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 😟

#books

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 🙁 )

@nelson

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