Group items tagged

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

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

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.

Harari: What do Jews do for the next 2,000 years? They learn—they sit in Yavne and they learn

Beckerman: It turned from a religion based on priests and temples and sacrifices into a religion of learning, right?

For me, the birth scene of Judaism is Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, one of the great sages, fleeing Jerusalem and coming to the Roman general Vespasian, who later became Roman emperor, and asking him for a favor: “Please give me Yavne and its wise men.” And Vespasian agrees. This is myth more than history. But this is the founding myth of Judaism. Yavne was a small town not far from present-day Tel Aviv, and that was where ben Zakkai established a learning center, and it changed the nature of Judaism.

Harari: I would say that the other side is Zionist, and it’s important to emphasize and reclaim this word, which has been vilified, not just now, but for decades.

Vespasian could have told ben Zakkai. Why did it take 2,000 years of learning in yeshivas to go back to that same moment and basically adopt the values of the Roman legion? Because if I think about what the values are of people like Itamar Ben Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, Netanyahu—it’s the values of the Roman legion.

Beckerman: So if Netanyahu and his partners on the extreme right are the Zealots, how do you see the other side—yourself—in this battle for the soul of Israel?

eventually the circle is almost closed. They come back. They come back to Jerusalem. And the Zealots have now taken over Jerusalem again. And the question that keeps bothering me: What did Jews learn in those 2,000 years?

Zionism is simply the national movement of the Jewish people. And if you think that Zionism is racist and is abhorrent, you’re basically saying that Jews don’t deserve to have national feelings

Zionism basically says three simple things that should be uncontroversial. It says that the Jews are a nation, not just isolated individuals. There is a Jewish people. The second thing Zionism says is that, like all other peoples, the Jewish people also have a right to self-determination, like the Palestinians, like the Turks, like the Poles. And the third thing it says is the Jews have a deep historical, cultural, spiritual connection to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, which is a historical fact.

Harari: What the political conclusion is from these three facts, that’s up for grabs. And throughout Zionist history, for the past 150 years, people had different ideas.

You can acknowledge that there is a Jewish people. It has a right to self-determination. It has a historical connection to the country. And at the same time, there is a Palestinian people. It also has a right to self-determination, and it also has deep historical, spiritual, cultural connection to the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River.

now the political question is, what do you do with these two facts? And there are potential solutions, a two-state solution, which you can argue, where exactly will the border pass and what will be the rights of Palestinians who remain in Israeli territory? And we can discuss all that

basically, Zionism doesn’t deny the existence and rights of Palestinian people.

Beckerman: Do you think that Israelis’ capacity for empathy has been degraded over the past year?

So I shout harder, and like any attention given to the pain of the other person, I feel it as an attack on me, because it has repercussions. I will suffer.

Beckerman: One of the other things I’ve been struggling with this past year has been the inability of most people to contain more than one narrative in their minds—like the two narratives you just described

Harari: This is one of the things that wars do. This is not unique to Israelis. When there is a war, the first few casualties get so much attention. The millionth casualty, it’s just a number. And this is one of the biggest dangers with the current war, is this process of desensitizing people, brutalizing people.

now the police are beating up the families of the hostages. The people spit at them. People curse them. There is a propaganda campaign against them through the right-wing media.

Harari: It bothers me, and at the same time, as a historian, unfortunately it makes sense; it’s humanity. Most people have no capacity to empathize with the suffering of the other side, partly because it’s like a resource that is exhausted.

Harari: To some extent, every peace needs justice and every justice needs peace. But they are different ways of looking at reality, at history. Every peace deal in history required giving up some justice. You can’t have absolute justice. Peace is more objective

people have very, very different concepts of what justice means to them. So if you try to gain absolute justice, you will never have peace. You cannot go back and bring the dead to life

The only change you can make is in the present. How do we make sure that more people are not killed and injured now and in the future?

Beckerman: I’m curious what you think about the pro-Palestinian protests here and why they have been so compelling, in particular, to young people

Harari: Obviously, as often happens, you project your own problems, your own issues, onto a distant conflict. And many times, people don’t really understand the conflict. I see it especially with this projection of the colonialist interpretation. People take this model, which is very central in the United States and other Western countries, and impose it on a completely different situation. And they say, Okay, the Israelis are the white Europeans who came to colonize the indigenous Palestinians. And there are some kernels of truth in this, but it’s a wrong model.

For 2,000 years, Jews were one of the chief victims of European civilization, and suddenly now they become the Europeans? This also ignores the fact that more than 50 percent of Israeli Jews are not European

Harari: Yes, and then even after everything that has happened with October 7 and the war, Netanyahu and his colleagues are still at it. You know, he has not taken any responsibility for October 7. I don’t hold him responsible for every decision of some company commander in the army and so forth. But the prime minister, the leader of the country, has one major responsibility—to set the priorities. He decided that the No. 1 problem with Israel is the supreme court. The priority is to destroy the supreme court. And this is his responsibility, nobody else’s. And if he, if Israel had given a quarter of the attention that was given to the supreme court to Hamas, there would have been no October 7.

The Israeli nation is collapsing, the patriotic bonds that hold the nation together are being torn deliberately by Netanyahu and his colleagues. He is the most hated person in the history of Israel. Like 50 percent of the people just hate him on a level that is unimaginable. I think the No. 1 responsibility of a leader, especially for a country in such existential danger as Israel, is to unify

People here ask me, Should Jews vote for Donald Trump? Should Jews vote for Kamala Harris? Who is better for the Jewish people? The key question is, what are the values of the Jewish people? Are the values of the Jewish people those of a bully who sees the world simply as a power game, where you need to subdue and win over everybody else?

Harari: Israel is facing a real existential threat from Iran and its proxies, and it’s no secret. They say it openly: They want to destroy Israel. What I think is that the United States should continue to support Israel, but demand something. Here, I am with Trump. You know this transactional worldview. You give so much money. Make some conditions for what Israel should do in exchange; use the leverage.

the campus D.E.I. bureaucracy was attempting to address an almost impossibly difficult and important task from within an ideological monoculture. It was doomed to fail, and it was doomed to fail in toxic ways.

It’s not because the D.E.I. bureaucracy is leftist. It’s because it’s full of human beings. It’s a fact of human nature that when like-minded people gather, they tend to become more extreme. This concept — called the law of group polarization — applies across ideological and institutional lines.

“Bowling Alone” highlighted the collapse in communal activity in America and how that loss of connection is driving an immense amount of our national polarization and pain.

the more ideologically or theologically “pure” an institution becomes, the more wrong it is likely to be, especially if it takes on a difficult or complex task.

It’s terrible for the confident majority — and for the confident majority’s cause.

I went back and forth between thinking Robert Putnam’s book “Bowling Alone” was the most prescient book of the 2000s and thinking that distinction belonged to Bill Bishop’s 2008 book, “The Big Sort.”

“The Big Sort” highlighted the fact that Americans were increasingly living in like-minded communities, and like-minded communities radicalize us. “Mixed company moderates,” Bishop wrote, “like-minded company polarizes. Heterogeneous communities restrain group excesses; homogeneous communities march toward the extremes.”

For those of us who see diversity, equity and inclusion as good values, the answer is less for the right to beat the left or for the left to beat the right, but rather for the right to be open to the left, and the left to be open to the right.

a moderate temperament is more inclusive, more open to different ideas, and the more difficult the task (easing and hopefully erasing the lingering effects of hundreds of years of formal, legal racial oppression in the United States), the greater the need for different perspectives.

Required D.E.I. statements — in which prospective faculty members are forced to state their own views about diversity, equity and inclusion — are often used as ideological screening mechanisms. As Confessore reported, articulating even mainstream arguments in favor of de-emphasizing identity-based differences or creating a “level playing field” in admissions could be “career suicide” at Michigan.

Instead, monocultures narrow the frame

The university’s vast D.E.I. bureaucracy seemed uninterested in one of the most critical aspects of diversity — the diversity of ideas. Michigan’s D.E.I. bureaucracy could even take issue with the idea that “students should be expected to encounter uncomfortable ideas.”

This is not a university-specific phenomenon. One of the most culturally significant institutions in the United States is the evangelical church, and many of its denominations are on their way to becoming as ideologically one-sided as the most progressive college campuses.

Ryan Burge, a scholar who studies religious trends in American life, recently observed that Southern Baptists were evenly split between Republicans and Democrats as recently as 2008. By 2022 the denomination was 75 percent Republican and only 21 percent Democratic

Hidden behind numbers like that are countless stories of alienation and exclusion. There are family rifts and behind-the-scenes power struggles. All for the sake of purity and righteousness that religious fundamentalism perversely makes more elusive.

No American faction — or party — has a monopoly on virtue or insight.

The term was most clearly defined and popularized in a 1999 paper by Cass Sunstein. The law of group polarization, according to Sunstein, “helps to explain extremism, ‘radicalization,’ cultural shifts and the behavior of political parties and religious organizations.”

Opening your mind to a wider range of perspectives is transformative. It doesn’t just protect the minority from the majority, it also helps protect the majority from itself, and the institutions that learn that lesson will be far more tolerant and successful

Trump has spent the past nine years not even trying to expand his base but just playing to the same MAGA grievances over and over again

Both parties “treat narrow victories like landslides and wave away narrow defeats, somehow seeing both as confirmation of their existing strategies.”

The parties, they write, “have prioritized the wishes of their most intensely devoted voters — who would never vote for the other party — over the priorities of winnable voters who could go either way.”

The problem is that where you find their weaknesses, there you find the priesthood. The public conversation on the Democratic side of things is dominated by highly educated urban progressives who work in academia, the media, the activist groups and so on

In days gone by, parties were political organizations designed to win elections and gain power. Party leaders would expand their coalitions toward that end. Today, on the other hand, in an increasingly secular age, political parties are better seen as religious organizations that exist to provide believers with meaning, membership and moral sanctification. If that’s your purpose, of course you have to stick to the existing gospel.

These folks have a highly developed and self-confident worldview — a comprehensive critique of American society. The only problem is that this worldview is rejected by most Americans, who don’t share the critique.

On these, as on so many other issues, the position that is held by a vast majority of Americans is unsayable in highly educated progressive circles. The priesthood has established official doctrine, and woe to anyone who contradicts it.

For example, the progressive priesthood, quite admirably, is committed to fighting racial oppression. Its members believe that the way to do that is to be hyperaware of racial categories — in the diversity, equity and inclusion way — in order to rearrange preferences to support historically oppressed groups.

Most Americans also seek to fight racism, but they seek to do it in a different way. Their goal is to reduce the salience of racial categories so that people’s talents and initiative determine their life outcomes.

Or take energy. Most members of the Democratic clerisy are properly alarmed by climate change and believe we should rapidly shift from fossil fuels. Liberal white college graduates favor eliminating fossil fuels by two to one. It’s no skin off their teeth; they work on laptops.

But if you live in Oklahoma or work in an industry that runs on oil, coal or natural gas, this idea seems like an assault on your way of life, which, of course, it is.

An overwhelming 72 percent of Americans favor an all-of-the-above approach, relying on both renewables and traditional energy sources.

Or take immigration. Highly educated white progressives tend to see the immigration and asylum issue through the lens of oppressor and oppressed: The people coming across our border are fleeing horror in their home countrie

most Americans see immigration through a law-and-order lens: We need to control our boundaries, preserve social order and take care of our own. In a June CBS survey 62 percent of Americans, including 53 percent of Hispanics, said they supported a program to deport undocumented immigrants — the most extreme version of this approach.

I think the reason for all this is that political parties no longer serve the function they used to

But in just the few months she has had to campaign, Harris can’t turn around the Democratic Party’s entire identity. Plus, her gestures have all been stylistic; she hasn’t challenged Democratic orthodoxy on any substantive issue

The result is that each party has its own metaphysics. Each party is no longer just a political organism; it is a political-cultural-religious-class entity that organizes the social, moral and psychological lives of its believers.

The political problem for Harris is that there are a lot more Americans without a college degree than with one. Class is growing more salient in American life, with Hispanic and Black working-class voters shifting steadily over to the working-class party, the G.O.P.

Why did Trump win?

any attentive reader of the more sophisticated forecasters in the game should have known that Tuesday’s outcome was one of the likely scenarios. As Silver emphasized throughout, polls have historically been off by an average of about three points—and given how close the race looked in many swing states, a three point miss in one or another direction would likely hand a clear victory to either Harris or Trump.

That is pretty much exactly what happened. And so anyone who now claims that forecasters did not consider Tuesday’s results a realistic possibility has failed a simple test of reading comprehension.

I’m a center-left Democrat with lots of degrees. I’m aghast and frightened by Trump’s victory. But I think it’s due to the opposite of racism and misogyny and transphobia. I think he won because of anti-anti-racism and anti-misandry and love of children combined with acceptance of gays.

Normies not overeducated out of common sense rejected identitarian politics. DEI departments, struggle sessions, Robin Angelo and Ta-Nehisi Coates, quotas limiting Asian-Americans, literacy and math as white supremacy, buying a fixer-upper in a poor neighborhood as settler colonialism, all of it.

Men—a rainbow coalition of them—finally got fed up with decades of rhetoric about toxic masculinity, testosterone poisoning, rape culture, patriarchy. They saw that for most men in this country, the reality was poor results in school, lousy job prospects, inability to form a family, and a culture in which dissing any identity group is a capital offense unless it’s men you’re dissing and then that’s fine.

And regular folks not caught up in the strange mania to over-treat the normal nuttiness of puberty with life-altering chemicals and surgery said stop—confusion is fine, it’s not a disease, and didn’t we recently decide that homosexuality is okay, so why are doctors suddenly trying to cut it out of children?

Revulsion at these things is viscerally powerful, existentially clear. Trump’s unfitness for office is more abstract, more distant. The calculation for many was he will mess up Washington, DC and the rest of the globe but it’s more important to save myself and mine. Voting for more of the same will just lead to more of the same. And enough of that. Enough.

I will tell you why I voted for Trump. My wife and I are masters/PhD educated Brooklynites who work in academia. Several weeks ago my wife was teaching a class and a student very proudly mentioned they would never willingly collect anything produced by a white man. It’s not that this was said, it’s that this is a common and acceptable position for democrats even though you’ll say it isn’t. I’m tired of the hypocrisy. What the democrat worldview says reality is like is neither true nor morally supportable.

many NYT comments the other day that said things like “Trump and Musk are the true elitists.” No, guys. No they’re not. It’s not about money. It’s about who gets to tell you what to say and who gets to break “the rules” and who doesn’t. It’s about what you can talk about and what you can’t. It’s about laws for some presented as if they’re for all. It’s about what you’re allowed to see. It is a fundamental, hypocritical rot that is just so clearly there

he once again tapped into a sense among many others that the country they knew was slipping away, under siege economically, culturally and demographically.

To counter that, those voters ratified the return of a brash 78-year-old champion willing to upend convention and take radical action even if it offends sensibilities or violates old standards. Any misgivings about their chosen leader were shoved to the side.

As a result, for the first time in history, Americans have elected a convicted criminal as president. They handed power back to a leader who tried to overturn a previous election, called for the “termination” of the Constitution to reclaim his office, aspired to be a dictator on Day 1 and vowed to exact “retribution” against his adversaries.

“The real America becomes Trump’s America,” said Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian at New York University. “Frankly, the world will say if this man wasn’t disqualified by Jan. 6, which was incredibly influential around the world, then this is not the America that we knew.”

“The Trump presidency speaks to the depth of the marginalization felt by those who believe they have been in the cultural wilderness for too long and their faith in the one person who has given voice to their frustration and his ability to center them in American life,”

Rather than be turned off by Mr. Trump’s flagrant, anger-based appeals along lines of race, gender, religion, national origin and especially transgender identity, many Americans found them bracing

Rather than be offended by his brazen lies and wild conspiracy theories, many found him authentic.

Rather than dismiss him as a felon found by various courts to be a fraudster, cheater, sexual abuser and defamer, many embraced his assertion that he has been the victim of persecution.

“This election was a CAT scan on the American people, and as difficult as it is to say, as hard as it is to name, what it revealed, at least in part, is a frightening affinity for a man of borderless corruption,” said Peter H. Wehner, a former strategic adviser to President George W. Bush and vocal critic of Mr. Trump. “Donald Trump is no longer an aberration; he is normative.”

Mr. Trump’s victory was a repudiation of an administration that passed sweeping pandemic relief, social spending and climate change programs but was hobbled by sky-high inflation and illegal immigration, both of which were brought under control too late.

Moreover, Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris never managed to heal the divisions of the Trump era as promised, though it may never have been possible. They could not figure out how to channel the anger that propels his movement or respond to the culture wars he fosters.

Ms. Harris initially emphasized a positive, joy-filled mission to the future, consolidating excited Democrats behind her, but it was not enough to win over uncommitted voters.

At that point, she switched back to Mr. Biden’s approach of warning about the dangers of Mr. Trump and the incipient fascism she said he represented. That was not enough either.

“The coalition that elected them wanted them to unite the country, and they failed to do so,” said former Representative Carlos Curbelo, an anti-Trump Republican from Florida. “Their failure has resulted in further disillusionment with our country’s politics and empowered the Trump base to give him another narrow victory

For all of its commitment to constitutionalism, the United States has seen moments before when the public hungered for a strongman and exhibited a willingness to empower such a figure with outsized authority. That has often come during times of war or national peril, but Mr. Trump frames the current struggle for America as a war of sorts.

“Trump has been conditioning Americans throughout this campaign to see American democracy as a failed experiment,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian and author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.” By praising dictators like President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and President Xi Jinping of China, she said, “he has used his campaign to prepare Americans for autocracy.”

She cited his adoption of language from Nazi and Soviet lexicons, such as branding opponents as “vermin” and the “enemy from within” while accusing immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country,” and suggesting that he might use the military to round up opponents. “A victory for Trump would mean that this vision of America — and the recourse to violence as a means of solving political problems — has triumphed,” Ms. Ben-Ghiat said.

Mr. Short predicted another four years of chaos and uncertainty. “I would anticipate a lot of volatility — personnel but also significant boomerangs on policy,” he said. “Not boomerang from Biden-Harris but boomerang from himself. You’ll have one position one day and another the next.”

Mr. Trump’s latest victory also adds ammunition to the argument that the country is not ready for a woman in the Oval Office

Mr. Trump, a thrice-married admitted adulterer accused of sexual misconduct by more than two dozen women, has for the second time defeated a woman with more experience in public office than he had. Each of them was flawed, just as male candidates are flawed, but the sense of 2016 déjà vu on the left on Wednesday morning was palpable.

Yet even though most abortion rights referendums were passing in various states on Tuesday, the issue did not galvanize women in the first presidential race since Roe v. Wade was overturned to the extent that Democrats had expected and Republicans feared.

“In many ways, this is the last chapter of the Jan. 6 drama,” said Mr. Naftali. “Many Republicans thought they had managed to thread the needle, to avoid pissing off their base while also jettisoning Trump. And it turned out they hadn’t. And now they have him back. And if he wins the bet, and he’s returned to power, then the final verdict of Jan. 6 is that in modern America, you can cheat and the system isn’t strong enough to fight back.”

The defining struggle going forward will be the war that Mr. Trump says he will now wage against a system that he deems corrupt. If he follows his campaign promises, he will seek to consolidate more power in the presidency, bring the “deep state” to heel and go after “treasonous” political opponents in both parties and the media.

He learned from his first term, not so much about policy, but about how to pull the levers of power. And this time, he will have more latitude, a more aligned set of advisers and possibly both houses of Congress as well as a party that even more than eight years ago answers solely to him.

The Trump era, it turns out, was not a four-year interregnum. Assuming he finishes his new term, it now looks to be a 12-year era that puts him at the center of the political stage as long as Franklin D. Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan were.

It is Mr. Trump’s America after all.

onspiracism is not an inherently right-wing indulgence. After September 11, many in liberal circles fell for nonsense alleging that the Bush administration was secretly behind the attacks

A person, alone in conversation, can be rational. People, in a crowd, become something else.

As different as some of the people I spoke with at these Trump rallies could be, when they went into the crowd, they experienced the ecstasy of the cruelties they would perhaps not allow themselves to indulge in alone. The rationalizations and explanations and denial melted away. They understood that they were there to mock and condemn those they hate and fear, and to listen to all of Trump’s vows to punish them.

The outer circle treats Trump’s authoritarianism and racism as regrettable and perhaps too colorful, but equivalent or similar to other common character defects possessed by all politicians. To acknowledge the liberal critique of Trump as correct would amount to a painful step away from a settled political identity that these outer-circle members are not willing to take—they would have to join the Never Trumpers in exile.

The innermost circle denies the radicalism of its agenda to the middle ring of fervent Trump supporters, presenting any criticism as the lies of the same liberal elites responsible for dispossessing real Americans of what is owed them

Denial is the mortar that holds the three MAGA circles together

This group of Trump voters treat his authoritarianism as mere bombast or as exaggerations from the media, seeing this election as an ordinary one in which a party with a bad economic record should be replaced by a party with a better one, not an election in which a man who tried to destroy American democracy is running for a chance to finish the job.

Then there is the outer circle: Americans with conservative beliefs who may be uneasy about Trump but whose identification with conservative principles and the Republican Party mean they wish to persuade themselves to vote for the Republican candidate.

they are so isolated from mainstream news sources that they believe Trump’s claims that he has no ties to it, and that he has their best interests in mind because “he cannot be bought” by the same elites they believe are responsible for their hardships.

There is a second, slightly larger circle around this first one, comprising devoted Trump fans. These fans are the primary target for a sanitized version of the “Great Replacement” theory, which holds that American elites have conspired to dispossess them of what they have in order to give it to unauthorized immigrants who do not belong. They are not ideologically hostile to the welfare state—indeed, many of them value it—but they believe it is being wasted on those who have no claim to i

There are, I’ve come to see, three circles of MAGA that make up the Trump coalition.

The innermost circle comprises the most loyal Trump allies, who wish to combine a traditional conservative agenda of gutting the welfare state and redistributing income upward while executing by force a radical social reengineering of America to resemble right-wing nostalgia of the 1950s. Trump’s advisers and other conservative-movement figures understand Trump’s populism as a smoke screen designed to conceal their agenda of cutting taxes for the wealthy, banning abortion, eviscerating the social safety net, and slashing funding for education, health care, and other support for low-income people

This faction wants a government that works to preserve traditional hierarchies of race, gender, and religion, or at least one that does not seek to interfere with what it sees as the natural order of things.

This innermost circle includes legislative allies such as House Speaker Mike Johnson, who has vowed to repeal the Affordable Care Act; policy aides such as Vought, who has spoken of mass deportation as a means to “end multiculturalism”; and elite backers such as Elon Musk

Classical liberalism is a doctrine built around respect for the equal dignity of individuals through a rule of law that protects their rights, and through constitutional checks on the state’s ability to interfere with those rights

But over the past half century that basic impulse underwent two great distortions. The first was the rise of “neoliberalism”, an economic doctrine that sanctified markets and reduced the ability of governments to protect those hurt by economic change. The world got a lot richer in the aggregate, while the working class lost jobs and opportunity. Power shifted away from the places that hosted the original industrial revolution to Asia and other parts of the developing world.

The second distortion was the rise of identity politics or what one might call “woke liberalism”, in which progressive concern for the working class was replaced by targeted protections for a narrower set of marginalised groups: racial minorities, immigrants, sexual minorities and the like. State power was increasingly used not in the service of impartial justice, but rather to promote specific social outcomes for these groups.

In the meantime, labour markets were shifting into an information economy. In a world in which most workers sat in front of a computer screen rather than lifted heavy objects off factory floors, women experienced a more equal footing. This transformed power within households and led to the perception of a seemingly constant celebration of female achievement.

The rise of these distorted understandings of liberalism drove a major shift in the social basis of political power. The working class felt that leftwing political parties were no longer defending their interests, and began voting for parties of the right.

Thus the Democrats lost touch with their working-class base and became a party dominated by educated urban professionals. The former chose to vote Republican. In Europe, Communist party voters in France and Italy defected to Marine Le Pen and Giorgia Meloni

With regard to immigration, Trump no longer simply wants to close the border; he wants to deport as many of the 11mn undocumented immigrants already in the country as possible. Administratively, this is such a huge task that it will require years of investment in the infrastructure needed to carry it out — detention centres, immigration control agents, courts and so on.

The Republican victory was built around white working-class voters, but Trump succeeded in peeling off significantly more Black and Hispanic working-class voters compared with the 2020 election. This was especially true of the male voters within these groups.

There is no particular reason why a working-class Latino, for example, should be particularly attracted to a woke liberalism that favours recent undocumented immigrants and focuses on advancing the interests of women.

It is also clear that the vast majority of working-class voters simply did not care about the threat to the liberal order, both domestic and international, posed specifically by Trump.

what is the underlying nature of this new phase of American history?

The real question at this point is not the malignity of his intentions, but rather his ability to actually carry out what he threatens. Many voters simply don’t take his rhetoric seriously, while mainstream Republicans argue that the checks and balances of the American system will prevent him from doing his worst. This is a mistake: we should take his stated intentions very seriously.

Trump is a self-proclaimed protectionist, who says that “tariff” is the most beautiful word in the English language. He has proposed 10 or 20 per cent tariffs against all goods produced abroad, by friends and enemies alike, and does not need the authority of Congress to do so.

As a large number of economists have pointed out, this level of protectionism will have extremely negative effects on inflation, productivity and employment.

Donald Trump not only wants to roll back neoliberalism and woke liberalism, but is a major threat to classical liberalism itself.

It will have devastating effects on any number of industries that rely on immigrant labour, particularly construction and agriculture. It will also be monumentally challenging in moral terms, as parents are taken away from their citizen children, and would set the scene for civil conflict, since many of the undocumented live in blue jurisdictions

He has vowed to use the justice system to go after everyone from Liz Cheney and Joe Biden to former Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Mark Milley and Barack Obama. He wants to silence media critics by taking away their licences or imposing penalties on them.

Whether Trump will have the power to do any of this is uncertain: the court system was one of the most resilient barriers to his excesses during his first term. But the Republicans have been working steadily to insert sympathetic justices into the system, such as Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida, who threw out the strong classified documents case against him.

Trump has privately threatened to pull out of Nato, but even if he doesn’t, he can gravely weaken the alliance by failing to follow through on its Article 5 mutual defence guarantee. There are no European champions that can take the place of America as the alliance’s leader, so its future ability to stand up to Russia and China is in grave doubt. On the contrary, Trump’s victory will inspire other European populists such as the Alternative for Germany and the National Rally in France.

East Asian allies and friends of the US are in no better position. While Trump has talked tough on China, he also greatly admires Xi Jinping for the latter’s strongman characteristics, and might be willing to make a deal with him over Taiwan

At the end of his term, he issued an executive order creating a new “Schedule F” that would strip all federal workers of their job protections and allow him to fire any bureaucrat he wanted. A revival of Schedule F is at the core of the plans for a second Trump term, and conservatives have been busy compiling lists of potential officials whose main qualification is personal loyalty to Trump. This is why he is more likely to carry out his plans this time around.

critics including Kamala Harris accused Trump of being a fascist. This was misguided insofar as he was not about to implement a totalitarian regime in the US. Rather, there would be a gradual decay of liberal institutions, much as occurred in Hungary after Viktor Orbán’s return to power in 2010.

This decay has already started, and Trump has done substantial damage. He has deepened an already substantial polarisation within society, and turned the US from a high-trust to a low-trust society; he has demonised the government and weakened belief that it represents the collective interests of Americans; he has coarsened political rhetoric and given permission for overt expressions of bigotry and misogyny; and he has convinced a majority of Republicans that his predecessor was an illegitimate president who stole the 2020 election.

In 2011, with Mr. Trump making headlines as the leading spokesman for birtherism, Barack Obama’s team seized the opportunity to cast him as the face of the entire Republican opposition. Years later, David Plouffe, an Obama campaign manager turned presidential adviser, explained the strategy. “Let’s really lean into Trump here,” Mr. Plouffe remembered thinking. “That’ll be good for us.”

the anti-MAGA coalition had rallied time and again, conveniently relieving Democrats of the burden that comes with deciding what to believe other than not being Mr. Trump.

But there was a price to be paid. No matter how progressive the rhetoric, Resistance politics inevitably feels conservative. It’s reactionary in a literal sense: The other side decides the terms of debate, and it usually ends with finding yet another norm under assault, a new outrage to be tutted over or another institution that needs protecting.

her biggest challenges were downstream from the failure to build a Democratic identity beyond #Resistance. Commitment to stitching together an anti-MAGA coalition made it impossible to lay out the priorities that would have guided a Harris administration

There was no way to tie her policies together into a unifying vision that set her apart from Mr. Biden, no account of what Democrats learned presiding over a country that most Americans feel is on the wrong track.

This fundamental problem explains the strange incoherence of Ms. Harris’s strategy. Judge the campaign by how it was described in the press, and you’d think the chief targets were Never Trump Republicans

Check out the ads that ran in swing states, though, and you’d hear a populist message that wouldn’t have sounded out of place coming from Bernie Sanders,

she struggled to harness material frustrations, even though testing from her chief super PAC, Future Forward, repeatedly demonstrated that it was her strongest argument with swing voters

the broad-based character of the shift toward Republicans is the classic tell of an electorate frustrated with an incumbent party. For now, the election looks like a rejection of Mr. Biden, not a realignment for Mr. Trump.

the pendulum that swung against Democrats on Tuesday will bring them back into power eventually. If history is any guide, that day will probably arrive sooner than feels possible right now.

Still, progressives worried that fascism is on the march would benefit from taking a closer look at how these movements gain power.

Reflecting on Hitler’s rise in her native Germany, Hannah Arendt pointed out that by the final days of the Weimar Republic, politics had split into two irreconcilable factions: “those who wanted the status quo at any price” versus “those who wanted change at any price.” One thing both groups had in common, she added, was “the tacit assumption that the electorate would go to the polls because it was frightened.”

He was impeached, indicted and convicted, and then he won more votes in a fair fight with what could well be the most racially diverse Republican coalition in decades. Trumpism doesn’t have a generational lock on American politics, but it has broad and deep support, with the potential to grow in the years to come.

It’s going to take a sprawling, messy and sometimes brutal debate inside the Democratic coalition — a debate that ends with a party that can plausibly present itself as a champion of ordinary people trying to make a better life in a broken system.

The Resistance has run into a dead end

it does mean giving up on the hope that laws, norms or one last impeachment will deliver us from Trumpism

In this frivolous new world, everything must be pleasing and inoffensive. Everything and everybody gets marketed like an exciting new product—even old, creepy politicians, or ancient film actors, or 80-year-old rock stars.

The public accepts this as a matter of course. They hardly expect anything to be real nowadays.

Let’s stay with 1996 for a moment—because it was a turning point. Before that time, Susan Sontag had been very receptive to popular culture—movies, commercial music, and campy pop art. But each of these was becoming unrecognizable in their turn-of-the-century guises.

These films were all different—but they had one thing in common: overwhelming special effects. In the final years of the twentieth century, computer technology had reached a level where massive levels of destruction could be shown on screen with an immediacy never before possible. Technology was setting the agenda for creativity. Everything else—script, directing, acting, was subservient to the computer-generated imagery. But 1996 was just the beginning of cinema as a digital spectacle. With each passing year, the artificial digital component has increased, and the real human element decreased. The advent of AI will now accelerate this even further. We may soon reach the point where nothing on the screen is real.

Carlyle rightly mocks the citizens of France who, in those days, put so much trust in paper—whether the deceptive newspapers or the collapsing paper currency. Humans had once created a Stone Age and an Iron Age—but now settled for the Age of Paper.

By implication, we live today in a digital age—or the Age of Less-Than-Paper. It doesn’t help that that cutting edge technologies are focused so much on deception—fake images, fake video, fake audio, fake books by fake authors, fake songs by fake musicians, fake news, fake everything.

Fake is our leading candidate for word of the century. It captures almost everything relevant now in a single syllable.

Here’s the scariest part of the story: Most of this is by design. Our culture is now obsessed with deception and misdirection—and it’s not just on the movie screen anymore. You see it everywhere, from cosplay conventions to bands wearing masks to the misguided virtual reality mania.

Never before in history has authenticity been in such short supply. That’s so much the case, that the very word authenticity is mocked. (I will write about that more in the future.)

This is the flip side of our culture of artificiality. Anything that threatens the dominant fakeness with reality stirs up an intense backlash. The dreamer does not want to awaken from the dream.

here’s the most salient fact of all: People who have their act together are now taking things very seriously in there own lives. They aren't waiting for guidance from an app from the Apple Store or a post from an influencer.

Can you build a culture on cotton candy? We will soon find out.

In a cotton candy society, everything feels insubstantial:People go to war online—in toxic Twitter posts—but it’s a fake war with the angriest combatants typically hiding behind avatars.People seek love online, but even here the fakeness is toxic—hence many are catfished (a term that didn’t exist a few years ago) by scammers pretending to be a romantic interest. People not only work and play online, but even construct their selves online—which is where their identity increasingly resides.

These are all signs that we are living in a society running low on seriousness.

Ah, the word action. That’s fallen out of favor, too—another symptom worth noting. Here’s the Google analysis of its usage since the year 1900.

The decline in the word action accelerated during the same period that saw the rise (shown above) in the word fake. They are mirror images of the same cultural shift.

Participants at Normandy and Selma were taking action. But soup hurlers operate at a symbolic level, or (let’s be honest) a less-than-symbolic level—because these paintings have no connection in any way with the issues at stake.

The targeted paintings aren’t appropriate symbols of the evil they are supposed to represent. In fact, they embody the exact opposite.

A psychoanalyst would say that the hostility here is displaced—like people who kick the dog because they hate their boss.

It’s not mere coincidence that anger and violence are targeted at objects that are inescapablyrealtangibleuniqueauthentic (that word again!)produced by human hand

In an age of fakery, people who operate without seriousness will inevitably focus their hostility on precisely these cherished objects.

he cluelessness in Cupertino is understandable. The dominant companies in Silicon Valley are threatened by reality and seriousness—which are like Kryptonite to the digital agenda. So these mishaps are inevitable. Fakery is now a business model. Reality is its hated competitor.

So are you surprised that everything in culture has a feeling of unreality right now? It’s like cotton candy that shrinks to nothing as soon as you put it in your mouth, just leaving a brief sickly sweet taste.

let’s call them leaders—because that’s what they will be. And that’s such a better word than influencer.

Five years from now, the cultural landscape will look much different. I expect a lot will change in just the next 12 months.

COMING SOON: I will write about “How to Become a Serious Person.”

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t hold these beliefs and never buy fast fashion or a piece of plastic. I hold these beliefs whilst sometimes buying new clothes or out-of-season strawberries in a plastic container. It’s the justification I have a problem with. 

Because I see these arguments constantly. Why should *I* have to do XYZ if a large corporation is doing ABC? Why can’t *I* go on holiday when an insert celebrity is flying their private jet 10x a week? Why should *I* care about this thing when no one cares about this other thing?! 

I’ve become a staunch believer there are few excuses when it comes to actions which directly harm our planet. 

We live in a society where unless you’re very wealthy and VERY time-rich you cannot exist without impacting the planet. Let’s not kid ourselves into believing there is any other reason we live in this way. 

the real question we should be posing is what does giving this stuff up open up for us? How does living in this different way enrich and improve our lives and our wider community’s lives? 

You don’t overconsume because your life is hard and big corporations exist, you overconsume because you live in a society built in a way to funnel you into doing exactly that.1

I wrote ‘the narrative younger people are fed’ because whilst these things are true, I often feel they’re used as a way to keep us down, to keep us depressed and complacent so we don’t rebel.

I think these students believe these narratives to be true, doing so keeps them safe in their current way of living, and allows them to get through the day without as much mental turmoil. 

I’ve been there. I tried to do it all. I tried to be zero-waste-thrift-store-girly, but it drove me crazy. One person can’t live in a completely ‘sustainable’ way, without ever leaving a footprint on this planet, it’s impossible and will only leave you feeling extremely exhausted and extremely guilty. 

The truth is sometimes I buy new socks and plastic contact lenses. Sometimes I want to buy a nice bag and a new pair of shoes and fit in with the wider society and others in my age group. Yes, it plays directly into capitalism’s hands, yes, I am doing what the man wants me to do, I still feel guilty, and I still question all my life choices, but god damn, you gotta live. 

can you blame ‘em? With the narrative younger people are fed these days: you’ll never own a house; the job market is atrocious; good luck building any kind of safety net; another oil and gas line has been approved; one war is brewing and one has broken out; oh look! another recession.

Rather than saying we have to give things up to Save The Earth!, that we have to stop consuming to Live Sustainably!, we need to tell people why living in this alternative way is so rich, so nourishing, so plentiful, so beautiful. 

I’ve quoted before and will quote again from Donella Meadows: “People don’t need enormous cars; they need respect. They don’t need closets full of clothes; they need to feel attractive and they need excitement, variety and beauty. [...] People need identity, community, challenge, acknowledgement, love, joy. To try and fill these needs with material things is to set up an unquenchable appetite for false solutions to real and never-satisfied problems. The resulting psychological emptiness is one of the major forces behind the desire for material growth.”2

Our climate conversations–our climate education–cannot just focus on what we need to give up, instead it must focus on what we get to build and welcome into our lives when we’re not wasting our money, time, and energy on buying or not buying new clothes or plastic-wrapped food.

The majority of my friends growing up did not have hobbies, we found joy and community and connection in consumption. Yes, consuming less is an essential piece of the climate puzzle, but telling people they can no longer consume will not get us there, it will only be taking away many people’s only sense of joy and satisfaction in life. 

We will not empower people by telling them to Be More Sustainable!, we will empower people by inviting them to create a world that finds value and beauty and satisfaction in more human ways, without the dark tint capitalist society has clouded our view with. 

Those of us in the global north are some of the biggest individual contributors to climate change, if we all lived like the average American, we would need 5.1 Earths to sustain us all (sorry, we can’t fob it all off to corporations). 

But, in a way, we are often the ones who are most cut off from any possibility of reactivating older institutions, ones that know how to live in harmony with the environment and the local land and could guide us to a better future.

We’re so dependent on existing systems we don’t even notice they exist–until they break down. Just take away one piece of our modern lifestyles and we are suddenly unable to function. A power cut? No cooking, no heating, no warm showers, not even the ability to boil the kettle for a lukewarm bath.

A food supply chain issue? I don’t know a single person in my local area who grows any type of fruit or vegetables

we also see ourselves as the hero, we’re going to save the world with our unrealistic techno-fixes (that don’t yet exist). We have the self-important sense that if we just had the right technology we could fix all of the world’s problems and then everyone would be happy. 

Westerners are often cast as both the villain and the hero of climate change. We’re the villain because we’ve created so many of these problems with our unquenchable thirst to pillage, develop, and create more and more crap.

I don’t know how we can turn back the wheels of modernised helplessness, but whilst we figure this one out, we need to consider what we want to bring into the new world.

learning new skills for a new future is an act of resilience. Creating a community of individuals who can look after each other is an act of resilience. Building a better way of life for yourself–and those around you–is an act of resilience. 

I can’t yet name the plants I meet on my walks, nor can I name the bird calls I hear outside of my window, but I can learn how to feed my family with food grown in my community garden, support builders and creators using reclaimed materials, and connect with people who live a stone’s throw away from my front door

Anything we learn to do for ourselves–actions that can be taken out of the hands of large corporations in an act of helplessness–is a way of helping our Earth. This is my act of resilience. 

we don’t know what the eff we’re talking about when we talk about religion. People start comparing religion, and the thing is ill-defined. Some religions are religions. Some religions are just bodies of laws

Judaism and Islam are not religions like Christianity is a religion, the exact opposite. Let me explain.

Islam and Judaism are laws. It’s law — there’s no distinction between holy and profane — whereas Christianity is not law. Why isn’t it law? A simple reason — you remember the Christ said what is for Caesar and is not for Caesar? It’s because the Romans had the laws. You’re not going to bring the law because they already have the law, and very sophisticated law at that, the Romans.

With Christianity was born the separation of church and state. It’s secular, so it’s effectively a secular religion that says that when you go home, you do whatever you want.

when people are talking about Salafi Islam — it’s not a religion in the sense that Mormon Christianity is a religion. It is a body of laws. It’s a legal system. It’s a political system. It’s a legal system.

So people are very confused when they talk about religion. They’re comparing things that are not the same

Sometimes religion becomes an identity, sometimes law, sometimes very universal.

The same weakness that I see sometimes describe ethnicity. Being Greek Orthodox is more ethnicity than something else, or being Serbian versus Croatian

Comparing religions naively is silly, it’s heuristic and leads to things like saying, “Well, he has a right to exercise his faith.”

Some faiths should not have the right to be exercised, like Salafis or extreme jihadism because they’re not religions. They’re a legal system. They’re like a political party that wants to ban all other political parties

countries that have too much stability become weaker, particularly if it’s propped up, sort of like companies. You see companies that go bust, you get companies that have zero volatility, compressed volatility.

Many of them really should have a little volatility, but some of them would be sitting on dynamite.

COWEN: What can we learn from Sufism?

The problem, that it was destroyed by Saudi Arabian funding. What can we learn from them is how your religion can be destroyed without anybody noticing. The number of Sufis —take Tripoli in Lebanon, it was Sufi. Why did it become non-Sufi? Because of funding from Saudi Arabia — you indoctrinate two generations, and that’s it.

as people get rich, they get controlled by the preferences, they’re controlled by the outside. It was $200 a person. I said, “OK, I’d rather pay $200 for a pizza and would pay $6.95 for the same meal except that by social pressure.” This is how we use controlling preferences. It’s the skin in the game. You discover that your preferences are . . . People are happier in small quarters. You have neighbors around you and narrow streets.

I’d rather eat with someone else a sandwich, provided it’s good bread — not this old bread — than eat at a fancy restaurant. It’s the same thing I discovered little by little. Even from a hedonic standpoint, sophistication is actually a burden.

Aside from that, there is something also that, from the beginning, you realize that hedonism — that pursuit of pleasure for pleasure’s sake — there’s something about it that gives me anxiety. On the other hand, doing something productive — not productive in the sense of virtual signaling, but something that fits a sense of honor — you feel good.

It was a revolutionary power that wanted to end capitalism everywhere, not just in the Soviet Union but all over Asia and Africa, North America, South America. They were gaining a lot of support in the decolonizing societies of Africa and Asia. America was not confident in the ability of its economy to have a permanent recovery from the Great Depression.

When I teach young people today, it’s hard for them to grasp the magnitude and the seriousness of the Cold War and how it shaped every aspect of American life. And the Soviet Union represented an existential threat to the United States.

What coheres to the New Deal is that the Republicans eventually submit to it. And that happens when Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower beats Senator Robert A. Taft. So tell me a bit about the counterfactual there that you think almost happened. What led to Taft losing prominence in the Republican Party, and what might have happened if he hadn’t?

he was slow to get on the bandwagon in terms of the threat of China, the threat of Communist expansion, and that opened up an opportunity for another candidate, by the name of Dwight D. Eisenhower, to enter the presidential race in 1952 and to present a very different vision.

He was a Republican in a classical sense — small central government, devolved power to the states, suspicious of foreign entanglements — believing that America was protected by the two vast oceans and thus did not need a strong standing army, did not have to be involved in world affairs. And he was opposed to the New Deal.

He thought it was a form of tyranny. It was going to lead to collectivism, Soviet style. And he was poised in the 1940s to roll back the New Deal, and he was looking forward to the postwar period after the war emergency had passed. Of course, the war emergency would require a very strong state to mobilize armed forces, to mobilize the economy for the sake of fighting a world war.

They needed foreign markets. America wasn’t sure whether it would have them. And the capitalist class in America was scared to death by the Communist threat, and it had to be met everywhere, and America mobilizes for the Cold War to contain Communism everywhere where it appeared. And that required a standing army in quasi-peacetime of a sort that America had never experienced before, and Taft was profoundly uncomfortable with this.

my counterfactual is that, absent the Cold War, the New Deal, which we now regard as such a juggernaut, would be seen as a momentary blip like so many other progressive moments in American politics. And we would see it as a blip and not for what it became, which was a political order that dominated politics for 30 years.

So there’s been this conventional story of the New Deal era, which is that the fear of Communism, the fear of being painted as soft on Communism or soft on socialism, leads progressives to trim their sails, moderates the sort of left flank of New Dealism. You argue that that story misses what’s happening on the right.

the imperative of fighting the Communists caused Republicans to make even larger concessions than the Democrats did.” What were those concessions?

Well, the biggest concession was agreeing to an extraordinary system of progressive taxation.

The highest marginal tax rate in the 1940s during World War II reached 91 percent, a level that is inconceivable in America of the 21st century. Eisenhower wins the election in 1952. He has both houses of Congress. And quite extraordinarily, Eisenhower maintains the 91 percent taxation rate

I think what mattered to him was the Cold War. The Cold War had to be fought on two fronts: It had to be fought militarily — international containment of Communism — and that required enormous expenditures on national defense, which meant not simply a conventional army but the nuclear arms race.

Eisenhower understood that in order to win the ideological struggle of the Cold War — which was not simply an American-Soviet struggle, but it was a global struggle to convince all the peoples of what was then called the Third World to come with the capitalist way, to come with the American way. In order for that to happen, America had to demonstrate that it could give its ordinary citizens a good life.

America had to prove that it had the better system, and that meant you could not return to unrestrained American capitalism — you had to regulate it in the public interest.

And the other aspect of that, which he appreciated, was that in the 1950s, it was not clear whether the Soviet Union or the United States could provide a better life for its average citizen. The Soviet Union was still doing quite well in the 1950s.

And that meant taking money from the rich and redistributing it, narrowing the inequality between rich and poor. It meant supporting powerful labor movement and not trying to roll back the Wagner Act, which the labor movement regarded as its Magna Carta, a very strong piece of federal legislation that gave it unambiguous rights to organize and obligated employers to bargain collectively with them.

He felt that this had to be the way that America went. Maintenance of Social Security — really all the key New Deal reforms — he ended up maintaining because he thought this would be a critically important instrument for convincing not just ordinary Americans but people around the world that this would prove the superiority of the American way.

That is why he acquiesced to the New Deal order.

It’s a pervasive recognition among America’s business class. You say, “The fear of Communism made possible the class compromise between capital and labor that underwrote the New Deal order.”

And you say it wasn’t just here; this was also true in many of the social democracies in Europe after World War II. Tell me a bit about that class compromise and the role the Cold War played in it.

It is often said that socialism was weaker in America than it was elsewhere. And in many respects, that has been true.

The corollary of that is that the American business class historically has been bigger, more powerful, more unencumbered than the business classes of other nations, especially in Western Europe among America’s industrial rivals. There was no shortage of labor protest in America, but rarely could labor achieve what it wanted to achieve because the resistance was extraordinary, the resistance was legal, it was extralegal.

The national security argument is crucial to getting large segments of the Republican Party on board. For them, the greatest threat, both internationally and domestically, was the Communist threat. And thus, they were willing to extend themselves beyond a point where they otherwise would have gone

I argue that it was the fear of the Soviet Union. And what did the fear of the Soviet Union represent? The expropriation of all corporate capital in the world. That was the Communist dream. And that was deeply felt. And it was felt not simply in a global setting. It was felt within the United States itself,

The history of industrial relations in America was very violent. The business class in America had a reputation of being very powerful and aggressive and unwilling to share its power with its antagonists. So what was it that got them to share that power?

it’s really remarkable to look at how closely the R. and D. state was designed and sold, in terms of its ability to keep America ahead for national defense. It has its roots in World War II, and it continues building much off that rhetoric.

so there’s this interesting way, I think we think of the New Deal in terms of Social Security. We think of it in terms of some of these individual programs. But it is this thoroughgoing expansion of the government into all kinds of areas of American life. And the thing that allows the Republican Party to get on board with a lot of that is this idea that if you don’t do that, well, the Soviets are going to do it

And the business class felt that it was in its interests to compromise with organized labor in a way that it had never done before. That was the grand compromise. It was symbolized in a treaty in Detroit between the three automobile makers, then among the biggest corporations in America, and the United Auto Workers — the Treaty of Detroit — purchasing labor peace by granting unions, good wages, good conditions, good pensions, good health care. Absent the threat of Communism, I think that grand compromise either would not have been arrived at or it would have been scuttled much sooner than it was.

they’re going to have the highways, or they’re going to have the technological or scientific superiority, they’re going to make it to the moon, etc., and then America is going to be left behind.

The vast education bills that are going to propel the tremendous growth of American universities in the 1960s and 1970s — which you mentioned about R. and D. — has a similar propulsion

the scale of this would not have reached the point that it did without getting a lot of Republicans on board. And the critical argument for them was national security, and a critical event was Sputnik, when Soviet Union shocks the United States by putting into orbit a satellite before the United States had done it.

that is a shocking moment: Oh, my God, America is falling behind. We must bend every muscle to beating the Soviet Union in every way, and that requires tremendous investments because of satellite technology and R. and D., and also that becomes the foundation of what is going to become the I.T. industry and the I.T. revolution — also a product of the Cold War.

How does that order end?

There are three factors that pull this order apart. The first is race, the second is Vietnam, and the third is the major economic recession of the 1970s.

Every political order has tensions within it in the United States. And the great contradiction in the New Deal Party of Franklin Roosevelt was the treatment of African Americans. In order to have a new political economy of a big state managing private capital in the public interest, Roosevelt had to get the South on board, and the South meant the white South.

And the entire promise of Western Europe prosperity and American university had been premised on the flow of unending supplies of very cheap Middle Eastern oil — most of them controlled by U.S. and British oil companies. And Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing nations in the 1970s say: No, these are our resources. We will determine how much is drawn out of the ground and the prices that they will be charged.

That was then complicated by Vietnam, a vastly unpopular war — inaugurated and presided over by Democratic presidents who were perceived by their own constituents to not be telling the truth about this awful quagmire.

It also inaugurated trade-offs between funding a war and funding Johnson’s beloved Great Society. Inflation began to take off.

the third element was profound changes in the international political economy. One of the reasons why America was able to enter its grand compromise between capital and labor and pay labor very high wages was that America had no serious industrial competition in the world from the ’40s to the ’60s.

Most of the industrialized world had been destroyed. The U.S. is actively helping the recovery of Western European economies, Japan, promoting development in Southeast Asia, and in the 1970s, these economies begin to challenge American supremacy economically. The symbol of that is the rise of Japanese car manufacturers

Roosevelt assented to that. But this was also a time, especially in the 1940s, when African Americans were migrating in huge numbers to the North, and they were becoming a constituency in the Democratic Party. This was the first point of crisis, and the Democratic Party found itself unable to contain the racial conflicts that exploded in the 1960s.

The quadrupling of oil prices leads to a profound economic crisis, along with competition from European nations against the United States. And this plunges the United States into a very unexpected and profound — and long — economic crisis known as stagflation. Inflation and unemployment are going up at the same time

None of the textbooks say this should be happening. The tools are no longer working. And it’s in this moment of crisis, the Democratic Party — this is the third strike against it — opens up an opportunity for alternative politics, an alternative party, an alternative plan for American political economy.

that sort of leaves out something that is happening among Democrats at this time. There’s a movement inside of liberalism. There’s the New Deal Democratic order, but you develop this New Left, and there is a movement of liberals against big government — young liberals for reasons of self-expression, for reasons of civil rights, for reasons of this feeling that they’re being fed into a bureaucracy and giant soulless organizations and eventually into the meat grinder of Vietnam

older liberals who are angry about the sort of reckless growth and the poisoning of streams and the building of highways through their communities and the sort of ticky-tacky rise of these suburbs. And this predates Reagan

Yes, the New Left erupts on university campuses in the 1960s, and the two primary issues in the beginning are race and Vietnam. But they also quite quickly develop a critique of the established order.

What was called at the time the system

what was the system? The system was large American corporations who were no longer under control. And one reason they were no longer under control is they were being aided and abetted by a large federal state that was supposed to manage them in the public interest

the system was meant to identify not just the corporations who were doing ill in America, but it was meant to identify a federal state that was birthed in the optimism of the New Deal and had been corrupted. So you have this fissure within the Democratic Party itself.

The other element of this is this profound search for personal freedom and autonomy that was intensely felt by members of the New Left.

The computers were these enormous machines, mainframes, and they were seen as stultifying to human creativity. The personal computer movement was born on — as part of the New Left. Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand imagined a personal computer that would be free of the IBM mainframe, free of big corporations, big corporate power — that it would be the authentic voice of only every individual who would be using that machine.

It was a profound expression of a desire for personal autonomy, individuality, expressiveness — unconstrained by larger structures. This cry, or cri de coeur, came from the left. It was a very powerful part of the New Lef

ne can see how it might suit the purposes of a rising neoliberal order because the rising neoliberal order was also intent on deregulating, freeing individuals from the grip of large institutions and allowing them to go their own way.

Neoliberals believe that the best economic program is one that frees capitalism from its shackles, that allows people to truck, barter and exchange goods, that gets the government out of economic life. And the only role for government is to ensure that markets can function freely and robustly. So it runs opposite to the New Deal. If the core principle of the New Deal was: Capitalism left to its own devices would destroy itself. The core principle of neoliberalism: Remove the shackles from capitalism. That will bring us the most productive and freest world we can imagine.

I have a shorthand for describing the neoliberal world that was envisioned by neoliberal thinkers and brought by policymakers into existence. It’s what I sometimes call the four freedoms of neoliberalism: freedom of movement, people; freedom of goods to move across national boundaries; the free flow of information; and the free flow of capital across all boundaries.

In a perfect neoliberal world, people, goods, information and capital are moving freely without constraint. If we can imagine a perfect world that The Wall Street Journal wants, this would be pretty close to it.

I do not want to suggest for a moment that the New Left intentionally created neoliberalism. But it turned out that the cries of freedom, personal freedom, personal autonomy that were emanating from them turned out to be very conducive to the economic philosophy of neoliberalism.

Jimmy Carter is an heir to suspicion of excessive federal power. But I also think he’s grasping at this moment a point of transition in the American economy and a sense that government policy as set forth in the New Deal was not working as well as it should have been. I think it mattered that he was an engineer and he was doing a lot of cost-benefit analysis: What kind of yield are we getting for the bucks that we’re investing?

so he’s open to this fertile moment of dissent. He’s channeling new thinkers and imagining a different Democratic Party that you are correct in saying precedes Clinton by 20 years. And the key figure in this movement is a man by the name of Ralph Nader.

I think as I evaluate the Carter presidency, I see a man really caught in the throes of a moment of transition, able to glimpse what is coming but unable to master what is coming

what defines his presidency, for me, is uncertainty, vacillation and, thus, failure. He’s a classical transitional figure, more controlled by than in charge of the moment.

Nader is a man of the left, but he doesn’t fit in the old left or the New Left.

We might call him a man of the consumer left. For him, the key figure in American society was the consumer, and he wanted to champion the consumer. And his contributions — in terms of automobile safety, occupational safety, food safety — were immens

But he also executed a profound shift in ideology, and I’m not even sure how aware he was of the consequences of what he was generating. Because in the process of making the consumer sovereign, he deflected attention, I would say, from what was and what remains the core relationship in a capitalist economy, and that is in the realm of production and the relations between employers and employees

And he was reluctant, in some respects, to challenge corporate power if corporate power was serving the consumer in a good way. He anticipates, in some respects, a profound shift in antitrust policy, and the key figure in this is going to be Robert Bork in the 1980s and 1990s.

It had been an article of faith in American history that no corporation should be allowed to get too large, because they would inevitably exercise power in an undemocratic fashion. So antitrust meant breaking up big corporations. Under Robert Bork, the question changed. Big corporate power was OK as long as it served the consumer with cheap goods.

he and his supporters and his organizations deserve a lot of credit for holding the government accountable and making vast improvements in a whole host of areas — regulating the environment and other matters, regulating food — and compelling government to do the service that it does.

But it also distracts from understanding part of that which powers the rise of large corporations and gives them the ability to control government and capture regulatory agencies. And I think the results of his attacks on government have been ambivalent, in terms of their consequences: in some respects really accelerating the process of delivering goods to the American people and American consumers that they want but, on the other hand, contributing to an atmosphere of thinking the government can’t really do much that’s right.

As you move toward Reagan, certainly part of Ronald Reagan’s appeal is his anti-Communism.So how do you describe the role of the Soviet Union in this period of political time?

The collapse of the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991 is one of the most stunning events, I think, of the 20th century and arguably much longer.

What were its consequences? First, it opened up the whole globe to capitalist penetration, to a degree that had not been available to capitalism since prior to World War I. And this generates a tremendous amount of belief and excitement and expansion and a good deal of arrogance and hubris within the capitalist citadel, which is the United States. So that’s one major consequence.

The second major consequence is: What does it mean for Communism no longer to exist as a threat? And what we begin to see in the 1990s is capital in America regaining the power, assurance, authority, belief in its unilateral power that it had, across the years of the Cold War, if not sacrificed, then moderated.

hat the Soviet Union had promised, what Communism had promised, was that private enterprise could be superseded by rational planning on the part of an enlightened set of rulers who could manage the economy in a way that benefited the masses in extraordinary ways.

That whole project fails, and it fails in a spectacular fashion.

Ronald Reagan had insisted that there was a continuum between Soviet government tyranny and what he regarded as New Deal government tyranny. They were on the same spectrum. One inevitably led to another. He and other Republicans, George H.W. Bush, the party as a whole take this as a great vindication of their core beliefs: that capitalism, which, under the New Deal, was sharply constrained, should be freed from constraint; its animal spirits allowed to soar; venture capitalists encouraged to go everywhere; investments made easy; lower taxation; let capitalists and capital drive America and the world economy, unconstrained by regulation.

these were the core ideas of neoliberals, which have been incubating for decades. And now suddenly these ideas seem to be vindicated. This is the moment of free market triumph.

it intersects in a very powerful way with the ongoing I.T. revolution, which is also bound up with the Soviet Union’s collapse. Because the Soviet Union was very hostile to the personal computer because it required a degree, at that time, of personal freedom that the Soviet Union wasn’t willing to allow what the I.T. revolution represented in the 1990s. And this is one of the reasons that Democrats get on board with it. What it represented was a belief that market perfection was now within human grasp, that there may have been a need for strong government in the past, because knowledge about markets was imperfect, it was limited, it took time for information about markets to travel, a lot of it was wrong, not enough of it was available instantaneously.

Well, suddenly in the 1990s, you have this dream, this vision of all economic knowledge in the world being available at your fingertips instantaneously and with a degree of depth and a range of statistics and figures that had been unimaginable, and a techno-utopianism takes hold

it’s the intersection of these two vectors — a sense that the collapse of the Soviet Union vindicates free market thinking and the I.T. revolution — that allows people to think market perfection is within our grasp in ways it never has been before, that pours fuel on the fire of neoliberal free market thinking.

You described Bill Clinton as the Dwight D. Eisenhower of neoliberalism. What do you mean by that, and what are some of the, for you, core examples?

When Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, no Democratic U.S. president had been elected since 1976. Sixteen years is an eternity in electoral politics in the United States. And the question becomes: Will he roll back the Reagan revolution of the 1980s — massive efforts at deregulation — or will he follow a path that Dwight Eisenhower followed in the early ’50s?

Clinton, in the beginning, is a little uncertain about what he is going to do. And he has some ambitious proposals in his first two years — most notably a vast program of national health insurance, which crashes spectacularly.

And then he gets punished for that venture severely in the 1994 congressional elections, which bring Newt Gingrich and a very right-wing group of Republicans to power — the first time that Republicans control both houses of Congress since 1952. It’s a huge achievement for the Republicans

Clinton reads that moment as signifying that the older Democratic Party of the New Deal, of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, really had to be reworked and revamped.

the only way for him to win re-election, and the only way for the Democrats to hold on to national power and to regain it in Congress in 1996, is for him to acquiesce to some core Reaganite beliefs. And at the center of the Reaganite project was deregulation — which is a code word for getting the government out of economic affairs or curtailing government power.

Archived clip of President Bill Clinton: We know big government does not have all the answers. We know there’s not a program for every problem. We know and we have worked to give the American people a smaller, less bureaucratic government in Washington. And we have to give the American people one that lives within its means. The era of big government is over.

so Clinton signs off on the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which effectively deregulates the burgeoning I.T. sector of the economy, makes possible an unregulated internet. He signs off on the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999.

The Glass-Steagall Act had divided investment from commercial banking and had imposed a kind of regulation on Wall Street that brought an end to the crazy speculation that had brought about the Great Depression in the first place. It was a core principle of the New Deal

He does not seek to revive the Fairness Doctrine, in terms of regulating public media, which had guided successive Democratic administrations: the idea that if a news outlet put out one side of a debate on a policy matter, they were obligated to give the other side equal access.

He becomes an advocate of deregulation and, in some respects, pushes deregulation further than Reagan himself had been able to do. And in that sense, he acquiesces to some of the core principles of the Reagan revolution rather than seeking to roll them back, and it is in that respect that I think it’s appropriate to think of him as a Democratic Eisenhower.

what one remembers most about those battles is how much Clinton and Newt Gingrich hated each other’s guts. And they were seen as being polar opposites.

Clinton, the representative of a New Left America: cosmopolitan, open to the liberation movements, looking for new ways of creating a new and diverse America, embracing sexual liberations — his embrace of gay rights was somewhat limited but still significant. Newt Gingrich, on the other hand, representing traditional Victorian America, wanting to reassert the patriarchal, heterosexual family, men at work, women in the home, religious.

one of the surprises, to me, in working on this book, because I remember those days very well, was the degree to which they worked together — on telecommunication, on reform of Wall Street, on welfare.

Clinton would claim, and his defenders would claim, that he was triangulating. He was trying to make the best of a bad deal, that popular opinion was running with free markets, was running with the Republicans. And to some extent, that was true.

the lesson that I draw from that moment is that one must refrain from always getting sucked into the daily battles over cultural issues.

“cosmopolitanism.” Something that was fresh, to me, in your book was this argument that in neoliberalism, you’re looking at more than just what we typically think of it as, which is an economic theory. You argue that there is a moral ethic that came alongside it, that is part of it. You talk about it as, at various times, cosmopolitan, individualistic. Tell me about it.

“Neoliberalism” is often defined, as you say, simply as being about markets and freeing them up

And “neoliberalism” is also defined as something that’s profoundly elitist in orientation, and it’s a device and an ideology used by elites to implant market ideology on a society in ways that deepens economic inequality and has the ability to strangle the democratic rights of the masses.

I also say that in America, it had a profound popular base. Reagan was an enormously successful president, and by “success,” I mean he was able to excite the imagination of majorities of American voters, and his core message was freedom.

half the time he meant freedom in terms of a free enterprise economy, but the other half of the time he meant freedom in terms of giving individuals the autonomy to go their own way.

he was not a fan of the liberation movements of the ’60s. But when Clinton becomes president in the 1990s, he has a profound connection to those liberation movements of the 1960s — to feminism, to sexual liberation, to civil rights.

he detects in a world in which everyone can travel to wherever they want to go. He valorizes immigrants. He valorizes diversity. These are all values that are profoundly compatible with the neoliberal vision. The opportunity to travel anywhere, to seek out personal adventure, to seek out different cultures.

This is a world that neoliberalism makes possible, and it’s a thrilling moment for many people who have the opportunity either to mix in the world of American cities, which have filled up with immigrants, or to travel abroad and experience other cultures.

A single global marketplace enables and encourages the kind of cosmopolitanism that people on the left-center side of the political spectrum in America have so deeply valued.

you locate the end of this era in the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009. Why?

The promise of neoliberalism was that it would lift all boats. There was an acknowledgment about those who were freeing the energies of the market economy that it would probably increase inequality, the distance between the rich and the poor, but that the increase in inequality wouldn’t matter because the forces of production that would be unleashed on a global scale would be so powerful and so profound that everybody would have more and everybody would have a better life.

And what the 2008-9 financial crisis exposed was first a lot of the market freedom that neoliberalism had unleashed had led to corrupt banking and financial practices that had brought the world to the edge of financial abyss of unimaginable proportions. We ended up skirting that abyss — but not by a lot.

on the other hand, it brought into view a sense of how profoundly unequal the access to power was under the neoliberal regime. And here it’s not so much the financial crash itself but the nature of what governments did to promote recovery from the financial crash.

The object in the U.S. and also in Europe became to save the banks first. The culprits of this financial crisis were the ones who were bailed out first. If you were an American in 2009, 2010, 2011, who had assets in the stock market, you had pretty much recovered your position by 2011, 2012. If you were not one of those fortunate Americans and you were living week to week on a paycheck, your recovery did not occur.

You didn’t reach pre-2008 levels until 2016, 2017, 2018, and people understood, profoundly, the inequality of recovery, and it caused them to look with a much more scrutinizing gaze at the inequalities that neoliberalism had generated and how those inequalities have become so embedded in government policy toward the rich and the poor.

one of the identity crises in the Republican Party — one reason the Republican Party is not held together better — is that the Soviet Union was fundamental to what made its various factions stay in place. And it was also, I think, fundamental to what kept the Republican Party, which at its core has a real anti-government streak, committed in any way to real government.

hen I think there’s a sort of casting about for another enemy. I think they end up finding it after 9/11, or think they have, in what they try to turn into global jihadism, and then it falls apart — both as the antagonist and as a project and just feels to me like another part of the sort of wreckage of this period that opens a way for something new.

That new thing, I think, is more Donald Trump than it is anything else.

I think it discredits what had been a core project of the Republican Party, which was to spread market freedom everywhere. When I teach the Iraq war, I tell my 20-year-old students that this is the worst foreign policy mistake in U.S. history, that it’s going to take the U.S. and the world 50 years to recover from. And it’s imbued with a neoliberal hubris that everyone in the world is simply waiting for the wonders of a market economy to unleash, to be unleashed upon them.

OK, if that era ended, what is being born?

there’s also new zones of agreement that have emerged. When I think about the way I covered politics in 2010, the legitimacy of elections could be taken for granted, and the legitimacy of the Affordable Care Act could not.

I think it’s useful in this moment of acute polarization to look at some of what lies beneath the polarization.

you’re right: On a series of issues there are intriguing conversations going on between Democrats and Republicans. China and tariffs are one area of agreement.

Ironically, immigration is becoming another area of agreement, regardless of who wins the election. One can imagine that the bill agreed to in the Senate late in 2023 could easily be implemented in some form.

here is an area of convergence on antitrust. Josh Hawley and Lena Khan seem to like each other and are finding some common ground on that. And the national security hawks in the G.O.P., people like Marco Rubio and Mitch McConnell, have converged with what we might call the industrial policy doves in the Democratic Party — people like Bernie Sanders — on the importance of reshoring critical sectors of manufacturing and on improving in dramatic ways the nation’s infrastructure.

we can see here a new political economy taking shape, one that breaks with the central principle of neoliberalism, which is that markets must lead and the only role for a state is to facilitate markets.

another element of that, which has been crucial to the ideological reorientation, is a new understanding of the relationship of free markets to democracy.