institutions, or clubs, and added: “I truly believe that people on the business side of newspapers shouldn’t either.”

Patrick Soon-Shiong’s controversial shakeup at the L.A. Times: ‘Bias meter,’ opinion upheaval and a call for growth
By James Rainey

Patrick Soon-Shiong had become accustomed to making the news.

He was the doctor and medical technology innovator who built a fortune, the striving South African immigrant who bought a piece of the Lakers and the L.A. billionaire who brought the Los Angeles Times back under local control when he purchased it in 2018.

…

“I’m extremely proud of work we’ve done right,” he said, “and we’ve done a lot right,” he said, pointing to six Pulitzer Prizes the paper has won during his ownership, among other honors.

…

With total outlays of about $1 billion, Soon-Shiong has made one of the largest investments in local journalism in America. He said he has not wavered in his commitment, but made clear that he expects more progress in building the audience, particularly online.

…

In the past, he infrequently attended the board’s meetings and did little to influence the content of editorials, he acknowledged.

That changed dramatically in the final weeks of this year’s presidential race. As The Times prepared to endorse Harris, and run a series of other editorials on the downsides of a second Trump presidency, Soon-Shiong said he wanted to take a different course.

He asked the editorial page leaders to create a feature enumerating the records of Trump and Harris during their respective four years as president and vice president. Soon-Shiong said that such an approach would have given readers more information, without recommending either candidate. He described that as the fairest approach.

…

“I knew this would be disruptive, and it took courage to do that,” he said, adding that he believes that in the long run the move will win over readers in a nation that has become too polarized. He rejected claims that the late decision was “so that I could support President Trump, so I could appease him, because I was scared of him, which was the furthest from the truth.”

Los Angeles Times Owner Clashed With Top Editor Over Unpublished Article
By Ryan Mac, Benjamin Mullin and Katie Robertson

When Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of The Los Angeles Times, hired Kevin Merida to be the newspaper’s top editor nearly three years ago, he hailed the journalist as someone who would maintain the publication’s high standards and journalistic integrity.

By this winter, the professional warmth between the two men had chilled. Their relationship was strained in part by an incident in December when Dr. Soon-Shiong tried to dissuade Mr. Merida from pursuing a story about a wealthy California doctor and his dog, three people with knowledge of the interactions said. The doctor was an acquaintance of Dr. Soon-Shiong’s, the people said.

The previously unreported incident occurred as The Los Angeles Times, the largest news organization on the West Coast, struggled to reverse years of losses amid a difficult market for newspapers. Mr. Merida resigned this month. Shortly afterward, the company laid off roughly 115 journalists, or about 20 percent of its newsroom.

It is not unheard-of for the owner of a publication to be consulted on sensitive reporting, particularly if it could jeopardize the newspaper legally or financially. But it is unusual for an owner or a publisher to pressure editors to stop reporting on a story well before publication, especially in cases that do not put government secrets or human lives at risk.

…

Dr. Soon-Shiong’s confrontation with Mr. Merida over the unfinished article stemmed from work that a business reporter was doing on Dr. Gary Michelson, a California surgeon who made his fortune with medical patents, the three people with knowledge of the situation said.

The reporter was looking into dueling lawsuits that involved Dr. Michelson and accusations that his dog had bitten a woman at a Los Angeles park. In a suit filed by Dr. Michelson in May, he said the woman had tried to extort him. The woman filed a personal injury lawsuit against Dr. Michelson.

Dr. Michelson, who lives in Los Angeles, and Dr. Soon-Shiong belong to a small and rarefied group of medical professionals who have become billionaires through their innovations and investments. Dr. Soon-Shiong made his fortune in biotechnology. Both are philanthropists.

…

At one point, Dr. Soon-Shiong asked to see a draft of the article, which Mr. Merida regarded as inappropriate, the people said. Dr. Soon-Shiong also told Mr. Merida on a call that he would fire journalists if he learned they were concealing the completed article from him, the people said.

Americans’ Trust in Media Remains at Trend Low
By Megan Brenan

As has been the case historically, partisans have different levels of confidence in the media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly. Currently, 54% of Democrats, 27% of independents and 12% of Republicans say they have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media. Independents’ trust matches the record low in 2022, while Democrats’ and Republicans’ are statistically similar to their historical low points.

…

The news media is the least trusted group among 10 U.S. civic and political institutions involved in the democratic process. The legislative branch of the federal government, consisting of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, is rated about as poorly as the media, with 34% trusting it.

Biden dropped out − is the news media to blame?
By Jacob L. Nelson

“Media effects” research, which, as the name suggests, “refers to the many ways individuals and society may be influenced by both news and entertainment mass media,” has long discredited the idea that people passively and predictably accept media messages – what’s referred to as the “direct effects” model.

Instead, media effects tend to be much more indirect. One of these indirect effects is “agenda setting,” which is the idea that journalists can increase the amount of time people spend thinking about a topic but not how people feel about the topic.

“The mass media set the agenda of issues for a political campaign,” write Maxwell McCombs, a professor emeritus at University of Texas at Austin, and Amy Reynolds, a dean and professor at Kent State University. The media does so not by telling people what to think but by telling them what to think about.

When The New York Times decides to place a story on the newspaper’s front page, Reynolds and McCombs point out, that decision implicitly legitimizes a topic as “newsworthy.”

…

As someone who studies the relationship between journalists and the public, I have found that journalists tend to struggle when it comes to engaging with the public. That engagement ranges from seeking more input from the public, getting the public to support the news via subscriptions, donations or memberships in news organizations, to simply competing for public attention in an increasingly overwhelming media environment.

I believe that, taken together, these limitations suggest journalists can never fully understand or control their audiences’ behavior.

Over 100 staff accuse BBC of bias in coverage of Israel’s war in Gaza
By Al Jazeera

The BBC has been accused by more than 100 of its staff of giving Israel favourable coverage in its reporting of the war on Gaza and criticised for its lack of “accurate evidence-based journalism”.

A letter sent to the broadcaster’s director general, Tim Davie, and CEO Deborah Turness on Friday said: “Basic journalistic tenets have been lacking when it comes to holding Israel to account for its actions.”

First reported by The Independent newspaper on Friday, the signatories included more than 100 anonymous BBC staff and more than 200 from the media industry, as well as historians, actors, academics and politicians.

“The consequences of inadequate coverage are significant. Every television report, article and radio interview that has failed to robustly challenge Israeli claims has systematically dehumanised Palestinians,” the letter said.

…

Last November, more than a month after Israel began its war in Gaza, eight United Kingdom-based journalists employed by the BBC wrote a letter to Al Jazeera and said the BBC is guilty of a “double standard in how civilians are seen”, given that it is “unflinching” in its reporting of alleged Russian war crimes in Ukraine.

Israel’s Shutdown of Al Jazeera Highlights Long-Running Tensions
By Vivian Yee, Emma Bubola and Liam Stack

Many defenders of Al Jazeera argue that its work is so strong that Israel wants to intimidate and censor it.

But its focus on bloodshed in Gaza has also generated controversy, with some Arab analysts saying it cheerleads for what it portrays as legitimate armed resistance to Israel, and presents commentary from Hamas officials and fighters with little critical pushback. The network is backed by the government of Qatar, which allows Hamas political leaders to live and operate in its country.

…

Israeli authorities did not specify their reasoning for barring Al Jazeera except to say that it harmed Israel’s security. But given that the network can continue broadcasting from Gaza and that its mainly Arab audience can still view the channel using virtual private networks or YouTube, many Israeli commentators called the move symbolic at most.

…

“The fact that it just gives the primary platform to Hamas, Hamas officials, Hamas spokesmen, et cetera, the fact that it cuts off any voices that are critical of Hamas — it has basically made it such that on Al Jazeera, Hamas is really the spokesman for the Palestinian people,” said Ghaith al-Omari, a Palestinian affairs analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a former adviser to Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president.

Al Jazeera rejects accusations that it is a mouthpiece for Hamas, saying in a statement that Israel’s ban is a “criminal act” that violates “the basic right to access of information.”

…

Sunday’s decision drew condemnation from rights advocates. A spokesman for the U.S. State Department, Matthew Miller, said on Monday, “We think Al Jazeera ought to be able to operate in Israel, as they operate in other countries.”

Analysts who follow Al Jazeera’s coverage say the network differentiates itself from other Arabic-language channels by broadcasting Israeli officials’ news conferences and inviting Israeli analysts and officials to appear on air.

But in general, Al Jazeera tends to embrace views held by many Arabs, broadcasting analysis “that glorifies the act of resistance” against what it portrays as “aggression by the occupation settler army,” that is, Israel, said Mahmoud Khalil, a media studies professor at Cairo University.

He added that Al Jazeera’s military analysts often exaggerated Palestinian battlefield successes and downplayed Israeli gains.

Mr. al-Omari, of the Washington Institute, said the network had also elided the worst of the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, helping to give rise to persistent denials among some Arabs of some of the bloodiest acts that Palestinian attackers had committed there.

…

Al Jazeera has been banned in other countries, including Arab states who accused the network of biased reporting and support for Islamist political movements — some of them violent — that those countries have suppressed.

As Gaza war rages, Deutsche Welle insiders accuse outlet of pro-Israel bias
By Jad Salfiti

Senior newsroom figures at Germany’s international broadcaster Deutsche Welle are cultivating a culture of fear among journalists who are tasked with reporting on Israel’s war on Gaza, 13 staff members and freelancers currently working for the network – plus a former long-term correspondent – have told Al Jazeera.

…

German support for Israel is seen as a historic duty and part of its raison d’etre to atone for the Holocaust.

A few days after the Hamas attack, Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to declare that Germany had “only one place – and it is alongside Israel”. Germany is Israel’s second-largest arms supplier after the United States.

Scholz’s government has been accused by lawyers at the International Court of Justice of aiding genocide and, in a separate case, of complicity, claims it denies. It is also regularly accused by activists of cracking down on pro-Palestinian voices.

Failing Gaza: Pro-Israel bias uncovered behind the lens of Western media
By Al Jazeera Staff

In November, CNN International Diplomatic Editor Nic Robertson embedded with the Israeli army to visit Gaza’s bombed-out al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital.

Once inside, military spokesperson Daniel Hagari claimed to have found proof Hamas was using the hospital to hide Israeli captives.

Hagari showed Robertson a document on the wall written in Arabic, which he said was a roster of Hamas members watching over the captives.

“This is a guarding list. Every terrorist has his own shift,” Hagari told Robertson.

Adam recalled the broadcast as “an embarrassing moment” for CNN.

“It wasn’t a Hamas roster at all,” he said. “It was a calendar, and written in Arabic were the days of the week. But the report that came out from Nic Robertson just swallowed up Israel’s claim.”

To make matters worse, the Israeli claim had already been debunked by Arabic speakers on social media before the CNN footage aired, and, according to multiple CNN journalists and an internal WhatsApp chat seen by Al Jazeera, a Palestinian producer alerted her colleagues, including Robertson, but was ignored. After the report aired on television, they said, another producer tried to get it corrected before it was posted online.

“One colleague saw the report and flagged to Nic, [saying,] ‘Hold on, people are saying that this is not accurate,’” Adam said. “And apparently, Nic said, ‘Are you meaning to say that Hagari is lying to us?’

“There was a chance for this to get stopped. But Nic was adamant, and it went out. He’s a very experienced correspondent. If you are trusting the Israeli government over your own colleagues, then you need to have your wrist slapped at the very least because your reporting has given cover to the Israeli operation.”

Media groups condemn Israel over Gaza journalist ‘massacre’
By Al Jazeera

Two separate reports from media freedom organisations that analysed the deaths of reporters worldwide this year found Israel carried out a “massacre” of journalists in Gaza, an accusation denied by the Israeli government.

An annual report published by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) on Thursday found the Israeli army killed 18 journalists – two in Lebanon and 16 in Gaza – as they were working this year.

The toll, equivalent to around a third of the total worldwide of 54, was described by RSF as “an unprecedented massacre”.

“Palestine is the most dangerous country for journalists, recording a higher death toll than any other country over the past five years,” the organisation said in its report, which covers data up to December 1.

In total, “more than 145” journalists have been killed by the Israeli army in Gaza since the start of the war there in October 2023, with 35 of them working at the time of their deaths, the report found.

RSF has filed four complaints with the International Criminal Court (ICC) for “war crimes committed against journalists by the Israeli army”.

…

In a separate report published on Tuesday, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) said that 104 journalists were killed worldwide in 2024, with more than half of them in Gaza.

The IFJ and RSF figures vary because they use different methodologies to calculate the tolls. RSF only records journalist deaths in its report if they have been “proven to be directly related to their professional activity”.

Netanyahu’s War on the Israeli Media
By David E. Rosenberg

Haaretz, long detested by the right for its leftist politics and more recently for its critical reporting on the war, was placed under official sanction by Netanyahu’s ministerial cabinet on Nov. 24. That means that government bodies and state-owned companies are no longer allowed to advertise or “have contact with the Haaretz newspaper in any form.”

Officially, the measures were taken due to the war, and the “many editorials that have hurt the legitimacy of the state of Israel and its right to self-defense, and particularly the remarks made in London by Haaretz publisher, Amos Schocken, that support terrorism and call for imposing sanctions on the government.”

Schocken did speak of “Palestinian freedom fighters, that Israel calls terrorists” at a London conference in October, but he later clarified that he wasn’t referring to Hamas. The newspaper backtracked further in an editorial: “Even in his clarification, Schocken erred. The fact that he didn’t mean to include Hamas terrorists doesn’t mean that other terrorist acts are legitimate, even if their perpetrators’ goal is to free themselves from occupation.”

…

In Israel’s 1999 election, Netanyahu famously slammed the media coverage he was getting, saying, “They are afraid.” He lost that election and blamed it on a hostile media. “I need my own media,” he reportedly told associates afterward.

To a degree, that is what he got. The first was the free daily newspaper Israel Hayom, which was launched in 2007 and soon became Israel’s most widely circulated newspaper thanks to generous subsidies by its owner, the late U.S. billionaire Sheldon Adelson.

…

Netanyahu has tried to do more to establish a grip on the media, but it has come to naught. He got another U.S. billionaire, Ronald Lauder, to invest in Israel’s now-defunct Channel 10, but it never resulted in the worshipful coverage he hoped for. Other efforts ended in criminal indictments—the first for allegedly trying to reach a deal with Yedioth Aharonot publisher Noni Mozes to swap friendly coverage for legislation curbing Israel Hayom and the second for allegedly trading regulatory benefits to the telecoms company Bezeq in exchange for friendly coverage on its Walla news site.

…

Israel’s war with Hamas has played a role, as well. Netanyahu has certainly not escaped criticism for his war conduct, but the trauma of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack and the fate of the hostages has made the public more receptive than in past wars when leaders accused the media of being insufficiently patriotic.

Netanyahu gives defiant speech to Congress as protesters mass near Capitol
By Abigail Hauslohner, Steve Hendrix and Louisa Loveluck

“This is not a clash of civilizations. It’s a clash between barbarism and civilization. It’s a clash between those who glorify death and those who sanctify life,” Netanyahu said to cheers and applause in the House chamber, as outside the Capitol throngs of police deployed pepper spray to keep protesters at a distance.

Gaza man with Down’s syndrome attacked by IDF dog and left to die, mother says
By BBC News

The Israeli military has admitted that a Palestinian man with Down’s syndrome who was attacked by an army dog in Gaza was left on his own by soldiers, after his family had been ordered to leave.

Muhammed Bhar was found dead by his family a week later. Responding to queries from the BBC, the Israeli army said the troops left Muhammed Bhar alone because soldiers injured in a rocket attack needed their help.

…

Muhammed Bhar was 24 and had Down’s syndrome and autism. His mother, Nabila Bhar, 70, told the BBC: “He didn’t know how to eat, drink, or change his clothes. I’m the one who changed his nappies. I’m the one who fed him. He didn’t know how to do anything by himself.”

…

In a weary tone, Nabila, who is a widow, reeled off the names of relatives’ homes where they’d sought shelter.

“We evacuated around 15 times. We would go to Jibreel’s place, but then there would be bombing at Jibreel’s place. We would go to Haydar Square, but then there would be bombing at Haydar Square. We would go to Rimal, but then there would be bombing at Rimal. We would go to Shawa Square, but there would be bombing at Shawa Square.”

Newborn saved from dead mother’s womb as Israeli strikes kill dozens across Gaza
By News Wires

Doctors in Gaza described delivering a newborn baby against incredible odds on Saturday, pulling him from his mother’s womb moments after she died of wounds sustained in an Israeli air strike.

At nine months pregnant, Ola Adnan Harb al-Kurd managed to survive just long enough to reach Al-Awda Hospital in central Gaza after an overnight strike hit her home in the Nuseirat refugee camp, medics said.

Emergency department doctors rushed into action when they saw the heavily pregnant woman arrive in critical condition, the head of the obstetrics and gynaecology department, Raed al-Saudi, said.

She was taken to the operating room, but was already “almost dead”, surgeon Akram Hussein told AFP.

Unable to save the mother, who they said was in her 20s, doctors detected a heartbeat and a team of obstetricians and surgeons was called.

“An emergency caesarean section was performed, and the foetus was extracted,” Saudi said.

Israel seeks to rewrite the laws of war
By Neve Gordon

According to the Israeli organisation Breaking the Silence, which is made up of military veterans, two doctrines have guided the Israeli assaults on Gaza since 2008. The first is the “no casualties doctrine”, which stipulates that, for the sake of protecting Israeli soldiers, Palestinian civilians can be killed with impunity; the second doctrine recommends intentionally attacking civilian sites in order to deter Hamas.

These doctrines have unsurprisingly led to mass-casualty attacks, which, according to the laws of armed conflict, constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity. As a consequence, Israel’s military lawyers have had to modify the way they interpret the laws of armed conflict so that they align with the new warfare strategies.

If two decades ago killing 14 civilians when assassinating a Hamas leader was considered disproportionate and thus a war crime by the Israeli commission of inquiry, in the first weeks after October 7, the military decided that for every junior Hamas operative, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians. If the target was a senior Hamas official, the military “authorised the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander”.

This might seem egregious, but an officer in the International Law Department of the Israeli army was very candid about such changes in a 2009 interview for the newspaper Haaretz: “Our goal of military is not to fetter the army, but to give it the tools to win in a lawful manner.”

The former head of the department, Colonel Daniel Reisner, also publicly stated this strategy was pursued through “a revision of international law”.

“If you do something for long enough, the world will accept it,” he said, “The whole of international law is now based on the notion that an act that is forbidden today becomes permissible if executed by enough countries.”

War and Famine
By Andrea Mazzarino

Many war stories end with hunger wreaking havoc on significant portions of a population. In Christian theology, the Biblical “four horses of the apocalypse,” believed by many in early modern Europe to presage the end of the world, symbolized invasion, armed conflict, and famine followed by death. They suggest the degree to which people have long recognized how violence causes starvation. Armed conflict disrupts food supplies as warring factions divert resources to arms production and their militaries while destroying the kinds of infrastructure that enable societies to feed themselves. Governments, too, sometimes use starvation as a weapon of war.

…

Today, armed conflict is the most significant cause of hunger. According to the United Nations’ World Food Program, 70% of the inhabitants of war- or violence-affected regions don’t get enough to eat, although our global interconnectedness means that none of us are immune from high food, fuel, and fertilizer prices and war’s supply-chain interruptions. Americans have experienced the impact of Ukraine’s war when it comes to fuel and grain prices, but in regions like sub-Saharan Africa, which depend significantly on Eastern European foodstuffs and fuel, the conflict has sparked widespread hunger. Consider it a particularly cruel feature of modern warfare that people who may not even know about wars being fought elsewhere can still end up bearing the wounds on their bodies.

…

Now, Gaza is a major humanitarian catastrophe in which the U.S. is complicit. Armed far-right Israeli groups have repeatedly blocked aid from entering the enclave or targeted Gazans clamoring for such aid, and Israeli forces have fired on aid workers and civilians seeking to deliver food. In a striking irony, Palestinians have also died because of food aid, as people drowned while trying to retrieve U.S. and Jordanian airdrops of aid in the sea or were crushed by them on land when parachutes failed.

This country’s complicity in Israel’s siege and bombardment of Gaza has been disastrous: an estimated at least two out of every 10,000 people there are now dying daily from starvation, with the very young, very old, and those living with disabilities the worst affected. Gazans are trying to create flour from foraged animal feed, scouring ruins for edible plants, and drinking tepid, often polluted water, to tragic effect, including the rapid spread of disease. Tales of infants and young children dying because they can’t get enough to eat and distraught parents robbed of their dignity because they can do nothing for their kids (or themselves) are too numerous and ghastly to detail here. But just for a moment imagine that all of this was happening to your loved ones.

A growing number of Gazans, living in conditions where their most basic nutritional needs can’t be met, are approaching permanent stunting or death. The rapid pace of Gaza’s descent into famine is remarkable among conflicts. According to UNICEF, the World Health Organization, and the World Food Program, the decline in the nutritional status of Gazans during the first three months of the war alone was unprecedented. Eight months into the Israeli assault on that 25-mile-long strip of land, a major crossing for aid delivery has again been closed, thanks to the most recent offensive in Rafah and a half-million Gazans face “catastrophic levels of hunger.” Thought of another way, the fourth horseman has arrived.

The starvation of Gaza is a perverse repudiation of Judaism’s deepest values
By John Oakes

Much of what we know about the effects of long-term starvation comes from a manuscript smuggled out of the ghetto in 1942 and translated into English in the 1970s as Hunger Disease. The remarkable document was compiled by a heroic team of 28 Jewish doctors working under unimaginable conditions.

Hunger Disease tracks the effects of starvation with both precision and striking descriptions: in breaking starvation down into three stages, Hunger Disease catalogs stage one, when surplus fat disappears, as being “reminiscent of the time before the war when people went to Marienbad, Karlsbad, or Vichy for a reducing cure and came back looking younger and feeling better”. With time and no break in malnutrition, starvation enters stage two: “Gradually youth was drained and young people changed into withered old people.” Eventually, “like a melting wax candle”, patients slip into the final, terminal stage.

The suffering and the defiance of the inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto have become touchstones for students of Jewish history, a story that every Jew knows well. As Holocaust museums struggle to address the Israel-Gaza war, the idea that we can somehow put what is happening in Gaza at a distant remove from the history of the Warsaw ghetto is grotesque.

Famine has spread throughout Gaza, say UN experts
By Eyad Kourdi and Lauren Said-Moorhouse

An estimated 495,000 people in Gaza – or 22% of the population – are “experiencing an extreme lack of food,” according to an Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) report last month.

Under the IPC system – a five-phase scale used as a common standard for classifying the severity of food insecurity – a famine can only be declared if data shows certain thresholds are met.

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The experts said that deaths of children from a lack of food and water indicate that health and social structures have been critically weakened. “When the first child dies from malnutrition and dehydration, it becomes irrefutable that famine has taken hold,” the experts added.

The statement cited the deaths of three Palestinian children — 6-month-old Fayez Ataya, 13-year-old Abdulqader Al-Serhi and 9-year-old Ahmad Abu Reida. It said they died from malnutrition and lack of access to adequate healthcare in late May and early June.

The experts emphasized that these children had died from starvation despite medical treatment in central Gaza, indicating that famine has now spread from northern Gaza into central and southern regions.

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Israel’s permanent mission to the UN in Geneva dismissed the statement, alleging the experts were “spreading misinformation” and “supporting Hamas propaganda.”

The ICC charged Israeli officials with starving Gaza. What happens now?
By Louisa Loveluck

With war-battered Gaza wracked by hunger, the move by the International Criminal Court to charge Israel’s highest officials with the crime of starvation has become a closely watched test case for international law.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant are the first individuals to be formally accused by an international court of deliberate starvation, one of seven charges for which ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan announced in May that he would seek arrest warrants.

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Israel, like the United States, is not an ICC member state, and experts expect the country will challenge any warrants on jurisdictional grounds.

“The problem is that the ICC has been very unclear about the grounds for its jurisdiction over sitting heads of state from non-state parties, despite having had the opportunity to deal with this question before,” said Monique Cormier, a senior lecturer in the Monash University Faculty of Law in Melbourne, Australia.

The only sitting country leaders from non-member states to be indicted by the ICC are former Sudanese president Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who was never arrested for those crimes, Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, whose case was dropped, and Russian President Vladimir Putin, who remains at large. The court has convicted five men of war crimes and crimes against humanity, all African militia leaders.

Israel rejects accusations that it is carrying out a policy of starvation, saying its war is against only Hamas militants and not Palestinian civilians.

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The ICC’s founding statute lists “intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare” as a potential war crime, meaning that a prosecutor must establish that food and other staples are being deliberately withheld from the civilian population. Statements from senior Israeli officials articulating a plan to seal off Gaza from the outside world, despite the dependence of its 2.2 million people on international aid, date back to the earliest weeks of the war.

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In addition to aid shortfalls, Israeli airstrikes and bulldozers have destroyed farms, greenhouses and orchards, devastating the enclave’s ability to grow its own food. Military operations have also heavily damaged Gaza’s water grid, electricity network and health-care system.

What is the ICC and why it is considering arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders
By Mike Corder

The ICC was established in 2002 as the permanent court of last resort to prosecute individuals responsible for the world’s most heinous atrocities — war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and the crime of aggression.

The Rome Statute creating the ICC was adopted in 1998 and took effect when it got 60 ratifications on July 1, 2002. The U.N. General Assembly endorsed the ICC, but the court is independent.

Without a police force, the ICC relies on member states to arrest suspects, which has proven to be a major obstacle to prosecutions.

Netanyahu said last month that Israel “will never accept any attempt by the ICC to undermine its inherent right of self-defense.” He said that while the ICC won’t affect Israel’s actions, it would “set a dangerous precedent.”

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In 2020, then U.S. President Donald Trump authorized economic and travel sanctions on the ICC prosecutor and another senior prosecution office staffer. The ICC staff were looking into U.S. and allies’ troops and intelligence officials for possible war crimes in Afghanistan.

U.S. President Joe Biden, whose administration has provided crucial military and political support for the Gaza offensive, lifted the sanctions in 2021.

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Last year, the court issued a warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin on charges of responsibility for the abductions of children from Ukraine. Russia responded by issuing its own arrest warrants for Khan and ICC judges.

Israel should evacuate settlements, pay reparations, ICJ says
By Loveday Morris

The International Court of Justice, the top judicial arm of the United Nations, said Friday that Israel should bring an end to its illegal occupation of Palestinian territory, cease new settlement activity, evacuate existing settlements and pay reparations to Palestinians who have lost land and property.

The Hague-based court said that Israel is responsible for “systematic discrimination” against Palestinians based on race or ethnicity and breached the right of Palestinians to self-determination.

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The searing advisory opinion issued by judges is not legally binding, but the decision could have expansive consequences in the international arena, including in trade and diplomacy. The court said that member states should not recognize as legal the situation arising from Israel’s unlawful presence in occupied territory, nor should they render aid or assistance in maintaining it.

Israel declined to take part in hearings and described the proceedings as biased and an “abuse of international law and the judicial process.”

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The ICJ said that Israel was responsible for restitution of property lost by “all natural or legal persons concerned,” or in cases where that is not possible, should pay compensation. It accused Israel of a “systematic failure” in preventing or punishing settler attacks in the West Bank, creating a “coercive environment” for Palestinians which is inconsistent with Israel’s responsibilities as an occupying power.

It said that Israel’s policies and practices “entrench” its control of illegally occupied territory, creating “irreversible effects on the ground” which essentially amount to the annexation of “large parts” of Palestinian territory.

Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in 1967 during a swift and resounding defeat of Arab armies led by Egypt, Syria and Jordan. Much international diplomacy on the conflict envisages a two-state solution based on 1967 borders — a stated goal of the Biden administration — but Israel has steadily expanded its settlements, drastically altering the territory.

Between November 2022 and October 2023, Israel “advanced or approved” 24,300 new housing units on occupied territory, Salam said. That included 9,670 in East Jerusalem.

Israel claims sovereignty of the entirety of Jerusalem, describing it as its “eternal” and “undivided capital.”

Israeli troops and settlers withdrew from Gaza in 2005, but retained control of its borders and ports, and the United Nations still considers the enclave occupied territory.

In the West Bank, Palestinians have been squeezed into ever-shrinking islands of land.

US says it wants Palestinians to have a country of their own – but its actions say otherwise
By Dennis Jett

Spain, Ireland and Norway recognized a Palestinian state in May 2024, bringing the total number of countries that do so to 144.

The United States is not one of them.

The U.S. has officially favored a two-state solution, meaning both Israel and a Palestinian state would be recognized as official countries, since the Clinton administration in the 1990s. President Joe Biden reiterated that position at his July 11, 2024, news conference following the NATO summit, when he said, “There’s no ultimate answer other than a two-state solution.”

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But while the American government’s vision for peace includes the creation of a Palestinian state in theory, the U.S. has repeatedly prevented attempts in the U.N. to elevate Palestine from its status from observer to a full member state.

That would be more than a symbolic change, as a Palestinian state would be officially recognized as a country in the eyes of the international community and that would provide it standing in other international organizations and courts.

The U.S. blocked that from happening as recently as April 2024, when it vetoed a “resolution on Palestinian statehood” in the Security Council, which must approve new U.N. members.

To honour Jimmy Carter’s legacy, amplify his call for freedom in Palestine
By Mustafa Barghouti

In 2006, Carter published Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, a book that shook the American political landscape. In it, he laid out a simple truth: without Palestinian freedom and dignity, there could be no peace. He made the case not as an enemy of Israel, but as someone deeply invested in its survival. Yet, for daring to speak this truth, Carter was vilified. He was accused of being anti-Semitic and ostracised by many in the US and even his Democratic Party. But Carter never wavered. He continued to speak the truth about the realities in Palestine – not out of malice for Israel, but from a deep belief in justice.

He understood that the only way Israel could truly thrive was through a just peace with the Palestinians. He recognised that the Palestinian people, who have lived under brutal occupation since 1967 and experienced repeated displacement since 1948, were entitled to the same rights and dignity as anyone else.

US action on a two-state solution in Israel-Palestine cannot wait
By Sultan Barakat and Erin McCandless

Recalling how his people once made a similar plea for international recognition of their independence, Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar described the two-state solution as “the only credible path for Israel, Palestine, and their peoples”. In addition to wide international consensus, a two-state solution is premised on the right of self-determination and respect for the rights of both peoples on the one hand, and sheer pragmatism on the other.

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Critics argue that a two-state solution is no longer viable due to settlement expansion, security concerns, and historical and religious claims to the entirety of the land on both sides. However, these obstacles, while significant, are not insurmountable. Other seemingly intractable conflicts, such as those in Northern Ireland and South Africa, have found resolution through compromise and dialogue.

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To achieve sustainable peace and a viable two-state solution, and prevent another cycle of violence, a comprehensive plan must also be put in place to ensure security for both nations, and crucially related, Palestinian economic independence. Beyond the exorbitant costs of rebuilding Gaza (estimated by the UN at $40bn and taking some 16 years), Palestinians will need reliable and comprehensive financial support from the international community to lay the ground for a viable, self-sufficient state.

Ultimately, action on a two state solution will require political will – notably by the international community – to move this process in the right direction of history, towards a viable and sustainable peace.

‘We see our history in their eyes’: Why Ireland is so staunchly pro-Palestinian
By Ron Kampeas

When the leader of Ireland appeared alongside President Joe Biden on St. Patrick’s Day, he spent about half of his speech advocating for a ceasefire in Gaza. But before he made his case, he explained why the issue hit so close to home.

“When I travel the world, leaders often ask me why the Irish have such empathy for the Palestinian people,” Leo Varadkar, the Irish taoiseach, or prime minister, said Sunday at the White House. “And the answer is simple: We see our history in their eyes — a story of displacement, of dispossession and national identity questioned and denied, forced emigration, discrimination and now hunger.”

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As Varadkar explained, Ireland has historically favored the Palestinians in their conflict with Israel, a sympathy that has manifested over the years in its diplomacy and culture.

Ireland was the last European Union country to allow an Israeli embassy to open, in 1993, and was the first to call for a Palestinian state, in 1980. It has spearheaded criticism of Israel at the United Nations.

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The Ireland-Israel analogy has spread beyond the shores of the two nations. The heyday of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in the 1990s, when the Oslo Accords were signed, coincided with the peace process in Northern Ireland, which culminated in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. The American former senator who helped broker that agreement, George Mitchell, later served as the U.S. envoy for Middle East peace.

On Sunday, Varadkar said the Northern Ireland peace in the 1990s could serve as a model for the Israelis and Palestinians.

“I also believe there are lessons that can be drawn from our own peace process in Northern Ireland, particularly the concept of parity of esteem and the totality of relationships,” he said at the White House.

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On Sunday, Varadkar stressed his sense of identification with the Palestinians. But despite his criticism, he added that he also recognizes a shared history between Ireland and Israel.

“Mr. President, we also see Israel’s history reflected in our eyes,” he said. “A diaspora whose heart never left home, no matter how many generations passed; a nation state that was reborn; and a language revived.”

Israel to close embassy in Ireland over ‘antisemitic’ policies
By BBC News

Israel will close its embassy in Dublin over “the extreme anti-Israel policies of the Irish government”, its foreign minister has said.

Gideon Saar said the Republic of Ireland had crossed “every red line”.

In a statement, he said Israel’s ambassador to Dublin had been recalled in the past following what it called Ireland’s “unilateral decision to recognise a Palestinian state”.

He added that the decision followed Ireland’s announcement of its support for South Africa’s legal action against Israel in the International Court of Justice (ICJ), accusing the country of “genocide”.

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Tánaiste (Irish deputy prime minister) Micheál Martin said there are no plans to close its embassy in Israel.

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He said: “I believe firmly in the importance of maintaining diplomatic channels of communication and regret that this decision has been taken”.

“Ireland’s position on the conflict in the Middle East has always been guided by the principles of international law and the obligation on all states to adhere to international humanitarian law.”

He said the continuation of the war in Gaza and the “loss of innocent lives is simply unacceptable and contravenes international law.

He added: “It represents the collective punishment of the Palestinian people in Gaza. We need an immediate ceasefire, the release of all hostages and a surge of humanitarian aid into Gaza.”

ADDRESS BEFORE THE IRISH PARLIAMENT, JUNE 28, 1963
By President John F. Kennedy

No people ever believed more deeply in the cause of Irish freedom than the people of the United States. And no country contributed more to building my own than your sons and daughters. They came to our shores in a mixture of hope and agony, and I would not underrate the difficulties of their course once they arrived in the United States. They left behind hearts, fields, and a nation yearning to be free. It is no wonder that James Joyce described the Atlantic as a bowl of bitter tears. And an earlier poet wrote, “They are going, going, going, and we cannot bid them stay.”

But today this is no longer the country of hunger and famine that those emigrants left behind. It is not rich, and its progress is not yet complete, but it is, according to statistics, one of the best fed countries in the world. Nor is it any longer a country of persecution, political or religious. It is a free country, and that is why any American feels at home.

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In an age when “history moves with the tramp of earthquake feet”–in an age when a handful of men and nations have the power literally to devastate mankind–in an age when the needs of the developing nations are so staggering that even the richest lands often groan with the burden of assistance–in such an age, it may be asked, how can a nation as small as Ireland play much of a role on the world stage?

I would remind those who ask that question, including those in other small countries, of the words of one of the great orators of the English language:

“All the world owes much to the little ‘five feet high’ nations. The greatest art of the world was the work of little nations. The most enduring literature of the world came from little nations. The heroic deeds that thrill humanity through generations were the deeds of little nations fighting for their freedom. And oh, yes, the salvation of mankind came through a little nation.”

Ireland has already set an example and a standard for other small nations to follow.

This has never been a rich or powerful country, and yet, since earliest times, its influence on the world has been rich and powerful. No larger nation did more to keep Christianity and Western culture alive in their darkest centuries. No larger nation did more to spark the cause of independence in America, indeed, around the world. And no larger nation has ever provided the world with more literary and artistic genius.

This is an extraordinary country. George Bernard Shaw, speaking as an Irishman, summed up an approach to life: Other people, he said “see things and . . . say ‘Why?’ . . . But I dream things that never were– and I say: ‘Why not?'”

It is that quality of the Irish–that remarkable combination of hope, confidence and imagination–that is needed more than ever today. The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics, whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were, and ask why not. It matters not how small a nation is that seeks world peace and freedom, for, to paraphrase a citizen of my country, “the humblest nation of all the world, when clad in the armor of a righteous cause, is stronger than all the hosts of Error.”

UN General Assembly demands ceasefire in Gaza and backs UN agency helping Palestinian refugees
By Edith M. Lederer

The U.N. General Assembly overwhelmingly approved resolutions Wednesday demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and backing the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees that Israel has moved to ban.

The votes in the 193-nation world body were 158-9, with 13 abstentions to demand a ceasefire now and 159-9 with 11 abstentions in support of the agency known as UNRWA.

The votes culminated two days of speeches overwhelmingly calling for an end to the 14-month war between Israel and the militant Hamas group and demanding access throughout Gaza to address the growing humanitarian catastrophe.

Israel and its close ally, the United States, were in a tiny minority speaking and voting against the resolutions. Other opposing both resolutions included Argentina, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay and Tonga.

While Security Council resolutions are legally binding, General Assembly resolutions are not, though they do reflect world opinion. There are no vetoes in the assembly.

The Palestinians and their supporters went to the General Assembly after the U.S. vetoed a Security Council resolution on Nov. 20 demanding an immediate Gaza ceasefire. It was supported by the council’s 14 other members but the U.S. objected that it was not linked to an immediate release of hostages taken by Hamas militants during their attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which triggered the war.

Why Are Cuba and the U.S. Still Mired in the Cold War?
By William M. LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh

Ten years ago this month, the United States and Cuba reached a historic deal to normalize diplomatic relations, which was intended to end decades of acrimonious conflict between the two countries and bring prosperity to Cuba. Instead, relations today are at a low point, and Cuba is facing one of the worst economic crises in its history. What went wrong?

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On Dec. 17, 2014, Obama and Cuban President Raúl Castro stunned the world with their simultaneous televised announcement that the United States and Cuba had agreed to restore ties.

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After more than 50 years of perpetual hostility in U.S. policy toward Cuba—dominated by dangerous Cold War episodes such as the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban missile crisis, CIA assassination plots, terrorist exile violence, and the enduring U.S. trade embargo—the rapprochement between Washington and Havana marked a historic foreign-policy achievement. In short order, Havana and Washington reopened embassies, normalized U.S. travel, expanded trade and commerce, and began collaborating on key areas of mutual interest. In March 2016, Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to travel to Havana since 1928.

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During the Trump administration, the historic opening to Havana was all but closed. One by one, President Donald Trump rescinded Obama’s executive authorizations on travel and commerce, replacing them with a slew of new, punishing sanctions—penalties that remained largely unaltered during Joe Biden’s presidency.

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And the worst may be yet to come. With Trump’s reelection in the 2024 presidential election, and his nomination of hardliner Sen. Marco Rubio for secretary of state, Cuba faces a return to the Cold War-era of regime-change intervention.

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During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump promised conservative Cuban Americans that he would dismantle Obama’s policy. On June 16, 2017, he repudiated normalization and resuscitated regime change, telling a cheering crowd in Miami, “Effective immediately, I am canceling the last administration’s completely one-sided deal with Cuba.” New regulations restricted travel, imposed limits on remittances, and blocked business with Cuban companies managed by the military, including most hotels. The diplomatic working groups on issues of mutual interest were disbanded.

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Together, these measures constituted the most severe sanctions since the embargo was imposed in the 1960s and cost the Cuban economy billions of dollars annually. Then came the COVID-19 pandemic. Beset by the structural problems typical of centrally planned economies and weakened by U.S. sanctions, the Cuban economy was like a patient with preexisting conditions. The tourism industry was closed for almost two years, with lost revenue of more than $6 billion. Family visits stopped, closing off the principal remaining channel for remittances, which fell from an estimated $3.7 billion in 2019 to $2.4 billion in 2020 and $1.1 billion in 2021. By the time Trump left office, Cuba was in crisis and few traces of Obama’s engagement policy remained.

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Biden’s election in 2020 seemed to promise some relief. During the campaign, he criticized the impact of Trump’s policies on Cuban families and promised to restore Obama’s policy of normalization “in large part.” But he never did.

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Most importantly, he left Cuba on the list of state sponsors of terrorism, even though Secretary of State Antony Blinken admitted publicly, and Biden himself admitted privately, that it did not belong there.

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Trump’s return to the White House could presage a return to maximum pressure, especially with Rubio as secretary of states and Rep. Mike Waltz as national security advisor.

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But resuming maximum pressure would stir a political hornet’s nest. After eight years of intense sanctions exacerbated by the Cuban government’s policy mistakes, the island is suffering an unprecedented economic and social crisis. Life is so hard and prospects for the future are so grim that more than a million Cubans—9 percent of the population—emigrated in the past three years. Three-quarters of them have come to the United States, 690,000 arrived undocumented at the southern border, another 100,000 admitted under Biden’s humanitarian parole program. If Trump adopts policies that deepen Cuba’s crisis, the new surge of migrants could dwarf these numbers, which would seriously complicate his plans to end irregular immigration.

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Historic and successful as it was, the Obama-Castro détente proved to be easily reversed by political forces in Washington more comfortable with the hostility and conflict of the past than with the future promise of constructive engagement and coexistence.

How Joe Biden Sabotaged the ‘Rules-Based Order’
By H.A. Hellyer

The alleged hypocrisy of U.S. foreign policy has long been a subject of fierce debate both within the West (including the United States) and outside of it. Yet there is something unique and disturbing about this moment. When the U.S. army invaded Iraq in 2003, for example, it did so claiming that an evil tyrant (Saddam Hussein) had to be stopped, and it put forward all kinds of legal justifications for the so-called collateral damage that the invasion caused.

By contrast, today, the United States—the proclaimed upholder of the rules-based order—is not only defending and backing Israel. It’s also denying that any infringements are even taking place.

The U.S. government is not even claiming that Israel is justified in its violations—as it did to defend its own actions in Iraq—or asserting some kind of exceptional circumstance or exemption. Washington is actually claiming that violations haven’t even taken place, or to quote National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby, that the State Department has found no incidents in which Israel “violated international humanitarian law” during its campaign against Gaza.

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Yet despite the growing body of evidence from U.S. investigators substantiating those allegations and indicating that at least certain units of the Israeli military have been guilty of “gross violations of human rights,” Washington has failed to consistently apply the Leahy laws—a set of laws intended to prohibit U.S. government funds from being given to foreign actors deemed to be in violation of human rights.

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This kind of parallel reality, where even potential violations of U.S. law are seemingly being disregarded by a U.S. president, is destabilizing in a way that the Washington establishment doesn’t seem to have quite appreciated as of yet.

Why America Has Failed to Forge an Israel-Hamas Cease-Fire
By Eric Min

Political scientists including Katja Favretto, Andrew Kydd, and Burcu Savun have found that powerful biased mediators—and the United States is certainly one for Israel—have greater success in convincing belligerents to settle than weak or unbiased mediators. This is because mediators that favor one side are capable of persuading that side to negotiate and abide by a deal. But the United States may be too biased. Washington has consistently shown its willingness to use UN Security Council vetoes to protect Israel, to criticize International Criminal Court charges against Israel, and to generally tolerate Israel’s wartime conduct. Overwhelming U.S. support for Israel has raised doubts that the United States would be able to deter Israel from reneging on a settlement.

How Trump could reorder the world
By Stephen Kinzer

Gaza is the foreign policy issue on which there seemed to be the least difference between Trump and his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. She repeated the familiar mantra about American support for Israel being “ironclad” and struggled to express sympathy with Palestinian victims. Trump didn’t even try. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has called Trump the “best friend that Israel has ever had in the White House.” Last month Trump reportedly gave him pithy advice about how to conduct his bombing of Gaza: “Do what you have to do.”

Biden Is Not the First U.S. President to Cut Off Weapons to Israel
By Peter Baker

The president was livid. He had just been shown pictures of civilians killed by Israeli shelling, including a small baby with an arm blown off. He ordered aides to get the Israeli prime minister on the phone and then dressed him down sharply.

The president was Ronald Reagan, the year was 1982, and the battlefield was Lebanon, where Israelis were attacking Palestinian fighters. The conversation Mr. Reagan had with Prime Minister Menachem Begin that day, Aug. 12, would be one of the few times aides ever heard the usually mild-mannered president so exercised.

“It is a holocaust,” Mr. Reagan told Mr. Begin angrily.

Mr. Begin, whose parents and brother were killed by the Nazis, snapped back, “Mr. President, I know all about a holocaust.”

Nonetheless, Mr. Reagan retorted, it had to stop. Mr. Begin heeded the demand. Twenty minutes later, he called back and told the president that he had ordered a halt to the shelling. “I didn’t know I had that kind of power,” Mr. Reagan marveled to aides afterward.

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The August 1982 bombardment in particular affected Mr. Reagan in a powerful way. Whatever his politics or policy, he reacted viscerally to the pictures he saw.

“Reagan was deeply upset by the bombardment of Beirut,” Richard Murphy, his ambassador to Saudi Arabia, recalled in an oral history by Deborah Hart Strober and Gerald S. Strober. “He made it very plain that he wanted this to come to a stop when the human side was pushed in his face.”

Mr. Reagan did not hold back and was willing to put it all on the line. “I was angry,” he wrote in his diary that last night, describing the tense conversation with Mr. Begin. “I told him it had to stop or our entire future relationship was endangered.” And stop it did, at least temporarily.

Gaza War Puts New Pressures on U.S. Arms Transfer Policies
By Michael Crowley

In February of last year, President Biden changed the U.S. standard for cutting off weapons deliveries to foreign militaries that harm civilians during wartime.

Under the new arms transfer policy, Mr. Biden said countries that were “more likely than not” to violate international law or human rights with American weapons should not receive them. Previously, U.S. officials were required to show “actual knowledge” of such violations, a higher bar to clear.

A few months later, in August, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken issued a directive instructing State Department officials overseas to investigate incidents of civilian harm by foreign militaries using American weapons and recommend responses that could include halting arms deliveries.

Hamas attacked Israel two months later, triggering the war in Gaza and plunging Mr. Biden and Mr. Blinken into an intense global debate about how Israel is using U.S. arms. To Mr. Biden’s critics, his steadfast refusal to limit arms deliveries to Israel runs counter to those initiatives and badly undermines his goal of positioning the United States as a protector of civilians in wartime.

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In one of his first major acts as president, in February 2021, Mr. Biden even halted the delivery of offensive arms to the Saudis, who are fighting Iran-backed Houthi militants in Yemen. “This war has to end,” he said. Mr. Biden has since restored the deliveries.

Behind the War of Words Between Macron and Netanyahu
By Catherine Porter and Aurelien Breeden

When President Emmanuel Macron of France said over the weekend that countries should stop supplying Israel with weapons if they want a cease-fire, the reaction from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel was swift and scathing.

“As Israel fights the forces of barbarism led by Iran, all civilized countries should be standing firmly by Israel’s side,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a video statement. “Yet President Macron and some other Western leaders are now calling for an arms embargo against Israel. Shame on them.”

“Let me tell you this,” he added. “Israel will win with or without their support, but their shame will continue long after the war is won.”

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France hardly sells any weapons to Israel, which receives over 90 percent of its arms shipments from the United States and Germany, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which tracks the global weapons trade.

Mr. Macron’s comments were widely seen as a sign of frustration with the United States. “If we call for a cease-fire, the consistent thing to do is not to supply the weapons of war,” he said at a news conference on Saturday, adding that those who provide such weapons “cannot stand by our side each day and call for a cease-fire while continuing to supply them.”

The EU’s support for Israel makes it complicit in genocide
By Niamh Ní Bhriain and Mark Akkerman

As the United States is considered the biggest backer of the Israeli war machine, it is easy to discount European support. A closer look at the extent of European financial and military assistance for Israel, however, lays bare the EU’s complicity in the continuing genocide in Gaza and various atrocities in the occupied West Bank.

The EU is the second-largest arms supplier to Israel after the US. According to figures from the European External Action Service’s COARM database, between 2018 and 2022, EU member states sold arms worth 1.76 billion euros ($1.9bn) to Israel.

Arms have continued to flow from EU countries to Israel even after the International Court of Justice made an interim ruling in January that the Israeli army was plausibly committing genocide. The EU has a system in place to implement arms embargoes but has refused to apply to Israel, leaving member states to slowly implement measures under pressure from civil society with scant political will to do so and falling far short of what is required.

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For all its talk about human rights and the rule of law, the EU has failed to uphold either in response to Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza leaving its credibility and legitimacy in tatters.

Amnesty International says weapons from U.S. allies are fueling Sudan’s raging civil war
By Sarah Carter

It’s often called the forgotten conflict, but the civil war that has torn Sudan apart for 19 months is fueling the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis. In just over a year and a half, 13 million people have been displaced from their homes. At least one overcrowded camp for displaced civilians is already dealing with famine, while other parts of the country are suffering though famine-like conditions.

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The war in Sudan has been complicated by support and weapon supplies from external countries to both sides. A new report by Amnesty International alleges the RSF is using weapons supplied by the U.S.-allied United Arab Emirates, and equipped with military technology made in France.

Amnesty experts have warned that those weapons could be used by the RSF to commit further alleged war crimes.

A July report by the rights group said there was a constant weapons supply from the UAE, China, Russia, Turkey and Yemen into Sudan, and often into Darfur, in breach of a long-standing United Nations arms embargo on the region.

The World Once Tried to Stop a Genocide in Sudan. Now It Looks Away
By Kholood Khair

Two decades ago, the world came together in an effort to “Save Darfur,” a mass mobilization of collective outrage that forced governments and multilateral institutions to act. Rallies, postcard- and letter-writing campaigns, moments of silence on college campuses, “Global Days for Darfur,” widespread support from Hollywood celebrities—all of it made Darfur and the Janjaweed, the notorious “devils on horseback,” into household names.

“In many ways it is unfair but it is nevertheless true that this genocide will be on your watch,” George Clooney told the U.N. Security Council in 2006. “How you deal with it will be your legacy.”

The carnage today, not only in Darfur but across Sudan, is in many ways worse than it was then.

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Twenty years ago, the SAF and RSF led a genocidal campaign against landed African ethnic groups in Darfur. Today, they are fighting each other while perpetuating serious rights violations. The RSF, in particular, has revived its genocidal campaigns against those same populations and extended it to the rest of the country. Alongside its allied Arab militias, the RSF have been accused of deliberate attacks on civilians amounting to crimes against humanity and war crimes. The International Criminal Court has opened new investigations into allegations of grave crimes committed by both the SAF and RSF in Darfur.

Sudan’s Manmade Famine
By Alex de Waal

Since April 2023, the Sudanese Armed Forces, headed by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, have been locked in a devastating conflict with the Rapid Support Forces, a heavily armed paramilitary group led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagolo, known as Hemedti. As the two former allies struggle for supremacy, both have deliberately used starvation tactics to advance their war aims.

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Until now, the two Gulf leaders that have the power to jointly bring Burhan and Hemedti to the table have failed to seriously engage with the crisis. These are Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, and the United Arab Emirates’ President Mohammed bin Zayed, known as MBZ. The Saudis hosted the talks—but MBS did not want the UAE to participate. The UAE does not want the Saudis to influence a deal—or get the credit for it.

There’s a tangled history here. Nine years ago, when the two Gulf kingdoms launched their war against the Houthis in Yemen, they enlisted the SAF to fight in their anti-Houthi coalition; Burhan was the leader of that SAF contingent. But at the same time, Hemedti provided RSF fighters under private contracts to both the Saudis and the Emiratis. And Hemedti’s family business, al-Junaid, became an important supplier of gold to the UAE. Today, there are indications that the UAE is arming and funding the RSF—charges that Abu Dhabi has unconvincingly denied. And Saudi Arabia, with its links to Burhan, has permitted Egypt, Qatar, and Turkey to support the SAF, including with weapons, and has blocked other peace initiatives. This kind of meddling on both sides means that any progress on a cease-fire will require joint action by Riyadh and Abu Dhabi.

With no end to the war in sight, other external actors have added fuel to the fire. Late last year Iran sent drones to SAF as part of an effort to revive its links with Sudan’s Islamists, who support the SAF. In May, Russia took steps toward a deal with the SAF for a naval facility in Port Sudan—and with its Wagner paramilitary group still closely linked to the RSF, Russia now has stakes in both warring camps.

US urges countries supplying weapons to Sudan’s warring parties to stop, warning of a new genocide
By Edith M. Lederer

The United States on Monday implored all countries supplying weapons to Sudan’s warring parties to halt arms sales, warning that history in the vast western Darfur region where there was a genocide 20 years ago “is repeating itself.”

U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield told reporters after an emergency closed meeting of the U.N. Security Council that El Fasher, the only capital in Darfur not held by paramilitary forces, is “on the precipice of a large-scale massacre.”

She urged all countries to raise the threat that “a crisis of epic proportions is brewing.” Britain’s deputy ambassador James Kariuki echoed her appeal saying: “The last thing Sudan needs is a further escalation on top of this conflict that’s been going on for a whole year.”

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U.N. political chief Rosemary DiCarlo told the council on April 19 the year-long war has been fueled by weapons from foreign supporters who continue to flout U.N. sanctions aimed at helping end the conflict. “This is illegal, it is immoral, and it must stop,” she said.

She didn’t name any of the foreign supporters.

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Thomas-Greenfield said Monday that all regional powers must stop providing weapons to the warring parties as the U.N. arms embargo demands, and told reporters the United States will continue pressuring them.

In response to a question, she said one of the countries the United States has engaged with is the United Arab Emirates, which has repeatedly denied providing any weapons to Sudan.

Sudan is burning and foreign powers are benefiting – what’s in it for the UAE
By May Darwich

Gold has been one of the main drivers of the Sudan conflict. It allows both parties to fuel their war machines. The UAE is the main beneficiary of this trade. It receives nearly all the gold smuggled from Sudan and has become a hub for laundering trafficked gold into the global market. The latest available statistics show that, officially, the UAE imported precious metals from Sudan valued at about US$2.3 billion in 2022.

Additionally, the UAE imports 90% of its food supply. Since the global food crisis in 2007, the UAE has made food security one of its highest priorities and started investing in farmlands abroad.

In Sudan, two Emirati firms are farming over 50,000 hectares in the north, with plans for expansion. Agricultural produce is then shipped through the Red Sea. To bypass the port of Sudan, which was run by the Sudanese government, the UAE signed a new deal in 2022 to build a new port on the coast of Sudan to be operated by the Abu Dhabi Ports Group.

The UAE has used the Rapid Support Forces to secure its interests and ambitions in achieving food security.

The UAE’s Secret War in Sudan
By John Prendergast and Anthony Lake

No country is doing enough to end the suffering, but some countries are actively fueling and benefiting from Sudan’s civil war. Egypt, Iran, and Turkey have provided military support to Khartoum, despite evidence that the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) engages in indiscriminate bombing and torture, and that it uses starvation as a weapon of war. Russia initially backed the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the other party to the conflict, which has roots in the Janjaweed militias that committed genocide in Darfur two decades ago. But Moscow is now playing both sides; in May, it entered an agreement with the SAF to establish a Russian logistical support base on the Red Sea in exchange for weapons and equipment. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, which has historical links to the SAF leadership, spent months undercutting efforts to restart negotiations between the warring parties that had stalled in late 2023. It took until this July for the United States to gain Saudi agreement to restart the talks, which will take place in August in Geneva.

The outside actor that bears the most responsibility for the starvation and ethnic cleansing, however, is the United Arab Emirates. As the RSF perpetrates genocidal attacks on civilians in Darfur and other regions, Abu Dhabi is delivering arms to the militia. Meanwhile, unscrupulous companies smuggle Sudanese gold into Emirati markets, fueling the conflict. The UAE has been able to act with impunity, as its oil reserves, its strategic importance as a counterweight to Iran, and its role in diplomatic efforts to end the war in the Gaza Strip make Western leaders hesitant to lean too hard on Abu Dhabi.

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Disrupting the trade in Sudanese conflict gold may be a particularly effective way for outside actors to peel the UAE away from backing the RSF, but it is not the only method at their disposal. Like Saudi Arabia, the Emirati government has invested heavily in sportswashing—laundering its reputation by financing, either directly or through private companies, sports leagues and teams around the world. Some of the biggest European soccer clubs, such as AC Milan, Arsenal, Manchester City, and Real Madrid, have received Emirati backing. So has Formula One, the international car racing league; Baseball United, a Dubai-based league whose ownership group includes former U.S. Major League Baseball players; and a number of U.S.-based sporting organizations, including the National Basketball Association, Ultimate Fighting Championship, and the U.S. Open Tennis Championships. Fans would be rightly dismayed to learn that the sponsors of their favorite athletes are also underwriting genocidal violence. If even a few sports teams, leagues, players, and fans were to use social media to call out the UAE’s contributions to Sudan’s crisis, the public embarrassment could make the UAE think twice about its policies.

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The United States should also reconsider the billions of dollars in arms it sells to the UAE each year. Members of Congress and civil society groups, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have raised alarms about the UAE arming the RSF and urged countries that provide weapons to the UAE to do extra due diligence to make sure those shipments do not end up in Darfur. Representative Sara Jacobs, Democrat from California and the ranking member on the Africa Subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, introduced a bill in May 2024 that would prohibit U.S. weapons sales to the UAE until the U.S. president certifies that Abu Dhabi has stopped arming the RSF. The ban would affect both U.S. government and private sales and would include firearms, artillery, ammunition, missiles, bombs, explosives, military vehicles, and aircraft, among other types of equipment. If momentum builds behind the bill, the signal that Washington is making this problem a priority could send a useful warning to the UAE.

Finally, U.S. congressmen, journalists, and human rights advocates should call out American firms that Abu Dhabi has hired to influence U.S. policy and shape public opinion to its liking. For example, the strategic advisory group FGS Global has two contracts with the Emirati government totaling $5.6 million, plus expenses, for 2024–25. Likewise, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, a prominent Washington law firm, subcontracted a D.C.-based lobbying firm to advise the UAE on military sales in 2023 and itself collected $3.8 million in fees from the UAE over six months the same year. As long as the UAE aids and abets the RSF, Washington lobbyists and law firms that do work for the UAE government are helping enable atrocities.

Nearly two decades ago, amid the genocide in Darfur, the global activist coalition Save Darfur set its sights on influencing policy in China, which at the time was by far the largest investor in Sudan. Save Darfur accused China of ignoring the atrocities in Darfur and launched a campaign criticizing Beijing’s lack of action as it was preparing to host the 2008 Olympic Games. In early February 2008, Steven Spielberg, who had been hired as an artistic director for the games’ opening and closing ceremonies, resigned in protest of China’s links to the genocide. Rising international condemnation had an effect: by late February, Beijing joined the international chorus pressing Khartoum to allow humanitarian aid into camps for internally displaced civilians, which prevented hundreds of thousands of deaths by starvation.

As the Spielberg episode showed two decades ago, pressure from unexpected sources can make a difference.

Sudan and the New Age of Conflict
By Comfort Ero and Richard Atwood

Outside meddling in wars is nothing new. But today, more foreign powers, particularly non-Western midsize powers, are jockeying for influence in unstable political arenas. This dynamic has helped fuel the deadliest wars of the past decade.

These entanglements are symptomatic of larger shifts in global power. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States was left with unmatched power in what is known as the unipolar moment. Too much nostalgia for Western hegemony would be misplaced; the bloody wars in Somalia and the former Yugoslavia, the Rwandan genocide, the brutal conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Afghan and Iraq wars, and even previous wars in Sudan all happened at a time of American predominance (and, in some cases, because of it). Nonetheless, the emergence of a strong and confident West, along with the United States’ growing network of alliances and security guarantees, played an outsize role in structuring global affairs.

The extent to which one assesses the unipolar moment as over depends, to some degree, on the metrics used to measure. (The United States remains the only country that can project military power on a global scale, for example.) Nonetheless, governments around the world no longer see the United States as a lone hegemon and are recalibrating accordingly. The uncertainty they sense about what comes next is destabilizing. Regional powers are jostling and probing to see how far they can go. Many sense a vacuum of influence and see a need to cultivate proxies in weaker states to protect their interests or stop rivals from advancing their own (as, they would argue, big powers have long done). Their forays into power projection have often been as counterproductive and disruptive as the U.S.-led efforts that preceded them.

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The Sudan crisis, like other recent ones, has many of the ingredients of a protracted war. According to the International Rescue Committee, wars now last on average about twice as long as they did 20 years ago and four times longer than they did during the Cold War.

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Today’s conflicts often persist in part because they tend to be more complex than in the past, often involving not only more foreign powers but multiple battling parties. Warlords can now more easily tap global criminal networks and markets to sustain their campaigns. In many war zones, jihadis are among the main protagonists, which complicates peacemaking: militants’ demands are hard to accommodate, many leaders refuse to engage in talks with them, and counterterrorism operations hinder diplomacy.

Democracies Aren’t the Peacemakers Anymore
By Chester Crocker

Sudan is a laboratory case of how warring factions export their divisions to external sponsors who return the favor by exporting their own divisions back into the conflict.

At first glance, all of this may look bad for the United States and, more generally, the West because it points to the erosion of the West’s hard and soft power.

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When necessary, the United States is capable of standing back and advancing its interests by empowering others, sharing credit, and borrowing leverage and even credibility from other players, including the transactional authoritarians, however unprincipled they are.

During the Balkan wars of the 1990s, it fell to the U.S. government to knock mostly authoritarian heads and impose a stop to the fighting. Representatives of the U.K., France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and the European Union attended the Dayton peace conference. In the case of Colombia’s long civil conflicts, Washington first deployed diplomatic leadership via Plan Colombia and helped shape the balance of power between the government and the Marxist rebels of the FARC.

In the next phase, the U.S. government operated more indirectly via a special envoy who participated discreetly in a process led by Cuba and Norway with facilitator countries Venezuela and Chile, all loosely coordinating with major European and neighboring states, the U.N., and the E.U., leading to the 2016 Colombian peace accords. Washington played its hand decisively but less visibly in the Northern Ireland process leading to the 1998 Good Friday agreement.

This less direct public face of peacemaking has a history. In 1905, Theodore Roosevelt indirectly maneuvered Tsarist Russia and imperial Japan to terminate a hugely costly war, leaving the visible negotiation to the direct parties. He never personally visited the conference table in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, but actively communicated with relevant governments and, in effect, borrowed leverage from authoritarian and democratic states alike, while blocking alternative approaches. The process required Roosevelt to navigate the politics of two authoritarian regimes which could not admit their need for his help.

Fast forward to the 1980s and 1990s when U.S. negotiators borrowed leverage from allies and erstwhile adversaries in bringing authoritarian regimes to make peace in Southern Africa (working with the British, Portuguese, and other Western allies as well as the Soviets, Cubans, Zambians, Congolese, Cape Verdeans, Mozambicans and the U.N. Secretariat), and to avert civil war in Ethiopia (working with Sweden, Britain, the Soviets, Israel, Sudan, and the Marxist-oriented rebel Eritrean and Tigrayan movements).

This is not a brand-new way of operating but one that could become more common in an age of multiple overlapping alignments where other states are partners on some issues and troublesome obstacles on others. It could also be less of a drain on the political capital available to presidents and secretaries of state. To work, it requires top level officials to delegate and a willingness to work closely with friends, partners, and other parties they wouldn’t want to bring home for dinner.

The map of the Middle East is being rewritten again
By Stephen Kinzer

The jihadi warriors now in control of Syria have a gruesome history. They have demonized the Alawite minority, to which Assad belongs, and fought with the battle cry “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the grave.” In 2017, the United States put a $10 million bounty on the head of their principal leader, Abu Mohammed al-Golani. Its notice, under the bold red-letter heading “Stop This Terrorist,” called him “the senior leader of … the Al-Nusra Front, Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria.” Under his leadership, the US notice said, the Al-Nusra Front “has carried out multiple terrorist attacks throughout Syria, often targeting civilians.”

Today al-Golani is Syria’s strongman and putative liberator.

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Syria’s spiral into civil war began in 2011, with civic protests that were part of the Arab Spring. The protests devolved into violence. Religious zealots who had long detested Assad for his secularism saw their chance. Chechens, Uighurs, Uzbeks, and other outsiders flooded into Syria. “The time has come for President Assad to step aside,” President Obama said then.

In 2013 Obama approved a secret program, Timber Sycamore, to support anti-Assad militias. Over the next four years, CIA instructors trained thousands of jihadist fighters at camps in Jordan and Turkey, and supplied them with assault rifles, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, anti-tank missiles, and sundry other weaponry. Many of them were Al Qaeda veterans. “AQ is on our side in Syria,” Jake Sullivan, then a State Department official and now President Biden’s national security advisor, wrote in a memo as the anti-Assad rebellion took shape. The United States spent $1 billion on Timber Sycamore before President Trump ended it.

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Foreign powers set the stage for al-Golani’s rise to power, and he has promised not to carry out “external operations” against them. Yet he seems hardly likely to become pro-American. He has said that he was radicalized as a teenager by the Palestinian intifada of 2000, and began “thinking about how I could fulfill my duties, defending a people who are oppressed by occupiers and invaders.” He left Syria to fight against the US Army in Iraq, became an Al Qaeda leader, was captured, and was imprisoned in the notorious American-run prison Abu Ghraib.

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The United States played a key role in the overthrow of two other Middle East dictators, Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. Removing them led not to democracy but to terror and upheaval. The same could happen in Syria.

How to Hold Syria Together
By Sam Heller

Some observers have suggested that the fall of the Assad government could pave the way for the return of Syrian refugees. The result, however, may be the opposite: new flows of migration out of Syria. It was always an oversimplification to claim that refugees who left Syria after the outbreak of the civil war in 2011 were all fleeing the persecution of the Assad government; many were, but many others were trying to escape general insecurity and violence, Syrian military conscription, or socioeconomic collapse. For refugees to return in a meaningful, sustainable way, Syria needs to be a place where people can actually live—somewhere that is safe, with public services and reliable jobs. Even Syrian refugees overjoyed at the fall of Assad will be unable to return home if law and order breaks down, or if they cannot find ways to support their families.

Economic privation could further encourage violent competition between Syrian armed groups over territory and revenues. After more than a decade of war, these groups have developed their own independent interests and needs.

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New migration from Syria and the resumption of internal conflict will have destabilizing effects on Syria’s neighbors—even as those neighbors may themselves play a destabilizing role inside Syria.

Hillary Clinton, ‘Smart Power’ and a Dictator’s Fall
By Jo Becker and Scott Shane

In Libya, Mrs. Clinton had a new opportunity to support the historic change that had just swept out the leaders of its neighbors Egypt and Tunisia. And Libya seemed a tantalizingly easy case — with just six million people, no sectarian divide and plenty of oil.

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The comparison with Mr. Biden was revealing. For the vice president, according to Antony J. Blinken, then his national security adviser and now deputy secretary of state, the lesson of Iraq was crucial — “what Biden called not the day after, but the decade after.”

“What’s the plan?” Mr. Blinken continued. “There is going to be some kind of vacuum, and how’s it going to be filled, and what are we doing to fill it?” Former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s famous adage about Iraq — if “you break it, you own it” — loomed large.

More decisive for Mrs. Clinton were two episodes from her husband’s presidency — the American failure to prevent the Rwandan genocide in 1994, and the success, albeit belated, in bringing together an international military coalition to prevent greater bloodshed after 8,000 Muslims were massacred in Srebrenica during the Bosnian war.

“The thing about Rwanda that’s important is it showed the cost of inaction,” said James B. Steinberg, who served as Mrs. Clinton’s deputy through July 2011. “But I think the reason Bosnia and Kosovo figured so importantly is they demonstrated there were ways of being effective and there were lessons of what worked and didn’t work.”

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The Libyans saw the threatened intervention not as a noble act to save lives, as Mrs. Clinton portrayed it, but in far darker terms. After all, Colonel Qaddafi, fearing the fate of Saddam Hussein, had abandoned his nuclear program and was sharing intelligence with the C.I.A. in the fight against Al Qaeda. Mrs. Clinton herself had publicly welcomed one of the leader’s sons to the State Department in 2009.

Now Colonel Qaddafi saw deep treachery, ingratitude and mercantile revenge. He railed to anyone who would listen that he was Libya’s only bulwark against extremism, that without him the country would become a terrorist haven.

A New Libya, With ‘Very Little Time Left’
By Scott Shane and Jo Becker

Mrs. Clinton certainly understood how hard the transition to a post-Qaddafi Libya would be. In February, before the allied bombing began, she noted that political change in Egypt had proved tumultuous despite strong institutions.

“So imagine how difficult it will be in a country like Libya,” she had said. “Qaddafi ruled for 42 years by basically destroying all institutions and never even creating an army, so that it could not be used against him.”

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After Colonel Qaddafi’s fall, with minimal violence and friendly interim leadership, Libya had moved quickly off the top of the administration’s agenda. The regular situation room meetings on Libya, often including the president, simply stopped. The revolt in Syria, in the heart of the Middle East and with nearly four times Libya’s population, took center stage.

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The neglect was made easier by the Libyans themselves. Displaying both naïveté and nationalism, the interim leaders insisted, at least in public, that they wanted no outside interference. They were so wary of foreign troops that they refused to let the United Nations maintain a basic security force to protect its compound.

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When it came to securing weapons, the Americans’ initial idea — to give the interim government assistance to buy them back itself — foundered when the Libyan ministers failed to carry out the program, several Libyan officials said.

So the State Department, working with the C.I.A., was left to try to strike its own deals with the militias. But there was little incentive to sell. As Mr. Shammam, the former spokesman for the interim government, put it: “How are you going to buy a Kalashnikov for $1,000? With a Kalashnikov, someone can make $1,000 a day kidnapping people.”

Worse, the program created an incentive for militias to import weapons to sell to the Americans, said Ali Zeidan, an adviser to the interim government who would inherit the problem in November 2012 when he became prime minister.

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Officials from Libya’s moderate governing coalition were demanding that the United States stop the wealthy nation of Qatar from sending money and arms to militias aligned with Libya’s Islamist political bloc. The Islamists, in turn, were accusing a rival gulf power, the United Arab Emirates, of providing similar patronage to fighters aligned with their political enemies.

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The weapons that had made it so hard to stabilize Libya were turning up in Syria, Tunisia, Algeria, Mali, Niger, Chad, Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan, Egypt and Gaza, often in the hands of terrorists, insurgents or criminals.

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A cynical line would begin to circulate in Washington: In Iraq, the United States had intervened and occupied — and things had gone to hell. In Libya, the United States had intervened but not occupied — and things had gone to hell. And in Syria, the United States had neither intervened nor occupied — and things had still gone to hell.

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Strikingly, President Obama said in 2014 that such criticism was just, and that Libya had provided his biggest lesson in foreign policy.

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Libya, aides say, has strongly reinforced the president’s reluctance to move more decisively in Syria. “Literally, this has given him pause about what would be required if you eliminated the Syrian state,” a top adviser said.

In Their Own Words: The Libya Tragedy
By Jo Becker and Scott Shane

Sarah Leah Whitson, director of the Middle East and North Africa division of Human Rights Watch

Ultimately it’s a judgment call as to whether Libya is better off with or without Qaddafi. The more meaningful question or approach is: What is the obligation and duty to hold a country together once you have intervened? There’s no cheap, easy and fast, or whatever the cute term you want to use is, way to do that. If you are going to carry out a military intervention to decapitate the government, you are making a commitment and you should be making a commitment to the stability of that country over the long haul.

Bosnia Is On the Brink of Breaking Up
By Srecko Latal

In the 1990s, the West was slow to react to the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. After much bloodshed, it eventually launched airstrikes against the Serb forces in Bosnia in 1995 and in Serbia and Kosovo in 1999, and deployed tens of thousands of NATO troops to oversee the truce and stabilize the region. In subsequent years, the United States and the European Union spent billions of dollars to help reconstruct the region. Though often justifiably criticized for focusing on short-term, slapdash solutions, their efforts were key to ensuring the safety and stability of the Balkans.

But their attention slipped away. The United States, more focused on its operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, had withdrawn from hands-on engagement by 2010. It handed over the responsibility to the European Union, which was supposed to underwrite the region’s long-term stability by accepting its countries into the bloc. Yet by 2019, as the European Union struggled with its own problems and divisions, it became clear that the offer had been effectively taken off the table.

Robbed of their European dream and denied full access to the bloc’s common market, Balkan leaders reverted to the nationalism and populism of the past. The rule of law, human rights and other key democratic principles fell by the wayside. In multiethnic countries with unfinished national projects, such as Bosnia, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Kosovo, ethno-political divisions have festered.

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Crucially, the abdication of the West not only allowed democratic backsliding but also opened the region to other outside forces. Russia has taken a pronounced interest, establishing a strong political influence in all Serb-populated parts of the region, while Turkey, the Gulf countries and Iran have done the same in Muslim-populated areas. China, using its political pragmatism and ample economic resources, has become a major presence throughout the region. What’s more, Croatia and especially Serbia have started to interfere in the internal politics of neighboring countries, adding to regional tensions.

It’s Time for America to Go Back to Afghanistan
By Kathy Gannon

When the Taliban previously controlled Afghanistan, from 1996 to 2001, Washington, the United Nations and others came down hard on Taliban leaders with conditions they were instructed to meet if they could hope to gain recognition by the United States and other nations. The Taliban were told to educate girls, end drug production and expel Osama bin Laden, who had lived there since the spring of 1996, before the Taliban took power.

But U.S. and U.N. sanctions closed off Afghanistan and undercut those among the Taliban who wanted to engage with the world and had a vision for their country that — while it might not have matched the conception in Western capitals — included having girls and boys attend school.

Most significantly, some of those Taliban members open to engagement did not support foreign fighters taking up residence in their country. As I reported at the time, the Taliban’s then deputy interior minister, Mohammad Khaksar, told me that in the years before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist strike on the United States, he had reached out to a U.S. diplomat and a C.I.A. official in neighboring Pakistan for help in expelling foreign fighters but was rebuffed. Gregory Marchese, at the time the vice consul at the U.S. Consulate in Pakistan’s northwestern city of Peshawar, later corroborated to me that he’d had that meeting with Mr. Khaksar and a C.I.A. official, Peter McIllwain. Mr. McIllwain later confirmed what Mr. Khaksar had said about it.

America did not focus on Afghanistan in the years after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, when it closed its embassy. This left Washington blind to what was taking shape there in the lead-up to Sept. 11.

Blowback Revisited
By Peter Bergen and Alec Reynolds

When the United States started sending guns and money to the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s, it had a clearly defined Cold War purpose: helping expel the Soviet army, which had invaded Afghanistan in 1979. And so it made sense that once the Afghan jihad forced a Soviet withdrawal a decade later, Washington would lose interest in the rebels. For the international mujahideen drawn to the Afghan conflict, however, the fight was just beginning. They opened new fronts in the name of global jihad and became the spearhead of Islamist terrorism. The seriousness of the blowback became clear to the United States with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center: all of the attack’s participants either had served in Afghanistan or were linked to a Brooklyn-based fund-raising organ for the Afghan jihad that was later revealed to be al Qaeda’s de facto U.S. headquarters. The blowback, evident in other countries as well, continued to increase in intensity throughout the rest of the decade, culminating on September 11, 2001.

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The foreign volunteers in Afghanistan saw the Soviet defeat as a victory for Islam against a superpower that had invaded a Muslim country. Estimates of the number of foreign fighters who fought in Afghanistan begin in the low thousands; some spent years in combat, while others came only for what amounted to a jihad vacation. The jihadists gained legitimacy and prestige from their triumph both within the militant community and among ordinary Muslims, as well as the confidence to carry their jihad to other countries where they believed Muslims required assistance. When veterans of the guerrilla campaign returned home with their experience, ideology, and weapons, they destabilized once-tranquil countries and inflamed already unstable ones.

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The Afghan experience was important for the foreign “holy warriors” for several reasons. First, they gained battlefield experience. Second, they rubbed shoulders with like-minded militants from around the Muslim world, creating a truly global network. Third, as the Soviet war wound down, they established a myriad of new jihadist organizations, from al Qaeda to the Algerian GIA to the Filipino group Abu Sayyaf.

How Negotiators Failed for Two Decades to Bring Peace to Afghanistan
By Andrew North

Of the many missteps the United States made in its two-decade war in Afghanistan, one of the early ones involved a missed opportunity with the Taliban. In December 2001, just weeks after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban made an offer to the Bush administration: Its fighters would be willing to lay down their arms, provided they could live “in dignity” in their homes without being pursued and detained.

The offer was made in the form of a message to Afghan political leader Hamid Karzai. Had it been accepted, it may have prevented years of bloodshed and a long American occupation that ended in ignominy. But the United States at the time was reeling from the attacks of 9/11 and determined to eviscerate the group that had hosted al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and refused to hand him over. U.S. officials did not even respond to the offer.

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In the years that followed, a weak, fractured, and aid-dependent Afghan government would struggle as the Taliban’s insurgency expanded. Their support grew as the death toll from U.S. night raids and airstrikes rose. But it was the Taliban, along with some of America’s European allies, who were first to revive efforts to talk.

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To show his support for the talks, Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar dispatched a trusted aide in 2009 to establish contact with both U.S. and European officials.

But nearly a decade into the Afghan war, entrenched American attitudes toward the Taliban made it difficult to get any talks started. Because of the risk that the United States would detain him and bundle him off to Guantánamo Bay, the aide, Tayyab Agha, had to work through intermediaries and travel clandestinely to the Middle East to set up meetings.

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When U.S. officials finally got the go-ahead to meet, it was only Agha, the Taliban emissary, who had a set of proposals and demands—the American side came empty-handed. Holbrooke’s sudden death, in late 2010, again stalled this tentative U.S. attempt to talk to the Taliban. And when his replacement was appointed, Rubin and his colleagues found themselves undermined by leaks from the Pentagon and the intelligence community, who were putting their hopes in the U.S. troop surge then underway, not peacemaking. “Most of the government was against us,” Rubin said.

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President Donald Trump brought a different approach to the White House—a determination to withdraw American troops no matter what it meant for the Afghan government. But by then, U.S. leverage had weakened. “Instead of trying to negotiate at the apex of U.S. power and the nadir of Taliban power and capability in Afghanistan, we finally got serious about it as the U.S. was clearly on the way out the door and the Taliban was making steady advances,” said Laurel Miller, who served as acting U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan at the start of the Trump administration.

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The United States and the Taliban did manage to strike a deal: the Doha Accord, which was signed in February 2020. It was supposed to be followed by power-sharing negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan government. But since the United States had already agreed on a date for withdrawing its forces, the Taliban had no real incentive to bargain further.

Trump Must Not Betray “America First”
By Dan Caldwell and Reid Smith

For years, Washington’s foreign policy establishment—often derisively portrayed as “the Blob”—has championed a bipartisan, interventionist strategy aimed at maintaining U.S. primacy abroad. When it emerged from the Cold War as the world’s lone superpower, the United States adopted a foreign policy premised on using its influence to promote American values worldwide. Since 9/11, however, this approach has imposed enormous costs on the United States without making the country dramatically safer or more prosperous. The United States sacrificed thousands of American lives and $8 trillion for wars in the greater Middle East that were largely unrelated to its own safety and core national interests. The expansion of the United States’ alliance commitments in Europe, meanwhile, encouraged its wealthy NATO allies to rely more heavily on its support and exacerbated tensions with Russia. As the United States plowed resources into other regions, China emerged as a serious economic and military competitor.

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The national debt now exceeds $35 trillion; interest payments on that debt surpass defense spending. In the post-pandemic era, the U.S. economy has struggled with inflation, undermining voters’ willingness to subsidize wealthy allies and fund foreign wars in perpetuity. More urgently, the U.S. military continues to face recruiting challenges, and much of its essential equipment is worn down after nearly 25 years of high-intensity operations. It has nearly exhausted its stockpiles of critical munitions and weapons in its support of Ukraine and partners in the Middle East. The United States’ limited industrial capacity makes these stockpiles difficult to replenish.

The Biden administration acted as if these constraints did not exist. The introduction to the 2022 National Security Strategy pronounced that “there is nothing beyond our capacity.” After Hamas’s October 7 attack, the journalist Scott Pelley pressed Biden on 60 Minutes about whether the United States could afford to assist allies fighting in both Ukraine and Gaza. “We can take care of both of these and still maintain our overall international defense,” Biden replied. Days after the interview, however, his administration was forced to redirect a shipment of artillery shells from Ukraine to Israel, underscoring the reality that U.S. resources are limited.

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Acknowledging the limits on American power does not mean lowering expectations for the United States’ future or accepting its decline. But denying constraints risks strategic insolvency: if the United States becomes unable to meet its expanding global commitments, that will significantly increase the risk of a major economic collapse or security failure.

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Trump has articulated a desire to negotiate with U.S. adversaries such as China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia to de-escalate tensions and avoid fresh conflicts. This approach is not new; it could also be called tough-minded diplomacy. It is how Republican presidents conducted foreign policy throughout most of the Cold War. Richard Nixon, for instance, restored relations with China and achieved détente with the Soviet Union. Ronald Reagan brokered agreements with Moscow to slow the arms race. His successor, George H. W. Bush, managed the breakup of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Warsaw Pact with deft diplomacy.

Trump the peacemaker? If only that were true.
By Stephen Kinzer

Rather than deal with Iran through “means of diplomacy,” for example, he ripped up the 2015 nuclear deal and ordered the assassination of a senior Iranian military commander. Rather than continuing the Obama administration’s nonconfrontational stance toward Russia, he approved the sale of heavy weapons to the Ukrainian government in 2017. Instead of trying to nudge Israelis and Palestinians toward compromise, he took provocative steps like moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Trump created a Space Force aimed at militarizing the earth’s atmosphere, bragged about dropping the world’s most powerful nonnuclear bomb on Afghanistan, kept American troops in Iraq and Syria, and happily sent American weaponry to countries accused of serious human rights violations. He ordered far more drone strikes on foreign targets than either his predecessor or his successor, and he ended President Obama’s policy of reporting civilian deaths caused by such strikes. Especially vivid was his decision to name some of Washington’s most extreme warmongers to direct his foreign policy.

For the Rest of the World, the U.S. President Has Always Been Above the Law
By Oona A. Hathaway

For decades, American presidents have waged illegal wars, plotted to assassinate foreign leaders, unlawfully detained and tortured people, toppled democratic governments, and supported repressive regimes without any possibility of legal accountability in either domestic or international courts.

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In the years since the 9/11 attacks in 2001, American presidents have overseen a vast expansion of the U.S. military’s use of lethal force abroad, sometimes in ways that have violated international law, domestic law, or both.

Around 300,000 Iraqi civilians were killed as a direct result of the U.S. war in Iraq beginning in 2003, a war that UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan called “illegal.” More than 70,000 Afghan and Pakistani civilians are estimated to have died as a direct result of the war against the Taliban, al Qaeda, and associated forces in Afghanistan beginning in 2001. The United States justified that war as lawful under Article 51 of the UN Charter at a time when few states had accepted that Article 51 could be used to justify wars against nonstate actors.

The U.S. military participated in ongoing combat in Afghanistan for two decades and faced serious allegations of war crimes, including torture at a detention center at Bagram Air Base. Bagram was just one of several U.S. detention facilities at which detainees were tortured. The United States operated unlawful CIA “black sites” in several locations around the world, such as Kosovo, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and Thailand, where it held and tortured detainees in secrecy.

Hundreds died in the 2011 war in Libya led by NATO with significant U.S. participation. Although the war was authorized by the UN Security Council, the U.S. Congress never approved U.S. participation in it. Two top administration lawyers advised that the U.S. law known as the War Powers Resolution required that the war cease after 60 days. President Barack Obama disregarded that advice, deciding instead to side with two other top administration lawyers who argued that the military operation in Libya did not amount to “hostilities” and therefore was not subject to that law.

Between 2021 and 2023, the U.S. government conducted counterterrorism operations in 78 countries, including ground combat missions in at least nine countries. Now with over 11,000 unmanned aircraft systems, the United States has the capacity to conduct airstrikes in much of the world with little notice. These systems, commonly known as drones, are generally used to target and kill suspected terrorists.

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Addressing the problem of impunity requires addressing not just the absence of criminal accountability for the clearly unlawful acts of the president in the United States but also the long-standing absence of accountability for the clearly unlawful acts of the president and the government the president leads around the globe.

In other parts of the world, patience with unaccountable power—American or otherwise—may be growing thin.

It’s Not Just About the President
By Karen J. Greenberg

Throughout American history, presidents have repeatedly sought to increase their powers, nowhere more so than in the context of war. As historian James Patterson has pointed out, “War and the threat of war were major sources of presidential power from the beginning.” Whether it was George Washington’s insistence that he was the one to formulate foreign policy when it came to diplomacy, treaties, and more; Thomas Jefferson’s assertion of complete control over whether or not to attack the Barbary pirates; James Polk’s decision to take actions which risked war with Mexico; or Abraham Lincoln’s “sweeping assertions of authority” in the Civil War era, executive claims to authority when it comes to matters of foreign relations and warfare have been a persistent feature of American history.

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As legal scholar Matt Waxman has reminded us, FDR’s successor, Harry Truman, went to war in Korea without congressional authorization. Dwight D. Eisenhower, who did consult with Congress over the need to protect U.S.-allied Pacific coastal islands from possible Chinese aggression and, in his farewell address, warned against “the military-industrial complex,” still believed “that the president had broad powers to engage in covert warfare without specific congressional approval.” In fact, his successor, John F. Kennedy, exercised those powers in a major way in the Bay of Pigs incident. Richard Nixon unilaterally and secretly launched the invasion of Cambodia in 1970, and Ronald Reagan created a secret Central American foreign policy, while arranging the unauthorized transfer of funds and weaponry to the Nicaraguan rebels, the Contras, from the sale of U.S. arms to Iran, despite the fact that such funding was prohibited by an act of Congress, the Boland Amendment.

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One week after the attacks of 9/11, Congress passed the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), which undermined its own power in Article I of the Constitution to declare war and weakened its powers of restraint on presidential actions carefully articulated in the 1973 War Powers Resolution (WPR), passed to guard against the very kind of secretive engagement in war that Nixon had unilaterally authorized in the Vietnam era.

Now, turning their backs on the power given them by the Constitution and the WPR, Congress, with that AUMF, acceded to the expansion of presidential powers and opened the door to the disastrous wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere early in this century.

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Jack Goldsmith and Bob Bauer, lawyers who worked in the Bush and Obama administrations, respectively, served, as they put it, “very different presidents” and hold “different political outlooks.” Yet they agree that the Trump administration took unchecked presidential authority to a new level. In their 2020 book, After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency, they contended that “Donald Trump operated the presidency in ways that reveal its vulnerability to dangerous excesses of authority and dangerous weaknesses in accountability.”

And as they make all too clear, the stakes were (and remain) high. “The often-feckless Trump,” they wrote, “also revealed deeper fissures in the structure of the presidency that, we worry, a future president might choose to exploit in a fashion similar to Trump — but much more skillfully, and to even greater effect.”

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Reporting on Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s nearly 1,000-page prescription for a second Trump presidency, written primarily by former office holders in the first Trump administration, New York Times reporters Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage, and Maggie Haberman reported that Trump “and his associates” plan to “increase the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House.”

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Consider all of that a frightening vision of our now all-too-imminent future: a president freed from the restraints of the constitution, unchecked by Congress or the courts — or by his cabinet advisors. In the words of MSNBC’s Ali Velshi, Project 2025 has set the stage for Donald Trump to be the very opposite of what this country’s founders intended, “a king,” surrounded not by “groups of qualified experts” but by “unblinking yes-men.”

Kamala Harris Is Not a Realist. I’m Voting for Her Anyway
By Stephen M. Walt

… as I noted repeatedly when Trump was president, he is not a realist, and you’re as likely to get sensible foreign policy from him as you were to get an education from Trump University. He is more accurately seen as a crude nationalist and unilateralist, and the “ism” that best captures him is narcissism. During his first term, he was better at garnering attention than making constructive diplomatic gains, which is why his reality show summits with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and Russian President Vladimir Putin went nowhere. He didn’t end any “forever wars” during his first term, gave the Defense Department more money that it didn’t need, and was perfectly content firing missiles into foreign countries to kill leaders he didn’t like. He was impulsive, crude, inattentive, and incapable of forging a clear strategy and sticking to it, which is why his four years in office were devoid of genuine foreign-policy achievements. The much-ballyhooed Abraham Accords don’t count, as they helped lay the groundwork for the carnage that is now convulsing the Middle East, just as critics had warned. (That’s what you get when a president lets his unqualified son-in-law play diplomat in a volatile region.)

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His first national security advisor lasted less than a month, and he burned through three more in a single term, along with multiple secretaries of state and defense. Staff turnover at Trump’s White House was one of the highest on record, and dozens of people who worked directly with him are adamantly opposed to giving him another shot.

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What is surprising is the number of well-educated and highly successful people who think Trump is on their side and won’t ever turn on them. I’m thinking of people like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, who remind me of those naïve and cocksure German politicians who thought they could control Adolf Hitler. If there’s one thing that’s clear about Trump (and it seems to be equally true of the shape-shifting Vance), it is that he would betray anyone if he thought it would advance his interests. Russian oligarchs like Boris Berezovsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky thought they could control Putin and that their wealth would protect them from retribution, and look what happened to them. If you’re a tech-bro gazillionaire and you think Trump is a trustworthy ally, you might want to reflect on what happened to former U.S. Vice President Mike Pence.

The Trump/Vance Unilateralist Delusion
By Stephen M. Walt

Trump’s unilateralist instincts have long been apparent, and there’s no evidence that he’s changed his views. He showed little interest in genuine diplomacy during his first term, and his handling of foreign policy was dismal. Claiming that he “was the only one that mattered,” he left key foreign-policy positions unfilled for months and appointed not one but two incompetent secretaries of state. He thought he could charm North Korean leader Kim Jong Un into giving up his nuclear arsenal and got nowhere, and he thought he could slap tariffs on China without provoking Beijing to respond. The self-styled “master dealmaker” was also prone to offering up concessions while getting little in return (an approach New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman rightly dubbed the “art of the giveaway”) and to walking away from agreements that were very much in America’s interest, such as the nuclear deal with Iran or the Paris climate accord.

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Like nearly everyone else, Trump sees China as the main long-term challenger to U.S. interests. The problem is that his policies toward that country are rife with contradictions. Abandoning the Trans-Pacific Partnership during his first term undermined a much-needed effort to preserve U.S. economic influence in East Asia and made it harder for Asian countries to give the United States the support it says it wants from them. Trump has questioned whether the United States should support Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack, but making it easier for China to revise the status quo in Asia (and possibly gain control of some of the world’s most advanced chip manufacturers) is hard to square with a desire to keep Beijing in check. GOP hawks are also clamoring to leave the Test Ban Treaty and resume nuclear weapons testing, an unnecessary step that will facilitate China’s efforts to develop new nukes and eventually reach parity with the United States. Does this make strategic sense?

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Similarly, there is a big difference between carefully negotiating and implementing a new division of labor with America’s European allies in order to free up resources to deal with China and engaging in a precipitous withdrawal or a spiteful campaign to browbeat them into spending more. I’m all for getting Europe to take greater responsibility for its own defense, but Trump 2.0 is likely to pursue that goal in the worst possible way.

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Like Biden, Trump gave Israel whatever it wanted, thought the Palestinian issue could be safely ignored, and focused on pursuing “special relationships” with demanding client states while refusing to talk to important regional rivals. There are many labels one could apply to this approach, but “realism” ain’t one of them. Trump abandoned the 2015 agreement that had successfully rolled back Iran’s nuclear program and imposed “maximum pressure” on Tehran instead, fueling regional tensions and allowing Iran to move much closer to having the bomb. As for Vance, he bizarrely claimed that Biden has “done nothing to help our ally Israel” (seemingly unaware of the billions of dollars of military aid provided since Oct. 7, 2023) and thinks the Biden administration should have backed Israel’s brutal war in Gaza even more strongly. In short, Vance is perfectly happy to support a genocide no matter how much damage it does to America’s or Israel’s image in the eyes of others.

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The United States will also take a big step backward on the environment under Trump and Vance. Empowered by a packed Supreme Court, they are certain to reverse efforts to deal with climate change and other sources of environmental harm, even as Americans swelter through increasingly hot summers; have to pay for wildfires, floods, and other weather-related events; and as global temperatures set new records each year. As for pandemic preparedness, do you really want the guy who thought bleach could cure COVID-19 back in charge?

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Mega-wealthy plutocrats like Elon Musk don’t need an effective government, because they can buy private bodyguards, fly in private jets, live in gated communities, use expensive tutors and private schools to educate their kids, and pay for whatever health care they might need no matter what it might cost. For these fortunate few, governments just get in the way. The rest of us, however, depend on effective public institutions to educate our children, build and maintain infrastructure, manage the economy, provide for a decent retirement, and engage with the rest of the world. The only thing worse than an inefficient or predatory state is no state at all, and I fear that we are about to discover what happens when the federal government is controlled by people who either want to take it apart or to use it to line their own pockets.