I was going along until it got too stupid to read: And nobody took Adam Tooze up on that because it would be far, FAR more sensible to call it "the square deal" or "the new deal" or "the great society" or any government program where the liberal wing demonstrates the importance of government by using it to give people jobs." Maga was about foreign isolationism and domestic cuts. The phrase the Biden administration made stick was "build back better." So... the US engagement in Ukraine was caused by Putin's invasion of it, Israel's aggression in the Middle East was caused by Hamas which was caused by Iran which was caused by Putin, and absolutely no one is talking about "the containment of China in East Asia." Well... he's got the facts on his side. The Tea party came out of 2008. Wealth for the bottom 90% of Americans has not accumulated since. There has been historical anti-incumbent sentiment and the incumbent in the United States lost by a smaller margin than anywhere else in the developed world. Meanwhile, he's been the national security advisor. Tooze? How'd that go See, you can't will it into being "historic." You have to demonstrate how it's different than, say, Reagan vs. Carter. or Kennedy vs. Eisenhower. Or Bush vs. Gore. Bush V Gore was historic because it was the first time the Supreme Court picked a president. What was historic about 2024 is everyone had ample reason to believe Trump would be fucking terrible and they voted for him anyway, despite the fact that the only clear policies he had were (1) deport lots of people (2) lower prices (3) stop paying for prison transgender surgery. He's almost got it... Hang on - so Tooze is taking the Democrats to task for having a little fun with a show for political junkies from 20 years ago? Excuse me, 25 - it's not like this was an official function or some shit. This is the craziest hypothetical cause-effect I have ever seen in political punditry. "If Trump is a lying sack of shit, does an old TV show visiting the White House as part of a press junket indicate that the Democrats are also lying sacks of shit?"In the wake of the Biden-Harris defeat, with Trump 2.0 still in waiting, I referred to Bidenomics as “Maga for thinking people”.
By November 2024 this had resulted in the three-pronged US engagement in Ukraine, in Israel’s aggression in the Middle East and in the containment of China in East Asia.
In his exit interview with the FT, far from distancing himself from the suggestion of continuity, former NSA Jake Sullivan doubled down.
I had the pleasure of commenting on a panel feating USTR Katherine Tai amongst other Bidenomics luminaries.
There was no sign, at all, of a clear-eyed assessment of the historic defeat in 2024.
Since then, MAGA 2.0 has turned out even more unhinged than the first iteration. It blends a very real and jarring adjustment of US foreign policy, above all towards Ukraine, and a savage attack on US institutions, the civil service and the Universities to the fore, with a barrage of policy measures, notably on trade, that seems driven largely by the desire to dominate the news-cycle rather than to generate real effects.
But then I remember the exchange with Katherine Tai and her heartfelt evocation of Martin Sheen/St Peter and I invite you to recall the delirious moment in September 2024 - in full election season - when the actual incumbents of the White House welcomed the cast of TV’s West Wing to the actual West Wing and Martin Sheen, in character, actually intoned “Dear Father, let our country awake” …. and I begin to wonder.
If Trump 2.0 takes the politics of the imaginary to a new level, is this a rupture with the supposedly more grounded Biden administration?
I took Tooze's basic point to be that Trumpism is rewriting the American and global order in ways that are profound and likely awful for most of us and that the Democrat machine - stuck in conceptual paradigms and narratives we've taken for granted (and useful) for decades - is failing to grasp the enormity of this, and consequently they are using the old paradigms and narratives to try to put out the fire even while the house is burning down around them.
That is definitely his basic point. He does not, however, support it with any aplomb. It's also - to be frank - a fucking dumb point to make considering 90% of the Harris Campaign's messaging was about Project 2025. The Democrats, in speaking to their base, were hair-on-fire serious about Trump's impact on the "American and global order." Democrats built their platform on "Trump will destroy the country." Republicans built their platform on "Democrats will pay for sex change operations for prisoners." In general, voters made their choice based on "inflation pisses me off." "Inflation pisses me off" is pretty much the go-to "throw the bums out" trigger point and Adam Tooze pretending that a West Wing reunion at the White House is a sign that Democrats aren't listening to voters just illustrates what a dipshit Adam Tooze is.
Yeah, fair enough. I recall infighting among Democrats in the campaign period about whether or not they should be concentrating on Project 2025 or talking about jobs and price hikes. That said, the examples he's citing (the West Wing reunion being just one of them) seems to be more about where they're at now - and more particularly where they are aiming, which is towards a restoration of the previous order - rather than redefining themselves for the new order. Tooze a dipshit? C'mon man. Wages of Destruction was a pretty landmark read.
Meh. The Nazis are a funhouse mirror through which every strident wannabe thought leader glances to confirm his historical accuracy. Very, very few actually bother to put the Nazis in the context of their time or their political history. WWI was launched in racism on a racist continent. The Zionists were looking for a homeland to avoid extermination since the Dreyfus Affair; the Balfour Declaration predates the Beer Hall Putsch by six years. From a humanitarian and totalitarian standpoint, the NSDAP and DNVP were equally nasty business; Russia went Communist because the Germans paid for Lenin to set up shop there to keep him out of Germany and even then, your political choices were basically "hard right fascists" "hard right fascists" "flailing centrists" "hard left communists" and "hard left communists." Throw that into an environment where the way out of reparations was ruinous inflation and you're gonna have a bad time. Worthy of note - "let's exterminate the jews" was a German secret hidden from the Germans much as "let's exterminate the Jews" was a Soviet secret hidden from the Soviets (and a non-secret before that). If it makes you feel better, Snyder's book is considered a landmark read too and even he can't avoid ski-jumping to "well since the Nazis exist, obviously they will exist in America." He also leans hard into the culpability of Poland in the extermination of Jews to avoid being exterminated themselves and skips right the fuck over The Western Betrayal. I haven't read Adam Tooze's book and I won't, but I've read maybe a dozen books on the economics of WWII? And none of them hypothesize that "The idea that Nazi Germany was an unstoppable juggernaut, backed by an efficient, highly industrialized economy" was central. EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM puts forth the idea that WWII was a make-or-break ploy by Germany and Japan to renegotiate the punitive economic treaties under which they operated, which is why battles were launched in violation of the standards of war, which were carried out with utter disregard to treaties and practices, which is why both countries were required unconditional surrender. Unfortunately, we required a narrative of "nope only the Nazis were bad, and they were very bad, and otherwise Germany is great, yep, we should totally extend them the Marshall plan, now that Hitler's gone it's all sunshine and rainbows" without any deeper analysis of how WWII happened. And damn near every book written since 1960 accepts the "nope only the Nazis were bad" argument with varying degrees of "well ackshully Stalin was bad/kinda bad/very bad" depending on the era in which it was written. You wanna know why the only quote anyone uses of Arendt is that "banality of evil" quip that she regretted putting on Eichmann in Jerusalem for the rest of her life? Because the corpus of her work was that antisemitism was largely the work of the CheKa, NKVD and KGB that was then deployed by opportunists clear to Henry Ford. Can't simultaneously blame someone for the Holocaust while also using grain shipments to control their foreign policy!