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Founded in 2013, the AfD isn’t brand new, nor is its provocative, thinly veiled racism and Islamophobia. But over the course of the past five years—and in the face of damning revelations last week about a secret meeting that took place in November—it has radicalized dramatically. The AfD is now more extreme than many fellow far-right parties across Europe, such as the Sweden Democrats, the Finns Party, and the Dutch Party for Freedom, among others.

Germany’s foremost expert on the subject, sociologist Wilhelm Heitmeyer, said the AfD now stands for an “authoritarian national radicalism,” namely, an ideology that propagates a hierarchically ordered, ethnically homogeneous society overseen by a strong-arm state. What’s particularly radical, he said, is the party’s communication with and mobilization of misanthropic groups that rain violence on select minorities

Its victims are refugees, foreign nationals, Jews, Muslims, and LGBTQ+ people.

Mr. Biden has abdicated his obligation to build bipartisan support for U.S. assistance to Ukraine. He has made no show of outreach to the Republicans who have voted for U.S. support to Ukraine.

Voters hold Presidents responsible for trouble on their watch, and they know Mr. Biden has framed the fight in Ukraine as an inflection point in history in the struggle between freedom and autocracy. The White House is so far indicating that it won’t abide a trade on natural gas, but is the President’s election-year LNG sop to the climate lobby really worth an historic blow to U.S. credibility if Ukraine falls to Mr. Putin?

n the end we hope he will let the House work its will in a floor vote on the Senate’s aid bill. House Republicans can rightly sell the vote as a down payment on U.S. rearmament on everything from 155mm ammunition to Patriot missiles. Ditto for more funding for Israel’s air defenses and Taiwan that is also part of the Senate bill thanks to Republicans like Alaska’s Dan Sullivan.

I remember when supporters of Operation Iraqi Freedom constantly hyped good news from the battlefield and minimized bad news — right until the bad news became so overwhelming

Before Bush changed tactics and reinforced American troops during the surge in 2007 and 2008, it sometimes felt disloyal in Republican circles to criticize the course of the war.

Could we have changed our military tactics sooner if we had been able to see the battlefield more clearly? Did paradigm blindness — the unwillingness or inability to accept challenges to our core ways of making sense of the world — inhibit our ability to see obvious truths?

We have watched the national polarization that divides Americans in eerily equal numbers play out in vastly uneven ways, state to state. But talk of “red” and “blue” doesn’t capture either the full extent of the imbalance, or the knock-on consequences for the formation and pursuit of sound public policy.

It happened pretty quickly. In the early 2000s, three-fifths of the states saw reasonable political balance between the two major parties

Today, “trifecta” government, meaning one-party control of the governorship and both legislative bodies, has become the norm across the 50 states. In 40 states, containing 83 percent of the American population, one party enjoys trifecta dominance, and often by overwhelming margins.

Applying the same pre-pandemic model to consumer sentiment during and after the pandemic, however, simply does not work. The indicators that correlated with people's feelings about the economy before 2020 no longer seem to matter in the same way

As with so many areas of American life, the pandemic has changed virtually everything about how people think about the economy and the issues that concern them

Prior to the pandemic, our model shows consumers felt better about the economy when the personal savings rate, a measure of how much money households are able to save rather than spend each month, was higher. This makes sense: People feel better when they have money in the bank and are able to save for important purchases like cars and houses.

. The concept of irrational German angst has become a bit of a cliche over the years, but this time the threats to social cohesion feel very real

a wave of aggression against politicians and activists. Last year alone there were 3,691 offences against officials and party representatives, 80 of which were violent

This series of assaults on politicians and activists fuel wider fears around the state of Germany’s post-war order

In Brussels, the seat of the European Union, rising crime, pollution and decaying infrastructure symbolize a continent in decline. With unusual clarity, Belgium shows what Europe has become in the 21st century: a continent subject to history rather than driving it.

For a long time, Belgian politicians and citizens hoped that European integration would release them from their own tribal squabbles. Who needed intricate federal coalitions if the behemoth in Brussels would soon take over? Except for the army and the national museums, all other levers of policy could comfortably be transferred,

The upward absorption has not come to pass. The European Union remains a halfway house between national government and continental superstate. There is no E.U. army or capacious fiscal apparatus. Consequently, Belgium has been put in an awkward position. Unable to collapse itself into Europe, it is stuck with a ramshackle federal state

Too many on the left wing of American politics have become inured to the effect of their overheated rhetoric and histrionic displays of fealty to in-group norms

Bowman’s supporters sought easy explanations for his defeat, including that redistricting had shifted his district northward out of much of the Bronx and into Westchester. But Bowman in fact had fared well in the predominantly Democratic suburban county in his 2020 and 2022 campaigns.

claims that the massive spending of pro-Israel groups was responsible for Bowman’s defeat warrant skepticism

One of the major differences between France and America, it seems, is that the French have not been beaten into a state of learned helplessness by the possibility of right-wing extremism.

The majority of French voters saw the National Rally as an existential threat to their values, and were alarmed and motivated enough to react. If Trump is in fact on the cusp of destroying American democracy, as so many have continually warned us, then Americans should respond to this crisis with a similar sense of pragmatism and urgency.

what’s most Faustian about Mr. Vance — and by proxy Mr. Trump. Their belief that a movement built on aggrievement and rage can be easily controlled, that there is some way in which you can trick the Devil while holding onto what he’s given you.

In my book on Faust, I argue that the politics of authoritarianism is often embraced as a tool by those who believe that they can contain such forces and use them for political gain.

There is a lesson for Mr. Vance from the Faust story, however, assuming he can hear it. Beyond mere self-interest, what the legend warns against is the embrace of irrational forces and powers, especially when there is the delusion that the person trading their soul can wrangle the Devil

There's now a disturbingly quick acceptance of the argument that "both sides are to blame." It was and remains the Republicans and Trump who have labeled the media as enemies of the people, politicians and refugees as vermin, and have spoken of bloodshed should Trump lose again in the next election. This discourse sharply contrasts with that of Democratic elites and Biden, who critique President Trump based on his policies (see Project 2025), labeling him a potential dictator and a threat to democracy. This critique remains within the bounds of normal political discourse and does not dehumanize political opponents or other demographic groups, as Trump's rhetoric frequently does. Such rhetoric has become "normal" and mainstream within the Republican Party but remains either non-existent or exceptionally rare among Democrats. This clearly indicates an asymmetric radicalization of our political discourse.

The ideological positioning of the two parties also reflects this asymmetry. Empirical analyses by notable U.S. political scientists show that the Republicans have moved significantly further to the right ideologically compared to the leftward shift of the Democrats. In certain segments, the ideological positions of MAGA representatives in Congress no longer fit within this spectrum, having departed from democratic norms.

Republicans have successfully shifted the discourse to place equal blame on both sides for polarization and radicalization, but this narrative does not reflect reality and must be addressed. It is the right-wing political spectrum and its associated media network that questions fundamental pillars of democracy and the rule of law. Similar challenges are not found within the left-wing political spectrum