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      Why Aren’t the Democrats Trouncing the Republicans?

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      My big takeaway from this election season would be this: We’re about where we were. We entered this election season with a nearly evenly divided House and Senate in which the Democrats had a slight advantage. We’ll probably leave it with a nearly evenly divided House and Senate in which the Republicans have a slight advantage. But we’re about where we were.Nothing the parties or candidates have done has really changed this underlying balance. The Republicans nominated a pathetically incompetent Senate candidate, Herschel Walker, in Georgia, but polls show that race is basically tied. The Democrats nominated a guy in Pennsylvania, John Fetterman, who suffered a stroke and has trouble communicating, but polls show that that Senate race is basically tied.After all the campaigning and the money and the shouting, the electoral balance is still on a razor’s edge. What accounts for this? It’s the underlying structure of society. Americans are sorting themselves out by education into two roughly equal camps. As people without a college degree have flocked to the G.O.P., people with one have flocked to the Democrats.“Education polarization is not merely an American phenomenon,” Eric Levitz writes in New York Magazine, “it is a defining feature of contemporary politics in nearly every Western democracy.”Over the past few years, the Democrats have made heroic efforts to win back working-class voters and white as well as Black and Hispanic voters who have drifted rightward. Joe Biden’s domestic agenda is largely about this: infrastructure jobs, expanded child tax credit, raising taxes on corporations. This year the Democrats nominated candidates designed to appeal to working-class voters, like the sweatshirt-wearing Fetterman in Pennsylvania and Tim Ryan in Ohio.It doesn’t seem to be working. As Ruy Teixeira, Karlyn Bowman and Nate Moore noted in a survey of polling data for the American Enterprise Institute last month, “The gap between non-college and college whites continues to grow.” Democrats have reason to worry about losing working-class Hispanic voters in places like Nevada. “If Democrats can’t win in Nevada,” one Democratic pollster told Politico, “we can complain about the white working class all you want, but we’re really confronting a much broader working-class problem.” Even Black voters without a college degree seem to be shifting away from the Democrats, to some degree.Forests have been sacrificed so that Democratic strategists can write reports on why they are losing the working class. Some believe racial resentment is driving the white working class away. Some believe Democrats spend too much time on progressive cultural issues and need to focus more on bread-and-butter economics.I’d say these analyses don’t begin to address the scale of the problem. America has riven itself into two different cultures. It’s very hard for the party based in one culture to reach out and win voters in the other culture — or even to understand what people in the other culture are thinking.As I’ve shuttled between red and blue America over decades of reporting on American politics, I’ve seen social, cultural, moral and ideological rifts widen from cracks to chasms.Politics has become a religion for a lot of people. Americans with a college education and Americans without a college education no longer just have different ideas about, say, the role of government, they have created rival ways of life. Americans with a college education and Americans without a college education have different relationships to patriotism and faith, they dress differently, enjoy different foods and have different ideas about corporal punishment, gender and, of course, race.You can’t isolate the differences between the classes down to one factor or another. It’s everything.But even that is not the real problem. America has always had vast cultural differences. Back in 2001, I wrote a long piece for The Atlantic comparing the deeply blue area of Montgomery County, Md., with the red area of Franklin County in south-central Pennsylvania.I noted the vast socio-economic and cultural differences that were evident, even back then. But in my interviews, I found there was a difference without a ton of animosity.For example, Ted Hale was a Presbyterian minister there. “There’s nowhere near as much resentment as you would expect,” he told me. “People have come to understand that they will struggle financially. It’s part of their identity. But the economy is not their god. That’s the thing some others don’t understand. People value a sense of community far more than they do their portfolio.”Back in those days I didn’t find a lot of class-war consciousness in my trips through red America. I compared the country to a high school cafeteria. Jocks over here, nerds over there, punks somewhere else. Live and let live.Now people don’t just see difference, they see menace. People have put up barricades and perceive the other class as a threat to what is beautiful, true and good. I don’t completely understand why this animosity has risen over the past couple of decades, but it makes it very hard to shift the ever more entrenched socio-economic-cultural-political coalitions.Historians used to believe that while European societies were burdened by ferocious class antagonisms, Americans had relatively little class consciousness. That has changed.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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      How Does Early Voting Work?

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      Election Day isn’t until next week, but the voting has already begun in much of the country.Most states allow early voting, also known as pre-election voting, which surged in popularity during the 2020 election in response to the coronavirus pandemic. And interest remains high: As of Wednesday afternoon, nearly 30 million early ballots had been cast nationwide, according to data from the United States Elections Project. In Georgia, in-person turnout was up 70 percent in the first five days of early voting compared with the 2018 midterm elections, according to the secretary of state’s office.The rules vary by state, but there are a few different ways to vote early: Head to a polling place to fill out a ballot in person; drop off a completed ballot at a secure drop box, usually by a polling site or government building; or vote by mail before Election Day.Drop off a completed ballot at a drop box in Mesa, Ariz. on Friday.Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesCheck your secretary of state’s website for details on your state’s early voting policies.Alabama, Connecticut, Mississippi, and New Hampshire do not offer pre-election voting, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.As widespread as early voting is, it has recently come under attack by critics who complain about the potential for voter fraud, which is exceedingly rare. On Tuesday, a federal judge in Arizona cracked down on an election-monitoring group staking out ballot boxes in Maricopa County. Members of the group, who cast themselves as “mule watchers” preventing fraud, were issued a temporary restraining order after complaints that they were intimidating and harassing voters. The individuals, some of whom were armed, had gathered around outdoor ballot boxes to take pictures of voters and, in some cases, posted the images online.The A.C.L.U. said on Tuesday that it was investigating at least three separate reports of people monitoring ballot drop boxes in Chester County, Pa., which includes the Main Line suburbs west of Philadelphia. None appeared armed, the group said. More

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      How the Right Became the Left and the Left Became the Right

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      One of the master keys to understanding our era is seeing all the ways in which conservatives and progressives have traded attitudes and impulses. The populist right’s attitude toward American institutions has the flavor of the 1970s — skeptical, pessimistic, paranoid — while the mainstream, MSNBC-watching left has a strange new respect for the F.B.I. and C.I.A. The online right likes transgression for its own sake, while cultural progressivism dabbles in censorship and worries that the First Amendment goes too far. Trumpian conservatism flirts with postmodernism and channels Michel Foucault; its progressive rivals are institutionalist, moralistic, confident in official narratives and establishment credentials.These reversals are especially evident in a pair of prominent headlines from the last week. If you had been told at any point from, say, 1970 to 2005 that a disturbed-seeming man living in the Bay Area with a history of involvement with nudist activists and the hemp jewelry trade had allegedly followed his paranoid political delusions into a plan to assault an important national politician, the reasonable assumption would have been that his delusions belonged to the farthest reaches of the left and therefore his target was probably some notable Republican.By the same token, if you had been told in George W. Bush’s presidency that a trove of government documents would reveal the Department of Homeland Security essentially trying to collude with major corporations to regulate speech it considers dangerous or subversive, an effort extending from foreign threats to domestic ones, you would have assumed that this was all Republican overreach, a new McCarthyism — and that progressives would be up in arms against it.In our world, though, things are otherwise. The man who allegedly attacked Paul Pelosi while hunting the speaker of the House did, seemingly, belong to left-wing, Left Coast culture in the not-so-distant past. But at some point in his unhappy trajectory, he passed over to the paranoias of the extreme right — probably not in some semi-rational radicalization process in which he watched too many attack ads against Nancy Pelosi but more likely in a dreamlike way, the nightmares of QAnon matching his mental state better‌ than the paranoias of the left.His journey’s violent endpoint was singular and extreme, but this kind of left-to-right migration has more normal correlatives: the New Age-QAnon overlap, the Covid-era migration of formerly left-wing skeptics of Big Pharma onto right-wing shows and platforms, the way that all doubts about the medical establishment are now coded as right-wing, Trumpy, populist.And the political right’s response to the Pelosi attack reflects these shifts as well. The ethos of Fox Mulder in “The X-Files,” “Trust no one,” is a now dominant value on the right, which in this case encouraged a swift leap from reasonable questions about the details of the assault, based on inaccurate initial reports, to a very specific narrative about a gay assignation that the cops and the Pelosis were presumably covering up.As of this writing, several public references to this theory from prominent conservatives have been deleted. But the cover-up narrative will probably survive indefinitely as a reference point, an underground “truth,” like the left-wing conspiracies of old.One of those deleted tweets belonged to Elon Musk, the new impresario of Twitter, and it inevitably became an exhibit in the case for liberal panic over his takeover: What could be more indicative of the platform’s imminent descent into a democracy-destroying hellscape than conspiracy theories spread by the Chief Twit himself?But the alternative to Musk’s reign was clarified by the second recent illustration of our left-right reversal: a story from The Intercept, by Lee Fang and Ken Klippenstein, detailing the Department of Homeland Security’s migration into the social-media surveillance and the pressure the department has tried to exert on internet companies to flag and censor content along lines favored by the national security bureaucracy.On the surface, this is not a partisan story: The Intercept is a left-wing publication, and the current version of the D.H.S. anti-disinformation effort got started in the Trump administration.But everyone understands those efforts’ current ideological valence. The war on disinformation is a crucial Democratic cause, the key lawsuit filed against the Biden administration on these issues comes from Republican attorneys general (joined by doctors critical of the public-health establishment), and the most famous flashpoint remains the social-media censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story, which Fang and Klippenstein suggest followed from what one could reasonably call a deep-state pressure campaign.Meanwhile, according to a draft report from the D.H.S. obtained by The Intercept, the list of online subject areas that the department is particularly concerned about includes “the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic and the efficacy of Covid-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine” — mostly areas where, whether in wisdom or in folly, the populist right is more likely to dissent from the establishment position.And for the future of Twitter, in particular, it’s notable that the Intercept story first points out that a committee advising DHS on disinformation policy included Twitter’s then-head of legal policy, trust and safety, Vijaya Gadde, and then notes that Gadde was one of the first people fired by Musk. It’s a tacit nod to the left-right switch: Under Musk the social-media giant is widely seen as moving “rightward,” but that could mean becoming less entangled with an arm of what was once George W. Bush’s national security state.The point of emphasizing this reversal isn’t to suggest that either side is likely to flip back. The evolving attitudes of right and left reflect their evolving positions in American society, with cultural liberalism much more dominant in elite institutions than it was a generation ago and conservatism increasingly disreputable, representing downscale constituencies and outsider ideas.But a stronger awareness of the flip might be helpful in tempering the temptations that afflict both sides. For progressives, that could mean acknowledging that the Department of Homeland Security’s disinformation wars, its attempted hand-in-glove with the great powers of Silicon Valley, would have been regarded as a dystopian scenario on their side not so long ago. So is it really any less dystopian if the targets are Trumpistas and Anthony Fauci critics instead of Iraq War protesters? And if it is a little creepy and censorious and un-American, doesn’t that make some of the paranoia evident on the right these days a little less unfathomable and fascist seeming, even a little more relatable?Then the Fox Mulder right might benefit from recalling the thing that conservatives — or this conservative, at least — used to find most insufferable about the anti-establishment left, which was not its skepticism but its credulity, not the eagerness to question official narratives but the speed with which implausible alternatives took root. (If parts of Oliver Stone’s “J.F.K.” make you understand where conspiracy theories come from, the part where the conspiracy gets “explained” should make you a Nixon Republican.)This is the key problem with the right today, whether the issue is the 2020 election or the Covid-vaccine debate or the attack on Paul Pelosi. Not the baseline of skepticism, not being attuned to weaknesses and inconsistencies in official narratives, not being open to scenarios of elite self-dealing and conspiracy and cover-up, all of which emphatically exist. It’s the swift replacement of skepticism with certainty, the shopping around for any narrative — even if it comes from Sidney Powell and Mike Lindell — to vindicate your initial theory, the refusal to accept that even institutions you reasonably mistrust sometimes get things right.Or to put this in terms of Musk and his hopes for Twitter: The ideal virtual town square would be a place where conservatives could discuss speculative, even conspiratorial theories of the day’s events — but also a place where they could be persuaded to abandon bad theories when the evidence dissolves them.Social-media and tribal incentives being what they are, that seems exceedingly unlikely. But if I had just paid billions to own a social media platform — and become both its main character and arguably the most important right-leaning figure in American life, pending the Donald Trump-Ron De‌ ‌Santis slugfest — I would be thinking about what it would take for a spirit of contrarianism and rebellion to aim, not simply at transgression, but at truth itself.In addition to my two weekly columns, I’m starting a newsletter, which will go out most Fridays and cover some of my usual obsessions — political ideas, religion, pop culture, decadence — in even more detail. You can subscribe here.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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      Don’t Buy the Republican Appeal to Workers

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      J.D. Vance, the Ohio Republican Senate candidate, states on his campaign website that he “fiercely defended working-class Americans.” In Pennsylvania, Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Republican Senate hopeful, sports a plaid shirt and jeans in a campaign ad, as he shoots guns of varying sizes. Guitar twangs in the background complete the scene.Mr. Vance, a venture capitalist and best-selling author, and Dr. Oz, the heart surgeon and TV personality, aren’t alone in their self-presentation as ordinary Joes. As November’s midterm elections near, many Republican candidates are all about pickup trucks, bluejeans and guns, as they perform the role of champions for the working stiff. Scratch the surface, though, and it’s a different story.This Republican working-class veneer is playacting. Their positions on workers’ rights make that crystal clear. Nationwide, most Republicans rail against liberal elites and then block a $15 an hour minimum wage, paid leave laws and workplace safety protections. They stymie bills to help workers unionize, and top it off by starving the National Labor Relations Board of funding, even as it faces a surge of union election requests. Several Republican attorneys general have sued to stop wage hikes for nearly 400,000 people working for federal contractors. Republicans also opposed extending the popular monthly child tax credit that helped so many working families afford basic necessities. The “issues” section on the campaign websites of Mr. Vance and Dr. Oz contain virtually no labor policy. Howling about China, as they do, isn’t a comprehensive labor plan.In other instances, what superficially seemed to be examples of Republican support for worker rights were really Trojan horse incursions to advance their culture war.For example, legislators or policymakers in at least six conservative states last year swiftly expanded eligibility for unemployment insurance to workers who quit or were fired for refusing to comply with employer Covid-19 vaccination mandates. The sudden largess was at odds with these states’ generally miserly approach to such benefits: They’d previously done most everything possible to limit the lifeline of unemployment insurance, including prematurely cutting off federally funded benefits in the summer of 2021.Only a sliver of the national work force dug in and refused to be vaccinated, including a small number of New York City employees recently granted reinstatement to their jobs by a Staten Island trial court judge. But anti-vax‌ workers were stark outliers in relation to the vast majority of their peers, from United Airlines employees to Massachusetts state employees, who overwhelmingly complied with mandates.Why did ‌these conservative Republicans suddenly want a safety net for unvaccinated workers? Because it served a culture war narrative, one that frames everything in divisive us-versus-them terms and in the case of vaccines, sees them as a nefarious liberal plot and vaccine-or-test mandates as one more example of government overreach.To that point, consider two legal cases, one brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission when its enforcement arm was led by a Trump appointee, and another heard by the Supreme Court, where six of the nine justices are Republican appointees. Both cases involved workers — but neither touched on pocketbook or dignity issues central to most workers’ concerns.The E.E.O.C. case involved two Kroger workers who claimed religious discrimination after being fired for refusing to wear company-issued aprons bearing a heart-shaped logo they saw as promoting gay rights. (In pretrial depositions, both workers were shown a range of corporate logos, and the workers said several of them also represented gay rights and were incompatible with their religion; they included the logos of NBC, Google, Southwest and Apple, as well as the Olympic rings.) A Trump-appointed federal judge in Arkansas rejected Krogers’ motion to end the case, ordering the case to trial, and earlier this month, the company and commission said they had reached a deal to resolve the dispute.In a Supreme Court case that became a national right-wing cause célèbre, the six conservative justices ruled that a Washington State school district violated the free speech and religious rights of a public school football coach who insisted on praying very publicly after games with students at midfield, rejecting more private locations that were offered.In light of genuine worker struggles in our country, these are the workers conservatives go to bat for? It seems the trickle-down crowd finds their inner Norma Rae only if it helps them “own the libs.” These aren’t workers’ rights issues. They’re divisive culture war battles that happen to occur in the employment arena. For ordinary workers, living paycheck to paycheck, who just want a safe place to work, decent pay, and some dignity, conservatives are AWOL.The praying coach and Kroger worker cases involved First Amendment and religious rights. But the most common example of silenced expression occurs when workers get fired for reporting labor law violations or supporting a union. How many Republicans have spoken up to support the expressive rights of unionizing Starbucks or Amazon workers?Similarly, Republicans may prioritize benefits for their favored workers (such as people who are unvaccinated), but all workers need a functioning safety net, including an adequately funded and functional unemployment insurance system. What’s also essential are robust and broadly available programs for paid family and medical leave, paid sick leave and universal health care, measures most Republicans have repeatedly opposed. In this context, the rush to ensure unemployment benefits to people refusing a lifesaving vaccine is cynical, indeed.Workers need safe conditions, good wages, fair treatment and a collective voice on the job. The culture war labor incursions are divorced from what matters most to our country’s working people.As the midterms approach, Republican candidates may play dress-up in plaids and work boots, as they vie for the votes of our nation’s workers. But even a pickup truck laden with bluejeans and hard hats can’t camouflage the callous facts. The absurdity of the worker causes Republicans champion should drive home the truth to wavering voters: these candidates don’t care about the real needs of working people.Terri Gerstein is a fellow at the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School and the Economic Policy Institute. She spent more than 17 years enforcing labor laws in New York State, working in the state attorney general’s office and as a deputy labor commissioner.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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      The Rising Tide of Global Sadness

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      Taylor Swift was quite the romantic when she burst on the scene in 2006. She sang about the ecstasies of young love and the heartbreak of it. But her mood has hardened as her star has risen. Her excellent new album, Midnights, plays upon a string of negative emotions — anxiety, restlessness, exhaustion and occasionally anger.“I don’t dress for women,” she sings at one point, “I don’t dress for men/Lately I’ve been dressing for revenge.”It turns out Swift is part of a larger trend. The researchers Charlotte Brand, Alberto Acerbi and Alex Mesoudi analyzed more than 150,000 pop songs released between 1965 and 2015. Over that time, the appearance of the word “love” in top-100 hits roughly halved. Meanwhile, the number of times such songs contained negative emotion words, like “hate” rose sharply.Pop music isn’t the only thing that has gotten a lot harsher. David Rozado, Ruth Hughes and Jamin Halberstadt analyzed 23 million headlines published between 2000 and 2019 by 47 different news outlets popular in the United States. The headlines, too, grew significantly more negative, with a greater proportion of headlines denoting anger, fear, disgust and sadness. Headlines in left-leaning media got a lot more negative, but headlines in right-leaning publications got even more negative than that.The negativity in the culture reflects the negativity in real life. The General Social Survey asks people to rate their happiness levels. Between 1990 and 2018 the share of Americans who put themselves in the lowest happiness category increased by more than 50 percent. And that was before the pandemic.The really bad news is abroad. Each year Gallup surveys roughly 150,000 people in over 140 countries about their emotional lives. Experiences of negative emotions — related to stress, sadness, anger, worry and physical pain — hit a record high last year.Gallup asks people in this survey to rate their lives on a scale from zero to 10, with zero meaning you’re living your worst possible life and 10 meaning you’re living your best. Sixteen years ago, only 1.6 percent of people worldwide rated their life as a zero. As of last year, the share of people reporting the worst possible lives has more than quadrupled. The unhappiest people are even unhappier. In 2006, the bottom fifth of the population gave themselves an average score of 2.5. Fifteen years later, that average score in the bottom quintile had dropped to 1.2.In an interview, Jon Clifton, the C.E.O. of Gallup, told me that in 2021 21 percent of the people in India gave themselves a zero rating. He said negative emotions are rising in India and China, Brazil and Mexico and many other nations. A lot of people are pretty miserable at work. In the most recent survey Gallup found that 20 percent of all people are thriving at work, 62 percent are indifferent on the job and 18 percent are miserable.Part of the problem is declining community. The polls imply that almost two billion people are so unhappy where they live they would not recommend their community to a friend. This is especially true in China and India.Part of the problem is hunger. In 2014, 22.6 percent of the world faced moderate or severe food insecurity. By 2020, 30.4 percent of the world did.Part of the problem is an increase in physical misery. In 2006, 30 percent of people who rated their lives the worst said they experienced daily pain. Last year, 45 percent of those people said they live with daily pain. Before the pandemic, the experience of living with pain increased across all age groups.A lot of those numbers surprised me. Places like China and India have gotten much richer. But development does not necessarily lead to gains in well-being, in part because development is often accompanied by widening inequality. This is one of the core points Clifton makes in his book “Blind Spot: The Global Rise of Unhappiness and How Leaders Missed It.” We conventionally use G.D.P. and other material measures to evaluate how nations are doing. But these are often deeply flawed measures of how actual people are experiencing their lives.Misery influences politics. James Carville famously said, “It’s the economy, stupid.” But that’s too narrow. Often it’s human flourishing, stupid, including community cohesion, a sense of being respected, social connection. George Ward of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has argued that subjective measures of well-being are more predictive of some election outcomes than economic measures. Measures of well-being dropped in Tunisia and Egypt before the Arab uprisings. Well-being dropped in Britain before the Brexit vote. Counties in the United States that saw the largest gain in voting Republican for president between the 2012 election and Donald Trump’s election in 2016 were also the counties where people rated their lives the worst.If misery levels keep rising, what can we expect in the future? Well, rising levels of populism for one. And second, greater civil unrest across the board. Clifton noted that according to the Global Peace Index, civic discontent — riots, strikes, anti-government demonstrations — increased by 244 percent from 2011 to 2019.We live in a world of widening emotional inequality. The top 20 percent of the world is experiencing highest level of happiness and well-being since Gallup began measuring these things. The bottom 20 percent is experiencing the worst. It’s a fundamentally unjust and unstable situation. The emotional health of the world is shattering.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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      Your Friday Briefing: The U.S. Economy Grew, Slowly

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      Plus the war in Ukraine may boost clean energy and investigations into Chinese outposts overseas.Quarterly changes in gross domestic product, adjusted for inflation.By The New York TimesU.S. economy grows, but slowlyThe U.S. economy grew slowly over the summer, adding to fears of a looming recession while simultaneously keeping alive the hope that one might be avoided.Gross domestic product, adjusted for inflation, increased by 0.6 percent after six months of decline, slightly exceeding forecasters’ expectations. That suggests that a path to “soft landing,” in which policymakers cool off red-hot demand without snuffing out the recovery entirely, remains open, but narrow.There are still plenty of economic headwinds. Consumer spending slowed as inflation cut into households’ buying power, and mortgage rates rose to the highest level since 2002, leading to a steep contraction in the housing sector. Big tech companies like Meta and Microsoft, which are usually two drivers of U.S. growth, are also signaling that tough times might be ahead amid inflation.In Europe: The European Central Bank raised interest rates again. In just three months, the bank has raised rates at the fastest pace in its history.Ripple effects: Interest rate increases by the U.S. Federal Reserve have hurt other currencies — including those of Japan, China and India — by making it harder for foreign borrowers with debt in U.S. dollars to repay their loans.Quotable: “Ignore the headline number — growth rates are slowing,” Michael Gapen, chief U.S. economist for Bank of America, said. “It wouldn’t take much further slowing from here to tip the economy into a recession.”Europe has seen an uptick in coal use as countries scramble to replace lost Russian gas.Martin Meissner/Associated PressThe war in Ukraine may boost clean energyIn response to natural gas shortages caused by the war in Ukraine, some countries are burning more coal. In the short term, European leaders looking for alternatives to Russian gas are turning to Africa to drill for more fossil fuels.But the International Energy Agency said yesterday that the war could speed up the shift to clean energy rather than slowing it down. One major reason is that soaring fossil fuel prices have led to a wider embrace of wind turbines, solar panels, nuclear power plants, hydrogen fuels, electric vehicles and electric heat pumps.The State of the WarFears of Escalation: President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia repeated the unfounded claim that Ukraine was preparing to explode a so-called dirty bomb, as concerns rose in the West that the Kremlin was seeking a pretext to escalate the war.The Looming Fight for Kherson: As Russian forces pillage the occupied southern port city and pressure residents to leave for Russia, a nearby hydroelectric dam has emerged as a linchpin in what is shaping up to be the site of the next major battle in Ukraine.A Coalition Under Strain: President Biden is facing new challenges keeping together the bipartisan, multinational coalition supporting Ukraine, which has shown recent signs of fraying with the approach of U.S. midterm elections and a cold European winter.Anti-Drone Warfare: Since Russia began terrorizing Ukrainian cities in recent weeks with Iranian-made drones, Ukraine has turned its focus to an intense counter-drone strategy. The hastily assembled effort has been surprisingly successful.The I.E.A. said global investment in clean energy is now expected to rise to more than $2 trillion annually by 2030 from $1.3 trillion in 2022.Still, the shift is not happening fast enough to avoid dangerous levels of global warming. The agency said that for things to change, governments would have to take much stronger action to reduce their emissions over the next few years.Notable: A climate protester glued his head to “Girl With a Pearl Earring,” a painting by Johannes Vermeer, at a museum in The Hague.Beyond catastrophe: In The Times Magazine, David Wallace-Wells argues that while there’s plenty of bad climate news, thanks to real progress, the world is headed toward a less apocalyptic future.From Opinion: The runoff election in Brazil on Sunday will determine the fate of the Amazon rainforest and Earth’s future.“It is such a brazen escalation and violation of territorial sovereignty,” said a member of a rights group.Bart Maat/EPA, via ShutterstockChina’s offshore police stationsThe Dutch government is investigating reports that Chinese law enforcement agencies are illegally operating offices in the Netherlands to police Chinese citizens overseas.The recent reports, which come from the news media and a human rights group, add to a growing body of evidence that suggests that Beijing surveils Chinese nationals from overseas outposts. The authorities in Canada are investigating similar operations there, and a rights group said that there are dozens of surveillance outfits around the world — including in New York, Paris, London, Madrid and Toronto.China said that the operations, which it described as “service stations” meant to help Chinese citizens with administrative tasks like passport renewals, also have the aim of “resolutely cracking down on all kinds of illegal and criminal activities related to overseas Chinese people.”Reaction: China’s Embassy in the Netherlands said it was “not aware” of and “not involved” with the offices. According to the Vienna Convention, an international pact that both China and the Netherlands signed, administrative matters are to be handled by consulates.THE LATEST NEWSAsia PacificFoxconn is now making the new iPhone 14.Gilles Sabrie for The New York TimesA Covid outbreak in China forced workers at a major iPhone manufacturing plant into quarantine right before an expected holiday buying surge.An Australian judge ordered a new trial of a former parliamentary staff member accused of raping a colleague in the Parliament House, after a juror brought a research article on sexual assault cases into the jury room.Around the WorldThe deal has stirred fierce debate in Israel: Some view it as an achievement; others see it as a dangerous capitulation.Jack Guez/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIsrael and Lebanon, which are technically still at war, signed a maritime agreement regulating their rights to gas reserves at sea.Brazil’s presidential runoff is Sunday. Many fear that President Jair Bolsonaro, who spent months building the myth of a stolen election, may not accept defeat.The War in UkraineVladimir Putin, Russia’s president, used an annual foreign policy speech to try to appeal to conservatives in the U.S. and Europe.Fearing aggression from Belarus, Ukraine said it had increased its troop presence in the north.Russian loyalists stole the bones of Prince Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin from Ukraine. Potemkin is an inspiration to Putin: He persuaded Catherine the Great, his lover, to annex Crimea in 1783.The Week in CultureSkechers said it escorted Kanye West, now known as Ye, from its Los Angeles offices after he showed up there unannounced. Many wonder whether his music can withstand the backlash to his recent string of offensive outbursts.A memoir by Prince Harry is due in January. Some royal experts say the project is fraught with risk for him.A Morning Read“We should lead this world,” Wang Xiaodong once said.Gilles Sabrié for The New York TimesWang Xiaodong was once called the standard-bearer of Chinese nationalism.Now, he warns that the movement he helped to ignite nearly 35 years ago has gone too far. “I’ve been called nationalism’s godfather,” he told my colleague Vivian Wang. “I created them. But I never told them to be this crazy.”SPOTLIGHT ON AFRICAA demonstration in Addis Ababa in support of Ethiopia’s armed forces last weekend.Amanuel Sileshi/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHigh-stakes talks on EthiopiaAfter nearly two years of civil war, representatives from the Ethiopian government and rebel forces in the country’s Tigray region began holding formal peace talks this week.The failure of the talks could exacerbate a conflict that began when fighting broke out after a contested election, and in which thousands have been killed and millions have been displaced.Little has emerged so far from the negotiations, which are being held in South Africa and mediated by former African leaders on behalf of the African Union. Tigrayans in exile have said they have little hope that the talks will end the fighting.“Ethiopia faces multiple challenges including major climatic stresses, an economy in deep distress, partly due to the war, and a number of other rebellions,” Murithi Mutiga, the Africa program director at the International Crisis Group, said.“It can’t afford a years’ long war on its borders,” he added. “A collapse in the talks will mean even more carnage in a war that’s already one of the world’s deadliest.”— Lynsey Chutel, reporter based in JohannesburgPLAY, WATCH, EATWhat to CookJohnny Miller for The New York TimesIf you have leftover rice, put it to good use in this crispy rice salad with halloumi and ginger-lime vinaigrette.What to ReadSome standout newly published books include “The Rebel and the Kingdom,” about a secret mission to overthrow the North Korean government.What to Watch“All That Breathes,” a subtle, poetic documentary, follows three men trying to rehabilitate New Delhi’s birds of prey.TravelHow to spend 36 hours in Sydney.Now Time to PlayPlay the Mini Crossword, and here’s a clue: Get older (three letters).Here are the Wordle and the Spelling Bee.You can find all our puzzles here.That’s it for today’s briefing. See you next time. — AmeliaP.S. Vivian Nereim will be our new Gulf bureau chief, becoming the first Times correspondent to lead a bureau in Saudi Arabia.The latest episode of “The Daily” is on the midterm elections in New York. Lynsey Chutel wrote today’s Spotlight on Africa. You can reach Amelia and the team at briefing@nytimes.com. More

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      ‘Maybe Gen Z Is Just Kinder’: How America’s Youngest Voters are Shaping Politics

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      Members of Gen Z (Americans under 26 years old) have come of age during the Trump presidency and a pandemic, in an era of protests over police violence, attacks on reproductive rights, rising economic inequality, and frequent school shootings. These young people are calling for major changes, but many aren’t confident that politicians will act with the urgency necessary to carry them out. As Gen Z voters consider the midterms, they are prioritizing the issues, not party allegiance.But with a history of low turnout, and disenchantment with politics across the spectrum, will young voters be moved enough by the issues to show up at the polls? And if so, will there be enough of them to sway decisive races?[You can listen to this episode of “The Argument” on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, or Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]Today on “The Argument,” Jane Coaston convenes three voters in their early 20s to talk about how their families and communities have affected their politics, what matters most to them at the ballot box, and what they wish older Americans and politicians understood about people their age.(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated PressThoughts? Email us at argument@nytimes.com or leave us a voice mail message at (347) 915-4324. We want to hear what you’re arguing about with your family, your friends and your frenemies. (We may use excerpts from your message in a future episode.)By leaving us a message, you are agreeing to be governed by our reader submission terms and agreeing that we may use and allow others to use your name, voice and message.“The Argument” is produced by Phoebe Lett, and Vishakha Darbha and Derek Arthur. Edited by Alison Bruzek and Anabel Bacon. With original music by Isaac Jones and Pat McCusker; mixing by Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Michelle Harris. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta with editorial support from Kristina Samulewski. More

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      A Step-by-Step Guide to Becoming a Trump Enabler

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      ​​“What would you do for your relevance?” the political journalist Mark Leibovich asks in his new book, “Thank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trump’s Washington and the Price of Submission.” “How badly did you want into the clubhouse, no matter how wretched it became inside?” For Leibovich, you can’t truly understand the current Republican Party without taking stock of the almost Shakespearean drama that unfolded during the Trump presidency — in which Republican after Republican bowed to the will of their ascendant party leader.Through his extensive — and often quite colorful — reporting with Trump’s inner circle of enablers, Leibovich tries to understand the motivations that fueled Trump’s takeover of the G.O.P. But this conversation isn’t only important in retrospect. With the Republican Party poised to possibly recapture at least one house of Congress in November, many of Trump’s core enablers could soon hold considerable political power. Who are they? What do they believe? How will they act if given power?[You can listen to this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]We discuss why the stakes in 2022 midterms feel higher than ever, why the Republican Party has changed so profoundly since the days of Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor, how the governing structure of the G.O.P. fell apart as Trump rose in influence, the many reasons politicians from Lindsey Graham to Elise Stefanik converted from Trump skeptics to staunch Trump defenders, the political motivations of Kevin McCarthy — who may become the next speaker of the House — and how he might wield power, how the persistence of Trumpism could profoundly alter American democracy, why Leibovich believes figures like J.D. Vance prostrated themselves to a man who insulted them, what options Democrats have for countering election denialism and more.You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)Ralph Answang“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Emefa Agawu, Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Original music by Isaac Jones. Mixing by Jeff Geld, Sonia Herrero and Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Kristina Samulewski. More