#political-downfall

#political-downfall

Forecasters now predict that the coming El Niño—a warming of the Pacific Ocean that deeply affects global weather patterns—is likely to be as severe as the one in 2023-2024, which triggered severe flooding and prolonged heatwaves around the world.

The cycle of dread and panic, of being driven to the edge at full speed before someone slams the brakes, harms our nervous systems, and has the potential to break our spirits.

"We have a great opportunity in our movements to learn how to be opponents without being enemies," says Tanuja Jagernauth. This perspective emphasizes the importance of maintaining respect and understanding even amidst conflict.

What most leaders label as a content problem is actually a presence problem. Leaders often assume credibility rises and falls based on wording alone. In reality, credibility is shaped by executive presence, which reflects the signals leaders send about confidence, clarity, and authority before their ideas are fully heard.

From the moment Donald Trump was sworn into office for his second term, he made clear that a major priority of his administration would be pursuing vindictive actions against his perceived enemies. One of the earliest targets of this agenda of retribution: law firms. In his first months in office, Trump signed executive orders that targeted firms that supported DEI, represented the Democratic Party, advocated for liberal causes, or employed prosecutors who had worked on former special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Trump's 2016 campaign.

In the early 20th century, sociologist Max Weber noted that sweeping industrialization would transform how societies worked. As small, informal operations gave way to large, complex organizations with clearly defined roles and responsibilities, leaders would need to rely less on tradition and charisma, and more on organization and rationality. He also foresaw that jobs would need to be broken down into specialized tasks and governed by a system of hierarchy,

It turns out: not that many world leaders or global citizens. That's because the Board of Peace, created last year by a UN security council resolution, and intended to have a singular focus on implementing a Gaza peace plan, is increasingly looking like a Donald Trump fiefdom, which could allow the US president to wade into other countries' affairs as he sees fit.

Collating data from the World Bank and other sources in innovative ways, he argues that globalization in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century was accompanied by then-unprecedented growth of income in both previously poor populations (notably in China) and people at the top of the world's income distribution (especially those in the West). By contrast, relative shares of world income stagnated or were thought to have declined for wealthy nations' middle and working classes, including in the United States.

The readings in my last series led me to see the genuine hatred conservatives have for what they call variously liberal hegemony, liberal ideology, left-wing ideology, and other names. David Brooks, newly ensconced at Yale and The Atlantic, is just sure it was liberals who caused Trump's wins, with their snotty "knowledge", and "refined tastes". I mocked this nonsense, but apparently Brooks was serious about the super bad feelings his people have about such things.

When we talk about our inability to pay attention, to concentrate, we often mean and blame our phones. It's easy, it's meant to be easy. One flick of our index finger transports us from disaster to disaster, from crisis to crisis, from maddening lie to maddening lie. Each new unauthorized attack and threatened invasion grabs the headlines, until something else takes its place, and meanwhile the government's attempts to terrorize and silence the people of our country continue.

Populism may well have been the defining word of the previous decade: a shorthand for the insurgent parties that came to prominence in the 2010s, challenging the dominance of the liberal centre. But no sooner had it become the main rubric for discussing both the far left and far right than commentators began to question its validity: worrying that it was too vague, or too pejorative, or fuelling the forces to which it referred.

Earlier this week, Gary Kendrick, a GOP council member in the red town of El Cajon, on San Diego's eastern outskirts, announced that he was crossing the aisle and joining the Democrats. Kendrick was the longest-serving Republican official in the region's local government. "I've been a Republican for 50 years," he said, in the statement explaining his action. "I just can't stand what the Republican Party has become. I'm formally renouncing the Republican Party."

We are in the middle of at least four unravelings: The unraveling of the postwar international order. The unraveling of domestic tranquility wherever Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents bring down their jackboots. The further unraveling of the democratic order, with attacks on Federal Reserve independence and excuse the pun trumped-up prosecutions of political opponents. Finally, the unraveling of President Donald Trump's mind.