Hey Paul. This isn’t relevant to this article, but could you write something about the impacts of skilled and unskilled labor fleeing the United States due to political persecution? My wife and I are both software engineers and feel that we need to leave the county while we still can due to the rapidly escalating persecution of transgender people. It’s really sad, and I wish more people were talking about it. It rarely seems to make the news.
I know we’re a very small minority so, as Times Opinion puts it, these policies are “low impact”, but the impact on each of us is very severe, and I’m sure there’s a compelling economic story to be told, too. You can check out r/transgender (top:week and top:month) on Reddit to get a pulse on the community’s anxieties if you aren’t familiar. Also feel free to reach out directly.
So true. I just read an article in Le Monde about how Trump is inspiring both Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Melenchon (so the far right and the far left) to see that you can be successful in destroying or weakening the “rule of law”, such that any law you think is just an obstacle stopping you from achieving your goal, that law can just be ignored, not obeyed, and you can dare the courts to try and stop you. This idea that the “rule of law” is an outdated post-war concept (along with NATO) has infected France’s fringe political parties, and maybe those of other countries as well.
Buying a firearm is not a reasonable defense against state-implemented persecution. Using it offensively as you imply will only create public opinion cover for yet more heinous programs.
As for your first argument, yes. I’m fluent in Japanese so we’re currently there for the medium term, but they’re relatively backwards on LGBT issues and I’m not convinced that their current public sentiment of apathy will hold. Our long term plan is to pick up permanent residency or citizenship in several locations to diversify our risk to illiberal spasms when they occur.
Still, I’m feeling unhopeful. I feel like there’s a deep-seated human instinct to find transgender people repulsive and loathsome. The uncanny, perhaps. Almost every developed country being deeply penetrated by Musk’s brain-worm dispenser that he has explicitly stated he will use to turn public opinion against transgender people in retaliation for his daughter transitioning doesn’t help.
All of us armed and pissed makes things much tougher. I empathize with your situation. We are all going down the tubes with you, if a bit further into the future. Carbon will destroy any possibility of a decent future; plutonium will eventually get involved in the physics-guaranteed resource wars.
Realistically our last best hope is 2026 elections so we can get enough Reps with some spine to STOP all lawmaking until 2028. Even then the Fascists Republicansand Trump will make life for decent Americans a living hell for sure.
If Fascist actions fail to get out an overwhelming vote in 2026, then we are essentially going to be in a Fascist realm that will go totally Feudal for the next thirty to forty years. At that point a destroyed eco-system will kill everyone or reduce us to chasing rats with sticks for food
I think the mid-term elections are too late. Trump tried very hard to steal the election in 2020, including a poorly organized armed insurrection. The people pulling in the direction of chaos will be hard to defeat at the ballot box and they will keep fighting and blocking any positive reforms even if they do lose election.
Trump et. al. couldn't do all this stuff and Republicans wouldn't be on board with it if it weren't for approval from the Base. I blame the working class. I just wonder how much pain they can take before they turn. And I suspect that it's quite a bit. For one thing, they don't really expect much. If kids die of measles...stuff happens. If their economic situation doesn't improve, that's nothing new. Like Joe the Plumber who turned out to be Sam the Handyman, they live on fantasies. They're primitive people. They want a Big Man to protect them and provide for them. I grew up in Mob territory and know whereof I speak.
They watch Fox because it tells them what they want to hear. And they voted for Trump because he’s giving them what they want. They are not dupes—they’re in control. This is the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
I'm with you, EUWDTB, on our "scandalously elitist education system."
It's testing tentacles chafe most because they are all designed to be so opposite of the personal -- to be, instead, tilted to discerning categorical groupings and keeping to linear, chronological causality.
They also heavily favor neutered language (as Diane Ravitch superbly evidences in "The Language Police").
The result is a nationwide system that measures everyone by the one, singular, dehumanized set of criteria by which the smallest minority compete for so few openings in Ivy League and related major research universities.
Add to this the ways those far right foundations used to kill humanities both in K-12 and higher ed following the Powell memo of 1971.
We have a nation whose elites have zero grounding in any of the novels, memoirs, essays, biographies, histories, films, and other arts in touch with our notoriously preyed on, offshored, and abandoned working classes. Classes vulnerable to the demagogues, billionaire algorithms, and agents of autocrats who finally took over.
The working-class’s support for Trump isn’t directly connected to lack of education except insofar as in the US education is a marker of social class, and it is not about their beliefs. They are not dupes. It is about their desires, about the kind of world they want. They want a ‘traditional society’—where Big Men provide for them and protect them, and maintain the traditional, conventional social arrangements they want—including traditional sex roles.
This is the cut between the West and the Rest and, in the West between the upper middle class who have embraced the Enlightenment and the lower classes. There are countries where highly educated people want Big Man rule. Think China. Or Hungary, an EU country that slid back into authoritarianism, or Russia. These people may be educated and rich but culturally they are third-world—like the lower classes in the US. It’s the culture.
The problem of a proletariat becoming so well educated about politics is that most people aren't interested in the things that shape modern politics...science, complicated finance and economies, technology, history and culture.
Drugs, celebrity, cable TV, Sinclair, Fuax everywhere with their strategic contracts, media deregulation by Newt and Bill, no local context, no local leaders on the TV and in the local newspaper…and the unintentional idea of Polarization feeding the extremes…one ‘trans’ man on girl’s team trumps all other facts and reality!
All about winners, and therefore losers, rather than a wide middle working together. Pitting white workers, against other men and women, and the fear of loss of one’s masculinity plays right into trans phobia!
Like climate science, neuroendocrinology is complicated! Experts and thinking…other than root genetics, gender is a social construct and some folks are MESO, not cis nor trans…organic chemistry and mirrors…very cool!…the moderate strong middle ground.
I’m glad you identify the “working class” as the problem. In fact they are, but it has more to do with selling out workers, busting unions, off-shoring jobs and creating a Wal-Mart economy. ALL really engineered by Free Market types harboring Nazi sympathies for an America with a 1923 like society.
How the Fascist were able to turn this aggrievment of the working class into a support system they would never otherwise had, really shows the power of billions in propoganda.
Propoganda so slick that even the “liberal” media would cite their agit-prop as legitimate points.
We wouldn't have such mass hatreds, H. E. if Dems had stayed in touch with people's pain.
If Dems had read some of the many, many good books on how the tens of millions got shafted, got their jobs offshored, kids standardize-tested to death in schools -- if they'd cited some of the movies on this, some of the songs, all those abandoned and feeling it would not have turned so embittered.
Please read Sarah Smarsh's essays on this, "Bone of the Bone." George Packer's many interviews across the U.S., "The Unwinding." Arlie Russell Hochschild's "Stolen Pride." And Barbara Kingsolver's novel, "Demon Copperhead."
It’s kind of a tired argument to keep blaming liberals for the behavior of conservatives. And liberals get blamed for their own behavior too. I haven’t noticed the reverse; conservatives being blamed for an increase in trans kids, for example.
Check out Diane Ravitch's "The Language Police." Both so-called liberals and so-called conservatives have agendas and sensitivities to which corporate textbook packagers and standardized testers must defer. This results in the fall of language to neutered register.
I blame Dems because MAGA is so obviously loathsome, and Trump so obviously a Kremlin tool, that we need Dems as alternative, which they cannot be when absence of humanities just guarantees their cluelessness, impotence.
Good points. I’ve been the victim of language police many times, even for saying “kill two birds with one stone”. I was apparently on the edge of becoming a mass murderer of birds, just by subconscious suggestion. I wish there was even a hope for a third party, which seems to fail repeatedly. Having two seems to favor an adversarial situation. And right now they are both not functioning as intended. It feels very bleak.
Thank you for providing transcripts alongside your video interviews. I appreciate having the option of re-reading some paragraphs and/or skimming through others.
If Democrats retake Presidency and Congress they better make increasing the size of SCOTUS a #1 priority if they want to govern effectively for the longterm
It is going to take so much more than that. This is a slow-moving coup cum constitutional crisis. We have a system dependent on leaders willing to follow norms. When the leaders simply ignore them we get a dictatorship.
Yes. At the end of Trump 1, there was talk about how much of the system relies on norms, not formal law. However, right now laws are being broken right left and center. None of what Musk is doing can be legal.
Hindsight being 20/20, Biden did make a mistake not trying to increase the size of the supreme court. And it may be a slippery slope but there is a better chance we go careening into the abyss than end up tit for tat adding justices as the presidency seesaws back and forth.
No, his mistake was not keeping his promise of one term. He was and will be remember not for being a great president but for not leaving when he was done.
No. Democrats would have lost in 2024 no matter what they did. The fact is a Democrat can win the presidency only in one of two cases. The first case is when a Republican president is in office. They can win against the incumbent if he is seen to have done a poor job (e.g. 1932, 1976, 1992, 2020) or against a different Republican some of the time (e.g. they won in 1960 and 2008, and lost in 1928 and 1988).
The second case is when a Democrat incumbent is running and is seen to have done an ok job (e.g. 2012, 1996, 1964, 1948).
Without Biden running in 2024 you had a situation in which a Democrat was running when a different Democrat was president. Since the establishment of the modern Republican party through its merger with the Know-Nothings after the 1856 election, Democrats have NEVER won an election of this sort. They are 0 for 9.
Republicans over this same period have won 5 out of 8 of this kind of election.
By nominating a 78-year-old in 2020, Democratic primary voters voted for what we have now.
NO TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION. I think it's time to begin this civil war with a boycott on Federal taxes come April 15th. If the regime is going to use un-elected and un-confirmed people to confound the people's will and override our elected officials, they can't use our tax dollars to do it.
Victor Urban attended Oxford. It is profoundly ironic (I used to think it was funny, but no more) that the only reason that Orban was able to go there is that he had a scholarship from George Soros' "Open Society Fund"
One thing that stands out in comparing Trump's coup to all the other major governmental overthrows in history: In all the others, the country was facing a very real economic and/or political crisis which the insurgent could use as an excuse to take emergency powers. The US faced absolutely no such crisis which might support a colorable argument for installing a "strong man." All we had were MAGA racism, MAGA's hysteria about the border, its high-pitched squealing about the non-issue of trans people, and its readily refutable lies about the economy, etc. On the basis of these nonexistent bogeymen, enough of said let's suspend the American Experiment to see what this guy can do to fix these non-problems. My god, we have a lot of spoiled people in this country.
The right wing propaganda has created a crisis. That's what all the immigrants are coming to rape and murder your wives and children is about. The immigrants are stealing your jobs and are going to take over the country.
They successfully sold the story that the Democrats plan to replace Americans with immigrants who will vote to forever keep them in power.
Not true. The ongoing crisis is that low-income workers/people have been living hand to mouth for a long time in this country, as the billionaires grab mind boggling amounts of riches.
A devastating pandemic accelerated the robbing of average people by the rich, with the approval of Biden who tried to put a few band aids in place, and who vacationed in a private equity executive's mansion on Nantucket every Thanksgiving.
I said that there was "no crisis which might support a colorable argument for installing a 'strong man'... The climate crisis and the wealth/poverty crisis are very real and would support NOT voting for Trump. Biden attempted to address both these issues but was stymied by Manchin, Sinema and the GOP. In asserting that the "robbing of average people" had Biden's "approval", you reveal yourself as a fool.
So thinking solutions: the if-ever-elected next opposition congress needs to spend its time campaigning against the courts and Heritage-captured judges (those damn "real elites"?), while doing one or two truly brilliant populist moves?
For brilliant populist moves I'd suggest eliminating any income tax for those making below $200k annually as a slogan, while removing money from politics via constitutional amendment. As a secret agenda I'd have the fair media practices legislation back to Make America Boring Again, and a few other things I'll save for when congress calls me for all their strategy.
I think people are unaware of the level of propaganda that exists in the USA now. There are not just low information voters, many of them have been deliberately fed lies and misinformation, as well.
When you add social media, a chunk that was taken over by Musk, to the already existing right wing sites, with their media personality shows, it is now very large.
Some may like Musk's cuts and what is happening now because they were so grossly misinformed to begin with about the cause of deficits and all else. A woman sitting in for the Trump team as PBS covered Trump's speech, opened and claimed that before Trump was elected, we are on the verge of WWIII. She knew she could confidently say this and a lot more, because the GOP voting base had been told this and nonsense about the economy and actually believed it.
It was very weird to see propaganda on PBS - creepy - but I guess they felt that to be fair they needed someone speaking on behalf of Trump.
The GOP is very good at fear baiting, so if one is in that media bubble they may have voted out of fear driven my propaganda nonsense.
We already have a Putin and Orban-like propaganda information system in the USA that has expanded its reach with social media gaining right wing control.
Thus, Trump's objective will be to hack away at the MSM and eliminate it so that propaganda will be 100%
Also I am tired if even some on the MSM saying Trump has a mandate. He said he was not for project 2025, and said this so he could win because people did not like it, and that is largely what he is doing anyway, although as pointed out here, a lot more chaotic due to Musk.
Once again, people who are in a right-wing bubble are not hearing about the chaos and threats all of this poses, either as it is all still being whitewashed and even praised in these bubble media propaganda sites.
I should say that I'm an emeritus law professor at CUNY (and one of its three founding faculty) and have been engage din progressive legal education for decades; I'm also a dual US/Hungarian citizen and in the course of the past 25 years I have spent a total of well over a year in Hungary, though the present regime makes spending time there far less appealing. I say that by way of suggesting that the critique I make has both some modest academic and political credibility, and I think your friend Ms Scheppele gets Orban, and the dangers of Orban (which are, if anything, perhaps even more scary and more transferable to our situation here in the US these days), pretty badly wrong. Though perhaps there is more texture to her views than I have yet seen. The core of this is Hungary is and has been pretty definitively a volitional autocracy/kleptocracy during Orban's current run of leadership (since 2010). He has used the tools of capitalism and democracy to establish what amounts to a sort of dictatorship of the proletariat, and while he's engaged ins various forms of manipulative political maneuvering, any analysis of the election results demonstrates that he has won the power he has assumed essentially fair and square. Even if you take gerrymandering into account, the votes fall into place to support his regime substantially. And initially he was voted in with such a substantial super majority in Parliament that he could pass essentially law he wished and, worse, modify the Constitution in any way he wished. He has done all this notwithstanding the external pressures in his first years from the EU and the IMF and the internal pressure of an independent judiciary (again, I'm referring to his first term) and an independent central banking entity. His efforts to take control of both of those internal stressors were popular and successful. Moreover, in terms of financial policy he pretty much uniquely immediately cast aside the strictures of the IMF on deficit spending and was pretty much the sole of the low GDP EU countries to follow your macroeconomic philosophy of spending on the safety net even when that incurred a deficit.
I launch this screed not to praise Orban, whose tenure has been execrable, but to suggest that if we want to look there for some measure of understanding what to fear here, we would be wise to do so on a far more subtle and less knee-jerk basis. We need to understand that he, like Trump, Is succeeding because what he is doing remains popular notwithstanding a vocal, active, protesting and not-directly-=suppressed opposition. We need to study the forces that produce that popularity, in greater detail than perhaps even we lavish on study the demagogues who speak for and take advantage of them.
Yes, John, let's look at "the forces that produce that popularity" for both Orban and Trump.
Both appeal to strange nostalgia for cultural purity -- Orban's the Magyar variety paranoid about being contaminated by Arabic and Muslim emigres, and Trump's white "Christo-nationalists" equally fearful of people of color at the U.S.'s southern border.
But scratch them, and you'll see deep cultural illiteracy regarding their respective cultures. Both Hungarians and Americans prey to the Orban and Trump demagoguery love the modern world of smart phones, social media, pick-up trucks, neon rows, credit cards, international fashion, and fast-food franchising. Few if any have any access to the novels, memoirs, essays, biographies, or histories well in touch with their cultures. Not from the schools. Not from their media.
Thus the popularity for demagogues and their nicely-scripted lies.
as a person whose political self-concept has been on what he fancies to be the extreme left for his entire life up to now, I find myself uncomfortably concluding these days that the health of the polity is largely a function of with whom the middle identifies and the degree to which the political system can be structured to put a thumb on the side of the scale that favors Rawlsian principles of justice.
I recognize that that’s an abstraction wrapped within an opacity and lodged inside a black hole… to try to put it more concretely:
it doesn’t seem in the longest of the long terms that the risks of authoritarianism are any greater when the leadership is far right than when it is far left — risks that include mass extermination of the opposition and adoption of corruption via kleptocracy — that is, it’s not clear that the authoritarianism of Stalin (or of the French Revolution) was all that much less sitifling than that of, say, Mussolini. Indeed, the most devastating recent authoritarian regimes have presented with an admixture of right and left (Nazi, after all, being short for National Socialism; Orban having edged the Socialists out by rejecting their begrudging acceptance of the pressures of international financial overseers to pare back the Hungarian social safety net; he and is party Fidesz instead seemingly embraced social democratic institutions from the right, and won).
But it does seem to matter whether the great mass in the middle see themselves in a there-but-for-the-grace-of-god sense as potentially being among the least well off or, instead, as potentially being among the most well off. That is, in the Depression and into the WWII years, the middle of the USA plainly identified with those hurt by the depression and placed at risk by the War, forming a coalition with the left to seek protection.
These days, the middle is forming a coalition, in many countries, with the right to protect the interests of the most well-off (because, we must assume, they believe their interests to be potentially,m aspiration ally,m similar; or, more coarsely, because they believe those at the bottom are prying their fingers loose from any possible chance of grabbing ahold of the wealth they deserve).
And it would help to know why the balance tilted one way in the past and another now.
But, again, in the abstract a juggernaut from the left has, in the past, had every bit as much the capacity as one from the right to empower authoritarian regimes.
What does seem to matter, it seems to me, are the degree to which Rawlsian/universalizing principles are given a structural advantage, a thumb on the scale that is the political decision-making process.
That is, Rawls’ notion that a just society is one that makes its decisions based on what choice best serves those least well-off is likely our only hope to fend off authoritarian predation. It sounds either hopelessly abstract or convoluted or wishful, but it actually plays out in pretty simple, anti-majoritarian, terms:
The Bill of Rights.
The Civil War amendments.
The Supreme Court’s seizing power to deem Congressional or Presidential action unconstitutional (that is, in essence, the separation of powers and Marbury v Madison).
Respect for the Rule of Law.
The independence of the judicial function.
Dare I say it, the filibuster?
What Orban has done, and what Trump is doing, is quite simply using an electoral majority to disassemble these fundamental Rawlsian anti-majoritarian protections.
What we here, and my friends abroad in Hungary, need to grapple with is the confusing apparent coalition of the middle with those who reject these Rawlsian structural mechanisms rather than with those who champion them. With the most well-off rather than the least well-off.
The data from the PRRI and Pew polling that reflects surprising support among voters for the view that the USA is a Christian nation in fact is pretty heartening: it suggests that 70% of those polled reject that exclusionary view. And yet the 30% plainly have gained the momentum in the national coalition that has voted the presidency and legislature into power.
The way I see it, from the far left, is that we need for those in the center to wrest control away from either end, overcoming our national dichotomy and antagonism between extremes, and replacing it with a tripartite split with something more akin to fuzziness between the right and fuzziness between the middle and the left and the middle as opposed to the chasm we now experience in the dualist split between right and left. For me at least, being on the Rawlsian left demands recreation of a strong governing center so that I can once again advocate for social changes from the secure knowledge that my views will remain marginal and marginalized (and protected by anti-majoritarian political structures).
The comment 'I feel like I can say what I want' was an almost visible sigh of relief in the UK post the Brexit vote as well. People felt they were not racist when making racist remarks because they are just good and normal people. It felt great that the thought police weren't monitoring you and that if you said things that upset people it was their fault for being upset. They had won so they weren't stupid and were right (on the assumption presumably that if the sun rotated around the Earth they would be correct if in the majority).
On a different note I guess the support for Russia and the far right in Europe can comfortably be seen as the desire for a new world order where properly functioning democracies are seen as a strange anomaly and rather undesirable.
I see no cause for any optimism of any sort, regarding the US. It has already been destroyed and sacked; its alliances in shreds. It will never be rehabilitated in any of our lifetimes. Gradually, then suddenly. Now it's just the division of spoils.
Yes, so re: " And just as an alert, public service announcement, the way to check is: you go into the list of all of your execute programs and you sort them by date and you see what the most recent ones are that are installed on your machine and that's one way to check. So everyone should just do that good hygiene on your computer." How do we do this? Anyone have directions?
Hey Paul. This isn’t relevant to this article, but could you write something about the impacts of skilled and unskilled labor fleeing the United States due to political persecution? My wife and I are both software engineers and feel that we need to leave the county while we still can due to the rapidly escalating persecution of transgender people. It’s really sad, and I wish more people were talking about it. It rarely seems to make the news.
I know we’re a very small minority so, as Times Opinion puts it, these policies are “low impact”, but the impact on each of us is very severe, and I’m sure there’s a compelling economic story to be told, too. You can check out r/transgender (top:week and top:month) on Reddit to get a pulse on the community’s anxieties if you aren’t familiar. Also feel free to reach out directly.
Thank you very much 🙏
I know of one couple who have expatriated to Paris. This strikes me as like leaving Nazi Germany in 1937 to safe haven of Paris…
We are experiencing a 2.0 version of Global Fascism. Only we are part of the problem not the solution this time.
So true. I just read an article in Le Monde about how Trump is inspiring both Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Melenchon (so the far right and the far left) to see that you can be successful in destroying or weakening the “rule of law”, such that any law you think is just an obstacle stopping you from achieving your goal, that law can just be ignored, not obeyed, and you can dare the courts to try and stop you. This idea that the “rule of law” is an outdated post-war concept (along with NATO) has infected France’s fringe political parties, and maybe those of other countries as well.
And go where? What liberal bastion isn’t either already far right or on the way? Stay and fight. Arm up.
Buying a firearm is not a reasonable defense against state-implemented persecution. Using it offensively as you imply will only create public opinion cover for yet more heinous programs.
As for your first argument, yes. I’m fluent in Japanese so we’re currently there for the medium term, but they’re relatively backwards on LGBT issues and I’m not convinced that their current public sentiment of apathy will hold. Our long term plan is to pick up permanent residency or citizenship in several locations to diversify our risk to illiberal spasms when they occur.
Still, I’m feeling unhopeful. I feel like there’s a deep-seated human instinct to find transgender people repulsive and loathsome. The uncanny, perhaps. Almost every developed country being deeply penetrated by Musk’s brain-worm dispenser that he has explicitly stated he will use to turn public opinion against transgender people in retaliation for his daughter transitioning doesn’t help.
All of us armed and pissed makes things much tougher. I empathize with your situation. We are all going down the tubes with you, if a bit further into the future. Carbon will destroy any possibility of a decent future; plutonium will eventually get involved in the physics-guaranteed resource wars.
hey, I'm Japanese, and do you happen to know this Japanese pun?: " ロシアの殺し屋、恐ろしや" lol
語呂がいいね😄。知らなかった。サンキュー
392 lol
Realistically our last best hope is 2026 elections so we can get enough Reps with some spine to STOP all lawmaking until 2028. Even then the Fascists Republicansand Trump will make life for decent Americans a living hell for sure.
If Fascist actions fail to get out an overwhelming vote in 2026, then we are essentially going to be in a Fascist realm that will go totally Feudal for the next thirty to forty years. At that point a destroyed eco-system will kill everyone or reduce us to chasing rats with sticks for food
I think the mid-term elections are too late. Trump tried very hard to steal the election in 2020, including a poorly organized armed insurrection. The people pulling in the direction of chaos will be hard to defeat at the ballot box and they will keep fighting and blocking any positive reforms even if they do lose election.
Trump et. al. couldn't do all this stuff and Republicans wouldn't be on board with it if it weren't for approval from the Base. I blame the working class. I just wonder how much pain they can take before they turn. And I suspect that it's quite a bit. For one thing, they don't really expect much. If kids die of measles...stuff happens. If their economic situation doesn't improve, that's nothing new. Like Joe the Plumber who turned out to be Sam the Handyman, they live on fantasies. They're primitive people. They want a Big Man to protect them and provide for them. I grew up in Mob territory and know whereof I speak.
When they finally do complain it will be to blame President Biden and President Obama
Because that is what they are told by FOX or whoever lies to them.
They watch Fox because it tells them what they want to hear. And they voted for Trump because he’s giving them what they want. They are not dupes—they’re in control. This is the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
You’re good. Damn Good! 👍
I'm with you, EUWDTB, on our "scandalously elitist education system."
It's testing tentacles chafe most because they are all designed to be so opposite of the personal -- to be, instead, tilted to discerning categorical groupings and keeping to linear, chronological causality.
They also heavily favor neutered language (as Diane Ravitch superbly evidences in "The Language Police").
The result is a nationwide system that measures everyone by the one, singular, dehumanized set of criteria by which the smallest minority compete for so few openings in Ivy League and related major research universities.
Add to this the ways those far right foundations used to kill humanities both in K-12 and higher ed following the Powell memo of 1971.
We have a nation whose elites have zero grounding in any of the novels, memoirs, essays, biographies, histories, films, and other arts in touch with our notoriously preyed on, offshored, and abandoned working classes. Classes vulnerable to the demagogues, billionaire algorithms, and agents of autocrats who finally took over.
The working-class’s support for Trump isn’t directly connected to lack of education except insofar as in the US education is a marker of social class, and it is not about their beliefs. They are not dupes. It is about their desires, about the kind of world they want. They want a ‘traditional society’—where Big Men provide for them and protect them, and maintain the traditional, conventional social arrangements they want—including traditional sex roles.
This is the cut between the West and the Rest and, in the West between the upper middle class who have embraced the Enlightenment and the lower classes. There are countries where highly educated people want Big Man rule. Think China. Or Hungary, an EU country that slid back into authoritarianism, or Russia. These people may be educated and rich but culturally they are third-world—like the lower classes in the US. It’s the culture.
The problem of a proletariat becoming so well educated about politics is that most people aren't interested in the things that shape modern politics...science, complicated finance and economies, technology, history and culture.
Drugs, celebrity, cable TV, Sinclair, Fuax everywhere with their strategic contracts, media deregulation by Newt and Bill, no local context, no local leaders on the TV and in the local newspaper…and the unintentional idea of Polarization feeding the extremes…one ‘trans’ man on girl’s team trumps all other facts and reality!
All about winners, and therefore losers, rather than a wide middle working together. Pitting white workers, against other men and women, and the fear of loss of one’s masculinity plays right into trans phobia!
Like climate science, neuroendocrinology is complicated! Experts and thinking…other than root genetics, gender is a social construct and some folks are MESO, not cis nor trans…organic chemistry and mirrors…very cool!…the moderate strong middle ground.
“media deregulation by Newt and Bill”
You left out Reagan, the granddaddy of it all.
Fuax is a drug dealer! This is their brand and the king of this work is Donny-John and this musky Sewer Circus! The flying turds over America!
Drug treatment would help but they don’t, and the petulant mini-me wrote about this in his book, want treatment, just more and better drugs.
Donny is the drug! He is the provider! What’s the anti-drug?
So want might work? Babies and their Mom’s, families and children, taking care of each other.
Reality based reality is so harsh on them…how can we ease them back?
I’m glad you identify the “working class” as the problem. In fact they are, but it has more to do with selling out workers, busting unions, off-shoring jobs and creating a Wal-Mart economy. ALL really engineered by Free Market types harboring Nazi sympathies for an America with a 1923 like society.
How the Fascist were able to turn this aggrievment of the working class into a support system they would never otherwise had, really shows the power of billions in propoganda.
Propoganda so slick that even the “liberal” media would cite their agit-prop as legitimate points.
They are undereducated people and that is on purpose. They have to go to work very young to keep their families alive.
Wait til Grandma’s Medicaid is ended, the nursing home kicks her out and they have to take care of her - oh, and without her social security checks.
We wouldn't have such mass hatreds, H. E. if Dems had stayed in touch with people's pain.
If Dems had read some of the many, many good books on how the tens of millions got shafted, got their jobs offshored, kids standardize-tested to death in schools -- if they'd cited some of the movies on this, some of the songs, all those abandoned and feeling it would not have turned so embittered.
Please read Sarah Smarsh's essays on this, "Bone of the Bone." George Packer's many interviews across the U.S., "The Unwinding." Arlie Russell Hochschild's "Stolen Pride." And Barbara Kingsolver's novel, "Demon Copperhead."
The loss of so many manufacturing jobs to China has been terrible for the working class. That was bipartisan.
Not just to China, Frau K.
Though it is fascinating to see how regularly U.S. billionaires helped enrich Chinese communist cadres as they gave the shaft to U.S. workers.
It’s kind of a tired argument to keep blaming liberals for the behavior of conservatives. And liberals get blamed for their own behavior too. I haven’t noticed the reverse; conservatives being blamed for an increase in trans kids, for example.
Plenty of blame to go around, JF.
Check out Diane Ravitch's "The Language Police." Both so-called liberals and so-called conservatives have agendas and sensitivities to which corporate textbook packagers and standardized testers must defer. This results in the fall of language to neutered register.
I blame Dems because MAGA is so obviously loathsome, and Trump so obviously a Kremlin tool, that we need Dems as alternative, which they cannot be when absence of humanities just guarantees their cluelessness, impotence.
Good points. I’ve been the victim of language police many times, even for saying “kill two birds with one stone”. I was apparently on the edge of becoming a mass murderer of birds, just by subconscious suggestion. I wish there was even a hope for a third party, which seems to fail repeatedly. Having two seems to favor an adversarial situation. And right now they are both not functioning as intended. It feels very bleak.
Thank you for providing transcripts alongside your video interviews. I appreciate having the option of re-reading some paragraphs and/or skimming through others.
Outstanding interview which rings with “spot on” analysis by outstanding experienced experts!!
Thank you professor!!
If Democrats retake Presidency and Congress they better make increasing the size of SCOTUS a #1 priority if they want to govern effectively for the longterm
It is going to take so much more than that. This is a slow-moving coup cum constitutional crisis. We have a system dependent on leaders willing to follow norms. When the leaders simply ignore them we get a dictatorship.
Yes. At the end of Trump 1, there was talk about how much of the system relies on norms, not formal law. However, right now laws are being broken right left and center. None of what Musk is doing can be legal.
Hindsight being 20/20, Biden did make a mistake not trying to increase the size of the supreme court. And it may be a slippery slope but there is a better chance we go careening into the abyss than end up tit for tat adding justices as the presidency seesaws back and forth.
No, his mistake was not keeping his promise of one term. He was and will be remember not for being a great president but for not leaving when he was done.
No. Democrats would have lost in 2024 no matter what they did. The fact is a Democrat can win the presidency only in one of two cases. The first case is when a Republican president is in office. They can win against the incumbent if he is seen to have done a poor job (e.g. 1932, 1976, 1992, 2020) or against a different Republican some of the time (e.g. they won in 1960 and 2008, and lost in 1928 and 1988).
The second case is when a Democrat incumbent is running and is seen to have done an ok job (e.g. 2012, 1996, 1964, 1948).
Without Biden running in 2024 you had a situation in which a Democrat was running when a different Democrat was president. Since the establishment of the modern Republican party through its merger with the Know-Nothings after the 1856 election, Democrats have NEVER won an election of this sort. They are 0 for 9.
Republicans over this same period have won 5 out of 8 of this kind of election.
By nominating a 78-year-old in 2020, Democratic primary voters voted for what we have now.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/my-take-on-the-election
Future elections are very much in doubt. I think we already had our last election.
Wishful thinking. It is free to dream. The gangrene is already quite deep. In that case, only extreme measures is the way. Cut!!!
NO TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION. I think it's time to begin this civil war with a boycott on Federal taxes come April 15th. If the regime is going to use un-elected and un-confirmed people to confound the people's will and override our elected officials, they can't use our tax dollars to do it.
And a consumer boycott. It’s already taking shape.
Victor Urban attended Oxford. It is profoundly ironic (I used to think it was funny, but no more) that the only reason that Orban was able to go there is that he had a scholarship from George Soros' "Open Society Fund"
An awful lot of our own budding fascists went to Yale or Harvard.
WOW! One lives, one learns… Sometimes, much to our chagrin.
Wow, another thing I learned today from this newsletter!
One thing that stands out in comparing Trump's coup to all the other major governmental overthrows in history: In all the others, the country was facing a very real economic and/or political crisis which the insurgent could use as an excuse to take emergency powers. The US faced absolutely no such crisis which might support a colorable argument for installing a "strong man." All we had were MAGA racism, MAGA's hysteria about the border, its high-pitched squealing about the non-issue of trans people, and its readily refutable lies about the economy, etc. On the basis of these nonexistent bogeymen, enough of said let's suspend the American Experiment to see what this guy can do to fix these non-problems. My god, we have a lot of spoiled people in this country.
The right wing propaganda has created a crisis. That's what all the immigrants are coming to rape and murder your wives and children is about. The immigrants are stealing your jobs and are going to take over the country.
They successfully sold the story that the Democrats plan to replace Americans with immigrants who will vote to forever keep them in power.
This is a decades long pig butchering scam.
Bravo. This is spot on.
Narcissism is our national trait. I think Reality TV created a bunch of “stars”, in their own heads.
Everything they are currently doing is creating a real crisis.
That is the supreme irony.
Not true. The ongoing crisis is that low-income workers/people have been living hand to mouth for a long time in this country, as the billionaires grab mind boggling amounts of riches.
A devastating pandemic accelerated the robbing of average people by the rich, with the approval of Biden who tried to put a few band aids in place, and who vacationed in a private equity executive's mansion on Nantucket every Thanksgiving.
I said that there was "no crisis which might support a colorable argument for installing a 'strong man'... The climate crisis and the wealth/poverty crisis are very real and would support NOT voting for Trump. Biden attempted to address both these issues but was stymied by Manchin, Sinema and the GOP. In asserting that the "robbing of average people" had Biden's "approval", you reveal yourself as a fool.
Brilliant guest Paul, thank you.
So thinking solutions: the if-ever-elected next opposition congress needs to spend its time campaigning against the courts and Heritage-captured judges (those damn "real elites"?), while doing one or two truly brilliant populist moves?
For brilliant populist moves I'd suggest eliminating any income tax for those making below $200k annually as a slogan, while removing money from politics via constitutional amendment. As a secret agenda I'd have the fair media practices legislation back to Make America Boring Again, and a few other things I'll save for when congress calls me for all their strategy.
Will elections be recognized or even fair?
In my opinion, no; assuming elections take place at all.
I think people are unaware of the level of propaganda that exists in the USA now. There are not just low information voters, many of them have been deliberately fed lies and misinformation, as well.
When you add social media, a chunk that was taken over by Musk, to the already existing right wing sites, with their media personality shows, it is now very large.
Some may like Musk's cuts and what is happening now because they were so grossly misinformed to begin with about the cause of deficits and all else. A woman sitting in for the Trump team as PBS covered Trump's speech, opened and claimed that before Trump was elected, we are on the verge of WWIII. She knew she could confidently say this and a lot more, because the GOP voting base had been told this and nonsense about the economy and actually believed it.
It was very weird to see propaganda on PBS - creepy - but I guess they felt that to be fair they needed someone speaking on behalf of Trump.
The GOP is very good at fear baiting, so if one is in that media bubble they may have voted out of fear driven my propaganda nonsense.
We already have a Putin and Orban-like propaganda information system in the USA that has expanded its reach with social media gaining right wing control.
Thus, Trump's objective will be to hack away at the MSM and eliminate it so that propaganda will be 100%
Also I am tired if even some on the MSM saying Trump has a mandate. He said he was not for project 2025, and said this so he could win because people did not like it, and that is largely what he is doing anyway, although as pointed out here, a lot more chaotic due to Musk.
Once again, people who are in a right-wing bubble are not hearing about the chaos and threats all of this poses, either as it is all still being whitewashed and even praised in these bubble media propaganda sites.
I should say that I'm an emeritus law professor at CUNY (and one of its three founding faculty) and have been engage din progressive legal education for decades; I'm also a dual US/Hungarian citizen and in the course of the past 25 years I have spent a total of well over a year in Hungary, though the present regime makes spending time there far less appealing. I say that by way of suggesting that the critique I make has both some modest academic and political credibility, and I think your friend Ms Scheppele gets Orban, and the dangers of Orban (which are, if anything, perhaps even more scary and more transferable to our situation here in the US these days), pretty badly wrong. Though perhaps there is more texture to her views than I have yet seen. The core of this is Hungary is and has been pretty definitively a volitional autocracy/kleptocracy during Orban's current run of leadership (since 2010). He has used the tools of capitalism and democracy to establish what amounts to a sort of dictatorship of the proletariat, and while he's engaged ins various forms of manipulative political maneuvering, any analysis of the election results demonstrates that he has won the power he has assumed essentially fair and square. Even if you take gerrymandering into account, the votes fall into place to support his regime substantially. And initially he was voted in with such a substantial super majority in Parliament that he could pass essentially law he wished and, worse, modify the Constitution in any way he wished. He has done all this notwithstanding the external pressures in his first years from the EU and the IMF and the internal pressure of an independent judiciary (again, I'm referring to his first term) and an independent central banking entity. His efforts to take control of both of those internal stressors were popular and successful. Moreover, in terms of financial policy he pretty much uniquely immediately cast aside the strictures of the IMF on deficit spending and was pretty much the sole of the low GDP EU countries to follow your macroeconomic philosophy of spending on the safety net even when that incurred a deficit.
I launch this screed not to praise Orban, whose tenure has been execrable, but to suggest that if we want to look there for some measure of understanding what to fear here, we would be wise to do so on a far more subtle and less knee-jerk basis. We need to understand that he, like Trump, Is succeeding because what he is doing remains popular notwithstanding a vocal, active, protesting and not-directly-=suppressed opposition. We need to study the forces that produce that popularity, in greater detail than perhaps even we lavish on study the demagogues who speak for and take advantage of them.
Yes, John, let's look at "the forces that produce that popularity" for both Orban and Trump.
Both appeal to strange nostalgia for cultural purity -- Orban's the Magyar variety paranoid about being contaminated by Arabic and Muslim emigres, and Trump's white "Christo-nationalists" equally fearful of people of color at the U.S.'s southern border.
But scratch them, and you'll see deep cultural illiteracy regarding their respective cultures. Both Hungarians and Americans prey to the Orban and Trump demagoguery love the modern world of smart phones, social media, pick-up trucks, neon rows, credit cards, international fashion, and fast-food franchising. Few if any have any access to the novels, memoirs, essays, biographies, or histories well in touch with their cultures. Not from the schools. Not from their media.
Thus the popularity for demagogues and their nicely-scripted lies.
as a person whose political self-concept has been on what he fancies to be the extreme left for his entire life up to now, I find myself uncomfortably concluding these days that the health of the polity is largely a function of with whom the middle identifies and the degree to which the political system can be structured to put a thumb on the side of the scale that favors Rawlsian principles of justice.
I recognize that that’s an abstraction wrapped within an opacity and lodged inside a black hole… to try to put it more concretely:
it doesn’t seem in the longest of the long terms that the risks of authoritarianism are any greater when the leadership is far right than when it is far left — risks that include mass extermination of the opposition and adoption of corruption via kleptocracy — that is, it’s not clear that the authoritarianism of Stalin (or of the French Revolution) was all that much less sitifling than that of, say, Mussolini. Indeed, the most devastating recent authoritarian regimes have presented with an admixture of right and left (Nazi, after all, being short for National Socialism; Orban having edged the Socialists out by rejecting their begrudging acceptance of the pressures of international financial overseers to pare back the Hungarian social safety net; he and is party Fidesz instead seemingly embraced social democratic institutions from the right, and won).
But it does seem to matter whether the great mass in the middle see themselves in a there-but-for-the-grace-of-god sense as potentially being among the least well off or, instead, as potentially being among the most well off. That is, in the Depression and into the WWII years, the middle of the USA plainly identified with those hurt by the depression and placed at risk by the War, forming a coalition with the left to seek protection.
These days, the middle is forming a coalition, in many countries, with the right to protect the interests of the most well-off (because, we must assume, they believe their interests to be potentially,m aspiration ally,m similar; or, more coarsely, because they believe those at the bottom are prying their fingers loose from any possible chance of grabbing ahold of the wealth they deserve).
And it would help to know why the balance tilted one way in the past and another now.
But, again, in the abstract a juggernaut from the left has, in the past, had every bit as much the capacity as one from the right to empower authoritarian regimes.
What does seem to matter, it seems to me, are the degree to which Rawlsian/universalizing principles are given a structural advantage, a thumb on the scale that is the political decision-making process.
That is, Rawls’ notion that a just society is one that makes its decisions based on what choice best serves those least well-off is likely our only hope to fend off authoritarian predation. It sounds either hopelessly abstract or convoluted or wishful, but it actually plays out in pretty simple, anti-majoritarian, terms:
The Bill of Rights.
The Civil War amendments.
The Supreme Court’s seizing power to deem Congressional or Presidential action unconstitutional (that is, in essence, the separation of powers and Marbury v Madison).
Respect for the Rule of Law.
The independence of the judicial function.
Dare I say it, the filibuster?
What Orban has done, and what Trump is doing, is quite simply using an electoral majority to disassemble these fundamental Rawlsian anti-majoritarian protections.
What we here, and my friends abroad in Hungary, need to grapple with is the confusing apparent coalition of the middle with those who reject these Rawlsian structural mechanisms rather than with those who champion them. With the most well-off rather than the least well-off.
The data from the PRRI and Pew polling that reflects surprising support among voters for the view that the USA is a Christian nation in fact is pretty heartening: it suggests that 70% of those polled reject that exclusionary view. And yet the 30% plainly have gained the momentum in the national coalition that has voted the presidency and legislature into power.
The way I see it, from the far left, is that we need for those in the center to wrest control away from either end, overcoming our national dichotomy and antagonism between extremes, and replacing it with a tripartite split with something more akin to fuzziness between the right and fuzziness between the middle and the left and the middle as opposed to the chasm we now experience in the dualist split between right and left. For me at least, being on the Rawlsian left demands recreation of a strong governing center so that I can once again advocate for social changes from the secure knowledge that my views will remain marginal and marginalized (and protected by anti-majoritarian political structures).
The comment 'I feel like I can say what I want' was an almost visible sigh of relief in the UK post the Brexit vote as well. People felt they were not racist when making racist remarks because they are just good and normal people. It felt great that the thought police weren't monitoring you and that if you said things that upset people it was their fault for being upset. They had won so they weren't stupid and were right (on the assumption presumably that if the sun rotated around the Earth they would be correct if in the majority).
On a different note I guess the support for Russia and the far right in Europe can comfortably be seen as the desire for a new world order where properly functioning democracies are seen as a strange anomaly and rather undesirable.
I see no cause for any optimism of any sort, regarding the US. It has already been destroyed and sacked; its alliances in shreds. It will never be rehabilitated in any of our lifetimes. Gradually, then suddenly. Now it's just the division of spoils.
Thank you for that! It explains our situation very well. I only wish that everyone in our country could read it.
Yes, so re: " And just as an alert, public service announcement, the way to check is: you go into the list of all of your execute programs and you sort them by date and you see what the most recent ones are that are installed on your machine and that's one way to check. So everyone should just do that good hygiene on your computer." How do we do this? Anyone have directions?
Thank you for this - very informative