Die USA zwischen Demokratie und Diktatur
Nächste Woche spreche ich in Hamburg über die politische Lage in den Vereinigten Staaten - und über die Geschichte und Gegenwart des Kampfes um die amerikanische Demokratie.
Kommt vorbei!
Thomas Zimmer
@tzimmer_history
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Historian - Democracy and Its Discontents - Podcast: Is This Democracy https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/is-this-democracy - Newsletter: Democracy Americana https://democracyamericana.com
If you are interested: This event will be held in German (although I’ll be happy to answer questions in English as well, obviously).
There will be plenty of time for a proper discussion. I promise I’ll stay until I’ve talked to anyone who wants to talk to me about America’s past or present.
The United States between Democracy and Dictatorship
I’ll be talking about the state of American politics, and what the rest of the world should expect from the Trumpist regime, in Hamburg next week.
Come join us!
I am grateful to Die Zeit for regularly giving me the space for such deep dives.
I’m hoping to make an extended English version available soon via Democracy Americana - which is also my main source of income as an independent writer.
If you’re interested in such long-form explorations, please subscribe:
https://steady.page/en/democracyamericana/newsletter/sign_up
And this story from Buckley to Rufo should also be an urgent warning to the political mainstream: These conservative intellectuals have never kept their promise of taming/purging the extremists. We should treat them as what they have been: Dangerous enablers of extremism.
Those self-proclaimed intellectual leaders who have been fueling this politics of friend-vs-foe / good-vs-evil, this hysterical siege mentality on the Right, do not deserve our sympathy when they are getting swept away by the very forces they have been summoning.
And such a movement is most certainly not going to be contained or restrained by people like Rufo who have been preaching that evil leftist, “globalist” forces are out to destroy the nation and only a comprehensive, ruthless “counter-revolution” may suffice to save America.
But the self-anointed intellectual vanguard was never in charge. Because the movement they are “leading” is not fueled by ideas. It is animated by grievance towards a changing society, by a desire to restore dominance in a world they believe owes them admiration and deference.
In that sense, there is a fairly direct path from William F. Buckley, the godfather of Modern Conservatism, to Rufo. Not the mythological Buckley who purged the extremists – but the real historical figure who deemed the demagogues useful and the extremist energies indispensable.
And so, we are at this point again where today’s intellectual vanguard of the Conservative Movement finds itself unable to steer the extremist forces whose rise to power they have fueled by laundering and legitimizing them, by refusing to draw a line against the extremist fringe.