while I was out in the hollers, I read me a chunk of Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes, which is pretty fascinating stuff
he seems to have a genuine respect for the long 19th c, which I found a bit surprising for a Marxist historian
and his reckoning with communism in the 20th c is interesting
though I doubt it's the last word on the subject, the parts of Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes on the rise of fascism make for terrifying reading if you're a US citizen
there have been a number of quasi-academic thinkpieces on how Trump isn't _really_ an ideologically consistent fascist
but it's hard to avoid the feeling that it's the sociological, political, and epistemic similarities to proto-fascism that are what's really worrisome 😟
to follow with a historiographical point:
I found Hobsbawm's emphasis on Nazism as a middle-class phenomenon particularly chilling (given middle-class Trump support in the primary), but it appears that this line of argument (influentially argued by Michael Kater) has undergone revision in the last decades: the revisionist position appears to be that Nazis drew support across classes
(but then, DT was heavily supported across classes in the general, too 🙁 )
to be sure, the analogy is imprecise at best-- and I'm coming to this from an instinctive distrust of sloppy historical analogies
(in this case, the German Mittelstand consisted of social groups that barely exist now, and Nazis had extensive support among the young)
but I am a bit spooked by the parallels all the same
I've been thinking about that great apocryphal Twain quote about history rhyming
there are ways in which the elements of our political and civil system have held up better than one might have expected after the election, but I'm a bit more concerned now that the echoes with the past are also real
that is to say, I guess, that it can be hard for a society to hang together if a substantial chunk of the middle of society decides they want to burn it down
actually, one of the nice things about Hobsbawm is that his perspective on various developments is pretty global
his book is not, I'm sure, the last word any subject (nor does he pretend as much), but his comparative arguments are interesting
@mrgah I'd read somewhere that Mussolini was more internally consistent, and Hitler was more shouty and incoherent... yes, here:
"prior to WWII, at least up until the mid or late 30s by my reading, Italian Fascism was definitely the more coherent ideology and Mussolini was the man with the plan; Hitler was frequently portrayed as an inchoate screamer whose philosophy boiled down to simplistic repetitions."
mrgah
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