Long War

EITHER A CHRISTIAN OR AN IDENTITARIAN:

Time With Erich Fromm: A Cautionary Tale (Art Kusserow, 7/18/25, Voegelin View)

Fromm’s comment on the inherent conflict described above might best be summarized here: “There is only one possible, productive solution for the relationship of individualized man with the world: his active solidarity with all men and his spontaneous activity, love and work, which unite him again with the world, not by primary ties but as a free and independent individual. However, if the economic, social and political conditions do not offer a basis for the realization of individuality in the sense just mentioned, while at the same time people have lost those ties which gave them security, this lag makes freedom an unbearable burden. It then becomes identical with doubt, with a kind of life which lacks meaning and direction. Powerful tendencies arise to escape from this kind of freedom into submission or some kind of relationship to man and the world which promises relief from uncertainty, even if it deprives the individual of his freedom.”

The ”relief from uncertainty” Fromm describes is to be found in identification with a leader who promises “freedom” from such uncertainty. The identification with such leaders, who are often elevated to “messianic” status, and the fantasied relief they promise, explains the psychological underpinnings of the supposed “populism” broad-based media often struggle to explain.

OTHEFR THAN THAT, HOW DID YOU ENJOY THE SHOW…:

Autocracy, Corruption, and Decline: Why Hungary and Orbanism Must Never be a Model for the U.S. (Michael Maya, June 30, 2025, Just Security)

Do average Hungarians share the enthusiasm for Orban exhibited by Trump, CPAC, and the Heritage Foundation? In short, no. Here is one telling statistic: from 2010 to 2024, emigration from Hungary rose by 464 percent. In fact, the number of Hungarians leaving their country rose sharply almost immediately after Orban’s April 2010 election victory. For scores of Hungarians, the future looks bleak, with a recent survey finding that 34 percent of recent graduates and 55 percent of 18-40-year-old Hungarians plan to emigrate. In light of Hungary’s aging population – its median age is 43.9 years – Orban can ill-afford to drive out Hungary’s best, brightest, and youngest. That so many Hungarians are eager to flee Orban’s rule provides the first hint that enthusiasm among his U.S-based cheerleaders is misplaced, even suspect.

Even a cursory inquiry into Orban’s record reveals that he has presided not over Hungary’s advancement but rather its alarming decline. For one, he has masterminded Hungary’s transformation from a full democracy to an “electoral autocracy,” according to the European Parliament. Freedom House now rates Hungary as only “partly free.” As noted in Bertelsmann’s 2024 Sustainable Governance Indicators (SGI): “Elections are typically free but not fair, with the ruling Fidesz party benefiting from large-scale gerrymandering, asymmetrical media access and the misuse of state assets.” Today, Hungary is an SGI bottom dweller, ranking 30th out of 30 with respect to: (1) Elections, (2) Quality of the Parties and Candidates, and (3) Access to Official Information.

Adding to Hungary’s woes is its economy, which has stagnated since 2022, with GDP growth rates declining for four years straight and a ballooning budget deficit of 4.9 percent of GDP, significantly higher than the European Union average of 3 percent. Hungary is also plagued by high inflation, forcing the government to take drastic steps such as limiting grocers’ profit margins. Predictably, Hungary’s currency, the Forint, has lost value and both domestic and foreign investors, wary of arbitrary regulatory shifts and opaque enforcement, are rethinking investments in Hungary. More than €20 billion in EU funds that would have come to Hungary have been suspended over rule of law violations, and innovation lags as firms hesitate to invest in research, development, or new technologies. Why? Among other things, they lack confidence in intellectual property protections.

For ordinary Hungarians, Orban’s mismanagement of the economy has translated into living standards significantly lower than many of the other 37 member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Given these and other declines, it is no surprise that, just in the last year, Hungary fell 13 places in Gallup’s World Happiness Report. Hungary now ranks below Russia, China, Uzbekistan, and Honduras. Predictably, countries with thriving democracies dominate the list of happiest countries.

WHY MAGA HATES AMERICA:

Rediscovering Order in an Age of Populism (Mike Pence & Ed Feulner, Summer 2025, National Affairs)

Conservatism once proudly embraced a positive vision, offering the American people clear alternatives to the prevailing left-leaning orthodoxies of the day. In the final decades of the 20th century, conservatives not only opposed affirmative action’s quixotic pursuit of equal outcomes, they championed equality of opportunity for all. Conservatives were not simply opposed to letting communism run wild; they contained it by boldly leading the free world. Conservatives were not just critical of big government; their support for free markets unleashed one of the greatest economic expansions in history. At the heart of conservatism lay an ambition to help America flourish, coupled with the desire to preserve the private institutions — families, churches, local communities, and the like — that serve as the building blocks of an ordered society. […]

Conservatism is not a rigid ideology promising utopia; it is a disposition — a state of mind grounded in timeless principles. It recognizes human nature as it is and has been throughout the ages, and points toward a distinct approach to governing ourselves. Conservatism values obedience to a transcendent moral order, reverence for tradition and our forebears, prudence in decision-making, humility regarding our place in history, and the pursuit of justice in a fallen world. These harmonious values make conservatism a timeless philosophy that aligns seamlessly with self-governance.

In seeking to privilege white males, the Right needs bigger government, has to repudiate morality for its universalism and, thereby, must oppose the Founding.

WHY MAGA IMAGINES DONALD MUSCULAR:

The Dark Magic of Words: Why Fascism and Illiberalism is So Seductive to Writers: Ed Simon Looks at Eduard Limonov, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Yukio Mishima, and Others (Ed Simon, June 23, 2025, LitHub)

Myth and fantasy are what the fascist trade in, of Russia made great again, or Italy made great again, or someplace made great again (it’s always some place), but at the expense of our souls. This is the danger of an artistic temperament at its most extreme, what Nietzsche celebrated as the “Dionysian” in The Birth of Tragedy, where the artist “enriches everything out of one’s own fullness: whatever one sees, whatever wills is seen swelled, taught, strong, overloaded with strength” until all of reality merely becomes “reflections of his perfection.”

Such idealization of pure experience is an idolatry of death, since such an artist can’t envision the world beyond their individuality, can’t conceive of others enduring after the poet’s extinction. Think of Limonov’s “Yes, Death!,” of D’Annunzio’s 1894 novel The Triumph of Death.

CUOMO RAN AS DONALD:

Zohran Mamdani and the Making of a “Muslim Menace”: Islamophobia and the politics of belonging (Tazeen M. Ali, June 24, 2025, ARC)

In a campaign mailer designed by a PAC supporting disgraced former New York governor and current mayoral hopeful Andrew Cuomo, Queens assembly member Zohran Mamdani’s image appears with his beard digitally altered to look longer, fuller, and darker. This manipulation invokes tired Islamophobic tropes that cast bearded brown Muslim men as dangerous, violent, and in Mamdani’s case, unfit for public office. While the mailer was never distributed by Cuomo’s camp, the image leaked online. Mamdani responded to the image by calling it what it was: Islamophobic and “meant to make me look threatening.”

Moreover, the manipulated beard image is a part of a long-standing tradition in American politics: altering minoritized candidates’ physical features to further racist, Islamophobic, and antisemitic tropes, and cast them as inherently other. Cuomo’s camp condemned the altered image, but this smear was not an isolated incident: it was part of a broader pattern. As Mamdani’s campaign has surged in the final days before New York’s Democratic mayoral primary—which ends Tuesday—he has faced a wave of coded and overt attacks. Cuomo has warned voters that to elect Mamdani would be “reckless and dangerous.” Mamdani has also received multiple death threats replete with Islamophobic language, calling him “a terrorist who is not welcome in New York or America.”

These attacks are not just about politics. They are also about identity. Mamdani, a Twelver Shia Muslim, African-born immigrant, and democratic socialist, represents a challenge to entrenched racial, religious, and political hierarchies. As with other progressive politicians of color, from Ilhan Omar to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the backlash against him reveals the limits of establishment tolerance for candidates who refuse to conform.

WHERE’S CATO WHEN WE NEED HIM:

Caesar in California: A domestic deployment in California could mark the moment the military ceases to serve the Constitution—and begins serving the man. (Jonathan M. Winer, Jun 9, 2025, Washington Spectator)

Most significantly, the President would be using the Insurrection Act not to restore order in a collapsed state, but to override political resistance in a functioning, law-abiding one.

This is not Little Rock, where federal troops escorted children into school after Governor Orval Faubus defied the Supreme Court. It is California—a sovereign state whose disagreements with federal immigration policy have been debated in courts, not on battlefields. The precedent is telling. Then, as now, a state deployed its National Guard in defiance of federal authority—Faubus to block school desegregation ordered by the Supreme Court, Trump now to impose federal immigration enforcement over local resistance. But the roles have been reversed: President Eisenhower used the Insurrection Act to uphold constitutional rights and enforce the judicial mandate to desegregate Arkansas public schools. Trump now flirts with using it to suppress political dissent and override judicially recognized state discretion. In both cases, the stakes concern more than law enforcement—they test whether the military serves the Constitution or the will of a single executive.

The Insurrection Act grants the President broad power—but that power depends on facts that justify its use. When those facts are weak, manipulated, or manufactured, the result is not emergency governance but authoritarian performance.

The administration may counter that ICE officers are unable to execute lawful warrants in cities where resistance is both physical and coordinated. They may argue that when protesters form human chains to block detentions, and local police stand down, the rule of law is undermined. These facts would need to be documented in detail—especially if challenged in a motion for emergency injunctive relief.

That challenge would come quickly. Within hours of a formal invocation, expect California to file for a temporary restraining order in federal district court. The complaint would argue that the President’s action is ultra vires, lacks factual basis, and violates constitutional principles of federalism, due process, and freedom of speech and association. Declarations from ICE personnel, federal marshals, and state officials would be critical in assessing whether the claimed “impracticability” is real or rhetorical.

Whatever a district court decides, the outcome would likely be appealed and quickly reach the Supreme Court. The stakes are enormous. The Insurrection Act grants the President broad power—but that power depends on facts that justify its use. When those facts are weak, manipulated, or manufactured, the result is not emergency governance but authoritarian performance.

We’re all so fond of declaiming, “Never Again!” And then we get spooked by “others” who mean it.

ALL DONALD HAS TO OFFER IS IDENTITARIANISM:

Against Identity by Alexander Douglas review – a superb critique of contemporary self-obsession: A philosopher challenges us to forget about ourselves in this powerfully strange counterblast to identity fetishism (Steven Poole, 10 Jun 2025, The Guardian)

Philosopher Alexander Douglas’s deeply interesting book diagnoses our malaise, ecumenically, as a universal enslavement to identity. An alt-right rabble rouser who denounces identity politics is just as wedded to his identity as a leftwing “activist” is wedded to theirs. And this, Douglas argues persuasively, explains the polarised viciousness of much present argument. People respond to criticisms of their views as though their very identity is being attacked. The response is visceral and emotional. That’s why factchecking conspiracy theories doesn’t work. And it’s not just a social media problem; it’s far worse than that. “If you define yourself by your ethnicity or your taste in music,” Douglas argues, “then you ipso facto demarcate yourself against others who do not share in that identity. Here we have the basis for division and intergroup conflict.”

The Right is the Left.

CAPRICE CLASSIC:

How Ancient Rome Blew Up Its Own Business Empire (Bret Devereaux, May. 2nd, 2025, Foreign Policy)

Roman aristocrats, like all ancient elites, almost universally disliked trade and held the merchants who made it possible in contempt. Trade was seen as a sordid, cheating sort of thing (the theory of comparative advantage that explained how a merchant produced value honestly would not be developed until 1776) whereby merchants could gain wealth outside of the proper ways of being born rich or capturing wealth in war. Worse yet, trade generated wealth outside of the direct control of the landholding elites who dominated politics in nearly every ancient society.

Yet the Roman Empire benefited greatly from expanding Mediterranean trade between the third century B.C.E. to the third century C.E. Roman policy encouraged trade and the economic growth it created lined Roman coffers too, at least until the Romans themselves fragmented the pan-Mediterranean trade zone they had created, impoverishing their empire and leaving it less able to face the challenges that would eventually lead to its fragmentation and dissolution in the West. […]

Beginning in 235, the Romans entered a period known as the Crisis of the Third Century: Five decades of renewed civil war shattered the unity of the empire and thus the unity and safety of its markets. Rival emperors, locked in brutal military competition, debased the currency to pay their soldiers and buy loyalty, leading the once reliable Roman currency system to become shaky at best.

Worse yet, when the crisis came to an end, the policies the newly triumphant emperors Diocletian and later Constantine pursued hardly favored economic freedom or the renewal of markets. When Diocletian’s fumbling efforts to stabilize the Roman currency system produced runaway inflation, he responded with the traditional expedient of attempting to fix prices, issuing an edict on maximum prices, the text of which is partially preserved today.

Like most such state interventions in the economy, the edict failed to stabilize prices. Meanwhile, Diocletian also revised the tax system, creating a bureaucratic, centralized, and cumbersome taxes that relied on a five-year census that was never regularly performed, leading to tax assessments that bore little resemblance to the economic activity they were taxing. In an effort to stabilize this system, Constantine, rather than creating a more agile tax system, created a less agile economy, forbidding tenant farmers to leave their lands in a forerunner of what would become European serfdom.

The result was that while the Roman economy stabilized, it did so as a less productive economy, more exposed to the decisions and caprice of emperors and one that provided, as a result, fewer resources for the Romans to defend their empire.

Trumpism has never worked.

WHAT DONALD MEANS BY “GREAT AGAIN”:

How Baseball Shaped Black Communities in Reconstruction-Era America: Gerald Early on the Early History of Black Participation in America’s Pastime (Gerald Early, May 1, 2025, LitHub)

But if the elevation of Black Americans during Reconstruction was a revolution, it was met by a fierce counterrevolution on the part of white Southerners who vehemently and violently opposed any change in the status of Black people. White Southerners utterly opposed the Freedmen’s Bureau, a federal agency established to help newly freed African Americans obtain fairer wages and better employment conditions from their former enslavers; the bureau also established, in conjunction with the American Missionary Association, some HBCUs (historically Black colleges and universities). But its main work ended in 1869, and the bureau closed for good in 1872, at which time it had not had nearly enough time to achieve the goal of helping a mostly impoverished people become self-supporting citizens.

Black citizens were climbing a steep hill, but they were willing to do so, in part because so many of them believed in this country, even if the country did not believe in them.
White Southerners formed terrorist organizations, like the Ku Klux Klan, that brutally intimidated Black citizens and created Black Codes to nullify African Americans’ new rights. Barely a year after the end of the Civil War, in May 1866, Memphis erupted in one of the worst racial pogroms of the Reconstruction period. White people, provoked because Black soldiers had stood up to racist white (mostly Irish) policemen, rampaged through the Black community of Memphis, killing 46 Black people, injuring over 75, and burning to the ground every Black school and church in the city. The Colfax Massacre in Louisiana in 1873 resulted in the murder of somewhere between 62 and 153 Black citizens who had surrendered after resisting a white attempt to take over the local courthouse.

Despite Frederick Douglass’s efforts as the last president of the Freedman’s Savings Bank, including lending it $10,000 to keep it afloat, the bank’s failure in 1874 destroyed the faith of millions of Black people in the country’s financial institutions. The lack of will on the part of the federal government and “the friends of the Negro” to enforce the social and economic changes that Reconstruction had promised left Black Americans feeling betrayed, powerless, and further impoverished by the 1880s. With the failure of Reconstruction, Black people were no longer fully empowered citizens but political and social ciphers. As Malcolm X once told a Harlem audience, “You’re nothing but an ex-slave.” The Confederates may have lost the Civil War, but the southern counter revolutionists won the race war that followed.

We did not Reconstruct hard enough.