Cara Salvatore loves a local corner bodega in Brooklyn, its specialty food items, and the cashiers who work there. But the writer and online entrepreneur rarely goes there anymore because its aisles feel too narrow and cramped to maintain social distance from other people. Instead, Mx. Salvatore’s purchases happen online – for just about everything.

“I don’t love letting somebody else pick what produce I get,” Mx. Salvatore says. Even the writer’s parents in Maryland are grocery shopping online now, “which I never expected. They’re in their 70s!”

It’s a similar story in Tacoma, Washington, for Rick and Sarah Daniel, MBA graduates who are not working as they care for Mr. Daniel’s ailing parents. Men’s deodorant? A click away on Amazon Prime. Bulk household items from Costco? A monthly delivery via Instacart, an online delivery service. The only in-person shopping the couple still does is for fresh food. 

The conundrum is the couch.

The Daniels want to get one so they don’t have to rely solely on their antique sofa from the 1800s that needs reupholstering. They’ve looked at new sofas online, but feel uncomfortable buying sight unseen, even with all the fancy 3D imaging on furniture websites. Yet they feel unsafe going into a store to sit on sofas. “We would prefer to wait and shop for that in person, so we can see and touch,” says Ms. Daniel.

Welcome to pandemic shopping 2020, where consumers constrained by health concerns and state and local restrictions on face-to-face commerce have turned most shopping into a sterile contactless experience. We’re still buying stuff, and when it comes to office chairs and web cameras we’re buying more than ever, thanks in part to federal stimulus dollars. And while that stimulus effect is fading, Christmas sales should provide a welcome boost to retailers. 

But this year’s festive shopping season will probably not be a “Miracle on 34th Street” for struggling brick-and-mortar retailers as the biggest gains will go to online platforms like Amazon, whose revenues are already up by more than a third this year. While Black Friday online sales surged by nearly a quarter compared to 2019, traffic at physical stores plunged by more than half, according to separate surveys. The near-term outlook for physical stores is dire: As many as 25,000 could close this year in the United States, nearly triple the closures last year, according to Coresight Research, which also expects a quarter of America’s 1,000 malls to close in the next three to five years. Mall stalwarts like J.C. Penney, Neiman Marcus, and Brooks Brothers have all filed for bankruptcy. 

The silver lining to all this disruption is that consumers and retailers have been jolted out of their old habits, forcing them to experiment with new ways of shopping. Some of these changes will permanently transform the way we shop, much as the advent of department stores did around the time of the Civil War, the adoption of indoor shopping malls after World War II, and the birth of e-commerce in the 1990s.

The difference is that most of those transformations enhanced, or at least preserved, the social aspect of shopping. In the present era of change, that social aspect has all but evaporated. Everyone agrees that online shopping will get bigger, more efficient, and more streamlined, and that the ease of ordering from home will be irresistible. 

But the future of the physical shop, from the big-box outlet near the interstate to the independent home decor store on Main Street, is less clear. Will shopping still be something that we do together, a form of leisure and entertainment? Will it ever become fun again?

Mike Segar/Reuters/File

A grocery picker works in a Peapod grocery distribution center in Jersey City, New Jersey, Aug. 21, 2018. Peapod offers grocery delivery services, which many consumers have turned to amid the pandemic.

***

As a Wall Street retail analyst, Greg Melich spends a lot of time figuring out how and where U.S. consumers are spending their dollars and which companies are best positioned to ring up their sales. He’s tracked the meteoric growth in digital commerce during the pandemic. Take Walmart, the nation’s biggest retailer: Online sales rose 79% in the third quarter. 

Still, Mr. Melich reckons that shopping as entertainment will be back, because most of us want to go back to shopping in person when it feels safe to do so again. “I’m not a believer that all retail goes online. ... People are social animals,” he says. 

The easing of the COVID-19 pandemic would provide short-term relief for shoppers who want to resume their social habits and indulge in what retail experts call “revenge shopping.” 

Ms. Daniel wants to go window-shopping with her mother again; Mr. Daniel wants to browse book and antique stores. “There’s things we’re definitely looking forward to getting back to,” he says.

Even after the pandemic is over, however, four shopping and lifestyle trends will drive the future of retail, according to Mr. Melich, a senior managing director at Evercore ISI, an investment bank. Two of these trends are familiar: online shopping and a hybrid of online and on-site purchases. The other two are more tied to the pandemic and thus more speculative. But they could prove far-reaching in how we live and shop.

One is nesting at home. The other is fleeing density, moving from crowded cities to less-crowded ones or to the suburbs. 

Nesting is likely to continue, Mr. Melich believes, because many Americans prefer to spend more time working from home and are also making fewer trips to restaurants and other public forms of entertainment. 

As a result they’re spending more on their home, creating a surge in sales for hardware and electronics stores, online furniture retailers like Wayfair, and even small entrepreneurs like Pack Matthews, whose Columbia, Missouri, firm sells office chairs meant to accommodate folks who prefer sitting cross-legged.

When the pandemic hit he fretted that sales would drop for handmade chairs that cost $980 and up. Instead, Mr. Matthews saw sales double. Under a deal he has with Google, he offers chairs at a discount to its employees working from home. The pandemic boom has allowed him to move production from a shared makerspace to a dedicated facility. 

“We’re helping folks make the home working environment its healthiest,” he says. 

The other trend is less certain. Early evidence points to some residents exiting New York and San Francisco. Other research finds a surge in temporary moves by urbanites who may be moving to less dense locations to wait out the virus. However, should that movement outlast the pandemic, it could parallel the national exodus to newly built suburbs after World War II.

These two trends could end up boosting retail sales. For roughly two decades, consumers have devoted an increasing share of their disposable income to experiences rather than physical items sold in stores. The pandemic has restricted or shut down venues that cram people together, whether it be airlines and restaurants or concert halls and movie theaters. So if we continue to hunker down at home, then more of our disposable income could wind up in the hands of retailers. 

That would be fine for Gustavo Bottan, a baby boomer and business development director at Northeastern University in Boston. Since the start of the pandemic, he’s grown wary of crowded spaces like movie theaters and is sticking with his TV for now. “I have a large enough screen that I can kind of feel what [the big-screen experience] is at home.”

Not so fast, says Michael Upton, a software engineer in North Chelmsford, Massachusetts, who graduated from college a year ago. “I definitely would go see movies more than anything,” he says. It’s not just movie theaters that he misses during the pandemic. “The community experiences that we have lost – they’re a big part of human nature that we enjoy doing. Imagine going to an amusement park when nobody’s there.”

Ann Hermes/Staff

“The community experiences that we have lost – they’re a big part of human nature that we enjoy doing.” – Michael Upton, software engineer and moviegoer

***

The challenge for retailers is to understand what kinds of communal shopping experiences will attract consumers in the future. Some are doubling down on online and hybrid options, knowing that even after the pandemic recedes there will be some who prefer to shop that way. 

“It’s easier for me to click a few buttons on my phone and get something in two days than to take an Uber to the grocery store,” says Grace Kim, a sophomore at Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. Even buying clothes online has become easier, she says, because sites like Boohoo help customers answer questions about specific brands’ sizes that fit them, the curvature of their hips and belly, and their preferences in loose vs. tight-fitting clothes. 

Ms. Kim still likes shopping in person. But in the future, “it would be less frequent.”

On a recent evening, retail consultant David Bishop placed an online order for curbside pickup at a Target store near Chicago. Curbside pickup, once a niche offering, has become a way of life for many pandemic shoppers wary of exposure to the coronavirus inside stores. It has also been a lifeline for retailers that would otherwise have had to shut down during state or local lockdowns. 

When Mr. Bishop’s notification came that his order was ready, he clicked on an app saying he was on his way and drove to the store. He parked, and a minute later his order of nearly two dozen grocery items had been brought out to his car. “So it’s almost, like, magical,” he says. 

The next day, he worked with another grocer in Minneapolis where the average wait time for a curbside pickup was five minutes. Five minutes may or may not be a long time to wait in a checkout line. But in the competitive world of hybrid shopping, it can feel like an eternity to wait five minutes in your car, especially if you have a young child and you know that other retailers can do the job in a minute. 

“At that level, you start getting to a point where a customer can get frustrated,” says Mr. Bishop, who is a partner at Brick Meets Click, a grocery consultancy in Barrington, Illinois. 

To pull off curbside “magic,” Target and other retailers are investing heavily in sophisticated geolocation and other technology that lets staffers know when the customer’s car is heading to the store, when it enters the parking lot, and when it’s approaching the pickup area. 

Going a step further, Amazon has pioneered cashierless stores, selling meals and snack food in cities like Seattle, Chicago, New York, and San Francisco. When shoppers take an item off the shelf, the system of cameras and sensors automatically charges it to their Amazon account. If they put it back on the shelf, the system credits their account. Once the system scans the Amazon app on the shoppers’ phone, there’s nothing else to scan: no special grocery carts or checkout lines before they leave the store.

Ted S. Warren/AP

An Amazon employee demonstrates how to scan a smartphone code to use at an Amazon Go Grocery store in Seattle, Feb. 21, 2020.

Of course, such technologies involve huge investments by multinational corporations, which raise privacy and competitive issues. Location tracking already happens under the radar, but in the hands of big companies it may draw additional government scrutiny. In 2019, Facebook paid a $5 billion fine for deceiving customers about their control over privacy. 

A House of Representatives subcommittee recently concluded that Amazon, along with Facebook, Apple, and Google, holds monopoly power. It found that Amazon holds sway over half or more of U.S. online retail sales by dominating the third-party sellers on its site. Amazon argues it isn’t a monopoly and has no incentive to undermine the sellers on its platforms. 

Some shoppers are also wary of Amazon’s growing clout. A recent survey of shoppers found that a third believe the company uses questionable practices, though nearly all respondents agreed that the company puts its consumers first. 

“I try really hard not to buy from Amazon, because I feel that it’s really hurting our small communities,” says Betsy Morris, a retired baby boomer in Huntington Beach, California. “I always look locally first and if I can’t find it, I’ll go to Amazon.”

***

Just as the pandemic is global, so too are the trends at work in the retail sector. Many of the pressures facing American brick-and-mortar stores are also roiling those in rich countries in Europe and Asia. For hints of what the future may hold, retail experts say, look to China.

That’s partly because Chinese consumers have embraced digital commerce more quickly than Americans have, leapfrogging the mall era to shop on their smartphones. China was also the first to experience the coronavirus and among the first to emerge from it. 

“China is now into the new normal, as it were, the first country in the recovery phase of COVID, and it serves as a signpost to the rest of the world,” says Kanaiya Parekh, a Hong Kong-based retail expert for Bain & Co. 

Several retail trends in China are recognizable to U.S. retailers: the move from in-store to online sales; growth in spending on health and wellness, everything from fresh fruit to sporting goods; and what Mr. Parekh calls a flight to value. Globally, luxury brand sales are down this year. In China they continue to grow, but cheaper local brands are growing even faster. 

Chinese online retailers led by behemoth Alibaba are also trying to make internet shopping fun by livestreaming celebrities selling goods. Livestreaming product demonstrations and celebrity endorsements is nothing new, but China, where nearly 1 in 4 retail sales are done online, has turned it into a juggernaut. 

Last year on Nov. 11 – China’s so-called Singles Day for online shopping – retailers sold about $60 billion worth of goods, says Mr. Parekh. That’s more than Amazon sells in an entire month. And livestream sales accounted for 7% of the total. This year on Singles Day, which actually stretched over several days, sales doubled to $120 billion and livestreaming made up 10% of the total.

Livestream companies featured personalities such as Li Jiaqi, China’s “King of Lipstick,” and even retired U.S. basketball legend Earvin “Magic” Johnson, who sold hemp- and cannabidiol-based creams on Alibaba’s Tmall platform. 

As in China, U.S. retailers are trying to make the online experience easier, more efficient, and less intimidating, including for personalized items, such as clothing and groceries. Still, many consumers report that the fun is still missing. 

Ann Hermes/Staff

The sun sets over cars in the parking lot of Walmart’s Intelligent Retail Lab on Nov. 19, 2020, in Levittown, New York. The facility is the only Walmart AI lab location of its kind. Walmart’s e-commerce sales rose 79% in the third quarter.

Ms. Morris, the retiree in Huntington Beach, still insists on grocery shopping in person. “Honestly, that’s the only social interaction I have. It’s fun,” she says. 

It should be even more fun when all the stores are able to reopen, she adds. “It has been like a year that we haven’t gone to a home goods store or a home decor store. We’re all going to go out and say: What is everyone doing? What do houses look like? Is gray out for a paint color?”

Mr. Bottan, the baby boomer in Boston, offers a different perspective. “I have never, ever liked shopping,” he says. “Going to the mall, looking for this or that, I hate that with a passion.” So for him, ordering online for home delivery is something of a relief.

But even he waxes poetic over the hours he’s spent in bookstores like Barnes & Noble. “You have a Starbucks there. You can browse,” he says. “You can go with your kids and read a book. They’re not selling a book; they’re selling an experience.”

***

Mx. Salvatore of Brooklyn, the writer who buys and sells almost exclusively online, sells artsy homemade picture frames at Duskshaped. But they (Mx. Salvatore identifies as nonbinary) dream of opening a physical shop in the future, a place where shoppers can linger and browse. 

Online retailers “put all those algorithms in place to try to show you things that you wouldn’t have discovered otherwise,” they say. “But I don’t think it compares to the experience of walking into a store and seeing things you wouldn’t have seen otherwise.”  

Ann Hermes/Staff

“I don’t think [online shopping] compares to the experience of walking into a store and seeing things you wouldn’t have seen otherwise.” – Cara Salvatore, online entrepreneur

That’s hardly an old-fashioned view. One of the myths in retail is that because younger customers are comfortable with digital technologies, they’re less interested in shopping in person. In fact, researchers have found that by a wide margin both millennials and the generation born after 1995 prefer brick-and-mortar shopping to buying online.

“I’m not really buying into” online grocery shopping, says Mr. Upton, the software engineer. “There’s something very tactile about food, to see what you’re eating.”

It’s perhaps the melding of physical and online shopping – the hybrid or multichannel category – that could spur some of the biggest retail innovations over the next few years. 

For most of history, people could only shop one way: in a physical location. In the 1870s, Montgomery Ward introduced catalog shopping to the general public, a novelty made possible by the crisscrossing of railroads across the continent. In the 1990s, e-commerce emerged on the back of the internet, a technology seeded by military research dollars. 

Now in the pandemic era, retailers like Target are working on making ordering online and picking up at the store a seamless process. And that could be just the start. Other hybrid models will emerge, especially as retailers wring delays out of the system, says Kirthi Kalyanam, executive director of the Retail Management Institute at Santa Clara University in California.

Amazon, which already provides free two-day delivery to Prime members, now offers one-day delivery nationwide for a fee and same-day delivery on select items in several cities. Its Amazon Fresh grocery service lets shoppers pick a two- to three-hour time slot for delivery.

Jason Redmond/Reuters

A woman walks through an Amazon Go Grocery store in Seattle, Feb. 21, 2020. Amazon has opened several convenience stores using an app and cashierless technology.

Yummy, a hybrid grocer in Los Angeles, is going one better. It now offers to deliver groceries to select LA neighborhoods and suburbs within 30 minutes of an online order. The fee is $6.99 for a minimum order of $14.99 – or free if you spend $125 or more. And in China, several delivery companies are also moving to 30-minute delivery for online orders, says Mr. Parekh.

Stores will increasingly become places to showcase products rather than to stock inventory, says Mr. Kalyanam. Online retailers will re-create their online persona in a physical space: Think Apple stores or Lululemon. And consumers will have multiple ways to buy their goods. Stores might not even carry inventory, but promise to deliver your purchase from a nearby warehouse in a half-hour.

“Fast forward three or four years, you’re going to have ... five, six different big, familiar ways of shopping,” says Mr. Kalyanam. “Shopping as fun will come back, and bricks-and-mortar will be stronger than ever before for shopping as fun.”

Molly Riley/AP/File

The new Texas GOP chairman, former congressman and retired Army officer Lt. Col. Allen West, shown here speaking at a Faith and Freedom Coalition Road to Majority event in 2014, sees politics as a war between conservatism and “progressive socialism.”

As dark fell over Taji, Iraq, on an August evening in 2003, Lt. Col. Allen West – angry and afraid – decided to take matters into his own hands.

His battalion had been ambushed several times, and now it had information of another imminent plot to attack them – and an alleged accomplice in custody. 

“I came here for two reasons, to get the information I need or to kill you,” Colonel West, his 9 mm pistol drawn and resting on his knee, told the alleged accomplice, according to a U.S. Army investigation of the incident.

But with each denial of knowledge of the plan by the alleged accomplice, local police officer Yehiya Hamoodi, the rumored attack grew more imminent and deadly in Colonel West’s mind. He ordered everyone outside. Minutes later, he was pushing Mr. Hamoodi’s head into a clearing barrel – a sand-filled container used to clear ammunition from weapons. He put the pistol a foot from Mr. Hamoodi’s head and fired a round into the barrel.  

“The man inside me probably did want to inflict hurt,” Colonel West told an investigator, “but the soldier and leader just wanted the pertinent intelligence for the safety of my soldiers.”

To this day, the incident – which dislodged faulty information – vexes ethicists and academics. It’s a case study in Army officer training for how to navigate moral gray areas in a war zone. But even when a situation is gray, Colonel West has a penchant for viewing it in black and white. 

He wasn’t court-martialed, but the incident brought his Army career to an end – while launching his political career as a conservative cause célèbre for sticking to his principles despite the consequences.

Now, as the new chairman of the Texas Republican party, Colonel West’s unbending commitment to conservative principle has become a window on how Trumpism will survive the Trump presidency, say party regulars watching in astonishment as well as grassroots Republicans watching in righteous support.

A Tea Party forerunner of Trumpian disruption, he criticized the president in 2017 but now backs him to the hilt. Last week, within an hour of the U.S. Supreme Court dismissing a Texas lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump’s election defeat in four states, he blasted the ruling, suggesting that “law-abiding states should bond together and form a Union.” He has critiqued outright calls for secession – “America needs Texas to lead, not secede,” he also said last weekend – but as the Republican Party fractures nationally over Mr. Trump’s election defeat, he is staking a claim to be a vocal, earnest leader of the party’s grassroots Trumpian wing.

“Allen West is tailor-made for this moment,” says Fred Wellman, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who is now a senior adviser at the Lincoln Project, a group of Republicans opposing Mr. Trump. 

“His political approach to this day [is] ‘take no prisoners,’” he adds. “He doesn’t work with anyone. He’s constantly making threats. ... Trumpism rises, and here he is, state chair of a large state.”

With a precise high-and-tight military haircut and wire-rimmed spectacles, the conservative warrior presents seriously in measured tones and frequent historical references. But the content of his zero-sum view of politics – as a war between conservatism and “progressive socialism” – fires up restless grassroots Texans more than it does the trustees of the old Bush “compassionate” conservatism. 

An African American born in a Blacks-only Atlanta hospital, he grew up in the same neighborhood that decades earlier produced Martin Luther King Jr. But he has called himself “liberals’ worst nightmare” and has rebranded the state GOP with a slogan, “We are the storm,” linked to the QAnon conspiracy theory (though the state party disputes that connection).  

His shoot-from-the-hip critiques are aimed equally at “socialist” Democrats and “traitorous” Republicans who would consort with them. And while the majority of Texas Republicans may not share that Manichaean view of U.S. politics, it’s a pillar of the Trump base.

“West wants to say you’re either with us or against us,” says Brandon Rottinghaus, a University of Houston political scientist. “That sends a clear signal that Donald Trump’s influence on American politics continues.”

A Florida “thorn”

Like one of his heroes, Davy Crockett, Colonel West likes to say he’s another Tennessee Volunteer who followed the call to Texas. He graduated from the University of Tennessee before joining the Army, where a glittering 22-year career included tours in the first and second Gulf Wars and a Bronze Star, among other decorations.

Crockett and another of West’s heroes – the Spartan King Leonidas – both perished in heroic last stands, and it’s this angle that best illustrates how Colonel West views his job in Texas and nationally. The political marketplace of ideas is, in his view, more a battlefield of ideas – not a dialogue, or even an argument, but a conflict.

“Right now what we see are two conflicting philosophies of governance, two conflicting ideological agendas,” Colonel West told the Monitor in a September interview. “People are truly ready to get out there and make sure that [conservatives] hold on to Texas.”

A state party chair is supposed to help the party gain or stay in power, but Colonel West has put his personal stamp on the job. Where past chairs kept a low profile, recruiting candidates and keeping party finances healthy, he makes regular appearances at rallies and on cable news.  

While he most often rails against Democrats, he’s fueled his rise in Texas by criticizing the state’s Republican leaders for what he calls the “tyranny” of Gov. Greg Abbott’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic: “My criticisms of Governor Abbott have nothing to do with the person. It has everything to do with the fact that we should not be ruled with orders, mandates, edicts, and decrees.”  

But in terms of uproar generated, Colonel West’s attacks on the governor pale compared with his November criticism of Dade Phelan, a Republican state representative from East Texas, as “a Republican political traitor” for seeking “affirmation from progressive socialist Democrats.”

State representatives were quick to hit back at Colonel West with one of the most potent political attacks in Texas: not being a true Texan.

“Allen West [needs] to be bought a one-way bus ticket back to Florida,” said Dennis Bonnen, the outgoing Republican House speaker, in a radio interview. “The problem is that I don’t think Florida will take him.”

Colonel West’s approach also runs counter to how the GOP has been able to comfortably hold political power in the state for 25 years, some Texas Republicans say. Making a heroic stand against “progressive socialism” in Texas is all well and good, but the reality is that Republicans have been winning voters just fine already – in part because they have worked with Democrats without compromising their fundamental principles.

“Colonel West is certainly focused on the grassroots perspective of the party,” says Jamie McWright, president of the Associated Republicans of Texas, adding that they need to focus on issues that matter most to all Texans. “If we do, we’ll continue to win.”

While the state GOP as a whole has drifted to the right of the business-friendly, “compassionate” conservatism of the Bush family, it has declined to push the envelope in governing. Bombastic ultraconservatives have always been a feature of Texas politics, says Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas, Austin, but they haven’t been “overly successful.”

“I’m not saying he’s not important or relevant,” he says, but Colonel West “wants to claim a majoritarian status within the Republican Party, and to my mind it’s not clear that that’s true. ... Allen West is a thorn in the side of many people. My suspicion is they’d rather pluck it than support him.”

“All business”

Colleen Stolberg was there at the colonel’s political start in southeast Florida, and it embarrasses her still that she spelled the newcomer’s name wrong – Alan West – on publicity material. 

As president of the Broward County Federation of Republican Women, her group was getting tired of cookie-cutter speeches from local candidates. She asked Colonel West to say something different, and he obliged: A talk about the women he served with in the military and the differences they’d faced in the countries he’d served in.

“He had everybody sold,” recalls Ms. Stolberg, who decided on the spot to volunteer for him. “He’s one of those people who will stand up for what he believes in and it doesn’t matter what the consequences are. ... If he ran for president tomorrow, I’d probably work for him again.”

“Not your average politician.” It’s a compliment often heard about Colonel West – and another trait he seems to share with President Trump.

“I’m going up [to Washington, D.C.,] and I’m going to drain that cesspool,” he said at one April 2010 rally, foreshadowing the 45th president.  And in his one term in Congress, from 2010 to 2012, he was committed to his ideological mission.

“He was all business,” says Tom Rooney, a former Florida Republican congressman who served with him on the House Armed Services Committee. “On the House floor he’d talk to you about issues, but he wasn’t a back slapper.”

And, he adds, in trying to compromise with some lawmakers on the Hill “you don’t know how to get from Point A to Point B. … You may never get to Point B with Allen, because he’s set in his ways, but at least you know where he stands.” 

Southeast Florida was an ideologically diverse area at the time, and Colonel West may have lasted longer in the House save for his consistently favoring principle over compromise. Of 11 bills he sponsored, two passed, neither with Democratic cosponsors.

In Texas, frustrated grassroots Republicans hope his rigid conservative ideology will force state leaders to finally fight for their interests and concerns – like banning abortion, reinforcing traditional views of sexuality, and cracking down on unauthorized immigrants. 

“The energy to keep Texas red didn’t come from Texans who want purple government,” says Luke Macias, a conservative political strategist.

“Republicans in Texas are ready for their elected officials to actually deliver conservative results, he adds. "Chairman West recognizes that and has rightfully [become] an ambassador of the grassroots.”

Colonel West would certainly be an earnest ambassador. Had he been willing to compromise on some of his values, he might still be in the Army or Congress. As it stands, with a constituency comprised exclusively of Republicans, he hopes to maintain – and expand – that grassroots base as a new standard-bearer of the Republican Party’s Trumpian wing.

“I would rather be in a position where I could do something to support candidates, where I could do something to support Texas overall,” he says.

Editor's note: This story has been updated to clarify a statement by Jamie McWright, president of the Associated Republicans of Texas, that the party should focus on issues that matter most to all Texans. And the regional name of Mr. West's southeast Florida congressional district has been corrected.

David Grunfeld/The Advocate/AP

The New Orleans Police Department investigates a double homicide on Arbor Drive in New Orleans East, April 19, 2020. Murder rates in the United States have surged this year.

After police discovered Huong Nguyen’s body in a car trunk earlier this year in New Orleans East, suspicion fell on her brother.

After being spotted on a surveillance camera walking away from his sister’s car the night she disappeared, Hoa Nguyen has been charged and, if convicted, could spend the rest of his life in prison.

For all its singular tragedy, Ms. Nguyen’s death is part of a tide of gun violence rising from New Orleans to Lubbock, Texas. Coming off a record low in homicides in 2019, New Orleans saw its rate spike by over 50% this year. It is not, by any stretch, an outlier. Lubbock doubled its murder rate, so far, from 2019 to 2020.

To be sure, overall crime has dropped dramatically in the U.S. since the late 1990s. But the 2020 homicide rate “now exceeds the rates of the late ’80s and ’90s, before the big drop,” says Richard Rosenfeld, lead author of “Pandemic, Social Unrest and Crime in US Cities,” a new report. “This round of crime increase is unprecedented.”

This year, 51 cities of various sizes across the U.S. saw an average 35% jump in murder from 2019 to 2020 – a “historically awful” development, says New Orleans-based crime analyst Jeff Asher, who crunched those numbers. A different study looking at 21 U.S. cities found 610 more murders in those jurisdictions this year over last year. In those cities, gun assaults increased by 10% over 2019.

SOURCE:

Rosenfeld, Richard, and Ernesto Lopez. 2020. Pandemic, Social Unrest, and Crime in U.S. Cities: November 2020 Update. Washington, D.C.: Council on Criminal Justice (December). Metropolitan Crime Commission. Crimealytics

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Karen Norris/Staff

Those who want to read partisanship into the trend will be disappointed. Like the pandemic, murder doesn’t discriminate by political affiliation: Cities with Democratic mayors are seeing the same increases in lethal violence as cities with Republican mayors.

“We’re seeing it pretty much across the board in places like New Orleans ... but also in smaller places like Omaha, Nebraska, that don’t typically have a lot of murders,” says Mr. Asher. “It’s really not something that’s got a lot of easy explanations.”

Calls for service and arrests in cities like New Orleans have plummeted in a pandemic year, though underreporting could be a factor in those drops.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/File

A “Thou shalt not kill” sign is nailed to a pole in the Third Ward, one of the neighborhoods with the highest homicide rate, in New Orleans on Jan. 29, 2019. New Orleans is one of 51 U.S. cities where homicides spiked during the 2020 pandemic.

One nonviolent crime that’s rising is shoplifting. An estimated 54 million Americans are struggling with hunger this year, a nearly 50% rise since 2019. High joblessness, the end of federal pandemic aid, and a relative lack of a safety net in the U.S. are leading to high rates of despair, experts say.

The pandemic’s grating effects and the electorate’s rebuke of a norm-busting presidency have dominated the national psyche. As Americans have bought guns at record rates, some research suggests a causal increase in those weapons being used against others.

The biggest spike in gun violence, notes Mr. Rosenfeld, came in the weeks of social unrest in late spring and summer after George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis.

What’s more, there is evidence that the bulk of the violence is occurring in poorer working class neighborhoods, such as New Orleans East, that have been hit hardest by the pandemic’s economic downturn and the backlash to calls for police reform.

Police activity – or lack of it – “is more likely a symptom of this concept of police legitimacy, where police pull back because people are upset and questioning their legitimacy,” says Mr. Asher in New Orleans. “And when people don’t believe that the police are going to be a natural arbiter, perhaps they’re more likely to take things into their hands – more retribution killings. But ... I’m skeptical that the explanation for why murder is going up everywhere is because police have somehow changed.”

After all, “murder is often mundane,” says Kim Davies, a researcher at Augusta University, usually involving people known to one another, often over insults or resentments fueled by alcohol and other drugs, the use of which have risen during the pandemic.

Interpersonal toxicity, she says, can be exacerbated by more foundational shifts – such as once in a century-level health crisis and a bitter election in which a peaceful transition has come under threat.

“When society’s norms and values are in flux or have disappeared or disintegrated, people don’t know how to behave,” says Ms. Davies, a sociologist who studies the dynamics of violent crime. “It’s a kind of normlessness that gives way to ‘Nothing matters.’ [The murder increase] is similar to spikes in suicide when we’ve had economic depressions. But nothing like this has ever happened.”

That unique dynamic also gives researchers hope that 2020 becomes a statistical anomaly.

“The strategy to reduce violence is, first and foremost, to subdue the pandemic,” says Mr. Rosenfeld, a professor emeritus and criminologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. “The second is to redouble smart policing activity. And the third is to take the essence of police reform seriously, because if police aren’t able to repair the relationship with communities in the cities that have experienced this uptick, I don’t think any crime reductions that might occur from more policing are going to last long.”

For many, it was a moment of unity and hope. Representatives from nations around the world had gathered in Paris in December 2015 and agreed to take drastic measures to curb climate change. 

But lurking behind the Paris Agreement was the understanding that those ambitious plans would not actually achieve the agreed-upon international goal of limiting global warming to an increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius, says Alden Meyer, a senior associate with E3G, a European climate change think tank.

There was an “ambition gap,” he says, so the parties agreed to reconvene and update their goals every five years. 

On Saturday, the Paris Agreement’s fifth anniversary, participating global leaders gathered once again – this time virtually – to reaffirm their commitment to the accord and to put forth even bolder plans.

“It’s all about putting some more meat on the bone,” says Rachel Cleetus, policy director with the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. It’s about “the countries not just making aspirational pledges, but backing them up with credible, ambitious policy plans domestically to make sure that they can meet their international commitments.”

“An important step forward”

The Climate Ambition Summit 2020 indeed delivered more tangible plans to reach lofty goals from many international leaders. But, experts say, there is still work to be done.

“The summit has now sent strong signals that more countries and more businesses are ready to take the bold climate action on which our future security and prosperity depend,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said on Saturday. “Today was an important step forward, but it’s not yet enough. Let’s not forget that we are still on track to an increase of temperature of 3 degrees at least in the end of the century, which would be catastrophic.”

For Saturday’s summit, 71 countries submitted more ambitious national climate plans. Many included significantly more aggressive goals than were outlined in Paris, and 45 focused on benchmarks for 2030. The European Union, for example, has now set higher goals than the ones it agreed to in Paris, promising to reduce net carbon emissions 55% from 1990 levels by 2030, a target that Mr. Meyer calls “a significant step up in ambition.”

Several countries pledged to go net-zero by the middle of the century – or sooner, in many cases. Perhaps most notably, Group of 20 countries like China, Japan, South Korea, the EU, and Argentina have joined that group.

Johanna Geron/AP

European Council President Charles Michel (center) speaks during a media conference at an EU summit in Brussels, Dec. 11, 2020. European Union leaders reached a deal to cut the bloc's greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55% by the end of the decade compared with 1990 levels.

When science meets politics

Since the Paris accord, some countries have taken strides in reducing their emissions. India, for example, has gone from being a growing source of global emissions to being on track to meet international plans to limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius, according to the Climate Action Tracker. The countries that have made notable progress tend to be smaller ones with minimal carbon emissions to start with.

But global carbon emissions have continued to rise, and most of the progress made in the last half a decade is hard to measure. 

There has been a move away from coal in much of the West, coinciding with falling costs of renewables, says Dr. Cleetus, making those energy sources competitive with fossil fuels in many parts of the world. 

“We know how to do 80% of emissions reduction,” says Katharine Mach, associate professor at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science and a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report and the U.S. Fourth National Climate Assessment.

“Technologically we know how to do it, economically, it’s the right choice, the lower cost option,” in more and more places, she says. “That we can get most of the way there, to the super aggressive targets, based on the technologies that exist now, for me, is always very hopeful.”

But this knowledge, she says, isn’t necessarily easy to translate into climate action. There’s politics to contend with. 

“Climate models usually have been just physics of how the science works, or in the solutions model space, it’s just straight economics,” she says. “In between the two is how societies actually work.”

Britta Pedersen/dpa/AP

Activists light candles showing the slogan "Fight for 1 Point 5" in front of the Brandenburg Gate during a protest of the Fridays for Future movement on the fifth anniversary of the signing of the Paris Agreement, in Berlin, Dec. 11, 2020.

A fickle friend

To Michael Mann, professor of atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State University and a lead author on the Observed Climate Variability and Change chapter of the IPCC Third Scientific Assessment Report, “ambition is a close cousin of optimism and hope.”

“Every bit of additional warming does damage, so we can never truly be too ambitious,” he writes in an email. “But we must also recognize the political constraints we’re operating under and work to achieve progress that is possible under those constraints.”

A big concern for Paris Agreement participants and climate change activists is the absence of action from some of the biggest emitters, like Australia and the United States. The U.S. emerged as a leader in climate pledges five years ago, but with the nation pulling out of the agreement under President Donald Trump, that changed sharply. 

Now, President-elect Joe Biden, who made climate change a central part of his campaign, has said he plans to rejoin the Paris Agreement. But much of the world is waiting to see what can actually be achieved when he takes office in January.

“The world is painfully aware of the yo-yo nature of American politics” and the partisan split, says Mr. Meyer. “The question people overseas have is, what can the U.S. deliver, given the political tensions?”

Curious minds deserve insightful books, and there was no shortage of excellent titles this year. Here is the Monitor’s list of superlative nonfiction books published in 2020, from histories to memoirs and everything in between.

“Caste” by Isabel Wilkerson

In her stirring follow-up to “The Warmth of Other Suns,” Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson persuasively argues that racism alone does not explain America’s social divisions. Rather, the United States ought to be understood as having a race-based caste system, one whose hierarchies, though artificial, are remarkably enduring. 

“Demagogue” by Larry Tye

Courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

“Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy” by Larry Tye, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 597 pp.

Bestselling biographer Larry Tye writes a long and comprehensive biography of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the polarizing spearhead of the Red Scare of the 1950s and – Tye contends – the origin of some disturbing features in our 21st-century political landscape.

“Warhol” by Blake Gopnik

“In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes,” Andy Warhol is credited with saying. But there is nothing fleeting about his legacy as an artist, filmmaker, and self-created pop-culture phenomenon. His life and work are examined in detail in Blake Gopnik’s biography. Warhol devotees will rejoice, and more casual readers will receive an education in all things Andy.

“Union” by Colin Woodard

Colin Woodard tells not the story of how America became a nation, but rather of how America crafted its own version of its national history, and how that national mythology has changed over the decades. 

“Stories of the Sahara” by Sanmao

Courtesy of Bloomsbury Publishing

“Stories of the Sahara” by Sanmao, translated from the Chinese by Mike Fu, Bloomsbury, 416 pp.

As a Chinese woman born in 1943, Sanmao was a pioneering global citizen. These 20 essays about living in one of the harshest areas of the world in the 1970s are testimony to her audacity and courage.

“Just Us” by Claudia Rankine

Claudia Rankine follows her prize-winning “Citizen: An American Lyric” with a brilliant and timely examination of whiteness in America. This consciousness-raising, bravura combination of personal essays, poems, photographs, and cultural commentary works on so many levels and is a skyscraper in the literature on racism.

“Dark Mirror” by Barton Gellman

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Barton Gellman writes an insider account of the breaking of Edward Snowden’s story and its wider implications for the modern world, all told in prose as gripping as a spy thriller.

“Cross of Snow” by Nicholas A. Basbanes

Courtesy of Penguin Random House

“Cross of Snow: A Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow” by Nicholas A. Basbanes, Alfred A. Knopf, 465 pp.

The poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow aren’t in fashion today, but in the first major biography of the fabled New England poet in many years, Nicholas A. Basbanes argues that Longfellow is making a comeback. His exhaustively researched account of Longfellow’s career should give that reappraisal a boost.

“Becoming Wild” by Carl Safina

Carl Safina looks at three species – the sperm whale, the scarlet macaw, and the chimpanzee – to chart all the ways they build and sustain their societies. He explores how those cultures echo and differ from our own.

“The Golden Thread” by Ravi Somaiya

U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld was negotiating an end to the Congolese civil war when he died in a plane crash in 1961. To this day, many believe he was assassinated. Journalist Ravi Somaiya explores one of the most compelling mysteries of the Cold War in this grim and absorbing book. 

“Abe” by David S. Reynolds

Abraham Lincoln had less than a year of formal education; he has often been portrayed as inexperienced and unprepared to lead. David S. Reynolds’ monumental, reverential biography rejects that narrative, arguing that Lincoln’s immersion in the high and low culture of 19th-century America, along with his deep moral convictions, equipped him to steer the Union through the Civil War.

“Eleanor” by David Michaelis

This riveting, cinematic biography of America’s longest-serving first lady spans Eleanor Roosevelt’s lonely childhood, her frosty marriage to FDR, their White House years, her intimate relationships outside their marriage, and her widowhood, during which she became an advocate for human rights.

“Veritas” by Ariel Sabar

Penguin Random House

“Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife” by Ariel Sabar, Doubleday, 416 pp.

In 2012, a religion scholar announced a discovery: an ancient papyrus fragment that suggested that Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene may have been married. Expanding on his 2016 article for The Atlantic, Ariel Sabar digs into the story of the papyrus and the couple who tried to pass it off as real.

“The Adventurer’s Son” by Roman Dial

Renowned biologist and explorer Roman Dial searches for his 27-year-old son, who has gone missing in the jungles of Costa Rica. Part memoir, part mystery, “The Adventurer’s Son” is a story of a father’s love – for his son, and for the natural world. 

Reuters

A protester holds a placard during a demonstration against suspected corruption in the response of the Kenyan government to the coronavirus disease.

Ten years ago on Dec. 17, a popular protest broke out in Tunisia against a corrupt regime. It not only felled a dictator and inspired similar revolts in the Arab world, but it also set a model for “smartphone revolutions,” or bottom-up rebellions driven mainly by young people organized through social media. (The iPhone had been invented only three years earlier.) In more than a dozen countries, from Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe, the uprisings of the past decade have had a similar demand: honest and open governance. 

On the 10th anniversary of Tunisia’s revolution, it is worth asking: Has this new style of anti-corruption protest achieved much?

The record remains mixed. In many countries, such as Brazil, Sudan, Algeria, and Armenia, heads of state were forced out. After some protests, the small economic injustices that triggered them – such as hikes in transit fare or a tax on WhatsApp – were resolved. In more than 30 countries, anti-corruption agencies have been set up, although many have been stymied by entrenched elites. In many countries, either an autocrat remains in power or democracy struggles to curb graft. In Zimbabwe, one strongman fell and another took his place.

Despite the setbacks or slow change, the protests have shifted attitudes for a generation. “The revolution showed me that everything is possible,” one young Tunisian woman, Ameni Ghimaji, told Agence France-Presse. In Tunisia, nearly two-thirds of people now “think ordinary people can make a difference in the fight against corruption,” according to Transparency International. And under the country’s new democracy, regular dialogue between political parties is a norm. Yet protests continue, mainly to demand jobs. Corruption is still prevalent.

For change to stick, societies need to be ready when opportunities arise. A new study by the Open Society Foundations on the support needed for anti-corruption reformers notes that “certain political moments create new possibilities for progress.” Such junctures “are triggered by some combination of events. ... Once open, [they] do not last forever; they are temporary shifts in political possibilities.” 

Success against corruption has long come in fits and starts. In South Africa, for example, mass protests against corruption in 2017 helped lead to the resignation of President Jacob Zuma. His successor, Cyril Ramaphosa, vowed to rid the ruling African National Congress party of “all bad tendencies.” That effort reached a significant milestone in November when ANC Secretary-General Ace Magashule was charged with 21 counts of fraud, corruption, and money laundering. 

Days after the charges were laid, however, President Ramaphosa rebuffed demands by opposition parties to detail his government’s clean-up strategy. Allegations of corruption against ANC figures, he said, were matters to be handled within the party. Mr. Magashule remains in his post and his case has been postponed until next year. Without successful prosecutions and broad legislative reforms, South Africa’s window of opportunity for credible anti-corruption reform is at risk of closing.

One African leader who did make some progress against corruption during her time in office was Liberia’s Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa’s first and only elected female leader. She focused on restoring honor to public service. In a recent essay in The Economist, Ms. Sirleaf argued that “political leaders must make government service a realistic, accessible and genuinely prestigious career choice for talented young people. We have to begin with the premise that government can and does work.”

Over the past decade, citizens in countries that saw social media-driven protests against corruption now realize that a moral revolution displayed on the streets requires the creation of institutional guardrails against greed. Tunisia, for example, is one of the few Arab countries that now allows individuals to present cases of corruption and make requests for access to official information in court. 

The smartphone revolutions remain largely unfinished. But the mental breakthroughs are real and the course ahead is becoming clearer. These are evolutions, not momentary episodes. A new generation has seen that good governance is not just an aspiration but an individual right.