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.
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.
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.
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.
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
“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.
"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.
“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 8th 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.
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
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.
"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.
Excellent piece. Another theme you see, that is passionately argued, is that Hitler was mainly trying to defeat Communism , which "swept Europe and dominated the world" and "still dominates recommended readings in US universities" according to one thread on X that I somehow got exposed to. Anti-Communism is a huge deal.
“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.
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.
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.
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
What happens after Trump is THE question. FWLIW, if Trumpism is resoundingly rejected, the GOP is dead. There's nothing else there but Trump now. If Trumpism remains viable, the GOP will probably become Christian nationalist. That's the only part of Trump's GOP which is for something rather than just against. Whether it can get enough traction to win nat'l elections is an open question.
"Liberal African-Americans are slightly less antisemitic than white conservatives, and Black and Hispanic conservatives are substantially more antisemitic than white conservatives."
Why, though? That's what I don't understand. I really *don't* understand. I'm not Jewish, nor black, nor Hispanic. I stand outside this dynamic and wonder what the hell is going on.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"The leftists helped make these people into Nazis" is certainly a take.
Extreme Right wingers have been putting nazi flags on things for decades.
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.
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
“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.
"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.
“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 8th 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.
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
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.
"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.
Excellent piece. Another theme you see, that is passionately argued, is that Hitler was mainly trying to defeat Communism , which "swept Europe and dominated the world" and "still dominates recommended readings in US universities" according to one thread on X that I somehow got exposed to. Anti-Communism is a huge deal.
“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.
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.
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.
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
What happens after Trump is THE question. FWLIW, if Trumpism is resoundingly rejected, the GOP is dead. There's nothing else there but Trump now. If Trumpism remains viable, the GOP will probably become Christian nationalist. That's the only part of Trump's GOP which is for something rather than just against. Whether it can get enough traction to win nat'l elections is an open question.
"Liberal African-Americans are slightly less antisemitic than white conservatives, and Black and Hispanic conservatives are substantially more antisemitic than white conservatives."
Why, though? That's what I don't understand. I really *don't* understand. I'm not Jewish, nor black, nor Hispanic. I stand outside this dynamic and wonder what the hell is going on.