Новости за 21.02.2020

It can be difficult to discern what passes for thought in Donald Trump’s mind, but on the matter of Russian election interference he is refreshingly clear. He sees Russia’s attempts to help him win the presidency and keep him in power not as a threat to the United States but as a threat to his own fragile ego.

I was an active Boy Scout as a teenager because I had strong motivation: getting myself the hell out of the Scouting movement. It was a cultural rite and a family thing, one I hated—but the rule was that I couldn’t leave until I’d reached the highest rank. My older brothers were Eagle Scouts, as were most of my cousins and nephews. Now the Boy Scouts of America are filing for bankruptcy, like USA Gymnastics and a bunch of Catholic dioceses in the United States before them, and for similar reasons. Читать дальше...

“I have read enough biographies,” Jenn Shapland writes early in her new book, “to know, in no uncertain terms, that they are built of artifice and lies. I am not a fiction writer, and this is not a biography.”

Politico readers learned two interesting things this week.

One: A prominent political scientist is making a novel argument that elections are won not by persuading swing-voting independents but by turning out the greatest number of people already inclined to support your side. This new reality, she argues, should prompt parties to back candidates who generate enthusiasm among those who might otherwise sit home or cast a protest vote, not moderates who might be able to persuade independent voters to switch parties. Читать дальше...

Since Donald Trump’s election, political commentators have bemoaned how polarized American politics has become—how angry, how uncivil, how tribal. A few years ago, NYU business professor Jonathan Haidt began seeing a sort of hardwired clannishness in college students. “A funny thing happens when you take young human beings … and you fill those minds full of binary dimensions,” he said. “You turn on their ancient tribal circuits, preparing them for battle.” Yale law professor Amy Chua has gone even further... Читать дальше...

As a general rule, people do not compare other people to Donald Trump as a compliment. It is plainly rude to tell another person that you see even trace amounts of Trump in them, but more to the point it is also almost always wrong. For all the try-hards on Twitter aiming to approximate his voice and the many GOP candidates wanly aping his scatterbrained hyperaggression, very few people alive are even remotely similar to Donald Trump.

That the world is a mess is a proposition with which the left and the right can both agree. Conservatives look around and see a heathen culture degraded by “cultural Marxism” and the tyranny of social justice; leftists, on the other hand, see a society brought to the brink of collapse by capitalism, patriarchy, and corporate greed. There is no shortage of explanations for why and when this downward slide began: It could have been the radical 1960s that kicked it off, or maybe the triumph of neoliberalism... Читать дальше...

Mike Bloomberg has proposed to buy American votes with $400 million (and counting) in advertisements. Elizabeth Warren walked onto Wednesday’s debate stage proposing to buy American votes with the body of Mike Bloomberg. It was quality television. It was “Big Dick Energy.” And it could mark the end of an era in American politics.