WHY CONSERVATIVE REGARD FOR COOLIDGE IS MISPLACED:

The dark parallels between 1920s America and today’s political climate (Alex Green, 3/10/25, The Conversation)

Other Americans were concerned about the possible rise of communism in the U.S., as well as the arrival of many immigrants. This led extremists to introduce and implement hate-based policies at the federal and state level that targeted nonwhite immigrants and disabled people.

Among the most significant results of that political moment was the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, a restrictive immigration policy that, among other changes, prohibited immigration from Asia.

Another pivotal movement was the Supreme Court’s 1927 Buck v. Bell decision, which affirmed that the state of Virginia had the right to sterilize intellectually and developmentally disabled people.

The Johnson-Reed Act prompted a major shift in American immigration policy, based on the fear of something that former President Theodore Roosevelt and others called “race suicide.”

The law introduced rigid restrictions keeping people out of the country who were not from Northern and Western Europe. The immigration quotas that it established would continue to be enforced into the 1960s.

The U.S. politicians who lobbied for this law were successful because they supported their effort by presenting evidence that showed purportedly scientific proof that almost all people in the world were biologically inferior to a group they called the Nordic Race – meaning people from Northern Europe – and their American descendants, who formed a group they called the “American Race.”

By restricting immigration from all other groups, these legislators believed they were counterbalancing a crushing period where war and pandemic had killed off what they saw as the country’s best people.

Different groups preyed on Americans’ grief about the war and pandemic and directed it against minority groups.

From Maine to California, a revived Ku Klux Klan attracted millions of followers with its belief that white people were superior to all others, and that Black people should remain enslaved. At the same time, a group of scientists, doctors and psychologists found enormous success in persuading the public that there were scientific reasons why hatred and discrimination needed to be incorporated into American government.

Their proof was something called eugenics, a pseudoscience which argued that humans had to use advanced technology and medicine to get people with good traits to reproduce while stopping those with bad traits from having the opportunity to do so.

Harry Laughlin, a eugenicist based at a research laboratory in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, was one of this movement’s most vocal representatives.

Laughlin worked for several different eugenics research organizations, and this helped him become successful at creating propaganda supporting eugenics that influenced public policy. He then gained a spot as an expert eugenics adviser to Congress in the early 1920s. With his position, Laughlin then provided the pseudoscientific data that gave the supporters of Johnson-Reed the claims they needed to justify passing the measure.

Nazism is just the German version of the science of American Progressives.

THE DRAGON HAS NO TEETH:

The End of the Chinese Dream (Yi Fuxian, Mar. 10th, 2025, Project Syndicate)

Back in 2016, I told the New York Times that China’s aging population and shrinking labor force would prevent its economy from overtaking America’s – a conclusion I had arrived at in the 2007 and 2013 editions of my book Big Country with an Empty Nest. Chinese authorities were not happy. I immediately went from being a state guest to a name on the government’s blacklist. Then, in 2019, I angered the authorities again by publishing a commentary bearing the headline: “Worse than Japan: how China’s looming demographic crisis will doom its economic dream.”

According to the dominant narrative at the time, the “Chinese century” was “well under way” (as The Economist put it). Nonetheless, my findings met with a receptive audience. In the introduction to a November 2020 Brookings Institution book on “the future of US policy toward China,” my commentary was the sole reference listed. (The author, Jeffrey Bader, had been one of the principal architects of the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia.”) Since then, the dominant narrative has shifted, with many more analysts warning of China’s “Japanification.”

Japan’s experience has confirmed that demographics matter for economic growth, and this will remain the case regardless of whether one looks at Germany, France, China, or any other country. Owing to a rapidly growing workforce and a young population, Japan’s GDP grew from a mere 9% of US GDP in 1960 to 73% in 1995, and its per capita GDP grew from 17% of America’s to 154% in the same period. By 1990, Americans had come to regard Japan as their chief rival, with polls showing that three times more Americans feared the economic threat posed by Japan than the military one posed by the Soviet Union.

Yet Japan’s GDP growth rate has been lower than America’s since 1992.

Fear of a rising China is just a function of Sinophobia.

WHITER BUT POORER!:

Trump to Wall Street: Brace for Impact (Peter Coy, 03.11.25, Free Press)

[S]tock prices have fallen at least in part because investors are coming to the painful realization that Trump doesn’t seem to care so much for them anymore. In his first term, Trump viewed the market as his personal scorecard. Now? “You can’t really watch the stock market,” he told Maria Bartiromo on Sunday.

With the market nearing correction territory—defined as a 10 percent drop—since its mid-February peak, I asked Mohamed El-Erian, the bond whiz who is now president of Queens’ College, University of Cambridge, whether this realization was part of the reason stocks had fallen over the past month. He agreed. The steadfast belief that Trump would do whatever it took to keep the stock market happy was termed “the Trump put.” (A put is a derivative that protects its owner from price declines.)

Confidence in the Trump put began to erode when Trump and his economic team started talking about bond yields, rather than stock prices, as their metric of choice, El-Erian said. (Bonds can do well even if stocks are doing poorly.)

Even before this past weekend, the market had been falling, partly thanks to the specter of high tariffs. But then, over the weekend, Trump and others on his team seemed to say that even a recession would not cause the administration to pull back from its tariff strategy.

And because the tariffs could lead not only to slower economic growth but also higher inflation—stagflation, it’s called—investors can’t count on the Federal Reserve to bail them out as it has in the past, El-Erian told me. (That’s called “the Fed put” on Wall Street.) The Fed will hardly be eager to cut interest rates aggressively if tariffs are pushing up prices, he said.

Stocks rose after Trump was elected because investors were looking forward to deregulation and tax cuts. Yes, they assumed that Trump might use the threat of tariffs to gain concessions from trading partners. But he surely wouldn’t be so foolish as to erect high and long-lasting tariff walls. Instead, El-Erian said, “The things that the market really likes haven’t come yet,” and the thing the market doesn’t like—tariffs—are turning out to be more than just tactical threats.

Destroying the economy makes America less attractive to immigrants. The nihilism is intentional.

SHERMAN WAS TOO CIRCUMSPECT:

Waiting for Liberal Democracy in the American South : Our country’s constitutional order is withering before us. In the states of the former Confederacy, democracy never fully flourished. (Alan Elrod, Mar 07, 2025, The Bulwark)

Liberal democracy has never put down deep roots in the South in the way it did across the rest of the country. The region never really abandoned its warped electoral politics and inclination to single-party cronyism, a Southern political instinct that helps explain how Democratic dominance transformed so completely into Republican one-party rule following the civil rights era. Inequality continues to define economic life in the region. […]

Bourbon rule across the South is a good starting place for understanding the challenges facing the region. The Bourbons—Southern Democrats of the planter and professional classes who opposed Reconstruction—came to dramatically shape American politics from the 1870s into the early twentieth century. For decades, this small elite fomented discord among poor whites to keep their political energies focused on their peers rather than their de facto rulers. As Reconstruction began to falter in the mid-1870s, Bourbon power brokers gained control in Southern states like Alabama and Georgia. By the 1890s, the Old South was aggressively reasserting itself. In 1896, the Supreme Court enshrined the principle of “separate but equal.”

In 1898, America’s first coup d’etat took place as the Democrats of Wilmington, North Carolina issued a “White Declaration of Independence.” They were attacking the coalition of black Republicans and white Populists that had control of the local government in the 1890s, which the old Confederates of the city found intolerable. With their resentment and rage being fueled by white Democratic powerbrokers, two thousand armed men forced out the duly elected government. None were more pleased by this result than their Bourbon backers.

V.O. Key Jr., one of America’s greatest scholars of Southern politics, blames this “banker-planter-lawyer” class for the South’s political and economic underdevelopment. Ostensibly pro-business but viciously self-interested, the Bourbons not only defended the South’s racial apartheid but also exploited the region’s poor rural whites, as the Wilmington coup attests.

The consequences of this, as of the Civil War, are still being felt. In a 2024 essay for Aeon, academic and writer Keri Leigh Meritt laid out the many ways the South as a region lags economically—pinned down by poverty, hobbled by an absence of public investments, and choked by a miasma of disillusionment and isolation:

Southerners in general are isolated and lonely, and wealth and power are heavily concentrated: there are a few thousand incredibly wealthy families – almost all of them the direct descendants of the Confederacy’s wealthiest slaveholders – a smaller-than-average middle class, and masses of poor people, working class or not. The South, with few worker protections, prevents its working classes from earning a living wage. It’s virtually impossible to exist on the meagre income of a single, low-wage, 40-hour-a-week job, especially since the US has no social healthcare benefits.

Vance’s comments on the Bourbons place them in a national frame, which brings us to another important dimension of the post-Civil War South. Historian Heather Cox Richardson and others have argued that the South’s oligarchic power structures were not dismantled following the defeat of the Confederacy. A number of modern studies have shown that, in many places in the South, the self-styled aristocrat Bourbons recovered their wealth and status in the years following the Civil War.

Always De-Nazifi.

SCRATCH A TERRORIST FIND A TRUMPIST:

Germany’s alleged Christmas market attacker was steeped in far-right ideology. Why didn’t anyone notice? (Jakob Guhl, March 03, 2025, The Prospect)

Our research team at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), an international counter-extremism organisation, has examined al-Abdulmohsen’s online profile over the past eight years and found that he did in fact have a clear set of views—security services just didn’t spot them. Al-Abdulmohsen consistently expressed views inspired by the counter-jihad movement, a loose network of bloggers, thinktanks and organisations promoting anti-Muslim and often far-right ideas. He considered Islam to be a dangerous, violent and totalitarian ideology, not a religion. He described Muslims and Arabs as intellectually primitive, promoted conspiracy theories about the “Islamisation” of Europe and justified discrimination against Muslims. These posts are not outliers but rather part of a consistent pattern spanning more than eight years.

Despite the AfD’s attempt to use the Magdeburg attack as further evidence to support its anti-migration policies, the alleged attacker had supported the far-right party since 2016. In his view at that time, “I and the AfD were fighting the same enemy in order to protect Germany.” In December 2017, he even shared a post by Alice Weidel in which she blamed Islam for security threats to Christmas markets.

He also supported international far-right figures promoting counter-jihad ideology, including Dutch politician Geert Wilders. In April 2019, he retweeted a post in which Wilders justified revoking Muslims’ freedom of religion. In 2020, he shared multiple tweets by Wilders that said “Stop Islam” or “Stop Muhammadanism”. In August 2024, he shared a post calling Wilders a “hero”.

As early as December 2016, al-Abdulmohsen also expressed support for the British far-right and anti-Muslim activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the founder and former leader of the English Defence League who goes by the name Tommy Robinson. In May 2024, he retweeted Robinson stating that “using the word Islamism let’s [sic] Islam off the hook. The problem is Islam.” In October 2024, he shared a tweet by Robinson promoting his new book, which he claimed provided “all the evidence of the replacement of Europeans by the oligarchy”.

Given the remarkably consistent beliefs in the alleged attacker’s online activity over nearly nine years, why were authorities in Germany seemingly unable to link him to the far right?

Because of Islamophobia.

MUST HAVE THOUGHT HE WAS DEALING WITH AN UNDERAGE GIRL:

From the Berghof to the Oval Office: Notes on the most shameful day in the history of the Republic (Claire Berlinski, Mar 01, 2025, The Global Cosmopolitan)

A man sits across from power. His fingers tighten around the arms of his chair.

The bully makes no effort to mask his contempt. He sits rigidly, eyes burning with an unnatural intensity, fingers twitching on the armrest of his chair. When he speaks, it is not a conversation but an eruption—words spat like bullets, contempt laced through every syllable.

The outburst does not abate. It is not a speech but an assault, designed not to persuade but to disorient, to cow, to humiliate. The bully leans forward, slamming his fists against the table. His face reddens, his voice sharpens. He moves from insults to threats, from history to grandiosity. The great country he leads will no longer be mistreated, he says. Those days are over. The people have had enough. His words are not arguments—they’re sentences, verdicts, pronouncements of doom.

“You are nothing,” says the bully, not quite shouting. One of his lackeys smirks. “You think you are independent? You are a failure, a disgrace.” Behind him, the immense generals stand silent, unmoving. They don’t need to speak; their presence says everything. The visitor looks at them and understands what is being offered. This is not diplomacy. It’s a choice between submission and annihilation.

The visitor is allowed no rebuttal. He does not speak until the torrent of invective slows, and even then, his words are weak, uncertain. He tries to protest, to insist that he and his country are not to blame, that he has done all he could to maintain peace. The bully’s response is bitter, scornful laughter, as if the very idea is absurd. He rises suddenly—pacing now, shaking his head, muttering to himself in a fevered rant. “You will sign, or we will act. You will agree, or you will cease to exist.”

There is no need to say what that means. The visitor has seen the faces of the men behind him. He knows that even if he signs, this meeting is not a negotiation but an autopsy. He has been given no options, only demands. If he yields, his nation dies slowly. If he resists, it dies swiftly. There will be no help coming.

The year was 1938. The visitor was the chancellor of Austria, Kurt Schusch­nigg. The bully was Adolf Hitler. The place was the Berghof…

MAGA IS A CULT:

How a son spent a year trying to save his father from conspiracy theories (Zach Mack, February 26, 2025, NPR)

Reporter Zach Mack and his dad are living in separate realities, and it’s tearing their family apart.
This story is an accompaniment to a podcast series released by NPR’s Embedded called Alternate Realities. You can listen to all three episodes here or wherever you listen to podcasts.

About a year ago, my dad bet me $10,000 that he could foretell the future.

It all started when he texted me a picture of a list. Writing in barely legible cursive, he had scribbled 10 politically apocalyptic predictions. My dad was foreshadowing verdicts of treason for Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden and the Clintons, who would go down for murder as well. Biden would ultimately be removed from office, and so would the governor of New York and the mayor of New York City. It went on. Donald Trump, who was seeking reelection, would have all charges leveled against him at the time dropped, all while being reinstated as president without the need for November’s election. He also thought that the U.S. would come under nationwide martial law.

For all his catastrophizing, I wouldn’t describe my father as a paranoid person — I tend to think of him as an optimist. He’s very friendly, the kind of father who cracks a lot of dad jokes with strangers. But like so many Americans, Dad had gotten swept up in conspiracy theories. Chemtrails, Biden body doubles, the idea that a shadowy cabal he calls “the globalists” is secretly running the world — these are just a few secret plots my father believes in.

The list, however, was something new. My father was now predicting the biggest shake-up in the country’s history, and he was absolutely certain that it would happen within a year.

At the bottom of the page was a challenge: $1,000 for each of the 10 predictions that were supposed to happen sometime in 2024.

MET ONE IDEOLOGUE…:

Were the Nazis Left-Wing?: The parallels between Nazism and communism complicate the standard left–right divide. (Gerfried Ambrosch, 24 Feb 2025, Quillette)

Hitler himself, however, did consider Nazism a form of socialism. In a 1923 interview, he stated,

Socialism is an ancient Aryan, Germanic institution. Our German ancestors held certain lands in common. They cultivated the idea of the common weal. Marxism has no right to disguise itself as socialism. We are not internationalists. Our socialism is national. We demand the fulfillment of the just claims of the productive classes by the state on the basis of race solidarity. To us, state and race are one.

In other words, Hitler considered Marxian communism a socialist heresy. Yet his description of National Socialism as “socialism in evolution, a socialism in everlasting change” echoes the Marxist view of history as a process of dialectical change.

Although Hitler’s version of socialism did not, as he put it, “repudiate private property,” it shared with communism a strong emphasis on collectivism over individualism, with the state not only enforcing the supposed interests of the collective but claiming identity with it. In this regard, the two movements were less ideological enemies than competitors—with liberal democracy as their common enemy. To quote F.A. Hayek in The Road to Serfdom, “The communists and Nazis clashed more frequently with each other than with other parties simply because they competed for the same type of mind and reserved for each other the hatred of the heretic.”

This also helps explain the strikingly similar iconographies that emerged in the totalitarian regimes the Nazis and communists went on to establish. Both these popular movements conceived of history as being propelled by “revolutionary struggle” and sought to remake man in the image of their respective ideologies. Hitler commented, “There is more that unites us with than divides us from bolshevism … above all the genuine revolutionary mentality. I was always aware of this and I have given the order that one should admit former communists to the party immediately.” According to Hitler, “all these new means of the political struggle used by us are Marxist in origin.”

And the parallels run deeper than means and mentality alone.

HONESTY OFFENSIVE:

‘It allowed us to survive, to not go mad’: the CIA book smuggling operation that helped bring down communism (Charlie English, 22 Feb 2025, The Guardian)

Years later, in 1976, when Bogucka joined the emerging Polish opposition movement, she decided to create a library of books that had bypassed the state censor, and donated her own small collection, including this Nineteen Eighty-Four. The SB security service, Poland’s KGB, kept continual watch on her, eavesdropping on her conversations, arresting her and searching her apartment, so she asked neighbours to store the forbidden books. Much of the time, though, they would be circulating among readers, since this would be a “Flying Library”, which rarely touched the ground.

Bogucka’s system of covert lending ran through a network of coordinators, each of whom was responsible for their own tight group of readers. She sorted the books into categories – politics, economics, history, literature – and divided them into packages of 10, before allocating each coordinator a particular day to pick up their parcel, which they carried away in a rucksack. The coordinator would drop the books back the following month at a different address, before picking up a new set.

The demand for Bogucka’s books was such that soon she needed more, and these could only come from the west. Activist friends passed word to London, where émigré publishers arranged shipments of 30 or 40 volumes at a time, smuggling them through the iron curtain aboard the sleeper trains that shuttled back and forth between Paris and Moscow, stopping in Poland along the way. By 1978, Teresa Bogucka’s Flying Library had a stock of 500 prohibited titles.

How many people read her copy of Orwell’s book in those crucial cold war years? Hundreds, probably thousands. And this was just one of millions of titles that arrived illegally in Poland at that time. As well as via trains, books arrived by every possible conveyance: aboard yachts; in secret compartments built into vans and trucks; by balloon; in the post. Mini-editions were slipped into the sheet music of touring musicians, or packed into food tins or Tampax boxes. In one instance, a copy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago was carried on a flight to Warsaw hidden in a baby’s nappy.

What some in the east suspected, but very few knew for sure, was that the uncensored literature flooding the country wasn’t reaching Poles by chance. It was sent as part of a decades-long US intelligence operation, known in Washington as the “CIA book program”, designed, in the words of the programme’s leader, George Minden, to assault the eastern bloc with an “offensive of free, honest thinking”. Minden believed that “truth is contagious”, and if they could only deliver it to the oppressed peoples of the Soviet zone, it was certain to have an effect.

THE SINGULAR GUIDEBOOK TO THE maga MIND:

MAGA’s Mass Appeal: An enigmatic mid-century thinker helps explain Trump’s true believers (Bernard Prusak, February 12, 2025, Commonweal)

Hoffer is not MAGA avant la lettre, so to speak, but reading him did throw light for me on MAGA as a movement, uniting a mass of people in a common cause. According to Hoffer, mass movements appeal to those he calls “the frustrated,” people who feel “disinherited and injured by an unjust order of things.” The leader of such a movement “cannot conjure [it] out of the void.” Instead, there first has to be “an intense dissatisfaction with things as they are.” The leader then articulates and justifies “the resentment dammed up in the souls of the frustrated” and stages “the world of make-believe” in which the world is made anew and the frustrated find satisfaction. Hoffer also notes “the enormous joy [the frustrated] derive” from decrying “the present and all its works.” They “derive as much satisfaction—if not more—from the means a mass movement uses as from the ends it advocates.” MAGA’s deep satisfaction at “owning the libs” springs to mind. So, too, does its aesthetics of transgression—its glory in ill-concealed dog-whistles and contempt for manners and norms.

Despite the high-flown language, Hoffer’s intellectual ambition was to write a sober, tell-it-like-it-is account of the nature of mass movements.
Consider further Hoffer’s thoughts on the archetypal leader of a mass movement. “The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass-movement leadership. What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the singlehanded defiance of the world. Charlatanism is to some extent indispensable”—confidently pretending to knowledge while paradoxically estimating it as worthless. And then there is this:

The main requirements [for the leader] seem to be: audacity and a joy in defiance; an iron will; a fanatical conviction that he is in possession of the one and only truth; faith in his destiny and luck; a capacity for passionate hatred; a cunning estimate of human nature; a delight in symbols (spectacles and ceremonials [and baseball hats?]); unbounded brazenness which finds expression in a disregard of consistency and fairness; a recognition that the innermost craving of a following is for communion and that there can never be too much of it; [and] a capacity for winning and holding the utmost loyalty of a group of able lieutenants.

I’m not sure that President Trump has “an iron will,” and many of his “lieutenants,” loyal though they certainly are, proved to be laughably inept when he sought to overthrow the 2020 presidential election. For its part, his new administration has already put on a few clown shows. (For example: freezing nearly all federal grants and loans, and then quickly rescinding that order when its implications became apparent.) But Trump goes some ways toward meeting most of the other requirements.

God bless the internet: there’s a free pdf available online.