I think a lot of these people are just very stupid, and we should stop treating them as babes in the woods with no agency, cast awash in seas of larger social forces. Hitler being bad is not some ideological theory, it’s an objective fact, probably among the best-documented historical facts of all time. There should be more shame and stigma associated with saying something as braindead as “bro saved Germany” about Adolph Hitler.
What I think is missing here is the context that Versailles was truly awful and made life miserable for millions of Germans who never wanted The Great War. I assume that’s what he means Hitler “saved” Germany from. And there is a plausible analogy, at least in their eyes, between Germany’s punishment and modern progressives’ desire to correct past injustices with anti-white, anti-male measures.
Perhaps the right response is, “Yes, the Treaty of Versailles was bad, but that doesn’t make Hitler good.” Which would, of course, also require, “Yes, Israel’s blockade of Palestine is bad, but that doesn’t make Hamas good.” We really need to stop responding to bad things by doing more bad things.
People forget that WWII was worse than Versailles: Germany got cut up into 4 administrations, lost its easternmost 30% of territory, and was occupied for decades.
The difference was that the allies had learned their lesson. They had failed to enforce Versailles, and occupation was necessary for enforcement.
Hitler didn't save Germany from Versailles, he assured that Germany got worse terms.
West Germany had the 4th largest GDP in the world (2nd in NATO) in 1980 before re-unification. Japan was 3rd. That means the number 2 and 3 countries in the Western alliance in the Cold War were the defeated enemies of WWII which ended only 35 years prior. If the Allies were trying to subjugate the Axis powers, they sure did a terrible job of it.
Before the war, western Germans had a per-capita GDP that approached that of the Americans. It would take West Germany 4 decades to approach it again. The war cost Germany much of its human capital. Their relative economic size was never replicated. Germany was tamed not just in terms of domestic economy, but in terms of trade, security and military affairs.
The Allies did subjugate Japan and Germany, and the Americans in particular did a great job of it... by occupying them and ensuring the creation and maintenance of liberal democratic institutions. They underwrote their security policies, along with those of their other allies.
The Americans also provided markets for Japanese and German goods and protection for their shipping. This was part of American grand strategy, a Soviet containment strategy, and it worked very well.
OT: We could benefit from American grand strategy of at least 1/10 that calibre right about now.
It’s a little of both. Germany was cut into pieces and the eastern half was crushed under a Soviet boot. But the western half was rebuilt and sent on a path to prosperity.
The German state as a cohesive entity was ended for 45 years. Their relative prosperity, even in the West, never recovered. So it's not a little of both. The punishment went far, far beyond Versailles.
Germany in the 30s, despite the Depression, was the worlds 2nd largest economy and the leading cultural and scientific powerhouse. Hitler and the post-war partition ensured the permanent end to all that.
The allies degraded and then ran down Germany's economy by 60%, and printed so many Reichsmarks by 1948 they destroyed the currency.
The reconstruction of Germany was not the goal of occupation. The benefits that eventually flowed to Germany, such as through the Marshall Plan, were by no means guaranteed, only latterly intended, and played only a minor role. The greater contribution by far was the West Germans saving themselves through sound money policy opposed by their occupiers.
Germany is now the largest economy, and leading cultural and scientific powerhouse, apart from the US and China (and it still leads China on some of these things). Even Japan and India aren't surpassing it any time soon on most of these fronts despite having substantially larger populations (though Japan arguably has been culturally more important for a few decades).
Germany enjoys far less global cultural exports than Japan and SK, and I'd argue a few others too. It's cultural footprint outside its own region is if anything surprisingly small.
The fact that Germany surpasses Japan economically now isn't great news long term for any country with a shrinking population, including Germany. I'm glad the Japanese have handled depopulation without war, I'm not sure anyone else will.
I have no dog in this hunt, and certainly no strong opinions.
While it is possible to hedge just about any statement, writing is clearer when widely held views of experts are stated as facts.
My statements repeat information from my history courses and broadly available economic data. The causes of the German and Japanese post-war economic miracles are relatively settled among professional historians. There is debate among economic historians about the relative contributions of various reconstruction plans, but virtually all would agree it is less than popularly understood history.
> The allies degraded and then ran down Germany's economy by 60%, and printed so many Reichsmarks by 1948 they destroyed the currency.
I would argue that the seeds of German rampant inflation post-WW2 was already there when the war was still raging on; in 1944 Speer started to say that "inflation is out of control". Price/wage controls and rationing can only do so much, given that Germany started running out of stuffs to plunder.
You might want to read "Wages of Destruction" by Adam Tooze to understand what happened with wartime economy in Nazi Germany.
Also, it's the basis for many alternate Nazi victory scenarios that Germany would fall into economic depression post-war (see Thousands Week Reich or The New Order: both are mods of WW2 game Hearts of Iron IV).
By some data I've seen, the UK economy slipped to 2nd permanently in 1911, and 4th as early as 1935.
The German economy grew dramatically faster in the 1930s. After adding territory, it had nearly 60% more people and at least 1/3 larger economy than the UK at the outbreak of war.
Comparisons with the British Empire are more difficult, especially since the most salient aggregate isn't obvious, given that the Empire wasn't entirely cohesive by the 1930s. Its contemporary and former colonies were however important to the war effort. That former parts of the Empire like Canada and Australia were already industrialized was helpful in supplying Britain in the war. However, with the obvious exception of India, their populations were often small. Canada's population is 2/3 of the UK's today, but less than 1/4 in the 1930s (10 million).
After WWI the US lapsed back into isolationism, and Britain and France were too weak to engage in a protracted occupation of Germany.
The post-WWII occupation stuck largely because it was a case of two drunks supporting one another: the UK and US wouldn't leave West Germany because the Soviets would move in, while the Soviets made a similar assumption about East Germany.
That’s not the kind of “bad” I was referring to. I’m talking about the material and emotional welfare of ordinary people. West Germans personally fared far better after WW2 than after WW1.
Many historians now argue that the material and emotional effects of the Treaty of Versailles were previously much overrated. Reparations were not a primary cause of hyperinflation, the treaty was not harsh for its time, and German resentment was fueled by propaganda. Blame German propagandists for the emotional effects, not the victors of WWI.
To contrast a single decision in WWII, the Allies executed the greatest forced resettlement in history to date - ~14.6 million Germans, out of their own country, Czechoslovakia and elsewhere. Roughly 1 in 4 German households lost everything after the war due to Allied decisions. It was revenge on a scale never seen before.
Interesting. I haven’t heard that. Any book recommendations?
In any event, we got on this whole thing by my suggestion that when the Twitter poster said Hitler “saved” Germany, Versailles was likely what he was referring to. The treaty’s harshness has been the mainstream interpretation to decades, so I think it’s quite plausible this is what he meant. And in any event, even the most unfavorable reading of its effects doesn’t mean WW2 or the Holocaust was justified.
I second the rec for Bloodlands. For Versailles, MacMillan's Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World is my favourite read, but I believe it has a different title in the US.
Bloodlands is a great book about all the ways that mass extermination and forced migration messed up Central and Eastern Europe before, during, and after WW2.
Onto Germany specifically after the war...
When the war was over, the Soviet Union kept their half of Poland that they had seized in 1939 in cooperation with Germany (modern Belarus and Western Ukraine). As a victorious power, the Soviet Union had to restore Poland's existence, but it didn't want to give the land back.
So it didn't.
Rather it moved the eastern border of Poland to the line that the Soviet Union had agreed on with the Germans, and then it moved the western border of Poland further west. This meant that a lot of formerly German land became Polish after 1945. There were millions of Germans living in what was now sovereign Polish territory. Many had fled already to avoid the advancing Red Army, but the rest were made to leave by force.
Similarly, in Czechoslovakia, Hitler had used the supposed oppression of the Sudeten Germans, (the ethnic Germans living within Czechoslovakia, Czechoslovakian citizenship, but on the borders of Austria and Germany) to annex the territory in 1938.
The 1945 Czechoslovakia thus kicked out several hundred thousand of their ethnic German citizens.
Several million Germans were evicted from what had been their homes and a smaller number (but still in the millions) of these people died in the process.
The world didn't really care as the Holocaust had just happened and the Germans had been the ones who started the war in the first place. But it was unequivocally more brutal with more German civilian deaths and property loss than what happened at Versailles.
You might want to read about Recovered Territories (the term that Polish propagandists post-WW2 justify for the annexation of eastern parts of Germany).
In the Czech case, Iron Curtain by Anne Applebaum and The Golden Maze by Richard Fidler wrote about that pretty well. (Czechoslovak leaders post-war justified about the need to expel the Germans by evoke the Battle of White Mountain in 1620, when Habsburg armies defeated Bohemian rebels).
Imagine comparing the treaty of Versailles to affirmative action, or hypothetical (highly unlikely, and manifestly unimplemented) proposals for slavery reparations. We have become deeply unserious as a society.
I don’t think these comparisons are ipso facto unserious. It depends critically on what you assert the analogy to be. If you say that the consequences of affirmative action have been as dire as the consequences of Versailles, that’s obvious hyperbole. If you say that affirmative action violates the same principles of fairness that Versailles violated, I think it’s eminently reasonable. The principle in question is punishing people for misdeeds they didn’t personally commit. That’s worth discussing.
Why don’t you ask commenter “Fallingknife” whether he thinks these two things are both deeply serious. I could give you the obvious answer from context and past comment history, but that’s not my place.
My point being, in the real world when someone says Chipotle’s new Carne Asada is literally worse than Hitler, we don’t have an online debate about the aptness of the metaphor. We just recognize that those two things aren’t remotely the same on any level of measurement, and we laugh or roll our eyes and go back to talking about things that are worth taking seriously.
You're right that these things have nothing in common. Versailles was a rational response to the devastation of WWI where the aggrieved nations, who had just lost millions of men, punished the nation that was directly responsible for it. Progressive DEI and reparations drivel, on the other hand, punishes people who had absolutely nothing to do with the injustice supposedly being addressed.
Forget left and right. The biggest problem with America today is that people are proud of being unserious, and this comment is really a great illustration of the whole phenomenon.
My definition of serious is not sounding like a hopped-up 14 year old boy.
Be left, be right, be anything you want. Say things that sound like an adult would say them. “Affirmative action and the end of WW1 and the Versailles treaty are the same” is just cringe.
This thread is getting long. Which comment are you referring to? I completely agree with you that bad-faith “arguments” are a huge issue, and as a committed centrist, I do my level best not to contribute to that. If it’s my comment you’re referring to, I’m very confused.
People who are comparing, I dunno, DEI statements to the treatment of Germany after the Versailles treaty is just… cringe. Like it’s not even an edgy online take, it’s just kinda dumb.
Half-right. Germany needed to be subjugated, it is true, but they were by no means the evil villain(s) of World War I. The real villains were the idiotic generals and windbag politicians who dragged the whole continent (and then the whole world) down into that meaningless conflict.
Germany was a major power, smack bang in the middle of Europe. Expanding meant invading other countries. That larger strategic question is why they needed to be contained, not the specifics of who was right or wrong or how the actual war was fought.
The Germany that suffered as a result of Versailles included the Germans who wanted WWI. It's been the historical norm that the defeated party in a war gets a bad deal. Wanting white people to compensate for things other white people did generations ago, most of whom weren't even the ancestors of the white people in question today, is not analogous to interwar Germany and does not have the same kind of historical precedent. Anyone who has convinced themselves otherwise is kidding themselves.
This is a valid point, but in the context of this discussion, it leaves me a little confused.
I originally brought up Versailles because I was postulating that young Republicans may draw a parallel between the collective punishment that it represented and the desire for collective punishment inherent in some progressive policies. (And then I said that, even if this analogy is valid, Versailles doesn’t justify Hitler.)
You say that anti-racist policies are worse than Versailles (at least in terms of degree of unfairness) because the people punished are farther removed from the original harm. Again, valid point. But what are you saying this implies about the original topic of Hitler’s recent popularity? Or did you not intend to imply any connection?
It's ironic that Keynes was the voice of reason then- the progressives were the ones pushing against Versailles because it was too punitive, which has apparently gotten flipped in the popular imagination. Conservatives want punishment. Progs just want the future to be better than the past.
But time transforms the real visceral truth of the thing into a theory. Without the emotion and recency, it's just a body of facts; it's not tried on the pulses. No amount of analysis, hand-wringing, or lecturing will get us back there. It's been about 70 years - in 250, it will be a dumb pirate movie.
Remains to be seen whether Anti-Nazism specifically becomes something of a civic religion in Europe. Obviously it's easier to imagine when among people with physical access to the principal locations of the bad stuff. Admittedly they're not very good at maintaining narratives over there rn.
I think people are likely to continue to care about something we have an enormous amount of powerful documentary evidence of, including photos and video, but that’s just me.
The decline in people caring about the lessons of nationalism the last 50 years is remarkable. But maybe you're right. The Holocaust as a term only went mainstream after the miniseries aired in 1978. It was too horrific to occupy the forefront of public consideration of the war for more than 30 years after it occurred.
They're likely to continue to care about it, but seeing how the salience of things like the 1918 pandemic, Napoleon, and the 30 years war faded, I expect WWII to fade as well.
Part of Hitler’s attraction for young men (as well as older men still “young at brain”, i.e., intellectually immature) is the taboo of it. If we insist on absolutes like this, we increase his allure. Germany was suffering when he came to power. We should admit that this was bad while still maintaining that exterminating Jews was neither a just nor, ultimately, an effective response to that situation. Nazis were against smoking, and it should be fine to compliment them on this while firmly holding that one sound public health policy does not excuse seizing Poland.
the phenomenon of Republicans calling everyone and everything socialist has definitely destigmatized identifying with the term on the left. i don't see why something similar wouldn't happen on the right
Where is that take in this post? I see Noah describing a similar dynamic that pushed progressive discourse further left in '20/'21 also acting on the right, not that the former caused the latter.
There's an entire paragraph in Noah's post headlined with the topic-sentence "also, the rise of the Palestine movement on the left probably contributed to the trend." It describes a causal process of the form "rise of Palestine movement on the left" -> "this kicked Jews out from protective umbrella of progressive pro-minority activism" -> "gave rightists a green light to unleash virulent antisemitism."
I'm just assuming you read the piece very carelessly, because the cause and effect lines in that paragraph are spelled out explicitly. You could re-write it as "if the left hadn't embraced the pro-Palestinian movement, Jews would be safe[r] from antisemitism on the right." None of this really makes the slightest bit of sense as a political theory; it seems like a child's view of political alignment.
He's describing a weakening of social norms rather than a blame claim. Noah’s saying left antisemitism made antisemitism less socially radioactive overall, which opportunists on the right exploited, not that the left created the right’s Nazism.
I'm the neighborhood rat catcher; I stop catching rats; the bubonic plague takes hold in my hometown. When people point this out (complete with negative valence indicating they think I'm a dumbass) they're not *blaming* me for it. They're just noting that the plague exploited an opportunity. Let’s read language as it’s clearly written and intended, not try to defend stupid.
PS This theory is itself a whole lot less sensible than the rat metaphor. Unlike "leftist attacks on the right", catching rats really does help to stop the spread of disease.
You're now arguing against Noah's actual take, not the one in your top-level comment that mocks a view Noah didn't portray, that the left created Nazi beliefs on the right.
I didn't write the top-level comment. I'm not even sure what you're talking about at this point.
But yes, I'm absolutely certain that when Noah claims that "the rise of the Palestinian movement on left contributed to the rise of anti-semitism on the right", this claim incorporates (in his mind) the idea that some people on the right actually became Nazis (or at least, became virulently antisemetic in Nazi-adjacent ways) due to the left's actions.
“Also, the rise of the Palestine movement on the left probably contributed to the trend. Although leftists certainly don’t like Hitler, the deep antisemitism of the Palestine movement … has effectively kicked Jews out from under the protective umbrella of progressive pro-minority activism. That gave rightists a green light to unleash their own much more virulent antisemitism without fear of leftist attack.”
I don’t buy this at all. Why would young members of the republican party care about leftist attacks? As far as I can tell that’s a sign of validation for their ideas more than anything. And if it were the case that this is happening because leftists aren’t “protecting” Jews anymore, why are Black people (still a protected group, I believe) constantly the subject of insult and threat by these people too?
You may disagree with Palestinian activism but there’s no sense in making it the cause of all other political/social issues you dislike.
The charitable view is that Noah writes this stuff into his pieces to please the right-wingers in his audience. He writes it in such a way that the theory makes zero sense, so everyone else will realize he's not being serious. But the conservatives won't look too closely at the logic, and will just be happy he shares their negative beliefs about the left.
Unfortunately, I think the charitable view is too kind, and Noah really is just politically deeply confused about how the world works.
"Also, the rise of the Palestine movement on the left probably contributed to the trend. Although leftists certainly don’t like Hitler, the deep antisemitism of the Palestine movement — which tends to view Jews as presumptive Zionists unless they prove their innocence via anti-Israel activism — has effectively kicked Jews out from under the protective umbrella of progressive pro-minority activism. That gave rightists a green light to unleash their own much more virulent antisemitism without fear of leftist attack."
That does not make much sense - yeah, those guys are so, so afraid of left-wing cancel culture... They make fun of black, Asians, LGBT, etc..... but they only attack the jews because they now have no fear of being attacked by the left?
My impression is that those guys love to "own the libs" - if anything, antisemitism (real or apparent) on the left should make them LESS anti-semitic; like it is happen in Europe, where parties with Nazi or Fascist roots (the Sweden Democrats, for example) are now pro-Israel, because now it is the "based" position
It is easy to forget that there have been Nazi sympathizers in the US almost as long as the party existed in Germany. One doesn’t hear George Lincoln Rockwell’s name much any more (he founded the American Nazi party in 1959), so all this is really nothing new except for Trump. He has been instrumental in bringing all sorts of lunacies 'out of the closet' of which this is only one.
Both authoritarianism and the fear of it has lurked below the surface of American politics almost since the Founding. Alexander Hamilton would not have been unhappy for a monarchy. One of the prime movers of one of the first two political parties in the US, Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans was formed in part because of fears that the other party, the Federalists were actually monarchists in disguise. The southern wing of the Democratic Party was clearly moving toward an authoritarianism of the elite in the decades before the Civil War and the so-called Gilded Age was replete with wealthy American businessmen who thought they ought to be in charge of just about everything (and a bit like now, the Supreme Court heartily backed them).
This tension is built into our political DNA, and it will never die - indeed it is necessary for the survival of the Republic. Its existence forces us to understand the eternally seductive appeal of autocracy to those who are uncomfortable with and in some cases completely determined to erase the essential messiness and inefficiency of democracy.
In the largest sense, then, No Kings Day was not really about Trump or Vance or Vought or Miller, but about the nature and practice of democracy itself - the maintenance of US, the most extraordinary, the most crucial, the riskiest, and the most complex ongoing experiment in human society and government ever attempted.
I don’t think that antisemitism on the left would encourage Nazism on the right. That’s not the pattern of modern American partisanship. The right doesn’t look for permission from the left to persecute anyone. If anything, when the left shows hatred toward some group, the right will reflexively defend them.
“Jews as presumptive zionists “? As in it’s ok to be a Jew but not a Zionist? That it’s not ok to be antisemitic but ok to be anti-Zionist ? The good Jews and the bad Jews?
The overall picture you paint is both accurate and terrifying. But in such a world I think every Jew should be a Zionist as the only safe place for a Jew in the world is Israel.
The events of October the 7th strongly suggest that Israel isn't safe. I can't think of anywhere else in the world since the end of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War (not even the Six Day War) where 1,000 Jewish people were killed in a single day. And the response that the Israeli state feels is necessary (and who knows, but it might be) is starting to weaken the support in the West that Israel relies on to hold the line. A tent pitched in the middle of a forest fire shouldn't be anybody's idea of safety. The world should be far more worried about the situation - not one side or other in the situation, but the situation as whole - than it is at present.
Jewish Israeli Prime Minister Rabin was killed by a Jewish Israeli terrorist.
Netanyahu marched in a protest where people carried a fake coffin of then prime minister Yitzhak Rabin with people burning him in effigy. They were angry about him signing the Oslo Accords.
Strangely enough, Rabin was assassinated a few weeks later by someone who had attended the protest.
I didn't say anyone was going anywhere. Israel is a permanent fact. The Palestinians in and around Israel and the Arab nations in the region are permanent facts. So the long history of conflict between the two - which has become the focus of global tensions between Christian and Muslim, East and West, North and South - is something that needs sustained effort and resources rather than grabbing our attention temporarily whenever it flares up.
The IRA, during its bombing campaign in mainland Britain, used to say that it didn't matter how many of their planned bombings were thwarted because eventually one of them would get through the security net and that's all they needed to achieve their aim. And in the meantime, British enforcement of the security net helped them get new recruits to the cause.
I am a big fan of Noah's. But in his last post i was taken by his raising of the distinction between being jewish, being zionist and being Israeli and it hit a nerve. While I think that an intellectual argument can be made for the distinction, i think it rings hollow. Jews have been persecuted forever. They are not the only persecuted people in history. But theirs stands out. 6 million jews were killed. because they were jewish. the US didnt let many of them who wished to flew the rise of Hitler and Nazism so they went all over the globe to anyplace that would take them. India, China, Argentina etc. They were fleeing for their lives. There have been jews in the middle east for thousands of years. But if you look at a heat map of jews in the middle east and north africa over time, it trends towards zero. no more Yemen, Egypt, Iraq, Syria etc. they left because they were not welcome; or worse. With the exception of Saudi, much of the middle east has been under the control of either the Ottoman Empire or the British Empire.
anyway yes, the jews arent going anywhere and neither are the arabs and the so called Palestinians. the Irish "troubles" took only 100 years to settle. Most arab countries do not want to fight with Israel. not the GCC, Saudi, Iraq, the new Syria, Lebanon ex Hezbollah, Egypt wants stability etc. if you ask most of these countries behind closed doors they will say the Palestinians are an expensive pain in the ass but they are Muslim so we must support them. But they dont want them to fight Israel. The real risk is Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood.
so we will see and hope.
but i do not see how Hamas will actually give up and disarm. They released the only 20 living hostages due to a 360 degree squeeze play and are now playing games with dead bodies.
The C20th troubles in Northern Ireland flared up in the 1960s, but the conflict started with the Elizabethan plantation policy in the late 16th century and raged/ rumbled on for hundreds of years, an apparently insoluble problem. It was calmed, if not exactly solved, by an improved understanding between the two sides, cash incentives (or the loss of them) and a dreadful event completely unrelated to the conflict (9/11) which nevertheless moved the US to take a more even-handed position in the conflict - though it made the Israeli-Palestine conflict far worse.
“Also, the rise of the Palestine movement on the left probably contributed to the trend. Although leftists certainly don’t like Hitler, the deep antisemitism of the Palestine movement — which tends to view Jews as presumptive Zionists unless they prove their innocence via anti-Israel activism — has effectively kicked Jews out from under the protective umbrella of progressive pro-minority activism.”
There a number of wild assumptions here that should not go unchallenged.
First, there’s the assumption that anyone critical of Israeli treatment of Palestinians is, ipso facto, anti-Semitic. This amounts to an irrational bias. Rationally I expect that some members of what Noah terms the “Palestine movement” are outright anti-semites. But all of them or even a majority? Is there any polling to suggest this is true? I would expect the modern weasel words “I feel like…”to proceed such speculation.
Second, the assumption that critics of Israel hate Zionism and Zionists. One can believe that Israel has a right to peaceful co-existence as a nation without having to believe Israel can do no wrong. And the killing of about 20,000 Gazan children, which a Lancet study deemed an undercount, is undoubtedly morally wrong. Most rational people would believe this.
Third, that progressives have somehow shunned Jews as a minority no longer worthy of protection. C’mon Noah, you know that Jews have long been very well represented among those who consider themselves progressive.
OK. I agree with him on that snippet. But he went much further than that. He is generalizing from some individual bad apples to assume the barrel is rotten. All I'm saying is that on this subject he is not applying the logic he usually brings to discussions.
"But at the same time, the struggle against MAGA will get a lot easier when Trump is gone."
A lot of Smart People™ seem to be espousing this take lately--the whole thing falls apart without its charismatic leader. I truly hope you're all correct.
The blog post's point wasn't exactly that the whole thing falls apart without its charismatic leader, but that lacking him the movement will rely further on ideology, which might turn more people against it.
As odious as that idea is, it’s hard for me to believe a self-described virgin incel could successfully appeal to many of the voters who thrilled to Trump’s libertinism.
Are you telling me that Stephen Miller, the Goebbels of the Trump Administration, the Nosferatu of the immigration agenda, will not be able to keep the Trump coalition together because he sleeps upside down? Who knew
While he is vile and draculaic Steven Miller seems to aspire to be a Lex Luthor or Joseph Goebbels type, but in reality most see him as more like a Dr. Evil clown. I don’t think he could win even a single presidential primary.
The biggest structural problem is that left wing Democrats think they don’t need to move policy positions toward what’s popular but would rather finger wag and condescend to the same electorate.
So if Noah is right we have a more authoritarians Right and an incompetent Left and… nobody to serve the 80%+ of the people in the middle
I think that's true. A little vocal extremism goes a long way, particularly in the context of a dominant, highly decentralised medium of mass communication like social media, that increasingly sets the news agenda for more traditional news media.
The best way to contain grassroots extremism and stop it contaminating parties of the centre is to allow it to have its own representation in the mainstream political process. That way it gets a voice (not being listened to appears to be at least part of the frustration of the right). But also it gets its own leaders who, if they want to have any influence at all, have to come to the table and deal with and compromise with other, mainly centrist, parties.
For this to happen there has to be some form of proportional representation. It's a paradox, but for the centre to hold, the political process needs to be decentralised and the concentration solely on two parties has to end.
The other possibility is that the current Republican party is more of a "not the libs" coalition than a cult of personality and they will actually gain ground when the personally off putting Trump is gone. This would explain the massive ideological diversity in the party currently. The "Hitler did nothing wrong" part of the coalition has essentially nothing in common with the RFK led healing crystal retard faction beyond a hatred of the establishment. I don't know whether this is right or not, but if the Republicans pick a generic boring "not the libs" candidate over an idealouge, I think they will win big. On the other hand I think it's incredibly unlikely that they will pick a candidate like that after Trump.
The one in pink doesn't actually seem wrong to me in any way. Even a couple decades ago it was clear that it was less than ideal that so much of culture was organized specifically around WWII as the unique central point, whether it's the Oscars (where it has often been hard for any non-WWII movie to compete against WWII movies), or the fact that everything from architecture to political polling to television basically had a single inflection point around WWII.
A society that thinks "Nazi" and "evil" are synonyms can underplay the importance of avoiding different failure modes, like the Khmer Rouge and the Great Leap Forward and Idi Amin. (And can also miss Hannah Arendt's core point about the "banality of evil", that sometimes the problem is a *system* that leads ordinary people to think it's ordinary to do evil things.)
You don't have to think Nazism isn't wrong to think that it's important to keep multiple models of good and bad in mind, rather than focusing on this as the only one.
This is a relatively small nitpick, but the post relies a lot on extreme takes from social media (given by people hiding behind usernames, not the least) while acknowledging that social media rewards extreme takes. Yes, it also shows Vance downplaying such takes, but does not show him exactly pushing such lines.
I'm not convinced these takes serve as good evidence of the Right's drift towards Far Right (although I'm not arguing such a drift might not be taking place). If better evidence exists, I think the post should have presented that, instead.
I think we underappreciate the Great Man Theory of History, now superseded by a more empirically tractable model of interconnected social and economic relationships as the cause of social change. But clearly, the fact that humans remain strongly attracted to charismatic leaders suggests a trait adaptative to the path dependency/contingency in the evolution of complex systems. So, what happens after Trump depends a lot on the strength of the leadership that succeeds him, hopefully to restore some social balance.
The opponents of the Great Man Theory fall short because they don't really get around the need for a Great Man. Their theory is basically that if you go back in time and kill Napoleon's mother then another Napoleon will arise in his place. But are there really all these potential Great Men just sitting around waiting to do great things? Seems like the answer is clearly no. If there were, you would think the Democratic party would have found one sometime in the last 3 elections.
I'm not so sure about this. There are plenty of highly skilled and charismatic individuals waiting in the wings; the trick is how to turn these capable candidates into "Great Men", a process that involves a lot of social reinforcement and conditioning.
The Democrats keep losing elections because they field shitty compromise candidates that the public don't take seriously. There are two Democratic roads to winning a presidential election: (1) a barnstorming charismatic populist like Bernie Sanders, or (2) a barnstorming charismatic centrist who pretends to be a populist (Bill Clinton or Obama).
Good point. You can't really have a Great Man policy. Nietszche said 'the superman justifies the millennia'. But that leaves an awful lot of time for humanity just sitting around waiting for the right person to turn up.
None of the historical analogs are good, around the world, kings included. Yesterday I was reading Joseph Howe on England after the death of Cromwell, which became "merrie" again, a deluge of merriment, as Howe put it, when continental culture returned in force with he monarchy. DT has been careful not to banish merriment or culture, though his sense of humor tends to the cruel and culture to the gold-plated. Deluge of what, is the question.
I think a lot of these people are just very stupid, and we should stop treating them as babes in the woods with no agency, cast awash in seas of larger social forces. Hitler being bad is not some ideological theory, it’s an objective fact, probably among the best-documented historical facts of all time. There should be more shame and stigma associated with saying something as braindead as “bro saved Germany” about Adolph Hitler.
What I think is missing here is the context that Versailles was truly awful and made life miserable for millions of Germans who never wanted The Great War. I assume that’s what he means Hitler “saved” Germany from. And there is a plausible analogy, at least in their eyes, between Germany’s punishment and modern progressives’ desire to correct past injustices with anti-white, anti-male measures.
Perhaps the right response is, “Yes, the Treaty of Versailles was bad, but that doesn’t make Hitler good.” Which would, of course, also require, “Yes, Israel’s blockade of Palestine is bad, but that doesn’t make Hamas good.” We really need to stop responding to bad things by doing more bad things.
People forget that WWII was worse than Versailles: Germany got cut up into 4 administrations, lost its easternmost 30% of territory, and was occupied for decades.
The difference was that the allies had learned their lesson. They had failed to enforce Versailles, and occupation was necessary for enforcement.
Hitler didn't save Germany from Versailles, he assured that Germany got worse terms.
West Germany had the 4th largest GDP in the world (2nd in NATO) in 1980 before re-unification. Japan was 3rd. That means the number 2 and 3 countries in the Western alliance in the Cold War were the defeated enemies of WWII which ended only 35 years prior. If the Allies were trying to subjugate the Axis powers, they sure did a terrible job of it.
Before the war, western Germans had a per-capita GDP that approached that of the Americans. It would take West Germany 4 decades to approach it again. The war cost Germany much of its human capital. Their relative economic size was never replicated. Germany was tamed not just in terms of domestic economy, but in terms of trade, security and military affairs.
The Allies did subjugate Japan and Germany, and the Americans in particular did a great job of it... by occupying them and ensuring the creation and maintenance of liberal democratic institutions. They underwrote their security policies, along with those of their other allies.
The Americans also provided markets for Japanese and German goods and protection for their shipping. This was part of American grand strategy, a Soviet containment strategy, and it worked very well.
OT: We could benefit from American grand strategy of at least 1/10 that calibre right about now.
"Before the war, western Germans had a per-capita GDP that approached that of the Americans."
Are you sure about that: my reading of Adam Tooze's "Wages of Destruction" suggested that pre-WWII Germany was essentially a middle-income country.
It’s a little of both. Germany was cut into pieces and the eastern half was crushed under a Soviet boot. But the western half was rebuilt and sent on a path to prosperity.
The German state as a cohesive entity was ended for 45 years. Their relative prosperity, even in the West, never recovered. So it's not a little of both. The punishment went far, far beyond Versailles.
Germany in the 30s, despite the Depression, was the worlds 2nd largest economy and the leading cultural and scientific powerhouse. Hitler and the post-war partition ensured the permanent end to all that.
The allies degraded and then ran down Germany's economy by 60%, and printed so many Reichsmarks by 1948 they destroyed the currency.
The reconstruction of Germany was not the goal of occupation. The benefits that eventually flowed to Germany, such as through the Marshall Plan, were by no means guaranteed, only latterly intended, and played only a minor role. The greater contribution by far was the West Germans saving themselves through sound money policy opposed by their occupiers.
Germany is now the largest economy, and leading cultural and scientific powerhouse, apart from the US and China (and it still leads China on some of these things). Even Japan and India aren't surpassing it any time soon on most of these fronts despite having substantially larger populations (though Japan arguably has been culturally more important for a few decades).
Germany enjoys far less global cultural exports than Japan and SK, and I'd argue a few others too. It's cultural footprint outside its own region is if anything surprisingly small.
The fact that Germany surpasses Japan economically now isn't great news long term for any country with a shrinking population, including Germany. I'm glad the Japanese have handled depopulation without war, I'm not sure anyone else will.
It seems like you have a bunch of strong opinions that I'd be interested in, except that you're stating them as facts, which makes me less so.
I have no dog in this hunt, and certainly no strong opinions.
While it is possible to hedge just about any statement, writing is clearer when widely held views of experts are stated as facts.
My statements repeat information from my history courses and broadly available economic data. The causes of the German and Japanese post-war economic miracles are relatively settled among professional historians. There is debate among economic historians about the relative contributions of various reconstruction plans, but virtually all would agree it is less than popularly understood history.
> The allies degraded and then ran down Germany's economy by 60%, and printed so many Reichsmarks by 1948 they destroyed the currency.
I would argue that the seeds of German rampant inflation post-WW2 was already there when the war was still raging on; in 1944 Speer started to say that "inflation is out of control". Price/wage controls and rationing can only do so much, given that Germany started running out of stuffs to plunder.
You might want to read "Wages of Destruction" by Adam Tooze to understand what happened with wartime economy in Nazi Germany.
Also, it's the basis for many alternate Nazi victory scenarios that Germany would fall into economic depression post-war (see Thousands Week Reich or The New Order: both are mods of WW2 game Hearts of Iron IV).
Surely in the 1930s the British Empire would have been the world's 2nd largest economy?
By some data I've seen, the UK economy slipped to 2nd permanently in 1911, and 4th as early as 1935.
The German economy grew dramatically faster in the 1930s. After adding territory, it had nearly 60% more people and at least 1/3 larger economy than the UK at the outbreak of war.
Comparisons with the British Empire are more difficult, especially since the most salient aggregate isn't obvious, given that the Empire wasn't entirely cohesive by the 1930s. Its contemporary and former colonies were however important to the war effort. That former parts of the Empire like Canada and Australia were already industrialized was helpful in supplying Britain in the war. However, with the obvious exception of India, their populations were often small. Canada's population is 2/3 of the UK's today, but less than 1/4 in the 1930s (10 million).
After WWI the US lapsed back into isolationism, and Britain and France were too weak to engage in a protracted occupation of Germany.
The post-WWII occupation stuck largely because it was a case of two drunks supporting one another: the UK and US wouldn't leave West Germany because the Soviets would move in, while the Soviets made a similar assumption about East Germany.
That’s not the kind of “bad” I was referring to. I’m talking about the material and emotional welfare of ordinary people. West Germans personally fared far better after WW2 than after WW1.
The same applies to ordinary people too.
Many historians now argue that the material and emotional effects of the Treaty of Versailles were previously much overrated. Reparations were not a primary cause of hyperinflation, the treaty was not harsh for its time, and German resentment was fueled by propaganda. Blame German propagandists for the emotional effects, not the victors of WWI.
To contrast a single decision in WWII, the Allies executed the greatest forced resettlement in history to date - ~14.6 million Germans, out of their own country, Czechoslovakia and elsewhere. Roughly 1 in 4 German households lost everything after the war due to Allied decisions. It was revenge on a scale never seen before.
Interesting. I haven’t heard that. Any book recommendations?
In any event, we got on this whole thing by my suggestion that when the Twitter poster said Hitler “saved” Germany, Versailles was likely what he was referring to. The treaty’s harshness has been the mainstream interpretation to decades, so I think it’s quite plausible this is what he meant. And in any event, even the most unfavorable reading of its effects doesn’t mean WW2 or the Holocaust was justified.
I second the rec for Bloodlands. For Versailles, MacMillan's Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World is my favourite read, but I believe it has a different title in the US.
Bloodlands is a great book about all the ways that mass extermination and forced migration messed up Central and Eastern Europe before, during, and after WW2.
Onto Germany specifically after the war...
When the war was over, the Soviet Union kept their half of Poland that they had seized in 1939 in cooperation with Germany (modern Belarus and Western Ukraine). As a victorious power, the Soviet Union had to restore Poland's existence, but it didn't want to give the land back.
So it didn't.
Rather it moved the eastern border of Poland to the line that the Soviet Union had agreed on with the Germans, and then it moved the western border of Poland further west. This meant that a lot of formerly German land became Polish after 1945. There were millions of Germans living in what was now sovereign Polish territory. Many had fled already to avoid the advancing Red Army, but the rest were made to leave by force.
Similarly, in Czechoslovakia, Hitler had used the supposed oppression of the Sudeten Germans, (the ethnic Germans living within Czechoslovakia, Czechoslovakian citizenship, but on the borders of Austria and Germany) to annex the territory in 1938.
The 1945 Czechoslovakia thus kicked out several hundred thousand of their ethnic German citizens.
Several million Germans were evicted from what had been their homes and a smaller number (but still in the millions) of these people died in the process.
The world didn't really care as the Holocaust had just happened and the Germans had been the ones who started the war in the first place. But it was unequivocally more brutal with more German civilian deaths and property loss than what happened at Versailles.
You might want to read about Recovered Territories (the term that Polish propagandists post-WW2 justify for the annexation of eastern parts of Germany).
In the Czech case, Iron Curtain by Anne Applebaum and The Golden Maze by Richard Fidler wrote about that pretty well. (Czechoslovak leaders post-war justified about the need to expel the Germans by evoke the Battle of White Mountain in 1620, when Habsburg armies defeated Bohemian rebels).
Imagine comparing the treaty of Versailles to affirmative action, or hypothetical (highly unlikely, and manifestly unimplemented) proposals for slavery reparations. We have become deeply unserious as a society.
I don’t think these comparisons are ipso facto unserious. It depends critically on what you assert the analogy to be. If you say that the consequences of affirmative action have been as dire as the consequences of Versailles, that’s obvious hyperbole. If you say that affirmative action violates the same principles of fairness that Versailles violated, I think it’s eminently reasonable. The principle in question is punishing people for misdeeds they didn’t personally commit. That’s worth discussing.
Why don’t you ask commenter “Fallingknife” whether he thinks these two things are both deeply serious. I could give you the obvious answer from context and past comment history, but that’s not my place.
My point being, in the real world when someone says Chipotle’s new Carne Asada is literally worse than Hitler, we don’t have an online debate about the aptness of the metaphor. We just recognize that those two things aren’t remotely the same on any level of measurement, and we laugh or roll our eyes and go back to talking about things that are worth taking seriously.
Having never tasted Hitler, I have to admit the possibility that the Carne Asada may be worse.
You're right that these things have nothing in common. Versailles was a rational response to the devastation of WWI where the aggrieved nations, who had just lost millions of men, punished the nation that was directly responsible for it. Progressive DEI and reparations drivel, on the other hand, punishes people who had absolutely nothing to do with the injustice supposedly being addressed.
Forget left and right. The biggest problem with America today is that people are proud of being unserious, and this comment is really a great illustration of the whole phenomenon.
It's pretty clear that your definition of serious is "agrees with me"
My definition of serious is not sounding like a hopped-up 14 year old boy.
Be left, be right, be anything you want. Say things that sound like an adult would say them. “Affirmative action and the end of WW1 and the Versailles treaty are the same” is just cringe.
This thread is getting long. Which comment are you referring to? I completely agree with you that bad-faith “arguments” are a huge issue, and as a committed centrist, I do my level best not to contribute to that. If it’s my comment you’re referring to, I’m very confused.
People who are comparing, I dunno, DEI statements to the treatment of Germany after the Versailles treaty is just… cringe. Like it’s not even an edgy online take, it’s just kinda dumb.
Nation on one side, individuals on the other, and you don't see the problem directly comparing the two. Interesting.
Versailles wasn't bad, it's enforcement was.
Are you saying the enforcement of Versailles, which was lax and inconsistent, should have been tougher? Not clear.
Yes. Clearly the WW1 winners were right about Germany. They just needed to enforce it.
Half-right. Germany needed to be subjugated, it is true, but they were by no means the evil villain(s) of World War I. The real villains were the idiotic generals and windbag politicians who dragged the whole continent (and then the whole world) down into that meaningless conflict.
Germany was a major power, smack bang in the middle of Europe. Expanding meant invading other countries. That larger strategic question is why they needed to be contained, not the specifics of who was right or wrong or how the actual war was fought.
The Germany that suffered as a result of Versailles included the Germans who wanted WWI. It's been the historical norm that the defeated party in a war gets a bad deal. Wanting white people to compensate for things other white people did generations ago, most of whom weren't even the ancestors of the white people in question today, is not analogous to interwar Germany and does not have the same kind of historical precedent. Anyone who has convinced themselves otherwise is kidding themselves.
This is a valid point, but in the context of this discussion, it leaves me a little confused.
I originally brought up Versailles because I was postulating that young Republicans may draw a parallel between the collective punishment that it represented and the desire for collective punishment inherent in some progressive policies. (And then I said that, even if this analogy is valid, Versailles doesn’t justify Hitler.)
You say that anti-racist policies are worse than Versailles (at least in terms of degree of unfairness) because the people punished are farther removed from the original harm. Again, valid point. But what are you saying this implies about the original topic of Hitler’s recent popularity? Or did you not intend to imply any connection?
It's ironic that Keynes was the voice of reason then- the progressives were the ones pushing against Versailles because it was too punitive, which has apparently gotten flipped in the popular imagination. Conservatives want punishment. Progs just want the future to be better than the past.
But time transforms the real visceral truth of the thing into a theory. Without the emotion and recency, it's just a body of facts; it's not tried on the pulses. No amount of analysis, hand-wringing, or lecturing will get us back there. It's been about 70 years - in 250, it will be a dumb pirate movie.
I think Hitler is a little bit better documented than Blackbeard.
It isn't about documentation - it's about salience. You are simply not going to be able to put the cat back in the bag on this one.
Remains to be seen whether Anti-Nazism specifically becomes something of a civic religion in Europe. Obviously it's easier to imagine when among people with physical access to the principal locations of the bad stuff. Admittedly they're not very good at maintaining narratives over there rn.
I think people are likely to continue to care about something we have an enormous amount of powerful documentary evidence of, including photos and video, but that’s just me.
The decline in people caring about the lessons of nationalism the last 50 years is remarkable. But maybe you're right. The Holocaust as a term only went mainstream after the miniseries aired in 1978. It was too horrific to occupy the forefront of public consideration of the war for more than 30 years after it occurred.
They're likely to continue to care about it, but seeing how the salience of things like the 1918 pandemic, Napoleon, and the 30 years war faded, I expect WWII to fade as well.
I think you have nailed it. People who say anything positive about Hitler are both ignorant and dangerous. Hitler was a monster, end of story.
Part of Hitler’s attraction for young men (as well as older men still “young at brain”, i.e., intellectually immature) is the taboo of it. If we insist on absolutes like this, we increase his allure. Germany was suffering when he came to power. We should admit that this was bad while still maintaining that exterminating Jews was neither a just nor, ultimately, an effective response to that situation. Nazis were against smoking, and it should be fine to compliment them on this while firmly holding that one sound public health policy does not excuse seizing Poland.
"The leftists helped make these people into Nazis" is certainly a take.
Extreme Right wingers have been putting nazi flags on things for decades.
the phenomenon of Republicans calling everyone and everything socialist has definitely destigmatized identifying with the term on the left. i don't see why something similar wouldn't happen on the right
Where is that take in this post? I see Noah describing a similar dynamic that pushed progressive discourse further left in '20/'21 also acting on the right, not that the former caused the latter.
There's an entire paragraph in Noah's post headlined with the topic-sentence "also, the rise of the Palestine movement on the left probably contributed to the trend." It describes a causal process of the form "rise of Palestine movement on the left" -> "this kicked Jews out from protective umbrella of progressive pro-minority activism" -> "gave rightists a green light to unleash virulent antisemitism."
I'm just assuming you read the piece very carelessly, because the cause and effect lines in that paragraph are spelled out explicitly. You could re-write it as "if the left hadn't embraced the pro-Palestinian movement, Jews would be safe[r] from antisemitism on the right." None of this really makes the slightest bit of sense as a political theory; it seems like a child's view of political alignment.
He's describing a weakening of social norms rather than a blame claim. Noah’s saying left antisemitism made antisemitism less socially radioactive overall, which opportunists on the right exploited, not that the left created the right’s Nazism.
I'm the neighborhood rat catcher; I stop catching rats; the bubonic plague takes hold in my hometown. When people point this out (complete with negative valence indicating they think I'm a dumbass) they're not *blaming* me for it. They're just noting that the plague exploited an opportunity. Let’s read language as it’s clearly written and intended, not try to defend stupid.
PS This theory is itself a whole lot less sensible than the rat metaphor. Unlike "leftist attacks on the right", catching rats really does help to stop the spread of disease.
You're now arguing against Noah's actual take, not the one in your top-level comment that mocks a view Noah didn't portray, that the left created Nazi beliefs on the right.
I didn't write the top-level comment. I'm not even sure what you're talking about at this point.
But yes, I'm absolutely certain that when Noah claims that "the rise of the Palestinian movement on left contributed to the rise of anti-semitism on the right", this claim incorporates (in his mind) the idea that some people on the right actually became Nazis (or at least, became virulently antisemetic in Nazi-adjacent ways) due to the left's actions.
Leftists don't make people into Nazis. They make people into people who will choose Nazis over Leftists if those are the only two choices.
“Also, the rise of the Palestine movement on the left probably contributed to the trend. Although leftists certainly don’t like Hitler, the deep antisemitism of the Palestine movement … has effectively kicked Jews out from under the protective umbrella of progressive pro-minority activism. That gave rightists a green light to unleash their own much more virulent antisemitism without fear of leftist attack.”
I don’t buy this at all. Why would young members of the republican party care about leftist attacks? As far as I can tell that’s a sign of validation for their ideas more than anything. And if it were the case that this is happening because leftists aren’t “protecting” Jews anymore, why are Black people (still a protected group, I believe) constantly the subject of insult and threat by these people too?
You may disagree with Palestinian activism but there’s no sense in making it the cause of all other political/social issues you dislike.
The charitable view is that Noah writes this stuff into his pieces to please the right-wingers in his audience. He writes it in such a way that the theory makes zero sense, so everyone else will realize he's not being serious. But the conservatives won't look too closely at the logic, and will just be happy he shares their negative beliefs about the left.
Unfortunately, I think the charitable view is too kind, and Noah really is just politically deeply confused about how the world works.
"Also, the rise of the Palestine movement on the left probably contributed to the trend. Although leftists certainly don’t like Hitler, the deep antisemitism of the Palestine movement — which tends to view Jews as presumptive Zionists unless they prove their innocence via anti-Israel activism — has effectively kicked Jews out from under the protective umbrella of progressive pro-minority activism. That gave rightists a green light to unleash their own much more virulent antisemitism without fear of leftist attack."
That does not make much sense - yeah, those guys are so, so afraid of left-wing cancel culture... They make fun of black, Asians, LGBT, etc..... but they only attack the jews because they now have no fear of being attacked by the left?
My impression is that those guys love to "own the libs" - if anything, antisemitism (real or apparent) on the left should make them LESS anti-semitic; like it is happen in Europe, where parties with Nazi or Fascist roots (the Sweden Democrats, for example) are now pro-Israel, because now it is the "based" position
It is easy to forget that there have been Nazi sympathizers in the US almost as long as the party existed in Germany. One doesn’t hear George Lincoln Rockwell’s name much any more (he founded the American Nazi party in 1959), so all this is really nothing new except for Trump. He has been instrumental in bringing all sorts of lunacies 'out of the closet' of which this is only one.
Both authoritarianism and the fear of it has lurked below the surface of American politics almost since the Founding. Alexander Hamilton would not have been unhappy for a monarchy. One of the prime movers of one of the first two political parties in the US, Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans was formed in part because of fears that the other party, the Federalists were actually monarchists in disguise. The southern wing of the Democratic Party was clearly moving toward an authoritarianism of the elite in the decades before the Civil War and the so-called Gilded Age was replete with wealthy American businessmen who thought they ought to be in charge of just about everything (and a bit like now, the Supreme Court heartily backed them).
This tension is built into our political DNA, and it will never die - indeed it is necessary for the survival of the Republic. Its existence forces us to understand the eternally seductive appeal of autocracy to those who are uncomfortable with and in some cases completely determined to erase the essential messiness and inefficiency of democracy.
In the largest sense, then, No Kings Day was not really about Trump or Vance or Vought or Miller, but about the nature and practice of democracy itself - the maintenance of US, the most extraordinary, the most crucial, the riskiest, and the most complex ongoing experiment in human society and government ever attempted.
I don’t think that antisemitism on the left would encourage Nazism on the right. That’s not the pattern of modern American partisanship. The right doesn’t look for permission from the left to persecute anyone. If anything, when the left shows hatred toward some group, the right will reflexively defend them.
“Jews as presumptive zionists “? As in it’s ok to be a Jew but not a Zionist? That it’s not ok to be antisemitic but ok to be anti-Zionist ? The good Jews and the bad Jews?
The overall picture you paint is both accurate and terrifying. But in such a world I think every Jew should be a Zionist as the only safe place for a Jew in the world is Israel.
Wish this wasn’t the case
The events of October the 7th strongly suggest that Israel isn't safe. I can't think of anywhere else in the world since the end of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War (not even the Six Day War) where 1,000 Jewish people were killed in a single day. And the response that the Israeli state feels is necessary (and who knows, but it might be) is starting to weaken the support in the West that Israel relies on to hold the line. A tent pitched in the middle of a forest fire shouldn't be anybody's idea of safety. The world should be far more worried about the situation - not one side or other in the situation, but the situation as whole - than it is at present.
The notion is that in Israel, at least you know that your countrymen won't be the ones that betray you.
Can we agree that this notion is silly and wrong?
Jewish Israeli Prime Minister Rabin was killed by a Jewish Israeli terrorist.
Netanyahu marched in a protest where people carried a fake coffin of then prime minister Yitzhak Rabin with people burning him in effigy. They were angry about him signing the Oslo Accords.
Strangely enough, Rabin was assassinated a few weeks later by someone who had attended the protest.
Where would you suggest?
October 7 was a security failure of existential proportions. It won’t happen again
I didn't say anyone was going anywhere. Israel is a permanent fact. The Palestinians in and around Israel and the Arab nations in the region are permanent facts. So the long history of conflict between the two - which has become the focus of global tensions between Christian and Muslim, East and West, North and South - is something that needs sustained effort and resources rather than grabbing our attention temporarily whenever it flares up.
The IRA, during its bombing campaign in mainland Britain, used to say that it didn't matter how many of their planned bombings were thwarted because eventually one of them would get through the security net and that's all they needed to achieve their aim. And in the meantime, British enforcement of the security net helped them get new recruits to the cause.
I am a big fan of Noah's. But in his last post i was taken by his raising of the distinction between being jewish, being zionist and being Israeli and it hit a nerve. While I think that an intellectual argument can be made for the distinction, i think it rings hollow. Jews have been persecuted forever. They are not the only persecuted people in history. But theirs stands out. 6 million jews were killed. because they were jewish. the US didnt let many of them who wished to flew the rise of Hitler and Nazism so they went all over the globe to anyplace that would take them. India, China, Argentina etc. They were fleeing for their lives. There have been jews in the middle east for thousands of years. But if you look at a heat map of jews in the middle east and north africa over time, it trends towards zero. no more Yemen, Egypt, Iraq, Syria etc. they left because they were not welcome; or worse. With the exception of Saudi, much of the middle east has been under the control of either the Ottoman Empire or the British Empire.
anyway yes, the jews arent going anywhere and neither are the arabs and the so called Palestinians. the Irish "troubles" took only 100 years to settle. Most arab countries do not want to fight with Israel. not the GCC, Saudi, Iraq, the new Syria, Lebanon ex Hezbollah, Egypt wants stability etc. if you ask most of these countries behind closed doors they will say the Palestinians are an expensive pain in the ass but they are Muslim so we must support them. But they dont want them to fight Israel. The real risk is Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood.
so we will see and hope.
but i do not see how Hamas will actually give up and disarm. They released the only 20 living hostages due to a 360 degree squeeze play and are now playing games with dead bodies.
The C20th troubles in Northern Ireland flared up in the 1960s, but the conflict started with the Elizabethan plantation policy in the late 16th century and raged/ rumbled on for hundreds of years, an apparently insoluble problem. It was calmed, if not exactly solved, by an improved understanding between the two sides, cash incentives (or the loss of them) and a dreadful event completely unrelated to the conflict (9/11) which nevertheless moved the US to take a more even-handed position in the conflict - though it made the Israeli-Palestine conflict far worse.
“Also, the rise of the Palestine movement on the left probably contributed to the trend. Although leftists certainly don’t like Hitler, the deep antisemitism of the Palestine movement — which tends to view Jews as presumptive Zionists unless they prove their innocence via anti-Israel activism — has effectively kicked Jews out from under the protective umbrella of progressive pro-minority activism.”
There a number of wild assumptions here that should not go unchallenged.
First, there’s the assumption that anyone critical of Israeli treatment of Palestinians is, ipso facto, anti-Semitic. This amounts to an irrational bias. Rationally I expect that some members of what Noah terms the “Palestine movement” are outright anti-semites. But all of them or even a majority? Is there any polling to suggest this is true? I would expect the modern weasel words “I feel like…”to proceed such speculation.
Second, the assumption that critics of Israel hate Zionism and Zionists. One can believe that Israel has a right to peaceful co-existence as a nation without having to believe Israel can do no wrong. And the killing of about 20,000 Gazan children, which a Lancet study deemed an undercount, is undoubtedly morally wrong. Most rational people would believe this.
Third, that progressives have somehow shunned Jews as a minority no longer worthy of protection. C’mon Noah, you know that Jews have long been very well represented among those who consider themselves progressive.
Noah believes that equating Zionism with racism and saying "From the river to the sea" are proof positive of anti semitism.
OK. I agree with him on that snippet. But he went much further than that. He is generalizing from some individual bad apples to assume the barrel is rotten. All I'm saying is that on this subject he is not applying the logic he usually brings to discussions.
"But at the same time, the struggle against MAGA will get a lot easier when Trump is gone."
A lot of Smart People™ seem to be espousing this take lately--the whole thing falls apart without its charismatic leader. I truly hope you're all correct.
The blog post's point wasn't exactly that the whole thing falls apart without its charismatic leader, but that lacking him the movement will rely further on ideology, which might turn more people against it.
Unfortunately, I suspect that the charismatic leader waiting in the wings is Nick Fuentes.
As odious as that idea is, it’s hard for me to believe a self-described virgin incel could successfully appeal to many of the voters who thrilled to Trump’s libertinism.
Are you telling me that Stephen Miller, the Goebbels of the Trump Administration, the Nosferatu of the immigration agenda, will not be able to keep the Trump coalition together because he sleeps upside down? Who knew
While he is vile and draculaic Steven Miller seems to aspire to be a Lex Luthor or Joseph Goebbels type, but in reality most see him as more like a Dr. Evil clown. I don’t think he could win even a single presidential primary.
The biggest structural problem is that left wing Democrats think they don’t need to move policy positions toward what’s popular but would rather finger wag and condescend to the same electorate.
So if Noah is right we have a more authoritarians Right and an incompetent Left and… nobody to serve the 80%+ of the people in the middle
I think that's true. A little vocal extremism goes a long way, particularly in the context of a dominant, highly decentralised medium of mass communication like social media, that increasingly sets the news agenda for more traditional news media.
The best way to contain grassroots extremism and stop it contaminating parties of the centre is to allow it to have its own representation in the mainstream political process. That way it gets a voice (not being listened to appears to be at least part of the frustration of the right). But also it gets its own leaders who, if they want to have any influence at all, have to come to the table and deal with and compromise with other, mainly centrist, parties.
For this to happen there has to be some form of proportional representation. It's a paradox, but for the centre to hold, the political process needs to be decentralised and the concentration solely on two parties has to end.
The other possibility is that the current Republican party is more of a "not the libs" coalition than a cult of personality and they will actually gain ground when the personally off putting Trump is gone. This would explain the massive ideological diversity in the party currently. The "Hitler did nothing wrong" part of the coalition has essentially nothing in common with the RFK led healing crystal retard faction beyond a hatred of the establishment. I don't know whether this is right or not, but if the Republicans pick a generic boring "not the libs" candidate over an idealouge, I think they will win big. On the other hand I think it's incredibly unlikely that they will pick a candidate like that after Trump.
The one in pink doesn't actually seem wrong to me in any way. Even a couple decades ago it was clear that it was less than ideal that so much of culture was organized specifically around WWII as the unique central point, whether it's the Oscars (where it has often been hard for any non-WWII movie to compete against WWII movies), or the fact that everything from architecture to political polling to television basically had a single inflection point around WWII.
A society that thinks "Nazi" and "evil" are synonyms can underplay the importance of avoiding different failure modes, like the Khmer Rouge and the Great Leap Forward and Idi Amin. (And can also miss Hannah Arendt's core point about the "banality of evil", that sometimes the problem is a *system* that leads ordinary people to think it's ordinary to do evil things.)
You don't have to think Nazism isn't wrong to think that it's important to keep multiple models of good and bad in mind, rather than focusing on this as the only one.
This is a relatively small nitpick, but the post relies a lot on extreme takes from social media (given by people hiding behind usernames, not the least) while acknowledging that social media rewards extreme takes. Yes, it also shows Vance downplaying such takes, but does not show him exactly pushing such lines.
I'm not convinced these takes serve as good evidence of the Right's drift towards Far Right (although I'm not arguing such a drift might not be taking place). If better evidence exists, I think the post should have presented that, instead.
I think we underappreciate the Great Man Theory of History, now superseded by a more empirically tractable model of interconnected social and economic relationships as the cause of social change. But clearly, the fact that humans remain strongly attracted to charismatic leaders suggests a trait adaptative to the path dependency/contingency in the evolution of complex systems. So, what happens after Trump depends a lot on the strength of the leadership that succeeds him, hopefully to restore some social balance.
The opponents of the Great Man Theory fall short because they don't really get around the need for a Great Man. Their theory is basically that if you go back in time and kill Napoleon's mother then another Napoleon will arise in his place. But are there really all these potential Great Men just sitting around waiting to do great things? Seems like the answer is clearly no. If there were, you would think the Democratic party would have found one sometime in the last 3 elections.
I'm not so sure about this. There are plenty of highly skilled and charismatic individuals waiting in the wings; the trick is how to turn these capable candidates into "Great Men", a process that involves a lot of social reinforcement and conditioning.
The Democrats keep losing elections because they field shitty compromise candidates that the public don't take seriously. There are two Democratic roads to winning a presidential election: (1) a barnstorming charismatic populist like Bernie Sanders, or (2) a barnstorming charismatic centrist who pretends to be a populist (Bill Clinton or Obama).
Good point. You can't really have a Great Man policy. Nietszche said 'the superman justifies the millennia'. But that leaves an awful lot of time for humanity just sitting around waiting for the right person to turn up.
None of the historical analogs are good, around the world, kings included. Yesterday I was reading Joseph Howe on England after the death of Cromwell, which became "merrie" again, a deluge of merriment, as Howe put it, when continental culture returned in force with he monarchy. DT has been careful not to banish merriment or culture, though his sense of humor tends to the cruel and culture to the gold-plated. Deluge of what, is the question.