january 1869

The Amazon HQ2 saga had all the hallmarks of the gaudiest reality TV. It was an absurd spectacle, concluding with a plot twist, which revealed a deep and dark truth about the modern world.

Fourteen months ago, Amazon announced a national beauty contest, in which North American cities could apply to win the honor of landing the retailer’s second headquarters. The prize: 50,000 employees and the glory of housing an international tech giant. The cost? Just several billion dollars in tax incentives and a potential face-lift to the host city. Then last week, in a classic late-episode shock, several news outlets reported that Amazon would split its second headquarters between Crystal City, a suburban neighborhood near Washington, D.C., and Long Island City, in Queens, New York.

With the United States starkly divided and with many Americans asking what kind of nation we are, it seems a good moment to look back to November 1863 in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, when Abraham Lincoln tried to answer the same question. Consecrating a Civil War battlefield where thousands of young men and boys had died four months before, he spoke of a nation “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” For most Americans since, and for much of the world, those words have at­tained the status of scripture. We draw our sense of collective identity from them. They were, however, not strictly true, and Lincoln knew it.

This is a story about what happens when you limit birthright citizenship and stir up hate against a certain class of immigrants. It takes place in the Dominican Republic. Like most countries in the Americas, for a century and a half the Caribbean nation’s constitution guaranteed birthright citizenship for anyone born on its soil, with a couple of exceptions: the children of diplomats and short-term travelers. And like most other peoples in the Americas, Dominicans have had a more complicated relationship with immigration than the framers of that constitution might have anticipated.

The Dominican Republic has long been dependent on a steady stream of cheap immigrant labor that cuts its sugar cane, builds its buildings, and staffs the beach resorts that draw in billions of foreign dollars a year. Almost all of that labor comes from the only country close enough, and poor enough, to have people who want to immigrate in large numbers to the Dominican Republic: its Hispaniolan twin, Haiti. Some working-class Dominicans without clear Haitian roots resent poorer neighbors willing to accept lower wages and tough conditions. Many wealthy Dominicans who profit wildly off the cheap labor supply are eager to have strict immigration laws in place, too—not because they want less immigration, but because they want a freer hand. Immigrants in the country illegally have no protection from workplace regulations and can be rounded up, deported, and replaced whenever convenient—including right before payday. (Sound familiar?)

As Florida begins a statewide recount to determine the outcome of its gubernatorial and U.S. Senate contests, commentators are rehashing the famous Bush v. Gore recount of 2000. That’s the most obvious reference—the same state and even some of the same counties are at issue, after all—but it’s not the only or even the most useful one. Democrats in particular should look to the now-forgotten fight over Indiana’s “Bloody Eighth” Congressional District.

Immediately after President Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory against Walter Mondale in 1984, which also returned to Congress a Democratic majority in the House and a Republican majority in the Senate, a bruising battle unfolded over Indiana’s Eighth Congressional District. The freshman Democrat Frank McCloskey, a 45-year-old first-term Democrat, led the Republican Richard McIntyre, a promising 38-year-old conservative state legislator, by 72 votes after the initial count. But a tabulation error in one county seemed to swing the election to McIntyre, by just 34 votes, at which point the Republican secretary of state, Edward Simcox, certified McIntyre the victor. After a full recount, McIntyre was up by some 400 votes—but many thousands of ballots were not counted for technical reasons.

This year will mark the passing of a full century since the end of World War I—a hundred years since the “War to End All Wars.” In that time, much of the battle-ravaged landscape along the Western Front has been reclaimed by nature or returned to farmland, and the scars of the war are disappearing. Some zones remain toxic a century later, and others are still littered with unexploded ordnance, closed off to the public. But across France and Belgium, significant battlefields and ruins were preserved as monuments, and farm fields that became battlegrounds ended up as vast cemeteries. In these places, the visible physical damage to the landscape remains as evidence of the phenomenal violence and destruction that took so many lives so long ago.

I. The Growing Fear of Irrelevance

There is nothing inevitable about democracy. For all the success that democracies have had over the past century or more, they are blips in history. Monarchies, oligarchies, and other forms of authoritarian rule have been far more common modes of human governance.

The emergence of liberal democracies is associated with ideals of liberty and equality that may seem self-evident and irreversible. But these ideals are far more fragile than we believe. Their success in the 20th century depended on unique technological conditions that may prove ephemeral.

Updated on November 12 at 1:12 p.m.

It’s November 4, 2020. Across the United States—and across the globe—liberals and Donald Trump–opposing conservatives alike drag themselves from fitful sleep, red-eyed and exhausted, filled with dread, incomprehension, and déjà vu. How did he do it again?

The night before, Trump had won reelection as president—despite a chaotic and frustrating first term, multiple investigations, and a historically low approval rating. Of course, Trump had won in 2016 despite many of the same weaknesses, but that win was thought to be a fluke, a product of a weak Democratic candidate, Russian interference, and Trump’s novelty. His critics never imagined lightning could strike a second time.

PARIS—The ceremony was planned long in advance. A chance for French President Emmanuel Macron to welcome world leaders to mark the centenary of the armistice that ended the hostilities of World War I. A way to decry nationalism and reinforce his deep commitment to multilateralism, and to a European Union born out of past conflicts.

Then President Donald Trump came to town.

Since his arrival late Friday night, Trump’s every action has seemed emblematic of the unilateralism he has made the hallmark of his administration. And of the whiplash he tends to inflict on his hosts. First, Trump tweeted a direct attack on Macron, who has been calling for Europe to step up its own defense. The two men acted as if they had made up Saturday morning when they appeared—both manspreading in their chair with a forced smile—making brief remarks at the Élysée Palace before a bilateral meeting. Trump said he wanted a strong Europe. But it was clear the romance was over.

Even as firefighters continue to battle the devastating Camp Fire in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains north of Sacramento, several other large wildfires are roaring through tinder-dry sections of California, including the Woolsey Fire, near Malibu. The Woolsey Fire and the nearby Hill Fire have forced the evacuation of nearly 250,000 residents from their homes near the Pacific Coast in Los Angeles and Ventura Counties. At least two deaths have been blamed on the fires, which have burned across more than 80,000 acres, destroying more than 150 homes in the past few days.

One of the most striking patterns in yesterday’s election was years in the making: a major partisan divide between white voters with a college degree and those without one.

According to exit polls, 61 percent of non-college-educated white voters cast their ballots for Republicans while just 45 percent of college-educated white voters did so. Meanwhile 53 percent of college-educated white voters cast their votes for Democrats compared with 37 percent of those without a degree.

The diploma divide, as it’s often called, is not occurring across the electorate; it is primarily a phenomenon among white voters. It’s an unprecedented divide, and is in fact a complete departure from the diploma divide of the past. Non-college-educated white voters used to solidly belong to Democrats, and college-educated white voters to Republicans. Several events over the past six decades have caused these allegiances to switch, the most recent being the candidacy, election, and presidency of Donald Trump.