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 😟
@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
None The Fewer