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The oddities of Joe Biden’s third presidential campaign are impossible to ignore. He is the oldest man ever nominated by a major political party, and the first nominee since 1992 to lose both Iowa and New Hampshire. He has been in seclusion inside his Delaware home since March, rarely venturing out of his basement. After winning the primary as a moderate, he has tacked left for the general, reversing the traditional sequence of presidential nominees. Nor has Biden played it safe as his lead grows over President Trump. On the contrary: he has become more ambitious. In April, in a bid for the Bernie Sanders vote, Biden proposed lowering the age of eligibility for Medicare and forgiving some student loan debt.

A friend in Washington saw Jared and Ivanka at a couple of smart DC dinner parties in the first year of the Trump administration. Ivanka seemed to want to depict them both as the internal opposition to her father, restraining his worst instincts, nudging him along on climate change or women’s issues. You might have assumed as much from ‘Javanka’s’ public image as a couple of rich young New Yorkers of conventional Manhattan liberal opinions who ended up in the White House by accidents of birth and marriage. (As Amber Athey writes, they haven’t changed.) But my friend was most impressed with Jared Kushner. Kushner had already been questioned in the Mueller investigation.

The end of World War Two inaugurated the era of American dominion, with the United States politically, economically and militarily the most powerful nation on the planet. Yet throughout the subsequent period of American global ascendency, the American people endured a seemingly endless sequence of domestic crises, upheavals and disasters. Primacy abroad did not insulate them, convinced of their unique place in human history, from the trials and tribulations routinely befalling other, more ‘ordinary’ nations. Yet neither did trials at home undermine the deep-seated belief that history had summoned the United States — and no one else — to lead the world.

Midway through Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, there occurs this exchange between two characters: ‘“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.”’ The process of civilizational bankruptcy takes a similar course. Casual, seemingly isolated attacks on the fabric of civilization feel at first like so many harmless insect bites. A speaker is shouted down. A statue is vandalized or removed. A college course once deemed essential is rebaptized as offensive: first it is pilloried, then it is canceled. People start quoting Tocqueville’s warning that in a democracy, as large inequalities dissolve, small inequalities are magnified, growing both rancid and rancorous.

Joan Didion wrote that New York is a city only for the very rich, the very poor and the very young. That was in her cult classic 1967 essay ‘Goodbye To All That’, in which she created the farewell-to-New York genre. It’s a quote I carried with me through my twenties, from one grim apartment to the next, each smaller, farther out and more expensive than the last. This is simply the nature of the place, I told myself. If you don’t like it, move somewhere else. Many of us emerged from Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s luxury dictatorship in the aughts with a sense of battle fatigue.

It was inevitable that the wave of destructive rioting and looting that has swept through cities that are almost all governed by progressive Democrats, triggered initially by outrage over the sickening death in police custody of George Floyd, would be compared to the American urban riots of earlier generations. But the parallels miss profound differences in the underlying economic and social dynamics. The Detroit and Newark riots of 1967 and the Los Angeles riot of 1992, for example, took place in cities suffering from the effects of deindustrialization. Los Angeles is not often thought of as a major manufacturing center, but Southern California had a flourishing aerospace industry that went into decline following the Cold War.

It is a strange habit, the American one of making talk-show hosts into preachers. There is no good reason, after all, why a comedian should be any kind of arbiter of morality or anything much else. Yet in America the court of public opinion accepts the right of the jester to preach the homily too. So it was that, in a period not short on ‘personal takes’ and celebrity messaging, one night in early June on his Late Late Show, James Corden delivered a teary monologue about race relations in America. Lots of people thought he did well, and praised Corden’s talk of ‘white guilt’ and all manner of other sins. But one phrase stood out for being especially bogus. It was a phrase that was widely quoted.

Violent left-wing activists have taken to styling themselves as antifa, short for ‘anti-fascists’, though their street-fighting tactics resemble nothing so much as the Brownshirt thuggery practiced by fascists themselves. This did not stop NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson from likening these hooligans to the heroes of World War Two. On the anniversary of D-Day, June 6, while America’s cities still smoldered after days of riots and looting, Liasson took to Twitter to call the Normandy invasion the ‘biggest antifa rally in history’. Dumb jokes are nothing new on Twitter. For many liberals today, however, it’s no laughing matter.

Dolphins returned to the canals of Venice during the COVID-19 lockdown, and neoconservatives are returning to the Democratic party. Bill Kristol and his colleagues at the Bulwark support Joe Biden for president, even though an anti-Trump Republican of sorts briefly jumped into the race. Michigan congressman Justin Amash earned the esteem of the Kristol crew when he collaborated with Democrats to impeach Donald Trump last year. But the Bulwark feared that if Amash was on the ballot as the Libertarian party’s presidential nominee, he’d take votes away from Biden.