Ice Age Europeans Had Some Serious Drama Going On, According to Their Genomes. By Sarah Kaplan.

Three ~31,000 years old skulls from Dolni Věstonice in the Czech Republic. For the next five thousand years, all samples analyzed in this study—whether from Belgium, the Czech Republic, Austria, or Italy—are closely related, reflecting a population expansion associated with the Gravettian archaeological culture. Credit: Martin Frouz and Jiří Svoboda.

Ice Age Europeans had some serious drama going on, according to their genomes. By Sarah Kaplan. Washington Post, May 5, 2016.

Game of bones: first Europeans’ shifting fortunes found in DNA. By Colin Barras. New Scientist, May 2, 2016.

Genetic analysis of Ice Age Europeans. Phys.org, May 2, 2016.

The genetic history of Ice Age Europe. By Qiaomei Fu et al. Nature, published online, May 2, 2016.

Nature abstract:

Modern humans arrived in Europe ~45,000 years ago, but little is known about their genetic composition before the start of farming ~8,500 years ago. Here we analyse genome-wide data from 51 Eurasians from ~45,000–7,000 years ago. Over this time, the proportion of Neanderthal DNA decreased from 3–6% to around 2%, consistent with natural selection against Neanderthal variants in modern humans. Whereas there is no evidence of the earliest modern humans in Europe contributing to the genetic composition of present-day Europeans, all individuals between ~37,000 and ~14,000 years ago descended from a single founder population which forms part of the ancestry of present-day Europeans. An ~35,000-year-old individual from northwest Europe represents an early branch of this founder population which was then displaced across a broad region, before reappearing in southwest Europe at the height of the last Ice Age ~19,000 years ago. During the major warming period after ~14,000 years ago, a genetic component related to present-day Near Easterners became widespread in Europe. These results document how population turnover and migration have been recurring themes of European prehistory.


Kaplan:

The entire drama of human history is encoded in our DNA.

Where we went. Who we slept with. How we died — or almost did. It's basically a scientific soap opera, complete with occasional discoveries of long-lost cousins we never knew we had.

Take Ice Age Europe, for example. A new study of genetic material from the period reveals a continent roiling with change.

First, an upstart band of modern humans arrived, slowly pushing their ancient predecessors out of existence. But soon that new lineage was swept aside by a group of big game hunters. For the next 15,000 years, the older community lay in wait in a remote corner of the continent before bursting back onto the scene. The usurpers were overturned, and history barreled forward. And all of this happened against a backdrop of dramatic environmental change — waves of cold and heat that sent glaciers surging back and forth across the continent.

“The demographic history of early European populations was much more dynamic than previously thought,” Cosimo Posth, a PhD student in archaeogenetics at the University of Tübingen in Germany and a co-author of the study, told the New Scientist.

Posth was just one of some six dozen researchers on four different continents who teamed up for the survey, which was published this week in Nature. The result of their efforts is the most comprehensive account of Europe's Ice Age population changes yet, and it's told entirely through ancient DNA.

[Ancient DNA shows Stone Age humans evolved quickly as they took up farming]

But before researchers could start analyzing that genetic material, they had to get it. DNA degrades over time, so extracting it from ancient human remains is difficult and costly.

Much of that delicate work was done by Qiaomei Fu, the lead author of the paper and a genetics researcher at Harvard and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. She had to make sure that each genome was uncontaminated by material picked up from microbes or present-day humans.

Over and over again, she screened the samples, which came from long-buried remains spanning nearly 40,000 years of history.

“It’s a great privilege to be able to work on these samples,” David Reich, the head of the Harvard Genetics Lab where Fu did some of her work, said in a news release.  “It’s like being an art historian given full access to the treasures of the Louvre.”

In the end, they had data from 51 individuals — a tenfold increase over the measly four that once gave researchers their only glimpses into this period.

“Trying to represent this vast period of European history with just four samples is like trying to summarize a movie with four still images,” Reich said. “With 51 samples, everything changes; we can follow the narrative arc; we get a vivid sense of the dynamic changes over time.”

One of the oldest genomes studied came from a thigh bone discovered in Goyet Cave in Belgium and given the unwieldy name GoyetQ116-1. Radiocarbon dating pegs the Goyet individual at some 35,000 years old, making him a likely member of the Aurignacian culture. These stone toolmakers produced the oldest known example of human figurative art — a 40,000-year-old figurine called the “Venus of Hohle Fels” — as well as countless cave paintings.

Goyet guy’s DNA is also strikingly similar to many modern Europeans’. Does this mean that his family were the final colonizers of the continent?

Not quite. Around 1,000 years after the Goyet individual was found, a new culture swept through Europe: the Gravettians. Analysis of genetic material from the time shows that art and artifacts weren’t the only things changing. The Gravettians’ DNA was significantly different from their Aurignacian predecessors, suggesting that they were a completely separate lineage.

[Forget peaceful human evolution: New proto-Neanderthal find points to ‘Game ofThrones’ era]

Goyet guy’s descendants retreated to the Iberian Peninsula (modern day Spain and Portugal) and waited for their time to come again.

It did, some 15,000 years later. Probably spurred by climate changes as glaciers began to recede, this dormant lineage expanded back into the rest of Europe, bearing a new culture known as Magdalenian. Not long after that, their genomes started to look like those of people from the Middle East and the Caucasus, suggesting that new arrivals from the southeast were mingling with — and in some cases supplanting — the existing population.

Impression of one of the Ice Age modern humans analyzed in this study,

 drawn by Stefano Ricci who is both a professional graphic artist

 and an author. Credit: Stefano Ricci.

This was a surprise, because researchers used to think that transition happened much later, when Turkish farmers introduced agriculture to Europe some 8,500 years ago.

“It is amazing how ancient DNA now starts to provide us with a detailed account of the earliest history of present-day Europeans,” Max Planck Institute anthropologist Svante Pääbo, another author of the study, said in a news release.

But like any good soap opera, this one is about disaster as much as it’s about success. The genetic analysis allowed researchers to trace the inexorable decline of Neanderthal DNA, which was two to three times more prominent in early human genomes than it is in modern-day ones. This supports theories that early humans interbred with Neanderthals, but that their DNA was toxic to us and gradually weeded out by natural selection over the course of millennia.

For those among us who still carry fractions of Neanderthal DNA, that process is probably still happening, Pääbo said. The drama isn't over yet.

The Scariest Reason Trump Won. By Dennis Prager.

The Scariest Reason Trump Won. By Dennis Prager. National Review Online, May 10, 2016.

Prager:

There are many reasons Donald Trump is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. The four most often cited reasons are the frustrations of white working-class Americans, a widespread revulsion against political correctness, disenchantment with the Republican “establishment,” and the unprecedented and unrivaled amount of time the media afforded Trump.

They are all valid.

But the biggest reason is this: The majority of Republicans are not conservative.

Conservatives who opposed Trump kept arguing — indeed provided unassailable proof – that Donald Trump is not a conservative and has never been one. But the argument meant little or nothing to two types of Republicans: the majority of Trump voters who don’t care whether he is a conservative, and the smaller number of Trump voters who are conservative but care about illegal immigration more than all other issues, including Trump’s many and obvious failings.

So, then, what happened to the majority of Republicans? Why aren’t they conservative?

The answer lies in America’s biggest – and scariest – problem: Most Americans no longer know what America stands for. For them, America has become just another country, a place located between Canada and Mexico.

But America was founded to be an idea, not another country. As Margaret Thatcher put it: “Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.”

Why haven’t Americans over the past three generations known what America stands for?

Probably the biggest reason is the influence of left-wing ideas.

Since its inception, the Left has opposed the American idea, and for good reason. Everything the American idea represents undermines leftist ideas. And the Left, unlike most Americans, has always understood that either the Left is right or America is right.

America stands for small government, a free economy (and therefore capitalism), liberty (and it therefore allows for liberty’s inevitable consequence, inequality), the “melting pot” ideal, and a God-centered population rooted in Judeo-Christian values (so that a moral society is created by citizens exercising self-control rather than relying on the state to impose controls).

Only America was founded on the idea of small government. But the Left is based on big government.

America was founded on the principle that human rights come from the Creator. For the Left, rights come from the state.

America was founded on the belief that in order to maintain a small government, a God-fearing people is necessary. The Left opposes God-based religions, particularly Judeo-Christian religions. Secularism is at the core of Leftism every bit as much as egalitarianism is.

The American Revolution, unlike the French Revolution, placed liberty above equality. For the Left, equality is more important than all else. That’s why so many American and European leftists have celebrated left-wing regimes, no matter how much they squelched individual liberty, from Stalin to Mao to Che and Castro to Hugo Chávez. They all preached equality.

It took generations, but the Left has succeeded (primarily through the schools, but also through the media) in substituting its values for America’s.

While the Left has been the primary cause, there have been others.

The most significant is success.

American values were so successful that Americans came to take America’s success for granted. They forgot what made America uniquely free and affluent. And now, it’s not even accurate to say “forgot,” because, in the case of the current generation, they never knew. While the schools, starting with the universities, were being transformed into institutions for left-wing indoctrination, American parents, too, ceased teaching their children American values (beginning with not reading to their children the most popular book in American history, the Bible).

Schools even stopped teaching American history. When American history is taught today, it is taught as a history of oppression, imperialism, and racism. Likewise, there is essentially no civics education, once a staple of the public-school system. Young Americans are not taught either the Constitution or how American government works. I doubt many college students even know what “separation of powers” means, let alone why it is so significant.

So, then, thanks to leftism and America’s taken-for-granted success, most Americans no longer understand what it means to be an American. Those who do are called “conservatives” because they wish to conserve the unique American idea. But conservatives now constitute not only a minority of Americans, but a minority of Republicans. That is the primary reason Donald Trump — a nationalist but not a conservative — is the presumptive Republican nominee.

As I noted from the outset, I will vote for him if he wins the nomination — because there is no choice. But the biggest reason he won is also the scariest.

Hillary: The Conservative Hope. By Bret Stephens.

Hillary: The Conservative Hope. By Bret Stephens. Wall Street Journal, May 9, 2016.

The Republican Party ruined conservatism long before Trump. By Sean Illing. Salon, May 10, 2016.


Stephens:

The best hope for what’s left of a serious conservative movement in America is the election in November of a Democratic president, held in check by a Republican Congress. Conservatives can survive liberal administrations, especially those whose predictable failures lead to healthy restorations—think Carter, then Reagan. What isn’t survivable is a Republican president who is part Know Nothing, part Smoot-Hawley and part John Birch. The stain of a Trump administration would cripple the conservative cause for a generation.

This is the reality that wavering Republicans need to understand before casting their lot with a presumptive nominee they abhor only slightly less than his likely opponent. If the next presidency is going to be a disaster, why should the GOP want to own it?

In the 1990s, when another Clinton was president, conservatives became fond of the phrase “character counts.” This was a way of scoring points against Bill Clinton for his sexual predations and rhetorical misdirections, as well as a statement that Americans expected honor and dignity in the Oval Office. I’ll never forget the family friend, circa 1998, who wondered how she was supposed to explain the meaning of a euphemism for oral sex to her then 10-year-old daughter.

Conservatives still play the character card against Hillary Clinton, citing her disdain for other people’s rules, her Marie Antoinette airs and her potential law breaking. It’s a fair card to play, if only the presumptive Republican nominee weren’t himself a serial fabulist, an incorrigible self-mythologizer, a brash vulgarian, and, when it comes to his tax returns, a determined obfuscator. Endorsing Mr. Trump means permanently laying to rest any claim conservatives might ever again make on the character issue.

Conservatives are also supposed to believe that it’s folly to put hope before experience; that leopards never change their spots. So what’s with the magical thinking that, nomination in hand, Mr. Trump will suddenly pivot to magnanimity and statesmanship? Where’s the evidence that, as president, Mr. Trump will endorse conservative ideas on tax, trade, regulation, welfare, social, judicial or foreign policy, much less personal comportment?

On Monday, former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who savaged Mr. Trump during the campaign, published an op-ed in these pages on why he plans to cast his vote for the real-estate developer as “the second-worst thing we could do this November.” Too much is at stake, Mr. Jindal said, on everything from curbing the regulatory excesses of the Obama administration to appointing a conservative judge to the Supreme Court, to risk another Democratic administration.

Mr. Jindal holds out the hope that Mr. Trump, who admires the Supreme Court’s 2005 Kelo decision on eminent domain (the one in which Susette Kelo’s little pink house was seized by the city of New London for the intended benefit of private developers), might yet appoint strict constructionists to the bench. Mr. Jindal also seems to think that a man whose preferred style of argument is the threatened lawsuit and the Twittertantrum, can be trusted with the vast investigative apparatus of the federal government.

The deeper mistake that Mr. Jindal and other lukewarm Trump supporters make is to assume that policy counts for more than ideas—that is, that the policy disasters he anticipates from a Clinton administration will be indelible, while Trumpism poses no real threat to the conservative ideas he has spent a political career championing. This belief stems from a failure to take Trumpism seriously, or to realize just how fragile modern conservatism is as a vital political movement.

But Trumpism isn’t just a triumph of marketing or the excrescence of a personality cult. It is a regression to the conservatism of blood and soil, of ethnic polarization and bullying nationalism. Modern conservatives sought to bury this rubbish with a politics that strikes a balance between respect for tradition and faith in the dynamic and culture-shifting possibilities of open markets. When that balance collapses—under a Republican president, no less—it may never again be restored, at least in our lifetimes.

For liberals, all this may seem like so much manna from heaven. Mr. Trump’s nomination not only gives his Democratic opponent the best possible shot at winning the election (with big down-ballot gains, too), but of permanently discrediting the conservative movement as a serious ideological challenger. They should be careful what they wish for. Mr. Trump could yet win, or one of his epigones might in four or eight years. This will lead to its own left-wing counter-reactions, putting America on the road to Weimar.

For conservatives, a Democratic victory in November means the loss of another election, with all the policy reversals that entails. That may be dispiriting, but elections will come again. A Trump presidency means losing the Republican Party. Conservatives need to accept that most conservative of wisdoms—sometimes, losing is winning, especially when it offers an education in the importance of political hygiene.

The Conservative Case Against Trump. By Ross Douthat.

The Conservative Case Against Trump. By Ross Douthat. New York Times, May 7, 2016.

Douthat:

THERE are many lessons that conservatives need to learn from the rise of Donald Trump. There are elements of his message that the party should embrace. There are grievances among his voters that the Republican Party must address.

But for conservatives to support Trump himself, to assist in his election as president of the United States, would be a terrible mistake.

It would be a particularly stark mistake for conservatives who feel that the basic Reaganite vision that’s dominated their party for decades — a fusion of social conservatism, free-market economics, and a hawkish internationalism — still gets things mostly right.

In large ways and small, Trump has consistently arrayed himself against this vision. True, he paid lip service to certain Reaganite ideas during the primaries — claiming to be pro-life, promising a supply-side tax cut, pledging to appoint conservative judges. But the core of his message was protectionist and nativist, comfortable with an expansive welfare state, bored with religious conservatism, and dismissive of the commitments that constitute the post-Cold War Pax Americana. And Trump’s policy forays since clinching the nomination have only confirmed his post-Reagan orientation.

Reaganite conservatives who help elevate Trump to the presidency, then, would be sleepwalking toward a kind of ideological suicide. Successful party leaders often transform parties in their image. William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson between them turned a conservative Democratic Party progressive. Dwight Eisenhower all but extinguished G.O.P. isolationism. Reagan himself set liberal Republicanism on the path to extinction.

A successful President Trump (and to support him is to hope for such a thing) could easily do the same to Reaganism. In a fully-Trumpized G.O.P., Reagan’s ideological coalition would crack up, with hawks drifting toward the Democrats, supply-siders fading into crankery, religious conservatives entering semi-permanent exile. And in its place a Trumpized Republican intelligentsia would arise, with as little interest in Reaganism as today’s conservatives have in the ideas of Nelson Rockefeller or Jacob Javits.

The things conservatives are telling themselves to justify supporting him — at least he might appoint good judges — miss this long-term point. The Reagan coalition might — might! — get an acceptable Supreme Court appointment out of the Trump presidency. But that could easily be the last thing it ever got.

But what if you’re a conservative who isn’t a Reaganite, or you believe that Reaganite ideas have long passed their sell-by dates? What if you agree with Trump about the folly of the Iraq War, the perils of open immigration policies, or the need for a different right-wing economic agenda? What if you think his populism might bring about some necessary creative destruction to a backward-looking G.O.P.?

Then supporting Trump for president could make ideological sense, and the crackup I’ve just described might seem like an advertisement for doing so.

But there still remains the problem of Trump himself. Even if you find things to appreciate in Trumpism — as I have, and still do — the man who has raised those issues is still unfit for an office as awesomely powerful as the presidency of the United States.

His unfitness starts with basic issues of temperament. It encompasses the race-baiting, the conspiracy theorizing, the flirtations with violence, and the pathological lying that have been his campaign-trail stock in trade.

But above all it is Trump’s authoritarianism that makes him unfit for the presidency — his stated admiration for Putin and the Chinese Politburo, his promise to use the power of the presidency against private enterprises, the casual threats he and his surrogates toss off against party donors, military officers, the press, the speaker of the House, and more.

All presidents are tempted by the powers of the office, and congressional abdication has only increased that temptation’s pull. President Obama’s power grabs are part of a bipartisan pattern of Caesarism, one that will likely continue apace under Hillary Clinton.

But far more than Obama or Hillary or George W. Bush, Trump is actively campaigning as a Caesarist, making his contempt for constitutional norms and political niceties a selling point. And given his mix of proud ignorance and immense self-regard, there is no reason to believe that any of this is just an act.

Trump would not be an American Mussolini; even our sclerotic institutions would resist him more effectively than that. But he could test them as no modern president has tested them before — and with them, the health of our economy, the civil peace of our society and the stability of an increasingly perilous world.

In sum: It would be possible to justify support for Trump if he merely promised a period of chaos for conservatism. But to support Trump for the presidency is to invite chaos upon the republic and the world. No policy goal, no court appointment, can justify such recklessness.

To Trumpism’s appeal, to Trump’s constituents, conservatives should listen and answer “yes,” or “maybe,” or “not that, but how about…”

But to Trump himself, there is no patriotic answer except “no.”

The Defeat of True Conservatism. By Ross Douthat.

The Defeat of True Conservatism. By Ross Douthat. New York Times, May 3, 2016.

True True Conservatism. By Andrew C. McCarthy. National Review Online, May 4, 2016.


Douthat:

When Donald Trump knocked first Jeb Bush and then Marco Rubio out of the Republican primary campaign, he defeated not only the candidates themselves but their common theory of what the G.O.P. should be — the idea that the party could essentially recreate George W. Bush’s political program with slightly different domestic policy ideas and recreate Bush’s political majority as well.

Now, after knocking Ted Cruz out of the race with a sweeping win in Indiana, Trump has beaten a second theory of where the G.O.P. needs to go from here: a theory you might call True Conservatism.

True Conservatism likes to portray itself as part of an unbroken tradition running back through Ronald Reagan to Barry Goldwater and the Founding Fathers. It has roots in that past, but it’s also a much more recent phenomenon, conceived in the same spirit as Bushism 2.0 but with the opposite intent.

If Bushism 2.0 looked at George W. Bush’s peaks — his post-Sept. 11 popularity, his 2004 majority — and saw a model worth recovering, True Conservatism looked at his administration’s collapse and argued that it proved that he had been far too liberal, and that all his “compassionate conservative” heresies had led the Republican Party into a ditch.

Thus True Conservatism’s determination to avoid both anything that savored of big government and anything that smacked of compromise. Where Bush had been softhearted, True Conservatism would be sternly Ayn Randian; where Bush had been free-spending, True Conservatism would be austere; where Bush had taken working-class Americans off the tax rolls, True Conservatism would put them back on — for their own good. And above all, where Bush had sometimes reached for the center, True Conservatism would stand on principle, fight hard, and win.

This philosophy found champions on talk radio, it shaped the Tea Party’s zeal, it influenced Paul Ryan’s budgets, it infused Mitt Romney’s “You built that” rhetoric. But it was only in the government shutdown of 2013 that it found its real standard-bearer: Ted Cruz.

And Cruz ended up running with it further than most people thought possible. His 2016 campaign strategy was simple: Wherever the party’s most ideological voters were, there he would be. If Obama was for it, he would be against it. Where conservatives were angry, he would channel their anger. Where they wanted a fighter; he would be a fighter. Wherever the party’s activists were gathered, on whatever issue — social or economic, immigration or the flat tax — he would be standing by their side. He would win Iowa, the South, his native Texas, the Mountain West. They wanted Reagan, or at least a fantasy version of Reagan? He would give it to them.

It didn’t work — but the truth is it almost did. In the days before and after the Wisconsin primary, with delegate accumulation going his way and the polling looking plausible once the Northeastern primaries were over, it seemed like Cruz could reasonably hope for a nomination on the second or third ballot.

So give the Texas senator some credit. He took evangelical votes from Mike Huckabee, Ben Carson and Rick Santorum; he took libertarian votes from Rand Paul; he outlasted and outplayed Marco Rubio; he earned support from Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush and Lindsey Graham, who once joked about his murder. Nobody worked harder; no campaign ran a tighter ship; no candidate was more disciplined.

But it turned out that Republican voters didn’t want True Conservatism any more than they wanted Bushism 2.0. Maybe they would have wanted it from a candidate with more charisma and charm and less dogged unlikability. But the entire Trump phenomenon suggests otherwise, and Trump as the presumptive nominee is basically a long proof against the True Conservative theory of the Republican Party.

Trump proved that movement conservative ideas and litmus tests don’t really have any purchase on millions of Republican voters. Again and again, Cruz and the other G.O.P. candidates stressed that Trump wasn’t really a conservative; they listed his heresies, cataloged his deviations, dug up his barely buried liberal past. No doubt this case resonated with many Republicans. But not with nearly enough of them to make Cruz the nominee.

Trump proved that many evangelical voters, supposedly the heart of a True Conservative coalition, are actually not really values voters or religious conservatives after all, and that the less frequently evangelicals go to church, the more likely they are to vote for a philandering sybarite instead of a pastor’s son. Cruz would probably be on his way to the Republican nomination if he had simply carried the Deep South. But unless voters were in church every Sunday, Trump’s identity politics had more appeal than Cruz’s theological-political correctness.

Trump proved that many of the party’s moderates and establishmentarians hate the thought of a True Conservative nominee even more than they fear handing the nomination to a proto-fascist grotesque with zero political experience and poor impulse control. That goes for the prominent politicians who refused to endorse Cruz, the prominent donors who sat on their hands once the field narrowed and all the moderate-Republican voters in blue states who turned out to be #NeverCruz first and #NeverTrump less so or even not at all.

Finally, Trump proved that many professional True Conservatives, many of the same people who flayed RINOs and demanded purity throughout the Obama era, were actually just playing a convenient part. From Fox News’ 10 p.m. hour to talk radio to the ranks of lesser pundits, a long list of people who should have been all-in for Cruz on ideological grounds either flirted with Trump, affected neutrality or threw down their cloaks for the Donald to stomp over to the nomination. Cruz thought he would have a movement behind him, but part of that movement was actually a racket, and Trumpistas were simply better marks.

Cruz will be back, no doubt. He’s young, he’s indefatigable, and he can claim — and will claim, on the 2020 hustings — that True Conservatism has as yet been left untried. But that will be a half-truth; it isn’t being tried this year because the Republican Party’s voters have rejected him and it, as they rejected another tour for Bushism when they declined to back Rubio and Jeb.

What remains, then, is Trumpism. Which is also, in its lurching, sometimes insightful, often wicked way, a theory of what kind of party the Republicans should become, and one that a plurality of Republicans have now actually voted to embrace.

Whatever reckoning awaits the G.O.P. and conservatism after 2016 will have to begin with that brute fact. Where the reckoning goes from there — well, now is a time for pundit humility, so your guess is probably as good as mine.

The Problem with Trump as CEO of America: Government Is Not a Business. By Fareed Zakaria.

A display of Donald Trump-branded products at a press conference after his March 8 Florida Primary victory. Reuters/Joe Skipper.

The problem with Trump as CEO of America: Government is not a business. By Fareed Zakaria. Washington Post, May 5, 2016.

Zakaria:

At the heart of Donald Trump’s appeal is his fame as a successful businessman. It’s why most of his supporters don’t worry about his political views or his crude rhetoric and behavior. He’s a great chief executive and will get things done. No one believes this more than Trump himself, who argues that his prowess in the commercial world amply prepares him for the presidency. “In fact I think in many ways building a great business is actually harder,” he told GQ last year.

There is some debate about Trump’s record as a businessman. He inherited a considerable fortune from his father and, by someaccounts, would be wealthier today if he had simply invested in a stock index fund. His greatest skill has been to play a successful businessman on his television show “The Apprentice.”

Regardless, it is fair to say that Trump has formidable skills in marketing. He has been able to create a brand around his name like few others. The real problem is that these talents might prove largely irrelevant because commerce is quite different from government. The modern presidents who achieved the most — Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan — had virtually no commercial background. Some who did, George W. Bush and Herbert Hoover, fared worse in the White House. There is no clear pattern. One of the few successful CEOs who did well in Washington is Robert Rubin. A former head of Goldman Sachs, he served as the chief White House aide on economics and then treasury secretary in Bill Clinton’s administration. When he left Washington, he reflected inhis memoirs that he had developed “a deep respect for the differences between the public and private sectors.”

“In business, the single, overriding purpose is to make a profit,” he wrote. “Government, on the other hand, deals with a vast number of legitimate and often potentially competing objectives — for example, energy production versus environmental protection, or safety regulations versus productivity. This complexity of goals brings a corresponding complexity of process.”

He then noted that a big difference between the two realms is that no political leader, not even the president, has the kind of authority every corporate chief does. CEOs can hire and fire based on performance, pay bonuses to incentivize their subordinates, and promote capable people aggressively. By contrast, Rubin pointed out that he had the authority to hire and fire fewer than 100 of the 160,000 people who worked under him at the Treasury Department. Even the president has limited authority and mostly has to persuade rather than command.

This is a feature, not a flaw, of American democracy. Power is checked, balanced and counterbalanced to ensure that no one branch is too powerful and that individual liberty can flourish. It is no accident that Trump admires Vladimir Putin, who doesn’t have to deal with the complications of modern democratic government and can simply get things done.

In interviews with the New York Times, Trump imagined his first 100 days in office: He would summon congressional leaders to lobster dinners at Mar-a-Lago, threaten CEOs in negotiations at the White House (“The Oval Office would be an amazing place [from which] to negotiate”) and make great deals. When talking about the positions he would fill, Trump explained, “I want people in those jobs who care about winning. The U.N. isn’t doing anything to end the big conflicts in the world, so you need an ambassador who would win by really shaking up the U.N.”

This displays an astonishing lack of understanding about the world. The United Nations can’t end conflicts because it has no power. That rests with sovereign governments (unless Trump wants to cede U.S. authority to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon). The notion that all it would take is a strong U.S. ambassador to shake up the U.N., end conflicts and “win” is utterly removed from reality. Yet it is a perfect example of business thinking applied in a completely alien context.

Success in business is important, honorable and deeply admirable. But it requires a particular set of skills that are often very different from those that produce success in government. As Walter Lippmann wrote in 1930 about Herbert Hoover, possibly the most admired business leader of his age, “It is true, of course, that a politician who is ignorant of business, law, and engineering will move in a closed circle of jobs and unrealities. . . . [But the] popular notion that administering a government is like administering a private corporation, that it is just business, or housekeeping, or engineering, is a misunderstanding. The political art deals with matters peculiar to politics, with a complex of material circumstances, of historic deposit, of human passion, for which the problems of business or engineering as such do not provide an analogy.”

General James Mattis: The Middle East at an Inflection Point.

The Middle East at an Inflection Point with Gen. Mattis. Video. CSIS, April 22, 2016. YouTube.

Trump vs. Hillary Is Nationalism vs. Globalism, 2016. By Robert W. Merry.

Trump vs. Hillary Is Nationalism vs. Globalism, 2016. By Robert W. Merry. The National Interest, May 4, 2016.

Merry:

The election’s real political fault line.

The pundits and commentators and pols and prognosticators will all identify multifarious political fault lines to explain the looming epic American battle between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton – women vs. Trump; evangelicals vs. Hillary; Hispanics vs. white, working-class Americans with no college; the LBGT community vs. traditionalists; old vs. young. It’s all important, but not very. Any true understanding of this election requires an appreciation of the one huge political fault line that is driving America into a period of serious political tremors, certain to jolt the political Richter scale. It is nationalists vs. globalists.

Globalists captured much of American society long ago by capturing the bulk of the nation’s elite institutions—the media, academia, big corporations, big finance, Hollywood, think tanks, NGOs, charitable foundations. So powerful are these institutions—in themselves and, even more so, collectively—that the elites running them thought that their political victories were complete and final. That’s why we have witnessed in recent years a quantum expansion of social and political arrogance on the part of these high-flyers.

Then along comes Donald Trump and upends the whole thing. Just about every major issue that this super-rich political neophyte has thrown at the elites turns out to be anti-globalist and pro-nationalist. And that is the single most significant factor in his unprecedented and totally unanticipated rise. Consider some examples:

Immigration: Nationalists believe that any true nation must have clearly delineated and protected borders, otherwise it isn’t really a nation. They also believe that their nation’s cultural heritage is sacred and needs to be protected, whereas mass immigration from far-flung lands could undermine the national commitment to that heritage. Globalists don’t care about borders. They believe the nation-state is obsolete, a relic of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which codified the recognition of co-existing nation states. Globalists reject Westphalia in favor of an integrated world with information, money, goods and people traversing the globe at accelerating speeds without much regard to traditional concepts of nationhood or borders.

Foreign Policy: Globalists are motivated by humanitarian impulses. For them, the rights and well-being of the world’s people supersede the rights and well-being of the American populace. Indeed, as writer Robert D. Kaplan has observed, the liberal embrace of universal principles as foreign-policy guidance “leads to a pacifist strain…when it comes to defending our hard-core national interest, and an aggressive strain when it comes to defending human rights.” Globalists, in advocating foreign policy adventurism, are quick to conflate events in the Baltics, say, or Georgia or Ukraine with U.S. national interest, but it’s really about the globalist impulse of dominating world events. Nationalists don’t care about dominating world events. Being nationalists, they want their country to be powerful, with plenty of military reach, but mostly to protect American national interests. They usually ask a fundamental question when foreign adventures are proposed—whether the national interest justifies the expenditure of American blood and treasure on behalf of this or that military initiative. The fate of other people struggling around the globe, however heartrending, doesn’t usually figure large in nationalist considerations. The fate of America is the key.

Trade: The history of trade in America admits of no straight-line analysis. Andrew Jackson was a supreme nationalist, and a free-trader. William McKinley made America a global power, but was a protectionist. In our own time, though, the fault line is clear. Globalists salute the free flow of goods across national borders on the theory that this will foster ever greater global commerce, to the benefit of all peoples of all nations. Writer and commentator Thomas L. Friedman, a leading globalist of his generation, once extolled America as the world’s role model for “globally integrated free-market capitalism.” That was before the Great Recession and the subsequent anemic recovery throughout most of the Obama years. Today’s American nationalists look at the results of the kind of “globalization” extolled by Friedman and conclude that it has hollowed out America’s industrial core. Whether they are right or not, their focus is on the American citizens whose lives and livelihoods have been also hollowed out in many instances. Thus has a powerful new wave of protectionism washed over the body politic, leaving globalist elites running to get out of the way. Globalists were too focused on global trade and commerce to notice the horrendous plight of America’s internal refugees from the industrial nation of old.

Political Correctness: Given that globalists dominate the nation’s elite institutions and often exploit their position of power to ridicule and marginalize the so-called “Middle America” of ordinary citizens, who also happen to be nationalists, these people often feel on the defensive politically and culturally. And we are beginning to understand, courtesy of the Trump candidacy, just how angry they were at the emergence of the political correctness cadres who tell them what to think, how to regard the political issues of the day, and how they themselves will be regarded if they don’t toe the line (racist, homophobe and xenophobe are frequent threatened epithets). Globalists don’t care much about this phenomenon because it is employed largely in behalf of their views and philosophical outlook, including their globalist sensibilities. But nationalists care about it a lot. They send their kids to college in pursuit of betterment, and discover that political correctness is hammering away at the views and values they tried to teach their children as they were growing up. And their views and values aren’t allowed to compete in any free marketplace of ideas on campus but instead are declared inappropriate and intolerable before they are even uttered.

Cultural Heritage: Nationalists care about their national heritage, which they view as a repository of wisdom and lessons handed down by our forebears in this grand experiment that is both mystifying and inspiring. Globalists, not so much. Nationalists seethe at the assault under way against so many giants of our heritage, flawed though they were (as are we today). Globalists are the ones leading the assault.

On all of these fault lines, we see just how much pressure has been building up in recent years while the globalist elites concluded the issues involved were either settled or under control. Immigration—much talk about the need for reform but nothing done while the influx continued. Foreign policy—polls showing many Americans wary of interventionist adventurism while interventionist adventurism remained the prevailing attitude of governmental elites. Trade—a solid consensus among elites that free trade had no serious opposition, while industrial America crumbled. Political correctness—a blithe disregard for the sensibilities of non-globalist citizens. Cultural heritage—the power of the influence class brought to bear against those who cherish their country’s history. It isn’t surprising that the globalist class concluded that it really didn’t have to worry about any serious opposition out in the country.

But they did, and Donald Trump was the messenger. He not only attacked out-of-control immigration but did it in such a way as to signal that this was one politician who truly intended to do something about it. Despite some of his boorish rhetoric, or perhaps even because of it, nationalist Americans perked up and rallied around. On foreign policy, he posed questions that nobody else was willing to raise: Why do we need NATO as currently constituted when the Soviet Union no longer exists to threaten Europe? Why should Americans pay for the defense of rich Europeans when they can easily afford to protect themselves? Why should America continue to pursue a policy of promiscuous regime change when recent history tells us it usually produces disaster and chaos? Why can’t the elites recognize and acknowledge the regional mess wrought by their ill-considered Iraq War? Trump answers these questions in ways that set the teeth of the elites on edge, but it turns out many Americans are asking the same questions and buying the Trump answers.

On trade, Trump isn’t exactly original in his protectionist leanings. Such thinking has played a significant role at various times in American history—in good times and bad. And as recently as 1988, Democrat Richard Gephardt ran on the issue of “economic nationalism.” But once again Trump has upended the old politics and opened up a new fault line. On political correctness, he offers a counter-assault that is breathtaking in its political distinctiveness and force. And on cultural heritage, he said it all when he said, “We’re going to be saying Merry Christmas again, folks.”

Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, is the personification of the globalist elite—generally open borders, humanitarian interventionist, traditionally a free trader (though hedging in recent months), totally in sync with the underlying sensibilities of political correctness, a practitioner of identity politics, which lies at the heart of the assault on the national heritage. Nothing reflects this Clinton identity more starkly than the Clinton Foundation, a brilliant program to chase masses of money from across borders to fund the underpinnings of an ongoing political machine.

It’s impossible to say at this early stage in the political season whether Trump, the candidate of the New Nationalism, actually has a chance to win the presidency. But, win or lose, he has shaken up the political system, introduced powerful new rhetoric and opened up a new political fault line between nationalism and globalism that isn’t going away anytime soon. For the globalist elites of America, it’s an entirely new era.

Alexis Bloomer Apologizes for Millennials.

Dear Elders, I’m Sorry. By Alexis Bloomer. Video. Alexis Bloomer, April 22, 2016. YouTube.

Mona Chalabi: Correcting Grammar Is Racist and Classist.

Grammar snobs are patronising, pretentious and just plain wrong. By Mona Chalabi. Video. The Guardian, April 20, 2016. YouTube.

Commentary at NewsBusters, The Daily Wire, Truth Revolt.

Donald Trump’s Speech on Foreign Policy at the Center for the National Interest.

Donald Trump’s Speech on Foreign Policy at the Center for the National Interest. Video. Right Side Broadcasting, April 27, 2016. YouTube. Transcript at The National Interest, DonaldJTrump.com.

Fareed Zakaria on Trump’s Speech: “It Was Sort of Rambling to the Point of Being Incoherent.” Video. Real Clear World, April 27, 2016.

Trump’s “Foreign Policy”: Incoherent and Shallow. By Andrew C. McCarthy. National Review Online, April 27, 2016.

We Can Celebrate Harriet Tubman Without Disparaging Andrew Jackson. By Jim Webb.

We can celebrate Harriet Tubman without disparaging Andrew Jackson. By Jim Webb. Washington Post, April 24, 2016.

Webb:

One would think we could celebrate the recognition that Harriet Tubman will be given on future $20 bills without demeaning former president Andrew Jackson as a “monster,” as a recent Huffington Post headline did. And summarizing his legendary tenure as being “known primarily for a brutal genocidal campaign against native Americans,” as reported in The Post, offers an indication of how far political correctness has invaded our educational system and skewed our national consciousness.

This dismissive characterization of one of our great presidents is not occurring in a vacuum. Any white person whose ancestral relations trace to the American South now risks being characterized as having roots based on bigotry and undeserved privilege. Meanwhile, race relations are at their worst point in decades.

Far too many of our most important discussions are being debated emotionally, without full regard for historical facts. The myth of universal white privilege and universal disadvantage among racial minorities has become a mantra, even though white and minority cultures alike vary greatly in their ethnic and geographic origins, in their experiences in the United States and in their educational and financial well-being.

Into this uninformed debate come the libels of “Old Hickory.” Not unlike the recently lionized Alexander Hamilton, Jackson was himself a “brilliant orphan.” A product of the Scots-Irish migration from war-torn Ulster into the Appalachian Mountains, his father died before he was born. His mother and both brothers died in the Revolutionary War, where he himself became a wounded combat veteran by age 13. Self-made and aggressive, he found wealth in the wilds of Tennessee and, like other plantation owners such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, owned slaves. He was a transformational president, hated by the reigning English American elites as he brought populist, frontier-style democracy to our political system.

Jackson became the very face of the New America, focusing on intense patriotism and the dignity of the common man.

On the battlefield he was unbeatable, not only in the Indian Wars, which were brutally fought with heavy casualties on both sides, but also in his classic defense of New Orleans during the War of 1812. His defense of the city (in which he welcomed free blacks as soldiers in his army) dealt the British army its most lopsided defeat until the fall of Singapore in 1942.

As president, Jackson ordered the removal of Indian tribes east of the Mississippi to lands west of the river. This approach, supported by a string of presidents, including Jefferson and John Quincy Adams, was a disaster, resulting in the Trail of Tears where thousands died. But was its motivation genocidal? Robert Remini, Jackson’s most prominent biographer, wrote that his intent was to end the increasingly bloody Indian Wars and to protect the Indians from certain annihilation at the hands of an ever-expanding frontier population. Indeed, it would be difficult to call someone genocidal when years before, after one bloody fight, he brought an orphaned Native American baby from the battlefield to his home in Tennessee and raised him as his son.

Today’s schoolchildren should know and appreciate that Jackson’s July 1832 veto of legislation renewing the charter of the monopolistic Second National Bank prevented the creation of a permanent aristocracy in our country. Jackson was virulently opposed in this decision, openly threatened by America’s elites. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Vernon Louis Parrington called this veto “perhaps the most courageous act in our political history.”

Just as significantly, in November 1832, South Carolina threatened to secede from the Union. Jackson put a strong military force in position, letting it be known that if it attempted secession he would have 50,000 soldiers inside the state within 40 days, with another 50,000 to follow shortly after. Wisely, South Carolina did not call Jackson’s bluff, and civil war was averted for another 28 years.

Jackson was a rough-hewn brawler, a dueler and a fighter. For eight years he dominated American politics, bringing a coarse but refreshing openness to the country’s governing process. Jefferson called him “a dangerous man.” Quincy Adams termed him a “barbarian.” But as Parrington put it, “he was our first great popular leader, our first man of the people. . . . one of our few Presidents whose heart and sympathy . . . clung to the simple faith that government must deal as justly with the poor as with the rich.”

Mark Twain once commented that “to arrive at a just estimate of a renowned man’s character one must judge it by the standards of his time, not ours.” By any standard we should respect both Jackson’s and Tubman’s contributions. And our national leaders should put aside their deliberate divisiveness and encourage that we do so.

Jim Webb, a Democratic U.S. senator from Virginia from 2007 to 2013, is the author of Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America.