History Readings

In nine years, countless Republican primary voters have moved from voting for Trump in spite of his transgressions to rejecting anyone who doesn’t transgress.

If you’re not transgressive, you’re suspicious. Decency is countercultural in the Republican Party. It’s seen as a rebuke of Trump.

While many decent people remain — and represent the hope for future reform — Trump’s Republican Party has become a magnet for eccentrics and conspiracy theorists of all stripes

Trump has set the course of the Republican Party’s cultural river for more than nine years. Fewer and fewer resisters remain, and they’re growing increasingly exhausted and besieged

Indeed, Trump in his diabolical shrewdness knows how to build and maintain his own base

He’s shed the Republican Party’s traditional commitment to life. He’ll sprint away from any policy or principle that he believes might cost him power. At the same time, he watches his crowd roar when he demonizes immigrants (MAGA’s true north star) and he sees “red-pilled” young men rally to his side when he punches hard and never backs down.

Leaders don’t simply enact policies; they dictate the cultures of the institutions they lead

I’ve compared the cultural power of a leader to setting the course of a river. Defying or contradicting the leader’s ethos is like swimming against the current — yes, you can do that for a time, but eventually you get exhausted and either have to swim to the bank and leave, or you’re swept downstream, just like everyone else.

the “crank realignment.”

The mere suggestion that Republican primary voters can and should do better is greeted by scorn and contempt.

Both parties have always been vulnerable to nominating or electing the occasional crank, but Donald Trump’s ascendance meant that a crank led the party, and the best way to join with him is to imitate him.

That’s how leaders change institutions. They make them into images of themselves.

In this case, Trump has done so explicitly. Almost all the worst figures in the Republican Party have ridden Trump endorsements to the top of their local pyramids. Robinson received Trump’s endorsement and swamped his primary opposition. Trump even called him “Martin Luther King on steroids.”

It’s possible that the Republican Party is simply too far gone, at least for now. A primary electorate that chooses Robinson over more reasonable candidates by 45 points — and a party that blames “the left” for revealing that he’s even worse than anyone knew — does not seem ready to change.

. All they needed was some cheap land and some cheap labor, and a railroad or highway to sell their products to the big cities and beyond, and they were good to go. The cheap labor was often immigrant labor from Europe.

Another big reason is job opportunities. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, American industry dispersed out of the big cities, aided by new highways and railroads. Factories plunked themselves down in small towns all across the heartland of America, and small cities grew up around them. Most of these factories were in pretty simple, labor-intensive industries — food processing, lumber processing, metals manufacturing

So why do a bunch of immigrants suddenly decide to descend on one American town or another? One is just word of mouth through ethnic networks — if one or two Somali families move to a town in Maine and find it’s quite nice, they may tell all of their Somali friends

If you’re a poor immigrant from a low-income country like Honduras, or Somalia, or Haiti, or Laos, or even the poorer parts of Mexico, the chance to live in a first-world country like America and work in a relatively clean, relatively safe factory for $14 an hour is the chance of a lifetime. You’ve really made it, if you can do that

That left the small-town factories without anyone to hire. Without labor, a labor-intensive business just goes bust. So they had basically two choices — go out of business, or find someone who was willing to work hard, day in and day out, at what most young Americans would consider a soul-crushing dead-end job

And of course there’s only one kind of person in America who will show up at a meatpacking plant or metal factory in a small midwestern town and treat it as if it’s the greatest opportunity in the world: an immigrant, without much education, usually from a low-income country.

But in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Americans — especially younger Americans — started to move away from these towns. Whose American dream is to stay in their small Midwestern town and work in the local meatpacking plant? Young people with even a modicum of talent, ambition, and wanderlust packed up and moved to New York City, or Chicago, or Los Angeles, etc.

If you think immigrants get “dumped” on small midwestern towns, you probably need to adjust your mental image. It’s not the government causing a bunch of Somalis to move to Lewiston or a bunch of Haitians to move to Springfield

it’s simply America’s freedom of movement and free enterprise at work. The people of an immigrant group decided to move to a town — usually from elsewhere in the U.S. — and local businesses decided to hire and recruit them. It’s all just the private sector and individual freedom at work here — the furthest possible thing from communism or socialism.

In fact, the only way you could prevent this sort of mass “flooding” or “dumping” of low-skilled immigrants into small heartland towns would be to either A) keep them from coming into the country at all, or B) institute some kind of communist-style internal mobility restrictions.

because immigrants tend to concentrate in specific locations — mainly to be around people who speak the same language — you’d have to essentially cut off most or all low-skilled immigration in order to make sure that no towns in America got “flooded” with immigrants. Again, this is exactly what the MAGA people want to do.

Would this be worth it? After all, these “floods” of immigration are just about the only thing that can save a small town in the American heartland.

You can see that the number of declining places has accelerated in recent years. It now includes big swathes of the Great Plains, the Midwest, the Deep South, and the interior of the Northeast. This is due to a combination of factors, but fertility decline and a greater desire for city living are the main ones

some argue that the remaining townspeople should just bite the bullet and move to someplace better. But many lack the money, the human networks, and the simple initiative and bravery to start again in a new place. You can’t get everyone to move out of a dying town — instead what happens is that half move out and half stay, and the half who stay have a bad time of it.

Meanwhile, a smaller customer base can’t support all the businesses that used to flourish in the town, so lots of commercial spaces get boarded up and vacated. Drug people move into those spaces, and they become urban ruins. A pall of despair settles over the whole town.

When a small town or a small city declines in population, bad things happen. A city has a built infrastructure — roads, a sewage system, an electrical grid — that takes a lot of tax money to maintain. When the tax base shrinks, it becomes hard to pay for infrastructure that was built for a much bigger population. Things begin to decay and fall apart

So if we care about the Americans who stay in all these declining places, what can we do? A lot of people thought very hard about this in the late 2010

My general answer was that we should build new colleges and new branch campuses in the middle of declining regions — the “eds” in the “eds and meds” — in order to consolidate rural areas into urban agglomerations centered around universities.

College in America is on the decline, due to a shortage of young people and a reduced tolerance for high tuition and student debt. That’s going to be a long-term sectoral trend

You can call for more skilled immigration, but people with college educations and professional skills are going to move to big cities and university towns — the same place their skilled native-born peers want to live.

That pretty much leaves just one option: mass low-skilled immigration. We know from experience that mass low-skilled immigration can and often does restore a declining heartland town to growth.

The stories of other small towns that have received a bunch of immigrants in recent years all sound the same. At first the newcomers are met with suspicion and apprehension, and schools struggle to deal with a sudden huge influx of ESL kids. But as time goes on, the small-town residents experience the optimism of the return of local growth, and most of them warm to the newcomers. The town gains a local ethnic flavor, and in general most people are either happy about the change, or at least accepting of it.

In fact, we have systematic evidence showing that this is the standard pattern. J. Celeste Lay, a political scientist at Tulane, wrote an excellent short book called A Midwestern Mosaic

She finds the same old American story: initial wariness and even some hostility to the newcomers, followed by broad acceptance and tolerance as locals get to know the newcomers. The Contact Hypothesis wins again, and the American mosaic becomes more colorful, etc. etc.

So if this research is right, why have we seen an upsurge in anti-immigration attitudes in America since 2021

There are two clear answers here. First, people get temporarily upset when there’s a flood of new immigrants, as there was from 2021 to 2023

Second, a lot of people are upset about the immigration they read about in the news, rather than the immigration happening in their own cities and neighborhoods. It’s a lot easier to fear people when you don’t meet them.

if you’re upset about “floods” of low-skilled immigrants getting “dumped” on small towns in the American heartland, you should ask yourself: How else do you propose to revive those declining regions?

What’s your alternative plan? Because I honestly don’t see any other way those places are going to get saved.

A number of polls suggest the AfD is now strongest in the Generation Z age bracket. In Thuringia it won 38 per cent of the vote among under-25s.

Nor is it a purely east German curiosity: one recent study of young adults across Germany found that the AfD was the most popular party, with about 22 per cent of the vote.

Plenty of voters remain dissatisfied. In Finsterwalde’s marketplace, where some of the mainstream parties have set up election stands, one 75-year-old woman who declined to give her name said she was outraged that eastern Germans who had paid into the system their whole lives were left with meagre pensions while immigrants received generous benefits from the state.

in the months before the Berlin Wall fell and saw the local unemployment rate rise as high as 25 per cent in the turbulent years that followed.

Today it is down to 8 per cent. The gap in per capita incomes with western Germany has shrunk from about 40 per cent to 10 per cent. On average each Brandenburg resident receives nearly €2,000 a year in fiscal transfers from the western side of the country.

Genilke leafs through a book that shows photographs of Finsterwalde as it was 40 years ago and as it is today: the town has been transmogrified. The roads, the schools and the nurseries have been almost entirely rebuilt. An open-cast coalmine has been converted into the third-largest solar farm in Germany.

This shift is hard to explain, especially as in macroeconomic terms there has never been a better time to be a Brandenburger.

In this town of 15,800 people there are precisely 867 asylum seekers and refugees. While there have been no incidents of violence, there have been isolated cases of theft and it is common to hear low-level grumbling about noisy or disruptive behaviour. “Sometimes you feel like a guest in your own country,” said one voter, who preferred to remain anonymous.

Overall, though, the progress since reunification has been impressive. “Thirty years ago we could never have dreamt we would have come this far,” said Genilke. “There has never been a better time in eastern Germany. Of course we still have problems. There’s no such thing as an ideal society. But we really have achieved a great deal.”

Knut Abraham, 58, a long-serving diplomat who is now the CDU MP for the local constituency, suggests one reason for the disillusionment of the young may be that they did not live through the toughest part of the economic transformation and can see only its shortcomings.

“I also think it has to do with identity,” he said. “The AfD disseminates an easily adaptable and comprehensible sense of national identity. And, of course, it is at the same time a protest and a rebellion against us.”

The culture of memory may be another factor. Socialist East Germany was an “anti-fascist” state by definition and did not encourage its citizens to do much soul-searching about how complicit they and their families had been in the crimes of the Nazi regime.

After the two Germanys were reunified in 1990, the west’s more self-flagellating traditions — the mandatory trips to concentration camps, the solemn schooling in the principles of liberal democracy — were transplanted into the east’s education system.

Gärtner said some of his fellow pupils had semi-openly sniggered during lessons about the Nazi period and one boy in the class below had deliberately shaved his head before a visit to a concentration camp in order to make his allegiance to the hard right visible.

He also described how the AfD had achieved near-total dominance over political discourse on TikTok, a social media platform used by more than 50 per cent of German teenagers. “Slowly you can begin to see the parallels with how Hitler gave the radio to his population back then as the Volksempfänger [people’s receiver],” Gärtner said.

Systems that are self-correcting — because they promote conversation and mutuality — are preferable to those that offer only blind, disenfranchised subservience.

The meat of “Nexus” is essentially an extended policy brief on A.I.: What are its risks, and what can be done?

The threats A.I. poses are not the ones that filmmakers visualize:

All of this is sort of obvious-interesting, while also being too vague — too open to objection and counterexample — to constitute a useful theory of information.

Or the outsourcing of human judgment — legal, financial or military decision-making — to an A.I. whose complexity becomes impenetrable to our own understanding.

Harari warns of a “Silicon Curtain” descending between us and the algorithms we have created, shutting us out of our own conversations — how we want to act, or interact, or govern ourselves.

None of these scenarios, however, is a given. Harari points to the problem of email spam

In 2015, Google was able to claim that its Gmail algorithm had a 99.9 percent success rate in blocking genuine spam. “When the tech giants set their hearts on designing better algorithms,” writes Harari, “they can usually do it.”

Parts of “Nexus” are wise and bold. They remind us that democratic societies still have the facilities to prevent A.I.’s most dangerous excesses, and that it must not be left to tech companies and their billionaire owners to regulate themselves.

West started his podcast, Philosophize This, in 2013. Podcasting, he realized, was the one “technological medium where there’s no barrier to entry.” He “just turned on a microphone and started talking.”

Within months, he was earning enough from donations to quit his warehouse job and pursue philosophy full-time. Now he has some 2 million monthly listeners on Spotify and 150,000 subscribers on YouTube, and Philosophize This holds the No. 3 spot in the country for philosophy podcasts on Apple.

He treats the philosophical claims of any given thinker, however outdated, within the sense-making texture of their own time, oscillating adroitly between explanation and criticism and—this is rare—refusing to condescend from the privilege of the present

He is, as he once described the 10th-century Islamic scholar Al-Fārābī, “a peacemaker between different time periods.” All the episodes display the qualities that make West so compelling: unpretentious erudition, folksy delivery, subtle wit, and respect for a job well done.

“He’s coming at this stuff from the perspective of a person actually searching for interesting answers, not as someone who is seeking academic legitimacy,” Shapiro said. “Too much philosophy is directed toward the other philosophers in the walled garden. He’s doing the opposite.”

“Academic philosophy is cloistered and impenetrable, but it needn’t be,” he told me. West, he said, “doesn’t preen or preach or teach; he just talks to you like a smart, curious adult.”

I counted just six books on a shelf next to a pair of orange dumbbells: The Complete Essays of Montaigne; The Creative Act, by Rick Rubin; Richard Harland’s Literary Theory From Plato to Barthes; an anthology of feminist theory; And Yet, by Christopher Hitchens; and Foucault’s The Order of Things. The rest of his reading material lives on a Kindle. “If you look at the desktop of my computer, it’ll be a ton of tabs open,” he said, laughing. “Maybe it’s the clutter you’d be expecting.”

He just “always wanted to be wiser,” Alina said. “I mean, when he was younger, he literally Googled who was the wisest person.” (Here we can give Socrates his flowers once again.) “That’s how he got into philosophy.”

All of us are, as the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset observed, inexorably the combination of our innate, inimitable selves and the circumstances in which we are embedded. “Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia.”

We are captive to the economic, racial, and technological limits of our times, just as we may be propelled forward in unforeseen ways by the winds of innovation.

Now he can design any life he likes. “I could be in Bora Bora right now,” he told me. “But I don’t want to be.” He wants to be in Puyallup with his family, in a place “where I can read and do my work and pace around and think about stuff.”

The U.S. faces the “most serious and most challenging” threats since 1945, including the real risk of “near-term major war.” The report warns: “The nation was last prepared for such a fight during the Cold War, which ended 35 years ago. It is not prepared today.”

the Commission finds that the U.S. military lacks both the capabilities and the capacity required to be confident it can deter and prevail in combat.”

But these past few weeks suggest that it wasn’t merely collateral damage at all. The assault on these groups really was the point. The alleged failures of liberal elites (to, say, close the border or protect manufacturing jobs) are the excuse for the assaults on immigrants and minorities that we’ve seen throughout the Trump years. That’s where the real political payoff is

By “hate” Vance means . . . hate. Not disagreement or even dislike. Hate.

Vance’s politics are the politics of hate

perhaps he just watched Trump’s success and internalized its lessons. But in any case, for Vance it’s all about hate.

And the assault on the Haitians of Springfield, Ohio, is a kind of culmination of Vance’s—and of course Trump’s—politics of hate.

It also represents a culmination of Vance’s and Trump’s politics of lying

Vance acknowledged yesterday on CNN that he had been trying to manufacture coverage of Springfield based on nothing more than a few unsubstantiated constituent phone calls. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

The creation of stories. One could call that fiction. Or lies

It’s familiar from the last century in Europe. It’s also familiar from periods of American history, especially with respect to race and immigrants.

in Trump’s case, the hatred is so mixed with his distinctive showmanship and conmanship that it’s sometimes hard to see the heart of the enterprise.

With Vance, who’s not as much of a showman or con man, it’s all much clearer.

he border’s been a mess, and there are people who’ve come across the border illegally and committed crimes. So there’s plenty of grist for the mill here for a more conventional (if still mean-spirited and demagogic) anti-immigration candidate.

instead, Vance and Trump have gotten “distracted” into a debate about legal Haitian migrants who’ve come to Springfield to work legally. Or is it a distraction? Might Vance and Trump know what they’re doing? Perhaps a pure play on racism and nativism is more effective politically than a somewhat complicated debate about the border

In any case, it’s striking that Trump and Vance are willing to make this campaign so clearly a referendum on nativism and racism.

Such efforts have worked at other times in American history. And such efforts have been aided by sophisticated allies who don’t quite join in the campaign, but certainly don’t go out of their way to denounce it or repudiate it

Think of the Southern Bourbons who tolerated and benefited from the uninhibited racism of Southern populists and demagogues.

The sounds you hear from that establishment and those elites, from corporate boardrooms and editorial offices, in the face of disgusting bigotry and dangerous incitement from the presidential ticket they support? Those are the sounds of silence.

a new book offers an exhaustive version of this story of fundamental depravity: Richard Beck’s Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life.

“The most important political story of the past two decades isn’t the intensifying conflict between Republicans and Democrats,” Beck, a writer at the literary magazine n+1, states near the end of his 500 pages, in what can be read as a summary of his book.

“It is the story of an empire, a world­-spanning political and economic system, that clawed its way to the top of the global power hierarchy and is now determined to imprison and kill as many people as it needs to in order to stay there.”

He looks at how the invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq made SUVs and Iron Man and shows like 24 popular in the United States; how social media’s business interest in collecting personal data converged with the National Security Agency’s desire to do the same; how the number of mass shootings, articles of clothing we had to remove at airports, and anxieties (about Muslims and immigrants) increased. These close readings of the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that the war came home, even though the fighting itself was far away and mostly invisible to Americans, are the most successful parts of Homeland.

The sense of collective fear, the worry that another terrorist attack could—that it most likely would—happen again, shaped the American response, and explains so many of the pathological excesses. Fear makes you act irrationally, makes you more suspicious of your neighbor or even tolerant of torture if it gives you the illusion that you can walk into a public space without panicking.

it does explain what happened in psychological terms that are entirely human. These societal and political failures did not occur in a vacuum. They were a reaction to an event in which 2,977 people were killed before the eyes of everyone in the country.

Beck never acknowledges this fear as a universal response to terror. What he sees at work is specific to Americans, an enactment of a “national mythology” forged in the 17th century

follows a narrative thread back to the helplessness of the early European colonists as they faced a forbidding wilderness full of Native people who did not exactly want them there. As Beck recounts it, the shame and vulnerability, articulated in captivity narratives in which white women were stolen by American Indians, transformed into an embrace of righteous, no-holds-barred violence to bring back civilizational order—Daniel Boone, Natty Bumppo, Davy Crockett, and John Wayne became the stars

Beck finds potency in the Freudian concept of “repetition compulsion,” a desire to play out an original trauma, in this case expiating that 17th-century shame again and again, with violence

Americans, he argues, are hardwired by these mythologies: “They let Americans know what they should expect from life, how they should inhabit the world, and what they should do when the enemy (especially a nonwhite enemy) shows up at the front door.”

This is history as a skipping record. It leaves little room for ethical development over time, no place for correction. Aspects of “The 1619 Project” offered the same fatalism: a country stained with the birthmark of slavery as forever and always racist. The clear implication is that the only change possible is a revolutionary one that smashes the experiment and starts from scratch.

To understand the real motives behind the breadth of the global War on Terror, he turns from Freud to Marx. The world economy, with America at its center, has been slowing since the 1970s. This has led to a severe dearth of formal employment everywhere, but especially in places such as Africa and the Middle East, creating what Marx originally called “surplus populations,”

The central motivator for terrorism, according to Beck, is this: an economic grievance against a superpower that is unable to grow or spread the wealth but is also holding on to its position of dominance at all costs.

the War on Terror appears as an excuse to strengthen America’s grip on the world’s economy and beat back any of those surplus populations that might dare to object

The invasion happened, Beck writes, in order “to force Iraq to join the twenty-first-century capitalism club, to make it subject to the same incentives and rules and pressures that structured the economies of all the other countries that had accepted the fact of America’s global leadership.”

Elements of his interpretation have some explanatory power—the United States is losing its footing; declining growth and ballooning levels of income inequality are an enormous problem. But he also leaves out so much texture for fear of diluting a story that can have only one villain.

When Beck applies his fixed worldview to 2024, his blinkers become obvious. In Russia’s war to swallow Ukraine, he spares some sympathy for President Vladimir Putin, who must deal with an American government that has “lavished Ukraine with military aid while simultaneously looking to expand NATO’s membership.” That the Ukrainians themselves have asked for this help in order to preserve their sovereignty seems irrelevant to Beck

No such moderation applies when he turns to the Palestinians. Their enemy, Israel, is an extension of America in the region, a “snarling dog,” a “nation of settler colonialists” that is doing nothing more in Gaza than quenching its “bloodlust.” His analysis ends there; because Palestinians are “the contemporary world’s paradigmatic example of a surplus population,” no other interpretation is needed—nothing, for example, about Iran’s interests as expressed through its proxies, or Israelis’ own legitimate desire for safety, given those proxies’ eliminationist goals.

Where does someone like Richard Beck turn to for hope?

Not to electoral politics. He admits that he refused to vote in 2012, when Barack Obama was up for reelection. Obama had outlawed torture and was withdrawing from Iraq; in one of his first major foreign-policy acts as president, he had flown to Cairo to address the Muslim world. But Beck saw only a sleek veneer. The war was continuing more quietly—with drones—and Obama would not be holding any top Bush-administration officials accountable for their crimes. So Beck opted out.

But even though these movements took on deep structural issues—racism and income inequality—they were not radical enough, he now thinks, because both assumed the legitimacy of the American government, that the “system” itself could be reformed.

Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter felt like what he was looking for.

my book is a full-throated defense of liberalism. But it starts at a prior question, which is where do we find ourselves today? And especially for people who aren't religious, where is it that we're getting our big values, our big moral ideals from? And my gambit is that liberalism is the thing

t the biggest growing group of religious affiliation today is non-affiliation

in the United States, it's a rather low number (still a gigantic population) of around 30%. You move to godless New Zealand and it's clocking almost at 60% now. Here in Australia, it's around 50%

That's my audience. I'm trying to speak to people who don't have a prior religion that they can point to as the source for who they are

if we're not religious then I think that the one that we've probably absorbed and adopted is this liberal framework, precisely because (and we can talk about this) liberalism is the official hegemonic morality of our time. It's sort of what we are bombarded with 24/7. We just kind of grew up in those waters and that's who we are now. And so what I'm trying to do is to get liberals to recognize how deep it runs

I don't know if there's a God-sized hole in our heart, but I do know there's a Christianity-sized hole in our culture.

There's all kinds of casting about for meaning. And I'm an academic, I'm a philosopher, and in my neck of the woods everyone and their mother is writing a book about wisdom from whatever tradition they are doing. So you have books coming out every day on how to live well according to the Scottish Enlightenment, Chinese philosophy, whatever. Everyone's trying to go somewhere else to try to find meaning and pull it into our world

Maybe we already have a robust philosophy and we've already absorbed it and we just need to double down on the thing that we already have.

You asked me about its top-line values. In my book, I nominate three that I think are really at the center of this thing. One is a commitment to personal freedom—to my freedom, to your freedom.

Another is a commitment to fairness.

And the third is a commitment to reciprocity in the sense that I matter no more than you and you matter no more than me

And you take those three things together—freedom, fairness, and reciprocity—and you put them in a constellation,  and I think you have something like liberalism. So those are typically seen as political values. But again, what I'm trying to say is that they've descended into the background culture.

great book written ten years ago by an author named Melissa Mohr and it has this fantastic title. It's called Holy Shit: A Brief History of Swearing. And in those two words, “holy” and “shit,” what she does is effectively summarize the history of swear words over a 3,000-year tradition in the West, and her point is that at different moments and times, under different moral and religious paradigms, you have different kinds of swear words.

And very quickly, by finding out what a society thinks is bad and taboo and can't be said, you very quickly reverse engineer what its main moral commitments are. 

we love the swear words that are safe to say and we can say the “holy” and “shit” kind of words all we like on this podcast and no one's gonna bat an eye

But there's a different kind of word today that if we were to say that would get your podcast in hot water and me fired within a week, which are of course slurs, right? Those are the truly unsayable words that we have today. And the reason why swear slurs are the big no-no word today is because they impugn the self-respect and the dignity of all people. We've so absorbed certain liberal commitments that our liberalism runs right deep down to our bones in the kinds of words that we reflexively do and don't use. 

Talk us a little bit through what those three values mean and why it is that they're specifically liberal.

Lefebvre: So a book that has really inspired me in this is Helena Rosenblatt's work, The Lost History of Liberalism. It's just terrific because it goes into the history of the word “liberal” and tries to see what it means right from the start.

It's 200 years old, which is like a newborn by the standards of intellectual history. But on the other hand, it is really old because the roots of the word go right back to Roman times. And the word liber means a couple of things; on the one hand, freedom and the quality of being free and being a freeborn person, but also the quality or the characteristic of being generous and a generous person. And it's those two qualities that are at the heart of what liberalism means in this tradition.

Now, we tend to quickly associate liberalism with liberty and (critics would say) with individualism, egoism, selfishness, all that kind of stuff. But it's pointing to the freedom half of that equation, and we tend to forget the generosity half

When liberalism is born in the 19th century, though, those two ideas of being free and generous are really robustly connected. And the big question that I think animates almost all 19th century liberals, whatever their fascinating disagreements, whether we're talking the Frenchies like Tocqueville, Constant or Madame De Stael, or we're talking about the British tradition, all of them are asking, basically, looking at the modern world, how is it that human beings could remain on the one hand free, and on the other hand, generous, given all of these new pressures and temptations that the modern world is throwing at us.

They were worried about capitalism and how it not just threatens inequality, but it threatens to turn us into nasty little consumerists who care only about our material satisfactions and pleasures; they were worried about nationalism and the closing of the mind in that sense; and they were especially freaked out by democracy.

Today we think that liberalism and democracy are like peaches and cream. But the reconciliation between liberalism and democracy took 200 years to achieve, and hard-fought negotiation and compromise on the part of each of those bits. Because, initially, liberalism was established in order to counteract all of the perceived dangers of democracy.

Mounk: And just to briefly double-down on that point

If you think of democracy as something like translating the preferences of the people into public policy, and you think of liberalism as something, among other things, as constraints on what the state can do to individual citizens, those two things can come to be in tension when majorities of people persistently want laws and legislation and rules that constrain what individuals can do. 

at the same time, conversely, it's very hard, I think, in the long run to maintain either element without the other. So once you start having a political system that is deeply illiberal, it's very easy for the government to stay in power because it controls the media, because it has control over the judiciary and so on. And conversely, if you have a sort of technocratic elite that guarantees certain kinds of freedoms—as was the case under military domination in Turkey until relatively recently, as is the case in Singapore in certain ways—in order to sustain themselves, they're also going to limit the freedom of people, at the very least to criticize the government and probably to do other things as well

So the relationship between liberalism and democracy is very complicated because I think that they do effectively stand in tension. But once you give up on one of them, the other becomes really vulnerable. 

Where we find ourselves today is that we've inherited a liberal tradition that in so many respects privileges freedom over all equalities.

they don't entertain the notion that someone's liberalism can run all the way down into them. And that's what my beef or my complaint with political liberalism is—it obscures what I think is the major morality of our time because a whole bunch of people aren't liberal plus something, they're just liberal all the way down. And I'm not saying the state should force that one. What I'm saying is that we need to recognize empirical reality for what it is.

he digs and digs and he finds this one concept, which he names fairness. And he says that —and this is the fundamental proposition of Rawls—that society should be a fair system of cooperation from one generation to the next

in the book, what I tried to do is flesh out a little bit more what it demands of ourselves, especially once these ideas have ceased to be just kind of political stuff, but have gone into a much broader cultural frame.

what I want to try to do is to insist again on the essential connection between the notion of freedom and of generosity. And the thinker that does this for me most powerfully is John Rawls,

I do definitely think I'm not a perfectionist liberal, by which I mean that I do not think that the liberal state should promote a certain way of life. All political liberals make one assumption, which is that everyone living in a liberal democratic society is, let's say, liberal plus something else. So they believe in liberalism, they uphold the Constitution, all that stuff, equal rights. but they are also something else: they're Christian, Muslim, Jewish. But there's always a composite identity between liberalism and some other form of identity

what I'm trying to do in my book is insist on a certain vision of generous and free living and how it can be revived for us today, especially for those of us who basically can profess no other values because we've been born in this liberal world.

So what would it mean for us as a society and what would it mean for me, for you, for all of our listeners to be more genuine, more authentic, more real liberals rather than ones that simply pay lip service to these moral ideals?

Lefebvre: One main thing is whether a lot of your day-to-day behaviors support fairness in some really simple way. We live, of course, in compromised societies and with deep inequalities, but there are certain things that we do here and now that are definitely illiberal.

I'll confess my great sin: I send my daughter to a private school here in Australia. Now, if I think about that for a moment, I don't think I can square that with my liberal commitments. I'm taking her talents, I'm taking some revenue out of the public system, and then putting it into this other thing which will lavish generational advantage on it, generating all this meritocracy business that we know and hate and love and participate in

I think all of us do game the systems in that way. We file for taxes, we try to claim any deduction we can, we treat others ungenerously, we always try to assert our privileges and prerogatives above those of others. They just insinuate themselves into our everyday behavior. So what I'm trying to say is that we have to call ourselves out for not living up to it.

the book isn't scolding. I'm not trying to say that you're a bad liberal

What I'm trying to do in the book is I'm trying to furnish readers with reasons as to why they might want to adhere to their liberal values. And so I outline all the kinds of pleasures and joys and what I call felicities (or perks) of living a liberal way of life. I think there are a great many. I think it's joyful, it's cheerful, it's redemptive in some important way. It leads to all kinds of wonderful ideas like being more impartial, more autonomous, more free. So that's the pitch that I'm trying to make.

The dissociated feeling some of us have gotten watching politics play out in 2024 came in part from watching conventional media and sensibilities fail to process this brutish, multilayered, densely referential, meme-drenched idiom

Mr. Trump dominated TV during a time when the shouty, humorless alpha white guy was a dominant cable archetype

Traditional discourse looks for stage directions, for mainstream media, which once had the power to define reality, to referee, and judge. Big-R Reality values are judgment-free, however: Attention is attention is attention.

But if there’s one thing that’s true for all TV genres, it’s that the medium is always looking for the next new thin

When Mr. Trump promises that he will be a dictator but only on “Day 1,” is it a joke or a terrifying threat? Possibly both, but in muddying the distinctions, he makes liberal warnings about constitutional norms seem like ninnyish Karening

In recent years, the freshest and most popular reality shows have been more ironic, more infused with queer sensibility, more, dare one say, joyful.

Mr. Trump’s recently cast political opponent seems to have grasped the vibe shift. The playfully self-deprecating memes and the repeated invocation of joy: She’s reality lite

Another way to think of him: as perhaps the single most influential person in the United States. His YouTube channel has 17 million subscribers. His podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, which launched in 2009, has held the top spot on the Spotify charts consistently for the past five years

Go to a cocktail mixer, an ayahuasca party, or a Brazilian-jiu-jitsu gym here and you might run into Tim Ferriss, the author of The 4-Hour Workweek; or the podcasters Lex Fridman, Chris Williamson, Ryan Holiday, Michael Malice, or Aubrey Marcus. Elon Mus

Rogan and his fans are often called “heterodox,” which is funny, because this group has converged on a set of shared opinions, creating what you might call a heterodox orthodoxy:

Diversity-and-inclusion initiatives mean that identity counts more than merit; COVID rules were too strict; the pandemic probably started with a lab leak in China; the January 6 insurrection was not as bad as liberals claim; gender medicine for children is out of control; the legacy media are scolding and biased; and so on

The heterodox sphere has low trust in institutions—the press, academia, the CDC—and prefers to listen to individuals

The Roganverse neatly caters to this audience because it is, in essence, a giant talk-show circuit:

Follow his Instagram, and his tastes soon become apparent: energy drinks, killing wild animals, badly lit steaks, migraine-inducing AI graphics, dad-rock playlists, and shooting the breeze with his buddies.

Rogan’s support of Gillis demonstrates why members of his inner circle are so loyal to him. Not only has Rogan personally boosted their careers on his podcast and in his club, but his popularity has forced the comedy industry to recalibrate its tolerance for offense.

What fans love about Rogan is the same thing his critics hate: an untamable curiosity that makes him open to plainly marginal ideas. One guest tells him that black holes are awesome. A second tells him that the periodic table needs to be updated because carbon has a “bisexual tone.” A third tells him that a deworming drug could wipe out COVID. He approaches all of them—tenured professors, harmless crackpots, peddlers of pseudoscience—with the same stoner wonderment.

Media Matters for America, a progressive journalism-watchdog organization, has accused Rogan and his guests of using his podcast to “promote conspiracy theorists and push anti-trans rhetoric.”

The liberal case against Rogan usually references one of two culture-war flash points: COVID and gender

“Free health care—yes!” Rogan tells his audiences these days onstage in Austin, riffing on the political demands of the left. “Education for all—right on! … Men can get pregnant—fuck! I didn’t realize it was a package deal.”

During the pandemic, The JRE also drew audience members who were frustrated with the limits of acceptable discussion, at a time when Facebook and YouTube were banning or restricting what they labeled misinformation. Rogan didn’t accept the proposition that Americans should shut up and listen to mainstream experts, and that led to him hosting vaccine denialists and conspiracists, and promoting an unproven deworming drug as a treatment for COVID

noble lie. This refers to the fact that Anthony Fauci initially told regular people not to wear masks in part because he was worried about supply shortages for doctors and nurses, but it has come to stand in for the wider accusation that public-health experts did not trust Americans with complex data during the pandemic, and instead simply told them what to do.

Her experience echoes that of other Rogan fans on the coasts, for whom the pandemic brought the realization that their values differed from those around them; at the time, the persistence of masking was a visible symbol of that difference. “It’s the Democrats’ MAGA hat,” Rogan told a guest in November 2022. “They’re letting you know, I’m on the good team.” Move to Texas, went the promise, and you won’t have to see that anymore.

When I visited the UATX offices, in an Art Deco building in downtown Austin, the provost, Jacob Howland, told me that he wanted “to get the politics out of the classroom,” and that faculty members will have succeeded if the students can’t guess how they vote from what they say in class. Just as in Rogan’s comedy club, smartphones are banned in class—“so that students can’t be distracted by them, or, for example, record other students and tell the world, ‘Oh, you know, this student had this opinion, and it’s unacceptable, and I’m putting it out there on TikTok.’ ”

Many on the left, however, suspect that heterodox just means “right-wing and in denial.” An attendee at last year’s Forbidden Courses sent me a slide showing survey results about the students’ political leanings: Out of 29 respondents, 19 identified as conservative

One major UATX donor is Harlan Crow, the billionaire who has bankrolled Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s lifestyle for years; he sat in the back of some 2023 summer-school lectures. Another is the Austin-based venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, who co-founded Palantir with Peter Thiel and others. He recently gave $1 million to a pro-Trump super PAC.

The Joe Rogan coalition may indeed represent a real strand in American intellectual and political life—a normie suspicion of both MAGA hats and eternal masking, mixed with tolerance for kooky ideas. But it is fracturing.

Today, fractures are obvious across the wider anti-woke movement—and they must be serious, because people have started podcasting about them.

There’s a real tension in the Roganverse between the stated desire to escape polarization and the appeal of living in an endless 2020, when the sharp definition of the opposing sides yielded growing audiences and made unlikely political alliances possible.

Those contradictory impulses are evident in Austin. Jon Stokes, a co-founder of the AI company Symbolic, described the city to me as the “DMZ of the culture wars,” while the podcaster David Perell put it like this: “Moving to Austin is the geographical equivalent of saying ‘I don’t read the news anymore.’ ”

relentless criticism from the left has pushed him and his fellow travelers closer to people who talk like this. Look at Elon Musk, who has developed an obsession with defeating the “woke mind virus” and an addiction to posting about his grievances.

During his stand-up set, Rogan said that Jones was right about the existence of “false flags”—events staged by the government or provocateurs to discredit a cause. Then he whispered to himself that Jones had gotten “one thing wrong.” He had gotten a lot of things right too, Rogan said at normal volume. Then his voice dropped again: “It was a pretty big thing, though.”

Rogan is a guy who started a podcast in 2009 to smoke weed with his fellow comics and talk about martial arts—and who, like many Americans, has taken part in a great geographical sorting, moving to be closer to people whose values he shares. He speaks to people who feel silenced, both elite and normie, even as he’s turned the very idea that opinions like his are being “silenced” into a joke in itself.

More than half the book covers his life before the presidency

Boot is particularly good at depicting 1920s small-town America, and he gives full consideration to how religion shaped Reagan’s outlook. Balancing out his ne’er-do-well father was his pious and optimistic mother, from whom Reagan inherited his characteristic sunniness. These early pages establish Reagan’s worldview as one defined by faith and belief, even at the expense of reality.

one gets the feeling that Boot, who describes himself as an “ardent admirer” of Reagan in his youth, hoped at some point to find all the ways the Gipper was not like the Orange Man. A former foreign policy adviser to Republicans like Mitt Romney, Boot eventually became a Never Trumper and then the author of “The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right.

The echoes fade as Reagan takes on the presidency and embraces uplifting, patriotic mythmaking straight out of World War II-era Hollywood films. The differences in presidential policy are also stark: Reagan, Boot writes, “rejected the siren song of nativism.” He was for Puerto Rican statehood, boosted free trade and saw America as an unalloyed force for good in the world.

“Did Reaganism contain the seeds of Trumpism?” Boot asks in the introduction. In many ways, his biography scratches another mark in the yes column

Reagan is a fabulist, passing often into an imaginary world pieced together from old movie scripts and the conspiratorial pamphlets of the anti-communist John Birch Society. He is impervious to correction, even by trusted advisers, Boot writes, “no matter how often his false assertions, statistics and quotations were rebutted.”

Reagan also voiced dark visions of the future and befriended bigots. In his mind, Boot explains, it was always “10 minutes to midnight,” with apocalyptic dangers threatening the nation. He perfected the racial dog whistle and depended on the support of the segregationist North Carolina senator Jesse Helms to rescue his 1976 presidential campaign

Some of his early affection for Reagan lingers, but over a decade of research, one imagines, it became impossible to avoid the similarities to Trump.

The strongest parallels to Trump come early, in the dawn of Reagan’s national career. Amid the social upheavals of the ’60s and ’70s, Reagan’s law-and-order rhetoric tended to divide and demonize.

The primary distinction, though, is Boot’s central argument: that Reagan was fundamentally a pragmatist.

Reagan clung to his most rigid and dogmatic beliefs about the Soviet Union, yet struck up an immensely consequential relationship with the Russian politician Mikhail Gorbachev.

Boot does not argue that Reagan sped along the end of the Cold War. In fact, he writes, Reagan’s military buildup may even have prolonged it by strengthening hard-liners within the U.S.S.R. Nonetheless, he says, “working so closely with a Communist leader was the ultimate tribute to his pragmatism.”

Boot asserts there is no evidence to suggest Reagan’s Alzheimer’s began while in office. Rather, from the start he was a lackadaisical manager who depended upon his staff to make granular decisions about policy.

Sometimes this led to disaster when the staff went rogue, as in the Iran-contra affair. At other times, Reagan’s remove allowed the full complexity of a situation to unfold, as it eventually did in the endgame of the Soviet Union.

Perhaps the main lesson is that once a leader grabs onto some mythic truth, everything else falls away. Pragmatism, to be sure, was Reagan’s great strength, as Boot argues.

But even when Reagan refused to bend, he paid no political consequences. That’s because his followers were not looking for policy, but for national restoration. They were yearning to see the American characteristics of optimism, grit, humor and cheer writ large in one man.

Many of Trump’s fans feel the same way, yet the emotional register could not be more different. Where Reagan saw morning in America, Trump sees American carnage. To the extent Trump’s followers share that vision, they aren’t the children of Reagan’s revolution after all.

This weekend, Offenbach is celebrating this diversity with an international cultural festival, as it has every year since the 1970s, organised by Rafoud and his colleagues. There will be music and dance from everywhere from Colombia, Bolivia and Ecuador to Bosnia and Romania and plenty of food.

The party secured 14 per cent of the vote in Offenbach in last October’s state elections in Hesse, the state in which the city lies — though this was lower than in Hesse as a whole, where the AfD’s support surged to 18 per cent.

“In the past 10 to 15 years so many people have come to Offenbach, and to Germany as a whole,” Rafoud said. “They need social housing they can afford: not flats for €1,500 or €2,000 but for €700 or €800.”

Yet here, as elsewhere in Germany, some voters — especially the young — are turning to the AfD, which is increasingly calling not just for tougher curbs on immigration but for “remigration” — persuading or obliging those who have come to Germany to leave.

Though describing himself as “open to the world”, Thon understands why Scholz’s government is striking a different tone from the Merkel era. “If you look at the situation in the world, many people have good reasons to flee their countries,” he said. “But every country has a certain capacity. Others must also do their bit.”

In announcing the measure, Nancy Faeser, Scholz’s interior minister, claimed 30,000 people had been turned away from Germany since similar controls were introduced last October on the border with Poland, Czech Republic and Switzerland. They have been in place on the Austrian frontier since 2015.

Nor are there any plans to rebuild the border control posts, which have long since disappeared from most of Germany’s frontiers. At the Pont de L’Europe, the bridge across the Rhine that links the French city of Strasbourg with the German town of Kehl, the new rules will mean more officers at the police station next to its eastern approach.

“Of course, we won’t be stopping every car,” said a young policeman standing with five colleagues on the platform of Kehl railway station. “But we will stop more of them than we do now.”

There has been enthusiasm, though, from Geert Wilders, leader of the Dutch far-right Freedom party, who declared: “If Germany can do it, why can’t we? As far as I’m concerned: the sooner, the better.”

On Friday the new right-wing coalition dominated by Wilders’s party took the even more dramatic step of demanding an opt-out clause from the European Union’s migration and asylum rules. Brussels has made clear that it will reject the demand.