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      Ahead of Iowa Caucuses, Voters Fear the Prospect of Civil Unrest

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      Presidential elections traditionally speak to future aspirations, offering a vision of a better tomorrow, the hope and change of Barack Obama or the compassionate conservatism of George W. Bush. Yet this year, even before a single vote has been cast, a far darker sentiment has taken hold.Across Iowa, as the first nominating contest approaches on Monday, voters plow through snowy streets to hear from candidates, mingle at campaign events and casually talk of the prospect of World War III, civil unrest and a nation coming apart at the seams.Four years ago, voters worried about a spiraling pandemic, economic uncertainty and national protests. Now, in the first presidential election since the siege on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, those anxieties have metastasized into a grimmer, more existential dread about the very foundations of the American experiment.“You get the feeling in Iowa right now that we’re sleepwalking into a nightmare and there’s nothing we can do about it,” said Doug Gross, a Republican lawyer who has been involved in Iowa politics for nearly four decades, ran for governor in 2002 and plans to support Nikki Haley in the state’s caucuses on Monday. “In Iowa, life isn’t lived in extremes, except the weather, and yet they still feel this dramatic sense of inevitable doom.”Donald J. Trump, the dominant front-runner in the Republican primary race, bounces from courtroom to campaign trail, lacing his rhetoric with ominous threats of retribution and suggestions of dictatorial tendencies. President Biden condemns political violence and argues that if he loses, democracy itself could falter.Bill Bradley, 80, who served for 18 years as a New Jersey senator, remembered when he ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2000, spending more than 75 days in Iowa during his bid. “We debated health care and taxes, which is reasonable,” he said, adding, “Civil war? No. World War III? No, no, no.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      The Case for Donald Trump By Someone Who Wants Him to Lose

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      Barring a political miracle or an act of God, it is overwhelmingly likely that Donald Trump will again be the Republican Party’s nominee for president. Assuming the Democratic nominee in the fall is Joe Biden, polls show Trump with a better-than-even chance of returning to the White House next year.Lord help us. What should those of us who have consistently opposed him do?You can’t defeat an opponent if you refuse to understand what makes him formidable. So maybe it’s time for readers of this newspaper to think a little more deeply about the enduring sources of his appeal — and to do so without calling him names, or disparaging his supporters, or attributing his resurgence to nefarious foreign actors or the unfairness of the Electoral College. Since I will spend the coming year strenuously opposing his candidacy, let me here make the best case for Trump that I can.Begin with fundamentals. Trump got three big things right — or at least more right than wrong.Arguably the single most important geopolitical fact of the century is the mass migration of people from south to north and east to west, causing tectonic demographic, cultural, economic, and ultimately political shifts. Trump understood this from the start of his presidential candidacy in 2015, the same year Europe was overwhelmed by a largely uncontrolled migration from the Middle East and Africa. As he said the following year, “A nation without borders is not a nation at all. We must have a wall. The rule of law matters!”Many of Trump’s opponents refuse to see virtually unchecked migration as a problem for the West at all. Some of them see it as an opportunity to demonstrate their humanitarianism. Others look at it as an inexhaustible source of cheap labor. They also have the habit of denouncing those who disagree with them as racists. But enforcing control at the border — whether through a wall, a fence, or some other mechanism — isn’t racism. It’s a basic requirement of statehood and peoplehood, which any nation has an obligation to protect and cherish.Only now, as the consequences of Biden’s lackadaisical approach to mass migration have become depressingly obvious on the sidewalks and in the shelters and public schools of liberal cities like New York and Chicago, are Trump’s opponents on this issue beginning to see the point. Public services paid by taxes exist for people who live here, not just anyone who makes his way into the country by violating its laws. A job market is structured by rules and regulations, not just an endless supply of desperate laborers prepared to work longer for less. A national culture is sustained by common memories, ideals, laws and a language — which newcomers should honor, adopt and learn as a requirement of entry. It isn’t just a giant arrival gate for anyone and everyone who wants to take advantage of American abundance and generosity.It said something about the self-deluded state of Western politics when Trump came on the scene that his assertion of the obvious was treated as a moral scandal, at least by the stratum of society that had the least to lose from mass migration. To millions of other Americans, his message, however crudely he may have expressed it, sounded like plain common sense.The second big thing Trump got right was about the broad direction of the country. Trump rode a wave of pessimism to the White House — pessimism his detractors did not share because he was speaking about, and to, an America they either didn’t see or understood only as a caricature. But just as with this year, when liberal elites insist that things are going well while overwhelming majorities of Americans say they are not, Trump’s unflattering view captured the mood of the country.In 2017, the demographer Nicholas Eberstadt joined this pessimistic perception with comprehensive data in an influential essay for Commentary. He noted persistently sluggish economic growth and a plunging labor-force participation rate that had never recovered from the 2008 financial crisis. There was a rising death rate among middle-aged white people and declining life expectancy at birth, in part because of sharply rising deaths from suicide, alcoholism or drug addiction. More than 12 percent of all adult males had a felony conviction on their record, leaving them in the shadowlands of American life. And there was a palpable sense of economic decline, with fewer and fewer younger Americans having any hope of matching their parents’ incomes at the same stages of life.Far too little has changed since then. Labor-force participation remains essentially where it was in the last days of the Obama administration. Deaths of despair keep rising. The cost of living has risen sharply, and while the price of ordinary goods may finally be coming down, rents haven’t. Only 36 percent of voters think the American dream still holds true, according to a recent survey, down from 48 percent in 2016. If anything, Trump’s thesis may be truer today than it was the first time he ran on it.Finally, there’s the question of institutions that are supposed to represent impartial expertise, from elite universities and media to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the F.B.I. Trump’s detractors, including me, often argued that his demagoguery and mendacity did a lot to needlessly diminish trust in these vital institutions. But we should be more honest with ourselves and admit that those institutions did their own work in squandering, through partisanship or incompetence, the esteem in which they had once been widely held.How so? Much of the elite media, mostly liberal, became openly partisan in the 2016 election — and, in doing so, not only failed to understand why Trump won, but probably unwittingly contributed to his victory. Academia, also mostly liberal, became increasingly illiberal, inhospitable not just to conservatives but to anyone pushing back even modestly against progressive orthodoxy. The F.B.I. abused its authority with dubious investigations and salacious leaks that led to sensational headlines but not to criminal prosecutions, much less convictions.The C.D.C. and other public-health bureaucracies flubbed the pandemic reaction, with (mostly) good intentions but frequently devastating consequences: “If you’re a public-health person and you’re trying to make a decision, you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is, and that is something that will save a life,” the former National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins acknowledged last month. “You attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way they never quite recovered.”Trump and his supporters called all this out. For this they were called idiots, liars and bigots by people who think of themselves as enlightened and empathetic and hold the commanding cultural heights in the national culture. The scorn only served to harden the sense among millions of Americans that liberal elites are self-infatuated, imperious, hysterical, and hopelessly out of touch — or, to use one of Trump’s favorite words, “disgusting.”A few readers might nod their heads in (partial) agreement. Then they’ll ask: What about the election denialism? What about Jan. 6? What about the threat Trump poses to the very foundations of our democracy? All disqualifying — in my view. But it’s also important to stretch one’s mind a little and try to understand why so many voters are unimpressed about the “end of democracy” argument.For one thing, haven’t they heard it before — and with the same apocalyptic intensity?In 2016, Trump was frequently compared to Benito Mussolini and other dictators (including by me). The comparison might have proved more persuasive if Trump’s presidency had been replete with jailed and assassinated political opponents, rigged or canceled elections, a muzzled or captured press — and Trump still holding office today, rather than running to get his old job back. The election denialism is surely ugly, but it isn’t quite unique: Prominent Democrats also denied the legitimacy of George W. Bush’s two elections — the second one no less than the first.Many rank-and-file Republicans regard the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol as a disgrace and the lowest point of Trump’s presidency. But they also believe that it wasn’t so much an insurrection as it was an ugly temper tantrum by Trump and his most rabid supporters, which never had a chance of succeeding. One reason for that is that the judges Trump appointed to the federal bench and the Supreme Court rebuffed his legal efforts — and he had no choice but to accept the rulings. An American version of Vladimir Putin he simply is not.That’s why warnings from Biden and others about the risk Trump poses to democracy are likely to fall flat even with many moderate voters. If there’s any serious threat to democracy, doesn’t it also come from Democratic judges and state officials who are using never-before-used legal theories — which even liberal law professors like Harvard’s Lawrence Lessig regard as dangerous and absurd — to try to kick Trump’s name off ballots in Maine and Colorado? When liberal partisans try to suppress democracy in the name of saving democracy, they aren’t helping their cause politically or legally. They are merely confirming the worst stereotypes about their own hypocrisy.As it is, the 2024 election will not hinge on questions of democracy but of delivery: Which candidate will do more for voters? That will turn on perceptions of which candidate did more for voters when they were in office. Biden’s supporters are convinced that the president has a good story to tell. But they also think that Trump has no story at all — only a pack of self-aggrandizing lies. That’s liberal self-delusion.Excluding the pandemic, a once-in-a-century event that would have knocked almost any sitting president sideways, Americans have reasons to remember the Trump years as good ones — and good in a way that completely defied expert predictions of doom. Wages outpaced inflation, something they have just begun to do under Biden, according to an analysis by Bankrate. Unemployment fell to 50-year lows (as it has been under Biden); stocks boomed; inflation and interest rates were low.He appealed to Americans who operated in the economy of things — builders, manufacturers, energy producers, food services and the like — rather than in the economy of words — lawyers, academics, journalists, civil servants. And he shared the law-and-order instincts of normal Americans, including respect for the police, something the left seemed to care about on Jan. 6 but was notably less concerned about during the months of rioting, violence and semi-anarchy that followed George Floyd’s murder.As for foreign policy, it’s worth asking: Does the world feel safer under Biden — with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Hamas’s and Hezbollah’s assault on Israel, Houthi attacks on shipping in international waters, the Chinese open threat to invade Taiwan — than it did under Trump? Trump may have generated a lot of noise, but his crazy talk and air of unpredictability seemed to keep America’s adversaries on their guard and off balance in a way that Biden’s instinctive caution and feeble manner simply does not.Ordinary voters care typically about results. What many care less about is Trump’s purported offensiveness. It’s at least worth asking whether his occasional Archie Bunkerisms are any more obnoxious than the incessant offense-taking, finger-wagging and fake prudishness of his opponents. Many of the same people who seemed to have suffered fainting spells when the notorious “Hollywood Access” tape came to light had, only a few years before, been utterly indifferent to much more serious allegations of sexual assault by Bill Clinton as Arkansas attorney general, governor and later president. You can fault Trump for coarseness, but you can’t pretend we don’t live in a coarse age.What about the other Republicans in the field? Why aren’t they at least preferable to G.O.P. primary voters than Trump, with all of his baggage and bombast?It’s a good question. My pet theory is that, if Republican voters think the central problem in America today is obnoxious progressives, then how better to spite them than by shoving Trump down their throats for another four years? If somehow Nikki Haley were to win the nomination and then the general election, her victory would be a matter of disappointment for Democrats but not the wailing and gnashing of teeth that went with Trump’s victory in 2016. For many Republicans, the visceral satisfaction of liberal anguish at a Trump restoration more than makes up for his flaws.But there’s a deeper reason, too, one Trump’s opponents ought to consider in thinking about how to beat him. As writers like Tablet’s Alana Newhouse have noted, brokenness has become the defining feature of much of American life: broken families, broken public schools, broken small towns and inner cities, broken universities, broken health care, broken media, broken churches, broken borders, broken government. At best, they have become shells of their former selves. And there’s a palpable sense that the autopilot that America’s institutions and their leaders are on — brain-dead and smug — can’t continue.It shouldn’t seem strange to Trump’s opponents that a man whom we regard as an agent of chaos should be seen by his supporters as precisely the man who can sweep the decks clean. I happen to think that’s exactly wrong — you don’t mend damaged systems by breaking them even further. Repair and restoration is almost always better than reaction or revolution. But I don’t see Trump’s opponents making headway against him until they at least acknowledge the legitimacy and power of the fundamental complaint. If you’re saying it’s “Morning in America” when 77 percent of Americans think the country is on the wrong track, you’re preaching to the wrong choir — and the wrong country.Trump’s opponents say this is the most important election of our lifetime. Isn’t it time, then, to take our heads out of the sand?The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      In Taiwan’s Elections, China Seems to Want a Vote

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      The first time I covered a Taiwan “election,” 38 years ago, the island was a dictatorship under martial law, with members of the opposition more likely to be tortured than to gain power.Government officials explained that modern democracy wasn’t fully compatible with Chinese culture, and one of my minders made a vague inquiry about paying me — apparently to see if a Times correspondent could be bribed.Taiwan lifted martial law the next year, 1987, and helped lead a democratic revolution in Asia, encompassing South Korea, Mongolia, Indonesia and others. Taiwan now ranks as more democratic than the United States, Japan or Canada, according to the most recent ratings by the Economist Intelligence Unit, and the island is now caught up in boisterous campaigning for presidential and legislative elections on Saturday.(The campaigning has mostly gone smoothly but not entirely so: As a gimmick, one Taiwanese party handed out 460,000 laundry detergent pods to win support. Some voters unfortunately mistook the pods for food.)The stakes here are enormous, for President Biden has repeatedly said that the United States would defend Taiwan from a military assault by China, and the policies of the new government may shape the risk of such a confrontation. The importance of the outcome to China is reflected in Beijing’s efforts to manipulate it — and perhaps we Americans can learn something here about resisting election interference.“What China has been trying to do is use Taiwan as a test ground,” Taiwan’s foreign minister, Joseph Wu, told me. “If they are able to make a difference in this election, I’m sure they are going to try and apply this to other democracies.”China resisted Asia’s democratic tide — yet it seems to want a vote in Taiwan’s election.Flags representing different political parties.An Rong Xu for The New York Times“Whenever Taiwan holds an election, China interferes — but this time it’s the most severe,” Vice President William Lai, who is leading in the presidential polls, told foreign reporters.The Chinese government has made no secret of its unhappiness with Lai’s candidacy, because he and his Democratic Progressive Party view Taiwan as effectively independent rather than as part of China. Beijing sees Lai as a secessionist, calling him a “destroyer of peace” and warning that he could be “the instigator of a potential dangerous war.”Paradoxically, China’s Communist Party appears to favor a victory by its historical enemy, the Kuomintang. That’s because the Kuomintang welcomes closer economic ties with China and opposes Taiwan’s becoming an independent country.In an effort to increase the chances of the Kuomintang presidential candidate, Hou Yu-ih, China appeared to pressure a billionaire businessman, Terry Gou, who operates factories in China making Apple products, to drop out of the race. Gou claimed to have backing from Mazu, a sea goddess, but the Communist Party must have prevailed over the goddess: Gou did indeed drop out.Meanwhile, networks on Facebook and TikTok are spreading Chinese propaganda in Taiwan as part of an election manipulation strategy, according to a research organization here. The networks mostly disparage Lai and other Democratic Progressives while raising suspicions about the United States.China has lately sent a series of intimidating large balloons — perhaps weather or surveillance balloons — over Taiwan. Some see the purpose as rattling the Taiwanese in the run-up to the election and warning them of the risks of electing Democratic Progressives.Then there are other accusations that are more difficult to assess. A Democratic Progressive candidate accused China of circulating a deepfake video of him engaged in a sex act. The cabinet called for an investigation.The best antidote to Chinese manipulation may be calling attention to it. In the past, Chinese election meddling in Taiwan has backfired, and Lai seems happier talking about Chinese manipulations than about the frustration voters feel about out-of-control Taiwan housing prices and government corruption.Presidential candidate William Lai, at a rally.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesOne reason for the global attention on Taiwan’s election is the backdrop of concern about the risk of conflict in the Taiwan Strait. Some in the Taiwan opposition warn that the danger will be greater if the next president is someone who flirts with Taiwan independence, like Lai. Partly because of accusations that he might poke China unnecessarily, Lai has gone out of his way to say that he will continue the policies of President Tsai Ing-wen — whom Beijing also can’t stand but who has been cautious about provoking China.The White House has called on “outside actors” — read: “China”— to avoid interfering in Taiwan’s elections, and I hope that Beijing will get the message that manipulations can backfire. Unfortunately, I suspect that the reality is nuanced: Blatant election bullying is counterproductive, but more subtle manipulations on TikTok or Facebook may succeed if they elude scrutiny. We in the press didn’t pay enough attention to foreign manipulation in the 2016 U.S. election; we must do better.One last thought: As I cover these Taiwan elections and think back to the first one I covered in Taiwan, I keep reflecting: When will change ever come to China?It wasn’t obvious in the 1980s which countries in Asia would democratize and which wouldn’t — and then rising education levels and a growing middle class led to a flowering in countries near China even as the Middle Kingdom itself became more repressive, especially in recent years under Xi Jinping.Beijing feels bleak today — but considering the transformation on an island once under prolonged martial law and a similarly autocratic regime, it may be that the place where it’s easiest to be optimistic about China is actually here in the thriving young democracy of Taiwan during election week.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      Trump Has Ushered in the Age of the ‘Great Misalignment’

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      The coming election will be held at a time of insoluble cultural and racial conflict; a two-tier economy, one growing, the other stagnant; a time of inequality and economic immobility; a divided electorate based on educational attainment — taken together, a toxic combination pushing the country into two belligerent camps.I wrote to a range of scholars, asking whether the nation has reached a point of no return.The responses varied widely, but the level of shared pessimism was striking.Richard Haass, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former director of policy planning at the State Department, responded, “So is the U.S. at a critical juncture? And is this juncture qualitatively different from previous difficult moments in our history?”His answer to his own question: “I lean toward yes, as one of the comparative advantages of this democracy has been its ability to reform itself and correct mistakes, and our ability to do so now is much less certain.”What worries Haass most isthe decline in a common American identity. Americans lead increasingly separate and different lives. From “out of many one” no longer applies. This is truly dangerous as this is a country founded on an idea (rather than class or demographic homogeneity), and that idea is no longer agreed on, much less widely held. I am no longer confident there is the necessary desire and ability to make this country succeed. As a result, I cannot rule out continued paralysis and dysfunction at best and widespread political violence or even dissolution at worst.In an email, Pippa Norris, a political scientist at Harvard’s Kennedy School, described the complex interplay of cultural and economic upheavals and the growing inability of politics to give voice to disparate interests as key factors driving contemporary dysfunction.Some developments, Norris wrote,are widely documented and not in dispute, notably the decades-long erosion of blue collar (primarily masculine) work and pay in agriculture, extractive and manufacturing industries, especially in unionized and skilled sectors which employed high school graduates, and the massive expansion of opportunities in professional and managerial careers in finance, technology and the service sector, in the private as well as in the nonprofit and public sectors, rewarding highly educated and more geographically mobile women and men living in urban and suburban areas.These developments have, in turn,been accompanied with generational shifts in cultural values moving societies, and in a lagged process, in the mainstream policy agenda, gradually in a more liberal direction on a wide range of moral issues, as polls show, such as attitudes toward marriage and the family, sexuality and gender, race and ethnicity, environmentalism, migration, and cosmopolitanism, as well as long-term processes of secularization and the erosion of religiosity.What kinds of political systems, Norris asked, are most vulnerable to democratic backsliding when voters become polarized? Answer: two-party systems like the one operating in the United States.In this country, Norris argued,Backsliding is strengthened as the political system struggles to provide outlets for alternative contenders reflecting the new issue agenda on the liberal-left and conservative-right. The longer this continues, the more the process raises the stakes in plurality elections and reinforces “us-them” intolerance among winners and especially losers, who increasingly come to reject the legitimacy of the rules of the game where they feel that the deck is consistently stacked against them.All of which lays the groundwork for the acceptance of false claims.Norris continued:The most plausible misinformation is based on something which is actually true, hence the “great replacement theory” among evangelicals is not simply “made up” myths; given patterns of secularization, there is indeed a decline in the religious population in America. Similarly for Republicans, deeply held beliefs that, for example, they are silenced since their values are no longer reflected in “mainstream” media or the culture of the Ivy Leagues are, indeed, at least in part, based on well-grounded truths. Hence the MAGA grass roots takeover of the old country club G.O.P. and authoritarian challenges to liberal democratic norms.These destructive forces gain strength in the United States, in Norris’s view,Where there is a two-party system despite an increasingly diverse plural society and culture, where multidimensional ideological polarization has grown within parties and the electorate, and where there are no realistic opportunities for multiparty competition which would serve as a “pressure valve” outlet for cultural diversity, as is common throughout Europe.Jack Goldstone, a professor of public policy at George Mason University, sees other factors driving intensified conflict. In an email, he wrote:If the Democrats manage to win another term and can control the Congress as well as the White House after 2024, they may make an even larger turn in the direction of F.D.R.-style government support for general welfare. But if the G.O.P. wins in 2024, or even wins enough to paralyze government and sow further doubts about the legitimacy of our government and institutions, then we drift steadily toward Argentina-style populism, and neither American democracy nor American prosperity will ever be the same again.Why is the country in this fragile condition? Goldstone argued that one set of data points sums most of it up:From the late 1940s to the mid-1970s, output and wages moved together. But slowly from the mid-1970s, and then rapidly from the 1980s, they diverged. By 2023, we’ve had 40 years in which the output of the economy has grown enormously, with output per worker hour growing by 126 percent, while compensation per worker has grown only 27 percent.In short, Goldstone continued, “a majority of Americans today are more pressured to get life’s necessities, more unsure of their future, and find it far more difficult to find avenues to get ahead. No wonder they are fed up with politics ‘as usual,’ think the system is rigged against them, and just want someone to make things more secure.”Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote in an email that pessimism has become endemic in some quarters: “I find that many of my friends, relatives and colleagues are equally concerned about the future of the country. The worst part of this is that we feel quite helpless — unable to find ways to improve matters.”That the leaders of one of our two major political parties “would support a corrupt, self-interested, and deranged former president,” Sawhill continued, “is certainly part of the problem but even more concerning is the fact that a majority of the public currently says they would vote for him in 2024.”The biggest challenge, she wrote, “is what I have called ‘the great misalignment’ between the institutions we have and those we need to deal with most of these problems.”The framers of the Constitution, she wrote:understood human frailties and passions. But they thought they had designed a set of institutions that could weather the storms. They also assumed a nation in which civic virtue had been instilled in people by families, schools or faith-based congregations. Over the coming year, those assumptions will be sorely tested.The difficulties of institutions in prevailing under such concerted duress is becoming increasingly apparent.Greg Conti, a political scientist at Princeton, in an essay published in December in Compact magazine, “The Rise of the Sectarian University,” describes the erosion of national support for the mediating role of key institutions:The real peril to elite higher education, then, isn’t that these places will be financially ruined, nor that they will be effectively interfered with in their internal operations by hostile conservatives. It is, instead, that their position in American society will come to resemble that of The New York Times or of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Which is to say that they will remain rich and powerful, and they will continue to have many bright and competent people working within their ambit. And yet their authority will grow more brittle and their appeal more sectarian.If universities continue to operate as they have been doing, a similar fate will be their destination. From being de facto national institutions, a valued part of our shared patrimony, pursuing one of the essential purposes of a great modern society, they are coming to be seen as the instruments of a sect. Public regard for higher education was falling across the ideological spectrum even before the events of this autumn. Without a course correction, the silent majority of Americans will be as likely to put any stock in the research of an Ivy League professor as they are to get the next booster, even as Ivy League credentials receive great deference within an increasingly inward-looking portion of our privileged classes.Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard and the author of “Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress,” is the most optimistic — or, perhaps, the least pessimistic — of those I contacted for this column. He replied by email to my query:One can always think one is in an unprecedented crisis by listing the worst things happening in the country at the time. But this is a non-random sample, and selecting the worst developments in a given year will always make it seem as if a catastrophe is imminent. It’s good to remember the apparently existential crises of decades that you and I lived through, including:the 1960s, with the assassination of three of the country’s most beloved figures, including the president; urban riots in which dozens of people were killed and neighborhoods burned in a single night; an unpopular war that killed 10 times as many Americans as died in Iraq and Afghanistan; fears of annihilation in an all-out nuclear war; a generation that rejected the reigning social and sexual mores, many of whom called for a violent Communist or anarchist revolution; a segregationist third-party candidate who won five states.the 1970s, with five terrorist bombings a day in many years; the resignations of both the vice president and the president; double-digit inflation and unemployment; two energy crises that were thought might end industrial civilization; “America Held Hostage” in Iran; a sitting president almost unseated by his own party; etc.the 1980s, with violent crime and homelessness reaching all-time highs; new fears of nuclear escalation; a crack cocaine crisis.the 2000s, with fears of weekly 9/11-scale attacks, or worse, attacks with chemical, biological and nuclear weapons; plans for the surveillance of the entire American population; widespread ridicule and hatred of a president who led the country into two disastrous wars.Pinker has repeatedly made his case in recent days on the X platform, posting “177 Ways the World Got Better in 2023” on Jan. 2, “From David Byrne’s Reasons to Be Cheerful” on the same day and “No, 2023 Wasn’t All Bad, and Here Are 23 Reasons Why Not” on Jan. 4.Pinker, however, is an outlier.Larry Kramer, who just retired as president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and is set to serve as president of the London School of Economics, wrote in an email that several major contemporary trends are negative, including:(1) Fragmentation of media, coupled with loss of standards, disappearance of local media, and degradation of journalistic norms; (2) weakening of parties through well-meaning but misguided regulation (e.g., campaign finance) that shifted control from professionals to private, wealthy ideologues; (3) policy regimes that wildly exacerbated wealth inequality and left overwhelming numbers of Americans feeling worse off, reducing life expectancy, and disabling government from addressing people’s needs; (4) a shift in the left and the right to identity politics that reduces people to their race, gender, and political ideology — sharpening the sense of differences by minimizing what we share with each other and so turning a shared political community with disagreements into warring camps of enemies.A number of those I contacted cited inequality and downward mobility as key factors undermining faith in democratic governance.Allen Matusow, a historian at Rice and the author of “The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s,” wrote by email that he belongs “to the school that believes that our democracy has not been in such peril since the Civil War, and the easy explanation is Trump. But the real question is why such a despicable demagogue commands the support of so many.”Matusow specifically cited “income inequality and “the cultural resentments of those left behind.”Trump’s contribution “to the left-behind,” Matusow wrote,is license to focus its resentments on minorities and to make the expressions of prejudice acceptable. Since WW II we have had two other notable populist demagogues. Both exploited a moment to attack elites, though neither was a threat to win the presidency. Joe McCarthy was careful not to stir up prejudices against racial and ethnic minorities, and for all his faults, George Wallace was not a serial liar. Trump is in a class all by himself.Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, shares Matusow’s concerns over the detrimental impact of inequality. Cain emailed me to say:The recent growing dissatisfaction with democracy is a reminder that people judge the fairness of their political system by how they are doing in it. Downward mobility and the loss of political and social status leads to alienation from democratic norms and distrust in government. We believe that democracy is a better form of government because it will produce better policies by being accountable to the people. But when it does not perform well, democratic legitimacy erodes across the political spectrum.These factors, Cain continued, work in tandem withsocial and political instability due to globalization, automation, and social media. Much has changed in recent decades such as the country’s more diverse racial and ethnic composition, job opportunities more strongly defined along education lines, and expanded gender roles. MAGA anger and anxiety about replacement stems from the simultaneous loss of social status, economic opportunity, and political power due to these significant economic, social and demographic trends.Dissension between Democrats and Republicans, Cain argued, feeds a vicious circle:The progressive left wants changes to happen more quickly, which only feeds right-wing fears and fervor. The cycle of political tension continues to build. Trump stirs the pot, but the tensions have been building for decades.In the short term, Cain is not optimistic:We can’t have effective government until we have sufficient consensus, and we can’t have consensus unless the people in government aim for effective policy rather than notoriety and a media career. Barring one party running the table and winning trifecta control, we will wallow in a polarized, divided government for another term or two. That is the design of the Madisonian system: stay in neutral until we know where we want to go.Perhaps the most trenchant comment I received was from Theda Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology at Harvard, who replied to my inquiry at the height of the controversy over the former Harvard president Claudine Gay:I have thought for some time that America was suffering multiple elite-driven institutional breakdowns across the board, opening the door to a national and global maelstrom. But now I find myself so overwhelmingly distressed by it all, including the collapse of core values at my own university, that I cannot write coherently about it.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      Setting the Stage for Iowa: ‘Trump Will Probably be Over 50 Percent’

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      Patrick Healy and The Republican caucuses in Iowa are just five days away, marking the official start of the 2024 presidential election season. To kick-start Opinion Audio’s coverage, Patrick Healy, the deputy editor of Times Opinion, and the Opinion editor Katherine Miller get together to discuss their expectations for Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, where they think the G.O.P. is headed and Donald Trump’s continued dominance. Stay tuned for more on-the-ground analysis from “The Opinions” in the coming weeks.Illustration by Akshita Chandra/The New York Times; Photograph by Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesThe Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, X (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram.This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Vishakha Darbha. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin, Alison Bruzek and Annie-Rose Strasser. Engineering by Issac Jones with mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Original music by Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. More

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      Resistance to Trump Is Not Futile

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      The outcome of the 2016 presidential election was such a shocking event that for people of a certain cast of mind, Donald Trump is less a politician than a force of history.To this class of observer, Trump is something like the world spirit made flesh, where the “world spirit” is a global tide of reactionary populism. He may not have ushered in the furious effort to defend existing hierarchies of status and personhood, but he seems to represent its essential qualities, from the farcical incompetence that often undermines its grand intentions to the unrelenting, sometimes violent intensity that has sustained a forward march through failure back toward power.The upshot of this idea of Trump as a kind of incarnation is that resistance is futile. You can defeat him at the ballot box, you can put him at the mercy of the criminal-legal system, you can even disqualify him under the Constitution, but the spirit endures. Trump or not, goes the argument, we live in an age of grass-roots reaction. Trump is just an avatar. His followers — the forgotten, if not exactly silent, remnant of the nation’s old majority — will find another something.It is hard not to be at least a little persuaded by this assessment of the state of things, even more so if you’re inclined to the fatalism that pervades much of American life at this particular time.But let’s step back for a moment. Before we embrace this almost baroque conception of the former president, let’s take a full picture of the past eight years in American politics. Let’s grab a loupe and look at the details. What do we see? Not inexorable forces at work, but chance events and contingent choices.In other words, it is true that Trump was produced by (and took advantage of) a particular set of social forces within the Republican Party and outside it. It is true that those forces exist with or without Trump. But Trump, himself, was not inevitable.If Republican elites had coalesced around a single candidate in the early days of the 2016 presidential race, they might have derailed Trump before he had a chance to pick up steam. If Republicans had chosen, in the aftermath of the “Access Hollywood” videotape, to fully reject his presence in American politics, he might have flopped and floundered in the November election. If Hillary Clinton had won just a few more votes in a few more states — a combined 77,744 in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — Trump would have never won the White House.It’s not that the reactionary populism that fueled Trump’s campaign would have completely dissipated. But the character of its politics might have been very different without Trump in the nation’s highest office to lead and give shape to the movement. As it stands, he had that power and stature, and there is now a reason the most MAGA-minded Republican politicians — or those with aspirations to lead Trump’s Republican Party — work tirelessly to mimic and recapitulate the former president’s cruelty, corruption and contempt for constitutional government.We saw this with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who went so far as to mimic Trump’s movements and posture, and we’re seeing it with Representative Elise Stefanik, an eager and unapologetic demagogue last seen, in a recent interview, defending Jan. 6 insurrectionists and refusing to commit to certifying a Trump election loss.If nothing else, it is difficult to imagine another Republican politician who would have inspired the same cult of personality as the one that has enveloped Trump during his years on the national stage. It’s no accident that to ensure loyalty or force compliance, followers of the former president have resorted to intimidation and death threats.If Trump is in a dynamic relationship with the social forces that produced him — if he is both product and producer — then it stands to reason that his absence from the scene, even now, would have some effect on the way those forces express themselves.Trump still leads the field for the Republican presidential nomination. But imagine if he loses. Imagine that he is, somehow, rejected by a majority of Republican voters. Does the character of American-style reactionary populism remain the same, or does it — along with the politicians who wield it — adjust to fit the new political environment? Will the next crop of Republican politicians have the force of personality to mold their supporters into a weapon to use against the constitutional order, or will they — with Trump’s persistent failure in mind — accept the basics of democratic society?One of the arguments against the effort to disqualify Trump from the presidency under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment is that it won’t save American democracy to remove him from the ballot. That’s true enough — the problems with American democracy run deeper than one man — but it’s also beside the point.If the character of a political movement is forged through contingency — the circumstances of its birth, the context of its growth, the personalities of its leadership — then it matters who sits at the top.The point, then, is that it would be better to face the challenges to American democracy without a constitutional arsonist at the helm of one of our two major political parties. A world in which Trump cannot hold office is not necessarily a normal one, but it is one where the danger is a little less acute.Trump, of course, will not be removed from the ballot. No Supreme Court, and certainly not ours, would allow this effort to get that far. The only way to move past Trump will be, once again, to beat him at the ballot box.Nonetheless, it is still worth the effort to say what is true: that our constitutional system, however flawed, is worth defending; that Trump is a clear and present threat to that system; and that we should use every legitimate tool at our disposal to keep him away from — and out of — power.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      Joe Biden Is Trying to Jolt Us Out of Learned Helplessness About Trump

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      After Joe Biden’s speech on Friday marking the anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection and laying out the democratic stakes of the next election, Mitt Romney pronounced himself unimpressed. “As a Biden campaign theme, I think the ‘threat to democracy’ pitch is a bust,” the Utah Republican told a New York Times reporter. “Biden needs fresh material, a new attack, rather than kicking a dead political horse.”If he is right, it’s as much an indictment of America — including the American media — as of the Biden campaign. It would mean that Donald Trump has already broken us, so frying America’s circuits that we can no longer process the authoritarian peril right in front of us.Whether or not it was savvy for Biden to center his first campaign speech of the year on the danger Trump poses to democracy, his words had the virtue of being true. “Trump’s assault on democracy isn’t just part of his past,” Biden said in the speech. “It’s what he’s promising for the future. He’s being straightforward. He’s not hiding the ball.”Romney almost certainly shares Biden’s sense of foreboding; as his biographer McKay Coppins wrote, after Jan. 6, Romney became obsessed with the fall of great civilizations throughout history. “This is a very fragile thing,” he said of America’s democratic experiment. “Authoritarianism is like a gargoyle lurking over the cathedral, ready to pounce.”That’s fundamentally what the 2024 election is about. But even though Romney appears to agree with Biden about the existential danger of another Trump presidency, he, like many others, seems worried that when it comes to the future of American self-government, a cynical and exhausted populace can’t be made to care.This fear could easily become self-fulfilling, as commentators treat Trump’s plot against America as a given instead of a major, still-unfolding story. On Saturday, CNN’s Chris Wallace analyzed Biden’s speech, in which the president noted, correctly, that Trump’s rhetoric about migrants echoed “the same exact language used in Nazi Germany.” Wallace asked one of his panelists, “Is Biden smart to go this hard at Trump?” Surely the more important question is whether Biden’s alarming warning about his predecessor is accurate. The #Resistance-era warning against “normalizing” Trump might now seem hokey, but it’s still apt. The alternative is to let Trump redefine our sense of what is shocking and aberrant in American politics.There was a line in the Biden speech that puzzled me: Trump “proudly posts on social media the words that best describe his 2024 campaign, quote, ‘revenge’; quote, ‘power’; and, quote, ‘dictatorship.’” I follow politics closely but didn’t know what Biden was talking about. It turns out that the day after Christmas, when I was on vacation and only briefly glancing at headlines, Trump posted to his Truth Social account a word cloud illustrating the terms voters in a survey most often associated with his political goals. In the center, in large, red-orange letters, are “power,” “dictatorship” and, most prominently of all, “revenge.” But Trump’s implicit boast about his authoritarian image was just a blip; by the time I got back online on Dec. 29, it had disappeared from the news cycle, much as the memories of so many other Trumpian outrages against the civic fabric have disappeared. All this forgetting is a result of Trump’s singular talent, which is to transgress at such speed and scale that the human mind can’t keep up.Biden has set himself the task of trying to jolt the country out of its learned helplessness in the face of Trump’s exhausting provocations. This is not, despite the fatalism of people like Romney, a doomed project. Congress’s Jan. 6 hearings demonstrated that a sustained focus on Trump’s wrongdoing can move at least some fraction of the public. Right now, the ex-president benefits from being largely out of the spotlight — his ejection from Twitter has, ironically, been a great boon to him — but the more Trump is in people’s faces, the less they like him. (That’s why his Covid news conferences were so disastrous for him.) It’s thus incumbent on Biden to try to make people pay attention to a man many of us would rather never think about again.On Monday, Biden gave his second campaign speech of the year, at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., site of a racist mass murder in 2015. It was ostensibly about white supremacy, but its real theme was truth, and the way historical fictions from the Lost Cause of the Confederate South to Trump’s big lie about the 2020 election license tyranny and oppression.“The truth is under assault in America,” said Biden. “As a consequence, so is our freedom, our democracy, our very country, because without the truth, there’s no light. Without light there’s no path from this darkness.”We won’t know until November whether this approach works, but given where we are, it’s hard to imagine a better one. I’d love to have a candidate who makes voters feel inspired, giving them something to vote for instead of against. But after three years in office, Biden probably won’t be able to talk Americans into feeling excited about him, and the pro-Palestinian demonstrators who interrupted him are a reminder of how disillusioned many progressives are by his Israel policy.To be sure, Biden’s presidency has been full of serious accomplishments; he spoke about some of them on Monday, including lowering the cost of insulin and canceling student debt for more than 3.6 million people. But ultimately, the best reason to vote for Biden is to stave off the calamity of an encore Trump administration, in which a lawless would-be dictator, proclaiming his own immunity from prosecution and lionizing the violent mob that tried to keep him in power, enacts an orgy of retribution against small-d democrats. If hammering away at this reality is an ineffective campaign strategy, we’re already lost.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      The Election No One Seems to Want Is Coming Right at Us

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      Gail Collins: Hey, Bret, it really is 2024 now. Happy new year. And the race is on! Next week, the Iowa caucuses. After Iowa …Bret Stephens: Le déluge.Gail: OK, I want to hear your thoughts. Any chance Donald Trump won’t be the Republican nominee? Do you have a Nikki Haley scenario?Bret: Gail, my feelings about the G.O.P. primary contest are like Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief. After the 2022 midterms, when Trump’s favored candidates were more or less trounced and he looked like a total loser, I was in complete denial that he could win. Then, as his standing in the party failed to evaporate as I had predicted, I was angry: “Lock him up,” I wrote. Next came bargaining: I said he might be stopped if only Ron DeSantis, Chris Christie and every other Republican dropped out of the race to endorse Haley.Gail: Stage four?Bret: Now I’m just depressed. After he takes back the White House in November, I guess acceptance will have to follow. Is there a stage six? Does eternal damnation come next?Gail: I don’t accept acceptance! Come on: I know Joe Biden isn’t the most electric candidate in history. We’re all obsessed with his age. But he isn’t under multitudinous indictments, charged with trying to overthrow the democratic process or in a stupendous personal financial collapse.We may wind up going through this every week for the next 10 months, but I’m sticking with my Biden re-election prediction.Bret: Saying Biden can win is like playing Russian roulette with three bullets in the revolver instead of the traditional one. You might be right. Or we end up like Christopher Walken at the end of “The Deer Hunter.”Gail: Ewww.Bret: It isn’t just that Trump is running ahead of Biden now in the overall race, according to RealClearPolitics’ average of polls. It’s that he’s running ahead of him in the states that matter: Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Wisconsin. I don’t quite understand all of these Democrats who say Trump is an existential threat to decency, democracy and maybe life on the planet and then insist they’re sticking with Biden instead of another candidate. It’s like refusing to seek better medical care for a desperately sick child because the family doctor is a nice old man whose feelings might get hurt if you left his practice.At a minimum, can we please replace Kamala Harris on the ticket with someone more, er, confidence-inspiring? Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan? Or Wes Moore, the governor of Maryland? Come on, why not?Gail: Real-world answer is that Harris hasn’t done anything wrong. You don’t dump a hard-working, loyal veep who also happens to be a woman and a minority just because you think there might be somebody better out there somewhere.Bret: Saying Harris hasn’t done anything wrong leaves out two more salient questions: What has she done well? And does she add to or detract from the ticket’s electability?Gail: Let’s go back to Biden. We all know the problems. But he’s done a good job. The economic recovery is going well. And did you hear his speech on Friday? I know he’s not a great orator, but he made it clear that he’s going to campaign against Trump very, very, very hard.Bret: Well, let’s hope it doesn’t kill him. In the meantime, your thoughts about Trump potentially being disqualified from running in Maine and Colorado?Gail: While I love the idea of his role in Jan. 6 making him an insurrectionist who’s constitutionally not permitted to run for president, I have to admit the whole thing makes me very nervous.You don’t take care of the Trump problem by evicting him from the ballot. He has to be defeated or it’ll be a rallying cry for his many crazy supporters that could split the country in two.Am I being too much of a downer here?Bret: Couldn’t agree with you more. The decisions are wrong, pernicious, misjudged, arrogant and guaranteed to backfire.Gail: Great string of adjectives there. Go on.Bret: If Eugene Debs could run for president in 1920 from prison after he was convicted of sedition, why shouldn’t Trump be able to run for president without having been convicted of anything? If Trump can be kicked off the ballot in blue states on account of a highly debatable finding of “insurrection,” then what’s to stop red state judges or other officials kicking Biden off on their own flimsy findings? And on what basis can liberals continue to argue that Trump or Republicans represent a threat to democracy when they are the ones engaged in an attempt to deny tens of millions of voters their choice for president?Gail: Speaking for liberals, I agree. But I also commend Biden for trying to make Trump’s outrageous, dangerous behavior on Jan. 6 a campaign issue.Bret: The Supreme Court should overturn the Colorado court, swiftly and unanimously, and let voters choose the next president. Maybe at Harvard, too, while we’re at it.Gail: Hmm, do I detect an issue that’s really on your mind? Have to admit Claudine Gay’s problems at Harvard haven’t been at the top of my obsession list. But are you ready to rant?Bret: Yes, particularly about a tweet that The Associated Press sent out the other day that seems to capture a particular kind of inanity. It read: “Harvard president’s resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism.” Maybe this “weapon” wouldn’t have been so injurious to Gay if she hadn’t violated a cardinal academic rule more than three dozen times or been at the top of an institution that is supposed to uphold strict intellectual integrity.I also think the episode is a good opportunity for universities to try to rethink what their core mission ought to be. For starters, they should reread the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report and get out of the business of making political statements of any kind. They should foster more intellectual diversity in their faculties and student bodies. And they need to downsize and restrain their administrative side, particularly the thought police in their Diversity, Equity and Inclusion office.Gail: Let me pick out a sliver of agreement here. This country has long had a crippling system of higher education in which kids could get very expensive loans very easily. Sometimes from smarmy private lenders who needed to be shut down and sometimes well-intentioned government-backed ones. But either way, ambitious young people were encouraged to borrow tons of money, and then left with hopeless piles of debt.And all that cash flowing in allowed universities to grow way too much, particularly in areas like administration.Bret: If we keep agreeing this much, the world might end.Gail: University heads have a lot of roles. Representing inclusivity is a worthy one. We’re moving into an era when schools can no longer consider race as its own factor in admissions. But they have to keep finding ways to make sure their student bodies aren’t totally dominated by well-heeled white kids. One strategy is having high-profile administrators and professors who represent a good mix of race, background, special interests, etc.Bret: Sure.Gail: Claudine Gay was an attractive choice on that front. Her performance at that hearing on antisemitism was a disaster, I think in part because she was used to appearing in very different contexts, and didn’t expect her generalizations about inclusivity to be so sharply attacked. Her mistake.Bret: Part of the problem here is that diversity, equity and inclusion went from being a set of worthy aspirations to a bureaucratic and self-serving apparatus with a highly ideological, polarizing and often exclusionary concept of its own mission.Gail: Think you’re leaving me behind here. But go on.Bret: Another part of the problem is that, while diversity is a fine goal, it needs to be in service to the university’s central mission of intellectual challenge and excellence, not at cross-purposes with it. My biggest problem with Gay wasn’t her plagiarism or even her disastrous testimony to Congress. It was her thin academic record: 11 published papers and not a single book in 26 years. I hope her successor is a model of scholarship, irrespective of race or gender.But getting back to politics, Gail, give me your advice on how Biden should run his campaign.Gail: Did you hear his Jan. 6 speech, the one I mentioned earlier? I thought it was pretty good. Best way for him to get past the age issue is to be feisty, take Trump head on. Make the Donald mad — because when he gets mad, he tends to sound more demented than Biden at his worst.Bret: The “Give ’Em Hell, Harry” approach. I like it.Gail: Our president should remind the country of all the good stuff that’s happened under his administration. Including the large economic improvement. And the country’s struggle against that huge jump in the national debt created by Trump’s tax breaks for the rich.Bret: Biden needs an ad campaign in the spirit of Ronald Reagan’s “There Is a Bear in the Woods.” In one ad, people would constantly wake up to a jackhammer, a chain saw or a car alarm, to remind them of what it was like to wake up to whatever Trump had tweeted at 2 in the morning. In another, parents have to deal with a petulant and boastful 12-year-old boy who’s constantly lying to them. A third would just be footage of Trump lavishing praise on Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un, not to mention Hezbollah.At the end of each ad, a voice that sounds like Tommy Lee Jones’s would ask the question: “Some people want four more years of this — do you?”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More