I think the "attack on liberalism" framing you mention here (and you made a similar point re fascism in your interview with the American Jewish Historical Society) is absolutely right. “Liberalism” having two senses in American can be frustrating, but here the right is attacking both: the libs (anyone left-of-centre) are hounded as woke, and the boundaries of liberalism (the philosophy—rule of law etc.) are being wrestled with.
Examples of the latter are obvious—DOGE, the executive orders, threatening tariffs that have no statutory basis. They are often throwing away Liberalism specifically to attack the libs (DOGE, USAID, “fraud”).
Liberal principles are pretty dry stuff, and particularly in the States, involve respecting a lot of dumb concepts (congress/presidential system is in fact very bad). But anti-Liberal/lib procedural radicalism by a personalist leader with a popular base gives off a very specific vibe.
Obviously hypocrisy doesn’t mean much these days. And I guess I shouldn’t be shocked. But it is bizarre that, less than a decade after blathering on about Obama’s imperial presidency, congresses role, etc., Republicans are supporting the executive flouting legislation in the most flagrant ways imaginable.
I think the courts, and Trump’s response to them, are going to be extremely important to watch. The conservative legal movement has always had a bizarre relationship with the executive—it should be unfettered to do bad things (torture memo, Trump case) but as fettered as possible in doing good things. The movement won a big fight in its campaign to against the latter when it overturned Chevron deference. It’s possible that them doing so sowed a problem for Trump—the executive actions, tariffs, etc. require massive deference. There’s tension between “deconstructing the administrative state” and Trumpy governance through that state.
Now, maybe the courts are too wimpy to apply that principle neutrally when Trump’s involved. But even if you’re cynical about the Supreme Court, one version of that cynicism is they’re cozy with capital interests, and I could certainly see them striking down actions that harm those interests (e.g., tariffs). What would Trump do then? I am not sure. The Fascism thesis predicts something quite bad. And he seems to have more hatchet men on hand this go-round who will take action even when Trump himself is too lazy. At the very least, it’s hard to use judicial review to make the executive follow through on legislation in good faith.
Regrettably, this shades into criticisms levelled by the cringest/nastiest anti-trumpers. But there appears to be a genuine constitutional crisis budding, and at that point one has to say that they got some wood on the ball.
Would also say that Storr’s characterization of government soc-dems describes the goated politics, and it makes me very sad to see it under assault :(
It's surprising but also encouraging that the several of the Manhattan U.S. Attorney's office officials who resigned yesterday are Trump-apppinted acting heads. Even that kind of transparently corrupt wheedling with Eric Adam's was apparently too much for their professionalism to allow. Which is agnostic on the broader ideology, but at least indicates there are some limits to what the system will tolerate and opens up a line of attack.
I’m no expert on the Red Scare in any respect but I am struck by the way that DOGE is using the language of kitchen table issues (“waste, fraud, and abuse…”) and supposed common sense to downplay how its core goals ultimately feel much more vindictive and based in attacks on particular identities (immigrants, trans folks, pretty much any religious minority).
Similarly, I feel like when I was taught the Mcarthy era in school the emphasis was always on the anticommunist over reach and never, ever emphasized the lavender scare or how anti-Asian animus pre-Korean War played into it, or why it might be worth taking a look at what it meant for the government to fry the Rosenbergs basically within the same time period that the Doctors plot conspiracy is popping off in the Soviet Union.
In short, The Red Scare feels like it has become a piece of post-cold war kitsch filled with mediated meaning and constructed truisms over the decades (see also the top comment on John’s last post discussing how 1984 has set a false precedent for how to recognize totalitarianism/facism in the present)
Like McCarthy, it helps to be able to throw around made up numbers whenever you need to. $100 million for Hamas condoms. 90% of America supports DOGE. Joe had to say these things out loud in official settings. Musk just has to type them on his phone to a bunch of chuckling toadies.
Can the ascendant right be combatted by vaguely ranting at length about the Rosenbergs? It hasn’t been tried before so I will be bravely beginning this strategic experiment here in this internet comment section in 2025 👍
Much of this seems pretty much spot on. I'm becoming skeptical tho that the '"libertarian" or ideological basis for all this destruction by Musk et al really possesses any there there.
Most of this activity and motion from the Trump/Musk alliance is pretty much devoid of ideology and appears to be just a means of accumulating power. All that waste, fraud and abuse talk would mean something if they were actually concerned with it. It's crystal clear they are not otherwise they wouldn't begin with USAID, fire IGs and legalize bribery. Republican/paleo-/libertarian/populist rhetoric is just the vehicle that got them here; it's for the rubes. They simply want power.
I don't know. Perhaps we're wasting our time subjecting them to ideological examination since these guys seem to be more Bronze Age Pervert than Hillsdale or Deneen.
What's clear is that what is appealing about Trump/Musk to much of the electorate is that they are actually doing stuff; the "energy". They aren't inert which is how a good deal of the public view the "normal" business of government - sclerotic mostly and when active, actively obstructionist or obnoxious. That they are violating all sorts of democratic norms, laws and constitutional strictures doesn't seem to matter much because, let's face it, the masses really don't care much for high-flown principled rhetoric and about policy only insofar as problem seen; problem dealt with; problem solved, i.e., not decades to solve a border issue. Government that "works" - in other words is energetic. Hence, the logic of Trump's mockery of "low-energy" politicians and "losers". "Losers" don't get things done.
Liberals and the Left are going to have to deal with that perception and what it means for their rhetoric and what they are offering. " Normal" is not what anyone wants any more even for those who can remember what it was.
I think this is the simplest way to describe the global elections of the last year.
Biden (insert equivalent incumbent) promised “back to normal” and during the post-pandemic they A. failed to deliver “normal” at the same time B. That the electorate stops believing “normal” is possible.
Ultimately the Democrats ceded the momentum “of do something, anything!” that they had in 2020 to people who had no foibles about throwing out a whole lot of something and anything right when the public’s appetite for action was at its peak….
Sure. Sarah Longwell recently conducted a survey of Biden voters who voted for Trump and the primary reason seemed to be that Trump got stuff done. It felt like things were moving to them.
Very helpful. I was a very small child when the McCarthy era was going on, but in retrospect it explains a lot about my parents, who were young adults at the time. They kind of adopted the paranoid style of that period, and during the 1960s and early 1970s, they were afraid I would "defect" to the scary hippie/Communist side of life. (I did, of course.) My dad, now in his 90s, is still suspicious of any man with a beard. He thought that gays had infiltrated the government and were trying to get "revenge" on society. He talked a lot about how government had gotten too big. In the early 70s, he thought Medicare was bad because it was socialism (but in the end, he and his other doctor friends made a lot of money because of Medicare).
My dad is a well-educated professional, and so are his friends, but most of them became Trump supporters, as enthusiastic as the most ignorant, poorly educated people in my rural county in TN. I could never understand this, but now I think it's because he and his friends recognized the McCarthyism of their early adulthood and latched onto it again, because it was satisfying and familiar.
Everything Landon Storrs says about the “varied group of leftists” neatly summarizes my own views. I’m going to read the book; in fact, I am developing a library of books that I will pass on to my granddaughter. I fear she is growing up in a world where such titles will be banned.
Musk and company flaunt their means. They have the power to fire people and take away funding. Their ends are to kill by disease and starvation. Oligarchs deem all the classes below them as expendable.
I think your analysis of Trumpism's "supply side" is superb, but I find myself wondering about the demand side; what do the "virtuous American volk" *want*? While there are many similarities between the hidden ideology of fascism of the 1930s and contemporary fascism (with people like Rothbard in between), times have changed, and what draws the masses to fascism today, what *they*, not the ideologues, are reacting to, is somewhat different from what it was a century ago. I've tried to put some of my thoughts in writing here: https://ron1621988.substack.com/p/its-the-stupid
As history shows, what Team Trump* is doing is what the Republicans have been dreaming for for decades— more or less since the Gilded Age got shut down. (*I’m reluctant to credit Trump personally with anything more than letting the dogs of chaos loose or grunting general directives while ignoring any details.)
Which is to thanks for the piece, John.
And yeah, sure, reporting should verify claims of waste or whatever but since the media owners support Trump besides needing to pay their share — literally — to his extortion, well factual reporting won’t be coming…
Good post. Just out of curiosity, do you have any insight into the psychology of the idealogy for Rothbard in particular? Francis just seemed like a straight up racist, but I am puzzled by Rothbard. A child of Eastern European Jewish immigrants becomes friends with Holocaust deniers and promotes David Duke? Is it just a combination of an over confident and hostile personality type, something about his home life? Scary.
I like Chomsky’s quote on it, although he said “no one takes it seriously” which appears unfortunately incorrect.
“Now, there are consistent libertarians, people like Murray Rothbard [American academic]—and if you just read the world that they describe, it's a world so full of hate that no human being would want to live in it. This is a world where you don't have roads because you don't see any reason why you should cooperate in building a road that you're not going to use: if you want a road, you get together with a bunch of other people who are going to use that road and you build it, then you charge people to ride on it. If you don't like the pollution from somebody's automobile, you take them to court and you litigate it. Who would want to live in a world like that? It's a world built on hatred.”
Armchair, intellectual here. I’m not as well-read as many, if not all, of you. A couple of years ago, I got curious about Bannon. And given that this local Colorado author put out a book about his background and path to, well, whatever he is today.
I’m curious what you all think of this. And if you haven’t read it, I recommend at least getting past the 3/8 that I read and was amazed by. In many ways, it feels like a decent meta-explanation of what we see happening on a number of continents. It also seems that Trump is just an opportunist riding the populist waves.
The hollowing-out of decent journalism, the reliance on scouring X for ideas, the advertising monopoly of the big SM platforms have left the legacy media toothless to take on any serious shift such as the one we are in.
You can see rolling news and radio phone-ins as a precursor to the algorithmic hellscape to which too many are now addicted.
Big changes still to come - the concentration of so much media reach is fatal for a flourishing society.
"You can see rolling news and radio phone-ins as a precursor to the algorithmic hellscape to which too many are now addicted." Yes, someone wrote a book about this :)
I think the "attack on liberalism" framing you mention here (and you made a similar point re fascism in your interview with the American Jewish Historical Society) is absolutely right. “Liberalism” having two senses in American can be frustrating, but here the right is attacking both: the libs (anyone left-of-centre) are hounded as woke, and the boundaries of liberalism (the philosophy—rule of law etc.) are being wrestled with.
Examples of the latter are obvious—DOGE, the executive orders, threatening tariffs that have no statutory basis. They are often throwing away Liberalism specifically to attack the libs (DOGE, USAID, “fraud”).
Liberal principles are pretty dry stuff, and particularly in the States, involve respecting a lot of dumb concepts (congress/presidential system is in fact very bad). But anti-Liberal/lib procedural radicalism by a personalist leader with a popular base gives off a very specific vibe.
Obviously hypocrisy doesn’t mean much these days. And I guess I shouldn’t be shocked. But it is bizarre that, less than a decade after blathering on about Obama’s imperial presidency, congresses role, etc., Republicans are supporting the executive flouting legislation in the most flagrant ways imaginable.
I think the courts, and Trump’s response to them, are going to be extremely important to watch. The conservative legal movement has always had a bizarre relationship with the executive—it should be unfettered to do bad things (torture memo, Trump case) but as fettered as possible in doing good things. The movement won a big fight in its campaign to against the latter when it overturned Chevron deference. It’s possible that them doing so sowed a problem for Trump—the executive actions, tariffs, etc. require massive deference. There’s tension between “deconstructing the administrative state” and Trumpy governance through that state.
Now, maybe the courts are too wimpy to apply that principle neutrally when Trump’s involved. But even if you’re cynical about the Supreme Court, one version of that cynicism is they’re cozy with capital interests, and I could certainly see them striking down actions that harm those interests (e.g., tariffs). What would Trump do then? I am not sure. The Fascism thesis predicts something quite bad. And he seems to have more hatchet men on hand this go-round who will take action even when Trump himself is too lazy. At the very least, it’s hard to use judicial review to make the executive follow through on legislation in good faith.
Regrettably, this shades into criticisms levelled by the cringest/nastiest anti-trumpers. But there appears to be a genuine constitutional crisis budding, and at that point one has to say that they got some wood on the ball.
Would also say that Storr’s characterization of government soc-dems describes the goated politics, and it makes me very sad to see it under assault :(
It's surprising but also encouraging that the several of the Manhattan U.S. Attorney's office officials who resigned yesterday are Trump-apppinted acting heads. Even that kind of transparently corrupt wheedling with Eric Adam's was apparently too much for their professionalism to allow. Which is agnostic on the broader ideology, but at least indicates there are some limits to what the system will tolerate and opens up a line of attack.
I’m no expert on the Red Scare in any respect but I am struck by the way that DOGE is using the language of kitchen table issues (“waste, fraud, and abuse…”) and supposed common sense to downplay how its core goals ultimately feel much more vindictive and based in attacks on particular identities (immigrants, trans folks, pretty much any religious minority).
Similarly, I feel like when I was taught the Mcarthy era in school the emphasis was always on the anticommunist over reach and never, ever emphasized the lavender scare or how anti-Asian animus pre-Korean War played into it, or why it might be worth taking a look at what it meant for the government to fry the Rosenbergs basically within the same time period that the Doctors plot conspiracy is popping off in the Soviet Union.
In short, The Red Scare feels like it has become a piece of post-cold war kitsch filled with mediated meaning and constructed truisms over the decades (see also the top comment on John’s last post discussing how 1984 has set a false precedent for how to recognize totalitarianism/facism in the present)
Like McCarthy, it helps to be able to throw around made up numbers whenever you need to. $100 million for Hamas condoms. 90% of America supports DOGE. Joe had to say these things out loud in official settings. Musk just has to type them on his phone to a bunch of chuckling toadies.
Can the ascendant right be combatted by vaguely ranting at length about the Rosenbergs? It hasn’t been tried before so I will be bravely beginning this strategic experiment here in this internet comment section in 2025 👍
Much of this seems pretty much spot on. I'm becoming skeptical tho that the '"libertarian" or ideological basis for all this destruction by Musk et al really possesses any there there.
Most of this activity and motion from the Trump/Musk alliance is pretty much devoid of ideology and appears to be just a means of accumulating power. All that waste, fraud and abuse talk would mean something if they were actually concerned with it. It's crystal clear they are not otherwise they wouldn't begin with USAID, fire IGs and legalize bribery. Republican/paleo-/libertarian/populist rhetoric is just the vehicle that got them here; it's for the rubes. They simply want power.
I don't know. Perhaps we're wasting our time subjecting them to ideological examination since these guys seem to be more Bronze Age Pervert than Hillsdale or Deneen.
What's clear is that what is appealing about Trump/Musk to much of the electorate is that they are actually doing stuff; the "energy". They aren't inert which is how a good deal of the public view the "normal" business of government - sclerotic mostly and when active, actively obstructionist or obnoxious. That they are violating all sorts of democratic norms, laws and constitutional strictures doesn't seem to matter much because, let's face it, the masses really don't care much for high-flown principled rhetoric and about policy only insofar as problem seen; problem dealt with; problem solved, i.e., not decades to solve a border issue. Government that "works" - in other words is energetic. Hence, the logic of Trump's mockery of "low-energy" politicians and "losers". "Losers" don't get things done.
Liberals and the Left are going to have to deal with that perception and what it means for their rhetoric and what they are offering. " Normal" is not what anyone wants any more even for those who can remember what it was.
I think this is the simplest way to describe the global elections of the last year.
Biden (insert equivalent incumbent) promised “back to normal” and during the post-pandemic they A. failed to deliver “normal” at the same time B. That the electorate stops believing “normal” is possible.
Ultimately the Democrats ceded the momentum “of do something, anything!” that they had in 2020 to people who had no foibles about throwing out a whole lot of something and anything right when the public’s appetite for action was at its peak….
Sure. Sarah Longwell recently conducted a survey of Biden voters who voted for Trump and the primary reason seemed to be that Trump got stuff done. It felt like things were moving to them.
Very helpful. I was a very small child when the McCarthy era was going on, but in retrospect it explains a lot about my parents, who were young adults at the time. They kind of adopted the paranoid style of that period, and during the 1960s and early 1970s, they were afraid I would "defect" to the scary hippie/Communist side of life. (I did, of course.) My dad, now in his 90s, is still suspicious of any man with a beard. He thought that gays had infiltrated the government and were trying to get "revenge" on society. He talked a lot about how government had gotten too big. In the early 70s, he thought Medicare was bad because it was socialism (but in the end, he and his other doctor friends made a lot of money because of Medicare).
My dad is a well-educated professional, and so are his friends, but most of them became Trump supporters, as enthusiastic as the most ignorant, poorly educated people in my rural county in TN. I could never understand this, but now I think it's because he and his friends recognized the McCarthyism of their early adulthood and latched onto it again, because it was satisfying and familiar.
Everything Landon Storrs says about the “varied group of leftists” neatly summarizes my own views. I’m going to read the book; in fact, I am developing a library of books that I will pass on to my granddaughter. I fear she is growing up in a world where such titles will be banned.
Musk and company flaunt their means. They have the power to fire people and take away funding. Their ends are to kill by disease and starvation. Oligarchs deem all the classes below them as expendable.
I think your analysis of Trumpism's "supply side" is superb, but I find myself wondering about the demand side; what do the "virtuous American volk" *want*? While there are many similarities between the hidden ideology of fascism of the 1930s and contemporary fascism (with people like Rothbard in between), times have changed, and what draws the masses to fascism today, what *they*, not the ideologues, are reacting to, is somewhat different from what it was a century ago. I've tried to put some of my thoughts in writing here: https://ron1621988.substack.com/p/its-the-stupid
As history shows, what Team Trump* is doing is what the Republicans have been dreaming for for decades— more or less since the Gilded Age got shut down. (*I’m reluctant to credit Trump personally with anything more than letting the dogs of chaos loose or grunting general directives while ignoring any details.)
Which is to thanks for the piece, John.
And yeah, sure, reporting should verify claims of waste or whatever but since the media owners support Trump besides needing to pay their share — literally — to his extortion, well factual reporting won’t be coming…
Good post. Just out of curiosity, do you have any insight into the psychology of the idealogy for Rothbard in particular? Francis just seemed like a straight up racist, but I am puzzled by Rothbard. A child of Eastern European Jewish immigrants becomes friends with Holocaust deniers and promotes David Duke? Is it just a combination of an over confident and hostile personality type, something about his home life? Scary.
I like Chomsky’s quote on it, although he said “no one takes it seriously” which appears unfortunately incorrect.
“Now, there are consistent libertarians, people like Murray Rothbard [American academic]—and if you just read the world that they describe, it's a world so full of hate that no human being would want to live in it. This is a world where you don't have roads because you don't see any reason why you should cooperate in building a road that you're not going to use: if you want a road, you get together with a bunch of other people who are going to use that road and you build it, then you charge people to ride on it. If you don't like the pollution from somebody's automobile, you take them to court and you litigate it. Who would want to live in a world like that? It's a world built on hatred.”
I've been wondering about him and his motives, too. John, do you know much about him and the source of his ideas?
Armchair, intellectual here. I’m not as well-read as many, if not all, of you. A couple of years ago, I got curious about Bannon. And given that this local Colorado author put out a book about his background and path to, well, whatever he is today.
I’m curious what you all think of this. And if you haven’t read it, I recommend at least getting past the 3/8 that I read and was amazed by. In many ways, it feels like a decent meta-explanation of what we see happening on a number of continents. It also seems that Trump is just an opportunist riding the populist waves.
WAR FOR ETERNITY ~
INSIDE BANNON'S
FAR-RIGHT CIRCLE OF
GLOBAL POWER BROKERS
"a vital need to appeal directly to the masses, emotionally, even demagogically, over the heads of the Establishment"
"a charismatic leader, a leader who could make a direct appeal to the masses and thereby undercut the ruling and opinion-molding elite"
JFC. McCarthy was 70 years ahead of his time. Lucky for America in the 50s that Xitter didn't exist back then.
The hollowing-out of decent journalism, the reliance on scouring X for ideas, the advertising monopoly of the big SM platforms have left the legacy media toothless to take on any serious shift such as the one we are in.
You can see rolling news and radio phone-ins as a precursor to the algorithmic hellscape to which too many are now addicted.
Big changes still to come - the concentration of so much media reach is fatal for a flourishing society.
"You can see rolling news and radio phone-ins as a precursor to the algorithmic hellscape to which too many are now addicted." Yes, someone wrote a book about this :)
Very much enjoyed it too, John.
Keep on keeping on.