Category Archives: History

Why the Republican Party Is Abnormal and Dysfunctional

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It’s good to keep in mind that the Republican Party isn’t normal or functional and why that’s the case. Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times explains:

The extent to which the Democratic Party operates as a normal American political party can shed light on how and why the Republican Party doesn’t. Take the overall strength of Democratic moderates, who hold the levers of power within the national party. One important reason for this fact is the heterogeneity of the Democratic coalition. To piece together a majority in the Electoral College, or to gain control of the House or Senate, Democrats have to win or make inroads with a cross-section of the American public: young people, affluent suburbanites, Black, Hispanic and Asian Americans voters, as well as a sizable percentage of the white working class. To lose ground with any one of these groups is to risk defeat, whether it’s in the race for president or an off-year election for governor.

A broad coalition also means a broad set of interests and demands, some of which are in tension with one another. This has at least two major implications for the internal workings of the Democratic Party. First, it makes for a kind of brokerage politics in which the most powerful Democratic politicians are often those who can best appeal to and manage the various groups and interests that make up the Democratic coalition. And second, it gives the Democratic Party a certain amount of self-regulation. Move too far in the direction of one group or one interest, and you may lose support among the others.

If you take the internal dynamics of the Democratic Party and invert them, you get something like those within the Republican Party.

Consider the demographics of the Republican coalition. A majority of all voters in both parties are white Americans. But where the Democratic Party electorate was 61 percent white in the 2020 presidential election, the Republican one was 86 percent, according to the Pew Research Center. Similarly, there is much less religious diversity among Republicans — more than a third of Republicans voters in 2020 were white evangelical Protestants — than there is among Democrats. And while we tend to think of Democrats as entirely urban and suburban, the proportion of rural voters in the Democratic Party as a whole is actually greater than the proportion of urban voters in the Republican Party. There is, in other words, less geographic diversity among Republicans as well.

Most important, where nearly half of Democrats identify themselves as either “moderate” or “conservative” — compared with the half that call themselves “liberal” — nearly three-quarters of Republicans identify themselves as “conservative,” with just a handful of self-proclaimed moderates and a smattering of liberals, according to Gallup. This wasn’t always true. In 1994, around 33 percent of Republicans called themselves “moderate” and 58 percent said they were “conservative.” There were even, at 8 percent, a few Republican liberals. Now the Republican Party is almost uniformly conservative. Moderate Democrats can still win national office or hold national leadership. Moderate Republicans cannot. Outside a handful of environments, found in largely Democratic states like Maryland and Massachusetts, moderate Republican politicians are virtually extinct.

But more than the number of conservatives is the character of the conservatism that dominates the Republican Party. It is, thanks to a set of social and political transformations dating back to the 1960s, a highly ideological and at times reactionary conservatism, with little tolerance for disagreement or dissent. The Democratic Party is a broad coalition geared toward a set of policies — aimed at either regulating or tempering the capitalist economy or promoting the inclusion of various groups in national life. The Republican Party exists almost entirely for the promotion of a distinct and doctrinaire ideology of hierarchy and anti-government retrenchment.

There have always been ideological movements within American political parties. The Republican Party was formed, in part, by adherents to one of the most important ideological movements of the 19th century — antislavery. But, as the historian Geoffrey Kabaservice has observed, “The conversion of one of America’s two major parties into an ideological vehicle” is a “phenomenon without precedent in American history.”

It is the absence of any other aim but the promotion of conservative ideology — by any means necessary, up to and including the destruction of democratic institutions and the imposition of minority rule — that makes this particular permutation of the Republican Party unique. It helps explain, in turn, the dysfunction of the past decade. If the goal is to promote conservative ideology, then what matters for Republican politicians is how well they adhere to and promote conservatism. The key issue for conservative voters and conservative media isn’t whether a Republican politician can pass legislation or manage a government or bridge political divides; the key question is whether a Republican politician is sufficiently committed to the ideology, whatever that means in the moment. And if conservatism means aggrieving your enemies, then the obvious choice for the nation’s highest office is the man who hates the most, regardless of what he believes.

The demographic homogeneity of the Republican Party means that there isn’t much internal pushback to this ideological crusade — nothing to temper the instincts of politicians who would rather shut down the government than accept that a majority of Congress passed a law over their objections, or who would threaten the global economy to get spending cuts they could never win at the ballot box.

Worse, because the institutions of American democracy give a significant advantage to the current Republican coalition, there’s also no external force pushing Republican politicians away from their most rigid extremes. Just the opposite: There is a whole infrastructure of ideologically motivated money and media that works to push Republican voters and politicians farther to the right.

It is not simply that the Republican Party has politicians like Jim Jordan and Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene. It’s that the Republican Party is practically engineered to produce politicians like Jim Jordan and Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene. And there’s no brake — no emergency off-switch — that might slow or stop the car. The one thing that might get the Republican Party back on the rails is a major and unanticipated shift in the structure of American politics that forces it to adapt to new voters, new constituencies and new conditions.

It’s hard to imagine what that might be. It can’t come soon enough.

An Historian Admires Biden and Fears the Other Guy

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The New York Times has described Heather Cox Richardson, a history professor at Boston College, as “the breakout star” of the newsletter platform Substack, where her Letters from an American has more than a million subscribers. She has a new book out called Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. The Guardian calls it “a thoughtful study of how the world’s wealthiest democracy came to teeter on the precipice of authoritarianism, with an assist from [you know who]”. More from The Guardian:

[Richardson says] “the reason for the book originally was to pull together a number of essays answering the questions that everybody asks me all the time – What is the Southern Strategy? How did the parties switch sides? – but very quickly I came to realise that it was the story of how democracies can be undermined.”

Crucial in that is how history and language can be used to divide a population and convince some the only reason they have fallen behind economically, socially or culturally is because of an enemy. The antidote, Richardson argues, is an explicitly democratic history “based in the idea that marginalised populations have always kept the principles of the Declaration of Independence front and centre in our history”.

She is not pulling punches. Her preface observes that the crisis in American democracy crept up on many and draws a direct comparison with the rise of Adolf Hitler, achieved through political gains and consolidation.

“Democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint,” she writes.

America’s current malaise, she argues, began in the same decade: the 1930s. It was then that Republicans who loathed business regulations in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal began to consider an alliance with southern Democrats, who found Roosevelt’s programmes insufficiently segregationist, and western Democrats who resented the idea of the federal government protecting land and water. In 1937, this unholy coalition came up with a “Conservative Manifesto”.

Richardson says: “When it gets leaked to the newspapers, they all run like rats from it… They all disavow it, but that manifesto gets reprinted all over the country in pro-business and racist newspapers and pamphlets and it has very long legs.

“They want to get rid of business regulation, they want to get rid of a basic social safety net and send all that back to the churches, they want to get rid of infrastructure projects that FDR is engaging in because they think it costs too much in tax dollars and it should be private investment. They don’t really talk about civil rights because because FDR is really just flirting with the idea of equality in the New Deal programmes, but they do say they want home rule and states’ rights, which is code for “We don’t want civil rights.’”

These four principles would become a blueprint for Republicans such as Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, language sometimes mapping directly. In the early 1970s, Richardson contends, Republicans began to pursue anti-democratic strategies such as gerrymandering and shifting the judiciary rightwards. They also spent decades waging an “information war”.

A prime example was the 1998 impeachment of Bill Clinton, an attempt to convince the public he was not a legitimate president.

“That era is when congressional investigations to smear the Democrats take off,” Richardson says. “Those investigations don’t turn up anything but it doesn’t matter because it keeps it in front of the American people – the idea that something is there.”

Enter [T], a blowhard who turned disinformation into an artform in the business world and become a reality TV star. He promised Christian conservatives he would appoint rightwing judges; he promised fiscal conservatives he would cut taxes; he promised the white working class he understood their resentments. He made the party his own….

“[T] is an interesting character because he’s not a politician. He’s a salesman and that is an important distinction because in 2016 he held up a mirror to a certain part of the American population [note: a white part], one that had been gutted by the legislation that has passed since 1981, and gave them what they wanted.

“If you remember in 2016, he was the most moderate Republican on that stage on economic issues. He talked about infrastructure, fair taxes, cheaper and better healthcare, bringing back manufacturing. He talked about all those economic issues but then he also had the racism and the sexism and of course that’s what he was really going for, that anger that he could tap into.

“Tapping into that anger was crucial to him forging an authoritarian movement, because at least in the United States the authoritarian rightwing movements have always come from street violence rather than the top and from ideas of what fascism should look like. He quite deliberately tapped into that emotional anger that he could spark with racism and sexism.”

Richardson is again not bashful about invoking the Nazi comparison when she cites the communications scholar Michael Socolow’s observation that [T’s] 2020 State of the Union address, in which he demonstrated that he could “raise hurting individuals up to glory”, mirrored the performances of Hitler, who sought to show an almost magical power to change lives….

Despite 91 criminal charges, Trump dominates the Republican primary….What would a second [T] term mean for America?

“An end of American democracy. I have absolutely no doubt about that, and he’s made it very clear. You look at Project 2025, which is a thousand pages on how you dismantle the federal government that has protected civil rights, provided a basic social safety net, regulated business and promoted infrastructure since 1933. The theme of his 2024 campaign is retribution.

“I don’t think people understand now that, if he wins again, what we’re going to put in power is those people who want to burn it all down. By that I mean they want to hurt their enemies for sure but, so long as they can be in control, they don’t care if it means that Nato falls apart or that Americans are starving or dying from pandemic diseases.”

Biden understands the threat. Last month in Phoenix, he issued another stark warning…. Richardson casts a historian’s eye at his record.

“Biden is a fascinating character in that in that he is one of the very few people who could have met this moment. I was not a Biden supporter, to be honest. I thought we needed somebody new and much more aggressive, and yet I completely admit I was wrong because he has, first of all, a very deep understanding of foreign affairs….

“I thought in 2020 that was not going to matter and could I have been more wrong? I think not. That really mattered and continues to matter in that one of the reasons Republicans are backing off of Ukraine right now is that they recognise, [although] it’s not hitting the United States newspapers, Ukraine is actually making important gains. A win from the Ukrainians would really boost Biden’s re-election. The Republicans recognise that and are willing to scuttle it so long as it means they can regain power….

“The other thing about Biden is his extraordinary skill at dealmaking has made this domestic administration the most effective since at least the Great Society and probably the New Deal. You think about the fact that [T] could never get infrastructure through Congress, even though everybody wanted it.

“That has been huge but … he needs to prove that the government can work for people after 40 years in which we had a government that we felt was working against us. That has been a harder and harder case for him to make because the media is not picking that up.

“The question going into 2024 is: will people understand that Biden has created a government that does work for the people? Whether or not you like its policies personally, he is trying to use that government to meet the needs of the people in a way that the Republicans haven’t done since 1981. He is a transformative president. Whether or not it’s going to be enough, we’re going to find out in 14 months”.

“I watch him constantly, I read him constantly, and I have met him and interviewed him. He’s fine mentally. As I get older, when I’m on task, I don’t miss a trick. I’m going to leave to go to the grocery store after this, and the chances are very good I will run into somebody I know quite well and not remember their name. That’s just the way it is.”

Richardson glides between excavations of 19th-century history and a running commentary on the hot political story of the day….

She reflects: “One of the things that people like me do is give people firm ground to stand on in a swamp. That is, … to have somebody say, ‘This happened, this happened, this happened and here are citations that you can go to check, and this is how things work,’ is very comforting…. “So it’s partly a search for history but it’s also partly a search to feel like you understand the world again, which is hard to do when you’re being bombarded with hearings and lies and all that kind of crap. I actually think that the meaning of it is less about history than it is about returning to a reality based community.”

The Violence Continues

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It’s happening now: “An unprecedented attack from Gaza spurs Israeli airstrikes, gun battles. Israeli civilians, soldiers held captive; hundreds feared dead across Gaza, Israel”.

Coincidentally, the next article I read in The New York Review of Books (probably behind a paywall) was “Heading Toward a Second Nakba”. (According to the United Nations, “the Nakba, which means “catastrophe” in Arabic, refers to the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Before the Nakba, Palestine was a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society”.) 

The article, published last month, provides some of the context for today’s violence. Here are excerpts:

In effect, the second Nakba is already underway.

It is happening slowly, piece by piece, and largely under the radar. Here’s an example. The beautiful village of Ein Samiya, not far from Ramallah, was for years subject to continuous settler harassment. First the Civil Administration issued a demolition order for the village school—by far the most impressive and important building there. An array of European sponsors had supplied the funds to build it. The villagers went to court, and on August 10, 2022, the Jerusalem District Court decreed, unsurprisingly, that the school could indeed be demolished. In January the High Court of Justice put a freeze on executing this ruling; but on August 17, 2023, the army destroyed the school.

Meanwhile, over recent months, attacks by settlers intensified. They frequently invaded the village, beat and stoned its residents, and brought their own sheep into the Palestinians’ fields, thereby destroying the growing crops—in short, they routinely terrorized their Palestinian neighbors. The army and police, as usual, did nothing to stop any of this. What finally broke the villagers’ spirit came after a night when armed settlers came into the village, supposedly looking for sheep that they claimed had been stolen. They couldn’t find any. The next morning, one of the villagers took his flock out to graze. A policeman turned up, arrested him, announced that the entire flock—thirty-seven sheep—had been stolen, and handed it over to the settlers. Meanwhile, settlers blocked the access roads to the village and stoned Palestinians trying to reach their homes. This went on for five consecutive days.

I was there on May 24, 2023.

I saw the last Palestinian trucks leaving with the few possessions the villagers could salvage. The entire village—twenty-seven extended families, over two hundred people—evacuated their homes… I’ve seen rather a lot of heartbreaking scenes in the Palestinian territories over the years, but the flight from Ein Samiya was one of the hardest to watch. It goes without saying that the villagers’ lands have now been appropriated by the settlers, with the collusion of the army, the police, the courts, and, not least, the government.

The fate of Ein Samiya is shared by many other Palestinian sites. In the South Hebron Hills, thirteen villages are in imminent danger of expulsion, with the backing of the High Court of Justice; the excuse is that they are located within an arbitrarily imposed training zone for the army. Al-Khan al-Ahmar, slightly east of Jerusalem, was on the verge of being destroyed—the army bulldozers had already begun their work—when the International Criminal Court in The Hague declared that a war crime was being committed. That stopped the destruction for the moment, though government ministers have been demanding that the army finish the job. The village of Ras al-Tin, not far from Ein Samiya, was emptied of most of its inhabitants after savage acts by the army. (Among other things, soldiers emptied and confiscated the large water tanks that made life sustainable in the stony desert hills.) Denying water to Palestinian shepherds in the Jordan Valley, where temperatures in summer can pass 120 degrees Fahrenheit, is a standard tactic employed by the army…. These are random names from a longer list.

In Nathan Thrall’s words, a “hidden universe of suffering” touches “nearly every Palestinian home.” There is no way to justify any of it, unless one thinks that ensuring eternal Jewish supremacy over all of Palestine, and with it an Israeli version of apartheid, is a worthy objective. The moral foundation of the State of Israel has been severely compromised, perhaps beyond repair, and exchanged for the horrific reality of the occupation, which is further entrenched with each passing hour.

To perpetuate that reality is, to no small extent, the real rationale of the antidemocratic legislation limiting the power of the Supreme Court that the Netanyahu government pushed through the Knesset on July 24, despite weeks of huge demonstrations against it. Right-wing fanatics think, with some reason, that the Supreme Court is the last remaining obstacle to the annexation of the territories (although its record on Palestinian matters is far from good). Hence the attempt to undermine the court, indeed to sabotage the state’s entire legal system and thus to give the government almost unlimited power to do whatever it pleases. In the face of overwhelming opposition to this move from critical sectors of Israeli society … and from abroad, the legislation abolishes the so-called reasonableness clause, which gave the Supreme Court the authority to overrule government decisions on grounds that they are patently unreasonable—for example, when the prime minister appoints to a ministerial position a politician repeatedly convicted for taking bribes (this is not a theoretical example).

The Supreme Court will pronounce on the legality of the new law; major figures in the government, including the Speaker of the Knesset, have announced in advance that they will not honor the court’s decision if it invalidates the law, and Netanyahu has more than hinted that he, too, will defy the court. Israel is in the throes of a constitutional crisis (in the absence of a constitution), and the threat to democracy, coming from the government and the slim right-wing majority in the Knesset, is without precedent in the country’s history.

For [those Palestinians] who have suffered unthinkable losses, there will be no release from pain. As long as the occupation continues on its self-destructive course, there will be many more innocent victims… It is obvious, though many refuse to see it, that the only way Israel can survive in the long run is to come to terms with the Palestinian national movement—that is, to make peace, an honest and generous peace.

I am certain that some form of mutual accord is still possible, though I may not live to see it. Palestine is in disarray, after decades of Israeli occupation and the deliberate erosion of Palestinian civil society and institutions by Israel; but there are still serious Palestinian partners for peace, including some whom many of us have known…. On the grassroots level, in the villages, most Palestinians want what most Israelis want—a livable life, without war. They also rightly want, and some day will certainly achieve, equality and an end to the current regime of discrimination, oppression, and constant threat. As my shepherd friend Jamal likes to say, “We were born to live in peace with one another. We think that hell lies somewhere beneath the earth, and heaven lies above us. But in fact people create their own hell on earth, when paradise, right here, could be ours.”

Unquote.

The author is David Shulman, Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was awarded the Israel Prize for Religious Studies in 2016. He is a longtime activist in Ta’ayush, the Arab-Jewish Partnership, in the occupied Palestinian territories.

The Tyranny of the Minority

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The authors of How Democracies Die have a new book coming out called Tyranny of the Minority. Zack Beauchamp of Vox has a review that’s worth reading in full. These are selections:

In The Odyssey, Odysseus and his crew are forced to navigate a strait bounded by two equally dangerous obstacles: Scylla, a six-headed sea serpent, and Charybdis, an underwater horror that sucks down ships through a massive whirlpool. Judging Charybdis to be a greater danger to the crew as a whole, Odysseus orders his crew to try and pass through on Scylla’s side. They make it, but six sailors are eaten in the crossing.

In their new book Tyranny of the Minority, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt — the authors of How Democracies Die — argue America’s founders faced an analogous problem: navigating between two types of dictatorship that threatened to devour the new country.

The founders, per Levitsky and Ziblatt, were myopically focused on one of them: the fear of a majority-backed demagogue seizing power. As a result, they made it exceptionally difficult to pass new laws and amend the constitution. But the founders, the pair argues, lost sight of a potentially more dangerous monster on the other side of the strait: a determined minority abusing this system to impose its will on the democratic majority.

“By steering the republic so sharply away from the Scylla of majority tyranny, America’s founders left it vulnerable to the Charybdis of minority rule,” they write.

This is not a hypothetical fear. According to Levitsky and Ziblatt, today’s America is currently being sucked down the anti-democratic whirlpool.

The Republican Party, they argue, has become an anti-democratic institution, its traditional leadership cowed by Trump and a racially reactionary base. As such, it is increasingly willing to twist legal tools designed to check oppressive majorities into tools for imposing its policy preferences on an unwilling majority. The best way out of this dilemma, in their view, is radical legal constitutional reform that brings the American system more in line with other advanced democracies.

Tyranny of the Minority is an exceptionally persuasive book. I think it is almost inarguably correct about both the nature of the modern Republican Party and the ways in which it exploits America’s rickety Constitution to subvert its democracy.  I come to some similar conclusions in my own forthcoming book on democracy, The Reactionary Spirit ….

In the US, Levitsky and Ziblatt see a democracy made vulnerable by its own Constitution.

The Constitution’s framers were the first to take Enlightenment ideas about freedom and translate them to an actual political system. The only historical democratic experiences they looked at were from antiquity, in places like Athens and Rome. Classical sources repeatedly chronicled threats to democracy, even outright collapse, emanating from mob rule.

Though the founders knew that democracy was at heart about majority rule, they took the Greco-Roman experience seriously and designed a system where majorities were severely constrained. The tripartite separation of powers, bicameral legislature, indirect election of the president and senators, lifetime Supreme Court tenure, the laborious process for amending the Constitution: all of these were built, in whole or in part, as limitations on the ability of majorities to impose their will on minorities.

Some American counter-majoritarian institutions emerged not from well-intentioned design but political necessity. Leading founders like James Madison bitterly resented the basic structure of the Senate, where each state gets two seats regardless of size; Alexander Hamilton called it “preposterous” during a constitutional convention debate. It was included purely to mollify small states like Delaware and Rhode Island, who were refusing to join the Union absent sufficient protections for their interests.

Over time, the US shed some of these minoritarian trappings — senators are now directly elected, thanks to the 17th Amendment — but deepened others. In 1803’s Marbury v. Madison, the Supreme Court gave itself expansive power to strike down legislation that was not explicitly granted in the Constitution. More recently, the filibuster emerged as a de facto 60-vote requirement for passing legislation in the Senate — a practice similar to the supermajority vote that the founders explicitly rejected early on.

Levitsky and Ziblatt show that almost every other peer democracy went in the opposite direction.

The United States is “the only presidential democracy in the world in which the president is elected via an Electoral College,” “one of the few remaining democracies that retains a bicameral legislature with a powerful upper chamber,” and “the only democracy in the world with lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices.” Moreover, they note, “the U.S. Constitution is the hardest in the world to change” — making it extremely difficult for reformers to do anything about America’s minority-empowering institutions.

These institutions allow the Republican Party to rule despite being a distinctly minority faction — one that holds extreme positions on issues like taxes and abortion, and has lost the popular vote in seven out of the last eight presidential elections.

So long as the party retains appeal among a hard core of racially resentful supporters, efficiently distributed around the country to take advantage of the Senate and Electoral College’s biases, it can remain nationally competitive. The right’s control over the Supreme Court will likely last decades, thanks to lifetime tenure, allowing it to remake American policy and institutions with impunity. The GOP’s disproportionate national power enables its cadres at the state and local level to pursue explicitly undemocratic policies for holding power, like felon disenfranchisement and extreme gerrymandering, without fear of federal intervention.

Hence the titular “tyranny of the minority”: The Republican Party, having broken with its core commitment to democracy, has now embraced a peculiarly American strategy for taking and wielding power undemocratically.

“America’s countermajoritarian institutions can manufacture authoritarian minorities into governing majorities,” they write. “Far from checking authoritarian power, our institutions have begun to augment it.”

Levitsky and Ziblatt are absolutely right that its outdated constitution makes it easier for the GOP to travel down an authoritarian path.

But “easier” doesn’t mean “necessary.” While Levitsky and Ziblatt ultimately take an institutions-first approach, seeing their reform as our way out of America’s crisis, I take a more society-first view: that America’s problems are primarily the result of deep social fissures exacerbated by outdated and poorly designed institutions. Even if the United States had a more authentically democratic institution, we’d still be riven by divides over race and identity that have unerringly produced the worst political conflicts in the country’s history.

It follows from this that institutional reforms are not enough: In addition to policies for political reform, we also need to think about ways to reduce the social demand for extreme politics. More bluntly: If widespread hostility to social change enables the Republicans’ far-right authoritarian lurch, we need to figure out ways to shift Americans’ beliefs in a more egalitarian direction.

But such a proposal should be considered in addition to Levitsky and Ziblatt’s proposals, not in replacement of them …

Unquote.

Fundamental changes to the Constitution are unlikely, but the success of Democrats in recent special elections justifies some optimism regarding 2024. The Republican tendency to overreach (e.g. by trying to legislate forced birth) is also a positive factor.

Today’s oldest voters are more conservative than the Baby Boomers who will soon replace them. Young voters are more motivated than they’ve been in years. There may come a time when there are enough sensible Democratic senators to change the Senate’s various anti-democratic procedures. Two more Democrats on the Supreme Court would make it a very different institution (the two oldest Supreme Court justices, Thomas and Alito, are especially evil Republicans).

But our antiquated Constituion is a major stumbling block. So is the corporate news media:

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Why the Weather Has Become So Weird

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It’s the difference between a linear and a non-linear system. Andrew Dessler, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas A&M, explains:

If you’re struggling to understand why the impacts of climate change suddenly seem so awful, it’s time we discuss a key scientific term: non-linearity.

In a linear system, changes occur in a straight line. If climate impacts were linear, each 0.1°C increase in temperature would produce the same increment of damage. In this world, things slowly get worse over decades until, later this century, the accumulations of slow impacts becomes truly terrible.

But impacts of climate change are different — they are non-linear. In a rain event, for example, the first few inches of rain typically produce no damage because existing infrastructure (e.g., storm drains) were designed to handle that much rain.

As rainfall continues to intensify, however, it eventually exceeds the capacity of the storm runoff infrastructure and the neighborhood floods. You go from zero damage if the water stops half an inch below the front door of your house to tens of thousands of dollars of damage if the water rises one additional inch and flows into your house.

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Thus, the correct mental model is not one of impacts slowly getting worse over decades. Rather, the correct way to understand climate change is that things are fine until they’re not, at which point they’re really terrible. And the system can go from “fine” to “terrible” in the blink of an eye.

The key to this is recognizing the thresholds that exist in the systems around us. For example, when engineers of the 20th century designed the infrastructure that we live with today (bridges, dams, storm runoff systems), they designed it for the range of climate conditions that existed at the time, adding in a small margin for unforeseen weather extremities. But not too much of a margin — they wanted to keep costs down.

This range and margin together define the design limits of the built world. If we still had the climate of the 20th century, we’d be fine. But the relentless warming of our planet has taken us to the edge and beyond these 20th-century design limits.

The speed of us passing limits is mind bending. People who are affected are often shocked and we frequently see people bemoaning the fact that some impact never happened before — this is the calling card of non-linear effects.

So when we see all of the climate impacts of the last few years suddenly appearing, it shouldn’t surprise us. The very rapid warming we are experiencing is pushing us past many thresholds in our human and natural systems.

Note that these damages are not uniformly distributed. When the globe warms from 1.1C to 1.2C, most people are unaffected. But, for a minority of people, this will drive the climate system past important thresholds, resulting in enormous damages and suffering for them. It could be a rainfall event that, intensified by warming, crosses a threshold and floods a city. Or it could be a heatwave that, powered by increasing temperatures, becomes intense enough to wipe out entire crops. Whatever the scenario, for those people it is awful.

When the Earth warms the next 0.1C, an entirely new group of thresholds will be passed, bringing great harms to entirely different groups of people. Many of them will not expect it, having been lulled into complacency by the fact that they hadn’t been negatively impacted by warming up to then. Is that you?

Let’s hope not, but the reality is that someone, somewhere, will inevitably face climate disaster in the near future. Therefore, it’s crucial to discard the notion of climate change as a distant, linear threat and acknowledge that all of us are in the non-linear firing line.