History Readings

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

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

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

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

Vance’s politics are the politics of hate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where does someone like Richard Beck turn to for hope?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another is a commitment to fairness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More than half the book covers his life before the presidency

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Russian peasants were awarded possession of land they had worked as serfs (although it was not free), while their former overlords received millions of rubles in compensation from the czarist government.

Southern slave owners, by contrast, who after all had been the backbone of a treasonous rebellion, received nothin

Their freed people, meanwhile, were abruptly thrown into the individualistic, sink-or-swim maelstrom of mid-19th-century America. They had few resources and little guidance, except from the short-lived Freedmen’s Bureau. The laissez-faire values that informed the era of Reconstruction, Mr. Kolchin writes, “implied an unwillingness to intervene on behalf of the freedpeople except in extraordinary circumstances.”

Former serfs were better protected, but less free. They were expected to remain in their established villages, and their ability to move required approval from local authorities. Although well-intentioned structures for peasant self-government were formed, they were expected to function by consensus and proved, often disastrously, inefficient

In the U.S., by contrast, former slaves showed an astonishing enthusiasm for political participation, elevating as many as 2,000 blacks to positions of responsibility in a multitude of local offices, in state legislatures and even in the U.S. Congress

Former serfs were never regarded as a race apart from other Russians, although they were, like American blacks, subjected to demeaning stereotypes, viewed as too lazy, immoral and stupid to be responsible for themselves.

Russia’s “reconstruction,” like America’s, tapered off in the 1870s as official support for the painstaking process of emancipation faded. In both cases, “enormous expectations . . . were soon dashed,

“A generation after emancipation, pervasive disillusionment characterized Russia and the Southern United States,” Mr. Kolchin says. Feelings of hope had been “replaced by widespread disillusionment, cynicism, and despair.”

Despite such retrenchment, there were important gains: in the American South, educational opportunity, strengthened family ties, varied forms of employment and land ownership

in Russia, land ownership and the strengthening of communal organizations.

Southern blacks officially received full civil and political rights, which were never on offer for the former serfs. Those rights would, of course, be largely stripped away by resurgent white reactionaries until they were recovered by the civil-rights movement of the 1960s

Judged from our present vantage, the American emancipation may sometimes appear timid, but it was radical indeed for its time and considerably more so than czarist Russia’s version.

Mr. Kolchin delivers the history of emancipation almost entirely from a top-down perspective, emphasizing the making of policy and the efforts to implement it

the history he recounts is an important one and often revelatory for those who may think of the emancipation of enslaved Americans as an almost unique event.

Mr. Kolchin also addresses, if mostly in passing, the emancipation of slaves elsewhere in the Americas, particularly in the British colonies, a mostly peaceful process mandated by an act of Parliament that encouraged the emancipation movement in the U.S. Several books in recent decades have addressed this once-neglected subject, such as Robin Blackburn’s magisterial 1988 study, “The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery: 1776-1848.”

it is impossible not to see that in both the U.S. and Russia the inability to continue the process of emancipation to its intended conclusion allowed democracy to be undermined for generations afterward. In the U.S., that failure led, for black Americans, to the grim century of Jim Crow repression and in Russia to a widespread sense of betrayal that would feed into the trauma of 20th-century revolution.

The second argues that the digital network is both quantitatively and qualitatively different from the print network that created modern democratic societies

All “true believers” are delusional. Anyone who calls a religion “a true representation of reality” is “lying.”

Information, Mr. Harari writes, creates a “social nexus” among its users. The “twin pillars” of society are bureaucracy, which creates power by centralizing information, and mythology, which creates power by controlling the dispersal of “stories” and “brands.”

Societies cohere around stories such as the Bible and communism and “personality cults” and brands such as Jesus and Stalin.

The third presents the AI apocalypse. An “alien” information network gone rogue, Mr. Harari warns, could “supercharge existing human conflicts,” leading to an “AI arms race” and a digital Cold War, with rival powers divided by a Silicon Curtain of chips and code.

“Subjective facts” based on “beliefs and feelings” cannot be true. The collaborative cacophony of “intersubjective reality,” the darkling plain of social and political contention where all our minds meet, also cannot be fully true.

Mr. Harari agrees that “truth is an accurate representation of reality” but argues that only “objective facts” such as scientific data are true

When the attempt is convincing, the naive “call it truth.”

Digitizing our naivety has, Mr. Harari believes, made us uncontrollable and incorrigible

He consistently confuses democracy (a method of gauging opinion with a long history) with liberalism (a mostly Anglo-American legal philosophy with a short history).

Digital networks overwhelm us with information, but computers can only create “order,” not “truth” or “wisdom.”

AI might take over without developing human-style consciousness: “Intelligence is enough.”

The nexus of machine-learning, algorithmic “user engagement” and human nature could mean that “large-scale democracies may not survive the rise of computer technology.”

The “main split” in 20th-century information was between closed, pseudo-infallible “totalitarian” systems and open, self-correcting “democratic” systems.

after the flood of digital information, the split will be between humans and machines

The machines will still be fallible.

Will they allow us to correct them

Mr. Harari nevertheless argues that “social media algorithms” play such a “divisive” role that free speech has become a naive luxury, unaffordable in the age of AI. He “strongly disagrees” with Louis Brandeis’s opinion in Whitney v. California (1927) that the best way to combat false speech is with more speech.

The survival of democracy requires “regulatory institutions” that will “vet algorithms,” counter “conspiracy theories” and prevent the rise of “charismatic leaders.”

Unfortunately, his grasp of politics is tenuous and hyperbolic. He seems to believe that populism was invented with the iPhone rather than being a recurring bug that appears when democratic operating systems become corrupted or fail to update their software

Mythologies of religion, history and ideology, Mr. Harari believes, exploit our naive tendency to mistake all information as “an attempt to represent reality.

He defines democracy as “an ongoing conversation between diverse information nodes,”

but the openness of the conversation and the independence of its nodes derive from liberalism’s rights of individual privacy and speech. Yet “liberalism” appears nowhere in “Nexus.

Mr. Harari isn’t much concerned with liberty and justice either.

Nexus” is a mirror to the unease of our experts and elites. It divides people into the cognitively unfit and the informationally pure and proposes we divide power over speech accordingly

Call me naive, but Mr. Harari’s technocratic TED-talking is not the way to save democracy. It is the royal road to tyranny.

Musk and other right-wingers who bemoan a coming “population collapse” tend to oppose foreign immigration. Musk—once an immigrant himself, and possibly an illegal one, for a time—consistently emphasizes the ways in which immigrants weaken or threaten American society. He’s even trafficked in conspiracy theories, such as the story that President Joe Biden was secretly flying hundreds of thousands of immigrants into the country. Musk has publicly affirmed his belief in core aspects of Great Replacement Theory.

These positions have led Musk into obvious contradictions. Despite claiming the world is “basically empty of humans,” Musk has also posted, “America will fail if it tries to absorb the world.” Why would America “fail” if there’s nothing to absorb?

Instead, the new pronatalism of the hard right is exclusionary and authoritarian. Instead of being portrayed as equal partners with men in building stable families, women in this paradigm are understood as either mere tools for reproduction or targets of sexual violence who require men’s protection. Family is not a good in itself, in this picture: It receives its value instrumentally, as a method of achieving the deeper goals that underlie right-wing cultural politics.

All this makes clear that Musk’s interest in raising birth rates is about producing not more people per se but more of what he considers the right sort of people. It’s why he claims that “the culture of Italy, Japan, and France will disappear” if the women of those countries don’t have more babies. In today’s right-wing pronatalist picture, children, like women, are demographic tools.

Musk has become a leading voice of right-wing pronatalism in the United States. Malcolm and Simone Collins, the oddball couple described by the Guardian as “America’s premier pronatalists,” celebrate Musk as one of their most important allies in spreading their vision for a genetically selective, IQ-focused, eugenics-adjacent pronatalism. “What Elon stands for, largely, I wholly support. Our politics are very aligned,” Malcolm told a profiler just after interrupting himself to smack one of his children in the face.

The demographic anxieties that give rise to these sorts of concerns also shape right-wing pronatalist views of white women. On Wednesday, Dave Rubin implored Taylor Swift to rethink her endorsement of Harris, invoking the threat of sexual violence from immigrant men: “You are a young pretty girl, do you know what the gang members from Venezuela do to young pretty girls? It ain’t pretty!”

Attractive, white American women are not fellow subjects or citizens so much as sexual prizes that must be protected from the threat of violence by foreign men. Men like Musk might offer, seriously or not, to give them a child. Rubin might act as if he’s protecting them from sexual savages. The common thread is that the role of women in all of this is to be beautiful, to produce children, and to remain unsullied by foreigners. There’s nothing pro-family about any of that.