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 🙁 )