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he lost faith in the Zionist mission and began to see Israel as a malign occupying power whose self-definition as a Jewish state, he later argued, made it “an anachronism.”

Mr. Judt returned to Britain disabused and highly skeptical of the radical political currents swirling around him at Cambridge

Casting his lot with the nonideological liberals, like Raymond Aron and Albert Camus, who dared to criticize the Soviet Union and third-world revolutionary movements, he subjected Sartre and others to a withering critique that came as a shock to many French and American intellectuals. His target, he wrote, was “the uneasy conscience and moral cowardice of an intellectual generation.”

Fluidly written, with a strong narrative drive and an insistent, polemical edge, both books established Mr. Judt as a historian whose ability to see the present in the past gave his work an unusual air of immediacy

A historian also has to be an anthropologist, also has to be a philosopher, also has to be a moralist, also has to understand the economics of the period he is writing about,” he told the online magazine Historically Speaking in 2006. “Though they are often arbitrary, disciplinary boundaries certainly exist. Nevertheless, the historian has to learn to transcend them in order to write intelligently.”

His views on Israel made Mr. Judt an increasingly polarizing figure. He placed himself in the midst of a bitter debate when, in 2003, he outlined a one-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian problem in The New York Review of Books, proposing that Israel accept a future as a secular, bi-national state in which Jews and Arabs enjoyed equal status.

All of the pathologies evident in the 1930s, which weighed so heavily on the minds of the EU’s architects, are resurgent—the high unemployment, the economic extremes, the perverse austerity policies, the popular backlash against ineffectual parliamentary politics, and the resulting ultra-nationalism.

For the right, the remedy was a return to a more laissez-faire model, even though there was little evidence that Europe’s social market had anything to do with the economic slowdown

For the first four postwar decades, democratically mobilized citizens in strong nation-states anchored the social part of Europe while the European Economic Community, predecessor of the EU, promoted the market part

WHEN JACQUES DELORS, a moderate French socialist, launched a full-blown European Union in the 1980s, the hope was to expand social Europe and market Europe in tandem. But in the actual Maastricht Treaty of 1992—Europe’s de facto constitution—free movement of goods, services, capital, and people are fundamental rights, and social protections are add-ons

IF EUROPE NEEDED ONE more assault to further undermine the model, it came via the refugee crisis. The crisis laid bare two awful fragilities. The first is the dysfunction of the EU as a confederation with multiple veto points and little capacity for leadership in a crisis

Politically, the collision of a lingering and needless economic crisis with a random refugee crisis has energized nationalism, both moderate and neo-fascist. In Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Finland, Austria, and elsewhere, the second- or third-strongest party is far-right populist. Much of this support is working-class, at the expense of social democrats.

he refugee crisis also makes clear that much of Europe’s social compact assumes a common national identity, to which foreigners do not easily fit in.

Europe might be able to accept a million refugees economically, but it cannot do so politically. The refugee crisis is simply an overlay on a deeper crisis of solidarity and common purpose. Unless there is a renewal of popular energy and a burst of progressive leadership, the three-decade era of broadly shared prosperity—les trente glorieuses, as the French call it—will be remembered as a historical blip. The EU aspired to combine that impossible trinity of the French Revolution: liberty, equality, and fraternity. All three are now on the defensive.

The postwar boom, when measured by the purchasing power of the average paycheck, continued into the early 1970s and then abruptly stoppe

Starting in 2000, two related developments added to worsening conditions for the middle and working classes.

that year marked the end of net upward mobility. Before 2000, the size of both the lower and middle classes had shrunk, while the percentage of households with inflation-adjusted incomes of $100,000 or more grew. Americans were moving up the ladder.

After 2000, the middle class continued to shrink, but so did the percentage of households making $100,000 or more. The only group to grow larger after 2000 was households with incomes of $35,000 or less. Americans were moving down the ladder.

The second adverse trend is that trade with China, which shot up after China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in December 2001, imposed far larger costs on American workers than most economists anticipated

If one had to project the impact of China’s momentous economic reform for the U.S. labor market with nothing to go on other than a standard undergraduate economics textbook, one would predict large movements of workers between U.S. tradable industries (say, from apparel and furniture to pharmaceuticals and jet aircraft), limited reallocation of jobs from tradables to non-tradables, and no net impacts on U.S. aggregate employment. The reality of adjustment to the China shock has been far different. Employment has certainly fallen in U.S. industries most exposed to import competition. But so too has overall employment in local labor markets in which these industries were concentrated. Offsetting employment gains either in export-oriented tradables or in non-tradables have, for the most part, failed to materialize.

High wage workers find it relatively easy to adjust and “do not experience an earnings loss,” argue Autor and his colleagues. Low wage workers, in contrast, “suffer large differential earnings loss, as they obtain lower earnings per year both while working at the initial firm and after relocating to new employers.”

The recipe for populism seems pretty clear: take a surge in manufacturing imports from China and continued automation in the US workplace and add a tepid macroeconomy. The result is a combustible stew sure to sour the stomach of party leaders nationwide.

The stew, to continue Hanson’s metaphor, began to boil over with the cataclysmic financial collapse in September 2008, which many people left and right felt was caused by reckless financial engineering on Wall Street. The collapse and the destruction it left in its wake was, without question, the most important economic and political event in recent years.

“It was the financial crisis, what it revealed about government-Wall Street links, and the fumbling of the response to it that put the nail in the coffin of trust in government,

, TARP insulated the very institutions and executives that caused the collapse and the disastrous recession that followed.

The widespread sense that all the elites in Washington and New York conspired to bail out the miscreants who caused the disaster and then gave them bonuses, while the rest of us lost our houses or saw their value, the biggest and often only asset of Americans, plummet, lost our jobs or saw them frozen and stagnant, and then saw gaping inequality grow even more, is just palpable.

On Jan. 10, 2010, the Supreme Court granted those in upper income brackets additional privileges in its Citizens United decision (buttressed by subsequent lower court rulings) that allowed wealthy individuals, corporations and unions to make unlimited political contributions. By opening the door to the creation of SuperPACs and giving Wall Street and other major financial sectors new ways to buy political outcomes, the courts gave the impression, to say the least, that they favored establishment interests over those of the less well off.

A Bloomberg poll last September found that 78 percent of voters would like to see Citizens United overturned, and this view held across a range of partisan loyalties: Republicans at 80 percent; Democrats at 83; and independents at 71.

. Obamacare, a program many in the white middle and working classes perceived as reducing their own medical care in order to provide health coverage to the disproportionately minority poor.

By the midterm elections of 2010, voter dissatisfaction among whites found expression in the Tea Party movement, which produced the sweeping defeat of Democrats in competitive congressional districts as well as of moderate and center-right Republicans in primary contests.Voter anger was directed at two targets — the “undeserving rich” and the “undeserving poor.”

To many of those who cast their ballots in anger in 2010 and 2014, however, it appeared that their votes had not changed anything. Obamacare stayed in place, Wall Street and corporate America grew richer, while the average worker was stuck going nowhere.

Already disillusioned with the Democratic Party, these white voters became convinced that the mainstream of the Republican Party had failed them, not only on economic issues, but on cultural matters as well.

A September 2015 Ispos survey asked voters if they agreed or disagreed with the statement “More and more, I don’t identify with what America has become.” 72 percent of surveyed Republicans concurred, compared to 58 percent of independents and 45 percent of Democrats. Two thirds of Republicans, 62 percent, agreed with the statement “These days I feel like a stranger in my own country,” compared to 53 percent of independents and 37 percent of Democrats. Here is one place where Trump’s scathing dismissal of political correctness found fertile ground.

If he prevails, a constituency that could force politicians to confront the problems of the working and middle class will waste its energies on a candidate incompetent to improve the lives of the credulous men and women lining up to support him.

the consequences of disillusionment with old guard Republicans:The intersection of inequality driven by real wage/income stagnation and the fact that the folks perceived to have blown the damn economy up not only recovered first, but got government assistance in the form of bailouts to do so. If you’re in the anxious middle and that doesn’t deeply piss you off, you’re an unusually forgiving person.

This election has demonstrated that there is no Republican Party organization, per se. The Republican Party exists as an array of allied groups, incumbent office holders, media organizations, and funding vehicles (e.g., SuperPACs, 501(c)(4)s, and the like). When people ask why the “establishment” or “the party” has not done anything to stop Trump, it is not exactly clear who they mean.

The tragedy of the 2016 campaign is that Trump has mobilized a constituency with legitimate grievances on a fool’s errand.If he is shoved out of the field somehow, his supporters will remain bitter and enraged, convinced that a self-serving and malign elite defeated their leader.

In these circumstances, Bernstein wrote, the logic supporting the traditional Republican Party fell apart:The core theme of Republican establishment lore has been to demonize not unregulated finance or trade or inequality, but ‘the other’ – e.g., the immigrant or minority taking your job and claiming unneeded government support. And yet, none of their trickle down, deregulatory agenda helped ameliorate the problem at all. So they lost control.

Missing in your narrative were 2 other factors that contributed to American anger and the turn to Mr. Trump. Those two factors are: the group of very wealthy American's who were convened by the Koch brothers to pool their resources to destroy President Obama and the Congressional Democrats and moderate Republicans, e.g. Senator Lugar.

were suffering from a major contraction and the drying up of credit & jobs and the President unwisely & wrongly appointed the Simpson-Bowles commission to rein in the debt. Remember Harvard's Rogoff & Reinhart who came up with that Debt to GDP ratio? And the rally of our elites & Pete Peterson et al that Deficits were the problem, when the truth, based on history, was just the opposite.

The 2nd factor which can also be attributed to the White House as well as Democrats in the Congress who joined Republicans in misdiagnosing the problem as deficits and debt.

The workers I interviewed after the recession for my book on unemployment—less-educated factory workers—offer some tentative clues about what might be driving the disquieting trends described by the Case and Deaton study.

This is one of the groups hit hardest by the rising inequality and greater risk of unemployment and financial insecurity that have become features of today’s economy, and their experiences put in concrete terms how the economy and culture have become more hostile to workers not lucky enough to be working in posh offices on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley.

When it comes to explaining American economic trends, it is important to remember how critical a role manufacturing and unions have played in the building—and now dismantling—of a strong middle class.

or generations, factories provided good jobs to people who never went to college, allowing families—first white ethnic immigrants, and then others—to be upwardly mobile.

But in the late ’90s—the beginning of the crisis period that Case and Deaton identify—the number of manufacturing jobs in the U.S. dropped dramatically.

Political leaders, bankrolled by the wealthy, rolled back the interventionist policies of the New Deal and postwar period.

Corporations, once relatively tolerant of unions, tapped a cottage industry of anti-union consultants and adopted unseemly tactics to crush any organizing drives in their workplaces.

the two-thirds of Americans over the age of 25 who don’t have a bachelor’s degree

Certainly, it cannot be said enough that African Americans and Latinos continue to fare significantly worse than whites in terms of their overall rates of death and disease, even if the racial gap has narrowed.

. In the decades after World War II, racial minorities were denied many of the jobs, loans, and other resources that allowed the white majority to buy homes and accrue wealth.

If the gains of economic growth have gone largely to the rich in recent years, in that earlier period the white working class could count on hefty rises in living standards from generation to generation, and they grew accustomed to that upward trajectory of growing prosperity.

For example, while the disappearance of high-paying jobs for those with little education is a large part of the overall story of a shrinking middle class, it can’t wholly account for the uptick of mortality identified in the Case and Deaton study.

Likewise, the groups that have been affected most viciously by these market trends in the U.S., African Americans and Latinos, have not suffered the dramatic increases in death by suicide or substance abuse that whites have.

When asked in national surveys about the people with whom they discussed “important matters” in the past six months, those with just a high-school education or less are likelier to say no one (this percentage has risen over the years for college graduates, too).

As scholars of family life as politically distinct as Andrew Cherlin and Charles Murray have stressed, college graduates and the less educated have greatly diverged in terms of when and how they partner up and have kids.

Nowadays, well-educated couples are much more likely to marry, stay married, and have children within marriage than those with less schooling.

A large part of the explanation for this must be that society’s attitudes about the sanctity and permanence of marriage have changed. But it’s important to note that there is an economic dimension to these trends, too—as the frequent separations and divorces I saw among the long-term unemployed made plain to me.

Those struggling financially are less likely to follow the traditional path of first comes marriage, then comes a baby.

The waning of religious belief may be another trend aggravating the modern malaise of the white working class. Since the ’90s, the number of Americans who declare no religious preference on surveys has almost tripled—from 8 percent at the beginning of that decade, to 21 percent in 2014.

Many said their faith was helping them get through their ongoing troubles, yet they rarely or never went to church. Some felt ashamed to be around people because they were out of work.

For others, their religious belief was somewhat a source of self-help, rather than a source of community.

The larger context of this isolation and alienation is America’s culture of individualism. It, too, can worsen the despair. Taken to an extreme, self-reliance becomes a cudgel: Those who falter and fail have only themselves to blame.

America’s frontier spirit of rugged individualism is strong, and it manifests itself differently by race and education level, too.

hite Americans, for instance, are more likely to see success as the result of individual effort than African Americans are (though not Hispanics). The less educated, particularly less-educated whites, also share this view to a disproportionate degree.

To this day, the supreme value of education remains one of the few things that Americans of all persuasions (presidential candidates included) can agree on.

Some of the analysis of the Case and Deaton article has focused rightly on recent developments in this country’s drug crisis—namely, the surge in abuse of prescription opioids, and the resurgence in heroin use, notably among whites.

There is clearly a pressing need to deal more vigorously with this drug problem and the epidemic of fatal overdoses and liver disease that has affected the poor and working class in particular.

At the same time, it should be said that risky individual behaviors are shaped by broader social conditions. As the researchers Bruce Link and Jo Phelan have argued, effective health interventions need to consider the underlying factors that put people “at risk of risks”—specifically, socioeconomic status and social support.

One parting observation, then, is that policies to keep people from sinking into poverty and long-term unemployment can make a huge difference.

Sound familiar? Just as populism is experiencing a comeback in America, so it's taking hold in Germany. But given the history of German nationalism, it inevitably has a more ominous tinge.

The strongest signal of hostility toward the status quo is the precipitous rise of a political party called the Alternative for Germany. It's attracting unprecedented numbers in public opinion polls. According to Bild, a national newspaper, Alternative for Germany would claim 11.5% of the vote if parliamentary elections were held today.

Now the attacks in Cologne have crystallized those challenges, and put Germans' doubts on worldwide display. Ever since reunification, their nation has asserted itself in Europe, looking outward, ruling confidently.

Richard Nixon’s administration was also riddled with criminality—but in 1973, the Republican Party of Hugh Scott, the Senate minority leader, and John Rhodes, the House minority leader, was still a normal organization. It played by the rules.

The corruption I mean has less to do with individual perfidy than institutional depravity. It isn’t an occasional failure to uphold norms, but a consistent repudiation of them. It isn’t about dirty money so much as the pursuit and abuse of power—power as an end in itself, justifying almost any means.

Taking away democratic rights—extreme gerrymandering; blocking an elected president from nominating a Supreme Court justice; selectively paring voting rolls and polling places; creating spurious anti-fraud commissions; misusing the census to undercount the opposition; calling lame-duck legislative sessions to pass laws against the will of the voters—is the Republican Party’s main political strategy, and will be for years to come.

Republicans will remain securely entrenched in the legislative majority through their own hyper-gerrymandering—in Wisconsin last month, 54 percent of the total votes cast for major-party candidates gave Democrats just 36 of 99 assembly seats—so they will go on passing laws to thwart election results.

Nothing can stop these abuses short of an electoral landslide. In Wisconsin, a purple state, that means close to 60 percent of the total vote.

The fact that no plausible election outcome can check the abuse of power is what makes political corruption so dangerous. It strikes at the heart of democracy. It destroys the compact between the people and the government. In rendering voters voiceless, it pushes everyone closer to the use of undemocratic means.

there’s no obvious remedy for what the state legislatures of Wisconsin and Michigan, following the example of North Carolina in 2016, are now doing

Republicans have chosen contraction and authoritarianism because, unlike the Democrats, their party isn’t a coalition of interests in search of a majority. Its character is ideological.

The Republican Party we know is a product of the modern conservative movement, and that movement is a series of insurgencies against the established order.

The first insurgency was the nomination of Barry Goldwater for president in 1964. He campaigned as a rebel against the postwar American consensus and the soft middle of his own party’s leadership. Goldwater didn’t use the standard, reassuring lexicon of the big tent and the mainstream. At the San Francisco convention, he embraced extremism and denounced the Republican establishment, whose “moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

the political opposition wasn’t just wrong—it was a sinister conspiracy with totalitarian goals.

During this first insurgency, the abiding contours of the movement took shape.

conservatives nursed a victim’s sense of grievance—the system was stacked against them, cabals of the powerful were determined to lock them out—and they showed more energetic interest than their opponents in the means of gaining power: mass media, new techniques of organizing, rhetoric, ideas.

Finally, the movement was founded in the politics of racism. Goldwater’s strongest support came from white southerners reacting against civil rights.

modern conservatism would never stop flirting with hostility toward whole groups of Americans. And from the start this stance opened the movement to extreme, sometimes violent fellow travelers.

It took only 16 years, with the election of Ronald Reagan, for the movement and party to merge. During those years, conservatives hammered away at institutional structures, denouncing the established ones for their treacherous liberalism, and building alternatives, in the form of well-funded right-wing foundations, think tanks, business lobbies, legal groups, magazines, publishers, professorships. When Reagan won the presidency in 1980, the products of this “counter-establishment” (from the title of Sidney Blumenthal’s book on the subject) were ready to take power.

But conservatism remained an insurgent politics during the 1980s and ’90s, and the more power it amassed—in government, business, law, media—the more it set itself against the fragile web of established norms and delighted in breaking them.

The second insurgency was led by Newt Gingrich

Gingrich liked to quote Mao’s definition of politics as “war without blood.” He made audiotapes that taught Republican candidates how to demonize the opposition with labels such as “disgrace,” “betray,” and  “traitors.” When he became speaker of the House, at the head of yet another revolution, Gingrich announced, “There will be no compromise.” How could there be, when he was leading a crusade to save American civilization from its liberal enemies?

Unlike Goldwater and Reagan, Gingrich never had any deeply felt ideology. It was hard to say exactly what “American civilization” meant to him. What he wanted was power, and what he most obviously enjoyed was smashing things to pieces in its pursuit. His insurgency started the conservative movement on the path to nihilism.

The party purged itself of most remaining moderates, growing ever-more shallow as it grew ever-more conservative

Jeff Flake, the outgoing senator from Arizona (whose conservative views come with a democratic temperament), describes this deterioration as “a race to the bottom to see who can be meaner and madder and crazier. It is not enough to be conservative anymore. You have to be vicious.”

The viciousness doesn’t necessarily reside in the individual souls of Republican leaders. It flows from the party’s politics, which seeks to delegitimize opponents and institutions, purify the ranks through purges and coups, and agitate followers with visions of apocalypse—all in the name of an ideological cause that every year loses integrity as it becomes indistinguishable from power itself.

The third insurgency came in reaction to the election of Barack Obama—it was the Tea Party.

In the third insurgency, the features of the original movement surfaced again, more grotesque than ever: paranoia and conspiracy thinking; racism and other types of hostility toward entire groups; innuendos and incidents of violence.

The new leader is like his authoritarian counterparts abroad: illiberal, demagogic, hostile to institutional checks, demanding and receiving complete acquiescence from the party, and enmeshed in the financial corruption that is integral to the political corruption of these regimes.

In fact, it took more than a half century to reach the point where faced with a choice between democracy and power, the party chose the latter.

Its leaders don’t see a dilemma—democratic principles turn out to be disposable tools, sometimes useful, sometimes inconvenient. The higher cause is conservatism, but the highest is power. After Wisconsin Democrats swept statewide offices last month, Robin Vos, speaker of the assembly, explained why Republicans would have to get rid of the old rules: “We are going to have a very liberal governor who is going to enact policies that are in direct contrast to what many of us believe in.”

As Bertolt Brecht wrote of East Germany’s ruling party: Would it not be easier In that case for the government To dissolve the people And elect another?

“Nothing in the West can compare with the role which aesthetics has played in Japanese life and history since the Heian period”; and “the miyabi spirit of refined sensibility is still very much in evidence” in modern aesthetic criticism.9

there has run through history the idea that the Japanese are, in terms of their original nature (that is, their nature before the introduction from the outside of such systems of thought and religion as Confucianism and Buddhism), essentially an emotional people. And in stressing the emotional side of human nature, the Japanese have always assigned high value to sincerity (makoto) as the ethic of the emotions.

If the life of the emotions thus had an ethic in makoto, the evolution of mono no aware in the Heian period provided it also with an aesthetic.

Tsurayuki said, in effect, that people are emotional entities and will intuitively and spontaneously respond in song and verse when they perceive things and are moved. The most basic sense of mono no aware is the capacity to be moved by things, whether they are the beauties of nature or the feelings of people,

One of the finest artistic achievements of the middle and late Heian period was the evolution of a native style of essentially secular painting that reached its apex in the narrative picture scrolls of the twelfth century. The products of this style of painting are called “Yamato [that is, Japanese] pictures” to distinguish them from works categorized as “Chinese pictures.”

The Fujiwara epoch, in literature as well as the visual arts, was soft, approachable, and “feminine.” By contrast, the earlier Jōgan epoch had been forbidding, secretive (esoteric), and “masculine.”

Despite the apparent lust of the samurai for armed combat and martial renown, much romanticized in later centuries, the underlying tone of the medieval age in Japan was from the beginning somber, pessimistic, and despairing. In The Tale of Genji the mood shifted from satisfaction with the perfections of Heian courtier society to uncertainty about this life and a craving for salvation in the next.

Despite political woes and territorial losses, the Sung was a time of great advancement in Chinese civilization. Some scholars, impressed by the extensive growth in cities, commerce, maritime trade, and governmental bureaucratization in the late T’ang and Sung, have even asserted that this was the age when China entered its “early modern” phase. The Sung was also a brilliant period culturally.

the fortuitous combination of desire on the part of the Sung to increase its foreign trade with Japan and the vigorous initiative taken in maritime activity by the Taira greatly speeded the process of transmission.

The Sung period in China, on the other hand, was an exceptional age for scholarship, most notably perhaps in history and in the compilation of encyclopedias and catalogs of art works. This scholarly activity was greatly facilitated by the development of printing, invented by the Chinese several centuries earlier.

In addition to reviving interest in Japanese poetry, the use of kana also made possible the evolution of a native prose literature.

peasantry, who formed the nucleus of what came to be known as the True Sect of Pure Land Buddhism. Through the centuries, this sect has attracted one of the largest followings among the Japanese, and its founder, Shinran, has been canonized as one of his country’s most original religious thinkers.

True genre art, picturing all classes at work and play, did not appear in Japan until the sixteenth century. The oldest extant genre painting of the sixteenth century is a work, dating from about 1525, called “Views Inside and Outside Kyoto” (rakuchū-rakugai zu).

the aesthetic principles that were largely to dictate the tastes of the medieval era. We have just remarked the use of sabi. Another major term of the new medieval aesthetics was yūgen, which can be translated as “mystery and depth.” Let

One of the basic values in the Japanese aesthetic tradition—along with such things as perishability, naturalness, and simplicity—is suggestion. The Japanese have from earliest times shown a distinct preference for the subtleties of suggestion, intimation, and nuance, and have characteristically sought to achieve artistic effect by means of “resonances” (yojō).

Amidism was not established as a separate sect until the time of the evangelist Hōnen (1133–1212).

But even in Chōmei we can observe a tendency to transform what is supposed to be a mean hovel into something of beauty based on an aesthetic taste for “deprivation” (to be discussed later in this chapter) that evolved during medieval times.

Apart from the proponents of Pure Land Buddhism, the person who most forcefully propagated the idea of universal salvation through faith was Nichiren (1222–82).

Nichiren held that ultimate religious truth lay solely in the Lotus Sutra, the basic text of the Greater Vehicle of Buddhism in which Gautama had revealed that all beings possess the potentiality for buddhahood.

At the time of its founding in Japan by Saichō in the early ninth century, the Tendai sect had been based primarily on the Lotus Sutra; but, in the intervening centuries, Tendai had deviated from the Sutra’s teachings and had even spawned new sects, like those of Pure Land Buddhism, that encouraged practices entirely at variance with these teachings.

Declaring himself “the pillar of Japan, the eye of the nation, and the vessel of the country,”14 Nichiren seems even to have equated himself with Japan and its fate.

The kōan is especially favored by what the Japanese call the Rinzai sect of Zen, which is also known as the school of “sudden enlightenment” because of its belief that satori, if it is attained, will come to the individual in an instantaneous flash of insight or awareness. The other major sect of Zen, Sōtō, rejects this idea of sudden enlightenment and instead holds that satori is a gradual process to be attained primarily through seated meditation.

Fought largely in Kyoto and its environs, the Ōnin War dragged on for more than ten years, and after the last armies withdrew in 1477 the once lovely capital lay in ruins. There was no clear-cut victor in the Ōnin War. The daimyos had simply fought themselves into exhaustion,

Yoshimasa was perhaps even more noteworthy as a patron of the arts than his grandfather, Yoshimitsu. In any case, his name is just as inseparably linked with the flourishing of culture in the Higashiyama epoch (usually taken to mean approximately the last half of the fifteenth century) as Yoshimitsu’s is with that of Kitayama.

The tea room, as a variant of the shoin room, evolved primarily in the sixteenth century.

Shukō’s admonition about taking care to “harmonize Japanese and Chinese tastes” has traditionally been taken to mean that he stood, in the late fifteenth century, at a point of transition from the elegant and “aristocratic” kind of Higashiyama chanoyu just described, which featured imported Chinese articles, to a new, Japanese form of the ceremony that used native ceramics,

the new kind of tea ceremony originated by Shukō is called wabicha, or “tea based on wabi.” Developed primarily by Shukō’s successors during the sixteenth century, wabicha is a subject for the next chapter.

The Japanese, on the other hand, have never dealt with nature in their art in the universalistic sense of trying to discern any grand order or structure; much less have they tried to associate the ideal of order in human society with the harmonies of nature. Rather,

The Chinese Sung-style master may have admired a mountain, for example, for its enduring, fixed quality, but the typical Japanese artist (of the fifteenth century or any other age) has been more interested in a mountain for its changing aspects:

Zen culture of Muromachi Japan was essentially a secular culture. This seems to be strong evidence, in fact, of the degree to which medieval Zen had become secularized: its view of nature was pantheistic and its concern with man was largely psychological.

Nobunaga’s castle at Azuchi and Hideyoshi’s at Momoyama have given their names to the cultural epoch of the age of unification. The designation of this epoch as Azuchi-Momoyama (or, for the sake of convenience, simply Momoyama) is quite appropriate in view of the significance of castles—as represented by these two historically famous structures—in the general progress, cultural and otherwise, of these exciting years.

Along with architecture, painting was the art that most fully captured the vigorous and expansive spirit of the Momoyama epoch of domestic culture during the age of unification. It was a time when many styles of painting and groups of painters flourished. Of the latter, by far the best known and most successful were the Kanō,

Motonobu also made free use of the colorful Yamato style of native art that had evolved during the Heian period and had reached its pinnacle in the great narrative picture scrolls of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

what screen painting really called for was color, and it was this that the Kanō artists, drawing on the native Yamato tradition, added to their work with great gusto during the Momoyama epoch. The color that these artists particularly favored was gold, and compositions done in ink and rich pigments on gold-leaf backgrounds became the most characteristic works of Momoyama art.

there could hardly be a more striking contrast between the spirits of two ages than the one reflected in the transition from the subdued monochromatic art of Japan’s medieval era to the blazing use of color by Momoyama artists, who stood on the threshold of early modern times.

aware, which, as we saw in Chapter 3, connotes the capacity to be moved by things. In the period of the Shinkokinshū, when Saigyō lived, this sentiment was particularly linked with the aesthetic of sabi or “loneliness” (and, by association, sadness). The human condition was essentially one of loneliness;

During the sixteenth century the ceremony was further developed as wabicha, or tea (cha) based on the aesthetic of wabi. Haga Kōshirō defines wabi as comprising three kinds of beauty: a simple, unpretentious beauty; an imperfect, irregular beauty; and an austere, stark beauty.

The alternate attendance system also had important consequences in the cultural realm, contributing to the development for the first time of a truly national culture. Thus, for example, the daimyos and their followers from throughout the country who regularly visited Edo were the disseminators of what became a national dialect or “lingua franca” and, ultimately, the standard language of modern Japan.

They also fostered the spread of customs, rules of etiquette, standards of taste, fashions, and the like that gave to Japanese everywhere a common lifestyle.

“[Tokugawa-period] statesmen thought highly of agriculture, but not of agriculturalists.”6 The life of the average peasant was one of much toil and little joy. Organized into villages that were largely self-governing, the peasants were obliged to render a substantial portion of their farming yields—on average, perhaps 50 percent or more—to the samurai, who provided few services in return. The resentment of peasants toward samurai grew steadily throughout the Tokugawa period and was manifested in countless peasant rebellions

Although in the long run the seclusion policy undeniably limited the economic growth of Tokugawa Japan by its severe restrictions both on foreign trade and on the inflow of technology from overseas, it also ensured a lasting peace that made possible a great upsurge in the domestic economy, especially during the first century of shogunate rule.

Both samurai and peasants were dependent almost solely on income from agriculture and constantly suffered declines in real income as the result of endemic inflation; only the townsmen, who as commercialists could adjust to price fluctuations, were in a position to profit significantly from the economic growth of the age.

We should not be surprised, therefore, to find this class giving rise to a lively and exuberant culture that reached its finest flowering in the Genroku epoch at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries. The mainstays of Genroku culture were the theatre, painting (chiefly in the form of the woodblock print), and prose fiction,

The Japanese had, of course, absorbed Confucian thinking from the earliest centuries of contact with China, but for more than a millennium Buddhism had drawn most of their intellectual attention. Not until the Tokugawa period did they come to study Confucianism with any great zeal.

One of the most conspicuous features of the transition from medieval to early modern times in Japan was the precipitous decline in the vigor of Buddhism and the rise of a secular spirit.

The military potential and much of the remaining landed wealth of the medieval Buddhist sects had been destroyed during the advance toward unification in the late sixteenth century. And although Buddhism remained very much part of the daily lives of the people, it not only ceased to hold appeal for many Japanese intellectuals but indeed even drew the outright scorn and enmity of some.

it was the Buddhist church—and especially the Zen sect—that paved the way for the upsurge in Confucian studies during Tokugawa times. Japanese Zen priests had from at least the fourteenth century on assiduously investigated the tenets of Sung Neo-Confucianism, and in ensuing centuries had produced a corpus of research upon which the Neo-Confucian scholarship of the Tokugawa period was ultimately built.

Yamaga Sokō is generally credited as the formulator of the code of bushidō, or the “way of the warrior.”4 Certainly he was a pioneer in analyzing the role of the samurai as a member of a true ruling elite and not simply as a rough, and frequently illiterate, participant in the endless civil struggles of the medieval age.

The fundamental purpose of Neo-Confucian practice is to calm one’s turbid ki to allow one’s nature (ri) to shine forth. The person who achieves this purpose becomes a sage, his ri seen as one with the universal principle, known as the “supreme ultimate” (taikyoku), that governs all things.

Neo-Confucianism proposed two main courses to clarify ri, one objective and the other subjective.7 The objective course was through the acquisition of knowledge by means of the “investigation of things,” a phrase taken by Chu Hsi from the Chinese classic The Great Learning (Ta hsüeh). At the heart of things to investigate was history,

Quite apart from any practical guidance to good rulership it may have provided, this Neo-Confucian stress on historical research proved to be a tremendous spur to scholarship and learning in general during the Tokugawa period;8 and, as we will see in the next chapter, it also facilitated the development of other, heterodox lines of intellectual inquiry.

the subjective course appeared to have been taken almost directly from Buddhism, and in particular Zen. It was the course of “preserving one’s heart by holding fast to seriousness,” which called for the clarification of ri by means remarkably similar to Zen meditation.

The calendrical era of Genro ku lasted from 1688 until 1703, but the Genroku cultural epoch is usually taken to mean the span of approximately a half-century from, say, 1675 until 1725. Setting the stage for this rise of a townsman-oriented culture was nearly a century of peace and steady commercial growth.

places of diversion and assignation, these quarters were the famous “floating worlds” (ukiyo) of Tokugawa fact and legend. Ukiyo, although used specifically from about this time to designate such demimondes, meant in the broadest sense the insubstantial and ever-changing existence in which man is enmeshed.

ukiyo15 always carried the connotation that life is fundamentally sad; but, in Genroku times, the term was more commonly taken to mean a world that was pleasurable precisely because it was constantly changing, exciting, and up-to-date.

the Tokugawa period was not at all like the humanism that emerged in the West from the Renaissance on. Whereas modern Western humanism became absorbed with people as individuals, with all their personal peculiarities, feelings, and ways, Japanese humanism of the Tokugawa period scarcely conceived of the existence of true individuals at all; rather, it focused on “the people” and regarded them as comprising essentially types, such as samurai, farmers, and courtesans.

there is little in the literature as a whole of that quality—character development—that is probably the single most important feature of the modern Western novel.

Although shogunate authorities and Tokugawa-period intellectuals in general had relatively little interest in the purely metaphysical side of Chu Hsi’s teachings, they found his philosophy to be enormously useful in justifying or ideologically legitimizing the feudal structure of state and society that had emerged in Japan by the seventeenth century.

With its radical advocacy of violent irrationality—to the point of psychosis—Hagakure has shocked many people. But during Japan’s militarist years of the 1930s and World War II, soldiers and others hailed it as something of a bible of samurai behavior, and the postwar nationalist writer Mishima Yukio was even inspired to write a book in praise of its values.

It is significant that many of the leading prose writers, poets, and critics of the most prominent journal of Japanese romanticism, Bungakukai (The Literary World, published from 1893 until 1898), were either converts to or strongly influenced by Protestant Christianity, the only creed in late Meiji Japan that gave primacy to the freedom and spiritual independence of the individual. The absolutism embodied in the Meiji Constitution demanded strict subordination of the interests of the individual to those of the state;

The feeling of frustration engendered by a society that placed such preponderant stress upon obedience to the group, especially in the form of filial piety toward one’s parents and loyalty to the state, no doubt accounts for much of the sense of alienation observable in the works of so many modern Japanese writers.

These writers have been absorbed to an unusual degree with the individual, the world of his personal psychology, and his essential loneliness. In line with this preoccupation, novelists have perennially turned to the diary-like, confessional tale—the so-called I-novel—as their preferred medium of expression.

In intellectual and emotional terms, the military came increasingly to be viewed as the highest repository of the traditional Japanese spirit that was the sole hope for unifying the nation to act in a time of dire emergency.

The enemy that had led the people astray was identified as those sociopolitical doctrines and ideologies that had been introduced to Japan from the West during the preceding half-century or so along with the material tools of modernization.

If there is a central theme to this book, it is that the Japanese, within the context of a history of abundant cultural borrowing from China in premodern times and the West in the modern age, have nevertheless retained a hard core of native social, ethical, and cultural values by means of which they have almost invariably molded and adapted foreign borrowing to suit their own tastes and purposes.

Western visitors drew on the writings of Charles Fourier (1772-1837) and others and used the “low” status of women among other “barbaric” Japanese practices to justify the previously-mentioned series of unequal treaties.

The overturning of these treaties was one of the main goals of the Japanese state after 1868, a goal achieved by the mid-1890s. This focus led to considerable discussion and reform across several decades. Government officials, intellectuals, reformers in the Japan and across East Asia focused on the “woman question” as a critical part of modernization, necessary to build a strong state and attain equal status with the western powers. Strikingly, they tended to accept the idea that the status of women in East Asia was low. In the process, commentators of all stripes painted a picture of women’s status in the premodern East Asian past that was static and uniform, a view not at all in line with the richness and diversity of the past, a past where some women were highly educated and produced masterful works of art and literature and others had political power and influence.[4]

Let us turn briefly to the period before Japan’s transition to modernity. Until quite recently, scholars have tended to see the preceding Edo/Tokugawa (hereafter Edo) period (1600-1868) as representing the nadir of women’s status. Scholars assumed that warrior rule and Neo-Confucian discourses led to an unparalleled subordination of women. Recent studies have challenged this view and revealed a more complicated and nuanced picture, one where women’s lives varied widely by status, age, locale, and time period. In short, scholars have demonstrated that gender ideals promoted by male scholars that stress women’s inferiority tell us little about the lives of the vast majority of women. Moreover, research shows that merchant women enjoyed more property rights than women of samurai (warrior) and peasant backgrounds.

One example that demonstrates the variety of women’s experiences lies in the area of education. Access to education grew dramatically during the Edo period. Particularly notable are the growth of what are sometimes called temple schools, where girls and boys learned basic reading and arithmetic. As a result of this development, Japan had one of the highest literacy rates in the early modern world. Moreover, some women of means had access to quite elite forms of education equivalent to those available to elite men

This situation would change dramatically in the modern period, for the advent of the nation-state after 1868 and the establishment of universal education in 1872 would eliminate the variety of potential experiences women had, and replace them with a uniform education deemed appropriate to women. In short, after 1872, a greater number of women had access to education than ever before, but the content of this education was more circumscribed than it had been in the past

Modern times saw concrete changes in gender roles within households especially in urban settings. In the Edo period, households in villages were productive units where husbands and wives shared labor

But as some people moved to the cities—a trend that accelerated in the modern period—husbands went out to work leaving middle class wives at home. Urban families increasingly lived in nuclear units, rather than in extended family groups. In the process, middle class women’s lives increasingly became defined in terms of motherhood, something that had not been highly valued in the Edo period. From the turn of the twentieth century on, middle class women in particular were called upon to be “good wives and wise mothers” (ryōsai kenbo)

For poor women, work in the textile mills and sex work continued to be the main occupations as they had in the preceding period. Some scholars have pointed out that Japan’s successful industrial transformation in the nineteenth century was accomplished on the backs of poor women, especially those who toiled in the textile mills. Meanwhile, some women from the middle class were able to pursue a limited number of professions including work as physicians, nurses, and teachers. As Sally Hastings has demonstrated, state policy actually supported these limited opportunities for women because the work was deemed appropriate to their gender. We should not imagine that all Japanese women before 1945 were wives and mothers; professional women existed in the prewar era. In fact, this group of professional women in the 1920s and 1930s played a role in the prewar suffrage movement. They also helped authorize a public role for women and laid the groundwork for women’s enthusiastic participation in political life in the immediate post World War II years.

The 1920s saw the rise of a vibrant women’s rights movement in Japan, one related to the movement for women’s suffrage in the west after World War I when American and British women finally gained the vote. The Japanese government reacted to women’s demands with a gradualist approach. In 1925, it granted universal manhood suffrage and by 1930 and 1931, the lower house of the Diet (legislature) passed bills granting women’s suffrage at the local level. However, as the political situation abroad changed dramatically in the 1930s and the Japanese military began a war in China, the movement to grant women’s political rights went by the wayside. Women’s rights advocates mostly supported the state during the period, hoping that their loyalty would enable them to influence policy on mothers and children.

Women’s political rights were granted after the war in 1945. But the story of how they came to be deserves some attention. The main issue here is what Mire Koikari has called the “myth of American emancipation of Japanese women,” for this period has often been misunderstood. In the fall of 1945, the head of the Occupation (SCAP) General Douglas MacArthur presented a list of demands to the Japanese government, including the demand that women get the vote. However, feminist leader Ichikawa Fusae and her fellow activists had already been lobbying the Japanese cabinet to grant women’s suffrage even before the Occupation arrived. Ichikawa did not want a foreign power to be responsible for granting women the right to vote. The Japanese cabinet was supportive of her initiative. Nevertheless, the subsequent course of events—a revised electoral law granting women the right to vote and stand for office was passed in December 1945—meant that the Occupation could take credit for enfranchising women. This view overlooks the efforts of Japanese women as early as the 1920s as well as their activities in the immediate aftermath of war, as well as the Japanese government’s support of their demands.

Most familiar to western audiences is the story of Beate Sirota Gordon’s role in proposing the gender equality clauses in the postwar Japanese constitution (Articles 14 and 24). At the time, Gordon, who was born in Vienna to Russian-Jewish parents but grew up in Japan, had returned to work for the Occupation as a naturalized American citizen. She was part of a group of Americans charged with the task of rewriting the constitution. Gordon later published her memoir The Only Woman in the Room (1997) relating her critical role in writing this legislation. She has been celebrated in some western and Japanese circles ever since. Yet Gordon’s story has also been subject to critique from several angles. For example, Mire Koikari sheds lights on Gordon’s participation in “imperial feminism,” since Gordon portrayed herself and was portrayed by others as liberating Japanese women. As Koikari adds, “In drafting women’s rights articles, Gordon tapped into her childhood memory where the Orientalist imagery of oppressed and helpless Japanese women predominated.”[7]

The point here is not to ignore Gordon’s contribution to the constitution for she did indeed draft the gender equality legislation, but rather to place her work in a larger context. In fact, as we saw, Japanese women had been working for political rights for decades. The granting of women’s political rights and guarantees of gender equality cannot be seen as a case where a progressive west granted passive Japanese women political rights.  (On a different but related note, acknowledging the agency of Japanese women also means recognizing their complicity in wartime militarism and nationalism, as Koikari emphasizes.)

“A rising economic tide tends to sink the Trump tugboat,”

This pattern is not limited to the United States. There are numerous studies demonstrating that European and British voters who are falling behind in the global economy, and who were hurt by the 2008 recession and the subsequent cuts to the welfare state, drove Brexit as well as the rise of right-wing populist parties.

political scientists at Penn, Duke and University College London, found, for example,A strong relationship between job loss and decreased generalized solidarity. We find evidence of in-group bias and the bias becomes more pronounced due to exposure to austerity policies

austerity policies adopted in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse were crucial both to voter support for the right-wing populist party UKIP in Britain and to voter approval of Brexit.

the EU referendum (Brexit) could have resulted in a Remain victory had it not been for a range of austerity-induced welfare reforms. These reforms activated existing economic grievances

Further, auxiliary results suggest that the underlying economic grievances have broader origins than what the current literature on Brexit suggests. Up until 2010, the UK’s welfare state evened out growing income differences across the skill divide through transfer payments. This pattern markedly stops from 2010 onward as austerity started to bite.

The results here and in England reinforce the conclusion that the worse things get, the better the right does.

As a rule, as economic conditions improve and voters begin to feel more secure, they become more generous and more liberal. In the United States, this means that voters move to the left

postwar prosperity from 1945 to the mid-1970s led to a liberal international consensus:In light of the historical experience of advanced countries, embracing the program of embedded liberalism made economic and political sense. Twentieth-century democratic capitalism had proved to be both successful and resilient: it had delivered high growth; it had allowed governments to fund generous social programs; and it had sent its main political and economic competitor — communism — to the ash heap of history.

As global competition, outsourcing and later, automation, began to produce significant economic disruption, beginning in the 1970s, this liberal consensus frayed.

If the Republican Party now depends on the votes of those who are falling behind, does the party have a vested interest in economic stagnation and decline?

“as conservatives see it, the more visible government dysfunction is, the better. It provides civic education.”

Taylor argued that as far as conservatives go,anything that dispels the illusion that government can be harnessed for positive ends is generally a good thing, and anything that reduces its power and scope is a salutary development.

Trump’s populism offered a false but compelling diagnosis of their economic problems, immigrants and insufficiently protectionist trade policy, which dovetails neatly with rural white anxieties about declining cultural status and relative political power. If you can align threats to identity with threats to material security, as Trump did, it’s pretty powerful.

But, in actual practice moving from campaigning to governing, Wilkinson continued, Trump’strade war is positively hurting agriculture and manufacturing, and every Republican member of congress has voted multiple times to strip away health benefits — leaving ‘identity threat’ as the party’s last resort.

Identity threat — ‘I don’t recognize this country anymore’ — is very abstract compared to material threat — ‘my daughter with leukemia will die if they don’t cover pre-existing conditions’ — and far less motivating. And the argument that the G.O.P. establishment itself has become a threat to economic/material welfare has started to become persuasive.

It’s going to get worse for the G.O.P. as the urgency of the economic problems grows. But they just don’t understand that pushing the same button over and over isn’t going to have the same effect. And this is so in part because they don’t really want to see the seriousness of economic divergence, because they have no idea what to do about it that is remotely consistent with Zombie Reagan social policy dogma.

This is not, according to Lindsey,a conspiracy, but rather a rotten equilibrium. Lack of trust in government brings charlatans to power, further reducing trust in government and widening the path to power for future charlatans

The first, of course, is Trump himself. His victory in 2016 was a charlatan’s ascent, and his presidency has served to sustain distrust in government — fuel, in one sense, for the continued success of charlatans. For the moment, though, his failure to win money for the border wall has punctured his viability as a governing force.

Trump’s second, if less heralded, achievement has been to invigorate the Democratic opposition

It also called into question the economic assumptions that had guided the country since World War II, opening the door for new assumptions that have governed us ever since.

Slowly, though, inflation entered the picture. It hit 5.7 percent in 1970, then 11 percent in 1974. Such sustained inflation was something that had never happened in stable postwar America. And it was punishing. For a family of modest means, a trip to the supermarket was now a walk over hot coals.

Total credit card balances began to explode.

the average family of 1936 was near poor. Everyone was in it together, and if Bill couldn’t find work, his neighbor would give him a head of cabbage, a slab of pork belly.

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But the Great Inflation, as the author Joe Nocera has noted, made most people feel they had to look out for themselves

Throw in wage stagnation, which began in the early ’70s, and deindustrialization of the great cities of the North

Inflation also produced the manic search for “yield” — it was no longer enough to save money; your money had to make money, turning every wage earner into a player in market rapaciousness

Even as Americans scrambled for return, they also sought to spend

The Great Inflation was an inflection point that changed us for the worse. This moment can be another such point, but one that will change us for the better.

a 2006 Department of Labor study pegged the average household income of 1934-36 at $1,524. Adjust for inflation to 2018, that’s about $28,000, while the official poverty level for a family of four was $25,100

Americans became a more acquisitive — bluntly, a more selfish — people. The second change was far more profound.

John Maynard Keynes. His “demand side” theories — increase demand via public investment, even if it meant running a short-term deficit — guided the New Deal, the financing of the war and pretty much all policy thinking thereafter. And not just among Democrats: Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon were Keynesians.

There had been a group of economists, mostly at the University of Chicago and led by Milton Friedman, who dissented from Keynes. They argued against government intervention and for lower taxes and less regulation. As Keynesian principles promoted demand side, their theories promoted the opposite: supply side.

Inflation was Keynesianism’s Achilles’ heel, and the supply-siders aimed their arrow right at it. Reagan cut taxes significantly. Inflation ended (which was really the work of Paul Volcker, the chairman of the Federal Reserve). The economy boomed. Economic debate changed; even the way economics was taught changed.

And this, more or less, is where we’ve been ever since

walk down a street and ask 20 people a few questions about economic policy — I bet most will say that taxes must be kept low, even on rich people, and that we should let the market, not the government, decide on investments. Point to the hospital up the street and tell them that it wouldn’t even be there without the millions in federal dollars of various kinds it takes in every year, and they’ll mumble and shrug.

we have a long way to go. Dislodging 40-year-old assumptions is a huge job. The Democrats, for starters, have to develop and defend a plausible alternative theory of growth

But others have a responsibility here too — notably, our captains of commerce.

They will always be rich. But they have to decide what kind of country they want to be rich i

Then along came Ronald Reagan. The great secret to his success was not his uncomplicated optimism or his instinct for seizing a moment. It was that he freed people of the responsibility of introspection, released them from the guilt in which liberalism seemed to want to make them wallow.

they can move moderate and maybe even conservative public opinion in a way that Democratic politicians, civic leaders and celebrities cannot.

A place of more and more tax cuts for them, where states keep slashing their higher-education spending and tuitions keep skyrocketing; where the best job opportunity in vast stretches of America is selling opioids; where many young people no longer believe in capitalism and record numbers of them would leave this country if they could?

Or a country more like the one they and their parents grew up in, where we invested in ourselves and where work produced a fair and livable wage?

Neo-Nazis have been emboldened by the arrival of Alternative for Germany, the first far-right party to break into Parliament since World War II. And there are concerns that the recent absorption of more than a million immigrants, many from the Middle East and many Muslim, has inadvertently created incubators of a different kind of anti-Semitism — one hiding behind the injustices of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but often reverting to hateful old stereotypes, too.

“Our most powerful tool,” she said, “is identification.”Recently, a young Syrian had asked a fellow guide, “Why do you turn your torture chambers into a museum?”To make sure we will never have torture chambers again, he had replied.The boy had thought this over for a while. “We have torture chambers in Syria,” he eventually said. “Maybe, when the war is over, we should turn them into a museum, too.”

the European super-nation has long needed to believe itself above the world, above native America, above Asia, and particularly above Africa. The truth is more disconcerting: The dark continent has never been South of the Sahara, but South of Minsk and East of Aachen in the jungles of the European soul. 

I don't have any gospel of my own. Postwar, and the early pages of Bloodlands, have revealed a truth to me: I am an atheist. (I have recently realized this.) I don't believe the arc of the universe bends towards justice. I don't even believe in an arc. I believe in chaos. I believe powerful people who think they can make Utopia out of chaos should be watched closely.

I don't know that it all ends badly. But I think it probably does.

I'm also not a cynic. I think that those of us who reject divinity, who understand that there is no order, there is no arc, that we are night travelers on a great tundra, that stars can't guide us, will understand that the only work that will matter, will be the work done by us.

Maybe the very myths I decry are necessary for that work. I don't know. But history is a brawny refutation for that religion brings morality.

"History contributes to the disenchantment of the world," writes Judt. ...most of what it has to offer is discomforting, even disruptive—which is why it is not always politically prudent to wield the past as a moral cudgel with which to beat and berate a people for its past sins.

But history does need to be learned—and periodically re-learned. In a popular Soviet-era joke, a listener calls up ‘Armenian Radio’ with a question: ‘Is it possible’, he asks, ‘to foretell the future?’ Answer: ‘Yes, no problem. We know exactly what the future will be. Our problem is with the past: that keeps changing’.  So it does—and not only in totalitarian societies. 

All the same, the rigorous investigation and interrogation of Europe’s competing pasts—and the place occupied by those pasts in Europeans’ collective sense of themselves—has been one of the unsung achievements and sources of European unity in recent decades. It is, however, an achievement that will surely lapse unless ceaselessly renewed.

Europe’s barbarous recent history, the dark ‘other’ against which post-war Europe was laboriously constructed, is already beyond recall for young Europeans.  Within a generation the memorials and museums will be gathering dust—visited, like the battlefields of the Western Front today, only by aficionados and relatives. If in years to come we are to remember why it seemed so important to build a certain sort of Europe out of the crematoria of Auschwitz, only history can help us.

If Europeans are to maintain this vital link—if Europe’s past is to continue to furnish Europe’s present with admonitory meaning and moral purpose—then it will have to be taught afresh with each passing generation. ‘European Union’ may be a response to history, but it can never be a substitute.

Thinking that they could ultimately control Hitler while enjoying the benefits of his popular support, the conservatives were initially gratified by the fulfillment of their agenda: intensified rearmament, the outlawing of the Communist Party, the suspension first of freedom of speech, the press, and assembly and then of parliamentary government itself, a purge of the civil service, and the abolition of independent labor unions. Needless to say, the Nazis then proceeded far beyond the goals they shared with their conservative allies, who were powerless to hinder them in any significant way.

If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell. He stoked the hyperpolarization of American politics to make the Obama presidency as dysfunctional and paralyzed as he possibly could. As with parliamentary gridlock in Weimar, congressional gridlock in the US has diminished respect for democratic norms, allowing McConnell to trample them even more. Nowhere is this vicious circle clearer than in the obliteration of traditional precedents concerning judicial appointments. Systematic obstruction of nominations in Obama’s first term provoked Democrats to scrap the filibuster for all but Supreme Court nominations. Then McConnell’s unprecedented blocking of the Merrick Garland nomination required him in turn to scrap the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations in order to complete the “steal” of Antonin Scalia’s seat and confirm Neil Gorsuch. The extreme politicization of the judicial nomination process is once again on display in the current Kavanaugh hearings.

Like Hitler’s conservative allies, McConnell and the Republicans have prided themselves on the early returns on their investment in Trump. The combination of Trump’s abasement before Putin in Helsinki, the shameful separation of families at the border in complete disregard of US asylum law (to say nothing of basic humanitarian principles and the GOP’s relentless claim to be the defender of “family values”), and most recently Michael Cohen’s implication of Trump in criminal violations of campaign finance laws has not shaken the fealty of the Republican old guard, so there is little indication that even an explosive and incriminating report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller will rupture the alliance.

Republicans begin with a systemic advantage in electing senators and representatives, because the Democratic Party’s constituency has become heavily concentrated in big states and big cities. By my calculation every currently serving Democratic senator represents roughly 3.65 million people; every Republican roughly 2.51 million. Put another way, the fifty senators from the twenty-five least populous states—twenty-nine of them Republicans—represent just over 16 percent of the American population, and thirty-four Republican senators—enough to block conviction on impeachment charges—represent states with a total of 21 percent of the American population. With gerrymandering and voter suppression enhancing even more the systemic Republican advantage, it is estimated that the Democrats will have to win by 7 to 11 points (a margin only obtainable in rare “wave” elections) in the 2018 elections to achieve even the narrowest of majorities in the House of Representatives

In France the prospect of a Popular Front victory and a new government headed by—horror of horrors—a Socialist and Jew, Léon Blum, led many on the right to proclaim, “Better Hitler than Blum.” Better the victory of Frenchmen emulating the Nazi dictator and traditional national enemy across the Rhine than preserving French democracy at home and French independence abroad under a Jewish Socialist.

The fascist movements of that time prided themselves on being overtly antidemocratic, and those that came to power in Italy and Germany boasted that their regimes were totalitarian. The most original revelation of the current wave of authoritarians is that the construction of overtly antidemocratic dictatorships aspiring to totalitarianism is unnecessary for holding power

the most apt designation of this new authoritarianism is the insidious term “illiberal democracy.” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary have all discovered that opposition parties can be left in existence and elections can be held in order to provide a fig leaf of democratic legitimacy, while in reality elections pose scant challenge to their power. Truly dangerous opposition leaders are neutralized or eliminated one way or another.

Total control of the press and other media is likewise unnecessary, since a flood of managed and fake news so pollutes the flow of information that facts and truth become irrelevant as shapers of public opinion. Once-independent judiciaries are gradually dismantled through selective purging and the appointment of politically reliable loyalists. Crony capitalism opens the way to a symbiosis of corruption and self-enrichment between political and business leaders. Xenophobic nationalism (and in many cases explicitly anti-immigrant white nationalism) as well as the prioritization of “law and order” over individual rights are also crucial to these regimes in mobilizing the popular support of their bases and stigmatizing their enemies.

Both Mussolini and Hitler came to power in no small part because the fascist-conservative alliances on the right faced division and disarray on the left. The Catholic parties (Popolari in Italy, Zentrum in Germany), liberal moderates, Social Democrats, and Communists did not cooperate effectively in defense of democracy.

In the five presidential elections of the twenty-first century, Democrats have won the popular vote four times. Two of these four (2000 and 2016) nonetheless produced Republican presidents, since the Electoral College reflects the same weighting toward small, more often Republican states as the Senate. Given the Supreme Court’s undermining of central provisions of the Voting Rights Act (Shelby County v. Holder), its refusal to take up current flagrant gerrymandering cases (Gill v. Whitford for Wisconsin; Benisek v. Lamone for Maryland), and its recent approval of the Ohio law purging its voting rolls (Husted v. Randolph Institute), it must be feared that the Court will in the future open the floodgates for even more egregious gerrymandering and voter suppression.

The unprecedented flow of dark money into closely contested campaigns has distorted the electoral process even further. The Supreme Court decision declaring corporations to be people and money to be free speech (Citizens United v. FEC) in particular has greatly enhanced the ability of corporations and wealthy individuals to influence American politics

To consolidate his dictatorship, Hitler had to abolish the independent unions in Germany in a single blow. Trump faces no such problem. In the first three postwar decades, workers and management effectively shared the increased wealth produced by the growth in productivity. Since the 1970s that social contract has collapsed, union membership and influence have declined, wage growth has stagnated, and inequality in wealth has grown sharply. Governor Scott Walker’s triumph over public sector unions in Wisconsin and the recent Supreme Court decision striking down mandatory public sector union dues (Janus v. AFSCME) simply accelerate a process long underway.

Alongside the erosion of an independent judiciary as a check on executive power, other hallmarks of illiberal democracy are the neutralization of a free press and the steady diminution of basic human rights

In Trump’s presidency, those functions have effectively been privatized in the form of Fox News and Sean Hannity. Fox faithfully trumpets the “alternative facts” of the Trump version of events, and in turn Trump frequently finds inspiration for his tweets and fantasy-filled statements from his daily monitoring of Fox commentators and his late-night phone calls with Hannity. The result is the creation of a “Trump bubble” for his base to inhabit that is unrecognizable to viewers of PBS, CNN, and MSNBC and readers of The Washington Post and The New York Times. The highly critical free media not only provide no effective check on Trump’s ability to be a serial liar without political penalty; on the contrary, they provide yet another enemy around which to mobilize the grievances and resentments of his base. A free press does not have to be repressed when it can be rendered irrelevant and even exploited for political gain.

the curtailment of many rights and protections Americans now enjoy is likely. Presumably marriage equality will survive, given the sea change in American public opinion on that issue. But the right of businesses and individuals to discriminate against gays is likely to be broadly protected as a “sincerely held religious belief.” Chief Justice John Roberts’s favorite target, affirmative action, is likely to disappear under his slogan that to end racial discrimination, one must end all forms of racial discrimination. And a woman’s right to abortion will probably disappear in red states, either through an outright overturning of Roe v. Wade or more likely through narrower rulings that fail to find any “undue burden” in draconian restrictions that in practice make abortion unavailable. And equal protection of voting rights is likely to be eroded in red states through ever more insidiously designed voter suppression laws and gerrymandering once the Supreme Court makes clear that it will not intervene to curb such measures

No matter how and when the Trump presidency ends, the specter of illiberalism will continue to haunt American politics. A highly politicized judiciary will remain, in which close Supreme Court decisions will be viewed by many as of dubious legitimacy, and future judicial appointments will be fiercely contested. The racial division, cultural conflict, and political polarization Trump has encouraged and intensified will be difficult to heal. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, and uncontrolled campaign spending will continue to result in elections skewed in an unrepresentative and undemocratic direction. Growing income disparity will be extremely difficult to halt, much less reverse.

Finally, within several decades after Trump’s presidency has ended, the looming effects of ecological disaster due to human-caused climate change—which Trump not only denies but is doing so much to accelerate—will be inescapable. Desertification of continental interiors, flooding of populous coastal areas, and increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, with concomitant shortages of fresh water and food, will set in motion both population flight and conflicts over scarce resources that dwarf the current fate of Central Africa and Syria. No wall will be high enough to shelter the US from these events. Trump is not Hitler and Trumpism is not Nazism, but regardless of how the Trump presidency concludes, this is a story unlikely to have a happy ending.

When I was born in 1982, the Communist system that the Soviet Union had, in the war’s immediate aftermath, imposed upon the continent’s eastern half seemed unlikely to collapse anytime soon. Meanwhile, the liberal democracies in its western half looked remarkably stable, in part because the brutal reality of totalitarianism had robbed extremists of the allure they had once enjoyed. Both systems, in their own ways, were based on an explicit rejection of the fascist politics that had led the continent on the path to perdition.

In 2000, when I turned 18, the fault lines of World War II no longer marked the continent as starkly, but the war’s lessons seemed to mark its politics even more deeply: In Central and Eastern Europe, citizens who had purchased their freedom with decades of suffering could be counted upon to guard it jealously. Meanwhile, the political culture of Western European countries—especially those, such as Germany, that bore the heaviest historical responsibility for World War II, or those, such as Spain and Portugal, that had been ruled by fascists well into the 1970s—seemed committed to moderation.

Two decades into the 21st century, both of these assumptions have turned out to be wishful illusions. Across Central Europe, citizens have freely elected authoritarian populists

Meanwhile, countries that thought they were immune to the resurgence of the far right are finding out that the salutary effects of their violent past have started to fade.

Sánchez said that the past had lost

After three-quarters of a century in which the legacy of World War II shaped the basic categories of the continent’s politics, its lessons are being thrown overboard.

Europe’s long 20th century is coming to an end. The past is lost—and the future is far less certain than many European politicians appear to grasp.

During this “golden age” for Europe, imperial powers had to navigate decolonization. The French wars in Indochina and Algeria and the Portuguese wars in Angola and Mozambique were difficult, regime-threatening challenge

Europe endured domestic violence during this golden age, be it from the Red Brigades in Italy, the Baader-Meinhof Group in West Germany, nationalists in Northern Ireland or separatists in the Basque region.

war, sometimes in the form of ethnic cleansing, erupted in the Balkans in the 1990s. Brexit, immigration, populism and even Jihadist-inspired terrorism seem like much smaller challenges than genocide.

Kershaw traces several positive, long-term trends in European history from 1950 to 2017 that are downright miraculous. Most important, most of the Continent lived in peace during the Global Age, a sharp contrast to the horrific atrocities chronicled in Kershaw’s previous volume in this series, “To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949.”

Europeans on average became richer than at any time before. In Kershaw’s estimation, the period between 1950 and 1973 was especially prosperous — a “golden age” or an “economic miracle” for the western part of the Continent, and even a “silver age” for the Communist bloc

As Kershaw sums up, “Europe is more peaceful, more prosperous and more free than at any time in its long history.” Alongside these three positive trends of peace, prosperity and democracy, cooperation among European countries expanded dramatically, culminating in the creation of the European Union and the euro.

It would be premature, however, to predict a new negative trajectory. Peace, prosperity and democracy in Europe still have serious momentum.

Kershaw allows for the possibility that individuals — not just innate structural forces — can shape history

Kershaw ascribes the greatest agency of all to the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. “The magnitude of Gorbachev’s personal contributions to the dramatic change, not just in the Soviet Union itself but throughout Eastern Europe, can scarcely be exaggerated.

European leaders should read “The Global Age” to be reminded of the incredible progress of the last 70 years — and told that such progress is something they have the power to sustain through their individual actions

Gaddis keeps pounding — to the point of monotony — the seemingly self-evident: The grand strategist must prune away emotion, ego and conventional wisdom to accept that “if you seek ends beyond your means, then sooner or later you’ll have to scale back your ends to fit your means.

Their implicit idea is to remind America’s future best and brightest how the mostly successful grand strategy of the past saw America become the pre-eminent world power of the 20th century by winning two world conflicts along with the Cold War.

The case studies are variously drawn from some 16 years of co-teaching a well-regarded seminar on “Studies in Grand Strategy” at Yale

Paul Kennedy’s edited “Grand Strategies in War and Peace,” Charles Hill’s “Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order” and more recently Linda Kulman’s “Teaching Common Sense: The Grand Strategy Program at Yale University.”

His repetitious observation about proportionality might have been banal — if so many leaders, many of them geniuses, had not forgotten it

A recurrent theme is the danger of omnipresent hubris. Even a great power cannot master the unexpected and uncontrollable — from the great plague at Athens, to the harsh Russian winter, to I.E.D.s and tribal factionalism in Iraq

The book is as much personal remembrance as strategic reflection, and is chock-full of aphorisms and enigmatic adages.

Gaddis believes the best way to hone strategic thinking is not just by mastering the advice of Machiavelli or Clausewitz (who both figure prominently in the class), much less contemporary high-tech wizardry, but also by understanding the interplay of history, literature and philosophy over 2,500 years of Western civilization — with occasional insights from Sun Tzu and other non-Western thinkers

In some sense “On Grand Strategy” is a traditional argument for the value of classical education in the broadest sense.

The student of strategy learns to balance a grasp of detail with proper humility: It is, of course, wise to have a plan and contingencies. But how will these prompt rival counter-responses? Do such agendas have the means adequate for their ends? Or are they more dreams, warped by ego and emotion

In contrast, the often arrogant neglect of grand strategic thinking has led to postwar quagmires, stalemates and the assorted misadventures that often drained American resources for either impossible or irrelevant aims, while tearing the country apart over the last 70 years.

Understanding the underappreciated role of irony is essential for a leader, and might have prevented the disasters of both 415 B.C. and 1588.

Tolstoy and Clausewitz appreciated that bad things can come from good intentions and vice versa. The best generals live with and react to paradoxes, Gaddis argues. The worst ignore or seek to undo them.

Gaddis sees these more successful global strategists as rope-a-dope pragmatists who remain elastic and patient enough to capitalize on events and opportunities as they unfold, rather than forcing them to fit preconceived schemes.

Morality matters, if defined less as self-righteous ardor and more as self-awareness of a leader’s effect on those around him and an appreciation of paradox.

A pragmatic St. Augustine has no problem with war — if it is a last resort to save civilization, without which there can be neither calm nor organized religion.

Still, courting calculated risk is essential

The gambler Winston Churchill took chances in 1940, albeit rational ones backed by educated guesses that, for all Hitler’s bluster, the Third Reich had neither the air nor sea power to destroy the Anglosphere

Gaddis’s American heroes are Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, who he thinks “rescued democracy and capitalism.”

Roosevelt somehow was cognizant early on of how the singular military and economic potential of America might save Europe and Asia, but only if he first prepared reluctant Americans materially and psychologically for the inevitable war to come

Gaddis concludes with an invaluable warning that true morality embraces neither messianic interventionism nor the quest for utopianism

Instead, ethical leadership pursues the art of the possible for the greater (not the greatest) good

With regard to the American 21st century, Gaddis’s favorite novelists and philosophers perhaps argue against both optional intercessions abroad and moralistic lead-from-behind recessionals. The better course is to marshal American power to prepare for the often unavoidable existential crises on the horizon, with the full expectation that we do not have to be perfect to be good.

“On Grand Strategy” is many things — a thoughtful validation of the liberal arts, an argument for literature over social science, an engaging reflection on university education and some timely advice to Americans that lasting victory comes from winning what you can rather than all that you want.

Ms. Sommerfeld, a philosopher in her own right, was swept up in another countercultural movement: In the summer of 2015, as hundreds of thousands of refugees arrived in Germany, she discovered the “New Right,” the intellectual spearhead of a nationalist movement that considers Islam and globalization existential threats.Her husband had celebrated the arrival of the refugees: “I think it is the first time in our cultural history that we have welcomed the foreign in this way,” he said.Ms. Sommerfeld, though, felt “anxious” and “repelled.”Today, she hopes her own fringe movement is tapping into a shifting zeitgeist that will reverberate in Germany and beyond, just as her husband’s did in its day.“We are the megaphone of a silent majority,” she claims.Mr. Lethen dismisses the analogy.“We were moved by a yearning for the world, we looked to the future,” he said. “They are moved by the yearning to go back to the womb of Teutonic tradition. It is a nostalgia for a past that never was.”

One recent evening Mr. Lethen called his wife and her far-right friends “spongers.”Their attack on liberal democracy was only possible because of liberal democracy, he reasoned. Fantasizing about an authoritarian regime like that in Hungary was akin to “sawing off the branch you’re sitting on.”Ms. Sommerfeld countered that the liberal mainstream consensus was itself authoritarian and did not even realize it. “You preach openness,” she said, “but you aren’t open to opinions you don’t like.”

Even the methods of the New Right borrow heavily from 1968: provoking with language; staging sit-ins; infiltrating book fairs with far-right publishing houses; breaking taboos like throwing a burqa over the statue of the Empress Maria Theresa in Vienna; forging international links to similar movements.And feeding in large part off the outrage and reaction of the other side.“Revolutionizing perceptions,” Ms. Sommerfeld calls it.The first time they really fought was in 2016 after a far-right politician insulted the German soccer player Jérôme Boateng, who is black.

“People consider Boateng a good footballer, but they don’t want to have him as a neighbor,” Alexander Gauland of the Alternative for Germany party had said. Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story

Ms. Sommerfeld remarked she would not want him as a neighbor either. Her husband exploded and called her a racist. Advertisement Continue reading the main story It was a key moment in their relationship. “That is the biggest conflict,” he said.Once, Mr. Lethen was so exasperated that he wrote down five conditions as a basis for discussion between them. Three of them had to do with acknowledging the Holocaust and the crimes of Germans during World War II.She rejected them all. Not, she says, because she denies the Holocaust, but because she rejects the notion that it should define modern German identity.

She wants to move on from “this extreme collective pathological obsession with the Holocaust which informs the entire moral discourse of the ’68 generation,” she said.(If he was really so concerned about anti-Semitism, she added, he might want to look at refugees from Syria who were taught in school that the Holocaust never happened.)“I want to say: ‘Dear lefties, this obsession with those 12 years is all yours. You can stew in it but it’s something we don’t want to deal with every minute of the day,’” she said.

Americans wanted a postwar system that outlawed such logic. In 1945, at the San Francisco Conference that founded the United Nations, the American delegate Harold Stassen explained that the United States “did not want exercised the right of self-defense before an armed attack had occurred.” Four years later, in August 1949, the Soviet Union tested an atomic bomb, ending America’s nuclear monopoly. Some in the military entertained the notion of destroying the USSR’s embryonic arsenal. But NSC 68, which in April 1950 famously outlined America’s strategy for fighting the Cold War, declared the notion unthinkable. “It goes without saying that the idea of ‘preventive’ war—in the sense of a military attack not provoked by a military attack upon us or our allies—is generally unacceptable to Americans,” it insisted.

The shift began after the Cold War. The generation of policymakers with first hand memories of World War II was passing from the scene. The 1991 Gulf War had boosted confidence in the American military. And the adversaries seeking nuclear weapons were no longer great powers like the Soviet Union and China but smaller “rogue states” like Iraq, Iran, Libya, and North Korea, with less capacity to retaliate against an American attack.

Now Donald Trump is perpetuating that assumption when it comes to North Korea. Referring to the potential for Pyongyang to test an intercontinental ballistic missile that could carry a nuclear warhead, he tweeted, “It won’t happen.” This week Mike Pence declared that, “When the president says all options are on the table, all options are on the table. We’re trying to make it very clear to people in this part of the world that we are going to achieve the end of a denuclearization of the Korean peninsula—one way or the other.”

To legitimize preventive war, Trump’s advisors are resuscitating all the bad arguments made about Iraq and Iran. Kim Jong Un’s ballistic missile tests, argues UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, prove that he is “not a rational person.” Really? Kim is a monster. But from the standpoint of regime preservation, his pursuit of nuclear weapons is highly rational. Since 9/11, the United States has deposed governments in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. It just bombed regime targets in Syria. What do these regimes have in common? They couldn’t deter an American attack because they didn’t have nuclear weapons. The North Koreans refer over and over to Muammar Qaddafi, who abandoned his nuclear program in a bid to win the West’s affection, and ended up being sodomized by Libyan rebels who were using NATO as their air force.

It’s hard to recapture the horror that earlier generations of Americans felt about preventive war when it was still something that other countries did to the United States and not merely something Americans contemplate doing to others. They viewed it the way some Americans still view torture: as liberation from the moral restraints that human beings require. One of the things that frightened them most about the Nazis was that Hitler had dispensed with the concept of original sin. He had aimed to create a new class of infallible, god-like, humans who need not be encumbered by the fetters that bound lesser races. Totalitarianism, argued Arthur Schlesinger in The Vital Center, aimed “to liquidate the tragic insights which gave man a sense of its limitations.” For Schlesinger, Reinhold Niebuhr, Walter Lippmann and other intellectuals who shaped America’s foreign policy debate in the early Cold War, acknowledging these limitations was part of what made America different. Because Americans recognized that they were fallible, fallen creatures, they did not grant themselves the illegitimate, corrupting power of preventive war.

That humility has been lost. If asked whether China, Russia, or even France, has the right to launch wars against countries merely because those countries are building weapons that could one day pose a threat, Americans would quickly say no. They would recognize immediately that such a right, if universalized, threatens the peace of the world. Yet in both parties, policymakers grant that right to America. They do so even after Iraq. And even with Donald Trump in the White House.

It is now Americans who consider themselves a higher breed, capable of wielding powers that they would consider illegitimate and terrifying in anyone else’s hands. Are today’s leaders so much wiser and more moral than Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Reagan that they can be trusted with a power that made those men shudder? Let’s hope Americans never find out.

The bomb story hasn’t changed but the country has changed since 1989. When Hirohito died in 1989, the same year the Cold War ended, the United States stopped being the only country that mattered to Japan. The country was [suddenly] facing Asia, and so you got the rise of issues like the comfort women and biological war crimes.

These things, according to Japanese opinion polls, have had a tremendous impact on the Japanese public. That is why there is a conservative backlash. If you look at polls about the comfort women, the Japanese people think the comfort women should be compensated.

Here, I don’t think the story has changed but the attitude is changing. The people who fought in WWII will not change their narrative. They tried to put it on a postage stamp saying, “Atomic Bomb Hastened War’s End.” But then you have future generations that are not all the same.

The Japanese ignore everything before Hiroshima and the Americans ignore everything after Nagasaki. Both of the stories are truncated.

There is one other point. The atomic bombings were a continuation of civilian bombing, area bombing, carpet bombing, that every country did in World War II. It was universal. So if we are talking about the lessons of Hiroshima, we need to talk about the lessons of civilian bombings generally.

I think the main thing of the visit—like most things involving the politics of memory—is symbolic. It is a symbolic gesture. It says, “We don’t believe nuclear war is right and we don’t want to see it ever again.” That’s what the banner in Hiroshima says: “We shall not repeat this evil.”

The New York Times asked what everyone else does: Does this refer to the bomb or the war? Yes, there is an ambiguity there. Actually it means both. And so that’s what Obama is saying with his visit. We are saying that this sort of suffering is terrible, and that’s good. Instead of having a huge military parade, which have gotten bigger and bigger in Moscow and Beijing, this is another way of talking about the war.