If you regularly read, enjoy, or share Unpopular Front, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. This newsletter is entirely reader-supported and is my primary source of income. Your $5 a month makes it possible for me to keep writing independently.

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My book, When the Clock Broke, is out in paperback in the US and UK, with copies turning up as far afield as Kuala Lumpur and Christchurch.

I also co-host the film podcast Unclear and Present Danger with Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times. Our Patreon features bonus episodes and a weekly politics discussion.

As I mentioned in an email to free subscribers this week, I’m going to be raising the price of this newsletter to $7 a month and $70 a year starting November 15. It’s been $5 since I started in early 2021, and as you may be aware, we have had quite a bit of inflation since then. I’m sorry to contribute to it, but it must be done. But there’s good news: if you subscribe now, you’ll be grandfathered in at the old rates. Nota bene for paid subscribers: As long as you don’t let your subscription lapse, you will pay $5 (or $55 for an annual subscription) in perpetuity. Also, as long as you remain subscribed, you will never get old, you will never die, and everyone will always love you—You have my personal guarantee.

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Now I’m gonna do some base self-promotion, which I find deeply shameful, and I’m very sorry for.

This newsletter is a pretty good value, if I do say so myself. I think the analysis I’ve provided over the past couple of years of Trump has been pretty solid! Who else called the Iran war in November 2024? Not too many people! Who else predicted the emergence of the tech right in 2022? Who else analyzed and dismissed “the vibe shift” back then, too? Who originally coined the term “groyperfication?” If you want to remain on the cutting edge of political and social commentary, this is the place to go. You read about here what you’ll be reading about in The New Yorker and The New York Times two years from now. I’m kinda kidding, but it’s also sorta true!

Everyone is still processing the terrific victory of the Democrats on Tuesday. I hope to write about it more in the coming week, but I especially liked the commentary of political scientist Daniel Schlozman, interviewed in n+1:

MK: Speaking of the ongoing conversation around progressives versus Atlantic-pilled moderates, there’s some discussion online happening about underperformance. Can you explain it to me?

DS: I have thoughts, but you need to ask me a question.

MK: Could you just give me your thoughts?

DS: No.

MK: Hm, OK. I mean, I don’t think this is world-historically important discourse that we need to spend a lot of time on, but I’ve seen commentators, by which I mean Matt Yglesias, lay out this shifting story about how Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan wasn’t actually that impressive because the margins were worse than, say, Jon Ossoff’s in Georgia or Roy Cooper’s in North Carolina. That line of thought has a thin, tautological quality I find sort of puzzling. [Here, here! —JG]

DS: In February 2020, E. J. Dionne published a book that mostly went unnoticed—because it was February 2020—called Code Red: How Progressives and Moderates Can Unite to Save Our Country. The thesis was that progressives and moderates are not only stuck together in the Democratic Party, inside a two-party system that isn’t going anywhere, but also that each bloc has qualities the other doesn’t and can’t have. Moderates have a special sauce when it comes to winning races in places that are hard to win. Progressives have a special sauce in that they have a long-term vision of where they want to take the country, and in identifying and instantiating core values—real core values, not the fake, TED Talk kind.

Code Red was sort of an instabook, but for all that there’s wisdom to this observation. In social science terms, there’s an internal validity question about underperformance: what is it, and then an external validity question, which is what does it explain? Which is related to questions about the benefits of moderation, however we’re defining moderation. Underperformance in comparison to what? What do you control for in your model? If you can raise more money, is that internal to the model? If your opponents are attacking you really, really loudly, is that internal to the model? There are some modest benefits to electoral moderation, I think that’s correct, but what then do you make of those benefits? That’s the external validity question. Once you’ve run your statistical model—and some of the statistics around underperformance seem to me more and less dodgy—what does that mean? Eventually the meaning of cross-sectional over- and underperformance on a given ballot looks much less clear than the people touting it would claim.

This gets at the political positivism (I’m really struggling with coming up with a good term for this; I’ve called it “abstract empiricism,” “logical pop-tivism,” “technocratic positivism,” “quantitative myopia”—maybe I should try something catchier like “number trash”) that’s been bugging me for a while, and I’ve written about it quite a bit. It’s very difficult to abstract from the actual circumstances of the races and then generate these metrics like “overperformance.” You’re left with bullshit that looks and sounds objective and scientific, which can become a huge problem both practically and also more broadly impoverish our intellectual culture as well. This is not about “moderation” per se—I have no problem with a candidate modulating their message to their audience; I just don’t think you can advise politicians well with this kind of nonsense, and a ton of donor money flows into it. Obviously, they should send their money to humanistically informed newsletter writers instead. More to come on this front soon.

Speaking of the humanities and the social sciences, I found a somewhat strange collection of essays in honor of Herbert Marcuse called The Critical Spirit at a very strange used bookstore in Upstate New York. One of the essays, by historian Peter Gay, is on the work of the Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer, whom I’ve talked about a little bit here before. His description of Cassirer’s concept of history appealed to me and clarified very nicely what I love about my vocation:

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I thought of Isaiah Berlin’s recollection of what Roosevelt had meant to him in the darkness of the 1930s.:

…the only light in the darkness that was left was the administration of Mr. Roosevelt and the New Deal in the United States. At a time of weakness and mounting despair in the democratic world, Mr. Roosevelt radiated confidence and strength. He was the leader of the demo­cratic world, and even to-day, upon him alone, of all the states­men of the thirties, no cloud rested neither on him nor on the New Deal, which to European eyes still looks a bright chapter in the history of mankind.

Melancholy airs will not do for a guest in the Roosevelt home. Lincoln was our great melancholic, the product of the century of romanticism and all its morbid preoccupations; FDR, for all his suffering and struggles, beamed. He was the spirit of modernity, not as alienation and existentialist angst, but as progress. (As an aside, it is interesting to think of Donald Trump as anti-FDR, the spoiled scion without class or taste, corrupt and greedy rather than filled with noblesse oblige, and Vance as anti-Lincoln, the man from modest roots filled with small envies and resentments rather than magnanimous wisdom. Men with the ambition of their historical parallels but without the virtue.) But I wasn’t thinking of any of that when I drove away from Hyde Park. I was very simply happy—carefree—and looking forward to visiting another great American institution just up the road: a diner.

Then the next day: the thunderclap. FDR’s America seems back from the dead. People are arguing already whether or not Americans really rejected the ugliness and hate of Trumpism or just the economic disappointment and disarray. I think they are inextricable to some degree, both products of the same disorder. Most Americans said they were voting against corruption, which has a literal, legal meaning but also a broader moral meaning that combines both economic unfairness and tyrannical abuse of power.

I always believed that an effective antidote to Trump would have to include both a case for democracy and a reconstruction of its promise for ordinary people. All the great successes of anti-fascist mass politics—from the New Deal to the Popular Front in France—combined a program of material improvement for working people with a defense of the democratic republic. The coalition to make that possible, that popular front, took a much longer time to cohere in the United States than I had hoped. Part of it was just fortune: it took time for the right combination of economic grievance and political outrage to come together, But again, much of what we are experiencing is the full fruit of Trumpian authoritarianism. Its economic failures are not separate from its political abuses: they are the consequences of it. Fascist politics always involves some volatile combination of the leader's personal vainglory and caprice, his followers' ideological fanaticisms, and his fellow travelers’ venal grasping. Hubris, fanaticism, and avarice for a moment seem to pull in one direction, giving the false impression of overwhelming power, but these cronies will always fall out sooner or later. The resulting disorder is not an unfortunate deviation from the original program as the “sensible” Trumpists now want to say: it is intrinsic to the regime. Fascism is inherently an incoherent response to genuine social problems. It can’t resolve the crises that bring it to power because its entire political imagination is organized around a systematic misapprehension of their causes; It can only project those contradictions onto imaginary enemies, and in the process deepen the discontents it promised to conquer.

The word that kept occurring to me yesterday was nemesis. Today, we use it to mean something like a personal arch-enemy, but the significance in ancient Greek is much deeper. Nemesis was the goddess that restored balance. Her name comes from the word nemein, to give what is due. Nemesis inflicts divine retribution on hubris, arrogance. Hubris often gives rise to its own nemesis: the belief in one’s own invincibility, the lack of recognition that one’s success is the product of good fortune, sows the seeds for one’s own downfall. One can see nemesis all over the Republican defeat. They confused a narrow electoral victory with an irrevocable popular mandate, their temporary and in many ways accidental possession of power with a permanent transformation of American society. In their overweening pride they sought to humiliate and punish their opponents. And in their arrogance, they forgot the source of their power: the people’s will, who had given it to them and could just as easily take it away. Their belief in their own omnipotence ultimately rendered them blind and then powerless.

But in Greek ethics, nemesis is also a disposition, a feeling of offended justice. It is what one feels when one sees the undeserved good fortune of others. Aristotle differentiated it from envy in that it is righteous indignation over the success of the unworthy rather than bitterness over the just success of the worthy. It’s an ethical emotion, a desire to see balance restore and the goddess Nemesis’s work done. There’s going to be a lot of discussion on how we are to handle the gross criminality of this regime. If they were guided by hubris, arrogant pleasure in domination for its own sake, let us be instead guided by nemesis: a desire to restore justice, balance, and order.

Almost exactly two years ago, I wrote a piece called “Testing the Fascism Thesis” with the subtitle “Keeping Myself Honest.” In it, I attempted to make the case that the fascism analogy wasn’t merely a piece of alarmist rhetoric but actually was a useful tool to assess the Trump movement and regime, and it even had some predictive power. I likened it to a “research programme” as described by the philosopher of science Imre Lakatos. In his theory, a “degenerating research programme” merely explains retroactively and alters its hypotheses to accommodate an emerging reality, but a “progressive research programme” will actually predict novel phenomena. I believed that the fascism research programme, as it were, had already proved itself to be progressive: believers that Trumpism had a lot in common with historic fascism predicted that something like January 6th would happen; doubters mocked this as mere hysteria. The fact that it didn’t work is immaterial, a little like saying that a diagnosis of cancer is false because the patient didn’t die. Of course, there are many different types and severities of cancer.

Back in November 2024, I hazarded 12 predictions of what a Trump regime might do if one understood it to be fascist or fascioid. I’d not invoke the philosophy of science today. I’ve become much more interested in what the Aristotelian tradition has to tell us about politics. For Aristotle, a historical analogy is part of a body of practical wisdom. It helps us judge a particular situation and deliberate on how to respond. Reasoning about real political events always deals with what’s merely probable: we can’t demonstrate our propositions with scientific certainty; we must always judge and therefore approximate, but we can do so with greater or lesser accuracy and revise our judgments based on the evidence. I’d probably say that the fascism analogy is an instance of what Aristotle called a paradeigma—the origin of our term “paradigm”—or reasoning by example, where we use a historical case to illuminate a yet-unknown present one, proceeding from part to part, or “like to like.” In the Rhetoric, there’s a very apt example: Dionysius of Syracuse requested bodyguards; therefore it was reasonable to argue that he was planning a tyranny, since Peseistratus and Theaganes of Megara did the same before they installed their own tyrannies. In like manner, if Trump or his cronies are doing something that Mussolini or Hitler did, it might be reasonable to suspect they have similar designs. Fascism is just one analogy, one paradigm of political judgment, but it’s not the only one, nor even necessarily the best one, especially if applied in isolation or in a dogmatic and blinkered way. But I still insist it does supply something valuable to our understanding, especially if properly qualified and combined with other examples and experiences.

Anyway, all that theoretical throat clearing is sort of neither here nor there. The initial exercise stands, and right before the midterms, I’d like to go through the list and see what has come true and what hasn’t.

The use of state-tolerated or encouraged mobs, either organized into paramilitaries or quasi-organized, to physically intimidate, maim, or kill political enemies and even unreliable allies. This is a big one and arguably already has come true. If this is a regular part of the politics of the next few years, I think the fascism thesis is in pretty good shape.

It came true on January 6th, but then it really didn’t develop. Paramilitaries and street fighters are not really a part of the political practice of Trumpism 2.0. The Proud Boys are not out there cracking skulls; The militias are not roving the streets of American cities. Researcher Dan Trombly, who wrote a guest post on political violence for this newsletter, called this a “failure to become fascist”: “the rise and decline of streetfighters as symptomatic of their failure to generate a dynamic fascist force within the MAGA movement.” I think this is very well-observed: there has been a marked sense of disappointment and failure of the most fascist elements within MAGA among the extreme right.

The use of mobs/paramilitaries as deputies to general state repression of dissent. This also would be a big red flag, but I have less confidence in this coming true. I think the cops will be enough.

Similar to the above. There are, however, two things to consider: First, there have been quite a bit of death threats and harassment directed at those who obstruct the administration—particularly judges and their families—suggesting that decentralized intimidation can do some of the same work as an organized mob. Second, the administration’s use of ICE against political speech and protest is a clear effort to turn a federal agency into a political police force.

Suspending elections or using violence, particularly assisted by paramilitaries or mobs, to disrupt elections. I don’t really see elections being in serious danger—at least, at first.

Well, we’ll see tonight, I guess, but I really don’t see the attempts to subvert the midterms being successful or even significant. I predict a pretty normal election. With that being said, they are trying to do something, and their apparent inability to pull it off tells us more about the limits of their power than the limits of their ambitions.

The use of the state security apparatus on domestic political rivals. This one needs no explanation.

Confirmed, but with significant failures. Comey and James are the obvious examples, but this goes well beyond Trump settling personal scores. The NSPM-7 memorandum gives the hunt for domestic enemies a bureaucratic framework, complete with investigations into political organizations and their supposed paymasters. The Justice Department placed the prosecution of 15 people associated with Direct Action Minnesota under this umbrella. Officials also called the Prairieland terrorism convictions an opening victory in their war on “antifa.” Prosecuting someone for shooting a police officer is one thing; treating the incident as a warrant to go hunting the left and its “funding networks” is another.

The use of federal troops and officers for mass deportations; the creation of a system of detention camps for the same purpose.

Yes, but again with some big failures and retreats along the way. Federal officers, military deportation flights, detention camps on military bases: all of these have happened. Add the wanton cruelty of third-country deportations, shipping people to countries where they have no ties, and the delivery of Venezuelans to El Salvador’s CECOT prison, where Human Rights Watch and Cristosal documented systematic torture. But the most grandiose plans have not survived contact with reality: the projected 30,000-person operation at Guantánamo was scaled back, and the much-hyped “Alligator Alcatraz” abandoned after less than a year. Surging arrests have run up against legal and logistical limits on deportations. But falling short of the administration’s ambitions is cold comfort to the people caught in the machinery.

The purging of “old regime” military officials and bureaucrats and replacement with new regime loyalists.

Confirmed, with pronounced racial, gender, and ideological dimensions. The purge of supposedly “woke” military leadership includes Joint Chiefs chairman General C. Q. Brown, who is black, and Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead the Navy. The campaign against “DEI” supplied an ideological rationale for removals, and civil-service applicants were asked how they would advance Trump’s policies. There are clear limits, though: a federal judge blocked that hiring question, and removing established officials does not automatically produce a reliably obedient replacement. Every vacancy, firing, or workforce reduction can’t be counted as a successful installation of an apparatchik. The purge is happening, but total institutional submission is another matter.

The use of extreme, dehumanizing rhetoric against regime opponents. Again, something already arguably fulfilled.

Confirmed. An easy one: The “enemies of the people” and “vermin” language, as well as the lie about Haitians eating pets, were already on the record when I wrote this. Trump has since called Somali-Americans and Ilhan Omar “garbage” and demanded that Omar, an American citizen and member of Congress, be thrown out of the country. This fusion of the categories of political opponent and racial enemy is definitively fascist.

A “state of emergency:” a suspension of civil liberties in the case of civil unrest or a terrorist attack. Invocation of Insurrection Act, troops on the streets of American cities. This is the “Reichstag fire” scenario. I think this would just simply prove the thesis, but not actually among my biggest fears.

Not fulfilled. Troops did appear on American streets, but the general suspension of civil liberties didn’t follow. The attempt to turn Charlie Kirk’s assassination into a pretext for a crackdown fizzled as the decisive emergency “Reichstag” moment, although it left behind NSPM-7 and the campaign against “antifa” discussed above.

The use of questionable constitutional “hardball” to ram through executive actions and circumvention of the separation of powers, i.e. proroguing Congress and doing recess appointments of cabinet members. These are sort of yellow flags: this is strongman behavior, and concerning, but sort of generally authoritarian than necessarily fascist.

Confirmed in substance, although the administration found other routes than the ones I guessed at. The freeze of congressionally appropriated funds and the efforts to keep favored prosecutors in office through disputed appointment maneuvers both qualify, I think. Congress was not prorogued, and recess appointments didn’t become the means of installing the cabinet.

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.

Check, but it hasn’t been in any way effective in covering up failure or rallying the public to the regime. I still think the most plausible explanation is that Trump’s failure to deliver on the domestic program encouraged a turn abroad, where the administration could demonstrate unlimited power and recover a sense of momentum. Instead, they were met with a quagmire. There’s a clear parallel with Mussolini’s attempt to reinvigorate his regime through imperial adventure, particularly the invasion of Ethiopia after the stagnation of the Depression years. Foreign conquest was used to make the feeling of national regeneration tangible. In Trump’s case, however, the supposed way out became another political failure. Womp womp.

Attacks on the rights of citizenship, in the form of abrogation of birth right citizenship and/or mass denaturalizations. This is a big one for me, as it would involve a suspension of the Constitution. Trump’s people want to cancel the 14th Amendment by executive fiat and then hope the Court ratifies this move. Big red flag.

Confirmed, but with significant resistance. Trump attempted the executive assault on birthright citizenship described above, although the Supreme Court rejected his original order—rather too closely, if you ask me. The administration has also expanded denaturalization proceedings and investigated Ilhan Omar’s citizenship after Trump demanded her expulsion. These efforts have not produced the wholesale cancellation of citizenship rights, but the nature of the attack itself is unmistakable. Again, the courts’ willingness to stop parts of it qualifies the administration’s success, but not my predictions.

“Cultural fascism:” A marked uptick in hate crimes, interpersonal sadism, the return of the casual and routine use of slurs to humiliate minorities, etc. Sort of hard to test, but more a kind of atmosphere. If this other stuff is happening, I imagine the feeling in the country will get a lot uglier.

Mixed, and probably overstated as a prediction of the national mood. There is plenty of public cruelty, racist rhetoric, and open delight in humiliation, including from the administration itself and its orbiting “influencers.” But that doesn’t establish a general transformation of everyday life or popular attitudes. Reported hate crimes actually declined in 2025, cutting against the most measurable part of this prediction. The hoped-for—or feared—“vibe shift” has not clearly materialized. The regime’s enthusiasm for sadism is evident; the country’s conversion to it is not, thank God.

Okay, so how are we doing? I think Trombly’s “failure to become fascist” is one decent way to assess these facts and takes into account the bitter disappointment of the extreme right that is now loudly defecting from MAGA. The most fascist elements of the Trumpian coalition have certainly not gotten all their wishes. But I think perhaps it would be more accurate to speak of an impotent or frustrated fascism. I must say that MAGA would most likely be a failed fascism is something I’d been positing since 2022, at least.

We have to distinguish between a fascist movement and a fascist regime. And also, to the latter, we must add three moments: fascist government—check, Stephen Miller as our Nazi “prime minister” etc.—fascist state—partial, not a total takeover of the bureaucratic structures—and fascist society, where fascist institutions and attitudes constitute the national “spirit”—not really at all. What we now possibly face is the exhaustion of the movement before the successful consolidation of the regime. One can also refer here to Robert Paxton’s Five Stages of Fascism: “1) the initial creation of fascist movements; (2) their rooting as parties in a political system; (3) the acquisition of power; (4) the exercise of power; and, finally, in the longer term, (5) radicalization or entropy.” It seems today that a failure in stage 4 has resulted in entropy rather than radicalization in stage 5.

That doesn’t mean an end to all dangers, but it does change their character. For the next two years, we’re most likely going to be fighting an isolated core that still has the levers of government but has no mass support. They still retain enormous powers to punish. They will still likely turn abroad again as their domestic powers are curbed. Like a cornered animal, they will become desperate and lash out wildly. But I believe American democracy, although badly battered, will survive. In the years to come, though, it will require a lot of care and attention to be brought back to full health. Otherwise, we will be back in the same situation soon, and perhaps without the luck.

If you regularly read, enjoy, or share Unpopular Front, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. This newsletter is entirely reader-supported and is my primary source of income. Your $5 a month makes it possible for me to keep writing independently.

Subscribe now

My book, When the Clock Broke, is out in paperback in the US and UK, with copies turning up as far afield as Kuala Lumpur and Christchurch.

I also co-host the film podcast Unclear and Present Danger with Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times. Our Patreon features bonus episodes and a weekly politics discussion.

The Verso event for A.J.A. Woods’s The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy tomorrow night is full! Looking forward to seeing everyone who could snag a ticket, and hopefully there will be audio or video available.

“It is a good thing, and a sign of health, that those in a free country who represent contrasted social theories should freely air their differences. Society today being what it is, class interests are bound to be at odds. Antagonisms there must be, and it is well that they should be recognized. It is only when this state of social friction ceases to be regarded as normal and legitimate that the country as a whole begins to suffer.”

—Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat

“But what a lack of judgment it requires to declare the Commune sacred, to proclaim it infallible, to claim that every burnt house, every executed hostage, received their just dues to the dot over the i! Is not that equivalent to saying that during that week in May the people shot just as many opponents as was necessary, and no more, and burnt just those buildings which had to be burnt, and no more? Does not that repeat the saying about the first French Revolution: Every beheaded victim received justice, first those beheaded by order of Robespierre and then Robespierre himself! To such follies are people driven, when they give free rein to the desire to appear formidable, although they are at bottom quite good-natured.”

—Friedrich Engels, “The Program of the Blanquist Fugitives from the Paris Commune”

From his Recollections of 1848, Alexis de Tocqueville, right before “the June Days” insurrection:

Milnes placed me next to Madame [George] Sand. I had never spoken to her, and I doubt whether I had ever seen her (I had lived little in the world of literary adventurers which she frequented). One of my friends asked her one day what she thought of my book on America, and she answered, ‘‘ Monsieur, I am only accustomed to read the books which are presented to me by their authors”’. I was strongly prejudiced against Madame Sand, for I loathe women who write, especially those who systematically disguise the weaknesses of their sex, instead of interesting us by displaying them in their true character. Nevertheless, she pleased me. I thought her features rather massive, but her expression admirable: all her mind seemed to have taken refuge in her eyes, abandoning the rest of her face to matter ; and I was particularly struck at meeting in her with something of the naturalness of behaviour of great minds. She had a real simplicity of manner and language, which she mingled, perhaps, with some little affectation of simplicity in her dress. I confess that, more adorned, she would have appeared still more simple. We talked for a whole hour of public affairs ; it was impossible to talk of anything else in those days. Besides, Madame Sand at that time was a sort of politican, and what she said on the subject struck me greatly ; it was the first time that I had entered into direct and familiar communication with a person able and willing to tell me what was happening in the camp of our adversaries. Political parties never know each other : they approach, touch, seize, but never see one another. Madame Sand depicted to me, in great detail and with singular vivacity, the condition of the Paris workmen, their organization, their numbers, their arms, their preparations, their thoughts, their passions, their terrible resolves. I thought the picture overloaded, but it was not, as subsequent events clearly proved. She seemed to be alarmed for herself at the popular triumph, and to take the greatest pity upon the fate that awaited us. ‘“Try to persuade your friends, monsieur,”’ she said, “not to force the people into the streets by alarming or irritating them. I also wish that I could instil patience into my own friends for if it comes to a fight, believe me, you will all perish.”

With these consoling words we parted, and I have never seen her since.

Some great commentary on the present protests in France from David A. Bell:

….the French do have a very long, very dense, very particular history of protesting. People in my field of French history can reel off a long list of classic works on the subject: Charles Tilly’s The Contentious French; Jean Nicolas’s La rebellion française; George Rudé’s The Crowd in the French Revolution; John Merriman’s Massacre, on the Paris Commune of 1871; etc. etc., not to mention a host of memoirs and literary treatments. When Paris descends into violence, I think not only about the Commune, and the Revolution, but all the way back to the year 1588, when outraged Parisians drove the erratic and vainglorious King Henri III out of the city in the so-called “Day of the Barricades.” Seven months later, after the King brazenly assassinated his chief rival, the Duc de Guise, leader of the Catholic League, the city again revolted and resisted a siege for many years. Armed priests and friars led processions through the streets on an almost daily basis to keep Parisians in a state of fervent. zealous mobilization. Preachers delivered vehement sermons on street corners declaring the King a devil in disguise, and printing presses churned out scorching pamphlets at a rhythm never before seen.

Today’s protestors have almost nothing in common with these fanatical predecessors, and I doubt many of them know much if anything about Henri III and the Catholic League. Even so, the awareness of the long history of French protest, however dim in the specifics, does provide them with a sense of legitimacy. That is where the history matters. More than in most other European countries, French protestors have a sense that protest itself is deeply legitimate. And not just peaceful protest. The history also gives a sense of the legitimacy, in certain circumstances, of violence. “When the government violates the rights of the people, insurrection is for the people and for each portion of the people the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties.” These words were written by Maximilien Robespierre in 1793 as the last article of his never-implemented revision of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. It encapsulates a deep sense, connected to the long history I’ve just described, that faced with a stubborn, defiant, oppressive government, violence has its place. And it is a sense that the far right possesses just as deeply as the far left. On February 6, 1934, a right-wing mob tried to storm the National Assembly and overthrow the moderate Third Republic, and that event still has its place of honor in the collective memory of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party.

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I’ve given Yglesias somewh…

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If you haven’t seen it, I’m gonna talk pretty generally, but there are some spoilers. I also must admit this is more an interpretatio…

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If you regularly read, enjoy, or share Unpopular Front, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. This newsletter is entirely reader-supported and is my primary source of income. Your $5 a month makes it possible for me to keep writing independently.

Subscribe now

My book, When the Clock Broke, is out in paperback in the US and UK, with copies turning up as far afield as Kuala Lumpur and Christchurch.

I also co-host the film podcast Unclear and Present Danger with Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times. Our Patreon features bonus episodes and a weekly politics discussion.

In case you missed it, I visited my friends at the Know Your Enemy podcast to talk about some recent pieces.

Reminder: Next Monday, October 26th, from 7-9:30 PM, I’ll be participating in a panel discussion of A.J.A. Woods’s The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West at the Verso office in Manhattan. Tickets are free, but you must RSVP due to limited space.

In my appreciation last week of the life and work of the late Anwar Shaikh, I forgot to include videos of his lectures based on his book Capitalism: Competition, Conflict and Crises. This is a grad-level course on economics, so it can be overly technical for people—like me—with lay knowledge, but the second-to-last lecture—”Postwar Accumulation, Forces Leading to the Current Crisis”—which puts his theory to historical work, is accessible and of general interest.

My publisher is reissuing Leonard Zeskind’s Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream. Released in 2009, its subject seemed, in the wake of Obama’s election, to be purely of the past. As his Times obituary put it last year:

….many reviewers in 2009 were skeptical, treating his work as a backward look at a fringe movement led by racist crackpots whose day was over. The United States had just elected its first Black president, and extremist movements such as Christian Identity, which preached that white Christians were entitled to dominate government and society, seemed antiquated.

The Los Angeles Times waved away those hate groups as questing after “an impossible future.” NPR noted that “while a handful of bigots” were still grumbling about the South’s defeat in the Civil War and spreading conspiracies about Jews, “some 70 million others have, in a testament to the overwhelming tolerance of contemporary American society, gone ahead and elected Barack Obama president.”

Zeskind was a member of the antifascist left whose research on the far right earned him a MacArthur grant. It’s to his book’s great credit that it was removed from the US Naval Library by Hegseth’s Department of Defense during their purge of materials on racism. It’s been indispensable for my own work, and I was proud to blurb the reissue.—

“Leonard Zeskin’s Blood and Politics is a neglected classic that has become only more important in recent years to understand the perilous situation in the United States. It is the essential subterranean history of modern America.”

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In this episode we talk to our friend John Ganz about the nature and function of conservative intellectuals—or “intellectuals,” whichever you prefer—past and present. In particular, the Trump era has been a kind of real-time experiment in seeing how rightwing writers and second-hand dealers in ideas degrade, contort, and reinvent themselves. From there we consider what intellectuals, right and left, actually do and what influence, if any, they (we?) have, and how that’s changed from the halcyon days of midcentury generalists to our fragmented and mind-numbing “media landscape” today. It’ll be a fun one, for some of you!

Sources:

John Ganz, Unpopular Front:

— “America is Mine, and it Owes Me a Living,” Oct 5, 2026

— “From Shitpost to Bullshit: The Function of Conservative Intellectuals,” Sept 30, 2026

— “Better Late Than Never? The Right Wakes Up to Fascism...Kinda,” Sept 22, 2026

A.J.A. Woods, The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West (2026)

Stephen Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton (1993)

— Presidential Leadership in Political Time: Reprise and Reappraisal (2020)

George Scialabba, What Are Intellectuals Good For? (2009)

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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.

I’ll be on the Know Your Enemy podcast discussing some recent pieces. I believe the episode drops tomorrow AM, so keep an eye out.

On Monday, October 26, I will be on a panel for A.J.A Woods’s very fine book The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy. It will be 7:30 to 9 at the Verso Office. The event is free, but limited space means you must RSVP.

The great Marxian economist Anwar Shaikh died last week. Shaikh was a theorist of capitalist competition, and I first encountered his work when trying to better understand the concepts of coercive and “fratricidal competition.” To a non-economist, his observations can sound intuitive and even commonsensical, which is an indication of how deformed that discipline has become. His basic insight is that capitalism is driven by firms’ need to accumulate profits, and competition is defined not by market equilibrium but by a relentless, destructive war of all against all that coerces them to slash costs or adopt labor-saving technology to survive. In our contemporary discussion of AI, his point that technological advance is not optional but rather compulsory because of the relentless struggle between capitals is crucial. What is rational and necessary on the level of one company—keeping abreast of its competitors—can produce systemic outcomes that are undermining to each sector and the economy as a whole.

In Jacobin, Vivek Chibber makes the case for Shaikh as being the most important Marxian economist since Marx himself:

Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises was hailed an instant classic. The accolades were extraordinary, and it is striking how many compared it to Marx’s own great work. James K. Galbraith suggested that there hadn’t been any economic treatise so ambitious and so successful in 150 years (i.e., since Marx himself), Geoffrey Harcourt called it “possibly the most comprehensive structure since Marx’s Capital,” and John Grahl wrote in the New Left Review that “the scope and scale of Capitalism are such as to invite comparison with Marx’s Capital itself.” It was a staggering achievement, and the economics profession instantly realized it.

The publication of Anwar’s magnum opus was a watershed moment in the history of Marxian economics. There have been other works of great importance published in the past twenty-five years or so. But none with the ambition, the thoroughness, the extraordinary erudition, and sheer breadth of Anwar’s book. With it, Marxist political economy can be in conversation with mainstream economics at every level of abstraction and in every domain that the economic theory inhabits. Even though it has been a decade since it was published, its full significance has yet to be absorbed. Anwar spent his last years tirelessly lecturing on different aspects of the argument, trying to make it absorbable. But while a decade is a long time in biographical years, it is but a flicker in intellectual history. It will take some time for the full significance of the work to be appreciated. But then, it is rare for a book to even be worthy of such consideration.

I have tried to read Shaikh’s magnum opus, but although I can understand the basic points, I must admit the book’s specific empirical findings and formal economic arguments are a little beyond me.

Speaking of destructive acquisitiveness, The Lamp has an issue on the seven deadly sins with a bunch of literary luminaries each taking their own favorite vice. I want to highlight B.D. McClay’s wonderful essay on envy, perhaps the most interesting—and certainly most painful and self-destructive—of the sins. (I always wanted to write a book, a novel maybe, with the title The Cure for Envy. I’m putting this down now to copyright it.)

Envy is often used synonymously with jealousy, but jealousy, in its strict sense, is a simpler feeling. Jealousy has to do with things you have and not wanting to lose them. Envy has to do with things you don’t have and wanting others not to have them, sometimes more than simply wanting them for yourself. A jealous person might be afraid of somebody “stealing” their romantic partner, but an envious person might want that partner for no reason other than that somebody else did first. Jealousy is anxious. Envy is resentful. Jealousy is Othello’s vice. Envy is Iago’s. Jealousy is a nasty vice, but not so hard to overcome, because sadness over the loss of something precious to us is a reasonable feeling. As an intellectual matter, you can decide not to be jealous and, with time, bring your feelings into line with that decision. Envy is subtler; it compromises our judgements and our aspirations, shrinking and distorting our interior world as well as our sense of the world around us. If you’ve ever been in the throes of envy but successfully shaken it off, its perspective looks like insanity. How could you have ever thought about the world that way?

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The hits keep coming. On Monday, I wrote about how the right increasingly justified itself using paleoconservative rhetorical forms—tropes of national decline, decadence, and intra-civilizational struggle—even if it did not entirely adopt the paleo policy program. On Wedn…

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It’s a real temptation and bad habit of mine to survey what’s going on and write, “See, I told you so!” For instance, I could do this with the recent Tucker Carlson interview with former Tory parliamentarian Jacob Rees-Mogg, where Carlson basically just repeated all the claims about Hitler not being such a bad guy and Britain mak…

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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 highly recommend Will Davies and James Butler on the LRB Podcast discussing “What Happened to the Intellectual.”

William Davies joins James to consider what distinguishes intellectuals from the technocrats, academics, experts, polemicists, thought leaders, gurus and utopians who compete for our attention, and to ask whether there’s still a role for them in the public realm. They look back to Weber’s and Gramsci’s ideas about the autonomy and responsibility of the intellectual and discuss the ways in which Hayek’s anti-intellectualism has shaped discourse up to the present day. Where do politicians look for ideas and does the modern marketplace of algorithmic video platforms pose a challenge to independent thought?

It dovetails nicely with my recent pieces on the function of right-wing intellectuals but also led me to reflect a lot about what it is I’m actually doing with my life—if I may be so bold as to claim the mantle of intellectual. I’ll have to get back to you on that one.—

People are sharing something stupid about one of my favorite topics: the Popular Front era and the Fall of France in 1940. It’s a Substack essay by the co-founder of a think tank called The Centre for British Progress and an economics student. It makes the very old and fairly well-debunked argument that the implementation of the 40-hour work week by the left-wing Léon Blum government hobbled France’s productive capacity just as it needed to rearm to face the newly belligerent Nazi Germany. (This is all to argue against restrictions on AI development, by the way.)

Some version of this case has circulated since Vichy. Pétain bewailed the triumph of the “esprit de jouissance” over the "esprit de sacrifice,” basically blaming the labor accords of the previous decade—the 40-hour week, paid vacation, collective bargaining rights—for the decline and decadence of the nation. At the Riom Trial in 1942, his government attempted to make this accusation stick by prosecuting Blum and other leaders of the Third Republic. This was an effort to shift the blame from the incompetent military command to the civilian leaders. (The French officer corps trying to blame a Jew for a humiliating defeat—where have I heard that one before?) It was a useful piece of political mythology to pass the buck from a reactionary bourgeoisie and senile aristocracy to labor and the left, but it does not fare well under historical scrutiny.

The central problem here is that French rearmament—especially when combined with its allies—was a substantial success. As Philip Nord writes in France 1940: Defending the Republic:

On the eve of war, the French army had achieved rough numerical equality to the Germans in armor. France’s air force was still smaller than the Luftwaffe, but the situation was not altogether bleak. French aircraft production was accelerating at a rate the Nazis could not match, and by early 1940, France and Britain together were churning out a higher total of warplanes than Germany In 1938, France’s air arm was not yet a match for the Reich’s, but it was on course to becoming so by 1941. In the meantime, purchased US aircraft made up part of the difference, not to mention the Royal Air Force, which was a formidable force in its own right spearheaded by the redoubtable Spitfire fighter plane.

It is worth underlining in this connection how rapid and massive the French military build- up was. France’s military budget skyrocketed from 12.8 billion francs in 1935 to 93.7 billion francs in 1939. The nation was investing 2.6 times as much on armaments production on the eve of the Second World War as it had on the eve of the First. The quality of France’s new weaponry, moreover, was on the whole respectable, if not first rate.

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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.

In the Los Angeles Reviews of Books, Mathias Fuelling has a review of Anton Jäger’s Hyperpolitics:

ANTON JÄGER’S Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization Without Political Consequences (2026) is a strange book: too short to offend, too long to be pithy or aphoristic. The effect is to make it flat. Jäger is explosively erudite, yet this erudition leads to banal ends, loud bangs that come to small talk. He is a superstar on the platform formerly known as Twitter, and the book captures Jäger’s charisma within a particular online socialist milieu—the wide-ranging references, close attunement to political events in Europe, and a gift for the incisive turn of phrase. Jäger’s insights are often provocative and penetrating, drawing on a wealth of comparative knowledge and a willingness to take intellectual risks, but they are left undeveloped, discarded as soon as they are expressed.

In the preface, he compares the current Democratic Party to an “inverted Peronist developmental bloc.” Further in, he tells us that “the KKK and other [American] white-supremacist groups might well count among the first properly fascist organizations in history.” Near the end, he notes of the culture wars during the Trump era that “OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] countries found themselves engulfed in a kind of permanent Dreyfus Affair, one that extended to family gatherings, circles of friends, and workplace cliques,” and that “the average Western European today is more likely to interact with geriatric nurses than workplace union reps.” Quips and analogies such as these can be found on almost every page, but what do they add up to?

Hyperpolitics can be seen as a hip remix of Marx’s “Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” for the early 21st century, with Trump in the role of Louis, though at its heart, it is less of an argument than a heuristic model. In the absence of efficacious class struggle over the now decades-long nadir of socialism, according to Jäger, we have ended up in an ersatz version of history in Europe and the United States, characterized by four succeeding waves of macropolitical orientations. A mass politics defined a period from the 19th century to the end of the Cold War, which marked the height of movements organized along social bases such as class. The triumphant globalization of the 1990s saw the rise of postpolitics, “in which citizens retreat from collective life into the private sphere.” An antipolitics emerged in response to the 2008 financial crisis, with people returning to politics but in a landscape “marked by the erosion—or even accelerated disintegration—of social bonds.” Since the initial election of Donald Trump, a hyperpolitics has taken hold, with people ever more politicized, but in a fractured environment inadequate for the mobilization of this political energy.

I was working on my own review of Hyperpolitics, but it was taking me so long that the magazine I was doing it for didn’t want it anymore, so I may just post it on here soon.

For my piece this past week on techne and phronesis, I revisited Hannah Arendt’s essay “The Crisis in Culture.” There are so many great passages and lines it’s difficult to pull just one:

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