I don’t buy the idea that making due with less is a real vision. It seems to me a retroactive response to the economic see-sawing because of the tariffs. It is actually an odd acknowledgement of reality by Trump. The Trump/Vance vision articulated in the campaign — we were going to all be winning and everyone else was going to pay. We were all going to be paying less for eggs and everything was going to be beautiful.
I do find the idea that there is a particular gendered suffering to tariffs fascinating and it does link to the wider attack on women and the retrograde pro-natalist rhetoric coming from the GOP.
Re "making do with less" - that's just rhetoric to push austerity-cum-tax-cuts. Differs from the neoliberal prescription in the institutions and free trade, but not in the basic effect of dismantling what's left of the welfare state, and facilitating concentration of wealth via privatization and monopolization of what used to be public goods.
The part which is nationalist ideology is domestic politics. Can't do the program if you don't have the power. There is a sort of reverse feminist element in that, and therefore the whole "anti-woke" strand is liable to do more harm than good since single moms raise such a large proportion of kids. But the need for power outweighs other consequences. Same for anti-immigration ideology.
The part to do with international power balance is changed the least. At least in goals and belief in US exceptionalism. A reshuffle as Israel/Iran line of action boosted from 80% priority to 99% priority. Re China, ship has sailed already as is plainly visible. But will be kept as a useful bogeyman to make allies do things they might otherwise resist.
This smells like sane-washing. Picking what a few factions are trying to do / saying and saying “this is the plan” when the most likely there are a bunch of competing factions being able to do whatever and there is no real plan.
What I think you're saying, if I can put it more simply, is that Trump offers voters an ideology and a narrative while Democrats don't. And as far as I can tell, no centrist left party in the West has put together a platform or series of ideas big and bold enough to supplant the Cold War narrative of us vs. the Soviet Union. Trump filled the void first and has been rewarded richly for it. It's tragic, but until the centrist left comes up with something as ambitious as Trumpism, it will struggle to win elections.
Failure of the centrist Left absolutely - they put up quite incomeptent candidates with no policies three times running. Much like the centrist Right who also couldn't find candidates to challenge Trump 3 times.
It’s funny that you say the centrist left had no ideas to put forward for voters. The same was long said about the GOP whose only offerings were tax cuts for the rich, and gun rights that were allegedly always on the edge of a cliff.
The contexts for the rise of fascism 1.0 was very different from the current backlash. The 1920s and 30s played out against the "spectre of communism" which cast a cloud over Europe and the world. Fascism can only be understood as a response to the fear of worldwide communist revolution even after Stalin decided to turn inwards and away from the goal of spreading communism abroad. The capitalist class embraced fascism more in desperation than as a desirable alternative. Fascism 1.0 happily coopted large parts of the socialist agenda and appealed rhetorically to the working class as an anti-capitalist phenomenon.
Arguably fascism 2.0 comes much closer to the original Marxist-Leninist definition as the last and most brutal stage of a dying capitalism. Without the existential threat of a hostile ideology like communism, the new fascism is a desperate attempt to ringfence neoliberal capitalism from its own self-destructive impulses as it seeks to accumulate ever greater power and wealth at the expense of society, government and a collapsing environment. The new fascism is capitalism in its most naked, destructive and sociopathic form that crushes anything that challenges its dominance. Even the rule of law, civic freedoms, freedom of speech and protection from arbitrary detention, dispossession and deportation, traditional bedrocks of the free-market, liberal open society that regards individual citizens rights and freedoms, haebeus corpus and the sanctity of property and due process as sacrosanct, are being brutally crushed to preserve the power and wealth of the oligarchs and super rich. The judiciary and the courts are no longer spared as the principle of separation of powers is attacked by an almighty executive freed from legislative oversight and judicial control.
The legitimacy of the neoliberal brand of capitalism has been crumbling ever since the financial crisis. As each attempt to shore it up failed, the billionaire class, their cronies and stooges its main beneficiaries have pushed the political dialogue further and further to the right, shouting down any attempts to question the foundations of the neoliberal model. Hoping to distract the disenfranchised and disillusioned masses away from the grotesque inequalities and unfairness of late-stage neoliberalism by scapegoating the weakest and most vulnerable members of society: migrants, ethnic minorities, women, the homeless, jobless and the poor. Unlike fascism 1.0, their only vision for the future is either the dystopian tech-led authoritarianism of Project 2025 or Putin's paranoid orwellian Eurasian fantasy of a Russian-Chinese empire to challenge the west and US hegemony.
Quinn Slobodian who has chronicled the emergence of the neoliberal consensus from its obscure beginnings in central Europe has published a new book linking its decay to the rise of the populist right "Hayek's Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right" https://www.ft.com/content/5d5be168-ada4-4fc2-a213-374334888514
It ain't fascist, it's communist. Look at these goals. Critique? Collectivism? Shared sacrifice and commitment?
Then think through practical realities. He wants to restore US manufacturing. Can we compete with Asia on quantity or quality of factory labor? Wages? Prices? Not a chance... unless we automate. All indicators point to that inevitability.
This means a complete transformation of the economy. AI and automation will take over the vast majority of human labor.
The only way to prevent political and social upheaval during drastic economic dislocations with dwindling opportunities for human labor is UBI. I would be immensely surprised if USA didn't have some form of it by 2035...
Massive state-sponsored and protected industries that control all production without competition, while citizens are paid a stipend, is basically the definition of communism. That's where we're headed.
Or it could lead to upheaval that elites manage actively and through neglect. Like "exterminism" in Peter Frase's book/article Four Futures about 4 possible results of automation replacing much of human labor.
So does scarcity, even if it's artificial. Trump's telling us our kids don't need 30 dolls. He may be right (I'm not a huge fan of rabid consumerism) but that's not the point. It reveals the mentality, the direction. Elon and Thiel are much less subtle.
Terminism seems like the modal outcome at this point, to me.
Clearly you haven't been reading the communists but at best the Stalinists, bitter social-democrats (CIA socialists) and academic historians who can't tell the difference. In any case, fascism does not equal communism; they are very very different, as Hitler found out. And Trump is no fascist (or we wouldn't be having this conversation). Lots of governments make repressive laws and follow through on them, some monsterously so. But you ever seen a capitalist government expropriate corporations without compensation, not just one or two, but across the board, while setting up central economic planning? Trump as communist?? He has nothing to offer the working class except breaking unions and strikes and less government regulation of wayward companies, driving down wages, forcing layoffs, environmentally decimating their towns and health, and if all else fails marching the younger of them off to war. Does that sound like communism?
The CCP is hardcore Stalinists, resting on a socialist revolution in a backward country. No workers democracy. Wasteful, self-serving and anti-revolutionary bureaucracy. Yes, they have *some* of the fundamental central planning elements of a socialist revolution, which is why they have been able to accomplish as much as they have, including an Industrial Revolution in 20 years (vs. the two centuries it took capitalism). But they are a far cry from being politically communist, even if they have people read Marx (and Mao). Before you go on about communism anymore, I suggest you start with Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution.
You're late to the party. Capitalism has been collectivizing aspects of its operation since the early 19th century. Hardly communism or "socialism" though. The drive for the accumulation of capital doesn't inherently lead to anything but depressions and wars and (sometimes) revolutions, some of which will be communist in one way or another.
“Late to the party…” don’t believe we’ve spoken before, so no.
Capitalism has been collectivizing for 175 years but it’s not collectivist. Capitalism only inherently leads to wars, and depressions, and revolutions, unlike Socialist and Communist countries, all of which have never experienced any of those. Got it.
I did say “endgame,” not “since the 19th century.”
Like the people who say, Well, Hitler was a dictator and Stalin was a dictator, so the fascism and communism are the same, you treat all participation in military conflict ("war") as the same.
1) World War I: After the October 1917 Revolution and the end of WWI, 18 capitalist countries, including the U.S., militarily attacked the Soviet Union in an attempt to overthrow the workers revolution, and in support of the Whites. The Red Army defended the revolution -- successfully.
2) World War II: Germany attacked the USSR, not the other way around (Stalin ignored warnings of it coming). Prior to that, the USSR occupied Finland as a defensive measure in case of war. The Red Army, having defeated the Germany army on its own soil, carried the war to Germany and, not wanting it to happen again, maintained political and defensive military alliances throughout Central and Eastern Europe.
3) Direct Soviet military incursions later into Hungary and Czechoslovakia were police actions, not wars, in collaboration and in support of local authorities.
4) China: Japan attacked and occupied China, not the other way around. Since the 1949 Revolution, its Chinese Red Army supported North Korea on its border (early 1950s) against the U.S. Army, a long way from its borders; China and India have had border disputes, sometimes involving a bit of shooting; China for awhile allowed its airspace to be used in support of the North Vietnamese and the southern National Liberation Front against the U.S. army, which invaded in support of its puppet regime in Saigon and its army (essentially intervening in a Civil War); and after the Indochina War, China (stupidly) invaded part of Vietnam, which is on its border (I forget the exact issues).
I love the way you just breezed through the Chinese Revolution like it was a walk along the riverbank in summertime. Call me when you get done counting Mao’s dead. High estimate is 70 million.
Since your factual claims don't stand up, why not switch subjects. While Stalinist Mao's dastardly "Great Leap Forward" directly and indirectly led to millions of deaths, your figure of 70 million is the stuff of right wing crackpots. The common estimates by credible researchers are 15-35 million. But if you want to count heads, go ahead and add up the victims of Stalin, Mao and the Khmer Rouge and you won't even come close to capitalism's victims. Not remotely in the ballpark. Yet about those you have nothing to say, let alone the fact that good majority of capitalist regimes throughout the world are outright or in effect dictatorships.
If you knew the slightest thing about China, you'd know that the victory of a Stalinist-led army/party was in fair part the result of U.S., British and Japanese capitalist imperialism's actions in the country over the previous 100 years. Yet, even with the enormous deformity and demoralization wrought by Stalinist rule, compare China and India in 1948 to where they are now. Night and day. The difference between the two are the effects of the victory of an ideologically socialist revolution, the sense and fact of considerable collectivization and state control of capitalist development and, mostly importantly, state controlled economic planning.
Trump's vision, it seems to me, is whatever people much more knowledgeable than he ascribe to his largely incoherent statements. Trump's claim to business success is based on inheritance and what he learned from the Mafia and Roy Cohn. He is but a child when it comes to strategic thinking compared to Xi and Putin. His vacuity is the danger.
I also disagree that policies that attempt to secure supply chains on key sectors of the economy is somehow retrograde or misguided when China and Russia pursue strategies to insulate themselves from economic repercussions of their aggressive military foreign policies. Trump does not understand that, but instead pursues his inane and self defeating tariffs. The future consists of making it through the next four years without a disaster. Trump's view of the future is day's or weeks; he improvises.
As I remember, Hirschman was describing the options available to people who work in an organization: voice, loyalty and exit. Thiel and Musk et. al own the organization, so the only thing they have to exit from is their responsibility from the failures of their instruments: Trump and Vance.
In his pursuit of power Trump cobbles together the various factions of the maga base for a misremembered nostalgia for a past when the deserving were in power. Philosophical rationalizations will be invented for the exercise of that power, but no one believes any of it.
Daily Mail: What the global elite reveal to Davos sex workers: High-class escort spills the beans on what happens behind closed doors - and how wealthy 'know the world is doomed, so may as well go out with a bang'
Mr. Tooze is too generous with Mr. Trump and his ilk.
Their ilk of American supremacists (exceptionalists) want to keep the US as the big gangster that runs a protection raket. Didn't Japanese officials (known by their diplomacy and subservience to the US) called US demands extortionists?
The fact is that more than wanting the jobs returned to the US (which some elites genuinely want, telling temselves that they will find a way to deal with the labour movement whent it is going to resurface then), Trump and all American hawks resent all the money China gets, which they used to invest in R&D big time, to improve the lot of the population, to really modernize China, to make it an industrial giant that can challange the US anytime and anywhere and thus cannot be made to pay "protection money".
The beef with Xi and Putin started when both curtailed the nascent oligarchs that were seeking light from Wall Street, and stopped the flow of money out of their respective countries. A Russia and a China still walking on such a road would be still highly praised by the US. US loves compradror elites, which make their work cheaper and more efficient. For instance, Romania, during its Phanariot period (cca 1720-1850) experienced exactly such a thing with the Ottomans as the big kahuna.
And MAGA & conservative stalwarts have already warned Trump that he is deviating from his promises. Because they actually don't want Armaggedon. Yeah, maybe a bit of sacrifice and turbulence, but potential war with Iran, with China, with Russia? WIth all three?
NIOSH was all disbanded. Who's going to uphold workers' safety with such an institution vanished? The new workplaces will be run as if every worker were an inmate... At the same salary...
Step 1 - admit that the US is going over the edge of a cliff - and see the world in that light.
This is the Thucydides moment.
Crazy Trump only makes sense if you pretend these are not crazy times. Contrast Biden and Trump.
One refuses to accept there is anything wrong, believes that US can keep funding its military, win wars (despire never having won in decades), and was in complete denial that anything was going wrong.
The other said Make America Greate AGAIN - the first and only real admission that US is not Great by any politician (it is truths like this that gets Trump elected).
Economics - by PPP china has been bigger since 2015 (earlier by more practical measures)
Military - they can't defeat Houthis - US has limited power, and moder missile tech (hypersonics and cheap accuracy) means that Aircraft Carriers and Multi hundred Million $ jets have become white elephants.
Soft Power - collapsing even before they chose to publicly support a genocide - never has US been hated like now.
AGI - deepseek shows how aI can be done cheaply - so the last Hail Mary of reaching AGI before China with big finance and Hi tech chip barriers is not going to work.
Simple prediction - if US really is a train going off the side of a cliff - Israel must be the first carriage - and it is. A failure to protect Israel will be simple evidence that US in no longer significant.
I used to think Europe would follow in the last carriages, unable to de-couple. But it seems that while US unloosed us, we are determined to follow close behind.
In which case the idiocies of Trump 2 (like weaponising its biggest weakness - the deficit) become normal.
Madness sets in and Trump clutches at straws.
At least the Trump team are aware of how bad it is. The Dem supporting media just insult the Gaucheness of manic Trump while the Band Plays On.
The Trumpist are not trying create a version of 1930's European fascism. They are trying create a modern version of 1920's Jim Crow South. Poor white southerners made economic sacrifices that resonate today in order to make sure that they were socially and at least marginally economically superior to black people.
But also the idea of tariffs is bound up with a confused idea of the past where tariffs protected an America that had high opportunity for less educated people and thicker social bonds
I believe it is you who is missing the point. Please forgive my bluntness.
When Klein and Taylor speak of "space junk" - which seems to annoy you quite a bit - they do not refer to the titanic industrial and political achievement of putting thousands of satellites into orbit, but to what Musk sees when he looks up at night, namely only that which he wants to see.
The whole Klein-Taylor piece is about attitudes, about a way of looking at this world and anything on it. It's not about what's on it or any tariffs applied to that. That is where your response derails.
There is a fascinating idea in it though, igniting at exactly that point of derailment: "that Musk did what we in the progressive camp would actually love to be able to do, namely to imbue a physical project of transformation with cultural and political heft". Could you please elaborate? This sounds essential.
Your response reminds me of the bane of all leftist thinking, namley fractioning - the Judean People's Front as Monty Python had it. While in agreement over 92% of the argument, we choose to split over 8% disagreement and feel the need to put Klein and Taylor in their place.
"El Salvador’s prisons are horrendous facilities, but they are not concentration camps, let alone extermination facilities"
So, Trump isn't (yet) Hitler. The more relevant comparisons are to Mussolini (the only fascist mentioned by name in the linked passage), Franco and the Austro-fascists. The regime Trump is trying (with a fair bit of success) to establish will be at least as bad as theirs. And there's nothing unique in Trump's rhetoric of sacrifice, which only emerged when it became obvious that things weren't going well. Goebbels on "guns or butter" is the most famous precedent.
While not the majority of Democrats, I think that there are a cohort "Green New Deal advocates" who would be willing to challenge to American society with the pleas of sacrifice for the future. Instead of decreasing consumerism with tariffs, it would be with taxes. But politicians have been conditioned to stay away from mentioning raised taxes at all cost. It was never you facing higher taxes – only the guy richer than you. Maybe they should have been more forceful in the realities of what's necessary to fix our future. Stop kicking the can down the road, and invest actual money in our country.
I don’t buy the idea that making due with less is a real vision. It seems to me a retroactive response to the economic see-sawing because of the tariffs. It is actually an odd acknowledgement of reality by Trump. The Trump/Vance vision articulated in the campaign — we were going to all be winning and everyone else was going to pay. We were all going to be paying less for eggs and everything was going to be beautiful.
I do find the idea that there is a particular gendered suffering to tariffs fascinating and it does link to the wider attack on women and the retrograde pro-natalist rhetoric coming from the GOP.
Re "making do with less" - that's just rhetoric to push austerity-cum-tax-cuts. Differs from the neoliberal prescription in the institutions and free trade, but not in the basic effect of dismantling what's left of the welfare state, and facilitating concentration of wealth via privatization and monopolization of what used to be public goods.
The part which is nationalist ideology is domestic politics. Can't do the program if you don't have the power. There is a sort of reverse feminist element in that, and therefore the whole "anti-woke" strand is liable to do more harm than good since single moms raise such a large proportion of kids. But the need for power outweighs other consequences. Same for anti-immigration ideology.
The part to do with international power balance is changed the least. At least in goals and belief in US exceptionalism. A reshuffle as Israel/Iran line of action boosted from 80% priority to 99% priority. Re China, ship has sailed already as is plainly visible. But will be kept as a useful bogeyman to make allies do things they might otherwise resist.
This smells like sane-washing. Picking what a few factions are trying to do / saying and saying “this is the plan” when the most likely there are a bunch of competing factions being able to do whatever and there is no real plan.
What I think you're saying, if I can put it more simply, is that Trump offers voters an ideology and a narrative while Democrats don't. And as far as I can tell, no centrist left party in the West has put together a platform or series of ideas big and bold enough to supplant the Cold War narrative of us vs. the Soviet Union. Trump filled the void first and has been rewarded richly for it. It's tragic, but until the centrist left comes up with something as ambitious as Trumpism, it will struggle to win elections.
Failure of the centrist Left absolutely - they put up quite incomeptent candidates with no policies three times running. Much like the centrist Right who also couldn't find candidates to challenge Trump 3 times.
It’s funny that you say the centrist left had no ideas to put forward for voters. The same was long said about the GOP whose only offerings were tax cuts for the rich, and gun rights that were allegedly always on the edge of a cliff.
The contexts for the rise of fascism 1.0 was very different from the current backlash. The 1920s and 30s played out against the "spectre of communism" which cast a cloud over Europe and the world. Fascism can only be understood as a response to the fear of worldwide communist revolution even after Stalin decided to turn inwards and away from the goal of spreading communism abroad. The capitalist class embraced fascism more in desperation than as a desirable alternative. Fascism 1.0 happily coopted large parts of the socialist agenda and appealed rhetorically to the working class as an anti-capitalist phenomenon.
Arguably fascism 2.0 comes much closer to the original Marxist-Leninist definition as the last and most brutal stage of a dying capitalism. Without the existential threat of a hostile ideology like communism, the new fascism is a desperate attempt to ringfence neoliberal capitalism from its own self-destructive impulses as it seeks to accumulate ever greater power and wealth at the expense of society, government and a collapsing environment. The new fascism is capitalism in its most naked, destructive and sociopathic form that crushes anything that challenges its dominance. Even the rule of law, civic freedoms, freedom of speech and protection from arbitrary detention, dispossession and deportation, traditional bedrocks of the free-market, liberal open society that regards individual citizens rights and freedoms, haebeus corpus and the sanctity of property and due process as sacrosanct, are being brutally crushed to preserve the power and wealth of the oligarchs and super rich. The judiciary and the courts are no longer spared as the principle of separation of powers is attacked by an almighty executive freed from legislative oversight and judicial control.
The legitimacy of the neoliberal brand of capitalism has been crumbling ever since the financial crisis. As each attempt to shore it up failed, the billionaire class, their cronies and stooges its main beneficiaries have pushed the political dialogue further and further to the right, shouting down any attempts to question the foundations of the neoliberal model. Hoping to distract the disenfranchised and disillusioned masses away from the grotesque inequalities and unfairness of late-stage neoliberalism by scapegoating the weakest and most vulnerable members of society: migrants, ethnic minorities, women, the homeless, jobless and the poor. Unlike fascism 1.0, their only vision for the future is either the dystopian tech-led authoritarianism of Project 2025 or Putin's paranoid orwellian Eurasian fantasy of a Russian-Chinese empire to challenge the west and US hegemony.
Quinn Slobodian who has chronicled the emergence of the neoliberal consensus from its obscure beginnings in central Europe has published a new book linking its decay to the rise of the populist right "Hayek's Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right" https://www.ft.com/content/5d5be168-ada4-4fc2-a213-374334888514
It ain't fascist, it's communist. Look at these goals. Critique? Collectivism? Shared sacrifice and commitment?
Then think through practical realities. He wants to restore US manufacturing. Can we compete with Asia on quantity or quality of factory labor? Wages? Prices? Not a chance... unless we automate. All indicators point to that inevitability.
This means a complete transformation of the economy. AI and automation will take over the vast majority of human labor.
The only way to prevent political and social upheaval during drastic economic dislocations with dwindling opportunities for human labor is UBI. I would be immensely surprised if USA didn't have some form of it by 2035...
Massive state-sponsored and protected industries that control all production without competition, while citizens are paid a stipend, is basically the definition of communism. That's where we're headed.
I think you mean feudalism
Same difference.
Or it could lead to upheaval that elites manage actively and through neglect. Like "exterminism" in Peter Frase's book/article Four Futures about 4 possible results of automation replacing much of human labor.
https://jacobin.com/2011/12/four-futures
Hierarchy seems inevitable.
So does scarcity, even if it's artificial. Trump's telling us our kids don't need 30 dolls. He may be right (I'm not a huge fan of rabid consumerism) but that's not the point. It reveals the mentality, the direction. Elon and Thiel are much less subtle.
Terminism seems like the modal outcome at this point, to me.
turns out blox is a typical born again right winger, throwing around terms from his past that he didn't get in the first place. It's hard to turn 30.
communist? You've been reading too many right wing texts.
Mostly just communist history.
Tell me, is this giving Benito Mussolini or Mao Zedong?
"You, cancer researcher -- go forge steel in Indiana!"
Clearly you haven't been reading the communists but at best the Stalinists, bitter social-democrats (CIA socialists) and academic historians who can't tell the difference. In any case, fascism does not equal communism; they are very very different, as Hitler found out. And Trump is no fascist (or we wouldn't be having this conversation). Lots of governments make repressive laws and follow through on them, some monsterously so. But you ever seen a capitalist government expropriate corporations without compensation, not just one or two, but across the board, while setting up central economic planning? Trump as communist?? He has nothing to offer the working class except breaking unions and strikes and less government regulation of wayward companies, driving down wages, forcing layoffs, environmentally decimating their towns and health, and if all else fails marching the younger of them off to war. Does that sound like communism?
>> Does that sound like communism?
Uh, yes. You have described the CCP.
The CCP is hardcore Stalinists, resting on a socialist revolution in a backward country. No workers democracy. Wasteful, self-serving and anti-revolutionary bureaucracy. Yes, they have *some* of the fundamental central planning elements of a socialist revolution, which is why they have been able to accomplish as much as they have, including an Industrial Revolution in 20 years (vs. the two centuries it took capitalism). But they are a far cry from being politically communist, even if they have people read Marx (and Mao). Before you go on about communism anymore, I suggest you start with Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution.
I’ve always thought that the endgame of capitalism perfected was communism
You're late to the party. Capitalism has been collectivizing aspects of its operation since the early 19th century. Hardly communism or "socialism" though. The drive for the accumulation of capital doesn't inherently lead to anything but depressions and wars and (sometimes) revolutions, some of which will be communist in one way or another.
“Late to the party…” don’t believe we’ve spoken before, so no.
Capitalism has been collectivizing for 175 years but it’s not collectivist. Capitalism only inherently leads to wars, and depressions, and revolutions, unlike Socialist and Communist countries, all of which have never experienced any of those. Got it.
I did say “endgame,” not “since the 19th century.”
Like the people who say, Well, Hitler was a dictator and Stalin was a dictator, so the fascism and communism are the same, you treat all participation in military conflict ("war") as the same.
1) World War I: After the October 1917 Revolution and the end of WWI, 18 capitalist countries, including the U.S., militarily attacked the Soviet Union in an attempt to overthrow the workers revolution, and in support of the Whites. The Red Army defended the revolution -- successfully.
2) World War II: Germany attacked the USSR, not the other way around (Stalin ignored warnings of it coming). Prior to that, the USSR occupied Finland as a defensive measure in case of war. The Red Army, having defeated the Germany army on its own soil, carried the war to Germany and, not wanting it to happen again, maintained political and defensive military alliances throughout Central and Eastern Europe.
3) Direct Soviet military incursions later into Hungary and Czechoslovakia were police actions, not wars, in collaboration and in support of local authorities.
4) China: Japan attacked and occupied China, not the other way around. Since the 1949 Revolution, its Chinese Red Army supported North Korea on its border (early 1950s) against the U.S. Army, a long way from its borders; China and India have had border disputes, sometimes involving a bit of shooting; China for awhile allowed its airspace to be used in support of the North Vietnamese and the southern National Liberation Front against the U.S. army, which invaded in support of its puppet regime in Saigon and its army (essentially intervening in a Civil War); and after the Indochina War, China (stupidly) invaded part of Vietnam, which is on its border (I forget the exact issues).
That's the sum of "warlike" communism.
I love the way you just breezed through the Chinese Revolution like it was a walk along the riverbank in summertime. Call me when you get done counting Mao’s dead. High estimate is 70 million.
Since your factual claims don't stand up, why not switch subjects. While Stalinist Mao's dastardly "Great Leap Forward" directly and indirectly led to millions of deaths, your figure of 70 million is the stuff of right wing crackpots. The common estimates by credible researchers are 15-35 million. But if you want to count heads, go ahead and add up the victims of Stalin, Mao and the Khmer Rouge and you won't even come close to capitalism's victims. Not remotely in the ballpark. Yet about those you have nothing to say, let alone the fact that good majority of capitalist regimes throughout the world are outright or in effect dictatorships.
If you knew the slightest thing about China, you'd know that the victory of a Stalinist-led army/party was in fair part the result of U.S., British and Japanese capitalist imperialism's actions in the country over the previous 100 years. Yet, even with the enormous deformity and demoralization wrought by Stalinist rule, compare China and India in 1948 to where they are now. Night and day. The difference between the two are the effects of the victory of an ideologically socialist revolution, the sense and fact of considerable collectivization and state control of capitalist development and, mostly importantly, state controlled economic planning.
Trump's vision, it seems to me, is whatever people much more knowledgeable than he ascribe to his largely incoherent statements. Trump's claim to business success is based on inheritance and what he learned from the Mafia and Roy Cohn. He is but a child when it comes to strategic thinking compared to Xi and Putin. His vacuity is the danger.
I also disagree that policies that attempt to secure supply chains on key sectors of the economy is somehow retrograde or misguided when China and Russia pursue strategies to insulate themselves from economic repercussions of their aggressive military foreign policies. Trump does not understand that, but instead pursues his inane and self defeating tariffs. The future consists of making it through the next four years without a disaster. Trump's view of the future is day's or weeks; he improvises.
As I remember, Hirschman was describing the options available to people who work in an organization: voice, loyalty and exit. Thiel and Musk et. al own the organization, so the only thing they have to exit from is their responsibility from the failures of their instruments: Trump and Vance.
In his pursuit of power Trump cobbles together the various factions of the maga base for a misremembered nostalgia for a past when the deserving were in power. Philosophical rationalizations will be invented for the exercise of that power, but no one believes any of it.
Daily Mail: What the global elite reveal to Davos sex workers: High-class escort spills the beans on what happens behind closed doors - and how wealthy 'know the world is doomed, so may as well go out with a bang'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14314191/global-elite-Davos-high-class-escort-spills-beans.html
Mr. Tooze is too generous with Mr. Trump and his ilk.
Their ilk of American supremacists (exceptionalists) want to keep the US as the big gangster that runs a protection raket. Didn't Japanese officials (known by their diplomacy and subservience to the US) called US demands extortionists?
The fact is that more than wanting the jobs returned to the US (which some elites genuinely want, telling temselves that they will find a way to deal with the labour movement whent it is going to resurface then), Trump and all American hawks resent all the money China gets, which they used to invest in R&D big time, to improve the lot of the population, to really modernize China, to make it an industrial giant that can challange the US anytime and anywhere and thus cannot be made to pay "protection money".
The beef with Xi and Putin started when both curtailed the nascent oligarchs that were seeking light from Wall Street, and stopped the flow of money out of their respective countries. A Russia and a China still walking on such a road would be still highly praised by the US. US loves compradror elites, which make their work cheaper and more efficient. For instance, Romania, during its Phanariot period (cca 1720-1850) experienced exactly such a thing with the Ottomans as the big kahuna.
And MAGA & conservative stalwarts have already warned Trump that he is deviating from his promises. Because they actually don't want Armaggedon. Yeah, maybe a bit of sacrifice and turbulence, but potential war with Iran, with China, with Russia? WIth all three?
NIOSH was all disbanded. Who's going to uphold workers' safety with such an institution vanished? The new workplaces will be run as if every worker were an inmate... At the same salary...
Step 1 - admit that the US is going over the edge of a cliff - and see the world in that light.
This is the Thucydides moment.
Crazy Trump only makes sense if you pretend these are not crazy times. Contrast Biden and Trump.
One refuses to accept there is anything wrong, believes that US can keep funding its military, win wars (despire never having won in decades), and was in complete denial that anything was going wrong.
The other said Make America Greate AGAIN - the first and only real admission that US is not Great by any politician (it is truths like this that gets Trump elected).
Economics - by PPP china has been bigger since 2015 (earlier by more practical measures)
Military - they can't defeat Houthis - US has limited power, and moder missile tech (hypersonics and cheap accuracy) means that Aircraft Carriers and Multi hundred Million $ jets have become white elephants.
Soft Power - collapsing even before they chose to publicly support a genocide - never has US been hated like now.
AGI - deepseek shows how aI can be done cheaply - so the last Hail Mary of reaching AGI before China with big finance and Hi tech chip barriers is not going to work.
Simple prediction - if US really is a train going off the side of a cliff - Israel must be the first carriage - and it is. A failure to protect Israel will be simple evidence that US in no longer significant.
I used to think Europe would follow in the last carriages, unable to de-couple. But it seems that while US unloosed us, we are determined to follow close behind.
In which case the idiocies of Trump 2 (like weaponising its biggest weakness - the deficit) become normal.
Madness sets in and Trump clutches at straws.
At least the Trump team are aware of how bad it is. The Dem supporting media just insult the Gaucheness of manic Trump while the Band Plays On.
lol
The Trumpist are not trying create a version of 1930's European fascism. They are trying create a modern version of 1920's Jim Crow South. Poor white southerners made economic sacrifices that resonate today in order to make sure that they were socially and at least marginally economically superior to black people.
But also the idea of tariffs is bound up with a confused idea of the past where tariffs protected an America that had high opportunity for less educated people and thicker social bonds
“Utopians”? Only for a select few. Everyone else pays a heavy price.
I believe it is you who is missing the point. Please forgive my bluntness.
When Klein and Taylor speak of "space junk" - which seems to annoy you quite a bit - they do not refer to the titanic industrial and political achievement of putting thousands of satellites into orbit, but to what Musk sees when he looks up at night, namely only that which he wants to see.
The whole Klein-Taylor piece is about attitudes, about a way of looking at this world and anything on it. It's not about what's on it or any tariffs applied to that. That is where your response derails.
There is a fascinating idea in it though, igniting at exactly that point of derailment: "that Musk did what we in the progressive camp would actually love to be able to do, namely to imbue a physical project of transformation with cultural and political heft". Could you please elaborate? This sounds essential.
Your response reminds me of the bane of all leftist thinking, namley fractioning - the Judean People's Front as Monty Python had it. While in agreement over 92% of the argument, we choose to split over 8% disagreement and feel the need to put Klein and Taylor in their place.
"El Salvador’s prisons are horrendous facilities, but they are not concentration camps, let alone extermination facilities"
So, Trump isn't (yet) Hitler. The more relevant comparisons are to Mussolini (the only fascist mentioned by name in the linked passage), Franco and the Austro-fascists. The regime Trump is trying (with a fair bit of success) to establish will be at least as bad as theirs. And there's nothing unique in Trump's rhetoric of sacrifice, which only emerged when it became obvious that things weren't going well. Goebbels on "guns or butter" is the most famous precedent.
I'm confused by this: "To this day there are Americans on the left fighting a forlorn rearguard action for industrial policy..."
Are you suggesting the US doesn't need an industrial policy?
Seriously?
While not the majority of Democrats, I think that there are a cohort "Green New Deal advocates" who would be willing to challenge to American society with the pleas of sacrifice for the future. Instead of decreasing consumerism with tariffs, it would be with taxes. But politicians have been conditioned to stay away from mentioning raised taxes at all cost. It was never you facing higher taxes – only the guy richer than you. Maybe they should have been more forceful in the realities of what's necessary to fix our future. Stop kicking the can down the road, and invest actual money in our country.