Matt Rourke/AP

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., arrives at a rally in Essex Junction, Vt., Tuesday, March 3, 2020.

History, it appeared, was poised to repeat itself.

A political outsider with a simple, compelling message and the ability to draw huge, sign-waving crowds had taken the nation by storm. A populist cry of “us against them,” the little guy versus the elites, fueled the palpable concern of party regulars. 

Four years ago, it was Donald Trump who fomented a political revolution, took over the Republican Party, and captured the White House. Today, Bernie Sanders is seeking to do the same, from the left, to the Democrats. 

But 2020 is not 2016, and on Super Tuesday, Senator Sanders’ momentum hit a brick wall. Paradoxically, it may be President Trump’s success – at least in upending many of the norms of governance and public life – that hurt the democratic socialist senator’s cause, even as the same norm-busting mentality has energized the Sanders-loving left. 

Many Americans, in short, are exhausted. Democrats and disaffected Republicans seem almost desperate to vote out Mr. Trump. And for a significant portion of the party’s electorate, a Sanders nomination promises nothing so much as failure – most likely, many believe, losing in November. Even if Mr. Sanders were somehow to win the presidency, such a radical shift in agenda would be nearly impossible to implement, and could just lead to more upheaval. 

For liberal Democrats disappointed by the sudden revival of former Vice President Joe Biden – an avatar of the party establishment and now a frontrunner for the nomination – there’s a simple explanation: a desire for stability twinned with skepticism toward “revolution,” a term that still infuses Mr. Sanders’ rhetoric.  

“Something’s going on with Americans and Democrats above the age of 40, 45 that I don’t totally get,” says Teddy Smyth, a 20-something former staffer on the presidential campaign of Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey. “I hate it, but it’s like a yearning for a return to normalcy as opposed to a gamble on a new vision, a new way of being American,” he says. 

Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s announcement Thursday that she is suspending her campaign now leaves Mr. Sanders and Mr. Biden as the only major Democratic candidates. Where Senator Warren’s supporters go is an open question; she’s a progressive, like Mr. Sanders, but has a more pragmatic streak. At press time, Ms. Warren had not issued an endorsement. 

Michael Bloomberg’s departure from the race Wednesday could help Mr. Biden, not only because the uber-wealthy former New York mayor endorsed the former VP but also because he’s keeping his campaign operation going to support Democrats in November up and down the ballot. Mr. Sanders has said he would reject such help, but Mr. Biden has not. 

Still, “Sandersism” – embracing Medicare For All, free college, higher taxes, and an aggressive approach to climate change – isn’t going away. Versions of the Sanders agenda have now become standard Democratic fare, a far cry even from the days of President Barack Obama, now seen by many as a moderate. 

Mr. Sanders “has brought back debates that seemingly were settled, like single-payer health care, exclusively government run,” says Bill Carrick, a veteran Democratic consultant in Los Angeles. 

It’s possible, political analysts say, that Mr. Sanders may become the “Barry Goldwater of the left.” Senator Goldwater, the Republican presidential nominee in 1964, lost in a landslide to President Lyndon Johnson. But his conservative and libertarian political philosophy lived on, forming the foundation of Ronald Reagan’s views and eventual rise to the presidency. 

The Arizona senator knew he was going to lose to Johnson, following the assassination of President John Kennedy, and decided, “I’m just going to run on principle,” says historian Michael Kazin of Georgetown University.  

Mr. Sanders exhibits the same sort of authenticity. “That’s why people like him,” says Professor Kazin, an expert on populism. “People think he’s saying what he really thinks.” 

Indeed, Mr. Sanders has been making the same arguments about inequality for decades, including eight years as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, in the 1980s. But back then, pragmatism prevailed over larger philosophical matters of social justice.

“There are obvious, real limits to what we can do,” Mayor Sanders told a Monitor reporter in 1984. 

As a senator, Mr. Sanders doesn’t have to govern anything, and can strike a more ideological stance. And over the years, on most legislation, he could be counted on as a reliable vote for the Democratic position, even as an independent. 

If Mr. Sanders were to win the Democratic nomination, now seen as less likely after underperforming on Super Tuesday, his views would spark a full-on national debate on socialism versus capitalism. 

Garry South, a longtime Democratic consultant based in Los Angeles, sees Mr. Biden as the likely nominee, and hopes that Mr. Sanders will work to unify his supporters behind him, doing everything he can to defeat Mr. Trump. 

“That’s what he claims he wants,” Mr. South says. “But it remains to be seen.”  

There’s no doubt that the Democratic electorate has moved to the left, Mr. South adds. No Democratic candidate today would think of voicing misgivings about same-sex marriage, for instance. 

But “it’s a real question in my mind whether Bernie Sanders has led that leftward drift or has simply tried to capitalize on it,” he says. 

He does not have many legislative achievements to his name. He gives passionate speeches, says Mr. South, but it’s kind of like the old saying, “There go my people and I must follow them because I am their leader.”

Indeed, Mr. Sanders was not a nationally known figure until he jumped into the 2016 Democratic nomination race – a decision, he said, that was driven by his view that Hillary Clinton should be challenged from the left, and after Ms. Warren declined to run. 

To the surprise of many, Mr. Sanders’ campaign took off, nearly overtaking Ms. Clinton, the establishment favorite. 

Now, many of those same Sanders supporters are urging him on again. But in 2020, with a more crowded Democratic field, he has failed to garner as big a percentage of the primary vote as he did four years ago. 

That has led to conspiracy theories, rampant on the web, that the Democratic “establishment,” including the Democratic National Committee, has been working to undermine the Sanders campaign. There is no evidence that that is true. In fact, the DNC changed its rules around superdelegates to accommodate Mr. Sanders’ concerns that they might try to take the nomination away from him at the Milwaukee convention in July. 

Mr. Sanders’ complaints about the party establishment and about the “corporate media” being biased against him echo Mr. Trump’s rhetoric at times – as does the rowdy behavior of both men’s most avid supporters.  

It’s no accident that some call Mr. Sanders the “Trump of the left.” Like the president, Mr. Sanders has tapped into concerns that more mainstream candidates failed to capture – particularly with younger voters. 

Shahrukh Shaikh, a young man from Fredericksburg, Virginia, who works at a Lowe’s home improvement store, said Tuesday he voted for Mr. Sanders because as president, he would cancel all student loan debt. 

“I’m drowning in student debt,” Mr. Shaikh said. “I can’t move out, nothing.” 

In the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, some waiting in line to vote on Super Tuesday were firmly for Mr. Sanders and others were still deciding how to go. But all said they’d vote for the Democratic nominee, including Mr. Biden. 

Margo Rust, porting her 10-month-old daughter in a snuggly, said she wasn’t enthusiastic about the former vice president. He would simply mean “more of the same,” while Mr. Sanders represents real change for a wide swath of everyday Americans – teachers, union members, farmers. 

Still, “I would hope that people can put specifics aside for a greater goal” of defeating President Trump, says Ms. Rust, who works as a freelancer in TV and film.  

Saul Prado, who runs his own handyman business, says Mr. Sanders has “started something appealing” – and in an ideal world, it would be great to get all the things he promises. But it’s not an ideal world, Mr. Prado adds. Leaning toward Ms. Warren (before her departure), he said he, too, would vote for Mr. Biden if it came to that. But he worries that some Sanders voters might not. 

“Sometimes they’re hard to pick apart from Trump voters,” he says. “They’re very dedicated. Almost cultish.”

If the party does fracture over its nominee, be it Mr. Biden or Mr. Sanders, that would pose a serious threat to the Democrats’ chances in November. 
 
“Divided parties never win,” Mr. Kazin says. “Ever.”

Staff writer Story Hinckley contributed to this report from Virginia.

The red sign on the red-draped table reads, “Stop Socialism. Unleash Capitalism.” For an exhibitor at America’s largest annual conservative shindig, it’s a slogan as truism, as ubiquitous as U.S. flags and Make America Great Again caps.

But the actual political messaging by Young Conservatives for Carbon Dividends (YCCD) borders on subversive. At its booth, sandwiched between the Federalist Society and a pro-Electoral College group, smartly dressed students make the case for Republicans to accept mainstream climate science and support a carbon tax as a capitalist solution.

For a party whose titular head, President Donald Trump, rejects the established science and has torn up regulations that restrain carbon emissions, that sounds like a tough sell. And a tax is still a tax, even if the revenue is to be returned in full to taxpayers as a dividend. 

But when Elise LaFleur, a politics senior at Catholic University of America in Washington, drops by the YCCD booth, she comes away impressed. For her generation, global warming isn’t a hoax but a reality to be faced, the sooner the better. 

“It’s a conversation we need to be having,” she says. “Conservatives do care about the climate.”

From college campuses to Washington think tanks, the ground is shifting beneath the feet of a party that has long sought refuge in climate obfuscation. Republicans’ fitful efforts to correct course – and hold onto voters concerned about climate – have largely been eclipsed by President Trump’s regulatory bonfires and cheerleading for fossil fuels. But GOP lawmakers in Congress have begun to support various proposals aimed at limiting emissions, including a carbon dividend plan backed by banks, manufacturers, and energy companies.  

“The question is not whether or not you view climate change as an issue that requires a solution, but what is your policy and how do you intend to reduce carbon emissions?” says Ryan Costello, a Republican and former U.S. House representative who lobbies for the dividend plan.

Courtesy of YCCD

Kiera O'Brien (far right), president of Young Conservatives for Carbon Dividends (YCCD), staffs her booth at CPAC 2020. YCCD works to mobilize the next generation of conservatives around free-market climate solutions – specifically the carbon dividends plan – and embolden the GOP to lead on climate.

This shift on the right hasn’t yet translated into votes in Congress. Eight bills have been introduced by Democrats in the House and Senate that would put a price on carbon, according to E&E News. But they have only a handful of Republican co-sponsors, and Rep. Francis Rooney, a Florida Republican who has co-sponsored several such bills, is stepping down this year.

Moreover, some of the GOP solutions – planting trees, subsidizing technology – fall well short of a comprehensive approach to rival the Democrats’ aspirational Green New Deal. When House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy unveiled his climate platform in January, it avoided carbon taxes and didn’t set any overall targets for emissions cuts. 

This reluctance to grapple with carbon pricing is understandable, given where Republicans started, says Joseph Majkut, director of climate policy at the Niskanen Center, a centrist think tank that supports a carbon tax. “Assembling a large coalition is an iterative process. These ideas need to be vetted and understood and stress-tested,” he says. 

“It’s not easy to be a sore thumb”

For activists like Kiera O’Brien, a Harvard senior and president of YCCD, student-led advocacy on climate policy offers a path to prod Republican leaders off the fence. She’s tired of being asked by left-leaning students why conservatives are ignoring the climate crisis. She also knows that at partisan events like last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), critics might spy a sellout to the left’s climate agenda.  

“It’s not easy to be a sore thumb in the Republican Party saying, ‘We need a solution,’” she says.

But it is getting easier, says Alex Flint, executive director of the Alliance for Market Solutions, a conservative, pro-carbon-tax group that works on Capitol Hill, far from the grassroots foment at CPAC. In 2018, when he met with 82 Republican members of Congress, all but one acknowledged climate change was a reality, even though “they weren’t having that conversation publicly,” he says.

In 2019 “that conversation went public,” he says. GOP lawmakers “are now beginning to explore what are the policies they can embrace to address it, and what are the politics of those policies. Because they have to understand both.” 

Polls show that young conservatives are increasingly concerned about the climate and want to see action. In a Pew survey last October, more than half of millennial and Generation Z Republicans said the government wasn’t doing enough on climate, compared with 31% of boomers and those older. Still, a partisan divide remains: Among Democrats the overall share was 90%, compared with 39% for Republicans. 

And while voters express concern, the saliency of climate varies. In surveys taken over the past decade by Yale and George Mason universities, the share of Republicans who said global warming should be “a very high priority” for the federal government never broke 10%; among Democrats it rose from 20% in 2010 to 48% in 2019. 

Growing up in Alaska, which is warming faster than the rest of the continental United States, Ms. O’Brien could see the effects of climate change. She also warmed to the idea of a dividend from carbon taxes since Alaska has returned some of its oil wealth this way for decades; Ms. O’Brien’s parents saved their annual checks to help pay for her college tuition. 

That’s why she goes to bat for a carbon-tax plan at CPAC, as well as at environmental events where, as a Republican, she’s in the minority. 

Beyond belief

At the opposite end of the spectrum is the Heartland Institute, a climate-denial group that is a perennial at CPAC, pushing a free-market vision of abundant fossil fuels. This year the Chicago-based group hosted Naomi Seibt, a German teenager and “climate realism” YouTuber, seeking to counter the reach of Greta Thunberg, the Swedish schoolgirl turned climate icon. 

The event for Ms. Seibt was barely a quarter full, though, and a modest Heartland booth in the exhibit hall was similarly becalmed. (YCCD and Heartland were both CPAC sponsors.) 

The YCCD booth saw plenty of foot traffic, including young attendees who wanted selfies with the life-size cutouts of former Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush that bracketed the table. In Ms. O’Brien’s eyes, both presidents are reminders that Republicans can lead nationally and internationally on climate policy.

Some older attendees took offense. “You believe in climate change? That’s nuts,” a middle-aged man told a YCCD volunteer, who calmly tried to explain the science behind the policy. “You’re just taking what the media says,” the man scoffed, claiming that NASA data showed three years of falling global temperatures (in fact, 2019 was the second hottest year recorded, after 2016).

Ms. O’Brien says she’s not trying to convert older climate skeptics. Her goal is to find young conservatives interested in pursuing bipartisan solutions to a self-evident problem. 

“Republicans have abandoned this issue to the Democratic Party for the past 30 years. As a young Republican, that is unacceptable,” she says. 

Mr. Costello, a two-term representative from Pennsylvania who stepped down in 2018, says that Democrats may be out front on climate but they’re divided on what to do. “The Democrats have not unified around a particular solution and nor have Republicans. What I’d like to see is Republicans unify around this solution,” he says, referring to carbon dividends. 

How long that takes, and whether success ultimately hinges on a change in the White House, is unknowable. Analysts say the current jockeying may not bear fruit until the next Congress. 

Mr. Flint, a former staff director of the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, has a theory of change. “Politicians in a democracy are not necessarily leaders,” he says, noting that scientists and economists have led on climate, and corporations have joined them. Elected officials, like ordinary voters, have been slower to grasp the policy challenge. 

“In a democracy, maybe it’s good that politicians wait until there’s a consensus among voters for change. And what’s happening now is there is increasingly a political imperative to take action.” 

Fred Weir

Mikhail Zhiganov, director of the Moscow central district My Documents center, represents the new, far friendlier face of Russian bureaucracy.

The portrait of the average Russian with a bureaucratic boot on his throat is a theme as old as Russian literature.

From youth, Russians learn to kowtow before – and often bribe – petty clerks who enjoy the power to grant or withhold vital documents. They endure endless lineups, rude treatment, and, all too often, rejection because their papers are not complete or haven’t been submitted in the proper order. Many of Russia’s greatest writers, from Gogol to Chekhov to Bulgakov, have turned their talents to skewering the Kafkaesque bureaucracy.

This has been a verifiable, everyday truth. At least, until recently. And now Russians are rubbing their eyes in amazement at a wave of transformations that seems to have happened almost overnight.

Due to a surge of government reforms over the past decade, the former public nightmare shops like the departments of taxes, pensions, and passports have been required to digitize their databases, put them online, and communicate directly with each other. That has resulted in a vast amount of simplification and streamlining – to the point where getting official paperwork is now quick and easy, and served with a smile. While it is still the face of an autocratic government, the new bureaucracy has a completely different approach toward its service – with nary a bribe needed.

“I remember, not very long ago, when you had to go to different places to collect papers for any simple thing like a driver’s license, wait in long lineups, and wait a month or more for the document to be issued,” says Natalya Beloborodova, a Moscow bookkeeper. “In the past you often had to take days off work to do these things. Now it is one stop, in and out quickly, much more efficient and reliable. If you’re missing a paper, the clerk might be able to download it for you and you can fill it out right there. It’s like a different world.”

“The state exists for the people”

It’s almost impossible to find anyone with a bad word to say about the new system, and many marvel at how quickly it has happened and how radically it has transformed the traditional drudgery and humiliation experienced by Russians anytime they needed to come face-to-face with their own state. If it’s still no pleasure, at least it’s become a fairly painless chore.

Perhaps the most significant change has been the establishment of centralized nodes where most key government services are concentrated under one roof. A citizen wanting to get a passport or a driver’s license, register a property or a small business, obtain a death certificate, pay for a parking space, or many other services too numerous to list, may just drop in to one of these My Document centers.

You take a number and are directed to a single window where a smiling clerk will check your papers, make sure everything is in order, and pass them on for processing. If one needs something additional, like a photo or photocopies, it’s all available on-site. Waiting times may differ, but a new rule says that if it takes more than 15 minutes, you will be served a free cup of coffee.

Moscow alone has 133 such centers by now, serving 70,000 people daily, and the Russian government says there are almost 10,000 of them countrywide.

Olga Fefelova, the director of public services for the Moscow city government, says the groundwork for these changes was laid about a decade ago, before she took over managing the city’s My Document network. As for why all these changes are happening now – after centuries of glacial, arrogant, and remote Russian bureaucratic practice – she says it just seems the obvious way for government to act.

“This is the 21st century, and it is understood that we can’t go on acting like people are the servants and clerks are the boss anymore,” she says. “I know how it used to be. You would go to a window, bow your head, wait for some official to decide your fate. But in reality, the state exists for the people and not the other way around, isn’t that so?”

Why now?

While Ms. Fefelova’s viewpoint is welcome, it does not seem a satisfactory explanation for the timing, especially since Russia remains an authoritarian state like its predecessors. It’s true that Russians enjoy greater personal freedoms than ever before, and nonpolitical civil society is stirring, but there have been few noticeable advances in building a working democracy.

Analysts suggest various responses to the “why now?” question.

One may be that the present Russian state, unlike all of its predecessors, lacks any ideological sense of higher purpose. Vladimir Putin may be an autocrat and pragmatic nationalist, but he has no grand social engineering schemes to pursue. So why not anchor the state’s claim to legitimacy by performing public works, like the vast infrastructure-building projects currently underway?

“This is a state that does not recognize ‘we the people’ as a political force to deal with, but it is deeply concerned with the people as a factor to reckon with, and seeks to keep them satisfied in socioeconomic terms,” says Masha Lipman, editor of Counterpoint, a journal of Russian affairs published by George Washington University.

Mikhail Chernysh, an expert with the official Institute of Sociology in Moscow, says the reforms are being driven by new technologies and the digitization of everything, and that’s something to worry about.

“All this high-tech integration, putting cameras everywhere, enables the state to follow each person with unprecedented efficiency,” he says. “More control for the bureaucracy is the driving force here, even if it results in a reduction of low-level corruption and more streamlined services.”

No more bribes needed

Everyone agrees that the reforms have had the effect of dramatically slashing traditional small-scale bribery. Ms. Fefelova says that two simple innovations – inspired by their close study of such services in other countries – has practically eliminated the scourge of petty corruption that was, not so long ago, an unavoidable feature of any simple bureaucratic operation.

First, the system of taking a number and waiting your turn – familiar to anyone who lives in the West – has eliminated the jumbled lineups of the past, along with the ill-tempered squabbles they generated and the temptation to pay someone a few rubles to jump to the front. Second, the smiling clerks who meet with citizens and collect their documents are not the same officials who process them.

“We have separated those functions,” says Ms. Fefelova. “The person in the front office who receives your documents, and helps you put them into order, is not the one who makes the decisions. You never meet that person face-to-face, so where would you direct your bribe?”

All these radical improvements present a quandary for some politically aware Russians, who seem reluctant to concede any credit to a government they had no democratic opportunity to elect, and which regularly uses its police powers to crush any attempts to protest in public.

“There has been an undeniable sea change in state services, and I do personally experience and appreciate them,” says Ms. Lipman. “But that does not make me any happier with the nature of the political system.”

In just one day, Rehan lost his home, his art, and his faith. 

Not his faith in God, he says. But his beliefs about what it means to be one of India’s 200 million Muslim citizens – and the government’s willingness to protect them.

“Everything has changed now,” he says. 

Tension had been building in New Delhi for weeks, amid India’s largest demonstrations in decades. Hundreds of thousands of people had taken to the streets since December, when legislators passed the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), opening a path to citizenship for non-Muslims from nearby Bangladesh, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. 

The government defended the law as a means of protecting religious minorities in those countries. Critics at home and abroad, however, assailed it as discriminating on the basis of religion, in a violation of India’s secular constitution. Where were the protections, they asked, for groups like Muslim Rohingya from Myanmar, one of the world’s largest refugee crises? Many viewed it as one more step in the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) Hindu nationalist agenda. For years, critics of Prime Minister Narendra Modi have said his government is pushing Muslims to the sidelines of the world’s largest democracy.

Thousands of demonstrators had been arrested, and two dozen killed. Counterprotesters and officials labeled the protesters “anti-nationals” and “traitors of the nation” – and one junior minister encouraged crowds to “shoot the traitors.”

Rehan, five years out of art school, sports a trimmed beard and short hair. (His last name has been omitted for his safety.) Coming from a family of skilled workers, he says his forefathers were his inspiration for becoming an artist.

“Like war in our neighborhood”

Last Monday, he was teaching an art class when he started to see the news: communal tensions erupting in northeast Delhi, where he lives. But still, he says, nobody expected disaster. He didn’t, either, until his wife called him at work. 

Mobs were gathering in their neighborhood, she said, and his mother instructed him to stay away. Over and over that night, he called his wife. But the situation had only grown worse by morning.

Mobs were searching for Muslim houses, mosques, and shops to loot and burn, and beating and shooting Muslims in the streets and their own homes. Collect my documents and your jewelry, he told his wife. Get ready to leave. I’m coming home.

“It was my responsibility to bring my family out safely,” he says. “It was like war in our neighborhood, but I still went ahead. Hindus were looking at us as if something major was coming. We only came out with the clothes we wore – my wife hadn’t collected the documents, either.”

He had to force his parents to leave, and abandon all the art in his studio. They fled on foot toward his brother’s rented house near the Al Hind hospital in Mustafabad – a Muslim-majority area – where many frightened residents have taken refuge.

For four days, the riots continued, killing at least 52 people – mostly Muslim – and injuring more than 350. Hindu mobs attacked Muslims, and Muslims retaliated. Video that Rehan received from a neighbor shows a cloud of smoke coming out of a house, burnt by mobs, and a blast, perhaps from cooking gas. In another video, Rehan points out a damaged mosque, saying, “I offer prayers at this mosque every day.”

But where the attackers were Hindu, many Muslim residents allege, police turned a blind eye, or even facilitated the violence. Video went viral of Delhi police beating a group of men, forcing them to sing the national anthem and mocking them with the word “Azadi,” or “freedom” – the slogan of the separatist movement in Muslim-majority Kashmir. 

Delhi police are directly under control of the federal government, and many were tasked last week with security for President Donald Trump’s state visit. On the first day of attacks, Prime Minister Modi responded to the riots on Twitter, saying police were working to restore calm.

“Peace and harmony are central to our ethos,” he wrote in a separate tweet. “I appeal to my sisters and brothers of Delhi to maintain peace and brotherhood at all times.”

Days later, however, at a march in Delhi, there were reports of BJP supporters chanting, “Shoot the traitors of the nation!”

History repeating?

Ghayur ul Hassan, a local resident and doctor who has been volunteering at the Al Hind hospital, says the violence recalls the Gujarat riots of 2002: three days of interreligious attacks that killed 1,000 people, mostly Muslim. Mr. Modi, then chief minister of the state, was barred from the United States over accusations that he failed to stop the killings.

Last week, Dr. Hassan wondered if history would repeat itself. “We didn’t receive any immediate help from the government,” he says. “We asked local medical stores for medicines, and doctors, paramedics came to volunteer as the situation escalated.”

For now, Rehan is staying at his brother’s rented apartment near the hospital, a small, private institution now hosting people who lost their homes. As an artist, he wants to return to his work. But his family, feeling traumatized, hasn’t let him venture out. A neighbor told him the house was looted and partly burned last Thursday, ruining several paintings in his studio.

Patriotism runs through Rehan’s work. His paintings show themes about communal harmony and nationalism: children standing next to the national flag, a mural of a yoga pose. In one of his classes, the children are drawing Hindu gods.

“I have read the constitution of India, understood it,” he says. “I also understood the value of justice and courts, but nothing is left anymore. The current rulers are not following it in the same form. People are so angry and hateful – if you go back to your house, even the police will not help you.”

Many who were displaced from northeast Delhi say they will not go back, including Rehan’s family, which hopes to sell its house and rent space in a Muslim-majority area. He feels increasingly pessimistic about the future, for him and all Indian Muslims. But he has not given up on his skill. 

“Art is a way to bring my emotions out,” Rehan says. “I used to be quiet about religion or communal issues. Religion is a way of living in peace, but in India it has become a reason to fight. Now, I want to express what people felt in these riots, what I felt.”

Already, he is brainstorming a project about the riots and residents’ suffering, sketching out what he has witnessed. He shows one picture he’s been drawing in the past few days, of a crying house.

“People have hesitation and fear,” he says. “I want to make an art installation around this. ... I want to display it somewhere.” 

To hear Tiffany Shlain talk about her “tech shabbat,” it sounds less like a fast and more like a banquet.

“It’s so much more about what I get back,” says the filmmaker about her sunset-to-sunset breaks from screens on Fridays and Saturdays. “I feel like my whole day is extra long and wonderful.”

Prodding people to unplug for 24-hours each week may look like an odd stance for Ms. Shlain, who founded the Webbys, one of the most prestigious awards for internet content. 

But she’s not alone. Tech-free retreats have become common among Silicon Valley’s elite. Even the famously tech-savvy Pope Francis said on Ash Wednesday that “Lent is a time to disconnect from cellphones and connect to the Gospel.”

Sunset on March 6 marks the start of the National Day of Unplugging, a 24-hour break from screens started in 2009 by the Jewish nonprofit Reboot. Past years have seen over 60,000 people participating. Ms. Shlain, whose book, “24/6: The Power of Unplugging One Day a Week,” was published last September, embraces this effort. Like many critics of tech overuse, she argues that always-available information feeds interfere with our fundamental need for mental downtime. “I just don’t think we were designed to be on 24/7,” she says.

As technology becomes ever more entrenched in our lives, even some of its most ardent proponents are suggesting we step away from time to time. If we don’t, they caution, we may be unwittingly making a huge sacrifice.

“This really does touch everyone’s lives,” says Kim Cavallo, an ambassador for the National Day of Unplugging and the founder of lilspace, whose smartphone app rewards users for taking breaks from their phones with local perks and charitable donations. “It’s not any one particular religious group. We all feel the sense of disruption of human connection.”

A “detox” or a transformation?

Many critics agree that unplugging for just one day will not, by itself, change your relationship with technology.

“I’m not a big advocate of extremes,” says Anastasia Dedyukhina, founder of the digital well-being training consultancy Consciously Digital. “It’s much more interesting to find a balanced way.”

Dr. Dedyukhina sees digital fasting as a first step in reclaiming our lives from tech overuse, but warns that, like many simple fixes, it can miss the bigger picture.

“It’s actually very dangerous to see this as a solution,” she says, “because the problem is not that we are spending too much time on the screens. It’s that so many of our functions are now outsourced to technology, and there’s no culture around this – what’s appropriate, what’s not appropriate.”

Computer scientist and self-help author Cal Newport agrees that unplugging can be a good first step, but warns that doing so needs to be seen not as a break – or worse, a “detox” – but as the first step in a transformation.

“The reason to step away is not just to lose the habit of technology, but to give yourself back the space,” he says. 

Another option: a 30-day tech fast, followed by a mindful reintroduction of only certain devices and apps, suggests Dr. Newport, an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University and the author of the 2019 bestseller “Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World.” 

“You don’t go back to what you did before. You rebuild it from scratch, but this time with intention,” he says. The key is to ensure that “all the tech you have is amplifying something that you really care about.”

Dr. Dedyukhina, who used to be hooked on her phone until about five years ago, says changing her technology use has helped her recover some of her humanity.

“In an age when computers are becoming more powerful,” she says, “we end up behaving more like computers.” 

Today, Dr. Dedyukhina mostly uses an old-school cellphone only for calling and keeps her smartphone turned off and in a drawer. “I suddenly became much more creative, with more space in my head,” she says.

Space for contemplation

Our phones stop our minds from wandering, says Dr. Newport, which might explain why many religious groups have encouraged their followers to limit their technology use. 

“What you see in the world’s wisdom traditions is contemplation. Inward focus is in many ways a key step toward gaining intimations, if not outright revelations, of the divine,” he says. “As soon as you remove comfort with the interior, you lose the basis on which all theological wisdom is based.”

But to Heidi Campbell, tech can be a positive force for religious understanding.

“It’s easy to say technology is good or technology is bad,” says Dr. Campbell, a professor of communications at Texas A&M University who studies religion and digital technology. “It’s another thing to do the hard work of figuring out which is which.”

She argues that such absolutist approaches can unwittingly promote “technological determinism.” 

“It assumes that people are robots and that they don’t have any ability to make decisions,” she says.

For Lent, Dr. Campbell created a website (and Instagram feed) to promote 40 Days of Kindness. “Instead of taking a technological sabbath this Lent,” the site reads, “prayerfully and strategically embrace technology in ways that spread kindness!”

Daniel Castro, vice president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a tech-policy think tank in Washington, D.C., does not oppose taking extended breaks from screens, but reminds us that alarm over tech overuse is primarily a problem of the affluent.

“Even for someone in the gig economy,” he says. “They’re not going to give up their means of income. ... It would be like not paying your bills each month.”

Mr. Castro suggests that those giving up technology don’t frame it as relinquishing a vice. “Think of it as sacrificing something you genuinely enjoy, so that you can appreciate it when you resume using it,” he says.

He also offers an alternative to tech abstinence: “Instead of saying ‘let’s unplug,’ can we ask, ‘Can I be nicer on social media?’”

Reuters

Leader of Joint List party, Ayman Odeh casts his ballot in Haifa together with his sons as Israelis voted in a national election March 2.

In its latest global report, Freedom House notes the many pro-democracy protests last year were a reminder of “the universal yearning for equality.” For 2020, the think tank need not look far for a fresh example of this yearning. On March 2, Israel held an election in which its Arab citizens, about 20% of the population, suddenly awoke to their rights of equality.

Long demonized by Israel’s right wing as a threat to the mainly Jewish state, Arab voters flocked to the polls in numbers not seen in 21 years. A political alliance of four Arab parties, known as the Joint List, also set a record for its representation in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament.

As the third-largest group in the Knesset, the 15 Joint List members – up from 13 – may now have a chance to influence the horse-trading politics expected in forming the next government. Such influence would be unusual in Israel’s 71-year history. In the election, no party won enough seats in the 120-seat chamber to form a majority. In addition, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of the Likud party, is facing the start of a trial for corruption on March 17.

Pundits described the Arab turnout as a political earthquake for Israel. Nearly two-thirds of Israeli Arabs showed up to vote compared with fewer than half in an election last April. An estimated 20,000 Jewish citizens also voted for the Joint List, partly in solidarity against the verbal attacks against Arabs.

Many more Israeli Arabs decided to vote this time because of the racist undertone in the campaign. They also worry about a part of President Donald Trump’s proposed peace plan that calls for some 20 Arab towns and villages to “become part of the State of Palestine.” A large majority of Israeli Arabs prefer to stay in Israel.

In the context of the Middle East, with its half-democracies and nondemocracies, this surge in the Arab vote sets a model for minorities peacefully asserting their legitimacy as full-fledged citizens. Equality is not just something given. It is also something realized, especially in a region whose religions teach that God created all with equal liberty. Israeli Arabs, in reimagining their role as citizens, have grasped that reality.