If you’re not yet a paid subscriber but regularly read, enjoy, or share Unpopular Front, please consider signing up. This newsletter is completely reader-supported and represents my primary source of income. And, at 5 dollars a month, it’s less than most things at Starbucks.

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When the Clock Broke is now out in paperback and available wherever books are sold. If you live in the United Kingdom, it’s also available there. The UK edition is also apparently available all over the world, too! I’ve received reports now of book sightings in places as far as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Christchurch, New Zealand. It seems relatively easy to find in Commonwealth countries and at English-language bookstores abroad.

I also do a film podcast with Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times. On our Patreon, we have a lot of bonus content, including a weekly politics discussion.

I will be presenting a paper as part of “The Past, Present, and Future of the Trump Era: A Mini-Conference” at the University of Cambridge on June 2nd. Tickets are available online.

In case you missed it, and I spoke to and about their new book Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed.

Unpopular Front

Talking to Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian about “Muskism”

Max Read and I spoke to Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian about their fantastic new book Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed. The provocative thesis is that Elon Musk is not just a collection of quirks and tics, but his approach to capitalism and government forms something like an ideology, which, if not coherent exactly, can at least be reconstructed, articulated, and analyzed, much like …

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4 days ago · 56 likes · John Ganz

Also, check out their essay “Muskism as Fordism:”

The first step to extrapolating Muskism from Musk is to counter the most common misreadings of the man and his ideas. One of the easiest to dispel is the notion of Musk as a libertarian. In fact, a core principle of Muskism is public-private fusion; the use of the state as funder, enabler, and backstop for high-risk, high-reward ventures—what we call state symbiosis. One can see this clearly in SpaceX, Starlink, and Tesla. Musk is a stalwart critic of bureaucracy and certain kinds of regulation but certainly not the state as such. On the contrary, he has consistently instrumentalized the state as a source of power and profit. He does so by promising to help governments fulfill their sovereign functions through reliance on his infrastructures: a dynamic we describe as sovereignty-as-a-service.

Another misconception is that Musk’s most high-profile company, Tesla, primarily sells a consumer car product similar to Ford’s—the Model Y as an electrified Model T. In fact, Tesla is not about cars. It’s about a vision of electric autonomy in an era of natural disasters, wars, and social instability. Musk has been able to capitalize on a period of global skepticism about the virtues of interconnected supply chains and offer a scalable model of sovereignty from the nation down to the individual in the home. The move from the Roadster to the Cybertruck tracks a shift from a bright green future of zero-carbon consumerism to a dark green future of climate breakdown and survivalism. At its most successful, Muskism taps into a desire for territorial hardening to external shocks, enemies, and undesirables. In a world of reshoring and rearmament, Muskism offers global infrastructure for national projects.

This worldview is also reflected in his embrace of vertical integration, an industrial model that is uniquely suited to our deglobalizing era. For decades, Musk has attempted to concentrate production as much as possible within his firms and to reduce his reliance on outside suppliers. Under Muskism, the factory is not a node within a global production network but an enclave. This strategy defied the conventional wisdom of the 2000s, the decade when Musk founded SpaceX and became CEO of Tesla, but would look prescient in the 2020s, as “a series of crises in finance, health, energy, and geopolitics… laid bare the risks of extreme global integration,” to quote Canadian prime minister Mark Carney’s remarks at Davos earlier this year.

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For an idea, check out their recent piece “Muskism as Fordism” for the Law and Political Economy project. And, of course, listen to our conversation!

Roberts, of course, was the guy who defended Tucker Carlson for having Nick Fuentes on. Gottfried coined the terms “paleoconservatism” and “alternative right,” and was the erstwhile mentor to white nationalist Richard Spencer. Chronicles is the premier outlet of paleo thought, and it once published Samuel T. Francis, the John the Baptist of MAGA.

Roberts is returning the favor: Chronicles stood up for him during the Tucker imbroglio. Now Roberts wants to help Chronicles “expand its reach.”

In a blog post published this morning, Paul Gottfried has taken exception to the Post’s coverage, particularly its statement that Francis once praised KKK wizard and neo-Nazi leader David Duke. According to Gottfried, I’m one of a group of writers who have “smeared” Francis by giving the impression that his endorsement of Duke’s politics was full-throated. He points to qualifications and criticisms in Francis’s work about Duke. Unfortunately for Gottfried, some of the “countervailing evidence” he cites is also quite damning.

For instance, Gottfried seems to think this passage from Francis’s 1991 Chronicles column “Bad Moon on the Rise” is exculpatory:

Of course, by itself, Mr. Duke’s ability to gain votes does not constitute a revolution, nor does the candidate himself seem to promise much as a serious leader of one. He simply carries too much baggage, and there are persistent rumors about irregularities in his personal life, which, if true, point to serious character flaws and threaten an eventual political embarrassment. Whatever his plans for the future, Mr. Duke and his supporters shouldn’t count on holding high elective office. He can at most be a gadfly, and perhaps the best thing for him to do now would be to institutionalize the movement he has started in a nationwide organization that could exert cultural and indirect political power and radicalize Middle American consciousness still further.

I don’t think encouraging David Duke to “institutionalize the movement he started” is exactly a repudiation. Perhaps Gottfried should get his prescription checked.

Francis’s criticisms of Duke were limited to his political viability as a representative of a coming populist wave, not to his beliefs. The evidence for Francis’s racial politics is nearly endless. And in regard to Duke, Francis seemed to buy his project to clean up white supremacy for a mass audience. After Duke visited the Washington Times offices, Francis wrote a column entitled “Respectable Racism?”

After his visit to the Senate, he dropped in at The Washington Times to explain himself to reporters and editors. The interview he gave suggests that he has not only managed to separate himself from Klan-like racism but also formulated a message new to American politics, a message that might be called “respectable racism.” While Mr. Duke now calls himself a “conservative Republican,” it became clear in the course of his remarks that he espouses a belief in the importance of race that most conservatives would shun.

Then Francis points out that Duke’s racial message may be more effective than a standard conservative one:

It’s interesting that Mr. Helms, despite a close contest with a black opponent, avoided racial issues like affirmative action in his campaign until last week. That may be why his campaign was floundering while Mr. Duke’s flourished. Conventional conservative themes such as Mr. Helms emphasized in most of his campaign may not attract voters anymore the way Mr. Duke’s new racial appeal does.

Francis did not always limit his praise to purveyors of respectability politics either, but was intrigued by what violent extremism heralded, as well. Look at his Chronicles column from 1985, “The End of Bourgeois Conservatism?” which he dedicated to analyzing the political meaning of the rise of neo-Nazi terrorist groups like The Silent Brotherhood, which had murdered Jewish radio host Alan Berg a year earlier:

It is because they are postbourgeois and antibourgeois, because they have so little attraction to the prosaic ambitions of bourgeois civilization and so much scorn for the baubles of the managerial regime, that the new militants or their successors may be able to achieve what no other force on the American right has ever been able to do, to formulate a myth of the right around which it would be possible to mobilize a massive popular challenge to the myth of the left that has animated Western politics for the last two centuries and which has now even insinuated itself into contemporary conservatism. "Myths," wrote Georges Sorel, "are not descriptions of things, but expressions of a determination to act. .. . A myth cannot be refuted, since it is, at bottom, identical with the convictions of a group, being the expression of their convictions in the language of movement; and it is, in consequence, unanalysable into parts which could be placed on the plane of historical descriptions." The frightening significance of the perpetrators of recent right-wing violence does not therefore consist in their "descriptions of things," but in their "determination to act," in the irrefutable power of their convictions, and in the possibility that they may be able to conjure up that most formidable of all specters in the nightmares of establishments, a revolution from the right, a rejection of both bourgeois comforts as well as of managerial humanism and social engineering, and an affirmation of our national identity and its destiny.

Again, the examples are nearly endless. There’s the inconvenient fact that Francis was ultimately fired from The Washington Times in 1995 for appearing at the conference of a white nationalist magazine, American Renaissance, and saying whites must “reassert our identity and our solidarity, and we must do so in explicitly racial terms through the articulation of a racial consciousness as whites. . . . The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people." This was after Francis was already on thin ice at the Times for a column that criticized the Southern Baptist Convention for apologizing for slavery. In that column, he wrote, theologically speaking, “neither ‘slavery‘ nor ‘racism‘ as an institution is a sin.”

What has happened in the centuries since the Enlightenment is the permeation of the pseudo-Christian poison of equality into the tissues of the West, to the point that the mainstream churches now spend more time preaching against apartheid and colonialism than they do against real sins such as pinching secretaries and pilfering from the office coffee pool. The Southern Baptists, because they were fortunate enough to flourish in a region where the false sun of the Enlightenment never shone, succeeded in escaping this grim fate, at least until last week.

This column is helpfully included in a collection published by American Renaissance entitled “Essential Writings on Race: Samuel Francis.”

I could go on and on and on. There’s also all the anecdotal evidence. Like Francis calling himself a “fascist” to a young Michael Lind. Or, as Adrianne Black told me, dining at the home of KKK chieftain and Stormfront founder. Don Black. You get the point.

If you’re not yet a paid subscriber but regularly read, enjoy, or share Unpopular Front, please consider signing up. This newsletter is completely reader-supported and represents my primary source of income. And, at 5 dollars a month, it’s less than most things at Starbucks.

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When the Clock Broke is now out in paperback and available wherever books are sold. If you live in the United Kingdom, it’s also available there. The UK edition is also apparently available all over the world, too! I’ve received reports now of book sightings in places as far as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Christchurch, New Zealand. It seems relatively easy to find in Commonwealth countries and at English-language bookstores abroad.

I also do a film podcast with Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times. On our Patreon, we have a lot of bonus content, including a weekly politics discussion.

My friend and collaborator has a great essay for the Criterion Collection’s “Corporate Thriller” series up on the Criterion site:

From a distance—looking down, say, from a penthouse office in a glass-paned downtown skyscraper—the U.S. economy of the 1990s and early 2000s could feel almost boring. Between Black Monday in 1987 and the Global Financial Crisis twenty years later, growth was steady, markets were mostly stable, and inflation was historically low. The “central problem of depression prevention”—that is, the key aim of economic policymaking since the 1930s—“has been solved,” the Nobel laureate Robert Lucas argued in 2003; dissenters to this rosy view of the dismal science were dismissed as cranks and luddites.

Whoops! Not quite two decades on from the Great Moderation, we find ourselves still stumbling through the social, political, and economic hangover it left behind. Rampant deregulation, accelerating deindustrialization, and an increasingly financialized and computerized economy gave us the GFC, and the vastly unequal economy it left in its wake—channeling gains toward capital, speculators, and a small number of professionals, while leaving workers in the lurch—helped birth the reactionary populism now tearing up global trade.

But how could the economists have known? Well, maybe they should have gone to more movies. In the years between Black Monday and the GFC, Hollywood—itself corporatizing, consolidating, and financializing in a surge of mergers and acquisitions—produced a wave of corporate thrillers driven by anxieties about the economic transformations grinding away in the background of steadily growing GDP. Viewed from the C-suite and the private jet, the economy maey have looked fine. But seen from the movie-theater seat and the Blockbuster aisle, it was quite clear something sinister was happening.

In Equator, an interview with Ivan Krastev on the earthquake in Hungary and the legacy of Orbán:

How innovative was this as a form of statecraft?

This model worked for 16 years. What made it particularly creative was that Orbán constructed an illiberal regime out of the elements of liberal democracy. Brussels struggled to challenge the restrictive media laws he introduced in 2010, for example, because Hungary argued that every single article had a precedent in the media law of another EU member state.

But ultimately, he stayed too long. He had positioned himself as a rebel, and to some extent he was one, particularly during the migration crisis in 2015-2016. But rebels don’t age well. After Trump came to power, Orbán’s private correspondence with Putin, in which he expressed his desire to be a mouse to the lion of Moscow, was leaked – and the image he had so carefully constructed collapsed.

Orbán seemed like a central figure in the illiberal revolution in central and eastern Europe, which is one of your great subjects. Could you talk about the nature of that revolution and its origins in the end of the Cold War?

Nineteen eighty-nine is normally recounted as a liberal revolution, and it was. But it was also a nationalist revolution. There was a coalition between liberals and nationalists who, for different reasons, both wanted to leave the Soviet empire and join the West. But they had different ideas about what kind of West they were joining.

The liberals were drawn to the post-sovereign liberal EU – open borders, rights, pluralism. The nationalists, by contrast – and this was as true of Poland under Jarosław Kaczyński as it was of Hungary – had been dreaming of a specific version of the West: more conservative, strongly anti-communist, nationalist rather than internationalist, religious rather than atheist, family-oriented rather than permissive. The West of the 1950s, essentially.

In the 1990s, the nationalists had a problem: they lacked a language for their belief system. Nationalism was so heavily associated with the Yugoslav wars and Milošević that emerging politicians like Orbán, who from around 1994 began his divorce from liberalism, found it difficult to identify with any part of the ideology. So through the decade they were largely muted.

The deeper resentment stemmed from the fact that the post-1989 transition from communism was experienced by many in the East as unidirectional. The West was not going to change; the East was going to imitate it. You could either migrate individually – move to Germany, Austria, study abroad – or migrate collectively, by joining the EU. Leaders like Orbán display the resentment of the second-generation immigrant: the sense that your identity is not respected, that it goes unrecognised.

During the migration crisis, when Orbán placed himself at the centre of European politics, his message was simple: the East is not going to imitate the West anymore. Now the West is going to imitate us.

To make that case, didn’t Orbán have to become something more than a Hungarian politician?

Orbán distinguished himself from other eastern European leaders by thinking beyond his own country. In that sense, he was for the political right what Castro was for the left: a leader of a small, relatively unimportant nation who harboured global ambitions. For years he commissioned opinion polling in European countries. He believed the EU should be reorganised entirely, with Hungary leading one of its blocs. These are ambitions you would normally associate with France or Germany.

On Friday, I participated in a day-long conference on Elites and Democracy at NYU’s Remarque Institute. I believe the video of my presentation and the entire event will be available soon, and I will share it as soon as I can. The event was centered around the publication of Hugo Drochon’s Elites and Democracy. Natasha Piano’s recent book, Democratic Elitism: The Founding Myth of American Political Science, was also much discussed. Both books, in different ways, take a fresh look at what’s called the Italian School of Elitism and its principal figures, Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923), Gaetano Mosca (1858–1941), and Robert Michels (1876–1936). Mosca gave us the idea of a “ruling class,” Pareto postulated politics and history as driven by the “circulation of elites,” and Michels posited “the iron law of oligarchy,” the tendency of all social organizations to be eventually dominated by a select few.

These “Machiavellian” thinkers are generally regarded as great cynics in political theory, an impression cemented by the fact that all three flirted with Italian fascism. Drochon and Piano want to find more salutary lessons in this tradition: Drochon thinks elites will always be with us, and the Elite Theorists explain how to balance and manage them; Piano thinks that the Elite Theorists are, in fact, trenchant critics of plutocratic elitism who open up paths to a substantive democracy that goes beyond mere elections and representative government. Piano makes the striking claim that democracy and elections are opposed rather than complementary phenomena: representative government was always presented in the republican tradition as an alternative to pure democracy, the representatives are necessarily an elite separate from the masses, and universal suffrage can paradoxically have the effect of undermining public belief in democracy when the masses see the repeated and perhaps inevitable failures in practice of the principle of representation.

Since “elites” and “elitism” are some of the biggest buzzwords of our era, along with the related “populism,” attempts to get some specificity and rigor into their meaning are welcome. A big topic at the conference is whether terms have any analytical and descriptive use whatsoever, or whether they are so freighted with rhetorical and normative content that they are little more than slurs at this point. Sometimes it seems like an “elite” is anybody you don’t like.

Both books are fascinating, worth checking out, and I think they help make sense out of the present morass. In particular, Piano’s treatment of Mosca’s critique of universal suffrage struck me as relevant to my own work, and I wish I had Piano’s book when I was writing my own; it makes sense out of the Gotti chapter and perhaps provides a clue to the Trump phenomenon as a whole:

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If you’re not yet a paid subscriber but regularly read, enjoy, or share Unpopular Front, please consider signing up. This newsletter is completely reader-supported and represents my primary source of income. And, at 5 dollars a month, it’s less than most things at Starbucks.

Subscribe now

When the Clock Broke is now out in paperback and available wherever books are sold. If you live in the United Kingdom, it’s also available there. The UK edition is also apparently available all over the world, too! I’ve received reports now of book sightings in places as far as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Christchurch, New Zealand. It seems relatively easy to find in Commonwealth countries and at English-language bookstores abroad.

I also do a film podcast with Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times. On our Patreon, we have a lot of bonus content, including a weekly politics discussion.

I appeared this week on Mike Pesca’s Not Even Mad podcast to discuss the Iran war, libertarianism, and what generally annoys me, with Reason magazine’s .

On Friday, April 17th, I will be giving a presentation as part of the day-long “Elites and Democracy” event at NYU’s Remarque Institute. You can register online to attend or tune in on Zoom.

After finishing his latest book, my friend and mentor Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland, Before the Storm, and Reaganland, has kicked off a Substack called “Rickipedia.” It’s aptly named because, besides being an enormously entertaining writer, Rick is an absolute treasure trove of information about the right and American history more generally.

Hungarians are heading to the polls today to decide whether or not to end the 16-year reign of the Fidesz Party and its leader, Viktor Orbán, who has brought his country back towards despotism. All civilized people in the world hope ardently for this fleshy tyrant’s defeat: perhaps it will signal the breaking of the right-wing wave. At the very least, it will be a stinging rebuke for fascist wannabes worldwide who have looked to his regime for inspiration. In the New Statesman, Ábel Bede:

Yet Orbán’s campaign focus on geopolitics exposes a vulnerability. Hungary’s economy has stagnated in recent years, with investment falling and headline inflation peaking at around 25 per cent in early 2023. The European Union is withholding roughly €17 billion (£14.8 billion) in funds over rule-of-law concerns – resources that previously underpinned rising living standards. As economic pressures mount, voters appear increasingly focused on domestic conditions rather than international positioning.

This shift is fuelling the rise of Orbán’s challenger, Péter Magyar. On the same day as Vance’s visit, Magyar held seven rallies outside Budapest, drawing large crowds even in small towns. His party, Tisza, now leads in several independent polls, with some suggesting it could even approach a constitutional majority. A former Fidesz insider, Magyar rose rapidly after a 2024 scandal that forced the resignation of President Katalin Novák. Since then, he has consolidated support across the political spectrum, positioning himself not as a liberal reformer but as a pragmatic critic of state decline. His campaign avoids abstract debates about democracy, instead focusing on healthcare, education, infrastructure, and corruption. At rallies, that message appears to resonate strongly. In Dévaványa, a town of 7,000, Magyar filled the main square on a weekday afternoon – an unprecedented turnout for an opposition figure in recent years. Asked why voters are responding differently this time, a local organiser offered a blunt explanation: “Because they are much poorer now.”

Magyar’s speeches frequently draw sharp contrasts between everyday hardship and elite wealth. “In ten years, Lőrinc Mészáros… has become richer than the British monarchy did in 400 years,” he told one crowd – a claim that overstates the comparison, though Mészáros’s wealth has indeed surged dramatically. He couples such rhetoric with vivid, emotional appeals, highlighting failing infrastructure and poverty.

It is not the first time The Democracy, as they used to call the cause writ large, has looked to Hungary for inspiration. I’m reminded of the hero’s welcome Lajos Kossuth received in the United States in the 1850s. He was thronged by adoring crowds, and the country briefly fell under a mania for all things Hungarian. Abraham Lincoln joined other leading citizens of Springfield, Illinois, to call a meeting in honor of Kossuth, and they issued a resolution in support of Hungary’s revolution. Some sources say they met; there’s not much hard evidence for that, but perhaps in the Gettysburg address, there’s an echo of a line in Kossuth’s 1852 speech in Columbus, Ohio—“The spirit of our age is Democracy. All for the people, and all by the people. Nothing about the people without the people – That is Democracy!”

Kossuth wanted to drum up support against the Russians, who had crushed the nascent Hungarian bid for independence, but although Americans had a great deal of affection for the dashing and romantic revolutionary, the political appetite for intervention was not there. Even that great enthusiast Walt Whitman was unswayed, and his remarks later perhaps reflect the country’s mood in a more sober state:

I knew Kossuth—talked with him on several occasions. He still lives, as bright intellectually—the same fine noble soul as ever. When I saw him he was a small man, eloquent to a great height—vivacious. Kossuth made a great mistake after his coming here. He had been almost importuned to come here by officials, by Congress, was brought in an American man-of-war. At that time any one of the nations—Germany, Austria, France, Russia—would have killed him—hung him—if they could have got him in their hands. But Kossuth’s great mistake after he got here was to make an effort to have America range herself in his cause. We all recognized it at once as deplorable. We could not have done it then, could not do it now, ought never to do it. Yet he went up and down through our states, pleading for it. I am even opposed to Congress petitioning the Czar to investigate Siberia—even that is out of our province. We can never be in a position to arbitrate—enforce our arbitrament—in European contests.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels went from great admirers of Kossuth’s “bourgeois revolution” against the reactionary powers of old Europe to bitter critics of what they considered to be his toadying to Napoleon III.

I have to take a small issue with an otherwise very fine piece in the New Yorker by Antonia Hitchens about the groyperfication of the GOP—and which also very generously quotes my book:

Fuentes picked up the mantle, repackaging paleoconservatism for the streaming era. In 2022, he put on a political conference in Florida, where he hosted Peter Brimelow, a paleocon who had pitched an early version of the great-replacement theory. (Brimelow has called immigration to the West “Hitler’s revenge.”) In the nineties, William F. Buckley had tried to keep paleocons like Brimelow and Buchanan out of mainstream conservatism by banning such ideas from the pages of National Review. Fuentes helped make their concerns a mass online phenomenon.

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If you’re not yet a paid subscriber but regularly read, enjoy, or share Unpopular Front, please consider signing up. This newsletter is completely reader-supported and represents my primary source of income. And, at 5 dollars a month, it’s less than most things at Starbucks.

Subscribe now

When the Clock Broke is now out in paperback and available wherever books are sold. If you live in the United Kingdom, it’s also available there. The UK edition is also apparently available all over the world, too! I’ve received reports now of book sightings in places as far as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Christchurch, New Zealand. It seems relatively easy to find in Commonwealth countries and at English-language bookstores abroad.

I also do a film podcast with Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times. On our Patreon, we have a lot of bonus content, including a weekly politics discussion.

Happy Easter and Chag Sameach Pesach to all who celebrate.

Thanks to everyone who came to the Night of Ideas festival at Albertine to see me, Max Read, and Maya Vinokour. I will have video and audio of the event up tomorrow, I think.

I’m focusing today on a single theme: Trump’s threats to bomb Iran back into the “stone ages [sic.]” Sometimes I feel that my job is to be an intellectual historian of idiocy. One might think that there’s no discipline less helpful to understand Trumpism than the history of ideas or culture, since Trump has neither, but as John Maynard Keynes once remarked, “Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”

The phrase “bomb them into the Stone Age” is a ghastly cliché, and so Trump and Hegseth probably just plucked it out of the air, but the actual origins are still instructive. It comes not from an academic scribber, but from Air Force General Curtis LeMay, the mastermind of the fire-bombing campaign that devastated Japan’s cities in World War II. He later served as head of the Strategic Air Command and Air Force Chief of Staff under John F. Kennedy, where he continually advised the President to initiate a preemptive nuclear strike during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He also appears to have taken actions that were designed to provoke the Soviet Union into World War III. He was the model for George C. Scott’s character in Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove and ran as segregationist George Wallace’s VP candidate on the American Independent Party ticket in 1968.

The New Yorker has a great piece by Richard Rhodes on LeMay’s efforts to start WWIII:

In 1954, LeMay remarked to a reconnaissance pilot whose plane had been damaged by a MiG-17 while over the Soviet Union, “Well, maybe if we do this overflight right, we can get World War III started.” The pilot, Hal Austin, told the documentary filmmaker Paul Lashmar that he assumed LeMay was joking, but years later, after LeMay retired, Austin saw him again and “brought up the subject of the mission we had flown. And he remembered it like it was yesterday. We chatted about it a little bit. His comment again was, ‘Well, we’d have been a hell of a lot better off if we’d got World War III started in those days.’ ”

The “Stone Age” quote appears in his 1965 autobiography, Mission with LeMay: My Story. The context is the burgeoning Vietnam War:

The military task confronting us is to make it so expensive for the North Vietnamese that they will stop their aggression against South Viet Nam and Laos. If we make it too expensive for them, they will stop. They don’t want to lose everything they have.

There came a time when the Nazis threw the towel into the ring. Same way with the Japanese. We didn’t bring that happy day about by sparing with sixteen-ounce gloves.

My solution to the problem would be to tell them frankly that they’ve got to shape in their horns and stop that aggression, or we’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age. And we would shove them back into the Stone Age with Air power or Naval power—not with ground forces.

You could tell them that they might not be convinced that you really meant business. What you needed with those characters is convince them that if they continue their aggression, they will have to pay an economic price they cannot afford.

We must throw a punch that really hurts.

For example, we could knock out all their oil. They don’t have oilof their own; it has to come into the country; so there are rich targets, in storage areas sprinkled around.

Knock them all out. This immediately brings a lot of things to a halt: transportation and power particularly. It would be the simplest possible application of strategic bombardment, and you could do the jobwith conventional weapons. You wouldn’t have to get into a nuclear fracas.

That sounds an awful lot like Trump, doesn’t it? It’s essentially the strategy he’s trying to pursue now with the threats against Iran’s infrastructure. Moral questions aside, it’s not clear if it even works. Contra Le May, Nazi Germany did not throw in the towel because of strategic bombing; the Reich had to be invaded at great cost to Allied armies. And Le May’s horrific destruction of Japanese cities did not defeat the Japanese: it took the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some military historians take Nixon’s strategic bombing of North Vietnam as proof of Le May’s concept, but it really achieved very little. The agreement that the US and North Vietnam came to was essentially the same as the principles hammered out before the bombing. “We bombed the North Vietnamese into accepting our concessions," an aide to Henry Kissinger acidly remarked. I’d bet this war ends similarly: unnecessary devastation followed by concessions.

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On Wednesday, Trump became the first president to attend oral arguments at the Supreme Court. Maybe he is simply trying to intimidate the Justices who have already struck down much of his program, but it’s telling what case he picked: Trump v. Barbara concerns his executive order that attempted to effectively end birthright citizenship. I think if you wanted to boil down the Trumpist project to its essence, it’s an attack on American citizenship itself. Jamelle Bouie has recently called this a “war on the 14th Amendment.” This is what Hegel would call the Geistesgehalt, the spiritual content, of MAGA. It is why all the forces of reaction and destruction rallied to Trump’s Pandæmonium: they sensed and were summoned by this essential nature.

The regime has been working on this for a long time—here’s the beginning of a piece I wrote for the Times in 2018:

Surveying the wreckage of McCarthyism in 1957, the political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote about efforts to denaturalize American citizens suspected of Communist ties.

“It seems absurd,” she concluded, “but the fact is that, under the political circumstances of this century, a constitutional amendment may be needed to assure American citizens that they cannot be deprived of their citizenship, no matter what they do.”

It no longer seems so absurd. Citizenship is squarely in the Trump administration’s cross hairs. It has organized a Citizenship and Immigration Services task force to denaturalize American citizens, the first effort of mass expatriation contemplated since the McCarthy era. In a recent op-ed article for the Washington Post, Michael Anton, a former national security official in the administration, even proposed getting rid of birthright citizenship — by dictatorial fiat, no less: “It falls, then, to Trump. An executive order could specify to federal agencies that the children of noncitizens are not citizens.”

Yes, you’re reading that right: A high-ranking former member of the state security apparatus seriously believes that it is good policy to revoke citizenship by executive order.

Well, that’s exactly what they did this time around.

What Trump and his cronies want to do is reverse the settled notion of American citizenship that has prevailed since the Civil War with something else, which I’d argue is not citizenship at all, but something more like subjecthood. Again, this is the innermost content of the MAGA revolution: an end to the American idea altogether.

And here’s what I wrote last summer, which I think all still applies:—

The essence of Trump’s movement is an attack on the very concept of American citizenship. It’s the bright, red thread that runs through the entirety of its existence: from its origin in birtherism, the racist idea that there was something questionable or tainted about Barack Obama’s citizenship, to the stolen election myth, which sought to disenfranchise millions of Americans, to the attempt to end birthright citizenship by fiat through executive order, and the newly announced prioritization of denaturalization cases by the Department of Justice. A Republican congressman called for New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s denaturalization and deportation. The White House said it should be “investigated.” This is not to be taken lightly.

I say it is an attack on the concept of citizenship, not a redefinition or even a return to the pre-Reconstruction racial state, because, in the Trumpian universe, there is no agreed-upon, apolitical definition of who is granted citizenship, of who bears inalienable rights under the law. The sovereign decides who a citizen is, as it decides who is an enemy and where and when the law applies. It becomes entirely arbitrary, a prerogative grant. Citizenship is no longer a right; it is, as the Orwellian executive order PROTECTING THE MEANING AND VALUE OF AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP puts it, “a privilege,” a “priceless and profound gift.” No one can seriously argue that, if possible, Trump would not like to revoke and grant citizenship at will. That’s what he is already trying to do. Look at the idea of the Trump Card, where someone can buy their way into citizenship. This a further degradation of the notion of citizenship from a set of rights and duties to a transferable and revocable commodity.

The correlate in practice of the destruction of citizenship in theory is deportation to a place beyond the law: the concentration camp or worse. That is the meaning of the experiments with deporting people to El Salvador or dangerous “third countries” where they may be killed or tortured. They are, in effect, rendering people stateless. In a 1952 letter to Robert Hutchins, then director of the Fund for the Republic, Hannah Arendt wrote:

As long as mankind is nationally and territorially organized in states, a stateless person is not simply expelled from one country, native or adopted, but from all countries—none being obliged to receive and naturalize him—which means he is actually expelled from humanity. Deprivation of citizenship consequently could be counted among the crimes against humanity, and some of the worst recognized crimes in this category have in fact, and not incidentally, been preceded by mass expatriations. The state’s right of capital punishment in case of murder is minor compared with its right to denaturalization, for the criminal is judged according to the laws of the country, under which he possesses rights, and he is by no means put outside the pale of the law altogether.

Justice Earl Warren, in Trop v. Dulles agreed, calling denaturalization “a cruel and unusual punishment:

We believe, as did Chief Judge Clark in the court below, that use of denationalization as a punishment is barred by the Eighth Amendment. There may be involved no physical mistreatment, no primitive torture. There is, instead, the total destruction of the individual’s status in organized society. It is a form of punishment more primitive than torture, for it destroys for the individual the political existence that was centuries in the development. The punishment strips the citizen of his status in the national and international political community. His very existence is at the sufferance of the country in which he happens to find himself. While any one country may accord him some rights and, presumably, as long as he remained in this country, he would enjoy the limited rights of an alien, no country need do so, because he is stateless. Furthermore, his enjoyment of even the limited rights of an alien might be subject to termination at any time by reason of deportation. In short, the expatriate has lost the right to have rights.

This punishment is offensive to cardinal principles for which the Constitution stands. It subjects the individual to a fate of ever-increasing fear and distress. He knows not what discriminations may be established against him, what proscriptions may be directed against him, and when and for what cause his existence in his native land may be terminated. He may be subject to banishment, a fate universally decried by civilized people. He is stateless, a condition deplored in the international community of democracies. It is no answer to suggest that all the disastrous consequences of this fate may not be brought to bear on a stateless person. The threat makes the punishment obnoxious.

From what I’ve been able to see, there’s been no discussion of the fact that the revocation of birthright citizenship would potentially make thousands of infants stateless. What would then be done with them?

It’s long been my contention that the attack on citizenship is the most serious and frightful aspect of the Trump phenomenon and the one that makes it most deserving of the epithet fascist or totalitarian. “MAGA,” in its innermost being, means “death to America.” If they successfully destroy American citizenship as enshrined in the Constitution, they will have destroyed the country. We will be, all of a sudden, somewhere else. It may be called the United States of America, but it really won’t be. It won’t feel like a big cataclysm, happening all at once. It will come not with a bang but a whimper. It will be a chaotic and shambolic existence where more and more people have to scramble to ensure they have the right papers or are in the right zone. It will be stupid and laughable, a “system” not particularly hard to outwit, but unspeakably dire in its consequences if one happens to slip through a crack. And likely, for most, they will have little to worry about. Superficially, life will continue much as before. But we will be a sad shadow of that former country, at times recognizable in its old outlines, but fading fast.

Fortunately, it sounded to me from listening to the Justices that they seem pretty unsympathetic to the government’s arguments. But it is much too close for comfort.

My knowledge of the language progressed more briskly after I became involved, first professionally and then not long after romantically, with an extraordinarily compelling and beautiful doctoral student at the university

Okay. That’s nice for you. A little further on, he feels the need to remind us of his liaisons, plural as well as his side hustle:

There were diversions, certainly, both professional and romantic.

I developed a side business of sorts, asking German colleagues who made trips to Zurich to bring me back Cuban cigars; the prices and taxes were more forgiving across the Swiss border. I kept half of the cigars for myself and sold the rest to bankers in Frankfurt.

This is a man very much impressed with his own cleverness.

Karp’s picture of Habermas is of a crotchety and even slightly tyrannical doyen who terrorized his students, routinely referred to people as “idiots” and “half-idiots,” and who ultimately declined to supervise Karp’s dissertation, a rejection whose “sting would linger for years.”

I don’t think anyone would doubt that a German philosophy professor of some stature might be inclined to be brusque. Still, the picture Karp paints is very different from the one that emerges from Habermas’s other students and colleagues. They remember someone patient, unpretentious, and generous with his time and intellectual energy. Is it possible that Habermas just didn’t like Karp very much? He certainly didn’t think highly of his work, writing to Karp, “You simply cannot compete with literary critics and theorists [who have recently weighed in on this subject.]” His doctoral dissertation, on the American sociologist Talcott Parsons and Theodor Adorno’s book The Jargon of Authenticity, was ultimately overseen by the sociologist Karol Brede, concerning principally “the human mind’s instinct towards aggression and its implications for our deployment of jargon as a means of exercising power over others.”

Despite the “wounding” of Habermas’s rejection, Karp sucks it up and appreciates the stern superego of an old-time father, so bracing and different from our own saggy times: “And yet it was his very willingness to be so productively unsparing that reminds me of what we have lost as a culture.”

But just as telling as the psychological pas de deux with an uninterested mentor figure is the substantive disagreement that Karp hints at with Habermas:

Habermas advocated for what he described as Verfassungspatriotismus, or constitutional patriotism — the view that one could be loyal to a republic while setting aside the more parochial and tribal affiliations that had dominated human history since the advent of the species. A permanent end to a distasteful and unenlightened nationalism in all of its forms, we were assured, was near.

The vision was noble yet, in hindsight it seems clear, strikingly premature and misguided. In 2011, the German magazine Der Spiegel described him as “the last European,” as the continental government for which he had advocated so fiercely came under increasingly sustained assault.

His hope for a sort of disembodied political identity, untethered from the inconvenient particularities of family and culture, represented an aspirational cosmopolitanism that has proven insufficient to animate allegiance in the modern era. Put differently, he believed in the possibility of a purely rational public discourse. I believed, and still believe, such a discourse must be rooted in a more corporeal and traditional — and indeed national and cultural — source.

He may yet be vindicated, but I fear not in our time.

As I noted in my review of his book, Karp bitches constantly about euphemism and the tendency to couch one’s language in neutral-sounding terms to avoid giving offense, but he is incapable of expressing himself directly, relying instead on highly abstract verbiage to disguise rather nasty impulses—incidentally, exactly what his thesis diagnoses.

What on Earth can he be talking about here?

The theater of the discourse, for many, became more important than what was happening in the world, which is that the profound successes of the progressive left in the middle part of the 20th century in advancing the interests of an American underclass had descended into a sort of imperial overreach — an obsession with theory at the complete expense of practice and results.

This sounds to me like an extremely opaque restatement of the general tech right thesis: woke, left-wing intellectuals care too much about blacks, women, and the poor at the expense of technological progress.

Habermas believed in civic patriotism because he saw what blood and soil wrought on Germany and the world; Karp thinks them are just the breaks and incidentally a good way to make loads of money. But since his dissertation was still critical of the latent aggression contained in “jargon,” one wonders if Karp’s embrace of nationalism and war was what led to his break with Habermas, or if it was the result of it. Is it all an act of aggression towards the father figure who rejected him?

It’s troubling to reflect that Habermas is the ancestor of not one, but two different lineages of tech-right thought. Curtis Yarvin, aka Mencius Moldbug, was deeply influenced by the hardcore libertarianism of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, who was also a student of Habermas but hybridized his work with the Austrian school economists Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. The keystone of Habermas’s edifice is the idea that rational argumentation and discourse intrinsically contain the foundations of ethics: the very practice of making claims and giving reasons commits us to treat others as fellow rational beings and equals. While Habermas’s idea is that giving and receiving reasons presupposes the possibility of a constructive and respectful relation to others, Hoppe thinks it first and foremost implies a relationship to ourselves: nothing we argue makes sense unless we own ourselves, our own bodies, and this self-ownership provides a transcendental justification of private property.

This is all very abstract, but you can see what appealed to Yarvin in what Hoppe believes flows from this absolutization of private property. Hoppe is like Shigalyev in Dostoevsky’s Demons, who said, “My conclusion stands in direct contradiction to the idea from which I started. Proceeding from unlimited freedom, I end with unlimited despotism.” The rights implied by absolute self-ownership end for Hoppe with absolute monarchy. For instance, this is how Hoppe talks about his notion of “covenant communities” in his book Democracy: The God that Failed:

In a covenant concluded among proprietor and community tenants for the purpose of protecting their private property, no such thing as a right to free (unlimited) speech exists, ... naturally no one is permitted to advocate ideas contrary to the very purpose of the covenant of preserving and protecting private property, such as democracy and communism. There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society. Likewise, in a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal. They – the advocates of alternative, non-family and kin-centered lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism – will have to be physically removed from society, too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order.

Or, even more disturbingly:

A member of the human race who is completely incapable of understanding the higher productivity of labor performed under a division of labor based on private property is not properly speaking a person, but falls instead in the same moral category as an animal — of either the harmless sort (to be domesticated and employed as a producer or consumer good, or to be enjoyed as a “free good”) or the wild and dangerous one (to be fought as a pest).

You might say that what Hoppe has essentially done is to invent Nazism from first principles, which is a tantalizing natural experiment for Critical Theorists who posit that fascism is somehow implicit in capitalism, the concept of private property taken to its extreme, or even in the subject-object relation itself. While Habermas strove to get away from the “philosophy of the subject” that created a kind of solipsistic and instrumental relationship between the “I” and the world facing him, Hoppe has embraced this, and it has spat out a truly horrifying system of universal domination. Just as Habermas would’ve predicted!

What’s really striking is something like the entire philosophical course of German Idealism is being recapitulated here: Fichte’s extreme subjectivism and solipsism lead to his embrace, almost invention, of a radical, exclusionary German nationalism: The nation itself simply takes the place of the sovereign “I” Hoppe simply runs the same program with property doing the work that Geist did in Fichte: the self-positing sovereign individual, unable to sustain himself in isolation, discovers that he requires a purified collective vehicle for his actualization and that vehicle requires the removal of everyone whose presence threatens its self-positing purity.

So you might say that Habermas’s bastards both express the recessive gene of German philosophy: rejecting the cosmopolitanism and universalism of reason and instead low-key becoming a Nazi.

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When the Clock Broke is now out in paperback and available wherever books are sold. If you live in the United Kingdom, it’s also available there. The UK edition is also apparently available all over the world, too! I’ve received reports now of book sightings in places as far as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Christchurch, New Zealand. It seems relatively easy to find in Commonwealth countries and at English-language bookstores abroad.

I also do a film podcast with Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times. On our Patreon, we have a lot of bonus content, including a weekly politics discussion.

I saw an exhibit by the painter of the above at the National Gallery in London. I discovered his work a few years ago while looking for painters who specialized in volcanoes. Unfortunately, none of his pictures of Vesuvius were on exhibition, but this macabre spectacle from the specialist in “tenebrism,” the extreme version of chiaroscuro, put me in mind of the topic of my talk with Max Read tomorrow evening at the Night of Ideas festival at Villa Albertine—"Dark Enlightenment.” We’ll be joined by Maya Vinokour of New York University.

Thanks again to everyone who came out to the talk at King’s College London on Thursday. In case you missed it, here is the text of the lecture. I had a big block quote from Sam Francis describing his vision of an America First foreign policy concept in the speech, but it didn’t transfer over when I copied and pasted it from my doc, so here it is.—

This comes originally from the 1982 essay “Message from MARS: The Social Politics of the New Right,” collected in The New Right Papers.

I bought an 1824 edition of William Hazlitt’s essay collection Table-Talk at Jarndyce Booksellers in Great Russell Street. It contains many of my favorite of his essays, including the apposite On Going a Journey, which I thought of on my way to find dinner on rain-lashed streets:

Read more

I was thinking when I was coming up with this talk, it would be crazy not to address the war, which perhaps is not so straightforward to deal with in terms of my book. From a certain perspective, it actually seems to create a lot of problems for one of its theses. Let me explain: part of the story of the political and social crisis that my book locates in the 1990s involves the factional struggle within the Republican Party and the Conservative movement between the paleoconservatives and the neoconservatives. Trump, on a very simplified reading of my book, ultimately represented the victory of this paleocon faction.

Now, since the neocons are the pro-Israel and pro-war guys, and the paleocons are the anti-Israel (and often antisemitic) and isolationist guys, you might think that this discredits my book. It seems like the neocons have triumphed again. So, Trump is not the avatar of a paleocon ascendency, QED.

But I’d like to think, on a more careful reading, the war in Iran is a product of some of the same forces and tendencies I identified in my book. Or at least, the book can still shed light on the present crisis.

Since I’m not going to assume you’ve all read the book or have very nerdy inside knowledge about the details of the American conservative movement, I’ll tell you a little bit about these groups. First, the neocons, which, despite their name, actually emerge before the paleocons. The neocons were liberals and leftists who defected from the left to the right in the 1970s. They moved rightwards because of their revulsion for the New Left on campus and their feeling that it, in particular, the Black Power movement, had become antisemitic. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or as it was then known, the Israeli-Arab conflict, is central here too, because the Black Radical groups openly identified and sympathized with the Palestinian cause in the wake of 1967 and 1973, angering many of their former Jewish comrades. The Neocons were also dedicated Cold Warriors, hawkish toward the soviet union, coming out of a perspective of anti-totalitarian anti-communism that viewed the USSR as a threat to democracy worldwide.

The paleocons claimed to be the real right, to be the genealogical descendants, often literally so, of an authentic American conservatism. They traced their lineage back to the prewar right, while they viewed the Neocons as essentially right-wing New Dealers. Murray Rothbard would sometimes even call them “mensheviks:”” I hope you don’t mind me quoting myself, but I don’t think I can put it any better than I wrote it. I was a much better writer then:

Two different visions of America divided these sects, or, to be more precise, two different versions of Americana. The neoconservatives largely still upheld the liberal mythos of America as the land of Lincoln and FDR. Self-consciously the sons and grandsons of immigrants, they championed the America of Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. They viewed the accomplishments of the civil rights movement as a point of national pride, even if they had a limited notion of it and often worked against the consolidation of its gains. They mostly believed that some form of the welfare state should exist, although significantly pared back from Great Society excess. Some were realists about foreign policy, but many believed that the United States had an obligation to spread democracy around the world—even at the point of a bayonet. To the paleos, the neos were just more representatives of the liberal modernity that they despised. And the neoconservative migra- tion to the right seemed a microcosmic repetition of the larger demographic changes to the country that the paleos decried. “The offensives of radicalism have driven vast hordes of liberals across the border into our territories. These refugees speak in our name, but the language they speak is the same one they always spoke,” wrote Clyde Wilson, Francis’s Tarheel conspiracy comrade. To Francis, the neocons were just “the right wing of the New Class” of managers and technocrats “engaged in an effort to moderate its collectivist and utopian dynamic with a strong dose of bourgeois liberalism.” Francis and his peers had come so close to power, only to see it snatched away by these upstarts.

Pat Buchanan had a soft spot for the idyllic 1950s, but for the most part, the whole postwar period was a scandal to the paleo mind. They traced their lineage to isolationist, prewar America Firsters. The New Deal, the Second World War, the civil rights movement, the Great Society, immigration, the New Left, the Vietnam War, opposition to the Vietnam War—all these things were deeply regrettable to the pa- leos and had changed American society almost beyond recognition. If the neocons held up mid-century New York as the height of U.S. civilization, the paleos wanted to go much further back: to the 1920s at least, and preferably back to the nineteenth century, to the world before Lincoln and the Civil War. While the neocons upheld statisti- cal research and the social sciences, the paleo intellectuals were mostly humanists who detested “managerial” technocracy.

The paleo aesthetic was American Gothic: white-sided Presbyterian and Congregational churches in small towns; stern, industrious folk; farmers, homesteaders, and frontiersmen. Added to this was the myth of the Gallant South and the Lost Cause. Many were Catholic traditionalists, but they praised the character-annealing rigors of the Protestant ethic. In the paleo junk shop of discarded historical forms, the dour Puritan Roundhead made a strange peace with the chivalrous Southern cavalier. Their imagination resembles nothing so much as the rainy-day transports of a boy who lines up all his toy soldiers from different periods in a grand alliance—here’s a knight, there’s a cowboy, here’s Davy Crockett, there’s a Special Forces commando. And for all its eclectic-yet-selective evocations of white civilizational virtue, the movement’s sentimentalism and romance was also steeped in Spenglerian gloom: the writing of this cohort of paleo thinkers is shot through with a deep cynicism, even nihilism, and a hard-hearted notion of power that questions democracy itself.

It goes without saying that the neocons were largely eastern and northern and urban, while the Paleocons were southern and western, and often rural.

So the first way I want to address Iran is by talking about Paleo “isolationism.” Isolationism is not quite the accurate label for the paleoconservative attitude towards foreign policy. The better term would be nationalist or sovereigntist.

We have to separate isolationism and unilateralism. Senator Robert Taft, whom the paleocons held up as an ancestor, the postwar link to the pre-war right, is a crucial figure here. Taft opposed NATO, opposed the Korean War, and opposed what he saw as Truman’s imperial presidency in foreign affairs, but he was not opposed to American power as such. He wanted a strong Air Force. He wanted American sovereignty unconstrained by alliances and institutions he saw as entangling the republic in other people’s quarrels. The Taft tradition is not “America should stay home.” It’s “America should answer to no one.”

The historian Tim Barker put this really well, I think:

The “isolationist” label actually makes it impossible to understand the precise dangers of a certain kind of right-wing foreign policy. The scariest thing about someone like Robert Taft was not his reluctance to go to war, but the fact that once he supported a war, he was willing to consider extreme forms of intervention. Taft made a bit of a fuss over the lack of Congressional authorization for the Korean War. But he soon became more frustrated with the fact that the war was stalemated, a situation he likened to “a football game in which our team when it reaches the 50-yard line is always instructed to kick. Our team can never score.”

Taft wanted to score, and to do so he was willing to countenance major escalation: “using Chiang Kai-shek’s troops in Korea or South China…the bombing of Chinese communications…perhaps imposing a blockade on the Chinese mainland…dismissing ‘any hesitation about the possibility that the Russians may come into the war.’” People like Taft especially liked nuclear air power, which they saw as an economical, capital-intensive, private-sector-friendly alternative to standing armies. “The ability of our Air Force to deliver atom bombs on Russia should never be open to question,” said the nation’s leading isolationist.

This is also maps onto Walter Russell Mead’s notion of a “Jacksonian” tradition in foreign policy—referring to Andrew Jackson, of course. Mead identifies Jacksonians as the folk-military culture of American nationalism — they don’t care about international institutions, democracy promotion, or liberal internationalist ideals. What they care about is a sense of American honor, American nationhood, and the willingness to use overwhelming and unapologetic force when either is threatened. Rubble doesn’t make trouble, they like to say. Jacksonians are not doves. They are conditionally, ferociously hawkish — the condition being that the fight be recognized as ours. And I should note that relatedly, Iran-hawkishness is really a big part of the institutional culture of the US military, particularly the Marines, because of the Beirut bombing. Revenge against Iran is for them a matter of honor.

Going back before the Jacksonian era, the paleocons like to talk about the founders and the Monroe Doctrine, of course. Here’s Pat Buchanan: “The message of George Washington’s Farewell Address was not to isolate America from Europe but to keep it independent of Europe. Stay out of foreign wars, Washington admonished. Look west to the mountains, the plains, the Pacific. That is where our destiny lies. Europe is the past. Avoid “permanent alliances”; devote your energies to your own country. Independence, not isolation, is the American tradition.” The Pacific is a key thing for this tradition; they were much more enthusiastic for the war against Japan than against Hitler and the Nazis, for a few reasons, but a major one being a notion of East Asians as a civilizational and even racial enemy.

Here’s how Sam Francis described what he wanted a paleo foreign policy to look like in the early 1980s, when Reagan was just elected,— He said his constituencies would “require protection against cheap imports and access to the raw materials and resources of the Third World, and they are less committed to international stability than to the continued predominance of the United States.”

I mean, Francis here basically is summarizing the attitude of the Trump administration towards foreign policy. He saw it in advance, and many of the Trump people, the ones that can and do read, have read Francis.

Here we have the aggression, the unilateralism, not buying into international agreements, the naked resource imperialism, and even the fixation on air power—strategic bombing—to solve problems.

But I have to admit that this sounds good on paper, but it is not a fully satisfying explanation, because many of the more paleocon or America First figures, like Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, or even JD Vance in Trump’s orbit or in the conservative movement at large, are the ones who still are opposed to the Iran war. Vance was quoted as saying something like “hit them fast and hard” which is sort of the whole Paleo war ethos in a nutshell.

But there are still a couple more ways to deal with this problem, I think. One is that there is less daylight between these factions, or subfactions of these factions, today than in the past. The Neocons also tended to have an unilateralist streak, and sometimes they let their mask slip, and the democratic globalist pretensions would give way to a more purely bellicose id.— “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” Said the neoconservative operator Michael Ledeen, by the way, one of the biggest Iran hawks in DC, who sadly died before he could see his dream come true.

The Norman Podhoretz branch of neoconservativism is a little earthier, raw and passionate, lets sa, than the Irving Kristol branch: Podhoretz was very impressed by Trump, associating him with a kind of bully that he saw on the streets of Brownsville and who could beat up people. Commentary under Podhoretz wasn’t primarily interested in building liberal international institutions. It was interested in will: American will, Western will, the willingness to identify enemies clearly and confront them without apology or hesitation. The target was always, at bottom, the liberal culture of doubt and accommodation — the McGovernite tendency, the Vietnam syndrome, the Carter years. Iran was almost constitutive of this sensibility. The hostage crisis, for neocons of the Podhoretz stripe, was the ultimate expression of everything wrong with post-Vietnam American liberalism.

Norman’s son John Podhoretz, and figures like him, have made a smoother accommodation with Trumpism. Norman’s son John Podhoretz, is pro-war, while Bill Kristol, Irving Kristol’s son, is now anti-war. Also, one has to consider the hollowing out of the conservative movement in general: the neocosnervatives started as a movement of intellectuals, but what remains is largely crude propagandists and hucksters, people like Mark Levin, who is a radio loudmouth.

There’s also something a friend of mine called the Buchanan to Bibi pipeline. A lot of younger members of the conservative clerical class who moved rightward in the past decade or so were first exposed to national populist or paleocon ideas and then became more friendly to Israel, which sounds paradoxical because Buchanan, of course, is an anti-zionist and a terrific antisemite. Some of this is pure careerism, but when you consider the failure and fading of liberal zionism in the US and the labor zionist tradition in Israel, and the open embrace of ethnic nationalism, and frankly openly genocidal, there is some ideological coherence. They often will talk about Israel as a “civilizational ally,” a kind of outpost of the West on the edge of the Eastern world. Of course, there has long been a philosemitic branch of White Nationalism. This is particularly evident in nationalisms that have a Calvinist background and therefore have a kind of spiritual kinship with Zionism,—So, some forms of American Protestantism—the Congregationalist lineage in the Northeast, Presbyterian and Baptist denominations in the South, and, of course, the kind of Christian Nationalism that Pete Hegseth is into. These Calvinoid nationalists can easily go from philosemitic to antisemitic when they decide they are the real Israelites. Boer nationalism was both antisemitic and zionist—lots of that about. And even here in the UK, naturally, there was a segment of imperialist thought that was antisemitic and Zionist. Winston Churchill is a prominent example here, who warned against International Jewry but supported the Jewish National Home in Palestine. That’s partly why Lord Montagu, the only Jewish member of Lloyd George’s cabinet, called the adoption of the Balfour Declaration intrinsically “antisemitic” and viewed the creation of Israel as the “world’s ghetto.”

But to bring us back from that tangent, there’s a strain of right-wing opinion that doesn’t care Israel is the “only democracy in the Middle East,” they view it as a white outpost, and are fascinated with it as an integral, militarized society, a garrison state, a Sparta.

Another thing we have to consider here, I think, is the role of Iran in the American popular, or to be more precise, populist, imagination. It’s perhaps not well remembered now, but the public anger about the hostage crisis was profound. It was a real humiliation for the American people; it reopened the not-quite-healed wounds of Vietnam. It contributed to Carter’s loss to Reagan, who was seen as tougher. Ross Perot, the billionaire businessman who ran a third-party campaign against Bush and Clinton and who is one of the principal figures in the book, and who I think is an important progenitor of Trump’s political career, became a kind of folk hero for his actions surrounding the revolution in Iran. Long story short: A bunch of Perot’s employees were jailed in Iran awaiting trial for corruption—charges which were almost certainly true‚—Perot was pretty open about bribing Iranian officials in the Shah regime, and Perot, frustrated with the lack of ability of the State Department to get his people organized his own commando raid, lead by a former Green Beret. They entered the country, but the State Department begged them not to attempt the raid, saying it would endanger other Americans remaining in the country, whether it succeeded or failed. They cast around for another solution, such as bribing an official. Events outstripped their efforts: the shah fled the country; Ayatollah Khomeini returned; revolutionary mobs descended on Tehran’s prisons; and the EDS employees walked out of their cells and into the Hyatt, where they met Simons and his team, who drove them across the Turkish border. Then he hired Ken Follett, an airport thriller writer, to write a book that dramatized the events called On Wings of Eagles. That book depicted the commando team as egging on the mob that busted them out of prison, which almost certainly did not happen. And then there was a television miniseries that depicted gunfights between the commandos and the guards. Definitely didn’t happen. So, against the unfolding hostage crisis, where the US government looks paralyzed, you have this businessman taking action. It made a big impression.

There was a country western song with the lyrics: “There ain’t no real-life heroes / Throughout this wretched realm / Where are you now when we need you, Ross Perot?” Letters of support from the public poured into Perot’s office. He wondered aloud if he should run for president. “No. King,” an employee joked.

Perot was opposed to the First Persian Gulf War, but not out of a sense of being dovish: he thought the US should have done a decapitation commando raid to take out Saddam instead. He shares with Trump something you might call “dumb guy epistemology.”

Trump himself has long been focused on Iran and especially the aspect of national humiliation. When he was flirting with running for president in the late 80s, he placed a full-page ad saying that the world was “laughing” at America’s leaders for their response to the Hormuz crisis brought on by the Iran-Iraq war. He did not like the multilateral aspect; he didn’t want the US protecting oil tankers we didn’t own with US ships — “protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help”.. You see, Trump does not understand markets at all—I just wanna make an aside here, he can’t really understand anything systemic at all, it’s all personal relationships and personalities.

I’m quoting Alex Barker in the Financial Times here:

Appearing a few weeks later at a New Hampshire rotary club event in 1987, Trump sneered about Iran’s navy being “little runabouts with machine guns” — had held America to ransom. “Why couldn’t we go in there and take some of their oilfields near the coast?” he asked.

In a 1988 interview with the Guardian: “One bullet shot at one of our men or ships, and I’d do a number on Kharg Island. I’d go in and take it.”

Of course, they are now considering doing just that.

I have a notion that I call the uneven and combined development theory of Trump’s brain, which is essentially that he’s stuck in the late 1980s and all of his policy ideas, insofar as you can call them that, originate a good deal from that.

As an aide, I think there is also an uneven and combined development thing going on with the Tech Right’s reactionary modernist program: they want to use advanced technology to reimpose a lost US hegemony or really domination, to return to an earlier era of US dominance and expansion.

I think at this point it’s also worth emphasizing the rhymes and the perennial nature of these themes in US history. First of all, there’s the weird rhyme with HW Bush’s foreign policy. Venezuela is like Panama 89 when we went in and took out Noriega, and then Bush I had his own Gulf War, which had much more ambiguous and complicated results. There is also the echo of US interventionism in the Cold War: largely successful in Latin America, with the exception, of course, of Cuba, but meeting greater difficulty in Asia.

And it’s striking that the debates, or the infighting now taking place on the American right, share the exact terms of the ones in the era of When the Clock Broke. The paleo movement itself really crystallized in opposition to the Persian Gulf War.

Just before the war, Pat Buchanan said on the McLaughlin group TV program: “There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East—the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States.”. Buchanan named four Jews in favor of action against Saddam Hussein—A. M. Rosenthal, Richard Perle, Henry Kissinger, and Charles Krauthammer. As William F. Buckley Jr. pointed out later, he could’ve named Alexander Haig, George Will, Frank Gaffney Jr., or James Jackson Kilpatrick, but didn’t. On another episode of McLaughlin, Buchanan called Congress “Israel-occupied territory,” coming perilously close to the “Zionist Occupied Government” canard spoken of by neo-Nazis.` At the time those accusations were really off base: HW was perhaps the last representative of a WASP pro-Arabist tradition in US foreign policy, —Tucker Carlson is trying to bring it back with his TE Lawrence-inspired visits to Bedouin tents and so forth—and the war was fought on realist premises, rememberign the oil shocks of the 1970s, they were worried about the supply of oil being cut going into an election year. The oil shock was not reversible, and it tipped the US into a recession, which may be happening now, except we caused the shock.

Today, Buchanan’s case seems more plausible given what we know about Netanyahu’s role in pulling America into the war, and now a lot of the public seems to think so: this idea is basically held by the younger generation on the right. One can imagine that the paleo position is going to become dominant. Despite their money and institutional resources, the neocons are having trouble reproducing themselves. So that’s one way that the paleocon ascendancy thesis in the book is still an open issue. Just wait a little while more.

I guess if I had to criticize myself here, the problem would be just that I implicitly portrayed Trump too much as a culmination and end point of a process in American history, rather than just a continuation. History just doesn’t stop. And look, it seems very likely from what we know in the news that Trump was simply persuaded, if not tricked, by Netanyahu in particular, that this was all a good idea, but I don’t think the persuasion can happen outside of these contexts.

Before I finish, I also want to present one crazier, more speculative idea. I think it’s interesting to conceptualize MAGA as a white decolonial movement. Let me explain this a little: in Francis’s articulation of the paleoconservative ideology, America is under the thumb of a globalist managerial elite, and his Middle American Revolution is the heartland overthrowing that domination, which he sees as cosmopolitan and anti-national. As early as Reagan, he wanted “The New Right will favor a populist-based presidency able to cut through the present oligarchical establishment . . . whose values and interests are hostile to the traditional American ethos and which is a parasitical tumor on the body of Middle America.” And Francis’s position was not simply backward-looking and reactionary. In fact, it was revolutionary: he thought that the America First revolution would make America truly a nation for the first time. Of the right-wing radical violence that emerged in the 1980s, he wrote that its perpetrators were “in the process of articulating something that has never existed in America: a national myth, rising above and overshadowing private interests, to which a revolutionary right can adhere and for which its adherents would gladly spill their own blood and that of others.” Obviously, that sounds a little fascist. Francis takes these marxisant categories of class struggle and adapts it to his vision of nationalist revolution. He speaks of a nation within the nation: A downtrodden mass who has been dispossessed by managerial capitalism and its cosmopolitan ideologies. To the extent this speaks to a reality, you can understand it like this: there are in America, away from the coasts, many who have experienced what we are trained to see as American power and might as actually a decline in American status, a net loss for America. Trump speaks directly to this impression, and I think he genuinely shares it. So yeah, we can blow up anything in the world, we have vast financial resources, but we’ve gutted the center of the country, replaced its people and its values. For them, the high-water mark of American power was already deep in a period of decline.

Critics of the fascism thesis often point out that the fascist powers were secondary imperial powers who wanted to make a bid for preeminence against Anglo-American dominance, and as such, the analogy doesn’t really work with the global hegemon America. But for the constituents of Trumpism and MAGA, we are a declining power and need to reassert ourselves, both domestically and internationally. And you can easily see how compatible this notion of globalist cosmopolitan domination is with antisemitism. But here I’m gonna go out on a limb, but bear with me. In a way, the revolution that they envisioned and have carried out, albeit incompletely, is analogous to the Islamic Revolution in Iran.

I refer here to the work of the great historian of the Islamic Revolution, Ervand Abrahamian. Abrahamian’s great insight about Khomeinism — developed most fully in his 1993 book Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic — is that it cannot be understood as a form of traditional Islamic conservatism or “fundamentalism.” It is instead a species of Third World populism, structured around the same issues that produced Peronism, Nasserism, and other mid-twentieth-century movements of the postcolonial periphery. The division of the world into oppressors and the oppressed, the mustazafin against the mustakbirin, is not primarily theological. It is Manichean populism in Islamic dress — drawing as much, Abrahamian argues, from Marxist anti-imperialism as from Shia theology.

You might even say Sam Francis is to the MAGA revolution what Ali Shariati was to the Islamic Revolution, someone who used a quasi-Marxist framework to herald a reactionary, national revolution.

Abrahamian gives, I think, a very fine definition of populism that applies just as well to Trumpism and Khomeinism:

By populism I mean a movement of the propertied middle class that mobilizes the lower classes, especially the urban poor, with radical rhetoric directed against imperialism, foreign capitalism, and the political establishment. In mobilizing the “common people,” populist movements use charismatic figures and symbols, imagery, and language that have potent value in the mass culture. Populist movements promise to drastically raise the standard of living and make the country fully independent of outside powers. Even more important, in attacking the status quo with radical rhetoric, they intentionally stop short of threatening the petty bourgeoisie and the whole principle of private property. Populist movements, thus, inevitably emphasize the importance, not of economic-social revolution, but of cultural, national, and political reconstruction.

Now you have to make a few changes in the American case, because it’s not the urban poor, it’s the white working class etc. but it applies quite well I think. And Trump is the ultimate representative of a big petit bourgeois, a family business owner, a great little man, as Lowenthal and Guterman wrote in their book on American agitators.

Both movements emerge from a sense of profound national humiliation at the hands of cosmopolitan, modernizing, globally connected elites who are experienced as agents of foreign domination. In Iran, that elite is the Pahlavi court and its American patrons — secular, Westernized, contemptuous of traditional culture, enriched by connections to global capital, while the urban poor and the provincial faithful are left behind. In America, the paleocon and Trumpist worldview is remarkably isomorphic: a coastal, credentialed, globally connected elite experienced as contemptuous of heartland culture, enriched by free trade and financialization, operating as agents of a globalist project that has de-industrialized American communities and replaced their culture with cosmopolitan liberalism.

In both cases, the humiliation is simultaneously economic, cultural, and civilizational — and in both cases it generates a politics of resentment that is anti-establishment, anti-cosmopolitan, and intensely focused on the recovery of national dignity. Francis’s Middle American Radicals are, in this comparative light, a remarkably precise analogue to Khomeini’s mostazafin — the dispossessed majority who feel themselves humiliated by a corrupt and alien elite.

The Iranian Revolution and the American New Right are not just structurally parallel: they are also historically entangled. The hostage crisis is the moment where these two populisms, each built on a rhetoric of humiliation and restoration, collide directly. Iran’s revolutionary populism tries to reassert its dignity against the Great Satan. America’s nascent right-wing populism receives that assertion as the ultimate confirmation of its own narrative — liberalism means weakness, the cosmopolitan elite has allowed America to be humiliated, and only a restoration of sovereign national will can recover American dignity.

So, they are, in a sense, mirror images of each other. Each was formed around a wound that the other inflicted, or is imagined to have inflicted. Each offering its constituency a politics of restoration and dignity against a corrupt and cosmopolitan elite. Each, at its worst, is capable of tremendous violence in the name of that restoration. And now, nearly half a century later, that mirroring has produced an actual war — two populisms, each built on humiliation and grievance, finally meeting in direct violent confrontation, with the cosmopolitan liberal internationalist order that both despised now able to do nothing but watch. Of course, Trump is not a Khomeini or Khamenei, and that will turn out to be the decisive difference. The MAGA revolution, as this war has emphasized to some, is a bit of a mirage.

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When the Clock Broke is now out in paperback and available wherever books are sold. If you live in the United Kingdom, it’s also available there. The UK edition is also apparently available all over the world, too! I’ve received reports now of book sightings in places as far as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Christchurch, New Zealand. It seems relatively easy to find in Commonwealth countries and at English-language bookstores abroad.

I also do a film podcast with Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times. On our Patreon, we have a lot of bonus content, including a weekly politics discussion.

There are just a few (free) tickets left for my lecture this coming Thursday, March 26th, at King’s College London. Today’s newsletter may be a little abbreviated because I’m working on my talk.

From a few weeks ago, Natasha Stagg on the banality of Jeffrey Epstein’s type of evil.

Beyond luxury purchases, big trades, political sway, and a massive underground ring of women, Epstein sought close relationships with linguists, gurus, scientists, political advisors, movie directors—the people considered, at the time, responsible for shaping our culture. He had a yen, it seems, for finding out what was missing from their lives so that he could offer it to them, using that exposed vulnerability to place them on his big ugly chess board. There is more speculation than ever about to what end this game was being played; the Files we can see have provided more dead ends than answers.

Sifting through the neutered notes, judging the tacky art and furniture in flash photography taken of Epstein’s homes by detectives, matching the names on sycophantic appeals to emeritus professor titles, fashion model agency heads, government officials, the co-founder of Microsoft for crying out loud, that grinding circus ballad “Is That All There Is?” plays in my head.

The version sung by Peggy Lee was famously named by Donald Trump as “a great song” in a 2014 interview conducted by biographer Michael D’Antonio, on the subject of how unfulfilling fame is. The lyrics, on the other hand, describe someone experiencing what she understood to be the height of intensity—a childhood home burning to the ground, the Greatest Show on Earth, falling in love, heartbreak—and coming up empty.

I’m sure everyone has the war on their minds and is trying to understand this baffling catastrophe; I found a few discussions on podcasts helpful. In no particular order:

• Stephen Wertheim, of the Quincy Institute, and Robert Malley, who was the lead negotiator on the “Iran deal” during the Obama administration, visited .

• Historian Stephen Kotkin interviewed by Foreign Affairs on the strengths and weaknesses of authoritarian regimes.

• Adam Tooze on the economics of war with Iran.

• Former Bernie Sanders foreign policy advisor Matt Duss on Know Your Enemy.

• Vali Nasr, a former State Department official and author of Iran’s Grand Strategy, whose family fled Iran in the wake of the revolution in 1979, was interviewed by Bloomberg.

You can also read an insightful review of Nasr’s book by Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi in the London Review of Books:

Underlying Nasr’s analysis – though this is not made explicit – is a familiar question in academic work on revolutionary states concerning how, and to what extent, they undergo ‘socialisation’, that is, accept the global interstate system and abandon their universalist ambitions in favour of a more conventional pursuit of national interest. Nasr’s treatment is more subtle than some versions of this argument. At times he advances a largely realist explanation centred on deterrence: by this account, Iran has attempted to offset its military disadvantages by dispersing risk, using missiles, proxy forces and different forms of retaliation, thereby raising the costs of direct military aggression by the United States. It’s an approach with considerable explanatory power, but elsewhere he follows a line more common in Washington, according to which the Islamic Republic is pursuing regional hegemony through its support for proxies. One limitation of this analysis is that it pays insufficient attention to local conditions and degrees of agency within the Axis of Resistance itself. It also obscures important distinctions: some actors are not proxies at all, but are pursuing their own political and ideological projects, while others have relationships with Tehran that are far more contingent and autonomous than is usually acknowledged in Western accounts. It is no secret, for example, that Hamas came into direct conflict with Hizbullah and Tehran during the Syrian civil war, or that the Houthis ignored Iranian advice when they moved to seize Sanaa, Yemen’s capital.

I’ve been meaning to write an extended response to Alana Newhouse’s atrocious Tablet essay, “Zionism for Everyone,” but haven’t found the time. I’ll just say this for now: her sketch of the origins of nationalism sounds like it’s taken, maybe at second or third hand, from Hans Kohn, the great 20th-century historian of European nationalism.

Kohn’s account in The Idea of Nationalism (1944) is that the ancient Hebrews, along with the Greeks who took a different path, were the first people to develop a national consciousness — not based on ethnic kinship, not imperial subjecthood, but a people constituted by covenant, law, and shared historical destiny under a universal God. The prophetic tradition then universalizes this: the particular nation becomes the vessel for a universal ethical message.

Newhouse is repeating a simplified variation of this argument. Jews gave the world the nation-concept; Zionism extends and preserves it, therefore, Zionism is both particular and universal simultaneously. It is a “gift” to the world. It’s Kohn’s first movement almost verbatim.

But what she misses is Kohn’s entire second movement, which is the distinction he draws between Western civic nationalism, which is rational, voluntary, universalist in aspiration, rooted in the Hebrew-Protestant tradition, the nationalism of the French Revolution, and Eastern ethnic nationalism, which is “organic,” blood-and-soil, and the product of German Romanticism. Kohn thought Zionism in practice had reproduced the “Eastern” model.

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Psychoanalysis speaks of “determination by the signifier”: the way people end up inhabiting the picture of them inscribed by others (parents, social institutions, and the like). You become what they say you are. Just so, Trump the war-wary populist has now fully given way to his liberal caricature: venal, erratic, childish, a chaos agent. Ordinary Americans do their best to protect their pocketbooks and 401(k) accounts from his whims; other world leaders increasingly look beyond him in preparing for the unstable international order he will leave behind.

Psychoanalysis also speaks of having your head up your own ass. The obvious retort is that the liberal caricature was not a caricature at all. It’s just the plain facts of the matter that anybody with eyes in their head can see. If you lacked an education or worldliness, maybe, maybe, you could be excused for falling for it. But an adult with a college education and a basic familiarity with the facts of life should have been able to see it coming. The only way you could talk yourself into believing Trump was anything other than a two-bit real estate hustler who elbowed his way onto the world stage was either ambition or delusion. It must be the latter, because the former can hardly be sated by his present employment. Maybe he was hoping to get into the court by playing lackey for JD Vance. For his trouble, Ahmari is now editor of a third-tier magazine. Why, Sohrab, it profits a man nothing to sell his soul for the whole world…but to edit UnHerd? Determination by the signifier, indeed. This is what happens when pretentions and pomposity get the better of the instinct for self-preservation: one becomes a buffoon. So it’s not a case of mental debility at all—again, that would be grossly unfair to the disabled who are innocent of this sin—but of willful self-delusion.

Ahmari is himself a bit of a charlatan who periodically picks up and drops intellectual positions for effect, so you can understand how he’d try out this bullshit, but Christopher Caldwell seems to me like a serious man. But still, he manages to feel disappointed by Trump at this late date and to believe nonsense like this: ‘Contrary to its portrayal in the newspapers, Trumpism was a movement of democratic restoration.” No, it really was not. It was always a con job. He goes on to write:

No one who witnessed Trump’s bravery after being hit with a would-be assassin’s bullet in Pennsylvania in 2024 will doubt he has character. But his virtues are not the ones you need to run a free country. Never has a president so availed himself of the public trust to line his own pockets. Trump welcomed Qatar’s offer of a new presidential airplane intended as a personal gift; he established a personal memecoin into which petitioners for presidential favor could drop multimillion-dollar contributions. We could go on.

Donald Trump? Corrupt? My word! Using the words “virtue” and “character” with a straight face in reference to Trump is patently ridiculous. So is this projection:

Trump has indeed made progress in fixing the deep state. His supporters like to think of him as a rough-hewn, corner-cutting, hard-bargainer of the Andrew Jackson sort, with the fortitude to ignore pleas from special interests.

But there has always been a red line: Americans did not expect Trump’s character flaws to endanger them in the realm of foreign policy. America’s Iran policy has been made over the past year by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Trump’s real-estate crony Steve Witkoff, working in consultation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Both Kushner and Witkoff carry the title “special envoy for peace,” but neither of them has been confirmed by the Senate, as top diplomats and cabinet members must be. Kushner did not even release a financial-disclosure statement. So these two go to the Middle East to discuss with Netanyahu what to do about Iran. Netanyahu lays out Israel’s priorities, which involve, at the very least, disarming Iran. What American priorities are Kushner and Witkoff advancing?

…

Kushner and Witkoff are neither financiers nor diplomats by trade, but real-estate moguls. At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, with President Trump in attendance, the pair unveiled an artist’s rendition of a gigantic, Dubai-esque oceanfront development called “New Gaza,” complete with a timeline for its construction. Of course, ground couldn’t be broken until the property had been purchased by whoever planned to develop it, unless Israel planned to neutralize the place by force of arms in the meantime.

I would bet quite a bit of money that a good deal of Trump’s supporters don’t even know Andrew Jackson is the guy on the twenty. They had no such expectations. They are smarter than Caldwell and Ahmari in a way because they elected Trump because he seemed like an unscrupulous gangster and thought that’s what the country needed. They still do: I’m not sure the war is as unpopular with Trump’s base as Caldwell wishes; they like it because Trump tells them to. That’s because they aren’t hardscrabble Jacksonian democrats chewing on corncob pipes and leaning on their rifles; they are addled boomers who watch Fox News for 12 hours a day. And, I’m sorry: many, many Americans did very much expect Trump’s character flaws to endanger them in the realm of foreign policy. For example, this American. It was extremely easy to see this coming. As I wrote in 2024:

Let’s also consider the consequences of Trump’s foreign policy with respect to Israel and Palestine. Allow me a Trumpian locution: Trump is the worst president we ever had on Palestine. That’s because he basically understands nothing about it and doesn’t really give a shit about it. What opinions he does have are guided by reflexive Islamophobia. And because he doesn’t care that much about it, he defers to people in his circle who actually do, who are either fanatics or amateurs. People like his ambassador to Israel David Friedman, once an attorney for the Trump organization, who has strong ties to the settler movement and organizations opposed to a two state solution. Or the Adelsons, who basically shaped Trump’s entire failed approach to the region. Or, Jared Kushner, his idiot son-in-law whose main qualification in this area is that he happens to be Jewish. (I think this is literally how Trump thinks: “Oh, Jared can do it, he’s Jewish. Oh, get David for it, he talks about Israel a lot. Israel guy. Oh, Sheldon, told me this, Miriam, told me that.”) These people are not diplomats, they are not spies, they are not statesmen, they are some schmucks off the street. That’s exactly who you are voting for when you vote for Trump: Schmucks off the street.

I can claim no particular sagacity in the realm of foreign policy: I was simply paying attention. And so were tens of millions of other Americans. Truly, the only people who could be this dumb are intellectuals. It’s exactly as Arendt observed when she noted how intellectuals in Germany “made up ideas about Hitler…Completely fantastic and interesting and complicated things.” Just relax—I’m not saying Trump is literally Hitler; I’m saying that this is the same failure of judgment Arendt spoke of: it’s the same incapacity to apply the correct concepts to the situation, namely that the person in question is a criminal lunatic.

As has been noted many times, the historical character Trump most resembles is, perhaps, Napoleon III—or, at least, Karl Marx’s caricature of him, as “An old, crafty roué, [who] conceives the historical life of the nations and their performances of state as comedy in the most vulgar sense, as a masquerade in which the grand costumes, words, and postures merely serve to mask the pettiest knavery.” The pettiest knavery. Just please call it—at long last—for what it is.

Here are some of the things we discussed:

• “Entire Team of Oil and Gas Experts Got DOGE’d Before Iran War” by Hafiz Rashid in The New Republic

• “The US-Israeli strategy against Iran is working. Here is why” by Muhanad Seloom in Al Jazeera

• “He Was Chevron’s Man in Venezuela—and a CIA Informant” in The Wall Street Journal

• “What do ‘which is A.I.’ quizzes tell us?” by Max Read

We try to do these chats every two weeks, then make the recording available to our paid subscribers the next day.

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If you’re not yet a paid subscriber but regularly read, enjoy, or share Unpopular Front, please consider signing up. This newsletter is completely reader-supported and represents my primary source of income. And, at 5 dollars a month, it’s less than most things at Starbucks.

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When the Clock Broke is now out in paperback and available wherever books are sold. If you live in the United Kingdom, it’s also available there. The UK edition is also apparently available all over the world, too! I’ve received reports now of book sightings in places as far as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Christchurch, New Zealand. It seems relatively easy to find in Commonwealth countries and at English-language bookstores abroad.

I also do a film podcast with Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times. On our Patreon, we have a lot of bonus content, including a weekly politics discussion.

Reminder: I will be coming to the UK to give a talk at King’s College London on March 26th. There are only a few tickets left, so click here to see the details and reserve a (free) spot!

The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas died yesterday at age 96, fittingly enough, on the same day Karl Marx died. A protege of Theodor Adorno, Habermas was the chief representative of the “second generation” of Frankfurt School critical theorists. While the first generation, like Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse, was formed by the rise of fascism and the Holocaust, Habermas was a creature of the postwar era. It should not be surprising, then, that his philosophy lacks the high gloom of his forebears. (Georg Lukacs once quipped that Adorno and his fellows had taken up residence in “The Grand Hotel Abyss.”)

But it seemed as if Habermas was one of the few philosophers in the continental tradition who still believed in reason. His peers included the “postmoderns” Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, who, in different ways, did not think we had access to capital T-truth and who believed capital R-reason was merely an effect of systems, not itself self-grounding and self-authorizing. Habermas was heir to the grand system builders of German Idealism, Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, but was an eclectic, taking also from American pragmatist thinkers like John Dewey and C.S. Peirce. Although he rejected the radical skepticism—some might say nihilism—that had taken hold of European thought, he was not a reactionary or a conservative; he was modern and democratic, and perhaps the last keeper of the Enlightenment’s flame. In fact, he may have been the most earnest liberal democrat in the whole European tradition. He took seriously the problems raised by the school of suspicion, but he still believed in progress. Modernity, as he once put it in a lecture, was an unfinished project, but one well worth carrying on.

While Kant grounded reason in the universal structure of the individual mind, and Hegel tried to overcome that subjectivism through the self-unfolding of Absolute Spirit, both remained trapped within what Habermas called the “philosophy of the subject” — a framework in which reason is ultimately referred back to a single consciousness confronting the world. Habermas’s move was to relocate reason in communicative practice itself: the validity claims to truth, moral rightness, and sincerity that speakers necessarily raise whenever they make an assertion, legislate a norm, or express themselves. Reason, on this account, is not a timeless metaphysical faculty or a property of any individual mind — it is embedded in the pragmatic structure of language, in the everyday human activity of making claims and holding each other accountable to them. This made for a less arrogant rationalism: rather than legislating from on high, reason was something we were already doing together, and its authority derived not from a Big Metaphysical Being but from the unavoidable presuppositions of genuine dialogue.

That sounds great, but it is little to be found in the present world, where the promise of universal communication seems to be leading to universal unreason, shared madness, and mental debility. If there is rationality to be found, it seems to be the instrumental rationality Habermas critiqued: the calculating treatment of people as mere means, rather than as ends in themselves. I greatly admire Habermas’s project, and I hope to contribute to the democratic public sphere he described, but I must say that I find the intense pessimism of his Frankfurt School predecessors both more bracing and plausible — and I don’t believe that’s for reasons of temperament or taste alone. It’s sad to say, but they seem more of this moment.

He is also not terribly quotable: Habermas also lacks the first generation’s literary panache, so he does not leave behind a legacy of pithy aphorisms. An ungenerous mind might find some cheap irony in the fact that the scholar of the virtue of public speech was not himself much of a wit. He was not Nietzsche, nor did he have any pretensions in that direction. In his commitment to rigor, he may have sacrificed clarity, at least as far as the casual reader is concerned. The book of his I like the most is actually a series of lectures called The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. It’s an attempt to perform his method of “rational reconstruction” on the often recondite thought of the 20th century and contains helpful interpretations and summations of some of the most difficult things ever written. But it begins in the 19th century, with Hegel, the first philosopher to thematize the modern condition and its problems:

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The barrage of clichés from Hegseth’s mouth is astonishing—“Flying over their capital. Death and destruction from the sky all day long. We're playing for keeps. Our warfighters have maximum authorities granted personally by the president and yours truly. Our rules of engagement are bold, precise, and designed to unleash American power, not shackle it. This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they're down, which is exactly how it should be….” Then General Caine (what a name) joins in the fusillade: “Profound sadness and gratitude….wounded warriors…standing shoulder to shoulder…making steady progress…clear-eyed…quiet professionals…call balls and strikes.” Clear-eyed, quiet professionals are making steady progress calling balls and strikes on our wounded warriors, to whom we feel eternal gratitude. We may run out of interceptors, but we are well-stocked with hackneyed phrases. And the munitions may be “precision guided,” but the language is necessarily vague. Too bad they can’t bore the enemy to death.

The images, too, are familiar and shopworn for anyone who can remember as far back as the First Persian Gulf War. The grainy footage of “precision strikes” (another cliché) on “key targets.” The night sky of a Middle Eastern metropolis illuminated with fire and smoke—we’ve all seen Shock and Awe (2002), dir. George W. Bush and Michael Bay—Tomahawks streaking into the sky. The jets screaming off the decks of carriers; The video edits using “the Macarena” or “Fortunate Son,” meant to recall Forrest Gump, itself already a pastiche of Vietnam movies. I’m sure something is reassuring about it all to a Fox viewer approaching senescence. But also for the young who have processed everything through video games. They’ve seen this movie before. (That’s another one, in case you didn’t notice.) It’s a kind of medley of America’s wars; the themes come and go: oil crisis…Iran…Kuwait…boots on the ground…Patriot missiles…Scuds. Even the sinking of an apparently unarmed Iranian warship by a submarine was a callback: Hegseth reminded us it was the first time a US sub had sunk an enemy vessel with a torpedo since WWII. It had no strategic or tactical purpose; it was just meant to generate an image: a ship going down viewed through the crosshairs of a periscope. Something out of Run Silent Run Deep, watched on a Sunday afternoon. Or the Victory at Sea doc, not for nothing, a movie that Trump obsesses over. Of course, “unrestricted submarine warfare” and abandoning survivors at sea recalls a coldhearted U-Boat skipper more than Clark Gable, but no matter.

In the past, propaganda served the purposes of war; now war serves the purposes of propaganda. But the blood remains real.

A.I. will supposedly give us fully automated wars in the future, but it’s here, right now. There’s a blind automatism to this war; It’s a war without thought or deliberation, public or private. It’s war as autocomplete. Of course, we were gonna “do” Iran. It was just what was next. Another barrage of clichés: “American blood on their hands…theocratic lunatics…the mullahs…We’ve been at war with Iran for 47 years.” The last one is particularly Orwellian: We’ve always been at war with West Asia.

In “Politics and the English language,” Orwell wrote, “[The] invasion of one’s mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one’s brain.” In 1946, he still felt that it was a reversible process: “Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.” But now the entire productive energy of our society is being fed into the cliché-generation machine, so prospects today seem rather more grim. The writer who saw this coming was Kierkegaard, in his essay “The Present Age:”

…[E]ventually human speech will become just like the public: pure abstraction-there will no longer be someone who speaks, but an objective reflection will gradually deposit a kind of atmosphere, an abstract noise that will render human speech superfluous, just as machines make workers superfluous. In Germany there are even handbooks for lovers; so it probably will end with lovers being able to sit and speak anonymously to each other. There are handbooks on everything, and generally speaking education soon will consist of knowing letter-perfect a larger or smaller compendium of observations from such handbooks, and one will excel in proportion to his skill in pulling out the particular one, just as the typesetter picks out letters.

An abstract noise. A kind of unbearable din of half-thought and non-thought. That’s our world.

Here’s an article about it from Al Jazeera by Omid Safi, the Director of the Islamic Studies Center. Like Safi, I think they are often good and even beautiful poems, but I also think it’s charlatanism to pass one’s work off as that of a world-historical figure. Not to mention being extremely corny. It’s as if you decided that your poems were really Milton or Shakespeare or Goethe.

This is doubly embarrassing for me because I ought to have known better: I grew up with Hafiz in the house. My parents’ syncretic spiritual beliefs included Sufi mysticism, and the poet was regarded in our household as a saint. We had several volumes of his works in a few different translations, including the almost word-for-word early 1891 Wilberforce-Clark version of the Divān. But I grew up under the impression that Ladinsky was just another translation, albeit a somewhat controversial one. I didn’t know that he couldn’t read the language at all! The fact that Ladinsky’s poems are not numbered like the ghazals in the Divān should’ve been a big clue. In any case, I regret the error.

Here is a real poem from Hafiz, selected at random in the manner of divination that uses the Divān, from the 1897 Gertrude Bell translation:

VI

A FLOWER-TINTED cheek, the flowery close Of the fair earth, these are enough for me— Enough that in the meadow wanes and grows The shadow of a graceful cypress-tree. I am no lover of hypocrisy;

Of all the treasures that the earth can boast, A brimming cup of wine I prize the most This is enough for me!

To them that here renowned for virtue live, A heavenly palace is the meet reward ; To me, the drunkard and the beggar, give The temple of the grape with red wine stored ! Beside a river seat thee on the sward ; It floweth past-so flows thy life away, So sweetly, swiftly, fleets our little day Swift, but enough for me !

Look upon all the gold in the world's mart, On all the tears the world hath shed in vain; Shall they not satisfy thy craving heart? I have enough of loss, enough of gain; I have my Love, what more can I obtain? Mine is the joy of her companionship Whose healing lip is laid upon my lip This is enough for me!

I pray thee send not forth my naked soul From its poor house to seek for Paradise; Though heaven and earth before me God unroll, Back to thy village still my spirit flies. And, Hafiz, at the door of Kismet lies No just complaint--a mind like water clear, A song that swells and dies upon the ear, These are enough for thee!

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When the Clock Broke is now out in paperback and available wherever books are sold. If you live in the United Kingdom, it’s also available there. The UK edition is also apparently available all over the world, too! I’ve received reports now of book sightings in places as far as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Christchurch, New Zealand. It seems relatively easy to find in Commonwealth countries and at English-language bookstores abroad.

I also do a film podcast with Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times. On our Patreon, we have a lot of bonus content, including a weekly politics discussion.

Reminder: I will be coming to the UK to give a talk at King’s College London on March 26th! I’m given to understand that the space is filling up fast, so click here to see the details and reserve a (free) spot.

All my reading this week is about Iran.

First, from that nation’s—and perhaps the world’s—greatest poet, Hafiz, on a very different kind of war.

“You Were Brave in That Holy War”

You have done well
In the contest of madness.

You were brave in that holy war

You have all the honorable wounds
Of one who has tried to find love
Where the Beautiful Bird
Does not drink

May I speak to you
Like we are close
And locked away together?

Once I found a stray kitten
And I used to soak my fingers
In warm milk;

It came to think I was five mothers
On one hand.
Wayfarer,
Why not rest your tired body?
Lean back and close your eyes.

Come morning
I will kneel by your side and feed you.
I will so gently
Spread open your mouth
And let you taste something of my
Sacred mind and life

Surely
There is something wrong
With your ideas of
God

O, surely there is something wrong
With your ideas of
God

If you think
Our Beloved would not be so
Tender

Interpreted by Daniel Ladinsky.

In The New Left Review, an interview with historian Ervand Abrahamian from a couple of weeks before the war began:

To return to the question of sanctions: what effect has this external economic coercion had on the Islamic Republic’s support base?

The sanctions have devastated the salaried middle class, especially in the past five years. People working in the public-sector administration, who would normally be broadly supportive of the regime, have been economically decimated. The poorer classes have been reduced almost to starvation-level poverty. The sanctions probably worsened the impact of the pandemic, which helped to reveal the problems; they meant that Iran couldn’t get medical help from Europe, and some of its vaccines were probably not as good as Western ones. But so far, unlike in 1978–79, there haven’t been public-sector strikes among civil servants, protesting against the regime. Whether that will come, I’m not sure, but there must be a lot of economic resentment.

The regime still has real roots in society, though its base is smaller now. This is essentially a petit-bourgeois or lower-middle-class regime and that class element is still strong, including in the rural sector. However unpopular the regime may be in general, it still has the support of that significant layer, strongly represented in the Revolutionary Guards. Many of the religious ideologues, those willing to kill, come from lower-middle-class families. As long as that social base exists, I think the regime is fairly secure. It won’t flinch from bloodshed. It will fight tooth and nail to survive. The devastating economic situation and escalating geopolitical tensions have intertwined with the hardening outlook of the regime, its foreclosing of any parliamentary-reform option, its garrison-state mentality, in ways that are very difficult to untangle. There’s a Persian term: one of us, or not one of us. That ‘us’ has become narrower and narrower, the result of thirty years of salami-slicing; the only people who can be trusted are regime insiders. It’s a classic no-way-out.

….

How should the current round of negotiations with the Americans be understood?

Here again, the American position doesn’t make sense. As Khamenei says, you give them one demand, they ask for another. So, what’s the bottom line? They said the missiles were a major threat. But during the Twelve-Day War, only 5 per cent of missiles got through and Israel will be better prepared now. So how important are missiles? Are they just a way of forcing Iran to submit? Again, the so-called proxies were supposed to pose a threat to the whole Middle East. But Hezbollah has been pretty much dismantled. The much smaller militias in Iraq have been silent. So why focus on them? That’s why, when these demands are made, one wonders what else Israel wants.

Trump has spoken openly about regime change—a euphemism for coup d’état, though that term is now out of fashion. But it still means some armed force, usually a section of the military, seizing power. The trouble with the Iranian situation is that the military is thoroughly penetrated by the irgc, which is more extreme than the clerics. The Americans and Israelis may think that somehow someone from inside will take over, but that person will almost certainly turn out to be a Revolutionary Guard. They must know, too, that the Pahlavis are not going to be returned unless there are American boots on the ground. That’s why I keep thinking that, if you put yourself in the shoes of Netanyahu or Trump, logically, knowing there can’t really be a regime change, they must be thinking of doing what was done to Iraq, Syria and Libya—breaking up the state.

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Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Mere anarchy. There is no effort to legally codify or even rationally justify this lurch into war. They will not even do the American people the courtesy of lying to them. It just doesn’t matter to them. Trump’s strategy, if you can call it that, is vague and amorphous. Essentially, “Maybe this will happen, maybe that will happen.” We have no idea what will happen, and neither does Trump. Here’s him talking to the New York Times:

The president offered a variety of often inconsistent visions of how a new government could take shape after the targeted killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who ruled the country for more than three decades until he was killed by an airstrike on Saturday.

When pressed on his plans for a transition of power, Mr. Trump said he hoped Iran’s elite military forces — including hardened officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps who have held substantial influence and profited from the existing regime — would simply turn over their weapons to the Iranian populace.

“They would really surrender to the people, if you think about it,” he said.

“If you think about it:” That’s someone riffing. He may have come up with that scenario on the spot. Already, some of his “plans” have come to naught. The pace of Israeli and American assassinations has eliminated some of Trump’s favored candidates to run the country. He told ABC News, “The attack was so successful it knocked out most of the candidates. It's not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead." It sounds like he’s still doing The Apprentice. Netanyahu may have some grandiose plan for the future of the world, but for Trump, as always, this is about television images.

The domestic context for this war is clear. In almost every respect, this is a failed administration. Its trade policy is in tatters. Its authoritarian push on immigration faces resistance and public rejection. Because of years of bad practice and ignoring the Constitution and the laws, the President’s hand is freest in foreign policy and war. The irony is that this administration, which was supposed to be a populist broom and new beginning, has been taken over by one of the hoariest DC lobbies, “the bomb Iran,” crowd. As Trump used to look for depressed properties to scavenge, now the neocons inhabit the decaying hulk of Trumpism.

In November 2024, I wrote about what the “fascism thesis” would predict; Here was one point: “An aggressive, jingoistic war to cover up a domestic failure. Trump’s supposed dovishness may come into play, but there are a lot of ‘neocons‘ in that administration already: if we intervene in Mexico to go after cartels, say, or pick a fight with Iran, I think fascism is back on the menu.” This broadly fits the pattern of fascist wars. The Italian antifascist exile Gaetano Salvemini wrote of Il Duce’s Ethiopian gambit: “The war was willed primarily by Mussolini…because something had to be done to restore the prestige of the Fascist regime in Italy…[which had] steadily declined during the six years of world depression…The Ethiopian war was the way out of domestic stagnation.”

Like Mussolini or Hitler with their foreign adventures, Trump and his gang seem to want to redeem in one fell swoop all of America’s frustrated and failed imperial projects: Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran. But those 20th-century wars were meant to mobilize the restive populations and get their support for the regime. There is no effort at all here to mobilize the American population or win their consent; No concern with public apathy or opposition to war after years of disastrous efforts. The understandable worry is that a regime such as this one would use war to justify repression at home. But is that even possible when they don’t make the faintest attempt to gin up a froth of warlike sentiment in the public? Trump cannot even be bothered to sing paens to the fallen dead. His rhetoric is always deflationary and bathetic. So far, his attitude has been “shit happens.”

Public support aside, it’s unclear if the war is even materially sustainable. The Wall Street Journal reports that the U.S. is racing to “destroy Iran’s missile and drone force before it runs out of interceptors to fend off Tehran’s retaliation.” The Washington Post reports, “Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, expressed his concerns at a White House meeting last week with Trump and his top aides, these people said, cautioning that any major operation against Iran will face challenges because the U.S. munitions stockpile has been significantly depleted by Washington’s ongoing defense of Israel and support for Ukraine. Caine’s remarks at the White House meeting have not been previously reported.” Another Post report in the wake of the killing of 3 American servicemen by Iranian missiles:

Inside the Pentagon, and among some members of the Trump administration, there was deepening concern Sunday that the Iran conflict could spiral out of control, said people familiar with the situation.

“The mood here is intense and paranoid,” one person said.

There is anxiety among senior leaders that the fighting will extend for weeks, further stressing limited U.S. air defense stockpiles, people familiar with the situation said.

“There is concern about this lasting more than a few days,” said another person. “I don’t think people have fully absorbed yet, like, what that has done with stockpiles,” they added, noting that it often takes two or three air defense interceptors to ensure that an incoming missile is stopped.

Back-of-the-napkin math suggests that the interceptors will be depleted in a matter of days, and the US and Israel would need to sustain a tempo of about 1000 strikes a day to degrade Iran’s ballistic missiles to the point where they would not simply overwhelm defenses.

On a personal note, I manage to stay angry at much this gang does to wreck our country and the world, but I confess to feeling almost a sense of numb resignation. It’s all so senseless and ill-conceived. We have teetered so long at the edge of an abyss that looking into it is longer so vertiginous. Or maybe it is just hard to tell up from down anymore.