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      Do You Live in a ‘Tight’ State or a ‘Loose’ One? Turns Out It Matters Quite a Bit.

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      Political biases are omnipresent, but what we don’t fully understand yet is how they come about in the first place.In 2014, Michele J. Gelfand, a professor of psychology at the Stanford Graduate School of Business formerly at the University of Maryland, and Jesse R. Harrington, then a PhD. candidate, conducted a study designed to rank the 50 states on a scale of “tightness” and “looseness.”Appropriately titled “Tightness-Looseness Across the 50 United States,” the study calculated a catalog of measures for each state, including the incidence of natural disasters, disease prevalence, residents’ levels of openness and conscientiousness, drug and alcohol use, homelessness and incarceration rates.Gelfand and Harrington predicted that “‘tight’ states would exhibit a higher incidence of natural disasters, greater environmental vulnerability, fewer natural resources, greater incidence of disease and higher mortality rates, higher population density, and greater degrees of external threat.”The South dominated the tight states: Mississippi, Alabama Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Louisiana, Kentucky, South Carolina and North Carolina. With two exceptions — Nevada and Hawaii — states in New England and on the West Coast were the loosest: California, Oregon, Washington, Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Vermont.In both 2016 and 2020, Donald Trump carried all 10 of the top “tight” states; Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden carried all 10 of the top “loose” states.Gelfand continued to pursue this line of research, publishing “Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire the World” in 2018, in which she described the results of a 2016 pre-election survey she and two colleagues had commissioned:The results were telling: People who felt the country was facing greater threats desired greater tightness. This desire, in turn, correctly predicted their support for Trump. In fact, desired tightness predicted support for Trump far better than other measures. For example, a desire for tightness predicted a vote for Trump with 44 times more accuracy than other popular measures of authoritarianism.The 2016 election, Gelfand continued, “turned largely on primal cultural reflexes — ones that had been conditioned not only by cultural forces, but by a candidate who was able to exploit them.”In a 2019 interview, Gelfand said:Some groups have much stronger norms than others; they’re tight. Others have much weaker norms; they’re loose. Of course, all cultures have areas in which they are tight and loose — but cultures vary in the degree to which they emphasize norms and compliance with them.Cultural differences, Gelfand continued, “have a certain logic — a rationale that makes good sense,” noting that “cultures that have threats need rules to coordinate to survive (think about how incredibly coordinated Japan is in response to natural disasters). But cultures that don’t have a lot of threat can afford to be more permissive and loose.”The tight-loose concept, Gelfand argued,is an important framework to understand the rise of President Donald Trump and other leaders in Poland, Hungary, Italy, and France, among others. The gist is this: when people perceive threat — whether real or imagined, they want strong rules and autocratic leaders to help them survive. My research has found that within minutes of exposing study participants to false information about terrorist incidents, overpopulation, pathogen outbreaks and natural disasters, their minds tightened. They wanted stronger rules and punishments.There are significantly different costs and benefits to tight and loose communities. In her book, Gelfand writes that tightness encourages conscientiousness, social order and self-control on the plus side, along with close-mindedness, conventional thinking and cultural inertia on the minus side. Looseness, Gelfand posits, fosters tolerance, creativity and adaptability, along with such liabilities as social disorder, a lack of coordination and impulsive behavior.I recently contacted Laura Niemi, a professor of psychology at Cornell, posing a series of questions that included these two:If liberalism and conservatism have historically played a complementary role, each checking the other to constrain extremism, why are the left and right so destructively hostile to each other now, and why is the contemporary political system so polarized?Along the same lines, if liberals and conservatives hold differing moral visions, not just about what makes a good government but about what makes a good life, what turned the relationship between left and right from competitive to mutually destructive?In her emailed reply, Niemi contended that sensitivity to various types of threat is a key factor in driving differences between the far left and far right. She cited research thatfound 47 percent of the most extreme conservatives strongly endorsed the view that “The world is becoming a more and more dangerous place,” compared to 19 percent of the most extreme liberals. Being threatened by the world, in turn, correlated with support for the Muslim ban and building a U.S.-Mexico wall. But if perceived threat were measured by endorsement of the statement “The U.S. is becoming a more and more dangerous place,” the results would likely look different — liberals, thinking of gun violence, may appear very high in threat perception.Conservatives and liberals, Niemi continued,see different things as threats — the nature of the threat and how it happens to stir one’s moral values (and their associated emotions) is a better clue to why liberals and conservatives react differently. Unlike liberals, conservatives strongly endorse the binding moral values aimed at protecting groups and relationships. They judge transgressions involving personal and national betrayal, disobedience to authority, and disgusting or impure acts such as sexually or spiritually unchaste behavior as morally relevant and wrong.Underlying these differences are competing sets of liberal and conservative moral priorities, with liberals placing more stress than conservatives on caring, kindness, fairness and rights — known among scholars as “individualizing values” — while conservatives focus more on loyalty, hierarchy, deference to authority, sanctity and a higher standard of disgust, known as “binding values.”As a set, Niemi wrote, conservative binding values encompassthe values oriented around group preservation, are associated with judgments, decisions, and interpersonal orientations that sacrifice the welfare of individuals. For example, binding values are associated with Machiavellianism (e.g., status-seeking and lying, getting ahead by any means, 2013); victim derogation, blame, and beliefs that victims were causal contributors for a variety of harmful acts (2016, 2020); and a tendency to excuse transgressions of ingroup members with attributions to the situation rather than the person (2023).Niemi cited a paper she and Liane Young, a professor of psychology at Boston College, published in 2016, “When and Why We See Victims as Responsible: The Impact of Ideology on Attitudes Toward Victims,” which tested responses of men and women to descriptions of crimes including sexual assaults and robberies.Niemi and Young wrote:We measured moral values associated with unconditionally prohibiting harm (“individualizing values”) versus moral values associated with prohibiting behavior that destabilizes groups and relationships (“binding values”: loyalty, obedience to authority, and purity). Increased endorsement of binding values predicted increased ratings of victims as contaminated, increased blame and responsibility attributed to victims, increased perceptions of victims’ (versus perpetrators’) behaviors as contributing to the outcome, and decreased focus on perpetrators.In summary, Niemi wrote:Numerous factors potentially influence the evolution of liberalism and conservatism and other social-cultural differences, including geography, topography, catastrophic events, and subsistence styles. What happened to people ecologically affected social-political developments, including the content of the rules people made and how they enforced them. Just as ecological factors differing from region to region over the globe produced different cultural values, ecological factors differed throughout the U.S. historically and today, producing our regional and state-level dimensions of culture and political patterns.Not everybody buys this.Joshua Hartshorne, who is also a professor of psychology at Boston College, took issue with the binding versus individualizing values theory as an explanation for the tendency of conservatives to blame victims:I would guess that the reason conservatives are more likely to blame the victim has less to do with binding values and more to do with the just-world bias (the belief that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people, therefore if a bad thing happened to you, you must be a bad person).Belief in a just world, Hartshorne argued, is crucial for those seeking to protect the status quo:It seems psychologically necessary for anyone who wants to advocate for keeping things the way they are that the haves should keep on having, and the have-nots have got as much as they deserve. I don’t see how you could advocate for such a position while simultaneously viewing yourself as moral (and almost everyone believes that they themselves are moral) without also believing in the just world. Conversely, if you generally believe the world is not just, and you view yourself as a moral person, then you are likely to feel like you have an obligation to change things.I asked Lene Aaroe, a political scientist at Aarhus University in Denmark, why the contemporary American political system is as polarized as it is now, given that the liberal-conservative schism is longstanding. What has happened to produce such intense hostility between left and right?Aaroe replied by email:There is variation across countries in hostility between left and right. The United States is a particularly polarized case which calls for a contextual explanation. For example, my own country, Denmark, has a multiparty system and now for the first time since 1978-79 has a coalitional government which includes both the main party on the political left and the party on the political right. A central explanation typically offered for the current situation in American politics is that partisanship and political ideology have developed into strong social identities where the mass public is increasingly sorted — along social, partisan, and ideological lines.I then asked Aaroe why surveys find that conservatives are happier than liberals. “Some research,” she replied, “suggests that experiences of inequality constitute a larger psychological burden to liberals because it is more difficult for liberals to rationalize inequality as a phenomenon with positive consequences.”Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, elaborated in an email on the link between conservatism and happiness:It’s a combination of factors. Conservatives are likelier to be married, patriotic, and religious, all of which make people happier. They may be less aggrieved by the status quo, whereas liberals take on society’s problems as part of their own personal burdens. Liberals also place politics closer to their identity and striving for meaning and purpose, which is a recipe for frustration.At the same time, Pinker continued,Some features of the woke faction of liberalism may make people unhappier: as Jon Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have suggested, wokeism is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in reverse, urging upon people maladaptive mental habits such as catastrophizing, feeling like a victim of forces beyond one’s control, prioritizing emotions of hurt and anger over rational analysis, and dividing the world into allies and villains.Why, I asked Pinker, would liberals and conservatives react differently — often very differently — to messages that highlight threat?“It’s difficult to pin down the psychological underpinnings of liberals and conservatives,” he said,because a predominantly liberal social science establishment tends to analyze conservatism as a kind of pathology and apply a double standard to the characterizations. It may be liberals (or at least the social-justice wing) who are more sensitive to threats, such as white supremacy, climate change, and patriarchy; who may be likelier to moralize, seeing racism and transphobia in messages that others perceive as neutral; and being likelier to surrender to emotions like “harm” and “hurt.”While liberals and conservatives, guided by different sets of moral values, may make agreement on specific policies difficult, that does not necessarily preclude consensus.Robb Willer, a sociologist at Stanford, agreed that research “consistently finds differences in the moral values endorsed by liberals and conservatives,” but, he argued in an email, there are ways to persuade conservatives to support liberal initiatives and to persuade liberals to back conservative proposals:While liberals tend to be more concerned with protecting vulnerable groups from harm and more concerned with equality and social justice than conservatives, conservatives tend to be more concerned with moral issues like group loyalty, respect for authority, purity and religious sanctity than liberals are. Because of these different moral commitments, we find that liberals and conservatives can be persuaded by quite different moral arguments. For example, we find that conservatives are more persuaded by a same-sex marriage appeal articulated in terms of group loyalty and patriotism, rather than equality and social justice.In a 2015 paper, “From Gulf to Bridge: When Do Moral Arguments Facilitate Political Influence?” Willer and Matthew Feinberg, a professor of organizational behavior at the University of Toronto, contend that “political arguments reframed to appeal to the moral values of those holding the opposing political position are typically more effective. We find support for these claims across six studies involving diverse political issues, including same-sex marriage, universal health care, military spending, and adopting English as the nation’s official language.”In one test of persuadability on the right, Feinberg and Willer assigned some conservatives to read an editorial supporting universal health care as a matter of “fairness (health coverage is a basic human right)” or to read an editorial supporting health care as a matter of “purity (uninsured people means more unclean, infected, and diseased Americans).”Conservatives who read the purity argument were much more supportive of health care than those who read the fairness case.Conversely, in a test of liberals, Feinberg and Willer measured support for maintaining high levels of military spending, with respondents reading either an editorial making the case “in terms of fairness (through the military, the disadvantaged can achieve equal standing and overcome the challenges of poverty and inequality)” or an editorial citing “a combination of loyalty and authority (the military unifies us and ensures that the United States is the greatest nation in the world).”Liberals who read the fairness argument were substantially more supportive of military spending than those who read the loyalty and authority argument.Willer is the co-author of a separate 2020 paper that focuses on a concept the authors call “neural polarization.”In “Conservative and Liberal Attitudes Drive Polarized Neural Responses to Political Content,” Willer, Yuan Chang Leong of the University of Chicago, Janice Chen of Johns Hopkins and Jamil Zaki of Stanford address the question of how partisan biases are encoded in the brain:Partisan biases in processing political information contribute to rising divisions in society. How do such biases arise in the brain? We measured the neural activity of participants watching videos related to immigration policy. Despite watching the same videos, conservative and liberal participants exhibited divergent neural responses. This “neural polarization” between groups occurred in a brain area associated with the interpretation of narrative content and intensified in response to language associated with risk, emotion, and morality. Furthermore, polarized neural responses predicted attitude change in response to the videos.The four authors argue that their “findings suggest that biased processing in the brain drives divergent interpretations of political information and subsequent attitude polarization.” These results, they continue, “shed light on the psychological and neural underpinnings of how identical information is interpreted differently by conservatives and liberals.”The authors used neural imaging to follow changes in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (known as DMPFC) as conservatives and liberals watched videos presenting strong positions, left and right, on immigration.“For each video,” they write,participants with DMPFC activity time courses more similar to that of conservative-leaning participants became more likely to support the conservative position. Conversely, those with DMPFC activity time courses more similar to that of liberal-leaning participants became more likely to support the liberal position. These results suggest that divergent interpretations of the same information are associated with increased attitude polarization. Together, our findings describe a neural basis for partisan biases in processing political information and their effects on attitude change.Describe their neuroimaging method, the authors point out that theysearched for evidence of “neural polarization” activity in the brain that diverges between people who hold liberal versus conservative political attitudes. Neural polarization was observed in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC), a brain region associated with the interpretation of narrative content.The question is whether the political polarization that we are witnessing now proves to be a core, encoded aspect of the human mind, difficult to overcome — as Leong, Chen, Zaki and Willer suggest — or whether, with our increased knowledge of the neural basis of partisan and other biases, we will find more effective ways to manage these most dangerous of human predispositions.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, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Obamacare Keeps Winning

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      Its North Carolina victory is a sign of larger changes.The government benefits began their existence as objects of partisan rancor and harsh criticism. Eventually, though, they became so popular that politicians of both parties promised to protect them.It was true of Social Security and Medicare. And now the pattern seems to be repeating itself with Obamacare.Consider what has happened recently in North Carolina: Only a decade after the state’s Republican politicians described the law as dangerous and refused to sign up for its expansion of Medicaid, Republicans and Democrats came together to pass such an expansion. The Republican-controlled House in North Carolina passed the bill 87 to 24, while the Republican-controlled Senate passed it 44 to 2.“Wow, have things changed,” Jonathan Cohn wrote in a HuffPost piece explaining how the turnabout happened.Obamacare — the country’s largest expansion of health insurance since Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 — is still not as widely accepted as those programs. North Carolina became the 40th state to agree to expand Medicaid under Obamacare, which means that 10 states still have not, including two of the largest, Texas and Florida. In those states, more than 3.5 million adults lack health insurance as a result.But the list of states signing up for the program seems to be moving in only one direction: It keeps growing.Source: Kaiser Family Foundation‘Humiliation’In its growing acceptance, Obamacare resembles other major parts of the federal safety net:When Congress was considering Social Security in 1935, conservatives and many business executives bitterly criticized it. One Texas newspaper described Social Security as “a huge sales tax on everybody on behalf of the oldsters.” A Wall Street Journal editorial predicted that the law would eventually be reason for Congress to look back in “humiliation.” Not exactly: Social Security is so popular that it is known as a third rail in American politics.When Congress was debating Medicare in the 1960s, Ronald Reagan — then an actor with a rising political profile — attacked the program as a step toward socialism. If it passed, Reagan warned, “We are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.” As president, Reagan praised and supported the program.After Congress created Medicaid — a health-insurance program primarily for low-income households — in 1965, some states did not initially join it. Arizona became the last to do so, in 1982.Roberts and McCainIn the initial years after Obamacare’s passage in 2010, it was similarly divisive. Blue states embraced it, while many red states rejected its voluntary Medicaid expansion. In Washington, congressional Republicans and Donald Trump tried to repeal it. Some Republican-appointed judges invalidated parts of it, and every Republican appointee on the Supreme Court except Chief Justice John Roberts voted to scrap the law.Twice, it survived by a single vote — first, by Roberts’s 2012 Supreme Court vote, and then by Senator John McCain’s late-night vote against its repeal in 2017. Since then, however, Obamacare has been gaining Republican support.The next year, voters in Idaho, Nebraska and Utah — red states, all — passed ballot initiatives expanding Medicaid. Oklahoma, Missouri and South Dakota have since done so. Montana’s state legislature has also approved an expansion.American Medical Association Communications DivisionIn 2019, Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky, a Democrat, narrowly won election in a Republican state by pledging to protect an earlier Medicaid expansion. In North Carolina, Roy Cooper, also a Democrat, became governor in a 2016 upset partly by campaigning in favor of an expansion — and was able to sign one this week.(Before it takes effect, Cooper and the legislature must agree on a state budget.)These developments are a sign of the law’s growing popularity. And that popularity isn’t especially mysterious: In a country with high levels of economic inequality and large numbers of people without health insurance, Obamacare has increased taxes on the affluent to subsidize health care for poor and middle-class families. At root, it is an effort to reduce inequality.Winning the middleEven with its flaws — including its often complicated process for signing up for insurance — the law has achieved many of its aims. The number of Americans without health insurance has plummeted. In states that have refused the Medicaid expansion, by contrast, rural hospitals are struggling even more than elsewhere because they do not receive the law’s subsidies for care.Greenwood Leflore Hospital — in the Mississippi Delta — is an example. It recently closed its intensive-care unit and maternity ward, as our colleague Sharon LaFraniere has reported. Nationwide, states that did not quickly accept Medicaid expansion have accounted for almost three-quarters of rural hospital closures between 2010 and 2021, according to the American Hospital Association.Similar problems in North Carolina were a reason that Republicans there reconsidered their opposition to Medicaid expansion. “We had these people coming down to Raleigh, farmers, business owners, people from rural areas, they were advocating, telling stories,” one Republican state representative told HuffPost.Many Republicans still oppose Obamacare, and some hard-right members of Congress also favor cuts to Medicaid — as well as to Medicare and Social Security. In a country as polarized as the United States, there isn’t much true political consensus. But Obamacare has won over the political middle more quickly than seemed likely not so long ago.Related: The number of people signing up for insurance through Obamacare has surged over the past two years, partly because of a new subsidies signed by President Biden.THE LATEST NEWSPoliticsMike Pence must testify to the grand jury investigating Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, a judge ruled.Republicans are trying to create obstacles to voting for college students, who lean Democratic.An election for a swing seat on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court has become an expensive political fight.A.I. is already affecting the 2024 elections, producing fake images of Trump getting arrested and videos that mimic Biden’s voice.Migrant DeathsA mourner in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.Go Nakamura for The New York TimesAt least 38 people died in a fire at a migrant detention center in Mexico, near El Paso, Texas. The fire started after a protest.U.S. policies have created overcrowding and desperation at the border.BusinessLawmakers grilled federal regulators who were supposed to supervise Silicon Valley Bank before it collapsed.Prosecutors added a foreign bribery charge to the list of crimes already pending against the FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.Alibaba Group, China’s e-commerce giant, is splitting into six business groups.Other Big StoriesThe shooter who killed six people at a Nashville school this week had legally purchased seven guns recently, the police said.Myanmar’s military dissolved the political party of the imprisoned opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.Russia sent a 13-year-old girl to an orphanage after her father criticized the war in Ukraine.An appeals court reinstated the murder conviction of Adnan Syed, the “Serial” podcast subject who was freed after more than 20 years in prison, and ordered a new hearing.OpinionsThe success of Israel’s protests suggests that its democracy is healthier than many feared, Bret Stephens writes.How can doctors better discuss dying with their patients? Start by trusting them, Dr. Sunita Puri writes.MORNING READS“La Ronde Enfantine,” painted circa 1862.The Fitzwilliam Museum, CambridgeStolen painting: He lost a Courbet when he fled the Nazis. His heirs are getting it back.15-minute city: A professor is getting death threats for his walkable urban design plan.A discovery: He solved a math problem by finding what’s known as an einstein.Midday snooze: Can a nap make up for a bad night of sleep?Advice from Wirecutter: Pick the best VPN.Lives Lived: Born into poverty in the segregated South, Randall Robinson galvanized Americans against South African apartheid and advocated on behalf of Haitian refugees. He died at 81.SPORTS NEWS FROM THE ATHLETICN.C.A.A. women’s tournament: Iowa vs. South Carolina is the Final Four matchup many wanted — and the one the sport deserves.A potential $6 billion deal: Multiple bidders have submitted offers to buy the Washington Commanders, including a group that includes Magic Johnson as an investor. Patriots won’t pursue Jackson: New England is out of the Lamar Jackson stakes, and plans to stick with Mac Jones as its quarterback.ARTS AND IDEAS The pistachio Suprême croissant from Lafayette.Julia Gartland for The New York TimesThe ever-changing croissantApparently there’s no end to the forms a croissant can take.Ten years after the Cronut, pastry chefs are twisting croissant dough into pinwheels and squiggles, tying it in knots and stacking it into cubes. They are turning it into breakfast cereal, tie-dyeing it and, in one case, wrapping it around baguettes.When the baker Scott Cioe wanted to lure crowds to Lafayette, a Manhattan restaurant, he turned to croissant dough, coiling it into a photogenic swirl he called the Suprême. “We eat with our eyes as well as our hands,” Cioe told The Times.PLAY, WATCH, EATWhat to CookJulia Gartland for The New York TimesTry cooking pasta like risotto, adding liquid gradually so that the noodles absorb it completely. The result is a creamy, rich dish.What to WatchRob Lowe and John Owen Lowe star in “Unstable,” a new Netflix series that exaggerates their barbed father-son dynamic.What to Listen toLana Del Rey’s ninth album asks big, earnest questions and isn’t afraid to get messy.Late NightStephen Colbert called the Nashville shooting horrible and familiar.Now Time to PlayThe pangrams from yesterday’s Spelling Bee were calculator and coloratura. Here is today’s puzzle.Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: Really awesome (four letters).And here’s today’s Wordle. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — DavidP.S. Nicholas Nehamas is joining The Times from The Miami Herald, to cover Ron DeSantis.Here’s today’s front page. “The Daily” is about Israel.Matthew Cullen, Lauren Hard, Lauren Jackson, Claire Moses, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Ashley Wu contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. More

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      Junta Disbands Aung San Suu Kyi’s Political Party in Myanmar

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      The regime has dissolved dozens of opposition parties ahead of the next general election, including the popular National League for Democracy.The political party of Myanmar’s imprisoned opposition leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, has been officially dissolved, in yet another blow to the Southeast Asian nation’s democracy.The party, the National League for Democracy, was disbanded by Myanmar’s military-appointed election commission, state media said late Tuesday night. The announcement set the stage for an upcoming election that will almost certainly keep the junta in power for years to come.Before Tuesday’s announcement, the N.L.D. had already made it clear that it would not participate in the election, calling it a sham. When the party failed to register with the election commission, Myanmar’s state television said that the N.L.D. — as well as 39 other opposition parties — would be dissolved.U Kyaw Htwe, a spokesman for the N.L.D., said the party would continue its activities, despite the announcement from the election commission. “As Daw Aung San Suu Kyi said before, if there are people, the N.L.D. party will exist,” said U Tun Myint, another N.L.D. spokesman. “The N.L.D. is already in the hearts of the people.”Mr. Tun Myint said that the military has burned down over 200 N.L.D. offices, killed more than 90 party members and supporters and arrested more than 1,300 party members since the generals seized power in a coup two years ago.“There is nothing darker than midnight,” he said, using a Burmese phrase that means things are as bad as they can get.The N.L.D. clinched landslide victories in three previous elections. In the last election, held in November 2020, the party won 82 percent of the available seats in Parliament. But before the new Parliament could be sworn in on Feb. 1. 2021, the military staged its coup, detaining Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi and other top N.L.D. officials.Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, 77, has since been given a 33-year prison sentence. The military regime accused her of a range of charges, including corruption and violating the Official Secrets Act. The United Nations and international human rights groups have condemned the prosecutions, calling them politically motivated with the intent of keeping Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi out of power.Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s former leader, in 2020. The country’s military leaders have long seen her as a threat to their power.Aung Shine Oo/Associated PressAfter the coup, N.L.D. leaders who escaped arrest — as well as politicians from other parties — formed a new government called the National Unity Government. The organization, which operates in exile and has not been recognized by any international body, has supported armed rebel groups engaged in violent clashes against the military.Battling against the People’s Defense Force, as the armed rebel groups are known, the military now struggles to control territory throughout the country.Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi has long been a thorn in the side of Myanmar’s generals, who see her overwhelming popularity as a threat to military power. She was previously kept under house arrest for nearly 15 years until 2010, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 in recognition of her struggle for democracy.Although Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi is still revered by many in Myanmar, a large swath of the population is now looking beyond her for guidance. In the two years since the coup, a younger, more progressive — and confrontational — generation has emerged, reshaping politics and society.The junta initially said this year’s general election would be held by August, but in February it announced a six-month extension of the post-coup state of emergency, delaying the vote without providing a new date. Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the head of the junta, said the military could not guarantee voters’ safety on election day because dozens of townships were not under military control.Fifty political parties have registered to contest the election, and 13 parties have applied to register, according to state media. The United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, Tom Andrews, has urged international organizations and election monitoring groups not to provide technical support in the election and to avoid lending legitimacy to the regime.“Instead, they should explicitly denounce what will be a farcical exercise designed to perpetuate military control of Myanmar’s political system,” Mr. Andrews said in a report. More

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      Israel’s Far-Right Government Backs Down, for Now

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      Mary Wilson and Sydney Harper and Patricia Willens and Diane Wong and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicFor months in Israel, the far-right government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been pushing a highly contentious plan to fundamentally change the country’s Supreme Court, setting off some of the largest demonstrations in Israel’s history.On Monday, Mr. Netanyahu announced that he would delay his government’s campaign. Patrick Kingsley, the Jerusalem bureau chief for The New York Times, explains the prime minister’s surprising concession.On today’s episodePatrick Kingsley, the Jerusalem bureau chief for The New York Times.Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, center. The country is in the throes of a political crisis that has ballooned in recent days.Maya Alleruzzo/Associated PressBackground readingMr. Netanyahu delayed his bid to overhaul Israel’s judiciary in the face of furious protests.Israel’s prime minister is caught between his far-right coalition and public anger over the government’s plan to weaken the judiciary.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.Patrick Kingsley More

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      Biden’s Defense of Global Democracies Is Tested by Political Turmoil

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      The administration’s Summit for Democracy begins this week amid crises in several countries allied with the United States, including Israel.WASHINGTON — A political crisis in Israel and setbacks to democracy in several other major countries closely allied with the United States are testing the Biden administration’s defense of democracy against a global trend toward the authoritarianism of nations like Russia and China.President Biden will deliver remarks on Wednesday at the second White House-led Summit for Democracy, which Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken kicked off on Tuesday morning.The three-day, in-person and virtual event comes as Mr. Biden has boasted, more than once, that since he became president “democracies have become stronger, not weaker. Autocracies have grown weaker, not stronger.”Casting a cloud over the long-planned gathering is a move by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government to weaken the power of Israel’s judiciary, a plan that his opponents call an existential threat to the country’s 75-year democratic tradition.But that is only the most vivid sign of how autocratic practices are making inroads around the world.Proposed changes to Israel’s judiciary have starkly divided society and ignited huge protests this week.Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York TimesBiden administration officials are also warily eyeing countries like Mexico, which has moved to gut its election oversight body; India, where a top opposition political leader was disqualified last week from holding a post in Parliament; and Brazil, where the electoral defeat last year of the autocratic president, Jair Bolsonaro, was followed by a riot in January that his supporters orchestrated at government offices in Brasília, the capital.Mr. Netanyahu’s decision to postpone the proposed judicial changes under intense political pressure may slightly ease the awkwardness of Israel’s participation in the summit, where he is set to deliver prerecorded video remarks. Mexico, India and Brazil will also participate.Mr. Netanyahu’s retreat came after private admonitions from Biden officials that he was endangering Israel’s cherished reputation as a true democracy in the heart of the Middle East.In a briefing for reporters on Monday, John F. Kirby, a White House spokesman, said that Mr. Biden had “strongly” urged Israel’s government to find a compromise to a judicial plan that has starkly divided society and ignited huge protests. Asked whether the White House might disinvite Israel from the summit, Mr. Kirby said only that Israel “has been invited.”But the larger troubles remain for Mr. Biden, who asserted in his State of the Union address last month that the United States had reach “an inflection point” in history and that during his presidency had begun to reverse a worldwide autocratic march.Democracy activists call that a debatable proposition, and U.S. officials acknowledge that the picture is nuanced at best.On the positive side of the ledger, U.S. officials and experts say, Mr. Biden has rallied much of the democratic world into a powerful coalition against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In a speech during his visit to Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, last month marking the anniversary of the invasion, Mr. Biden repeated his assertion about the growing strength of democracies against autocracies and said that the war had forced the United States and its allies to “stand up for democracy.”Damage in Siversk, Ukraine, this month. U.S. officials and experts say Mr. Biden has rallied much of the democratic world into a powerful coalition against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.Tyler Hicks/The New York TimesMr. Biden has also rallied democratic nations to take firmer stands against Chinese influence around the world at a time when experts say Beijing is looking to export its model of governance.And some argue that Mr. Biden has been a savior of democracy by winning the 2020 presidential election — defeating President Donald J. Trump, a U.S. leader with authoritarian tendencies — and by containing for now Mr. Trump’s efforts to reject the results of that election and myriad other democratic norms.“Without suggesting that the fight has been won, or that Biden is doing everything right, I think we need to give him credit for helping to save American democracy and standing up to the great authoritarian powers,” said Tom Malinowski, a former Democratic congressman from New Jersey.But Mr. Biden’s claim that autocracies have grown weaker faces a stark reality in some nations.President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia may find himself economically isolated and militarily challenged in Ukraine. But he still has strong political support in Russia and has even consolidated power through a crackdown on dissent that has driven hundreds of thousands of Russians from the country.In Beijing, Xi Jinping was awarded a third five-year term this month not long after suppressing protests against his government’s coronavirus policies. In its latest official worldwide threat assessment, the U.S. intelligence community found that arms of the Chinese Communist Party “have become more aggressive with their influence campaigns” against the United States and other countries.President Xi Jinping of China was awarded a third five-year term this month not long after suppressing protests against his government’s coronavirus policies. Wu Hao/EPA, via ShutterstockBiden officials conceived a democracy summit during the 2020 campaign to address a belief that autocratic influence had been spreading for years, destabilizing and undermining Western governments. They also worried about a growing perception that political chaos and legislative paralysis in places like Washington and London — or in Israel, which held five elections in three years before Mr. Netanyahu narrowly managed to form his coalition — was creating a sense around the world that democracies could not deliver results for their people.Mr. Biden’s first Summit for Democracy, in December 2021, featured uplifting language from world leaders and group sessions on issues like media freedom and rule of law in which countries could trade best practices on strengthening their democracies and share advice on countering foreign efforts to manipulate politics and elections.The summit this week will include about 120 countries and will be hosted by Costa Rica, the Netherlands, South Korea and Zambia in addition to the United States.Recent democratic trends can be described as mixed at best. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s annual democracy index found last year that in 2021, the first year of Mr. Biden’s presidency, “global democracy continued its precipitous decline.” More recently, the same survey found that in 2022, democracy had “stagnated.”Mr. Biden hosted a Summit for Democracy from the White House in 2021.Doug Mills/The New York TimesSimilarly, a report released this month by Freedom House, a nonprofit group that monitors democracy, human rights and civil liberties around the world, found that global freedom had slipped for the 17th year in a row, by its measurement. But the group also reported that the steady decline might have plateaued and that there were just slightly more countries showing a decrease in freedoms compared with those whose records were improving.“This seems like a critical moment,” said Yana Gorokhovskaia, an author of the Freedom House report. “The spread of decline is clearly slowing. It hasn’t stopped.”That has been clear in some countries. Last month, Mexican lawmakers passed sweeping legislation hobbling the election oversight body that is widely credited with steering the country from decades of one-party rule. Critics say the country’s populist president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has shown some troubling autocratic tendencies.In India, opponents of the country’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, have complained for years that he is weakening the democratic tradition of the world’s second-largest country by population by cracking down on critics and religious minorities. The concerns reached a new level with the expulsion from Parliament of Rahul Ghandi, a prominent opponent of Mr. Modi’s, a day after a court found him guilty of criminal defamation for a line in a campaign speech in 2019 in which he likened Mr. Modi to two thieves with the same name.And after supporters of Mr. Bolsonaro — who blamed electoral fraud for his narrow defeat in December — stormed government buildings in Brazil’s capital, Mr. Biden condemned “the assault on democracy.”Supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil stormed government buildings in Brasília, the capital, in January.ReutersDemocratic setbacks have also occurred in West Africa, where there have been coups in Mali and Burkina Faso in recent years. In Nigeria, a country of 220 million people, experts say that the presidential election in February appeared suspect.In Europe, thousands of people in the Republic of Georgia have taken to the streets to protest a measure that would curb what the government calls “foreign agents,” but which activists say is an effort to crack down on nongovernmental organizations and news media groups. The State Department called a March 7 parliamentary vote approving the measure “a dark day” for democracy in Georgia, which U.S. officials have tried to support against the influences of Russia, its neighbor.The tumult over Israel’s democracy has been particularly shocking to U.S. officials and experts who have long seen the country as a paragon of democratic values and an especially bright example in a region long plagued by dictatorship.And the summit this week will notably exclude two members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Hungary and Turkey, whose autocratic political systems have grown no less repressive during Mr. Biden’s tenure.Still, some people who track democratic trends say they are optimistic.“Perhaps the most striking indication of democracy’s forward movement over the last two years has been the election of President Biden, and the election of President Lula in Brazil,” said Sarah Margon, the director of foreign policy at Open Society-U.S.Those events “sent a critical message to people who are looking to defeat autocrats or leaders with autocratic tendencies,” added Ms. Margon, whom Mr. Biden nominated last year to the State Department’s top position for human rights and democracy. (Her nomination expired after Republican opposition and was not renewed in January.)But many world leaders profess to be unmoved by critiques from democracy advocates, especially from U.S. officials.“If they want to have a debate on this issue, let’s do it,” Mr. López Obrador said last month. “I have evidence to prove there is more liberty and democracy in our country.” More

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      A Campaign Aide Didn’t Write That Email. A.I. Did.

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      The Democratic Party has begun testing the use of artificial intelligence to write first drafts of some fund-raising messages, appeals that often perform better than those written entirely by human beings.Fake A.I. images of Donald J. Trump getting arrested in New York spread faster than they could be fact-checked last week.And voice-cloning tools are producing vividly lifelike audio of President Biden — and many others — saying things they did not actually say.Artificial intelligence isn’t just coming soon to the 2024 campaign trail. It’s already here.The swift advance of A.I. promises to be as disruptive to the political sphere as to broader society. Now any amateur with a laptop can manufacture the kinds of convincing sounds and images that were once the domain of the most sophisticated digital players. This democratization of disinformation is blurring the boundaries between fact and fake at a moment when the acceptance of universal truths — that Mr. Biden beat Mr. Trump in 2020, for example — is already being strained.And as synthetic media gets more believable, the question becomes: What happens when people can no longer trust their own eyes and ears?Inside campaigns, artificial intelligence is expected to soon help perform mundane tasks that previously required fleets of interns. Republican and Democratic engineers alike are racing to develop tools to harness A.I. to make advertising more efficient, to engage in predictive analysis of public behavior, to write more and more personalized copy and to discover new patterns in mountains of voter data. The technology is evolving so fast that most predict a profound impact, even if specific ways in which it will upend the political system are more speculation than science.“It’s an iPhone moment — that’s the only corollary that everybody will appreciate,” said Dan Woods, the chief technology officer on Mr. Biden’s 2020 campaign. “It’s going to take pressure testing to figure out whether it’s good or bad — and it’s probably both.”OpenAI, whose ChatGPT chatbot ushered in the generative-text gold rush, has already released a more advanced model. Google has announced plans to expand A.I. offerings inside popular apps like Google Docs and Gmail, and is rolling out its own chatbot. Microsoft has raced a version to market, too. A smaller firm, ElevenLabs, has developed a text-to-audio tool that can mimic anyone’s voice in minutes. Midjourney, a popular A.I. art generator, can conjure hyper-realistic images with a few lines of text that are compelling enough to win art contests.“A.I. is about to make a significant change in the 2024 election because of machine learning’s predictive ability,” said Brad Parscale, Mr. Trump’s first 2020 campaign manager, who has since founded a digital firm that advertises some A.I. capabilities.Disinformation and “deepfakes” are the dominant fear. While forgeries are nothing new to politics — a photoshopped image of John Kerry and Jane Fonda was widely shared in 2004 — the ability to produce and share them has accelerated, with viral A.I. images of Mr. Trump being restrained by the police only the latest example. A fake image of Pope Francis in a white puffy coat went viral in recent days, as well.Many are particularly worried about local races, which receive far less scrutiny. Ahead of the recent primary in the Chicago mayoral race, a fake video briefly sprung up on a Twitter account called “Chicago Lakefront News” that impersonated one candidate, Paul Vallas.“Unfortunately, I think people are going to figure out how to use this for evil faster than for improving civic life,” said Joe Rospars, who was chief strategist on Senator Elizabeth Warren’s 2020 campaign and is now the chief executive of a digital consultancy.Those who work at the intersection of politics and technology return repeatedly to the same historical hypothetical: If the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape broke today — the one in which Mr. Trump is heard bragging about assaulting women and getting away with it — would Mr. Trump acknowledge it was him, as he did in 2016?The nearly universal answer was no.“I think about that example all the time,” said Matt Hodges, who was the engineering director on Mr. Biden’s 2020 campaign and is now executive director of Zinc Labs, which invests in Democratic technology. Republicans, he said, “may not use ‘fake news’ anymore. It may be ‘Woke A.I.’”For now, the frontline function of A.I. on campaigns is expected to be writing first drafts of the unending email and text cash solicitations.“Given the amount of rote, asinine verbiage that gets produced in politics, people will put it to work,” said Luke Thompson, a Republican political strategist.As an experiment, The New York Times asked ChatGPT to produce a fund-raising email for Mr. Trump. The app initially said, “I cannot take political sides or promote any political agenda.” But then it immediately provided a template of a potential Trump-like email.The chatbot denied a request to make the message “angrier” but complied when asked to “give it more edge,” to better reflect the often apocalyptic tone of Mr. Trump’s pleas. “We need your help to send a message to the radical left that we will not back down,” the revised A.I. message said. “Donate now and help us make America great again.”Among the prominent groups that have experimented with this tool is the Democratic National Committee, according to three people briefed on the efforts. In tests, the A.I.-generated content the D.N.C. has used has, as often as not, performed as well or better than copy drafted entirely by humans, in terms of generating engagement and donations.Party officials still make edits to the A.I. drafts, the people familiar with the efforts said, and no A.I. messages have yet been written under the name of Mr. Biden or any other person, two people said. The D.N.C. declined to comment.Higher Ground Labs, a small venture capital firm that invests in political technology for progressives, is currently working on a project, called Quiller, to more systematically use A.I. to write, send and test the effectiveness of fund-raising emails — all at once.“A.I. has mostly been marketing gobbledygook for the last three cycles,” said Betsy Hoover, a founding partner at Higher Ground Labs who was the director of digital organizing for President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign. “We are at a moment now where there are things people can do that are actually helpful.”Political operatives, several of whom were granted anonymity to discuss potentially unsavory uses of artificial intelligence they are concerned about or planning to deploy, raised a raft of possibilities.Some feared bad actors could leverage A.I. chatbots to distract or waste a campaign’s precious staff time by pretending to be potential voters. Others floated producing deepfakes of their own candidate to generate personalized videos — thanking supporters for their donations, for example. In India, one candidate in 2020 produced a deepfake to disseminate a video of himself speaking in different languages; the technology is far superior now.Mr. Trump himself shared an A.I. image in recent days that appeared to show him kneeling in prayer. He posted it on Truth Social, his social media site, with no explanation.One strategist predicted that the next generation of dirty tricks could be direct-to-voter misinformation that skips social media sites entirely. What if, this strategist said, an A.I. audio recording of a candidate was sent straight to the voice mail of voters on the eve of an election?Synthetic audio and video are already swirling online, much of it as parody.On TikTok, there is an entire genre of videos featuring Mr. Biden, Mr. Obama and Mr. Trump profanely bantering, with the A.I.-generated audio overlaid as commentary during imaginary online video gaming sessions.On “The Late Show,” Stephen Colbert recently used A.I. audio to have the Fox News host Tucker Carlson “read” aloud his text messages slamming Mr. Trump. Mr. Colbert labeled the audio as A.I. and the image on-screen showed a blend of Mr. Carlson’s face and a Terminator cyborg for emphasis.The right-wing provocateur Jack Posobiec pushed out a “deepfake” video last month of Mr. Biden announcing a national draft because of the conflict in Ukraine. It was quickly seen by millions.“The videos we’ve seen in the last few weeks are really the canary in the coal mine,” said Hany Farid, a professor of computer science at University of California at Berkeley, who specializes in digital forensics. “We measure advances now not in years but in months, and there are many months before the election.”Some A.I. tools were deployed in 2020. The Biden campaign created a program, code-named Couch Potato, that linked facial recognition, voice-to-text and other tools to automate the transcription of live events, including debates. It replaced the work of a host of interns and aides, and was immediately searchable through an internal portal.The technology has improved so quickly, Mr. Woods said, that off-the-shelf tools are “1,000 times better” than what had to be built from scratch four years ago.One looming question is what campaigns can and cannot do with OpenAI’s powerful tools. One list of prohibited uses last fall lumped together “political campaigns, adult content, spam, hateful content.”Kim Malfacini, who helped create the OpenAI’s rules and is on the company’s trust and safety team, said in an interview that “political campaigns can use our tools for campaigning purposes. But it’s the scaled use that we are trying to disallow here.” OpenAI revised its usage rules after being contacted by The Times, specifying now that “generating high volumes of campaign materials” is prohibited.Tommy Vietor, a former spokesman for Mr. Obama, dabbled with the A.I. tool from ElevenLabs to create a faux recording of Mr. Biden calling into the popular “Pod Save America” podcast that Mr. Vietor co-hosts. He paid a few dollars and uploaded real audio of Mr. Biden, and out came an audio likeness.“The accuracy was just uncanny,” Mr. Vietor said in an interview.The show labeled it clearly as A.I. But Mr. Vietor could not help noticing that some online commenters nonetheless seemed confused. “I started playing with the software thinking this is so much fun, this will be a great vehicle for jokes,” he said, “and finished thinking, ‘Oh God, this is going to be a big problem.’” More

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      United Auto Workers Usher In New Era of Leadership

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      Shawn Fain, who ousted the incumbent president, is presiding over a convention to chart the union’s approach in contract talks this year.The United Auto Workers union has opened a new chapter in its storied history, and it may end up looking a lot like its combative past.Over the weekend, the 88-year-old union confirmed that an outsider, Shawn Fain, had prevailed in a hotly contested election for president, ousting the incumbent. An electrician whose father and grandfathers were also U.A.W. members, Mr. Fain has promised to take a tough negotiating line for increased wages in contract talks this year with the three Detroit automakers.“It is a new day for the U.A.W.,” Mr. Fain said on Monday at the start of a three-day convention, where hundreds of delegates will hammer out priorities and strategies for the contract talks that will formally open this summer.“We are here to come together for the war against our one and only true enemy — the multibillion-dollar corporations and employers who refuse to give our members their fair share,” Mr. Fain said.He opened his address by shouting, “Let’s get ready to rumble!” — drawing out the final word in the style of the famed boxing ring announcer Michael Buffer.Mr. Fain, 54, won by a razor-thin margin after prolonged vote-counting and more than two weeks of wrangling over some 1,600 challenged ballots. With the count nearly complete, Mr. Fain had 69,459 votes — 483 more than the incumbent, Ray Curry. Mr. Fain was declared the victor, and Mr. Curry conceded, when the margin exceeded the number of ballots still under challenge.The election was the first in the U.A.W.’s history in which the president and the union’s other senior executives were chosen through direct balloting of members. In the past, the leadership was chosen by delegates, a system in which favors and favoritism played a heavy role.T-shirts on display at the convention showed support for the union faction led by Mr. Fain. Rebecca Cook/ReutersThe democratic election had been mandated by a court-appointed monitor who has been overseeing the U.A.W.’s efforts to carry out anti-corruption reforms. The monitor was appointed as part of a 2021 settlement of a federal investigation that found that top union officials had embezzled more than $1.5 million from membership dues and $3.5 million from training centers, and had spent some of the money on expensive cigars, wines, liquor, golf clubs, apparel and luxury travel. More than a dozen U.A.W. officials, including two former presidents, pleaded guilty.Mr. Curry was not a target of the corruption investigation but many members saw him as linked to the establishment that had been running the union for years.Mr. Fain takes office along with several other outsiders running on his slate who were elected to senior posts by convincing margins. They won support from members who were angered over the corruption scandals and wanted an executive team that would push harder for higher wages and other demands in contract talks with General Motors, Ford Motor and Stellantis, the automaker formed through the merger of Fiat Chrysler and Peugeot S.A.Decades ago, the U.A.W. had more than 1.5 million members and the power to influence presidential elections and demand steady increases in wages and benefits. When the manufacturers resisted, it called strikes that shut down a large part of the industry. Over the years, the U.A.W.’s gains helped lift wages and living standards for a broad swath of manufacturing workers across the United States.But its influence declined as the Detroit automakers struggled. When G.M. and Chrysler were reorganized in bankruptcy court in 2009, the union made concessions on wages and benefits that it has not won back, and it has had to weather the closing of dozens of plants. It now has about 400,000 members.The contract talks come after years in which G.M., Ford and Stellantis have been reporting record results and have paid significant sums to workers in profit-sharing bonuses. In 2022, for example, G.M. made a profit of $9.9 billion and paid a bonus of $12,750 to each of its U.A.W. workers.Members want Mr. Fain to fight for wage increases to offset inflation, an end to a two-tier wage system that pays newer workers significantly less than veterans and assurances that new plants will be built in the United States rather than abroad.At the convention, the rank and file appeared to back Mr. Fain, despite his narrow margin of victory.“I’m ready to strike,” said Romaine McKinney III, an electrician at a Stellantis stamping plant in Warren, Mich. “We have to show these companies that we are ready to walk out.”Jamonty Washington, a worker at a Detroit plant where Stellantis makes Jeeps, said he started his job 12 years ago making just under $16 an hour — working next to a colleague making $31 an hour. He has worked his way up to $30 an hour, he said, but thinks the union has to fight to eliminate such differences in pay.“Equal pay for equal work,” he said. “It’s time for this union to get back to being militant — not asking but demanding.” More

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      Trump ya no controla a su movimiento

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      El intercambio más revelador en el mitin de Donald Trump en Waco, Texas, el sábado, no vino del propio Trump. Ocurrió al principio, cuando Ted Nugent, una vieja estrella del rock, animaba a la multitud. “Quiero que me devuelvan mi dinero”, gritó. “No autoricé ningún dinero a Ucrania, a un tipo raro y homosexual”.Momentos después, en Real America’s Voice, un canal de televisión de extrema derecha, el excorresponsal de Fox News Ed Henry calificó de “asombrosas” las palabras de Nugent “sobre Zelenski” y sobre el financiamiento a Ucrania. Luego resumió la carrera hacia el fondo del movimiento trumpista en una frase sucinta: “Está canalizando el sentir de muchos estadounidenses”.En efecto. Y también todos los oradores del maratónico mitin de Trump. Uno tras otro, miraron a una multitud enardecida y adepta a las conspiraciones y consintieron, alimentaron y avivaron cada elemento de su furiosa visión del mundo. No vi a ningún verdadero líder en el escenario de Trump, ni siquiera al propio Trump. Vi una colección de seguidores, cada uno compitiendo por el afecto del verdadero poder en Waco, la turba populista adulada.Para entender la dinámica social y política de la derecha moderna, hay que comprender cómo es que millones de estadounidenses se inocularon contra la verdad. Durante las primarias republicanas de 2016 no faltaron líderes ni comentaristas republicanos dispuestos a poner en evidencia a Trump. John McCain y Mitt Romney, los dos candidatos presidenciales anteriores del partido, incluso dieron el extraordinario paso de condenar a su sucesor en términos inequívocos.Sin embargo, cada vez que Trump se enfrentaba a la oposición, él y sus aliados llamaban a los críticos “elitistas”, “noticias falsas”, “débiles” o “cobardes”. Era mucho más fácil decir que los detractores de Trump tenían el “síndrome de enajenación de Trump”, o que eran “simples títeres de la clase dominante”, que comprometerse con una crítica sustancial. Así comenzó la adulación a la mente populista (irónico para un movimiento que se deleitaba llamando “copos de nieve” —que no aguantan nada— a los estudiantes progresistas).El desacuerdo en la derecha se convirtió de inmediato en sinónimo de falta de respeto. Si “nosotros, el pueblo” (el término que los partidarios de Trump aplican a lo que ellos llaman el “Estados Unidos de verdad”) creemos algo, entonces el pueblo merece que sus políticos y expertos reflejen esa opinión.Lo vemos en los documentos internos de Fox News que salieron a la luz en el litigio por difamación de Dominion, en el que Dominion Voting Systems demandó a Fox News por difundir afirmaciones falsas sobre las máquinas de votación después de las elecciones de 2020. En repetidas ocasiones, los líderes y personalidades de Fox que no parecían creer que las elecciones de 2020 fueron robadas se refirieron a la necesidad de “respetar” a su audiencia al decirles lo contrario. Para estos empleados de Fox, respetar a la audiencia no significaba transmitir la verdad (un verdadero acto de respeto). Por el contrario, significaba alimentar el hambre insaciable de los espectadores por confirmar sus teorías conspirativas.Fui testigo directo de este fenómeno al principio de la era Trump. Conversaba con un pequeño grupo de pastores evangélicos sobre cómo los evangélicos blancos ya no valoraban la buena reputación de los políticos. En comparación con otros grupos cristianos y estadounidenses no afiliados, los evangélicos blancos pasaron de ser el grupo menos propenso en 2011 a creer que “un funcionario electo que comete un acto inmoral en su vida personal puede, a pesar de ello, comportarse con ética y cumplir su deber” al grupo más propenso a excusar a los políticos inmorales en 2016, según una encuesta del Public Religion Research Institute/Bookings Institution.En esa conversación hablé de la Resolución de la Convención Bautista del Sur de 1998 sobre la moralidad de los funcionarios públicos. Aprobada durante el punto álgido del escándalo en torno a la aventura de Bill Clinton con Monica Lewinsky, declaraba un compromiso cristiano con la integridad política en términos inequívocos. “La tolerancia de las faltas graves por parte de los líderes”, decía, “cauteriza la conciencia de la cultura, engendra inmoralidad desenfrenada y anarquía en la sociedad, y sin duda resulta en el juicio de Dios”.Cuando le recordé esas palabras al grupo, un pastor de Alabama planteó una objeción: “Eso les va a parecer elitista a muchos miembros de mi congregación”. Yo estaba confundido. Un pastor bautista me estaba diciendo que a su congregación le parecería “elitista” una declaración reciente de creencia bautista. Quedó claro que muchos bautistas creían en su propia resolución cuando se refería a Clinton, pero no cuando se refería a Trump.Los políticos siempre tienen la tentación de ser complacientes, pero rara vez se ve una abdicación tan completa de cualquier cosa que se acerque a un verdadero liderazgo moral o político como lo que ocurrió en el mitin de Waco. Comenzó con esa ridícula e irrelevante declaración sobre Volodímir Zelenski (¿qué tiene que ver su orientación sexual con la rectitud de la causa ucraniana?); continuó con Mike Lindell, de MyPillow, quien repitió aseveraciones electorales totalmente falsas y terminó con un airado, aunque repetitivo, discurso de Trump, también plagado de falsedades.Y si se piensa por un momento que hay algún arrepentimiento en el mundo de Trump por la insurrección del 6 de enero de 2021, el mitin ofreció una respuesta contundente. Antes de su discurso, Trump se puso de pie —con la mano sobre el corazón— mientras escuchaba una canción llamada “Justicia para todos”, que grabó con algo llamado el “Coro de la Prisión J6”, un grupo de hombres encarcelados por asaltar el Capitolio. La canción consiste en que el coro canta el himno nacional mientras Trump recita el juramento a la bandera.Es habitual criticar el movimiento trumpista como un culto a Donald Trump, pero eso ya no es del todo correcto. Sigue teniendo una influencia enorme, pero ¿acaso los verdaderos sectarios abuchean a su líder cuando se desvía del guion aprobado? Sin embargo, eso es lo que ocurrió en diciembre de 2021, pues una parte de la multitud de un mitin en Dallas abucheó a Trump cuando dijo que se había puesto un refuerzo de la vacuna contra la covid. ¿Y alguien cree que Trump es aficionado a QAnon? Sin embargo, en 2022 impulsó contenido explícito de Q en Truth Social, su plataforma de redes sociales preferida.Quizá haya habido un momento en el que Trump de verdad dirigiera su movimiento. Ese tiempo ya pasó. Ahora es su movimiento el que manda. Alimentado por teorías de la conspiración, está hambriento de confrontación, y mítines como el de Waco demuestran su dominio. Como el pirata que se planta frente al personaje de Tom Hanks en la popular película de 2013 Capitán Phillips, la derecha populista se planta frente al Partido Republicano, los medios conservadores e incluso los republicanos de base reticentes y lanza un único y sencillo mensaje: “Ahora yo soy el capitán”.David French es columnista de opinión del New York Times. Es abogado, escritor y veterano de la Operación Libertad Iraquí. Es un exlitigante constitucional y su libro más reciente es Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation. @DavidAFrench More