Saturday, January 11, 2025
Climate Change Is Supercharging Disasters
As Los Angeles burned for days on end, horrifying the nation, scientists made an announcement on Friday that could help explain the deadly conflagration: 2024 was the hottest year in recorded history.
With temperatures rising around the globe and the oceans unusually warm, scientists are warning that the world has entered a dangerous new era of chaotic floods, storms and fires made worse by human-caused climate change.
The firestorms ravaging the country’s second-largest city are just the latest spasm of extreme weather that is growing more furious as well as more unpredictable. Wildfires are highly unusual in Southern California in January, which is supposed to be the rainy season. The same is true for cyclones in Appalachia, where Hurricanes Helene and Milton shocked the country when they tore through mountain communities in October.
Wildfires are burning hotter and moving faster. Storms are getting bigger and carrying more moisture. And soaring temperatures worldwide are leading to heat waves and drought, which can be devastating on their own and leave communities vulnerable to dangers like mudslides when heavy rains return.
Around the globe, extreme weather and searing heat killed thousands of people last year and displaced millions, with pilgrims dying as temperatures soared in Saudi Arabia. In Europe, extreme heat contributed to at least 47,000 deaths in 2023. In the United States, heat-related deaths have doubled in recent decades.
“We’re in a new era now,” said former Vice President Al Gore, who has warned of the threats of global warming for decades. “These climate related extreme events are increasing, both in frequency and intensity, quite rapidly.”
The fires currently raging in greater Los Angeles are already among the most destructive in U.S. history. . . . . As of midday Friday, at least 10 people were dead, and losses could top $100 billion, according to AccuWeather. . . . . the Los Angeles fires are being driven by a number of factors that scientists have linked to fire weather and that are becoming increasingly common on a hotter planet.
Last winter, Southern California got huge amounts of rain that led to extensive vegetation growth. Now, months into what is typically the rainy season, Los Angeles is experiencing a drought. . . . . Temperatures in the region have also been higher than normal. As a result, many of the plants that grew last year are parched, turning trees, grasses and bushes into kindling that was ready to explode.
That combination of heat and dryness, which scientists say is linked to climate change, created the ideal conditions for an urban firestorm.
As the Los Angeles fires consumed some of the most valuable real estate in the world, an unfolding tragedy became fodder for political attacks.
President-elect Donald J. Trump blamed Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, for the disaster. Mr. Trump inaccurately claimed that state and federal protections for a threatened fish had hampered firefighting efforts by leading to water shortages.
And on Thursday, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and an ally of Mr. Trump, inserted himself into the debate over the role climate change plays in wildfires.
“Climate change risk is real, just much slower than alarmists claim,” Mr. Musk wrote to his 211 million followers on X, the social media site he owns. He said the loss of homes was primarily the result of “nonsensical overregulation” and “bad governance at the state and local level that resulted in a shortage of water.”
Those claims were rebutted by scientists, who noted that, as humans continue to warm the planet with emissions, extreme weather is becoming more common.
News that 2024 was the hottest year on record was hardly a surprise. The previous hottest year was 2023. All 10 of the hottest years on record have come in the last decade.
“We sound like a broken record but only because the records keep breaking,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which monitors global temperatures. “They will continue to break until we get emissions under control.”
In late September and early October, Hurricane Helene, which scientists said was made worse by climate change, roared across the Southeast, unleashing deadly floods and landslides in several states, including North Carolina.
In May, scientists found the fingerprints of climate change on a crippling heat wave that gripped India, and found that an early heat wave in West Africa last spring was made 10 times more likely by climate change.
Heat waves. Drought. Fires. Superstorms. Floods. Mudslides. These are the growing threats of a rapidly warming world, and scientists say nowhere is entirely protected from the effects of climate change.
“We think sometimes that if we live in a city, we’re not vulnerable to natural forces,” Dr. Schmidt said. “But we are, and it comes as a huge shock to people. There’s no get out of climate change free card.”
Friday, January 10, 2025
Meta's Capitulation to Trump Shows Its Moral Hollowness
For years, Mark Zuckerberg tried to keep his social networks above the fray of partisan politics.
And why not? Meta’s flagship apps — Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — were rowdy nation-states unto themselves, with billions of users, fragile internal politics, skittish advertisers, perpetually aggrieved influencers and a sprawling, uneven enforcement regime (known as “content moderation”) that was supposed to keep the peace. . . . the last thing Mr. Zuckerberg wanted was to become too enmeshed with actual governments — the kind that could use the force of law to demand that he censor certain voices, thumb the scale on politically sensitive topics or threaten to throw Meta executives in jail for noncompliance.
But that was then. Now, on the eve of a second Trump term, Mr. Zuckerberg is giving his company a full MAGA makeover.
In the process, he is also revealing that Meta — a shape-shifting company that has thrown itself at every major tech trend of the last decade, from crypto to the metaverse to generative A.I. to wearable computing — has a fundamental hollowness at its core. . . . it will adopt whatever values Mr. Zuckerberg thinks it needs to survive.
The most recent changes started before the election, when Mr. Zuckerberg — whose contributions to election integrity efforts in 2020 had led Mr. Trump to threaten him with lifetime imprisonment — called Mr. Trump’s recovery from an assassination attempt “badass.” But they have accelerated in recent weeks, after Mr. Trump and Mr. Zuckerberg met at Mar-a-Lago to mend fences.
On Monday, Meta announced the appointment of three new board members, including Dana White, the chief executive of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and a close friend and political ally of Mr. Trump’s.
And on Tuesday, Mr. Zuckerberg — wearing a $900,000 wristwatch and an air of strained enthusiasm — announced in an Instagram Reel that Meta was replacing its fact-checking program with an X-style “community notes” feature. The company is also revising its rules to allow more criticism of certain groups, including immigrants and transgender people, letting users see more “civic content” in their feeds and moving its content review operations from California to Texas to avoid, he said, the appearance of political bias.
Mr. Zuckerberg’s stated reason for these changes — that Meta had realized that its old rules had resulted in too much censorship and that it should return to its roots as a platform for free expression — was nonsense. (For starters: Which roots? Facebook was inspired by a hot-or-not website for Harvard students, not a Cato Institute white paper.)
In reality, Mr. Zuckerberg changed his views on speech many times, usually in the direction of the prevailing political winds. And the details of the latest changes (a laundry list of right-wing speech demands) as well as the method of delivery (Mr. Kaplan went on “Fox & Friends” to announce them) made it clear what the real purpose was.
The most popular theory about Mr. Zuckerberg’s motives is that he is just doing the politically expedient thing: cozying up to the incoming Trump administration, the way many Silicon Valley tycoons have, in hopes of getting better deals for himself and Meta while Mr. Trump is in office.
A different theory — one supported by conversations I’ve had with several friends and associates of Mr. Zuckerberg’s in recent months — is that the billionaire’s personal politics have shifted sharply to the right since 2020, and that his embrace of Mr. Trump may stem less from cynical opportunism than real enthusiasm.
I can’t prove or disprove this theory. Mr. Zuckerberg, unlike Elon Musk, doesn’t broadcast his unfiltered political opinions dozens of times a day. But I find it plausible. I’ve spent a lot of time studying the right-wing conversion narratives of disaffected liberals, and Mr. Zuckerberg’s recent arc fits the bill surprisingly well: . . . . grows annoyed by the woke left and angry at the mainstream media, rebrands himself as a bad boy, and adopts the label of a “classical liberal” while quietly supporting most of the tenets of MAGA conservatism.
Whatever the cause, these changes amount to Meta’s biggest political realignment since 2016, when it responded to rampant misinformation on Facebook and widespread criticism over its role in Mr. Trump’s election by revamping its rules and investing billions of dollars in content moderation.
The list of people hurt by Meta’s new rules may be long: Immigrants, transgender people, victims of online bullying and harassment, the targets of future QAnon-style conspiracy theories and Facebook and Instagram users who want to see reliable information when they log on.
But the most unexpected casualty may be Mr. Zuckerberg himself, who has always strained to avoid being painted into a corner by political pressure, and will now (at least for the next four years, or until the winds shift again) be judged by his willingness to surrender to the right on issues of speech.
He may find that his new allies on the right make more censorship demands of him, and are less forgiving of his mistakes, than the left ever was.
Meta’s real problem, though, is that the company still doesn’t know what it is. Is it a purveyor of aging (though still profitable) social media apps? A champion of open-source A.I. development? A creator of next-generation augmented-reality hardware? A way for people to connect with their families and friends? A TikTok-style algorithmic feed, filled with a mix of professional influencers and A.I. slop? A builder of immersive virtual worlds? Some other, weirder thing?
A political reset might buy Mr. Zuckerberg some time to answer these questions. But in order for Meta to thrive beyond the Trump years, he’ll have to do more than bend the knee.
Thursday, January 09, 2025
Wednesday, January 08, 2025
Democrats Prevail in Virginia Special Election Races
Democrats on Tuesday held two key state legislative seats in Virginia, retaining their majorities in the General Assembly in the first special elections since President-elect Donald J. Trump won back the White House.
The results were expected in overlapping House of Delegates and State Senate districts in Loudoun County, a Washington suburb. Democrats have traditionally occupied the seats, which became vacant when the local state senator was elected to Congress and the delegate subsequently resigned to run to replace him.
But Democrats, who held single-seat majorities in both chambers, had worried that a shift toward Republicans in Loudoun County could accelerate after Mr. Trump’s victory. They poured far more resources into the contests than Republicans did.
Kannan Srinivasan, a Democrat who had held the State House seat for the last year, won election to the State Senate, defeating Tumay Harding, a Republican schoolteacher, according to The Associated Press. JJ Singh, a former Capitol Hill aide, won Mr. Srinivasan’s old State House seat, topping Ram Venkatachalam, an information technology consultant . . . .
In the end, the margins in both Loudoun races tracked the difference between Vice President Kamala Harris and Mr. Trump from November — even though the turnout is just a fraction of the presidential contest.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, has one year left in his term.
Democrats focused their efforts on the Loudoun contests, with elected officials from across Virginia and beyond traveling to the districts to help get out the party’s vote in what was expected to be a low-turnout special election.
“In Virginia, everything was at stake,” said Roger Lau, a deputy executive director for the Democratic National Committee. He added, “As we face increasing extremism at the federal level, it’s more important than ever for Democrats to fight back in the states.”
Mr. Srinivasan and Mr. Singh campaigned on the importance of retaining Democratic control of the General Assembly in Richmond, where their party aims this year to advance state constitutional amendments on abortion rights, same-sex marriage and the restoration of voting rights for felons.
“Our win today shows the power of compelling candidates focused on unlocking Virginians’ potential and protecting their rights,” said Dan Helmer, the campaign chair for the Virginia House Democratic caucus. “It bodes well for expanding our majority and taking back the governor’s mansion.”
Tuesday, January 07, 2025
The Internet Brainwashing Machine
Try to remember for a moment how you felt on January 6, 2021. Recall the makeshift gallows erected on the Capitol grounds, the tear gas, and the sound of the riot shields colliding with hurled flagpoles. If you rewatch the video footage, you might remember the man in the Camp Auschwitz sweatshirt idling among the intruders, or the image of the Confederate flag flying in the Capitol Rotunda. The events of that day are so documented, so memed, so firmly enmeshed in our recent political history that accessing the shock and rage so many felt while the footage streamed in can be difficult. But all of it happened: men and women smashing windows, charging Capitol police, climbing the marbled edifice of one of America’s most recognizable national monuments in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
It is also hard to remember that—for at least a moment—it seemed that reason might prevail, that those in power would reach a consensus against Donald Trump, whose baseless claims of voter fraud incited the attack. Senator Lindsey Graham, a longtime Trump ally, was unequivocal as he voted to certify President Joe Biden’s victory that night: “All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough.” The New York Post, usually a pro-Trump paper, described the mob as “rightists who went berserk in Washington.” Tech platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, which had generally allowed Trump to post whatever he wanted throughout his presidency, temporarily suspended his accounts from their service.
Yet the alignment would not last. On January 7, The Atlantic’s David A. Graham offered a warning that proved prescient: “Remember what yesterday’s attempted coup at the U.S. Capitol was like,” he wrote. “Very soon, someone might try to convince you that it was different.” Because even before the rioters were out of the building, a fringe movement was building a world of purported evidence online—a network of lies and dense theories to justify the attack and rewrite what really happened that day. By spring, the narrative among lawmakers began to change. The violent insurrection became, in the words of Republican Representative Andrew Clyde of Georgia, a “normal tourist visit.”
The revision of January 6 among many Republicans is alarming. It is also a powerful example of how the internet has warped our political reality. In recent years, this phenomenon has been attributed to the crisis of “misinformation.” But that term doesn’t begin to describe what’s really happening.
Think back to the original “fake news” panic, surrounding the 2016 election and its aftermath . . . . Academics and pundits endlessly debated the effect of these articles and whether they might cause “belief change.” Was anyone actually persuaded by these stories such that their worldviews or voting behavior might transform? Or were they really just junk for mindless partisans? Depending on one’s perspective, either misinformation posed an existential threat for its potential to brainwash masses of people, or it was effectively harmless.
Lately, our independent work has coalesced around a particular shared idea: that misinformation is powerful, not because it changes minds, but because it allows people to maintain their beliefs in light of growing evidence to the contrary. The internet may function not so much as a brainwashing engine but as a justification machine. A rationale is always just a scroll or a click away, and the incentives of the modern attention economy—people are rewarded with engagement and greater influence the more their audience responds to what they’re saying—means that there will always be a rush to provide one. This dynamic plays into a natural tendency that humans have to be evidence foragers, to seek information that supports one’s beliefs or undermines the arguments against them.
Evidence foraging might historically have meant digging into a subject, testing arguments, or relying on genuine expertise. That was the foundation on which most of our politics, culture, and arguing was built. . . . The current internet—a mature ecosystem with widespread access and ease of self-publishing—undoes that. As the mob stormed the Capitol on January 6, the justification machine spun up, providing denial-as-a-service to whoever was in need of it, in real time.
Fairly quickly, the narrative emerged that the attack was a false flag, and the media were in on it. Conspiracists pointed to the time stamp of an NPR live blog that seemed to announce the riot before it happened as evidence it was all preplanned by the “deep state” (and neglected to note that the story, like many, had been updated and re-headlined throughout the day, while retaining the time stamp of the original post). The famous footage of a Capitol Police officer heroically leading the mob away from the door to the Senate was “proof” in MAGA world that Trump supporters were being coaxed into the Capitol by the cops.
The function of this bad information was not to persuade non-Trump supporters to feel differently about the insurrection. Instead, it was to dispel any cognitive dissonance that viewers of this attempted coup may have experienced, and to reinforce the beliefs that the MAGA faithful already held. And that is the staggering legacy of January 6. With the justification machine whirring, the riot became just more proof of the radical left’s shocking violence or the deep state’s never-ending crusade against Trump.
Conspiracy theorizing is a deeply ingrained human phenomenon, and January 6 is just one of many crucial moments in American history to get swept up in the paranoid style. But there is a marked difference between this insurrection (where people were presented with mountains of evidence about an event that played out on social media in real time) and, say, the assassination of John F. Kennedy (where the internet did not yet exist and people speculated about the event with relatively little information to go on).
The justification machine, in other words, didn’t create this instinct, but it has made the process of erasing cognitive dissonance far more efficient. Our current, fractured media ecosystem works far faster and with less friction than past iterations, providing on-demand evidence for consumers that is more tailored than even the most frenzied cable news broadcasts can offer. And its effects extend beyond conspiracists.
Spend time on social media and it’s easy to see the demand for this type of content. The early hours of a catastrophic news event were once for sense-making: What happened, exactly? Who was behind it? What was the scale? Now every event is immediately grist for the machine. After a mass shooting, partisans scramble for evidence to suggest that the killer is MAGA, or a radical leftist, or a disaffected trans youth. Last week, in the hours after a mass murderer ran a car into civilians on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, Trump began tossing out lies and speculation about the suspect, suggesting that he was a migrant (information later arrived indicating that the driver was a U.S. citizen and Army veteran).
This reflex contributes to a cultural and political rot. A culture where every event—every human success or tragedy—becomes little more than evidence to score political points is a nihilistic one. It is a culture where you never have to change your mind or even confront uncomfortable information.
The justification machine thrives on the breakneck pace of our information environment; the machine is powered by the constant arrival of more news, more evidence. There’s no need to reorganize, reassess. The result is a stuckness, a feeling of being trapped in an eternal present tense.
This stagnation now defines the legacy of January 6. Once Republicans rewrote their side’s understanding of the insurrection (as a nonevent at best and an example of deep-state interference at worst), they dismissed all attempts for accountability as “Trump derangement syndrome.”. . . . By Republicans’ cynical logic, the events of January 6 were overblown, but are also ancient history. Only hysterical Democrats, obsessed with taking down Trump, could not move on.
When the Democratic Party chose to make the 2024 election about Trump, his threat to the rule of law, and the “battle for the soul of this nation,” as President Biden once put it, it was under the assumption that the indelible images of January 6 would be able to maintain their resonance nearly four years later. That assumption, broadly speaking, was wrong. Confronted with information that could shake their worldviews, people can now search for confirming evidence and mainline conspiracist feeds or decontextualized videos. . . . . The hum of the justification machine is comforting. It makes the world seem less unpredictable, more knowable. Underneath the noise, you can make out the words “You’ve been right all along.”
Monday, January 06, 2025
Sunday, January 05, 2025
When the Reality of Deteriorating Living Conditions Outweighs Demagoguery
On a winter afternoon in January 2024, Prime Minister Narendra Modi stood before a podium, gazing out at a handpicked audience of the Indian elite: billionaires, Bollywood actors, cricket stars, nationalist politicians.
Modi had come to the north-central city of Ayodhya, in the state of Uttar Pradesh, to consecrate the still-unfinished temple behind him, with its seven shrines, 160-foot-high dome, and baby-faced statue of the Hindu god Ram, carved in black stone and covered in jewels. He did not mention the fact that the temple was being built on a contested site where Hindu radicals had torn down a 16th-century mosque three decades earlier, setting off years of protests and legal struggle.
Instead, Modi described the temple as an emblem of India’s present and future greatness—its rising economic might, its growing navy, its moon missions, and, most of all, its immense human energy and potential. The temple signified India’s historic triumph over the “mentality of slavery,” he said. This nation of nearly 1.5 billion was shedding its old secular creed and, despite the fact that 200 million of its citizens are Muslim, being reborn as a land of Hindu-nationalist ideals.
Shukla has supported Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party since it rose to power in 2014. He was drawn to Modi’s confidence and his talk of making India an explicitly Hindu country. But in 2024, for the first time in his life, he voted for the opposition, helping deliver an electoral setback late last spring that changed the narrative of Indian politics. Instead of the sweeping victory Modi had predicted, his party lost its majority in the lower house of India’s Parliament—just a few months after that triumphant speech at the new Ayodhya temple. Modi had done everything he could to bend the system in his favor . . . . . Modi would remain prime minister, but with only 240 of the 543 seats in Parliament, he would be dependent on coalition partners.
I asked Shukla why he had lost faith in Modi. One reason, he said, was “animals.” When I looked confused, he pointed helpfully to the street, where a huge cow was meandering down the middle of the road. “Look, here’s an animal coming now.” It took me a moment to realize what he was talking about. The BJP’s preoccupation with protecting cows—for Hindus, a symbol of divine beneficence—was driving people crazy. No one was allowed to touch them anymore, Shukla said. . . . funds have been set up to protect cows, Shukla said, but “the money disappears.”
Shukla moved on from cows to the government’s more basic failures. Small-business owners like him were most affected by the Modi government’s mistakes, such as the surprise decision in 2016 to cancel large-currency banknotes, a misguided effort to curtail money laundering that left ordinary people desperate for cash. The mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic caused staggering losses of life and income. Many small firms folded, and others had to let go of workers. At the same time, Modi’s grand promises about being India’s “Development Man” remained unfulfilled. The schools were a mess. The local hospital was a joke.
India has been living on hype. Its leaders manufacture bigger promises every year: India as an economic titan, a spiritual leader, a world power capable of standing alongside China, Russia, Europe, and America. Modi’s enablers describe him as a “civilizational figure”—someone who stands above politics, who will use his country’s demographic weight to rewrite the rules of the global economy. This kind of chest-thumping is often picked up on in the West, where leaders such as President Joe Biden and France’s Emmanuel Macron have expressed a desire for a reliable and prosperous Indian ally.
But the election results and their aftermath hint at a crack in Modi’s populist facade and a spreading discontent with his economic and political record. India’s growth has been heavily weighted toward the wealthy, who have become exponentially richer on Modi’s watch. Those who have benefited most are a small cadre of billionaire friends to whom Modi has granted special access for years.
At the same time, eight in 10 Indians live in poverty. Extraordinary numbers are out of work; one estimate puts unemployment among those ages 15 to 24 at more than 45 percent (though other estimates run lower). Instead of moving from farms to seek employment in cities, as people in other developing countries have done, many Indians—unable to find factory or service jobs—are making the trek in reverse, even as farm income stagnates and drought turns fields into deserts. Modi often says he wants India to be a developed country by 2047, a century after it gained its independence from Britain. But by several key social measures, it is falling behind neighbors such as Bangladesh and Nepal.
Many Indians appear to be tiring of Modi’s showmanship and growing frustrated with his failures. They may be proud of India’s fabled economic growth, but it hasn’t reached them. During the weeks I spent traveling in India last year, I detected levels of frustration and anger that were noticeably different from what I’d heard on earlier visits—about lost jobs, failed schools, poisoned air and water.
India is—among many other things—an experiment, the largest such experiment in the world, and one with urgent relevance for many other countries. The Modi years have made India into a testing ground for the following question: What, in the long run, exerts greater sway on the electorate—the lure of demagoguery, or the reality of deteriorating living conditions?
Back in 1992, Modi was a party worker in the RSS, India’s first and most influential Hindu-nationalist group (the acronym stands for Hindi words meaning “national volunteer association”). The RSS was founded in 1925 in an effort to overcome the Hindu weakness and disunity that had, its founders felt, allowed India to be colonized by the British and other invaders over the centuries. . . . A central part of that nationalist ideal was the exclusion of Muslims, who were tacitly cast as latecomers to and usurpers of a Hindu realm.
On February 27, 2002, a train carrying Hindu pilgrims home from Ayodhya caught fire in the western state of Gujarat. Fifty-nine pilgrims were killed, and rumors quickly spread that Muslims had caused the fire. In the pogroms that followed, more than 1,000 people were butchered, most of them Muslim. Modi had just become the chief minister, meaning governor, of Gujarat, and he was accused of telling the police to stand back and let the rioters teach the Muslims a lesson. . . . His defiance in the face of pressure for his removal by opposition politicians made him a hero among many Hindus and gave him a national political profile.
Modi’s timing was impeccable: India’s old order had been crumbling for years. . . . India’s leaders had already begun appealing to either Hindu or Muslim communal feelings as a way to get votes. A new capitalist ethic was rising, a consequence of the 1991 decision to embrace the free market and abolish the “license Raj”—heavy-handed economic management by government bureaucrats that had stifled Indian business for decades. The elite had become richer and more isolated from the rest of the country, putting added strain on the old Gandhian ideals of austerity and simplicity.
Modi became prime minister in 2014 amid a popular movement against corruption, saying he would clean house and fulfill India’s great economic promise. Many liberals were receptive, despite their unease with his triumphalist Hindu rhetoric.
Three years ago, India became the world’s fifth-largest economy, surpassing its former colonial master, the United Kingdom. Yet by early 2024, even as Modi was declaring the dawn of a glorious new era, unsettling rumbles could be heard. Foreign direct investment in India had dropped by an astonishing 43 percent in the preceding year, partly thanks to high borrowing costs and unease about the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Out-of-work men could be seen trekking along the brand-new highways, part of the movement from cities to farms that began during the pandemic. The magnitude of the unemployment problem could not be hidden.
Much of this story arc would have been familiar to anyone who had taken a close look at the “Gujarat model.” . . . Modi focused on big companies, but small and medium-size enterprises, which make up the backbone of India’s economy, did not fare as well. The obsession with growth appears to have masked a neglect of health, literacy, and the environment.
According to India’s Annual Status of Education Report, an independent analysis, most 14-to-18-year-olds in rural regions were still struggling with basic division in 2023, and about a quarter of them with basic reading. Some 30 percent of all students appear to drop out of high school. . . . . One of its recurrent themes is the disparity between India and East Asian societies, which have seen mass primary education as a precondition to industrial growth and large-scale employment.
The schools have only gotten worse. Modi’s educational priorities appear to be mostly ideological. History textbooks have been rewritten to include more Hindu-nationalist figures, praise Modi’s own initiatives, and minimize contributions by Indian Muslims. In 2023, India cut a number of science topics from tenth-grade textbooks. You won’t find Darwin’s theory of evolution, the periodic table of elements, or the Pythagorean theorem.
Of the world’s 100 most polluted cities, 83 are in India, according to 2023 data from the environmental group IQAir. . . . .India’s environmental problems are among the most serious on the planet, but they have not been high priorities during Modi’s decade in power. He has shown occasional interest in the condition of the Ganges, India’s most famous river, which is sacred to Hindus. It is also one of the most polluted rivers on Earth, with stretches that are ecological dead zones.
Modi’s reputation is built partly on stage presence. His rallies have drawn as many as 800,000 people. On giant screens, his magnified image towers over the crowd. People who have been in a room with him sometime speak of an overpowering aura, as if he were a rock star or the pope. . . .Almost as impressive is Modi’s ability to deploy—or inspire—an entire industry of social-media fans and public-relations professionals who get the message out on a daily basis, telling Indians how Modi has made them respected in the world and defended their Hindu faith from attack by Muslims, “sickularists,” and “anti-nationals.”
But the south [of India] has not been receptive terrain for Brand Modi. . . . . The south’s priorities are the inverse of Modi’s, PTR told me. They are rooted in decisions made a century ago, when southern leaders—even before India’s independence—began passing progressive reforms including compulsory education for both sexes, women’s right to vote and hold office, and affirmative action for members of historically disadvantaged castes. The motives for those reforms may have been political, but the effect was to create a springboard for greater prosperity, as in Singapore and other East Asian countries. While northern India has pursued a zero-sum model of growth, the southern states have tried to ensure that “the pie grows because everybody is vested in the system,” PTR said. “Everybody’s got access to the basic things,” such as jobs, decent schools, and health care.
Will Trump and Republicans take note? I doubt it. Meanwhile those in the working and middle classes best prepare themselves for a declining standard of living and declining schools as Republicans seek to divert public school funding to private "Christian" schools.
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