The millennials have spoken, and they overwhelmingly chose Sanders’ radical change over Clinton’s incremental reform.
Judging from Super Tuesday’s results, Sen. Bernie Sanders has a long row to hoe if he is going to overtake Hillary Clinton and become the Democratic nominee. By and large, the margins of her victories were larger than the margins of his. And as In These Times Deputy Publisher Christopher Hass reported last week, it is in the size of these margins that the Democratic standard bearer will be determined.

But the race for the Democratic nomination is not only a contest between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. It is also the venue for competing ideas about how social change is made, in which two visions for the future have been offered.

In a new doc, Monty Python’s Jones illustrates capitalism’s tendency toward disaster

Boom Bust Boom is an odd little documentary co-written by Terry Jones, formerly of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, with economics professor and entrepreneur Theo Kocken. In it, an assortment of experts take us on a tour through the great busts of financial markets, all the way back to the bursting of the colossal tulip bubble of 1637.

We hear from economists Dan Ariely, Zvi Bodie, Andy Haldane and Robert J. Shiller, economic journalists Paul Krugman, John Cassidy and Paul Mason, and deceased economists John Kenneth Galbraith and Hyman Minsky in goofy cloth puppet form. Playwright Lucy Prebble and actor John Cusack also hold forth, for reasons that are not entirely clear. These talking heads describe the grim realities of the workings of capitalism in strangely chipper tones, enlivened by puppetry, animation, computer graphics and clips from South Park.

But the real question driving the film is why government leaders and economists seem to chronically forget the harsh lessons learned during those bitter busts. Unsurprisingly, the blame falls on classical economics and its myopic focus on free market competition as an engine of growth, while simply ignoring the built-in tendencies toward instability and crisis. Encouraged to mistake the map for the territory, generations of economists cling to their models regardless of real-world economic upheavals. Thus Alan Greenspan, Federal Reserve chairman from 1987 to 2006, finally admitted, after failing to predict the disastrous 2008 collapse, that his model might have some slight imperfections—only to later take back his temporary mea culpa.

Paris — Twenty-five years ago, in February 1991, the leaders of Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary met in Visegrad, a Hungarian town overlooking the Danube. Those three countries had recently broken free of the Soviet bloc; their newly elected leaders, Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel and Jozsef Antall, had taken an active part in the liberation. Two, Mr. Havel and Mr. Walesa, had been jailed for their activities.

The Visegrad meeting had one central purpose: to accelerate the integration of the three countries into a free, democratic and prosperous Europe, through NATO and what was then the European Economic Community of 12 member states. Western European leaders looked favorably on the Visegrad Group: Central Europeans could practice regional cooperation before joining the adults’ group of what would become the European Union.

Visegrad was where the kings of Bohemia, Hungary and Poland parlayed in 1335. Since then, these nations had gone through many wars and occupations, their borders redrawn several times, or even dissolved altogether.

Today, the Visegrad bloc is experiencing a resurgence of sorts. In a splintering familiar to Central Europe, the Visegrad Three became four: Czechoslovakia ceased to exist in 1993, giving way to the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

If there was any doubt about why the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan seized the newspaper Zaman last week, consider this: Within 48 hours after the takeover, the paper began publishing pro-Erdogan propaganda.

Zaman, Turkey’s largest circulation daily, was one of the country’s few opposition media outlets before the police used tear gas and water cannons on Friday to disperse a crowd outside the paper’s headquarters chanting, “Free press cannot be silenced” as it raided the offices. The police acted after a court in Istanbul, without explanation, put the paper under the administration of a panel of trustees.

Before the takeover was complete, the journalists put out a Saturday edition of the newspaper with the headline, “The Constitution Is Suspended.” In the end, the newspaper’s editor was fired and efforts were underway to eradicate the paper’s entire online archive, according to news reports.

Sometimes you have to simply step back from the hubbub and take stock, with cleareyed sobriety, at a moment in history to fully appreciate its epochal import. Now is such a time.

A nativist, sexist, arguably fascist and racist demagogue who twists the truth is the front-runner in the race to become the Republican Party’s presidential nominee, over the protestations of the party’s establishment, who rightly view his ascendance as an existential threat to an already tattered brand.

He is odd and entertaining, vacuous and vain, disarming and terrifyingly dangerous.

And, according to The New York Times, he “could lock up the nomination in May” if he “keeps winning by the same margins.” Furthermore, the Republican Party is seeing record turnout on its way to this end. There is a political revolution in this country but, so far at least, it appears to be one driven in large part by the Republicans.

Let this sink in, America.

Lack of self-awareness can be fatal. The haplessness of the Republican establishment in the face of Trumpism is a case in point.

As many have noted, it’s remarkable how shocked — shocked! — that establishment has been at the success of Donald Trump’s racist, xenophobic campaign. Who knew that this kind of thing would appeal to the party’s base? Isn’t the G.O.P. the party of Ronald Reagan, who sold conservatism with high-minded philosophical messages, like talking about a “strapping young buck” using food stamps to buy T-bone steaks?

Seriously, Republican political strategy has been exploiting racial antagonism, getting working-class whites to despise government because it dares to help Those People, for almost half a century. So it’s amazing to see the party’s elite utterly astonished by the success of a candidate who is just saying outright what they have consistently tried to convey with dog whistles.

What I find even more amazing, however, are the Republican establishment’s delusions about what its own voters are for. You see, all indications are that the party elite imagines that base voters share its own faith in conservative principles, when that not only isn’t true, it never has been.

Here’s an example: Last summer, back when Mr. Trump was just beginning his rise, he promised not to cut Social Security, and insiders like William Kristol gleefully declared that he was “willing to lose the primary to win the general.” In reality, however, Republican voters don’t at all share the elite’s enthusiasm for entitlement cuts — remember, George W. Bush’s attempt to privatize Social Security ran aground in the face of disapproval from Republicans as well as Democrats.

Yet the Republican establishment still seems unable to understand that hardly any of its own voters, let alone the voters it would need to win in the general election, are committed to free-market, small-government ideology. Indeed, although Marco Rubio — the establishment’s last hope — has finally started to go after the front-runner, so far his attack seems to rest almost entirely on questioning the coiffed one’s ideological purity. Why does he imagine that voters care?

HE supported the biggest amnesty bill in history for illegal immigrants, advocated gun control, used Keynesian stimulus to jump-start the economy, favored personal diplomacy even with the country’s sworn enemies and instituted tax increases in six of the eight years of his presidency.

He was Ronald Reagan.

The core beliefs that got Reagan elected and re-elected were conservative: lower taxes, smaller government and a stronger, more assertive military. But Reagan was also a pragmatist, willing to compromise, able to improvise in pursuit of his goals and, most of all, eager to expand his party’s appeal.

The current field of Republican presidential candidates invokes Reagan as a patron saint, but the characteristics that made him a successful politician seem lost on them. Instead, they’ve turned his party into a swamp of nativism, ideological extremism and pessimism about the country’s future, in direct opposition to Reagan’s example. And they’ve transformed primary season into a reality show of insults, betrayals and open feuds, defying the so-called 11th Commandment that Reagan espoused: Thou shall not speak ill of any fellow Republican.

In one of the more pleasant surprises of this presidential campaign, young Americans are voting in big numbers, contributing to some unexpected results so far.

This is the first presidential campaign in which people age 18 to 29 make up the same proportion of the electorate as do baby boomers — about one-third. This year, the youth turnout for both parties in the primaries so far is rivaling 2008, the year of Barack Obama’s first campaign. On Saturday, young voters turned out in far greater numbers in the South Carolina Republican primary than they did in 2008 or 2012 in that state, according to a study by Tufts University’s Circle center. Donald Trump won the primary, with 32.5 percent of the vote, but young voters were the only group he didn’t carry. Marco Rubio came in second with 22.5 percent, closely followed by Ted Cruz, with 22.3 percent. Both Mr. Cruz and Mr. Trump drew bigger share of the youth vote than Mr. Rubio.

The youth vote’s biggest beneficiary by far is Bernie Sanders, who filled venues in Las Vegas with cheering young admirers last week, after winning more than 80 percent of this group in both Iowa and New Hampshire. On Saturday young people made up 18 percent of voters in Nevada’s Democratic caucus, five percentage points more than in 2008. Mr. Sanders again drew more than eight in 10 of these voters. Mrs. Clinton won Nevada with 52.7 percent, besting Mr. Sanders by 5.5 percentage points. But young people were largely responsible for closing what just a month ago had been a more than 20-point lead for her.

If prediction markets (and most hardheaded analysis) are to be believed, Hillary Clinton, having demonstrated her staying power, is the overwhelming favorite for the Democratic nomination. The Republican race, by contrast, has seen a lot of consolidation — it’s pretty much down to a two-man race — but the outcome is still up for grabs.

The thing is, one of the two men who may still have a good chance of becoming the Republican nominee is a scary character. His notions on foreign policy seem to boil down to the belief that America can bully everyone into doing its bidding, and that engaging in diplomacy is a sign of weakness. His ideas on domestic policy are deeply ignorant and irresponsible, and would be disastrous if put into effect.

The other man, of course, has very peculiar hair.

Marco Rubio has yet to win anything, but by losing less badly than other non-Trump candidates he has become the overwhelming choice of the Republican establishment. Does this give him a real chance of overtaking the man who probably just won all of South Carolina’s delegates? I have no idea.

But what I do know is that one shouldn’t treat establishment support as an indication that Mr. Rubio is moderate and sensible. On the contrary, not long ago someone holding his policy views would have been considered a fringe crank.

Let me leave aside Mr. Rubio’s terrifying statements on foreign policy and his evident willingness to make a bonfire of civil liberties, and focus on what I know best, economics.

You probably know that Mr. Rubio is proposing big tax cuts, and may know that among other things he proposes completely eliminating taxes on investment income — which would mean, for example, that Mitt Romney would end up owing precisely zero in federal taxes.

America’s two big political parties are very different from each other, and one difference involves the willingness to indulge economic fantasies.

Republicans routinely engage in deep voodoo, making outlandish claims about the positive effects of tax cuts for the rich. Democrats tend to be cautious and careful about promising too much, as illustrated most recently by the way Obamacare, which conservatives insisted would be a budget-buster, actually ended up being significantly cheaper than projected.

But is all that about to change?
On Wednesday four former Democratic chairmen and chairwomen of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers — three who served under Barack Obama, one who served under Bill Clinton — released a stinging open letter to Bernie Sanders and Gerald Friedman, a University of Massachusetts professor who has been a major source of the Sanders campaign’s numbers. The economists called out the campaign for citing “extreme claims” by Mr. Friedman that “exceed even the most grandiose predictions by Republicans” and could “undermine the credibility of the progressive economic agenda.”

That’s harsh. But it’s harsh for a reason.