History Readings

Here are four things I wish my 2024 self could travel back and say to 2015 me, a much more naïve writer for National Review.

Community is more powerful than ideology. If you came of age politically during the Reagan Revolution, you thought of the Republican Party as fundamentally and essentially ideological. We were the party of limited government, social conservatism and a strong national defense, and these ideological lines were ruthlessly enforced.

The story we told ourselves behind closed doors was the story we told in public — the Republican Party was a party of ideas and those ideas defined the party.

In 2011, I taught a college class on the meaning and value of work. It was a general-education class, the sort that students say they have to “get out of the way

I assigned them nine books. I knew I was asking a lot, but the students did great. Most of them aced their reading quizzes on Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” and Plato’s “The Republic.” In class, our desks in a circle, we had lively discussions.

I haven’t assigned an entire book in four years.

Jan. 6 proved to be a turning point. For an American historian of 20th-century Europe, it was hard not to see in the insurrection echoes of Mussolini’s Blackshirts, who marched on Rome in 1922 and took over the capital, or of the violent riot at the French Parliament in 1934 by veterans and far-right groups who sought to disrupt the swearing in of a new left-wing government.

But the analogies were less important than what Paxton regarded as a transformation of Trumpism itself. “The turn to violence was so explicit and so overt and so intentional, that you had to change what you said about it,” Paxton told me. “It just seemed to me that a new language was necessary, because a new thing was happening.”

In a column that appeared online on Jan. 11, 2021, Paxton wrote that the invasion of the Capitol “removes my objection to the fascist label.” Trump’s “open encouragement of civic violence to overturn an election crosses a red line,” he went on. “The label now seems not just acceptable but necessary.”

nationalism was only Trump’s surface narrative. What really distinguished him, at least as the standard-bearer of one of the two parties, is that he did not believe in a whole people who shared a common interest. He divided voters between loyalists and enemies. In What Is Populism?, the German historian  Jan-Werner Muller defined the term with a quote from a 2016 Trump campaign speech: “The only important thing is the unification of the people--because the other people don’t mean anything.”

Trump’s deep message was that “the other people”--immigrants, liberals, Blacks, etc–are not part of “us.” Fringe figures on the right, like Father Coughlan or Henry Ford, had spoken this way, but presidential nominees had not. Bernie Sanders, for all that he excoriated the rich, did not–any more than FDR had in 1932. And since 2016, Trump’s surface narrative, the one that has actual policy prescriptions that allegedly would benefit all Americans, has largely fallen away to reveal the one beneath that speaks of the other party as “the enemy within.” This is precisely the kind of rhetoric that the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt considered essential for a leader seeking to gain the acclaim of the mob—his, and apparently Trump’s, idea of democracy.

there is a strain of thought, favored by moderate conservatives like the New York Times’ David Brooks, that treats our growing polarization as a symmetrical phenomenon that equally afflicts left and right

part of the basic confusion of that little cultural moment was to suppose that snark (reflexive, dismissive negativity) and smarm (treacly positivity in which power might hide) were antonyms. But Millennial snot demonstrates that they were always kissing cousins, easily integrated, two complementary spices begging to be added to the same chowder.

Millennial snot is smarmy in that it depends on the speaker’s certainty that they are the good, righteous being in every exchange, and it is snarky in that it operates under a logic of being limitlessly disaffected, an asserted perpetual superiority that’s always believed to be apparent to everyone. It’s a simulation of being witty and cutting the way people are in movies, impressed with the self and literally nothing else, like asking ChatGPT to make you into the cool kid at the back of the class that you’ve always longed to be. Millennial snot so easily integrates two supposedly opposed approaches to communicative integrity because it’s the vocabulary of people who have no particular interest in integrity. They simply want to feel powerful, if however briefly, if only in insincere and meaningless online exchanges.

The purveyors of Millennial snot attempt to fool themselves and the world about their level of self-belief with two primary tools: one, through embracing the preening sanctimony of contemporary left politics, acting as though they simply are the campaigns against racism or injustice or need, themselves, expressed of course in an obfuscatory academic vocabulary; two, through the language of droll disdain that has become the default idiom of the 21st century as insecurity has become the universal marinade of American elite life.

Try to picture just one person unwillingly deported: the altered life, the use of force, the effect on those who participate, those who inform, or those who stand by.  And now try to do it twice: imagine a second person.  And now consider a country with twelve million such scenes.  It is a different America, one in which violence is normal and everywhere, one is which we see it and are dulled to it, one in which we all change for the worse.

When you imagined the scene, did you remember the family?  Forced deportations are directed against families.  About twenty million people in this country are part of a family with mixed documentation status.  That means that if the Trump-Vance plan were to proceed, twenty million families would be broken.

In most of these cases, that means children losing a parent or both parents. 

specific events and deeper forces made the time ripe for unbelief — because the early internet served as a novel transmission belt for skepticism, because Sept. 11 advertised the perils of religious fundamentalism, because the Catholic Church’s sex abuse crisis undermined the West’s strongest bastion of organized Christianity and because the digital-era retreat from authority and institutions hit religious institutions first.

success in the battle of ideas is often about recognizing when the world is ready to go your way, when audiences are suddenly primed to give your ideas a fuller hearing than before.

The new-atheist idea that the weakening of organized religion would make the world more rational and less tribal feels much more absurd in 2024 than it did in 2006

in 2024, I have a different thought. I have seen and endured right-wing institutions engaging in the same (and sometimes much worse) intolerance as left-wing institutions. When I wrote about my own recent cancellation at the hands of my former denomination, I was flooded with hundreds of personal emails relating similar stories.

Even the smallest deviations from the required right-wing orthodoxies were being met with a withering response in conservative churches and conservative religious organizations across America.

Confessore’s Michigan report. He wrote that the growing D.E.I. bureaucracies “represented a major — and profoundly left-leaning — reshuffling of campus power.” University faculty members lean far to the left, yet “administrators were even more politically liberal than faculty members, according to one survey

A central roadblock, the psychologist Keith Payne writes, is that people employ “flexible reasoning.” By conceding here and asserting there, they evade our queries, leading us into mazes of rationalization. Once we’re in the maze, it can seem as though these people don’t have stable beliefs, or don’t believe things in the usual way.

In “Good Reasonable People: The Psychology Behind America’s Dangerous Divide,” Payne recounts arguing with his brother, who supported Trump, about whether the 2020 election was stolen. “I didn’t know how I could relate to him if he embraced Trump’s lie,” Payne recalls. To Payne’s great relief, his brother rejected Trump’s denialism, writing, on Facebook, that “by the letter of the law, yes, Biden won.” Yet his brother went on to say, “I think there was some malfeasance there in areas, I do. But it can’t be proven.” Like many people, Payne concludes, his brother had arrived at a kind of semi-belief, which allowed him both to acknowledge reality and “to hold on to the larger feeling that Biden’s victory was, deep down, illegitimate.”

It’s tempting to assume that only one’s political opponents are this slippery. But flexible reasoning, in Payne’s view, is “a bipartisan affair.

Through their many papers and books including Why Nations Fail and Power and Progress, these economists have gone well beyond standard analysis of supply and demand, elevating the role of institutions, power, inclusivity, and exploitation in understanding cross-country differences in economic outcomes. Such an expansion of the scope of what’s fair game for economic analysis has had real world implications for our Administration’s policy agenda. The work of these newly-minted Nobelists has significantly informed CEA’s analysis, in areas such as inequality, worker bargaining power, race, gender, climate, and pathways to opportunity. We are thrilled to see such important, pathbreaking, historically-grounded, and timely work get the credit and acknowledgement it deserves.

I must admit that before reading the Boushey and Bernstein comments, I had not made the connection between the work of AJR and Bidenomics. On reflection, I think it is very illuminating.

a series of key aspects of their research agenda were clear: 1. institutions shape economic growth as much as economic growth shapes institutions. They are skeptical, therefore, of crude materialist or modernization theories, that see the influence running from technology and economics to institutions and do not allow for a reverse flow

For a generation, conservatives — not just the far right, which Crusius appeared to identify with — had propelled the notion that climate change was a hoax fabricated so the government could impose new restrictions on the economy and society

Yet Crusius hadn’t denied climate change at all. Instead, he seemed to claim its impacts were themselves arguments justifying his violence. I wanted to understand why and, by extension, what it said about the rise and threat of American extremism as the world warms.

Crusius’ manifesto was striking because he considered the crushing squeeze of environmental degradation — the very changes that would be amplified by climate change — on communities, but from the opposite perspective

In a recent interview with the New York Times, the Ohio Republican answered a number of questions about faith and family with uncomfortable candor.

Asked about his conversion to Catholicism, he discussed meritocracy, his search for how to live a virtuous life, and appealing to the authority of his wife’s opinion: “She was, like, really into it. Meaning, she thought that thinking about the question of converting and getting baptized and becoming a Christian, she thought that they were good for me, in sort of a good-for-your-soul kind of way.”

Had she converted, the interviewer asked? “No, she hasn’t,” Vance said, laughing. “That’s why I feel bad about it. She’s got three kids. Obviously, I help with the kids, but because I’m kind of the one going to church, she feels more responsibility to keep the kids quiet in the church.”

And the day after tomorrow there will be no democracy and no country, just a politics of impotence and a fascist catastrophe.

Today, our American fascists blame the hurricanes on the meteorologists and disrupt the government response.  Tomorrow they will blame climate change on the climate scientists and deport their enemies of choice.

Trump and Vance are teaching us that the government cannot do anything except turn us against one another.  They do so by spreading disinformation about critical matters like hurricanes, so that people despise and disrupt the government, the only institution that can help.  This is impotence politics, and it leads to fascism. 

the fact is you’re LIVING in a culture where MOST PEOPLE…would SEE you talking about something like the limitations of utilitarianism, and you ask them to join in. And most people would be like, you know what? I actually can’t think of anything I’d like to do LESS than that right now. That sounds like actual torture to me. 

That IS the world we currently LIVE in