American Reformers

This nails it

“It seems to me that the reason it’s so difficult to pin down what Trump is is that Trump isn’t anything. An interrogation of Trump’s political remarks over the last few decades leads one to the conclusion that to ascribe to him any sort of ideological adherence or coherence is too generous. His biography is far more instructive. If Trump exhibits authoritarian tendencies, it’s not because he believes in it as a form of popular governance, but because, as Adam Davidson has pointed out, Trump spent his entire life in the New York real estate market, which is more comparable to Eastern European or Mid-East-style money-and-power nexuses than to any sort of free and fair exchange. As Davidson wrote, Manhattan real estate “is not a marketplace characterized by competition and dynamism; instead, Manhattan real estate looks an awful lot more like a Middle Eastern rentier economy. It is a hereditary system. We talk about families, not entrepreneurs. A handful of families have dominated the city’s real estate development for decades.” It’s a kind of mafia — a strictly hierarchical structure, in which the patriarch makes all decisions, and the threat of violence underlies any transgression”

In the Court of Public Opinion – After Trump

published simultaneous op-eds by Robert Paxton and Timothy Snyder, two definitive historians of the 1930s and 1940s, analyzing the implications of the Trump administration. Paxton and Snyder didn’t exactly come to contradictory conclusions – they echoed each other in speculating that a terrorist att…


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