Voters at campaign events bring up their worries that political division could lead to large-scale political violence. Pollsters regularly ask about the idea in opinion surveys. A cottage industry has arisen for speculative fiction, serious assessments and forums about whether the country could be on the verge of a modern-day version of the bloodiest war in American history.

And “Civil War,” a dystopian action film about an alternative America plunged into a bloody domestic conflict, has topped box office sales for two consecutive weekends. The movie has outperformed expectations at theaters from Brownsville, Texas, to Boston, tapping into a dark set of national anxieties that took hold after the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol.

Of course, the notion of a future civil war remains a mere notion. But, as another presidential election approaches, it has suddenly become a hotly debated one, reflecting the bipartisan sense of unease that has permeated American politics. In polls and in interviews, a segment of voters have said they fear that the country’s divides have grown so deep that they may lead not just to rhetorical battles but actual ones.

“I personally do not believe we will descend into a formal armed civil war,” said Maya Wiley, who ran for mayor of New York City in 2021 and now serves as the president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a civil rights group that has fielded several polls on the topic. “But it’s in the air. It doesn’t surprise me at all that we’re seeing a very explicit fear of where things could go.”

Daniel C. Dennett, one of the most widely read and debated American philosophers, whose prolific works explored consciousness, free will, religion and evolutionary biology, died on Friday in Portland, Maine. He was 82.

His death, at Maine Medical Center, was caused by complications of interstitial lung disease, his wife, Susan Bell Dennett, said. He lived in Cape Elizabeth, Maine.

Mr. Dennett combined a wide range of knowledge with an easy, often playful writing style to reach a lay public, avoiding the impenetrable concepts and turgid prose of many other contemporary philosophers. Beyond his more than 20 books and scores of essays, his writings even made their way into the theater and onto the concert stage.

But Mr. Dennett, who never shirked controversy, often crossed swords with other famed scholars and thinkers.

I caught up with Rep. Tom Cole, a veteran Republican from Oklahoma, to get his insights into the internal dynamics at play here. Cole knows what he’s talking about, having chaired the Appropriations Committee and the Rules Committee — both in the past month.

In press shorthand, Cole is usually described as an institutionalist, and since the tea party era, he’s also been known for butting heads with his more rambunctious, often newer colleagues on the far right.

Today’s antagonism toward House leadership stems from “a lack of respect for the institution and the wisdom of the institution,” he said. Speaking of the bomb-throwers, he added, “You know, you’ve got to grow up.”

Cole is also a member of the Chickasaw Nation, a trained historian and as a cigar aficionado, literally a devotee of Washington’s smoke-filled back rooms.

On this week’s episode of Playbook Deep Dive, we got deep into the weeds of why the Rules Committee has been such a trouble spot for recent GOP speakers and whether Cole thinks Johnson can hang on as members threaten to oust him. I also had Cole answer some prying questions from some of his favorite historians on the subject of Donald Trump.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/04/20/grow-up-a-veteran-republican-is-tired-of-his-partys-insurgents-00153454

Donald Trump is spending as much on legal bills as he is on campaigning. Joe Biden, meanwhile, is building a reelection behemoth.

Campaign finance reports filed this week underscored the unusual nature of this campaign: the current president running against his predecessor, who is more preoccupied with his criminal trial than the campaign trail.

Like most incumbent presidents, Biden is outgunning Trump, raising and spending multiple times more than the presumptive GOP nominee, especially with his post-State of the Union ramp-up last month.

But the two aren’t even in the same ballpark. A PAC controlled by Trump spent almost as much on legal bills as his campaign did on anything else — and Biden’s campaign outspent Trump’s by nearly eight-to-one.

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/04/20/donald-trump-joe-biden-fundraising-takeaways-00153511

Record heat, hurricanes, wildfires all have been making news in recent years. And while not everyone agrees events like these are the direct result of climate change, they do connect to peoples' opinions about it: a big majority of Americans feel the U.S. needs to address climate change, with those who report experiencing extreme weather more likely to say we should do so right now.

Views on climate change have long been associated with partisanship, and they still are, but age is a factor, too. Younger Americans, including younger Republicans, are even more likely to say the U.S. needs to take steps to at least try to slow it.

There's a sense of urgency from many in the public, too. A large majority think it needs to be addressed at least in the next few years, including half who think it needs to be addressed right now.

There's the sense that we should address climate change, and there's also some belief that we can.

Tax cuts for the wealthy have long drawn support from conservative lawmakers and economists who argue that such measures will "trickle down" and eventually boost jobs and incomes for everyone else. But a new study from the London School of Economics says 50 years of such tax cuts have only helped one group — the rich.

The new paper, by David Hope of the London School of Economics and Julian Limberg of King's College London, examines 18 developed countries — from Australia to the United States — over a 50-year period from 1965 to 2015. The study compared countries that passed tax cuts in a specific year, such as the U.S. in 1982 when President Ronald Reagan slashed taxes on the wealthy, with those that didn't, and then examined their economic outcomes.

Per capita gross domestic product and unemployment rates were nearly identical after five years in countries that slashed taxes on the rich and in those that didn't, the study found.

But the analysis discovered one major change: The incomes of the rich grew much faster in countries where tax rates were lowered. Instead of trickling down to the middle class, tax cuts for the rich may not accomplish much more than help the rich keep more of their riches and exacerbate income inequality, the research indicates.

Kevin McCarthy is having a grand old time.

He’s traveling the country giving six-figure speeches, playing pundit and elder statesman on TV, holding forth at high-brow political forums and, not least, plotting vengeance against those behind his unceremonious ouster as House speaker.

Eight Republican lawmakers joined 208 Democrats in toppling the former Bakersfield congressman, the first time in history a House leader has been voted out. Rather than hang on, McCarthy left office at the end of 2023.

Two of the eight Republicans are joining him in retirement. Three others — Bob Good of Virginia, Eli Crane of Arizona and Nancy Mace of South Carolina — face strong primary challenges. McCarthy has been working behind the scenes to end their congressional careers, strategizing and directing money and other resources to their opponents.

“He wants to hold to account those who pushed him out,” said a Central Valley political operative, who has a decades-long relationship with McCarthy.

Days after President Donald Trump clinched a surprise victory in the 2016 presidential election, Mark Zuckerberg touted his company’s influence in politics. The CEO proclaimed he was “proud” Facebook had given many “a voice in this election.”

“We helped millions of people connect with candidates so they could hear from them directly and be better informed,” Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook.

Now, on the eve of a matchup between Trump and President Biden, Meta is changing course.

After years of pitching its suite of social media apps as the lifeblood of campaigns, Meta is breaking up with politics. The company has decreased the visibility of politics-focused posts and accounts on Facebook and Instagram as well as imposed new rules on political advertisers, kneecapping the targeting system long used by politicians to reach potential voters.