Andrea Gawrylewski in Scientific American:

Dear New Zealand,

The two largest nations in the English-speaking world have just suffered catastrophes at the hands of voters—in both cases the uneducated, anti-intellectual portion of voters. Science in both countries will be hit extremely hard: In the one case, by the xenophobically inspired severing of painstakingly built-up relationships with European partners; in the other case by the election of an unqualified, narcissistic, misogynistic sick joke as president. In neither case is the disaster going to be short-lived: in America because of the nonretirement rule of the Supreme Court; in Britain because Brexit is irreversible.

There are top scientists in America and Britain—talented, creative people, desperate to escape the redneck bigotry of their home countries. Dear New Zealand, you are a deeply civilized small nation, with a low population in a pair of beautiful, spacious islands. You care about climate change, the future of the planet and other scientifically important issues. Why not write to all the Nobel Prize winners in Britain and America, write to the Fields medalists, Kyoto and Crafoord Prize and International Cosmos Prize winners, the Fellows of the Royal Society, the elite scientists in the National Academy of Sciences, the Fellows of the British Academy and similar bodies in America. Offer them citizenship. The contribution that creative intellectuals can make to the prosperity and cultural life of a nation is out of all proportion to their numbers. You could make New Zealand the Athens of the modern world.

Yes, dear New Zealand, I know it’s an unrealistic, surreal pipe dream. But on the day after U.S. election day, in the year of Brexit, the distinction between the surreal and the awfulness of the real seems to merge in a bad trip from which a pipe dream is the only refuge.

Yours,

Richard Dawkins, founder and board chairman, Richard Dawkins Foundation.

More here.

François Furstenberg on his Facebook wall:

1. I have spent most of the last quarter century studying U.S. history, dwelling much on its darker aspects: slavery and the slave trade; genocide and land expropriation; the limits of liberal citizenship; the cruelties petty and great, fathomable and unfathomable, by which the United States became a global power. We’ve seen far worse than this. For god’s sake, why, then, am I so shocked, dismayed, and upset by what has just happened?

2. Politics always involves some element of performance and theatricality, of course, and it always has. But I think we’ve entered a qualitatively new era here, probably related to the media conglomerates that disseminate most of our news, and which must bear no small part of the blame for this fiasco. For a long time now, elections have been transformed from an exercise in democracy into an entertainment spectacle. We have theme songs, logos, fancy sets, famous stars, and so much more. No matter how great the mismatch we’ve got to keep it close, make it a good show, keep the viewers’ attention. Watching ABC last night, with their stage set in Times Square, I was reminded more of Dick Clark’s New Year’s Eve special with the apple dropping and pop singers performing than I was of a forum for election returns. Instead of being limited to a few weeks or months, as they are in other countries, elections here are always ongoing affairs, and no doubt people are already talking about 2020 and who is up and who is down. In short, elections have become virtually indistinguishable from a vapid reality television show and I suppose we should not be surprised that the winner is a vapid reality television star.

3. I share the opinion of people like Thomas Frank who believe the Democratic Party has sown the seeds of the disaster since at least Bill Clinton if not before. By abandoning labor and shedding any class language or analysis from its politics, allying itself instead to the monied professional classes, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley, the party advanced an agenda of deregulation and free trade for labor alongside protectionism for large corporations and elite professions. It thus allowed the Republican Party, traditionally the party of capital, to knock down one of the pillars of the Democrats’ New Deal coalition. You reap what you sow I suppose. But will the powers that be in the Democratic Party change course? Charles Schumer seems set to be the new Senate minority leader, and yet he exemplifies perhaps more than anyone the Democratic Party that has failed. Is the party capable of change?

More here. [François Furstenberg is professor of history at Johns Hopkins University.]

Fredrik deBoer in the Washington Post:

Donald Trump’s stunning victory is less surprising when we remember a simple fact: Hillary Clinton is a deeply unpopular politician. She won a hotly contested primary victory against a uniquely popular candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders. In her place, could he have beaten Trump?

That Clinton has unusually high unfavorables has been true for decades. Indeed, it has been a steady fact of her political life. She has annually ranked among the least-liked politicians on the national stage since she was the first lady. In recent years, her low favorability rating was matched only by that of her opponent, animated hate Muppet Donald Trump. In contrast, Sanders enjoys very high popularity, ranking as the most popular senator for two years in a row. Nationally, his favorability rating is more than 10 points higher than Clinton’s, and his unfavorability rating is more than 15 points lower. This popularity would have been a real asset on the campaign trail.

Clinton’s inability to ever capture the approval of most Americans hurt her in a number of ways. Consider her performance in predominantly black, working-class counties in Michigan. These are precisely the kinds of areas that she was supposed to count on in the Rust Belt, the “blue wall” that would supposedly secure her victory even if she lost out in Florida and North Carolina.

More here.

Greg Borzo in Phys.org:

New research conducted at the University of Chicago has confirmed a decades-old theory describing the dynamics of continuous phase transitions.

The findings, published in the Nov. 4 issue of Science, provide the first clear demonstration of the Kibble-Zurek mechanism for a quantum phase transition in both space and time. Prof. Cheng Chin and his team of UChicago physicists observed the transition in gaseous cesium atoms at temperatures near absolute zero.

In a phase transition, matter changes its form and properties as in transitions from solid to liquid (for example, ice to water) or from liquid to gas (for example, water to steam). Those are known as first-order phase transitions.

A continuous phase transition, or second-order transition, forms defects—such as domain walls, cosmic strings and textures—where some of the matter is stuck between regions in distinct states. The Kibble-Zurek mechanism predicts how such defects and complex structures will form in space and time when a physical system goes through a continuous phase transition. Examples of continuous phase transitions include the spontaneous symmetry breaking in the early universe and, in the case of the experiment by Chin's team, a ferromagnetic phase transition in gaseous cesium atoms.

More here.

Ian P. Beacock in The Point:

In May 1940, Hitler’s armies swept lightning-fast into France and the Low Countries. Fearing the worst as the Nazis advanced, more than eight million panicked civilians left their homes and fled south. It was soon one of the largest mass migrations in recorded history. Today, the French simply call it l’exode: the exodus. Two million Belgians were on the road by June, roughly one-third of the entire country. Six million of the refugees were French. Somewhere between one quarter and one third of them were children. Entire cities emptied overnight. Reims, a bustling regional center in Champagne, lost 98 percent of its quarter-million inhabitants. The town of Evreux shriveled from twenty thousand souls to fewer than two hundred. By June 13, even Paris had been deserted; only the old, the sick and the poor remained behind. Southbound roads coagulated and clogged with overheating cars, teenage boys on bicycles, pushcarts piled high with suitcases and mattresses and tired children. The last trains to leave the capital were choked with people.

One of the refugees, a 62-year-old French novelist named Léon Werth, produced an astonishing eyewitness account of his passage into exile. “We’re not living in ordinary times,” Werth wrote that summer. “We are shipwrecked.” That the memoir was ever published is something of a miracle. Thirty-three days after they left Paris, Werth and his wife Suzanne arrived in Saint-Amour, a village in the foothills of the Jura mountains. The text was completed by autumn, but publishing it in the so-called “free zone” of Vichy France was out of the question: Werth was Jewish. In October, however, Werth was visited by his best friend Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a gifted writer and pilot who smuggled the manuscript out of France via Algiers and Lisbon. Werth never saw the book in print. Lost mysteriously for fifty years, the memoir first appeared in France in 1992. The first English edition of 33 Days appeared last year, a slim volume translated with great dexterity and feeling by Austin Denis Johnston.

More here.

From Nature:

Republican businessman and reality-television star Donald Trump will be the United States’ next president. Although science played only a bit part in this year’s dramatic, hard-fought campaign, many researchers expressed fear and disbelief as Trump defeated former secretary of state Hillary Clinton on 8 November. “Trump will be the first anti-science president we have ever had,” says Michael Lubell, director of public affairs for the American Physical Society in Washington DC. “The consequences are going to be very, very severe.” Trump has questioned the science underlying climate change — at one point suggesting that it was a Chinese hoax — and pledged to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement. Although he has offered few details on policies for biomedical research, Trump said last year that he has heard “terrible” things about the US National Institutes of Health; he has also derided NASA as a “logistics agency for low-Earth orbit activity“, and said he would expand the role of the commercial space industry in the US space programme.

Trump’s hard-line positions on immigration — including a pledge to bar Muslims from entering the United States, and a plan to build a wall along the US border with Mexico — have worried research advocates who say such stances could dissuade talented foreign scientists from working or studying at US institutions. “I think at the very least it would put a chilling effect on the interest of scientists from other countries in coming here,” says Kevin Wilson, director of public policy and media relations at the American Society for Cell Biology in Bethesda, Maryland. Some researchers are already thinking about leaving the United States in the wake of the election. “As a Canadian working at a US university, a move back to Canada will be something I'll be looking into,” tweeted Murray Rudd, who studies environmental economics and policy at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. (Read more reaction from scientists.)

More here.

Roz Kaveney at the Times Literary Supplement:

From a teenage appearance on a news magazine programme defending his right to wear his hair long to the last mimed videos of wrecked, button-eyed beauty, David Bowie was always in control of, and thoughtful about, how he looked. His last stage appearance – at a charity gala – was a performance of “Life on Mars” crooned in the style of Frank Sinatra. His less than entirely successful experiment with high finance – the Bowie Bonds – nonetheless enabled him to re-purchase the whole of his back catalogue. Even when, in the mid-1970s, his personal life – and in particular his problems with cocaine addiction – span out of control and he made ill-judged remarks about fascism, he continued to develop musically and in other modes of performance, such as theatre and film. He was one of the two or three most conscious and conscientious artists in rock music.

A case can be made – and is strongly implied in the video for the late single “The stars are out tonight”– that Bowie was least creative when happiest, when that control was least threatened by his demons. The last two albums – The Next Day and Blackstar – written and assembled when he knew himself to be dying, were a return to greatness. When one of his last artistic enterprises is as flawed yet patchily brilliant as Lazarus, we have to consider the possibility that its flaws are less than they seem or the result of unavoidable practical choices. His record of sheer quicksilver cleverness – he was also one of the most intellectual of rock stars, in his art school autodidact polymath way – demands that concession of us.

more here.

David Beer at berfrois:

Walter Benjamin is full of surprises. This is perhaps why his work seems to have endured so well. He has a knack for carving out unexpected angles on familiar issues. In this collection the surprise is not so much in themes that it covers, many of which are typical of Benjamin’s other work, rather the surprise is in Benjamin’s exploration of different styles. It is a book of experimentation that finds Benjamin in the mode of the storyteller.

The volume gathers together Benjamin’s fiction along with some reviews linking to those fictional themes. Here Benjamin is either writing fiction or writing about fiction. These pieces, like the earlier collection of Benjamin’s radio broadcasts, are a testament to his lifestyle. They show a freelancer at work, trying to eke out a living as a writer. These are the remnants of a peripatetic life of the mind, deployed wherever necessary to make ends meet and to enable his other writings to continue. It was a struggle for Benjamin. But it seems he always liked to produce interesting and creative work, even when it was a necessity of living.

Benjamin probably didn’t mind indulging in some fiction writing or in reviewing fictional works. He always had a soft spot for fiction, particularly detective novels – which he even considered writing himself. This affection is most notable in his short review piece ‘Detective Novels, on Tour’, where he describes the enchantment of finding a detective novel in a station bookstore before a journey.

more here.

Joanna Tice-Jen at The Immanent Frame:

Survey data indicates a growing generational split among evangelicals, with the younger generation supporting a range of left-leaning policies that their parents and grandparents vehemently opposed. These young evangelicals are interested in environmentalism, alleviating global poverty, fighting the AIDS epidemic, andsupporting LGBT rights, while continuing a generally conservative tack on abortion, national defense, and capital punishment. Although, even those core issues are sometimes thrown into question. Furthermore, young evangelicals are more ethnically diverse than previous generations, which also works to shift their politics to the left on most issues.

Historically, this is not a surprising shift, as the story of evangelical America supplies ample precedents for an evangelical leadership that throws their weight behind leftist causes: “the old fashioned gospel” of the Gilded Age; the “social gospel” of the Progressive Era; and the political preaching and religiously-infused activist rhetoric of black evangelical pastors during the civil rights era. Furthermore, since the 1970s, the dominance of the Christian right has always been countered by progressive evangelical denominations and organizations, such as Sojourners and Messiah College. While the forces of the evangelical left will not reach a critical mass in this week’s election, it seems inevitable that they will make their presence known four years from now, if not in earlier congressional and local races.

more here.

Dear Son, when the warm multitudes cry,
Ascend your throne majestically,
But keep in mind the waters where fish
See sceptres descending with no wish
To touch them; sit regal and erect,
But imagine sands where a crown
Has the status of a broken-down
Sofa or mutilated statue:
Remember as bells and cannon boom
The cold deep that does not envy you,
The sunburnt superficial kingdom
Where a king is an object.

Expect no help from others, for who
Talk sense to princes or refer to
The scorpion in official speeches
As they unveil some granite Progress
Leading a child and holding a bunch
Of lilies? In their Royal Zoos the
Shark and the octopus are tactfully
Omitted; synchronized clocks march on
Within their powers; without, remain
The ocean flats where no subscription
Concerts are given, the desert plain
Where there is nothing for lunch.

Read more »

Sue Halpern in the New York Review of Books:

For generations of Americans especially, and young Americans even more, driving and the open road promised a kind of freedom: the ability to light out for the territory, even if the territory was only the mall one town over. Autonomous vehicles also come with the promise of freedom, the freedom of getting places without having to pay attention to the open (or, more likely, clogged) road, and with it, the freedom to sleep, work, read e-mail, text, play, have sex, drink a beer, watch a movie, or do nothing at all. In the words of the Morgan Stanley analysts, whose enthusiasm is matched by advocates in Silicon Valley and cheerleaders in Detroit, driverless vehicles will deliver us to a “utopian society.”

That utopia looks something like this: fleets of autonomous vehicles—call them taxi bots—owned by companies like Uber and Google, able to be deployed on demand, that will eliminate, for the most part, the need for private car ownership. (Currently, most privately owned cars sit idle for most of the day, simply taking up space and depreciating in value.) Fewer privately owned vehicles will result in fewer cars on the road overall. With fewer cars will come fewer traffic jams and fewer accidents. Fewer accidents will enable cars to be made from lighter materials, saving on fuel. They will be smaller, too, since cars will no longer need to be armored against one another.

With less private car ownership, individuals will be freed of car payments, fuel and maintenance costs, and insurance premiums. Riders will have more disposable income and less debt. The built environment will improve as well, as road signs are eliminated—smart cars always know where they are and where they are going—and parking spaces, having become obsolete, are converted into green spaces. And if this weren’t utopian enough, the Morgan Stanley analysts estimate that switching to full vehicle autonomy will save the United States economy alone $1.3 trillion a year.

There are many assumptions embedded in this scenario, the most obvious being that people will be willing to give up private car ownership and ride in shared, driverless vehicles. (Depending on the situation, sharing either means using cars owned by fleet companies in place of privately owned vehicles, or shuttling in cars owned by fleet companies with other riders, most likely strangers going to proximate destinations.) There is no way to know yet if this will happen. In a survey by the Insurance Information Institute last May, 55 percent of respondents said they would not ride in an autonomous vehicle. But that could change as self-driving cars become more commonplace, and as today’s young adults, who have been slower to get drivers’ licenses and own cars than their parents’ generation, and who have been early adopters of car-sharing businesses like Zipcar and Uber, become the dominant demographic.

More here.

Oliver Roeder in Nautilus:

It’s not hard to find close elections.

In 2015, a Mississippi state house race ended in a tie, after which the winner was decided by drawing straws. A 2013 mayoral race in the Philippines was deadlocked and resolved with a coin toss. A 2013 legislative election in Austria was decided by a single vote, after wrangling over the validity of a ballot featuring a vulgar cartoon. Heck, I didn’t have to look far to find examples: In 1990, my own uncle lost his bid for Congress by less than 1 percent of the vote.

But there is one election that is so consistently close, and so important, that it deserves special consideration—the United States presidential election.

I plotted the top two popular vote-getters in every U.S. presidential election since 1824, using data from The American Presidency Project. The top two contenders, typically a Democratic and a Republican, but occasionally a Whig, have danced closely around the 50-50 mark for nearly 100 years. Only four times since 1824 has the winner received more than 60 percent of the popular vote. Since 2000, the candidates have been separated by an average of 3.5 points. The median and average separations have been 8.2 and 9.5 points since 1824—a figure skewed upward due to a few outlying and not particularly close races. (The electoral tally doesn’t usually appear so close because the Electoral College tends to magnify differences in the popular vote.)

This is a feature of U.S. politics that many of us have become accustomed to. So is it unsurprising? Not really. “Considering all of the factors that go into what would make an election close or not close—incumbency, the brand of the parties—my perspective is that there’s a surprising rate of close elections,” Eitan Hersh, a Yale political scientist and the author of Hacking the Electorate: How Campaigns Perceive Voters, told me.

The question is, why?

More here.

Sarah Leonard and Nancy Fraser in Dissent:

Sarah Leonard: What is social reproduction, and why does it lie at the core of your feminist analysis?

Nancy Fraser: Social reproduction is about the creation and maintenance of social bonds. One part of this has to do with the ties between the generations—so, birthing and raising children and caring for the elderly. Another part is about sustaining horizontal ties among friends, family, neighborhoods, and community. This sort of activity is absolutely essential to society. Simultaneously affective and material, it supplies the “social glue” that underpins social cooperation. Without it, there would be no social organization—no economy, no polity, no culture. Historically, social reproduction has been gendered. The lion’s share of responsibility for it has been assigned to women, although men have always performed some of it too.

The rise of capitalism intensified this gender division—by splitting economic production off from social reproduction, treating them as two separate things, located in two distinct institutions and coordinated in two different ways. Production moved into factories and offices, where it was considered “economic” and remunerated with cash wages. Reproduction was left behind, relegated to a new private domestic sphere, where it was sentimentalized and naturalized, performed for the sake of “love” and “virtue,” as opposed to money. Well, that was the theory at least. In fact, social reproduction was never situated exclusively within the confines of the private household, but has been located as well in neighborhoods, public institutions, and civil society; and some of it has been commodified. Nevertheless, the gendered separation of social reproduction from economic production constitutes the principal institutional basis for women’s subordination in capitalist societies. So for feminism, there can be no more central issue than this.

Leonard: In your judgment, we have entered a crisis of care. What does that mean and how have we arrived here?

Fraser: In capitalist societies, the capacities available for social reproduction are accorded no monetized value. They are taken for granted, treated as free and infinitely available “gifts,” which require no attention or replenishment. It’s assumed that there will always be sufficient energies to sustain the social connections on which economic production, and society more generally, depend. This is very similar to the way that nature is treated in capitalist societies, as an infinite reservoir from which we can take as much as we want and into which we can dump any amount of waste.

More here.

Thomas Chatterton Williams in the LRB.

Before the publication of The Underground Railroad, his sixth novel – a mostly straightforward and historically realistic tale of a slave’s escape from southern bondage into tenuous northern freedom – it would have been difficult to imagine a less obvious candidate for the title of Woke Black Artist of the Year than the 47-year-old Colson Whitehead. He distinguished himself in his late twenties with his first novel, The Intuitionist (1999), an explosively original story set in a fantastical world of elevator inspectors, and quickly won critical acclaim on the strength of a rollicking, hyper-idiosyncratic body of work that refused to adhere to the mandates of identity politics or the constrictions of literary genre. Writing with David Foster Wallace-level verbal firepower, he was prepared to subvert the simplistic clichés attached to blackness – and the impulse towards sentimentality that goes along with them. At the height of black rapture over Obama’s election, Whitehead published an irreverent, almost flippant op-ed in the New York Times entitled ‘Finally, a Thin President’, which made a mockery of the notion that an earth-shattering symbolic power was attached to the historic achievement. The next year, he published another satirical op-ed in the New York Times, this one a guide for blocked novelists in search of fresh material. One of his more eyebrow-raising suggestions was what he called the Southern Novel of Black Misery. ‘Africans in America,’ he wrote,

cut your teeth on this literary staple. Slip on your sepia-tinted goggles and investigate the legacy of slavery that still reverberates to this day, the legacy of Reconstruction that still reverberates to this day, and crackers. Invent nutty transliterations of what you think slaves talked like. But hurry up – the hounds are a-gittin’ closer! Sample titles: ‘I’ll Love You Till the Gravy Runs Out and Then I’m Gonna Lick Out the Skillet’; ‘Sore Bunions on a Dusty Road’.

This op-ed appeared on the heels of his 2009 novel, Sag Harbor, a thoroughly uneventful but frequently brilliant autobiographical account of an upper-middle-class black holiday enclave in the Hamptons. That book, set in the summer of 1985, accomplished what very few people attempt to do with the contemporary black American experience: remove it entirely from the realm of extremes. Sag Harbor isn’t a lament about nightmarish, historically predetermined agony or a celebration of fairytale-worthy, impossible to replicate individual talent and success. It doesn’t deny the persistence of racism or fetishise it: anti-blackness, in Sag Harbor as in real life, is just one facet of black experience, no longer the entirety or perhaps even the majority of it – if it ever was. Told from the perspective of a 15-year-old Whitehead stand-in called Benji, Sag Harbor provides many clues about the author’s own Manhattan-bred, Harvard-educated relationship to the inheritance of racial trauma.

More here.

Thomas Frank at The Guardian:

How did the journalists’ crusade fail? The fourth estate came together in an unprecedented professional consensus. They chose insulting the other side over trying to understand what motivated them. They transformed opinion writing into a vehicle for high moral boasting. What could possibly have gone wrong with such an approach?

Put this question in slightly more general terms and you are confronting the single great mystery of 2016. The American white-collar class just spent the year rallying around a super-competent professional (who really wasn’t all that competent) and either insulting or silencing everyone who didn’t accept their assessment. And then they lost. Maybe it’s time to consider whether there’s something about shrill self-righteousness, shouted from a position of high social status, that turns people away.

The even larger problem is that there is a kind of chronic complacency that has been rotting American liberalism for years, a hubris that tells Democrats they need do nothing different, they need deliver nothing really to anyone – except their friends on the Google jet and those nice people at Goldman. The rest of us are treated as though we have nowhere else to go and no role to play except to vote enthusiastically on the grounds that these Democrats are the “last thing standing” between us and the end of the world. It is a liberalism of the rich, it has failed the middle class, and now it has failed on its own terms of electability. Enough with these comfortable Democrats and their cozy Washington system. Enough with Clintonism and its prideful air of professional-class virtue. Enough!

more here.

Maximillian Alvarez at The Baffler:

This is the crux of the problem. When faced with people like Trump supporters, whose views we may see as stupid, intolerant, and recklessly backward, it’s become perfectly acceptable to rebuke those views simply by shouting “this is 2016!” We see our fellows and their different lifeworlds (dangerously unenlightened as they may be), not as unavoidable elements of a history that is still unfolding, but as irritating roadblocks in the way of a history whose coming is already a foregone conclusion. Buoyed by the grace of “progress,” we posit our liberal values as the open, forward-looking counterweight to conservative retrenchment, which stubbornly clings to outdated traditions and the dismal norms that complement them. But, in fact, our approach is the mirror image of conservatism. Like nostalgic right-wingers who resist the onslaught of a changing cultural sphere by upholding the righteousness of tradition, liberals line the barricades erected around a future whose righteousness speaks for itself.

This trend really emerged with Bill Clinton’s ascent as the walking embodiment of the New Democrats’ messages of a “third way,” which simultaneously promoted social egalitarianism and multiculturalist tolerance while ramping up economic deregulation and punitive crackdowns on crime. Many will remember that the treacly, feel-good melody that served as the soundtrack for Slick Willie’s ’92 campaign was none other than Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop (Thinking about Tomorrow).” But what kind of tomorrow were we supposed to be thinking about?

more here.

Evan Osnos at The New Yorker:

Donald Trump’s America was always there, just beneath the surface. You glimpsed it in the crowds, furious but patient, waiting to see him, no matter how long they had to stand in the sun. You heard it in the words of his admirers, who saw him not only as an improvement on our current leaders but as an antidote, a bend in history, an agent of revolution. In the final weeks, there were the accelerants to his fire—the intervention of F.B.I. director James Comey in the Presidential race, a surge in health-plan prices under Obamacare—but none of them alone created his path. Only the people themselves could do that.

Clifton, Virginia, is a picturesque Washington, D.C., suburb less than thirty miles from the White House. The route into Main Street winds between stately, colonnaded homes and equestrian farms. The median household income in the surrounding area is $174,233, nearly triple the state average. Nearby suburbs are becoming more Democratic, as immigrants and yuppies move from the city, but Clifton has remained a proud pocket of limited-government conservatism; in 2012, the Clifton precinct favored Mitt Romney over Barack Obama by twenty-three percentage points.

For weeks, one of the main pieces of conventional wisdom about this election was that prosperous, traditional Republicans would, in the end, turn away from Donald Trump. In Clifton, it soon became clear, that was not the case.

more here.

Ronald Brownstein in The Atlantic:

The places that feel most left behind in a changing America propelled Donald Trump to a stunning victory over Hillary Clinton Tuesday night. In his unexpected win, Trump mobilized enormous margins among rural and exurban voters, and crushing advantages among blue-collar whites. In several cases, he prevented Clinton from making as many gains among college-educated white voters as seemed possible. That allowed Trump to overcome Clinton’s strong performance among minority voters and college-educated white women. Trump’s winning map underscored the risk Clinton faced pouring disproportionately so many more resources into her insurance states than in some of the core states in her campaign’s preferred path to 270 electoral college votes. As I noted last week, Clinton invested about $180 million in television ads in Florida, North Carolina, and Ohio through the end of October—and yet, in the end, lost all three. By comparison, over that period she spent only around $16 million in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Colorado; the third seemed safely in her hands as the evening progressed, but Wisconsin slipped away and Michigan wobbled, and with them went her advantage in the Electoral College. Trump held the traditionally Republican states—he won all of the states Mitt Romney won in 2012—and did exactly what his campaign had predicted for months: battered through the Democratic defenses in the Midwest.

… In an election that became virtually a cultural civil war between two Americas, Trump’s side proved much more enthusiastic and united than Clinton’s. And it has now propelled America into an unexpected, and perhaps, unprecedented, experiment.

More here.

David Remnick in The New Yorker:

The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism. Trump’s shocking victory, his ascension to the Presidency, is a sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy. On January 20, 2017, we will bid farewell to the first African-American President—a man of integrity, dignity, and generous spirit—and witness the inauguration of a con who did little to spurn endorsement by forces of xenophobia and white supremacy. It is impossible to react to this moment with anything less than revulsion and profound anxiety.

There are, inevitably, miseries to come: an increasingly reactionary Supreme Court; an emboldened right-wing Congress; a President whose disdain for women and minorities, civil liberties and scientific fact, to say nothing of simple decency, has been repeatedly demonstrated. Trump is vulgarity unbounded, a knowledge-free national leader who will not only set markets tumbling but will strike fear into the hearts of the vulnerable, the weak, and, above all, the many varieties of Other whom he has so deeply insulted. The African-American Other. The Hispanic Other. The female Other. The Jewish and Muslim Other. The most hopeful way to look at this grievous event—and it’s a stretch—is that this election and the years to follow will be a test of the strength, or the fragility, of American institutions. It will be a test of our seriousness and resolve.

More here.