Today, the Strait of Hormuz is closed — or maybe it isn’t. Confusion reigns over how much oil the U.S. Navy is escorting through the strait. Whether it’s 10 million or 5 million barrels per day, this was not the argument President Trump envisioned when he recklessly ignored the counsel of his advisors, instead bought an Israeli con job, and launched his air war against a country of 90 million people on February 28. By now, Trump believed he’d be riding high into the midterm elections as the liberator of Iran, that implacable foe of the United States for the past 47 years.

What is there to say that hasn’t been said already? This strategic fiasco and moral stain cannot be salvaged. On my Aug. 11 podcast, Will Walldorf suggested it will be Trump’s successor who extricates the country from this bind. He may be right. As the administration turns to a strategy of economic warfare, it appears Trump is choosing the path of least resistance between all-out war and surrender. Washington and Tehran will drift along, staring at each other from opposite ends of the Strait of Hormuz, as they compete for victories in the realm of world opinion. Whether both sides will return to serious negotiations sooner or later, I cannot say.

What is certain is that it was naive to think that Donald Trump would truly avoid the quagmires that engulfed many of his White House predecessors. I admit to thinking (or hoping) that even Trump could not be so stupid as to leap headlong into the Middle East again. Why would he risk his presidency?

There is more to the Iran war’s origins than Trump’s hubris and ego, however. As I wrote in an essay for Responsible Statecraft a couple months ago, historical structures also explain how we got here.

Myanmar’s collapse

This is another “summer edition” of the History As It Happens newsletter, although it has nothing to do with a late August siesta. Washington still feels empty, but I’m as busy as ever. Thus, I simply don’t have the time to write extensively about this week’s podcasts.

In Tuesday’s episode, historian Maitrii Aung-Thwin discussed the origins of Myanmar’s ongoing civil war, now in its fifth year. We cover all the major turning points and setbacks for democracy, from 1948 to 1962 to 1988 to 2015, to the 2021 coup that once again restored military dictatorship.

‘The Battle of Algiers’ at 60

In late August 1966, a remarkable film premiered at the Venice Film Festival. ‘The Battle of Algiers,’ directed by the Italian realist Gillo Pontecorvo, portrayed the brutal realities of colonialism, war, and torture in grainy black-and-white.

In today’s episode, historian Martin Evans discusses why Pontecorvo’s masterpiece still resonates after having inspired generations of revolutionaries.

Remember Iraq?

In this week’s bonus episode, the Quincy Institute’s Adam Weinstein reminds us what’s happening inside Iraq, the other Middle Eastern country that was supposed to be transformed by the United States crusaders.

Some 23 years after the toppling of Saddam Hussein, Iraqi Shia militias backed by Iran continue to exert influence in Baghdad. The Trump administration wants new Iraqi prime minister Ali al-Zaidi to disarm them no later than September 30. Weinstein explains why that is impossible.

This is a nice moment to encourage you to become a paying subscriber to History As It Happens podcast. Subscribers have access to all of my bonus content. Otherwise, you can only preview the first few minutes.

Subscribe today and listen to Adam Weinstein’s important insights about Iraq and why the U.S. still exerts so much control over its sovereignty.

Up next…

Next week, author Kai Bird on Roy Cohn (and Donald Trump). This episode will drop Tuesday.

Meanwhile, you can read my review (in The American Conservative) of Bird’s Cohn biography American Scoundrel.

And Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick will discuss their must-read book Israel’s Lobby. It’s a superb analysis of the historical origins of AIPAC and affiliated groups, and the ongoing threat to free expression. In my view, pro-Israel fanatics pose the greatest danger to free expression, academic freedom, and open debate in our country.

I recommend reading Kai Bird’s new book about Cohn’s life and times, and his relationship with Donald John Trump from 1973.

In the meantime, you can read my review here. It was published by The American Conservative today.

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I’m also almost “out of words” for the week anyway. Writing a book review absorbed a lot of my time and energy, but I am excited that my review of Kai Bird’s biography of Roy Cohn will be published soon. I’ll make sure to share it with you once it’s available. Kai will hopefully appear on my podcast in the coming weeks to talk about his book, American Scoundrel.

It’s late August, and a welcome calm has descended over Washington as it does at this time every year. The city feels empty with Congress not in session and lots of folks squeezing in a summer vacation before September. And I’ve gotta hit the road soon for Pittsburgh. Here’s a quick look at the week’s podcasts.

What really happened at Camp David?

In light of what Israel is doing to Gaza and the West Bank — the violent destruction of Palestinian society — a counterfactual question seemed worth revisiting in Tuesday’s podcast episode.

What if the Camp David summit had succeeded?

The Oslo Peace Process feels like ancient history. Today, a truly just and durable peace between Israel and the Palestinians appears out of reach.

Listen to my conversation with historian Mark LeVine, who has written an account of the Clinton-Barak-Arafat summit in July 2000 in Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989.

American empires

Some trivia: What was the United States’ last acquired territory? Answer below.

After President Trump returned to the White House in 2025, he sounded like he had just arrived from a time-traveling expedition in the nineteenth century. He called on Canada to join the union. He threatened to take Greenland by force. He promised to reclaim the Panama Canal. Early this year, Trump turned Venezuela into a vassal and hoped to do the same to Iran. That last one isn’t working out so well.

The United States was expansionist from its birth. Territorial conquest was the norm, starting with the lands of Native Americans. During the Revolutionary War, the Continental Army invaded Canada. In the 1840s, the westward-expanding nation took over much of Mexico. Hardly a generation later, William Seward made a bid for Greenland. Seward’s “folly” was obtaining Alaska. Imagine Cold War history without it. Soviet missiles in Alaska?!

In today’s podcast episode, author Mark Kawar talks about the three phases of American expansion. As he put it in an essay for Law & Liberty:

This is the pattern of America’s annexation history: A period of rapid territorial growth and vast ambitions, followed by a more selective approach to strategic annexations, and then an era of expanding control without expanding territory.

There are very good reasons why territorial annexation — the redrawing of national borders through force — is illegal, but that doesn’t automatically stop some leaders from trying to roll back the clock. See: Putin, Vladimir. The post-1945 era was supposed to be different in this regard.

Although the U.S. no longer acquires territory, it has a sprawling, unsustainable global military footprint with a ~$1 trillion annual price tag. Kawar discusses the shift from annexation to this “different model of power,” what some call global hegemony or even imperialism.

We also talk about the acquisitions that got away. Kawar has written a lively book on the topic, America, but Bigger: Near Annexations from Greenland to Galapagos. Did you know that ambitious Americans once negotiated with Vladimir Lenin over the Kamchatka peninsula? I only remembered Kamchatka as a territory on the Risk board.

Answer to the above trivia question: The Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands was the last acquired U.S. territory in 1976.

Americans emerged from their stunned disbelief and sorrow — the first days and weeks after the attacks stood still — as a frightened nation galvanized by moral outrage and eager for revenge. Today, with the perspective of a quarter-century, we can safely conclude that the U.S. response to 9/11, a crusade to eradicate Islamist enemies and transform the Greater Middle East, was a catastrophe whose consequences continue to harm U.S. interests. So much blood and treasure, so little to show for it: Afghanistan is still not a country, and Iraq is basically a failed state heavily influenced by Iran. And the open wound of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is as far from a just settlement as it’s ever been since 1948. (What about al-Qaeda? I will produce an episode next month about the heavily degraded terrorist organization as one of several retrospectives on the GWOT.)

Can the United States ever fully extricate itself from these intractable calamities? With the country involved in another unnecessary war in the Persian Gulf, the question was on my mind as I interviewed Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat and potential 2028 presidential candidate.

In today’s podcast episode (31 minutes), Van Hollen and I talk about the Iran war disaster, the War Powers Act of 1973, his support of the Libya intervention in 2011, Israel-Palestine and charges of genocide, AIPAC, U.S. hegemony, and the limits of power.

The following is a partial transcript of our conversation, although I encourage you to listen to the full podcast.

The newsletter will continue beneath the transcript with a brief discussion of Tuesday’s episode with Will Walldorf about presidents and their stalemated wars, my stance on sharing transcripts, and a few other observations!

Q&A with Senator Chris Van Hollen

Martin Di Caro: Let’s begin with the Iran war. In June, the House and Senate passed a concurrent War Powers resolution. It directed the president to remove U.S. forces from hostilities. The administration says it does not have to abide by the vote because of the ceasefire, which it says reset the 60-day withdrawal clock.

Is the War Powers Act of 1973 irreparably broken?

Sen. Van Hollen: Well, it’s very damaged. Donald Trump has really shredded its provisions and done so with the complicity of Senate Republicans. Our constitutional framers believed that, by setting up a separate branch of government with its own powers, including the power to declare war, that as an institution Congress would protect its prerogatives. But now we have a Republican Party that is just a rubber stamp for Donald Trump… It’s my strong view that this was an illegal war when Donald Trump started it and it is an illegal war now as he continues it in violation of the concurrent War Powers resolution.

Di Caro: Presidents of both parties going back decades have said the War Powers Act is unconstitutional. Do you agree with that?

Van Hollen: I do not agree with that. We have not had it fully tested, of course, in our courts and obviously we’re looking at the possibility of litigating the issue of the concurrent resolution. One of the questions, though, is standing, and in order for Congress to bring a lawsuit, you need a majority. Right now we have Republicans controlling the House and the Senate.

Di Caro: What other means does Congress have at its disposal to stop an unnecessary war?

Van Hollen: Ultimately, Congress has to use its power of the purse. I’ve been very clear: not one penny for this illegal war. As you know, the administration has asked for a supplemental of around $70 billion. My view is Congress should not appropriate those funds because by doing so, we’d be giving consent and approval to an illegal war retroactively. So it’s very important that we hold the line and not provide that funding. We’re also expending munitions at a tremendous and expensive rate. That’s another constraint potentially on the administration’s continuation of the war, at least at the [prior] intensity level.

On Libya 2011…

Di Caro: One more question about the War Powers Act and Congress’s failure going back decades to restrain the executive. For example, the Libya intervention under Barack Obama in 2011. The United Nations did authorize NATO intervention there to protect civilians, but when Congress challenged President Obama about the 60-day withdrawal clock — this was in June 2011 — Harold Koh, a legal adviser at the State Department, testified on Capitol Hill.

He said, “As everyone recognizes, the legal trigger for the automatic pullout clock — hostilities — is an ambiguous term of art that is defined nowhere in the statute. The legislative history which we cite makes clear there is no agreed upon view of exactly what the term hostilities would encompass. Nor has that standard ever been defined by any court or by Congress itself.”

I have a two-part question. What do you make of that statement 15 years on? And do you regret voting in support of the Obama intervention in Libya?

Van Hollen: No, to [answer your] second point, and here’s why. I recognize this is a very gray area in certain instances. And the Libya circumstances were a gray area. Iran is not a gray area. Not one bit. We’ve obviously lost 18 service members. There’s no question about whether or not we’re engaged in hostilities in Iran.

In the case of Libya, as you know, in addition to the U.N. resolution and NATO’s involvement, the Arab League also urged the United States to support the effort as part of a coalition to prevent what was viewed as an imminent massacre of hundreds of thousands of people. And it was exclusively air power. So I do recognize that it was a murky area, but my view was that for the limited period that the Obama administration was engaged in that action, with the support of both the U.N. and the Arab League, the administration’s argument was sound. At least it wasn’t frivolous. Let’s put it that way. Whereas in the case of the Iran situation, the Trump administration’s argument is plainly frivolous.

Di Caro: In Libya, it started with good intentions, but there was mission creep and it ended up a regime change operation after President Obama had said he would not [seek that outcome] militarily. And ultimately Libya became a failed state. Maybe it would have been a failed state without U.S. intervention, but I think Libya is an important example in this long story of how we got here today.

Van Hollen: I agree that it resulted in mission creep. No doubt about it. You asked me about the original justification, but if you’re looking at the results, on the one hand, it was successful at preventing a mass slaughter, and I think that’s obviously a good thing. On the other hand, as you say, the mission did seem to evolve and resulted in the toppling of Gaddafi, and Libya became a failed state. So, I’m not suggesting the Libya operation was an ultimate success. I do think it was a limited success with respect to its original purpose.

Israel and AIPAC…

Di Caro: Let’s move on to Israel now. You wrote an op-ed in the New York Times calling on Democrats to reckon with their failure to use U.S. leverage to restrain Israel’s conduct. Some former members of the Biden administration have recently come under intense public scrutiny for not conditioning aid to Israel as it was destroying Gaza. Yet today, U.S. weapons and U.S. manufactured bulldozers keep flowing to Israel. Why is that?

Van Hollen: It’s because we still haven’t mustered enough votes to stop it. We’ve made gains. I remember in the March-April period of 2025 when there was a full blockade of all food and humanitarian assistance into Gaza that lasted almost 80 days. We had about 17 votes or thereabouts in the Senate to prevent the transfer of U.S. weapons to the Israeli government. In a more recent vote, we were able to secure 40 Democratic senators to block weapons and bulldozers. So, the trend is in the right direction, at least on the Democratic side. Now, on the Republican side, you have a continued blank check to the Netanyahu government regardless of the conduct of Israel, whether in Gaza or the West Bank.

So I guess the answer to your question is there’s growing sentiment that United States taxpayers should stop providing a blank check to Israel. My view is that any offensive weapons should also be conditioned on withdrawal of the Israeli occupation in the West Bank, according to an agreed upon timetable.

Di Caro: You’ve been one of the more vocal senators criticizing Israel. I often wonder if privately your colleagues in the Senate voice those same opinions, but they’re afraid to say them publicly.

Van Hollen: The short answer is yes, that is very true. Mine was a lonely position a number of years ago. In fact, before the war in Gaza, I was very focused on trying to end the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and to use [U.S.] leverage to do so. I had colleagues even then who agreed with me privately, but it was politically inconvenient for them to agree openly.

And then with the war in Gaza, people have witnessed the horrendous destruction, what human rights organizations, historian Omer Bartov, and others have concluded is genocide. They have the right analysis. So, more and more of [my] colleagues are finally waking up to the idea that providing a blank check to the Netanyahu government is undermining our security in the region and undermining our position around the world.

Di Caro: It’s not unusual for Congress to trail public opinion. That was the case during the Vietnam War. The public turned against the war before a majority in Congress did. But across the political spectrum now, especially among younger voters — left, center, and right — they have soured on U.S. support for Israel. Why are some of your Senate colleagues still afraid to vote against Israel? Is it as simple as AIPAC or is there more to it?

Van Hollen: The number one driver is politics here in the United States. It’s AIPAC. AIPAC has traditionally been a very strong political player. They weigh into elections. Look, we’ve just witnessed them putting $30 million into the race against Abdul El-Sayed [in the Michigan Senate race]. They’re involved in many other races. They’ve shown a willingness to use their political muscle to defeat any candidate that doesn’t support unconditional aid to Israel. Now, their position is obviously weakening among Democrats. And there are a lot of other groups in this space, including other prominent Jewish political organizations like J Street, that take a very different position. But AIPAC has been the biggest player, and that is why Congress remains largely in a bubble on this issue, although the bubble is being pierced here and there.

Di Caro: Do you agree with the experts, scholars, and human rights organizations who say Israel has committed genocide and is still committing genocide in Gaza?

Van Hollen: I do. I’ve reviewed this question very carefully. Nobody should come to a quick conclusion because it is a very serious charge. In my view, having read Omer Bartov’s book, and having looked at the analyses of human rights organizations from Amnesty International to Human Rights Watch to B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, is that the overwhelming weight of the evidence meets the definition of genocide. What I think is absolutely indisputable is that the Israeli government’s been engaged in ethnic cleansing in Gaza. You would hope even the strongest boosters of this Israeli government would have to concede that, given what’s happened on the ground, but they don’t.

Future of U.S. primacy…

Di Caro: Is U.S. hegemony waning and is that such a bad thing for the rest of the world?

Van Hollen: I would say two things are happening. One is that complete U.S. dominance is certainly waning. We’ve seen the ongoing rise of other powers, China being the biggest one.

Di Caro: Primacy. You’re referring to primacy?

Van Hollen: Yes, I’m talking about the U.S. being an unchallenged leader. What it means, though, is other countries do need to take on more responsibility for their collective defense. I will say that the Trump administration has completely shredded and destroyed U.S. credibility. We used to be a champion for international law and the rules-based order — I would say a very imperfect one. I’m well aware of that, and the Biden administration did a lot of damage in that regard, with respect to not applying international law in the case of Gaza, for example. The Trump administration has just abandoned [international law] altogether. It’s in the United States interests to again work to adhere to a rules-based order internationally. There’s a lot of repair work to be done there.

Di Caro: To me, this often comes down to the ability to recognize the limits of power... To those of us who’ve been arguing for a more restrained U.S. foreign policy, the primacists don’t understand the limits of power — even though we’re seeing it everywhere today, and not just with the United States.

Van Hollen: Well, I think you’re right. I think your analysis is spot on. What we’re witnessing in Iran is Exhibit A of the limits of power. Donald Trump thought he could go into Venezuela, grab Maduro, and in a short period of time he can do whatever he wants anywhere in the world. Obviously that’s just not true. So we need to reassess the huge military footprint we have around the world.

Presidents and their quagmires

If Wake Forest University political scientist Will Walldorf is correct, the U.S.-Iran war won’t be settled until at least 2029. In Tuesday’s episode, Walldorf said recent history shows that presidents who initiated military interventions were rarely the ones to resolve them. That was left to their successors.

The Korean War with Truman and Eisenhower. Vietnam with LBJ and Nixon. Afghanistan and Iraq carried on for years after George W. Bush exited the White House. U.S. forces are still in Iraq!

Today, the American president is out of his depth and increasingly deranged. Who knows — maybe Donald Trump will surprise us by ending the Iran war before the midterm elections. After all, it is in everyone’s interest to resolve the conflict over the Strait of Hormuz.

Then again, I do not have any special insights into the strategy of Iran’s new leadership cadre. Maybe I should do a fresh podcast episode about who’s running Iran.

On transcripts and a few other notes…

Listeners have asked why I don’t share transcripts of my podcasts. The main reason is I’d like you to listen rather than read. I put a lot of effort into crafting an informative and entertaining audio experience. Plus, it’s a business decision. Every listen means ad impressions, and ad impressions mean revenue.

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Coming up next…

On Tuesday, historian Mark LeVine will answer: What really happened at Camp David (and afterward) in 2000?

Next Friday’s episode will feature historian and author Mark Kawar in a discussion about the history of U.S. expansionism (back in vogue, yes?). Our focus will be on the annexations that didn’t happen.

And next week’s newsletter will be short, as I will be on the road to Pittsburgh to visit an older brother.

We might be forgiven for missing what’s been happening to Cuba, given the relentless chaos (or circus) absorbing our attention in Trump’s Washington and overseas. The Iran quagmire dominates headlines. Other crises fight for our time. And there aren’t many American reporters in Cuba. But the economic warfare is taking on historic proportions, as it may be the most intense pressure Washington has ever exerted on Havana since Castro’s revolution triumphed in 1959. The goal is to bring down the Cuban government somehow. It hasn’t worked yet, so the CIA has formed a secret task force to increase the pressure, according to The New York Times.

With the brief exception of the Obama thaw, the U.S.-Cuba relationship has been frozen in time, as if the Cold War never ended. Almost from the beginning of Cuba’s revolutionary period, the U.S. has sought to reverse Castro’s victory over the pro-U.S. Batista regime, and it repeatedly rebuffed Castro’s feelers seeking a modus vivendi with the superpower to the north. There’ve been paramilitary operations, such as the Bay of Pigs fiasco, assassination attempts, an embargo, sanctions, and other forms of state terror carried out by Washington against Cuba. For two weeks in October 1962, there was nearly nuclear Armageddon.

Both the Ford and Carter administrations considered normalizing relations, but Cuba’s defense of Angola against South African attack ruined that possibility. Was Angola really that important on the Cold War chessboard?

After the Cold War, the Clinton administration sought “to push a beleaguered Cuba toward an Eastern European-style free market transition by putting immense pressure on the Cuban economy and people through punitive policies like the 1996 Helms-Burton bill,” according to Sujatha Fernandes. Some positive reforms followed, and then the “pink tide” helped Cuba significantly more.

When Obama took a lighter touch the following decade, announcing that a half century of conflict had failed to advance anyone’s interests, Raúl Castro began “liberalizing Cuba’s state-controlled economy in 2009. His reforms included decentralizing the agricultural sector, relaxing restrictions on small businesses, opening up real estate markets, allowing Cubans to travel abroad more freely, and expanding access to consumer goods,” according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

The détente didn’t last. Upon taking office in 2017, Donald Trump reverted to hardline policies that, predictably, failed to transform Cuba to his liking.

In today’s episode of History As It Happens, the historian Alexander Aviña traces the origins of today’s crisis from the protectorate (semi-colony) years after the Spanish-American War, followed by the brutal Fulgencio Batista regime, then into the Eisenhower/Kennedy response to Castro (which pushed him into Soviet arms), through to the post-Cold War period.

“The Cuban revolution was driven by a desire for social justice and national sovereignty. If there’s one thing the Cuban people to this day are consistently affirming, it’s those two principles, right? It’s the broader continental impact of the Bay of Pigs. The Cubans talked about how it was the first defeat that the U.S. empire had suffered in Latin America. The historical memory of the [1959] revolutionaries goes all the way back to 1898, when the U.S. took over the city of Santiago from Spanish forces. They didn’t let the Cuban patriots go in. So when the Cubans actually took over Santiago and Havana in late 1958, early 1959, one of the first things Fidel said was, this time we are going into Santiago! — and historical memory drove a lot of Cuban conduct toward the United States in the early 1960s. They see the U.S. for what it is. They know that the U.S. is an empire. It’s always been an empire in relation to Cuba. So, they have to act accordingly. And I think that again explains in part why they were looking for an ally [the USSR] to offset this menacing force,” Aviña says.

Castro’s regime was repressive and undemocratic. It was also economically inept. But the United States has managed to co-exist with — or actively support — many unpleasant regimes before, during, and after the Cold War. The U.S. normalized relations with two communist countries after decades of hostility: China and Vietnam. Millions of Vietnamese died in the Vietnam War. Today, the country hosts major multinational businesses employing hundreds of thousands of people, such as Nike. Yet Cuba remains in a time warp.

What is ethnic nationalism?

After producing many episodes about the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the role of Zionism — as well as Arab and Palestinian nationalisms over the decades — it was time to widen my lens and take on the broader subject of ethnic nationalism.

First, what is ethnic nationalism? Sune Haugbølle, an expert on social memory, the history of radical movements, and transnational solidarity at Roskilde University in Denmark, was my guest in Tuesday’s episode.

“Ethnic nationalism is a kind of nationalism where you define the nation very narrowly — by ethnicity. Ancestry, cultural heritage, cultural belonging, things you have in common, such as language. This is different from nationalism defined by citizenship or political values. If you have an ethnic nation, then by definition it’s [confined] to those who belong to that lineage of people,” Haugbølle says.

Ethnic nationalism establishes group identity by reaching back into history and finding (often mythic) origins of the “imagined community.” Nationalist movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were based on trying to reestablish a lost nation.

“There was a certain awakening happening in the nineteenth century based around the ideas of discovering history, discovering nationhood, and reproducing that nation. So it’s reaching back into history but also looking forward to how you can recreate the nation in question,” he said.

Ethnic national movements were often driven by grievances against perceived traitors, minorities, and various “others” who can never truly belong. It takes a small step to move from legal forms of discrimination to outright violence. We can all think of an example of such a movement, which took power in Germany in 1933.

Listen to the podcast here.

Coming up

Political scientist Will Walldorf will appear in Tuesday’s podcast to discuss American presidents and their quagmires. Why is it so difficult to end a stalemated war? He wrote about it for Foreign Policy.

Next Friday, I will publish an exclusive interview with Maryland Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen about war powers, Iran, Israel-Palestine, defense spending, and U.S. hegemony.

If you missed it, did you catch my interview with Robert Kagan?

Is he now reconsidering his past advocacy for U.S. interventionism (including the Iraq war catastrophe of 2003)?

As you read through our discussion, consider the following: There is an important difference between, on the one hand, criticizing a war after it turns bad, and, on the other, understanding that such endeavors can only produce failure. Put another way, it’s not a matter of execution. Kagan seems to understand there is no correct way to go to war with Iran. I am not sure he would say the same about Iraq in 2003.

I wish I had made this point more emphatically during the interview, but the nature of conversation has a way of distracting an interviewer from his preparation, yes? Like any journalist, I’ve never walked away from an interview fully satisfied with my performance, but I trust you’ll find this conversation worth your time.

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/robert-kagan-iran/

Sudan’s unrelenting agony

We mustn’t ignore Sudan. This cursed country of 50 million people is again being torn apart by civil war, genocide, mass rape, mass displacement, and hunger. Yet Sudan’s agony, now well into its fourth year, is rarely front-page news in the United States, which is why I invited Alex de Waal to return to today’s episode of History As It Happens.

Alex de Waal is the Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation. He is a professor at Tufts University, one of the foremost experts on Sudan and the Horn of Africa, and the co-author with Willow Berridge of The Sudans: Africa’s Search for Peace, Democracy, and Two Viable States.

This year marks 70 years of Sudanese independence from Britain and Egypt. Forty-three years of Sudan’s seven decades as an independent nation-state have been consumed by three civil wars, not counting the many years of violence and genocide that devoured Darfur from 2003. The current civil war erupted in April 2023 when two rival militaries, each with a horrendous human rights record, vied for complete control of the country. The brief moment of light following the 2019 ouster of dictator Omar al-Bashir did not last.

Listen here.

Joseph Ellis and the failures of the founders

Let’s do a counter-factual.

The antislavery delegates to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 so insist on their positions that the southern delegates from the Carolinas and Georgia walk out. Maybe the Virginians and Marylanders follow them.

Instead of one country, two countries emerge from the convention to replace the Articles of Confederation. A southern confederacy of slave-holding states, having rejected the Constitution labored upon in Philadelphia, is created. Its leaders are now uncommitted to ending the African slave trade as early as 1807. They are free to expand westward, knowing there will be no obstacle to extending slavery to new territories — the Constitution the southerners rejected allowed Congress to restrict slavery from the territories. No one disputed this.

Think about this counter-factual as you read Joseph Ellis’ provocative new book, “The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding.”

Ellis contends the two great failures of the founding generation were 1) not abolishing slavery when the revolutionary ideas concerning fundamental human equality were burning brightest, and 2) the failure to make peace with Native Peoples.

Listen to our conversation here.

Coming up….

What is ethnic nationalism? Is Zionism a form of ethnic nationalism? We’ll tackle that sprawling subject in Tuesday’s episode.

On February 28, President Trump attacked Iran, believing all the bombs and missiles flung at the Islamic Republic would topple the government, magically create pliant successors, and crush for all eternity Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. Trump, an ignorant, malleable man, bought what Netanyahu and Israeli intelligence sold him about an easy victory. He called on Iranians to rise and take back their country. His defense secretary, the unhinged Pete Hegseth, boasted two weeks into hostilities that Iran’s military had been rendered “combat ineffective.” It was all a lie, and now Donald Trump is stuck in a lie from which he can’t extract himself because it would require admitting error.

How much longer must this deadly charade last? The U.S. and Iran exchange missile fire. Tankers U-turn away from the Strait of Hormuz. Trump claims the Iranians want a deal. The Iranians say they’re not interested. Trump threatens to destroy the country. Then he backs down. He’s done so 10 times! No war, no peace, no clue.

Where’s the way out? In this bonus episode of History As It Happens, Trita Parsi explains why reaching any deal on the Strait of Hormuz, let alone Iran’s nuclear program, will be difficult. The pre-war status quo is dead and buried, and the U.S. lacks leverage to dictate the terms of the Persian Gulf’s future. Concessions to Iran are unavoidable. The limits of power, indeed.

This is a gift link (16 minutes) to the bonus episode with Trita Parsi, the co-founder and executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He is an expert on US-Iranian relations, Iranian foreign policy, and the geopolitics of the Middle East.

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But there’s more than these subscription benefits! History As It Happens is unique; no other podcast offers the same kind of sustained, serious, and entertaining historical analysis of current events. My guests are first-rate. Just yesterday I interviewed Joseph Ellis, the great historian of the American founding.

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When future historians write the story of the second Trump administration, they will be able to fill chapters with Congress’ disgraceful descent into irrelevance. The origins of this surrender as a coequal branch stretch back decades, but it has reached its nadir under the craven, cultish Republican deference shown to President Donald Trump. Democrats may embarrass cabinet officers during congressional hearings, but until more Republicans (and more than a few Democrats) start voting with republican virtue, the rogue executive will behave with the confidence that he has carte blanche.

The 119th Congress has not only failed to check the executive during an illegal war. A bipartisan majority in both chambers has continued to fund Israel’s genocidal campaigns in Gaza and southern Lebanon. To enable Trump’s promised brutalization of immigrants, Congress approved a massive funding increase for ICE, whose untrained, unhinged agents shoot to death, assault, or imprison “illegals” or people mistaken as such. A few dissenting votes notwithstanding, Senate Republicans confirmed every one of Trump’s wholly unqualified cabinet picks (would-be attorney general Matt Gaetz withdrew before a likely rejection). Four have since departed for various reasons, none positive.

The legislative branch has capitulated on tariffs, too, allowing Trump to exercise bogus “emergency” powers to raise or lower tariffs as he wishes, punishing a longtime ally here, carving out a self-dealing exception there. Only the courts have provided some relief. Congress groveled as the administration dismantled agencies such as USAID, which was torn apart by a heinous Elon Musk, increasing death and misery for the world’s poorest inhabitants. And Republicans on Capitol Hill have stood by while the president and his family engaged in open corruption and personal-enrichment of historic proportions. Watergate, normalized. In a healthy republic, President Trump would have been impeached and convicted months ago.

Democrats are scarcely less partisan, incompetent, and unpopular. Indeed, modern oversight of the executive branch means accountability only when the president belongs to the opposing party. Our republic will be doomed if future Democratic-led congresses allow Democratic presidents to get away with what Republicans are now tolerating from Trump.

Yet hyperpartisanship is not the sole reason for Congress’ decrepitude as a coequal branch.

In Stuck: How Money, Media, and Violence Prevent Change in Congress, a concise study of the legislative branch’s inner workings and external pressures, the Brennan Center’s Maya Kornberg identifies how and when dysfunction seeped in. Kornberg was my guest on today’s podcast episode, where she discussed why Congress is at a historic low in “terms of its productivity, the number of days it’s meeting, the number of bills it’s passing, and a near historic low in popularity.”

Individual members’ offices and congressional committees are simply outmanned by the executive branch. For instance, the maximum number of staffers per office hasn’t changed in decades, even though the size of individual constituencies has grown with the U.S. population. And, during the Gingrich revolution of the mid-1990s, committee staffs were slashed.

“The capacity issue is one that people don’t often realize,” Kornberg says. “There’s been a cap on the number of staff that members can hire in their personal offices, and that cap has not changed since the mid-1970s, even though constituencies have grown tremendously and members are dealing with even more complex policy issues. “They’re only allowed to hire eighteen staff each, and they don’t have a very large budget.”

On congressional committee staffing: “We have a Congress today that has several thousand fewer professional staff than it did a few decades ago… It started in the 1990s when Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House. He was instrumental in gutting committee staff, slashing that by a third, defunding entire congressional support agencies, and cutting staffing to others. Congress has not recovered. So there’s a lot of anger [directed] at a Congress that isn’t standing up to the executive. But when you have a Congress that, according to a recent metric, has one hundred twenty times less funding than the executive branch and many fewer professional staffers, it’s just hard for it to hold its own,” she says.

Also discussed in the podcast with Maya Kornberg: “Watergate babies” of 1974 midterms; War Powers Act of 1973; 1994 midterms; money in politics; fundraising pressure; how legislation is actually written vs. public perception; perverse social media incentives; and much else.

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Liberal patriotism

Michael Kazin is a distinguished historian at Georgetown University. He was a radical lefty in the 1960s. The horrors of Vietnam and Jim Crow had a way of radicalizing American youth. Kazin became a co-editor of Dissent for a decade. He’s a leftist Democrat who is pleased that social democrats (or democratic socialists?) are running as Democrats rather than under the banner of a third party.

And in Tuesday’s episode of History As It Happens, Kazin talked about the importance of today’s liberals, lefties, and radicals embracing patriotism. Not mindless, jingoistic love it or leave it patriotism. Rather, the patriotism of the abolitionists, suffragists, labor organizers, civil rights pioneers, and other social justice champions who strove to make America a better place.

Kazin rejects interpretations of the American past where white supremacy and capitalist exploitation seem to be the only important themes. Of course Kazin agrees that the violent dispossession and genocide of Native peoples, enslavement, racism, imperialism, etc., etc., are major parts of the story. One cannot understand U.S. history without its dark sides. Another major part — one he believes is too often discarded by some leftists today — is how Americans fought to overcome some of these challenges inspired by the ideals of the founding generation. For instance, Martin Luther King invoked the “promissory note” from Thomas Jefferson during his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963.

While some may diminish the patriotic activism of figures such as Ida B. Wells or Eugene Debs, many right-wingers still subscribe to the notion that democratic socialism or even open dissent (such as antiwar demonstrations) is un-American. This is another false historical rendering that Kazin discusses in our podcast.

“The Declaration of Independence is an ambiguous document. The majority of the people who [signed] it were slaveholders, northerners as well as southerners. But it also talks about the need for the government to have the consent of the governed… It also argues that all men are created equal, a great Enlightenment belief. So the Declaration and American ideals generally are a resource one can use to fight for different points of view, including points of view which are left-wing, social democratic, even socialist. So seeing American history as nothing but a terrible saga of oppression and inequality… undervalues the fact that a lot of Americans who are patriotic have claimed those ideals for themselves and have been able to make incredible advances because of it,” Kazin says.

Listen to my conversation with Michael Kazin here.

Coming up…

A busy week awaits.

Joseph Ellis will return to talk about his new book on the failure of the founding generation to completely end slavery and reach a just accommodation with the Native Americans.

Bonus episodes! Alex de Waal will update us on Sudan, as its civil war rages uncontrolled. And Joe Cirincione will tackle the Trump administration’s nuclear enrichment deal with Saudi Arabia.

Harpers Ferry tells the American story from its origins. It is best known for a lunatic named John Brown, who tried and failed to incite a slave revolt in the autumn of 1859 by, among other hairbrained ideas, seizing the federal armory, which had been completed in 1802. There’s so much more to Harpers Ferry, which was settled in the early 1700s, than John Brown’s suicide mission. Its rich historical landscape stimulates my mind and even inspires my work.

History As It Happens is all about origins and origin stories, the mix of truth and myths about ourselves and our nation awaiting us in the lining of the crib, but which we are obligated to interrogate as thinking people.

So, as I prepare to depart the concrete jungle of Washington, D.C., for the steamy (and smoky) mountains in the eastern panhandle of West Virginia, please consider this pitch to support my work.

History As It Happens podcast needs to become financially sustainable. This newsletter will always be free. The podcast can only survive because of the generosity of paying subscribers.

For $5 per month or $50 per year, you’ll get ad-free listening, early access to every new episode, and all of our bonus content (2 to 4 bonus episodes per month). Beyond these benefits, you’ll be able to say you’re supporting the important work of providing genuine experts in history, political science, economics, and journalism a platform to disseminate their knowledge.

Just take a look at some recent episodes. Lindsay Chervinsky, the director of the George Washington Library at Mount Vernon, appeared on the podcast twice to talk about the American Revolution. So did Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Alan Taylor, Sean Wilentz, and Jim Oakes. In all, I produced eight episodes for the semiquincentennial.

Roger Griffin, one of the world’s leading minds on fascism and political ideology, returned to the show. Roham Alvandi, Maha Yahya, Jeremi Suri, Nelson Lichtenstein, Michael Kimmage, Chuck Todd, and Damon Linker were other recent guests discussing an array of topics, from Moby-Dick to Alan Greenspan to O.J. Simpson to the harrowing situation in the Greater Middle East.

When it comes to serious, sustained historical analysis, History As It Happens is unique. I let my expert guests do the talking, interwoven with archival audio that brings you back in time: you learn while being entertained. If you want mindless banter or knee-jerk political tribalism, you know to look elsewhere.

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Carter and Kharg

This morning Responsible Statecraft published my essay on Jimmy Carter and Kharg Island. During the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-80, Carter was presented with plans to invade and capture the strategic oil hub in the northern Persian Gulf. The idea was to obtain leverage to pressure Ayatollah Khomeini to release the American captives. Carter wisely rejected this military option.

Today, President Trump is mulling a similar operation to bend Iran’s new leaders to his will. This would likely fail, resulting in many U.S. casualties.

Read my essay here: https://responsiblestatecraft.org/kharg-island-trump/

This week’s podcasts

On Tuesday’s episode, Michael Kimmage talked about Moby-Dick and democracy through the character of Starbuck, the first mate aboard the doomed Pequod.

In today’s show, the Quincy Institute’s Anatol Lieven delved into the contested origins of the Russia-Ukraine war. Might they point the way toward an enduring peace?

Okay, I’m off to Harpers Ferry!

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Graham entered Congress in 1994, the year of the ‘Gingrich Revolution,’ a historic GOP landslide that gave the party control of both chambers for the first time in 40 years. Graham died one of Donald Trump’s most shamelessly fawning supporters, after having condemned the reality TV star during the 2015-16 campaign as a hateful demagogue. Graham won his first Senate seat in 2002 and was expected to win a fifth term this November.

In a special episode of the podcast (18 minutes), the historian Jeremi Suri and I discuss Lindsey Graham’s influential legislative and political career in foreign policy, the federal judiciary, and the face of the new Republican Party, which is less a party than a personality cult.

You may debate whether or not Graham’s legacy is positive, but there’s no denying his influence at the moment. Weighing influence, rather than casting moral judgments, is the work of the historian.

Listen to the episode with Jeremi Suri here.

Jeremi Suri teaches history at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He hosts “This is Democracy” podcast and writes Democracy of Hope newsletter on Substack.

And remember, you can find this special episode of the podcast wherever you normally listen to History As It Happens.

How much of this weekly newsletter do you typically read? Maybe the particular subject doesn’t interest you. Maybe it arrives in your inbox at the wrong time, and you never manage to return to it. There are too many emails, too much to scan nowadays, an overload of internet debris floating by.

Whether you read one sentence or commit the entire newsletter to memory, I am confident that you’re an avid reader and a critical thinker. That’s my audience. And you’re in a shrinking minority.

The Atlantic published a deeply reported piece by Rose Horowitch titled “The End of Reading is Here” that I’ve been discussing with friends (and distressing over a bit) all week. The gist is that fewer and fewer Americans are reading books, and people of all ages struggle to comprehend anything longer than a paragraph or two.

“Americans can swallow words and sentences, but they’re losing the ability to think deeply about writing that’s longer than an Instagram post. Nearly 30 percent of American adults cannot paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text. In 2017, that number was less than 20 percent,” reports The Atlantic.

It seems all those warnings about becoming a post-literate society were onto something. Do we really want to be a nation of dummies?

Now, on to this week’s podcasts in a “summer edition” of this newsletter.

Inside the mind of Roger Griffin

As I mentioned in today’s podcast episode, the discourse is drowning in -isms. President Trump is railing against an imaginary resurgence of communism. The Democratic Party is being taken over by “socialism.” Its critics say the Trump administration is putting the country on the road to fascism, if we aren’t there already. And I spend a lot of time trying to define something called Trumpism.

Historian Roger Griffin, professor emeritus at Oxford Brookes University, has been studying and writing about fascism and ideological movements his entire career. Definitions, in his view, should be heuristically useful starting points for understanding ideology, rather than intellectually constraining barriers. Take his one-sentence definition of fascism:

“Fascism is a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultranationalism.” — The Nature of Fascism (1991)

Thus, we may see elements of fascism in Trump’s movement, even though the man himself is not a fascist. There are elements of ideology and myth-making in Trumpism, even though the man himself is not an ideologue (unless you define corrupt self-enrichment as an ideology).

“Any famous person can create an ism,” says Griffin. “Carl Gustav Jung said that today all our gods rhyme with ism. In other words, in a secular society, all that energy that used to feed religious cultures has been diverted like petrodollars floating around, investing themselves into individuals either out of horror of what they are or out of misplaced adoration.”

Griffin continues: “I think you’re absolutely right to suggest that there is a particular hollowess in the idea of Trumpism as an ideology. However, I think if you dig a bit deeper, if you move from ideology to the word myth, and then you look at some major figures in the twentieth century… I mean, Marxism is seen as an ideology because it had an awful lot of theory behind it because of a guy called Karl Marx and a lot of his followers, like Gramsci, were definitely intellectuals trying to use intellectual tools to shape a worldview and shape policy, etc.

But there are some very interesting forms of political vision which generate a lot of words and a lot of thought. The point at which they actually can be dignified with the word ism is another matter… Trump takes so much of the American tradition and blatantly mythifies it. The reason we can see that so clearly is because of his intellectual ineptitude in handling language and concepts, but in a funny sort of way, I don’t think he’s much more hollow than an awful lot of American presidents in the 20th century.”

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW.

Why Mossadegh matters

In light of the Trump administration’s dashed hopes that Iranians would rise and take back their country — one of many fantasies that paved the way to the ongoing Iran war disaster — I talked to historian Roham Alvandi about the time democratic nationalists in Iran did try to establish the country’s independence from a craven Shah and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. It was 1953, and their leader was Mohammad Mossadegh.

Listen here: https://historyasithappens.libsyn.com/why-mossadegh-matters

Coming up next

As mentioned at the top, this was a “summer edition” of the History As It Happens newsletter. It’s July. We all need to catch our breath a little. So please pardon the brevity if you were hoping for a longer newsletter. I also have other assignments that require sustained time and concentration, and there are only so many hours in a week.

Next Friday, I’ll be traveling, so you can expect another concise newsletter on July 17.

But not before two more outstanding podcasts!

On Tuesday, Michael Kimmage on Moby-Dick and democracy. Read his wonderful essay in the journal Liberties.

On Friday, Anatol Lieven on the Russia-Ukraine War. In every war, there is a battle over its origins.

Transcript of podcast w/ Roger Griffin

MdiC: Roger Griffin, welcome back to the podcast.

RG Thank you.

MdiC: We’re going to dive into your history as a historian and how you came to this subject, a lifelong study of fascism and other isms and history, and political science. We’ll get to all of that in a little bit. I just want to talk to you about what’s happening right now because you’ve been coming on my show for four or five years now. And for the past decade in this country and really across the world, people have been trying to figure out what is Trumpism. It’s really not an ideology. And given recent reports about Trump’s staggering corruption, self-enrichment, self-dealing, the incontestable fact is that the man really doesn’t have any core values except himself, that maybe there really is no ism here.

RG: Well, of course, any famous person can create an ism. Carl Gustav Jung said that today all our gods rhyme with ism. In other words, in a secular society, all that energy that used to feed religious cultures has been diverted like petrodollars floating around, investing themselves into individuals either out of horror of what they are or out of misplaced adoration. I think you’re absolutely right to suggest that there is a particular hollowness in the idea of a Trumpism as an ideology. However, I think if you dig a bit deeper, if you if you move from ideology to the word “myth” and then you look at some major figures in the 20th century that have generated isms you will come to ideology. I mean Marxism is seen as an ideology because it had an awful lot of theory behind it because of a guy called Karl Marx and a lot of his followers like Gramsci: they’re definitely intellectuals trying to use intellectual tools to shape a worldview and shape policy etc.

But there are some very interesting forms of vision political vision which generate a lot of work words they generate a lot of thoughts without solid intellectual content. The point at which they actually can be dignified with the ideological suffix ism is another matter. But in a way I think if you were, say, a Chinese or a Japanese political scientist looking at Trumpism from a safe distance and another culture, you could say well look there is something deeply ideological about Trump which locates him existentially and historically in an ideological tradition despite his extraordinary displays of ego and intellectual shallowness. Listen to his ramblings on the 4th of July from within a particular version of American history and it is clear that his myth of American destiny and supremacy has got a very strong ideology behind it in the constitutional myth, or what’s called the foundation myth, of America. The independence myth subsumed very strong ideological components from the French Enlightenment which later fed into the French Revolution through major Enlightenment thinkers like Paine and Montesquieu, and these thinkers informed a vision of liberal democracy, the rights of the people, and national sovereignty, all deeply ideological constructs, which is reflected in the way Trump is called a populist. So, I would be careful not to dismiss the ideological pedigree of Trump too quickly. He taps into a deep tradition of democratic nationalism and, as socialists would stress, finance capitalism. He taps into American history and ideology even though he’s deeply ignorant of both.

If you see his presidency comparatively, if you talk about Xi Jingping’s vision of China, for example, I think by the time you’ve become a president, you are a carrier of culturally and historically shaped ideas and ideology which are taken for granted and normalized. If you take contemporary China. I mean, there’s very little ideological communism left, but nevertheless, you couldn’t possibly make sense of who he is and what the Chinese leadership is doing now without going back to the Chinese revolution and Mao and ultimately Marx. So, I think what you’re dealing with, with politicians like Trump anyway, is very often a hollowing out of what was originally fairly substantial in terms of rationalization and ideology. It’s just that Trump takes so much of the American tradition and blatantly mythicises it, and the reason we can see that so clearly is because of his intellectual ineptitude in handling language and concepts. In a curious way, though, I don’t think he’s much more hollow ideologically than an awful lot of American presidents in the 20th century, for example when they talked about their reasons for going into Vietnam.

MdiC: Well, you know one reason why it’s hard to discern an ideology with Trump is for the reasons I already mentioned—you know he doesn’t stick to a position for more than 45 seconds etc—is that there’s so much chaos. And I was thinking of Nazism before connecting with you. There was plenty of chaos and corruption and inefficiency in the Nazi regime, which we often think of as ideology in power. Hitler himself was obsessed with ideological concepts of race and war and social Darwinism, right? But he was surrounded by a whole bunch of thugs and grifters, too. Goering basically stole every piece of art in Europe he could get his hands on. So I guess these things can coexist within an ideological system. You can have self-deifying, corrupt, inefficient rival bureaucrats. I mean that’s something that Hitler fomented in Nazi Germany. He had people at each other’s throats competing with each other to win his favor.

RG: Exactly. When we talk about political theory and political commentary, etc. we are dealing with a sort of sliding scale that goes from an absolutely irrational, blatantly psychotic myths right the way through to a high level of rationalization, ideologization and intellectualization. And just to take one example, the idea of white supremacy can be massively rationalized, and indeed in the past it was extensively with pseudo-biology and pseudo-anthropology and pseudo-history. In the 19^th century it was taken very seriously as a scientific fact. It became a cultural and political ideology. If you look at the eugenics movement for example you see a high level of scientization and rationalization as well. But ultimately the idea of white supremacy is a completely hollow myth with no scientific basis whatsoever. So, when we talk about phenomena such as Trumpism we have to accept the principle that ideas themselves manifest themselves in a whole range of different levels of substantiality and articulateness, but at the end of the day probably all ideologies are rationalizations of very deep lying mythic constructs, even the Enlightenment myth of reason itself.

MdiC: We’ve talked about what’s happening across the world several times on this podcast, not just what’s happening in the United States with Trump. Alex De Waal, Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation, who’s a scholar at Tufts University here in the US, uses the term “the political marketplace” which he sees as now the dominant dynamic in international relations. He calls it global mafia politics. Human rights, democracy, freedom, liberty do not matter. It’s all about the deal and verbal manipulation to get the deal. So, countries on the periphery of world power are sliced, diced, ranked, and traded. And Trump is a practitioner of global mafia politics. Not an ideologue but a political wheeler and dealer using violence and the threat of violence to get his way like a common hood. Just look at Venezuela.

RG: Well, here I’m reminded of Brecht. One of Brecht’s greatest plays was The Resistible Rise, (not irresistible), The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, which is a parody of the rise to power of Hitler. In it, Hitler is portrayed as the head of a violent gangster syndicate in Chicago which wants to take over the vegetable market. It’s a superb parody of the rise of Hitler and demystification of power and ideology. And to see Hitler as ultimately a sort of capitalist gangster trying to take over—I mean it’s just brilliant: and there’s an element of that too if you look at the history of the Soviet Union and you look, for example, at the tension between Trosky and Stalin—I mean, you can see mafia elements in all power politics: as for a place like North Korea that element is quite extraordinary. You remember when two high-ranking officers were executed by Kim Jong-Un in 2016 using anti-aircraft guns! Like something out of Tarantino! But again, it’s complicated, isn’t it, because if you go back through history or look at look at the history of the Roman Empire etc. there are a few phases when the Roman Empire or the Roman politics seem to align with certain ideas of any profundity even in the Republican period.

There was a period in the Roman Republic which used the central concept of the people, Populus Romanus, for example. And, of course, it was using the concept of the people in a slave society where ideas and debate nevertheless seem to be taken seriously. But there is an argument for the idea—and I think there’s a feminist line here as well—that in the whole history of patriarchal power ultimately there’s a huge amount of rationalization and powerplay going on behind the screen of high rhetoric, the villas, the banquets and ballrooms and big sculptures, all being used to glorify something which we can now see clearly dressing up as naked power. There’s that lovely line from Bob Dylan (It’s alright, ma. (I’m only bleeding) that even the president of the United States sometimes has to stand naked. Trump manifests something which is probably an integral part of all patriarchal politics: look at the history of the papacy, look at the history of the Borgias in the middle of the renaissance: monsters surrounded by high art. I just think there’s probably always been a tension between virtuous idealists and the most horrifically criminal pathological people all playing verbal and social games to dress up their power as legitimate.

MDeC: You’ve been studying fascism your whole professional life. Let’s start from the very beginning, shall we? You were born in post-war United Kingdom. You could still see in the London bomb sites the damage from the war that fascist Germany waged against your country. I guess if somebody ran into you as a child, they probably wouldn’t have guessed you’d become a well-regarded and highly cited professor on the subject.

RG: I certainly would not have guessed if I met my younger self now. I’m 78 and I’ve reached a point where you look back and you think, well, actually this has been a very weird life, and it’s especially weird when I meet eminent historians or political scientists who and I look at their trajectory to being who they are now. Most of them seem to have actually studied at undergraduate level what they’ve become an expert in and a lot of them come from academic families or they had a father or a relative or something that initiated them to what they eventually got really good at. But my trajectory seems to have been extremely weird when I think about it because I was born in the coldest winter on record in in in Britain since the last ice age: 1947-1948, in pretty dire circumstance. I won’t take out the violin but my mum’s was effectively a war widow and she lived in conditions of deep impoverishment. She herself had left school at 15 and had diphtheria and there’s a whole tragic story there, but I was born into a postwar Britain which economically was ravished by the effects of the conflict and my early years reflected that extreme poverty. The rationing continued to the early 1950s for some products. So, there was nothing really in my background to point towards an academic career. Not a hint academia in my family. It emerged out of a series of sliding door moments. I went to a very ordinary school, what’s called a primary school in England. This was a suburbia of London called Harrow. If you know anything about the history of fascism, Oswald Mosley was MP for Harrow. If you know anything about upper class education in the UK, a lot of prime ministers went to either Eaton or Harrow school. So, it’s famous for that. But Harrow School’s on the hill. I was not on the hill. I was down in the depths of ordinary, suburban Harrow. At my primary school, which was a very ordinary, poorly resourced school, I had never heard of John Lyon, who was a farmer in the 16th century whomade a lot of money. And he founded Harrow School, a boarding school, after the dissolution of the monasteries, which meant that there was a great need for public education (which is why they’re called public schools now, even though they’re private schools). And he’d set up a foundation for a few poor kids at the time to go to a day school in the area. That had meant by the time I came into the world a couple of hundred years later—that there was a test that you could take at eleven – so in the late 1950s for me—as an entrance exam for John Lyon School. Now I think I’m old enough to reveal an embarrassing fact. My bench-mate took the exam on the Tuesday and I took the exam on the Thursday: he told me what the English essay question was and it was my mum who wrote the English essay which I learned by heart for the exam. I got into this plush school on my mom’s English (I failed the maths badly). As a result, for years had a “total imposter syndrome”, which was made worse by the fact that I was surrounded by very rich kids so did not fit in, but by also by the great error I made of assuming that rich kids were bright kids: so for years I thought at some point I’d be exposed as a fraud.

MdiC: So, your mom did your homework:

RG: My imposter syndrome ensured that I did loads of homework.

MdiC: Sure. But your mom did your homework to help you be there?

RG: No. No. Well, I actually very quickly got disillusioned with my mum and homework because I let her do a French test and she was rubbish. And from then on, I did it all myself and I got into this sort of nerdy habit of overdoing my homework because I found myself in a perfect feedback system. If I did good homework, my mum was happy, the school was happy, and I was sort of happy in a nerdy sort of way. And I didn’t have friends and or proper shared hobbies, because it was an outsider in a very socially oriented and middle-class school: I didn’t really realize till much later that and nobody had ever invited me to their house. It was probably because I was one of these horrible swatty kids. Who kept winning prizes. But the positive side to this was that it created a massive…… and this is of course long before social media or computers etc…..create a deep habit of reading. I just loved reading and it was primitive days of TV as well, so minimum distraction. On top of that, my mum loved literature and loved classical music, especially requiems. So strangely enough, I grew up in a sort of hot house of literature and music even though we were in a poor little terraced house.

The one thing I would give my public-school credit for was that I was taught languages well enough for me to be able to apply for Oxford University and actually won I a scholarship to Oxford. So that sliding door moment of my mum’s essay now created an even deeper imposter syndrome. I no longer thought about that essay, but I really did not sociologically identify with Oxford at all, I did not feel bright enough to be there, I could not identify with the impressive ancient architecture, I did not belong.

MdiC: So, you got into Oxford based on your strength in languages.

RG: Yes, I studied French and German literature.

MdiC: How many languages do you read today?

RG: French and German. My Italian is fairly good. My wife’s Italian, so that’s down to her mum and the need to communicate with her. And I can read other Latin languages. I’ve recently got a post in a Slovak university called Matej Bel in Banksá Bystrica and I must say learning another language at this age is really quite scary. But when I was young, I loved languages and could still soak up knowledge. And because I was so poorly equipped for Oxford social life—rowing and parties and all that sort of all the stuff that Oxford’s associated with—I ended up almost by default doing lots and lots of work on what I loved, and I loved French and German literature and relating them to their historical context. So soon I also loved relating literature to ideas and cultural periods—and we’re back to isms her. For example, I found Voltaire fascinating because he was meant to embody this thing called “the Enlightenment” and the ideas of a better, an improvable, perfectible society, and came to understand the debt which the French Revolution would have to the philosophes. Very quickly I had this sense that when I was studying a literary person in either France or Germany, they were like a mirror or a prism for looking at what was going on in their society, in Europe, and in that country at the time. So, by default I was doing a sort of intellectual history course by studying literature, even if I did not realize it at the time.

MdiC: You know, when politicians write an autobiography, the reader has to be careful about their origin stories: people write myths about themselves, and you know, human memory is notoriously unreliable. And when I think about how I got to where I am today, the memory comes back to me that because I listened to a lot of sports commentaries I decided at some point to move towards public broadcasting on the radio. I remember suddenly wanting to become a broadcaster, and that memory is now part of what is now referred to as ‘my truth: whatever its objective truth. In your memory there was one moment that stands out, wasn’t there? A sort of epiphany when your life started moving in a new direction. You visited the Goethe House in Weimar.

RG: Yeah. Well, this is another sliding door moment. At 17, I was this nerdy linguist studying at Oxford. (Incidentally, I ended up getting a good First from Oxford University. I never thought I could. I mean, it’s a mythic thing, a First from Oxford. Anyway, that’s another story. But it is worth pointing out that, I again overestimated how much my colleagues were working because again fellow students were doing very little study.) But there I was studying away and taking seriously all my assignments. I found out later only what are called by the “beautiful people” mugs—or “suckers” in US” colloquial English—actually take their assignments and their reading lists seriously. But yeah, thanks to my work-rate I won a grant to go to study German in Germany, and I chose a course in a place called Göttingen where there was a big US army base just after the war. But part of the course was a trip to East Germany. Now East Germany at the time—this was the Cold War era and for me East Germany was like Mars: I mean in the West we had no real idea in England about life in the Soviet Empire. This was long before in-depth documentaries and good new reporting from the other side, and obviously long before any sort of electronic communication with the world, so it was a real adventure, a trip into the unknown. I wanted to see what had happened to Eastern Germany because this terra incognita included a whole chunk of Berlin and mythic places like Leipzig and Dresden, and all cities that were now drüben or “over there.”

So, I ended up part of the program going to Weimar. Now Weimar was associated with Goethe. Goethe is the German Shakespeare whose poetry and plays I had studied at Oxford, and in the morning I went religiously to his shrine in the house where I saw the study table on which he wrote some of his greatest works. And in the afternoon, we were bussed out from this Soviet hotel with a big Communist red star planted in flowers in front of it and we were bussed out to a place that was coincidentally the site of Goethe’s favourite tree, the “Goethe Oak”. But shatteringly I discovered that the oak tree was actually inside Buchenwald, the Nazi concentration camp. By the way, Buchenwald means beech forest: a perversely romantic name for hell on earth. How about a euphemism! And some prisoners were actually tortured on Goethe’s oak tree. I remember going around the camp museum (which incidentally didn’t mention Jews. It was only communists who were killed according to the Soviets), and I came away from there with a grotesque sense of disconnect. Something had been lit inside me which was going to nag at me from then on because I couldn’t reconcile the Germany I was getting to know and love through its language, literature and culture and what the Germans had done, or rather the Nazis had done, in the Second World War.

And that, I think, became if not a real turning point, but certainly the beginning of a latent fascination, an almost morbid fascination, with Nazi “evil”. Don’t forget, I’d been born just after the war. My uncle had been an air-force mechanic in the war repairing bombers that were coming back to base all shot-up. He was very young. He became an engineer but he had seen some terrible things. My father who I had met but did not know had been a “desert rat” in North Africa. So, the war was very close in a personal way. And also I still remembered the extraordinary impact even years later of the revelation of the sheer scale of Nazi inhumanity when Belsen was liberated by British and US troops, an event recorded in a report by a BBC journalist called David Dimbleby, the images and words of which never left me: and that revelation of what the Allies had been fighting created a huge shock wave through British culture when we found out how justified the war was morally. So that was a big moment for me going to Buchenwald, and sparked a subliminal mission to try to make sense of the relationship between German culture and the Nazi concentration camp system.

MdiC: But at this point, you’re still not decided on you know I’m going to become an expert on fascism.

RG: No, actually when I graduated with a top grade I still wanted to be a Germanist ,but I did have misgivings. I did reach this point which was quite anarchic and impractical where I said actually if you really love literature, you shouldn’t teach it, you should write it. And I did make some abortive attempts at writing, but I quickly discovered didn’t really have any gift, and also I realize now I was lacking a father figure to give me a sense of direction. I didn’t have any sort of vocation: I didn’t realize that a lot of people go to Oxford to get a First to go into finance or business or politics or running things, but I had absolutely no idea. I was very naïve, still an outsider, while an awful lot of politicians and businessmen in Britain have been to Oxbridge, got a degree and gone straight into making as much money as possible, or with a First are drawn towards some sort of powerful post. What saved me was that I was one of these rare people at University who actually sort of enjoyed what I was studying. So, I started a doctorate. But I got nowhere. It was an abortive doctorate because partly because I was sort of lost at that time in my sense of direction and needed intensive tutoring and guidance of the sort that Oxford simply did not offer. My mother had recently died very early, which really threw me.

MdeC: Yeah, I’m sorry to hear that about your mother. I was just going to ask you about another step in your intellectual development toward becoming a historian of fascism and isms and political movements. Really, the first country that became a fascist country was Italy and you were introduced to a book by one of its leading Fascist intellectuals, Julius Evola.

RG. Well, this is yet another sliding door moment, “Meeting My Future Wife”. I had met an Italian in Oxford and while I was in her home town, Genoa, a mysterious book was introduced. It was called (in Italian) The Revolt against the Modern World, by Julius Evola. I was in a taverna in a very beautiful part of Genoa by the sea, and was on my own having a meal. A guy was sitting a table on his own reading who recognized my foreign accent. He introduced himself and tried to convert me to this book which he said contained all the answers to all the big problems of the world. And so, being a bit naive and not having very good Italian, I took a note of the title and when I went back to Oxford, I checked out the book. At the time, I assumed—again naively—that Oxford, the Bodleian library, had all the important books in the world. Not just Oxford, but the whole of the UK, it seemed, was oblivious of this book. So, I thought, “Oh, this is strange. I have to investigate further.”

I somehow sensed I was onto something which resonated with my experience of the Goethe Oak. I suppose I had a sixth sense this was going to lead me to something (I am probably retro-justifying it). Anyway, I eventually bought the book in a Genovese neofascist bookshop called Il Basilisco (remember the basilisk in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets?) and as I read it, I had this extraordinary experience that I was getting to the heart of what fascism meant for fascists: it was about being an active part in this extraordinary cycle in history moving from national greatness, the decay of the nation, and then a rebirth of national greatness. It’s absolutely mapped out in this book. It dramatizes the revolt against the modern world as it is: liberalism, democracy, pluralism, equality, all these values fascist associate with cultural decay, you know, female emancipation, vulgarity of consumerism.

Evola wrote it in 1936, wrote shelf-loads of publications till his death in 1974 as the great guru of postwar fascism, having become a major inspiration for black terrorism in the 1970s in Italy. So, he was a major figure for Italian fascists, and later for intellectual fascists the world over, but outside fascist circles nobody seemed to know about him, at least in Anglophone scholarship in fascism. In fact, my first article ever written was on this guy published in 1985. So, that was another bit of the jigsaw: that I got interested in ideas, or what are called in French idées-force, and I’d come across this guy in a taverna who swas convinced he’d seen bigger historical picture, and who was very articulate and not overtly racist, or at least didn’t come across as such. But he was a believer and that experience of total belief probably made a subliminal link inside my mind with what I’d seen in Buchenwald: what I saw there was what the Nazis were bent on destroying in order to save civilization from decadence, move the historical process towards rebirth, and create a NEW MODERNITY. I thought, “Wow”…

MdIC: they’re not psychopaths.

RG: Well, it’s so complicated, isn’t it? I mean, real psychopaths have a sort of some psychodynamic malfunction inside makes them destructive nihilists, psychopaths. But Evola shows that you can have a seemingly intelligent, creative, truth-seeking, vision-seeking individual who “can’t stand the world” he is in anymore and promotes violent action to clean it up and purify it. Robert De Niro’s character in Taxi Driver (1976), before he starts his mission to murder the presidential candidate and then save Jody Foster from evil, utters the line “Here is a man who would not take it anymore. A man who stood up against the scum, the dogs, the filth, the shit. Here is a man who stood up!” Such a great film. I mean, Travis Bickle comes back from Vietnam. He’s damaged but not a psychopath as such, yet he ends up a mass murder, killing the pimps, Jody Foster’s pimps, because he has this sudden vision of his mission is to clean up New York. He sacrifices himself to this idea of a mission. He wants to obliterate decadence. He shows us the raw energy of creative destructive idealism that lies at the heart of fascism when it becomes the basis of a mass movement of social and political catharsis. And suddenly, by studying Evola the jigsaw pieces of the fascist mindset were all coming together in my head.

And then this next extraordinary event happened. When I abandoned my Oxford doctorate, I had lost my grant and needed a job—and amazingly, out of the blue, I was offered an unadvertized job teaching “isms”, or rather The History of Ideas, at Oxford Polytechnic (which later became Oxford Brookes University). A fiercely anti-communist Head of Department, a lovely guy… okay I’ll say the name, his name was Robert Mowat, had opened up this opportunity for me to be a lecturer in higher education.

MdiC: But you haven’t done your PhD yet, right?

RG: No, this was after I’d aborted my German PhD.

MdiC: Yes. So, you haven’t done any sort of postdoctoral work to prepare you to work on fascism.

RG: No, no. I was still a just lost soul trying to make sense with my postgraduate Oxford self and find a direction after my mother’s death. The history department at Oxpoly had just employed a Marxist, and Mowat was so concerned about communism being taught that he felt he needed someone to provide a counterbalance to socialist ideas. He met me at a reception and heard I got a First and was so impressed by my enthusiasm for literary history, he basically fixed a job for me. He could never do something like that now, and quite right too. So, again, I experienced a totally freak, leftfield moment in my career. I got a job without an interview at Oxford Polytechnic and in fact I’ve never had an interview for a job in my life since except for my recent appointment to lecture at Matej Bel in Slovakia.

MdiC: And you were hired to teach the other side of this debate with Marxists over the basic patterns of ideas and ideologies unfolding in the historical process…

RG: Well, that was the subtext. In practice, I was just given free range to teach topics in the History of Ideas from a non-Marxist perspective. And at the time that wasn’t difficult because I was too indoctrinated by my own family’s conservative background to even be close to being a Marxist. I was a sort of what would now be called “woke” and at the time “a bit of a Hippie” (though there are some much more pejorative ways of putting it).

MdeC: But you had studied languages, not history.

RG: I know, but my secret gurus at the time were artists like Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. In a way, I only survived psychologically at Oxford and after my degree by going vicariously into Californian counterculture with its artists like the Doors and intellectuals like Timothy Leary and Robert Pirsig, and recovered geniuses like William Blake and Carl Jung (in his post-Nazi phase). But now I was teaching courses on the history of ideas which was really getting me to grips with political ideologies like absolutism, liberalism, socialism and antisemitism.

And it was at this point in the early 1980s that along comes a new Head of Department. And this new Head (who has no virtual presence that I can find) was pivotal to my trajectory towards fascist studies. Dr Robert Murray, an American, had fought Nazi-Fascism from Sicily up through the peninsula, and after the war he went to university in America (I don’t even know where he went) and emerged with a degree and an even greater curiosity about what he he’d been fighting. Reading the accounts of Fascism and the war now appearing did not really help him understand the force that he had risked his life fighting. When he met me and knew I was now married to an Italian, he immediately asked, “Can you teach a course on fascism with me?” Suddenly my life fell into place because I was now reading theories of fascism for my teaching job and my private obsessions and public role, my private and public personae, merged. The new course gave me a chance to explore the pattern I had encountered in Evola’s critique of modern civilization shape, and I started as systematically as possible to track down other fascist intellectuals and ideologues, but also theorists of generic fascism, fascism outside Italy. Very soon I was building up (writing notes longhand initially and making photocopies) an archive of fascist who displayed the same pattern of decadence and rebirth, and historians and political theorists of fascism, some of whom glimpsed this pattern.

But no single theorist of fascism seemed to have seen the pattern clearly and recognized how central it was to understanding the myth that drove fascist destruction, state creation and war. I mean, I couldn’t find it clearly articulated anywhere in any of the languages I read. Before long I was sure that nobody had actually synthesized this pattern of decadence and rebirth into a sort of neat generic theory of fascist ideology. Then suddenly, one day in 1984, I thought, “Well I’ve blown the doctorate in German literature I tried to write at Oxford a decade ago….Why don’t I go back to Oxford part-time and write a doctorate on this new theory of fascism?

MdeC: So what was the state of fascist studies at this point in the history of fascism? because, you’re kind of coming to it randomly: you have a background in languages, you’re hired to teach history of ideas, and then you meet this fellow who says why don’t we teach a course on fascism. What was the state of fascism studies?

RG: Well, that was the beauty in a way. I mean, if I was on the “right” sort of psychotic drugs, I’d probably think I had some sort of destiny to work out my theory in depth and publish it: I had the languages, the teaching post, the chance to register for a DPhil at Oxford (with no fees!), a Head of Department encouraging me, and it was as if I was “meant” to write it. Objectively, that is nonsense, of course. But the whole situation was extremely neat. For example, if I had quickly found in my research somebody who had already proposed my theory, that would have immediately put an end to my budding career as a political scientist. What I found, instead, was several major experts who had glimpsed components of what I call “my” theory now.

Obviously, it’s never anyone’s theory. I mean, we are all dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants. But I soon saw my task was to synthesize elements from existing theories with my own understanding of the core mythic pattern shaping fascist though and produce a heuristically valuable and concise “working definition”, precisely what had been missing to date. For example, George Mosse had achieved a considerable advance by taking fascist ideas seriously as expressions of a genuine ideology and belief system. He was a refugee from Nazi Germany, spoke German and moved from medieval studies—which had impressed on him the power of ideas and myths in shaping history—to fascist studies. He had noticed the basic preoccupation with decadence and rebirth, and that the power of fascism derived from its ability to ‘capture dreams”, but he hadn’t yet synthesized it into a theory. There was a brilliant modern historian called Stanley Payne who had got an almost fully complete theory of fascism as something not reactionary and not nihilistic but actually having an ideology of national renewal, but who still saw the anti-dimension of fascism as primary. I could give you a few other names of researchers (a couple in the US, one in Israel, one in Italy) working in the same direction, but overall, the situation was marked by a profound lack of consensus and fruitful collaboration. So if you ran a conference on international fascism with academics from all over the world, as Stuart Woolf did twice at Reading University in the UK, the papers all apply different definitions of fascism or no definition at all: there’s absolutely no consensus whether Latin American dictatorship is fascist, Nazism is fascist, Franquism is fascist: there is a complete lack of any sort of scholarly consensus, to the point where Woolf joked that the term fascism should be banned for a few years.

So it was into this perfect Babel type scattering of theories of fascism hat I came into the field, and at the time I did develop quite a missionary zeal to demonstrate empirically and promote the validity of my theory. And I ended up submitting an Oxford DPhil in the proper format establishing my “new ideal type” of fascism. There was another hurdle, however: the head of St Antony’s and my internal examiner was Sir Ralph Dahrendorf, who rejected any idea that fascism embraced a vision of a new future and new modernity. He wanted to fail me. Once again, my future as a fascist theorist was in jeopardy. So here we have another sliding door moment: at a moment when I felt very lonely with my theory, which was meeting with universal incomprehension at Oxford, I’d written to the now extremely eminent Sir Ian Kershaw, one of the most famous British historians of Nazism, certainly the best biographer of Hitler you’ll ever come across, to see if I was mad pursuing this research. I got a letter back about 3 months later (this was a pre-email era) which basically said “I think you’re on to something”. So, when I was asked who I’d like to be the external examiner for my viva, I suggested him. It was Ian Kershaw of Sheffield University who defended me against the negativity my internal examiner. (It’s meant to be the other way round, by the way.) And this is how I got my doctorate from Oxford. By the skin of my teeth.

MdiC: So what year was this?

RG. 1991. And there the story would have ended. I had no idea about marketing my ideas through journal articles or building a postdoc career, and Oxford Polytechnic actively discouraged research before it became a university! However, that I invited myself to a conference on fascism in Lancaster (UK), and it was being presided over by an established expert on right-wing politics called Roger Eatwell. I literally buttonholed him (well not quite literally) after the conference and said I’ve got this theory of fascism, I’ve been awarded a doctorate on it and I’d really like you to see it (and please if you’re ever in this position to help a keen postdoc student with a decent theory and a bit of enthusiasm, and give her or him a bit of hope and encouragement, please do so). I don’t think he thought I was going to make anything of my theory, but by chance he was editing a series on the nature of the right and a few eeks later suddenly I get this letter (still no emails yet), a physical I letter: would you like to turn your doctorate into a book. And then I can actually literally say that at this point “the rest is history”. The DPhil thesis became The Nature of Fascism. And this book nearly got remaindered, except that a (hardcopy) version of it was in the briefcase of a reader for the publishing firm Routledge when her car broke down on the way to a conference. She was sitting in a garage waiting for her car to be fixed and by chance pulled out my Nature of Fascism out of her bag and started reading it. And the next thing I know, I get a letter in 1993 saying, “I think we’d like to turn your nature of fascism into a paperback.”

And that was it. A classic was born.

MdiC: Well, let’s go back here. Let’s roll the clock back again. So, you got this opportunity to study fascism. You develop this theory of fascism into a PhD thesis that you defended with a very hostile examiner who didn’t believe it was worth studying but which is rescued by Ian Kershaw. I was asking you before about what was the nature or the status of fascism studies. Here we are what in the 1980s, a generation or more after this political phenomenon had lit the world on fire and started a war that killed some 50 million people. It was widely assumed to be pathologically nihilistic, destructive, anti-modern, and lacking a genuine ideology, and also “over” and not worth studying. Your approach was different. You can actually read fascist ideologues, propagandists, and thinkers because of your skill in languages. You read the writings of fascists to figure out what they believed in. Why were historians opposed to doing that?

RG: Well, this I find this really fascinating. Most “experts” on fascism saw t as generically different from other political forces. You see, if you if you actually look up a political science definition of feminism or anarchism or Marxism or liberalism, they quote their main theorists. They quote Simone de Beauvoir, Kropotkin, Marx, or J. S Mill or whatever. But when it comes to fascism, nobody was quoting fascists like Mussolini or Hitler, let alone Evola, to define it generically. Why? Because the consensus was that fascism had no genuine ideas. It was all totalitarian propaganda. It was a like a tornado of nihilism, destructiveness and death. And it was backward-looking. It was anti-modern. It wanted to take European civilization back to the stone age. It did not want to build a new civilization or a found a new era. Yet actually, when you read fascists, they were saying existing modern democratic society is decadent and it is communism that is destructive. The liberal nation is falling apart and communism is a world threat. We need a new, reborn nation. We want to go forward, but we’re going to take the best of the past, of our golden age, of the best qualities of our nation, and we’re going to create a new modernity: not a modernity based on democracy, but a modernity based on this extraordinarily dynamic and creative essence of the nation and the race, which will make it great again in a “new order”.

Now, before anybody takes that phrase out of context, I don’t believe that Trump is a fascist precisely because he’s doing it (trying to make the US great again) within the existing democratic system and not in a new order. But the point is, the different national fascists had a coherent belief system or vision of the future based on the same core myth. But to show the widespread state of historical misunderstanding or non-understanding of fascism when I entered fascist studies in the mid-1980s, I went to a classic Oxford event called a cocktail party or drinks party where students mix with academic big wigs. I had just started work on my doctorate. And one of the big wigs present was an eminent Italian historian called Dennis Mack Smith. (You can look him up: Dennis Mack Smith). And he said, “Oh, Roger Griffin,” (I’d been to Oriel College which he was attached to).” And he asked, “How is your research coming on?” And I said, “Well thanks: I’m working on fascism.” And his reply was: “Oh, why are you bothering about fascism: I mean fascism’s dead: do work on something that is not over.”

MdiCaro: Well at the time it is basically over: yes there are probably some fanatics like National Front activists, etc., but it’s no longer a significant historical factor.

RG: Anyway, Mack Smith asks “what’s your approach? I said “Well I’m working on fascist ideology”, and all he said was “But fascism has no ideology, my dear boy—I love the “my dear boy”— “have another glass of sherry”. I thought, “Wow, what a put down”. This historian was able to write entire books about the era which produced Italian fascism with no reference whatsoever to the coherence of its underlying vision, to the core of fascist vision that brought together all these very different Fascists—technocrats, politicians, members of the church, poets etc., clustered around this central myth, the myth of the reborn Italy, that I had recognized but which for him didn’t exist. And so, in a way, that meeting with him didn’t crush me: instead, I thought, oh dear! there really is a gaping vacuum here to fill, a complete absence of conceptual sophistication.

MdiC: So Roger: this brings us to what you identified as making fascism distinct from other right-wing ultranationalist and populist ideologies. Something that I learned from you. I think our first conversation I offered you my definition of fascism and you gave me a B because I was missing something. I was aware of it but not what you had called it: palingenesis. How did you figure out palingenesis? Well, first tell us what it is and then how did you figure out this being so important to understanding fascism.

RG: Well, and this is where my literature studies come in. When you when you study something like romanticism as a generic phenomenon it is quickly clear that it isn’t limited to Germany and England or France and Italy. And you further realize that Italian romanticism is different from French romanticism from English, like different dialects of a root language. So you get used to seeing, or rather your mind is trained to see a general pattern with many individual permutations, and to acknowledge that even within the same country, e.g. the UK, there are very big differences between Wordsworth or William Blake or Shelley or Walter Scott. And so, in a way a couple of good things did come out of my Oxford education in literary studies: a) I’d read a lot and was used to devouring/speed-reading texts; b) I was trained to pattern recognition, which didn’t mean literal duplication but modulations of key components to form a family of different related variants. So, when I was reading all these different fascists there were obviously huge differences between Codreanu in Romania or Primo de Rivera in Spain. I mean for a start one was Spanish one was Romanian, and if you want if you want to have a fascist revolution, the way you conceive it is going to be very much dictated by the history and culture of the country you’re in.

However, when they started talking about what was wrong with the present liberal democratic West, there suddenly seemed to be the same extraordinary pattern of this twin theme: and I could give it to you in different languages, but “decadence”, fearing the idea of falling or falling apart or falling to pieces; and rebirth, renewal. I’ll give you a trivial fact about Trump. When he calls traditional Washington politics “the swamp”, that is literally the same term that the Nazis used about Weimar (Sumpf) which also it means the swamp. So, you can get this fascist language of “draining swamps”: in fact, one of the key concepts in Italian fascism was bonificare. Bonifico means “making good”, i.e. draining a swamp. So under Fascism, to “make good” a swamp, you drain it, get rid of the malaria, then use the reclaimed land to build a Fascist New Town on it. So, the fascists in Italy loved building on drain swamps as one of many symbols of the Fascist revolution. Now fascist Germany didn’t use the image of draining swamps, but often used the metaphor of (Säuberung) cleansing, of tidying up, the “decadence” of art, or making the race “clean”, as in the horrific expression “Judenrein” (“Jew-clean”). Different words, different metaphors, but the same core myth of regeneration. So, I saw this pattern and I got really excited at the pattern I had seen, which seemed the key to founding a collaborative discipline of comparative fascist studies and differentiation of fascism from other sorts of illiberal right. being a nerd). I found this incredibly exciting and probably bored people to death explaining it to them.

MdiC: Bonificare?

If you ever make a bank transfer in Italy now, they call it bonifico, which means “making good a debt” and has lost all Fascist connotations. So I saw clearly saw this empirically demonstrable pattern of “making good” and “cleaning up”, and “renovation” in fascist thinking. I had a language problem, a terminological problem, because I needed an adjective which went with ultranationalism and identified the specifically fascist element in it under fascist regimes. Fascism was a form of extreme nationalism, but there have been loads of nationalisms throughout history right back to the Middle Ages. You could even think that the Roman empire: Romanness, had a sort of nationalistic element. I needed an adjective to go with ultranationalism and it had to imply some sort of rebirth. But there wasn’t an adjective derived from rebirth or renewal: renewing ultranationalism, rebirthing ultranationalism did not work. While rebirthing is a Californian psychotherapy where you get psychologically reborn, so that was out. And I was sort of vaguely looking for an adjective and I just by chance I came across this little book by a theological socialist called Pierre-Simon Ballanche who was an activist in French postrevolutionary history. The name of his book was La palingénésie sociale: the rebirth of society. Researching further, I found the word was well established in Italian and Spanish palingenetico, but when I looked it up in English it had been used about the rebirth of Christ and it was used about fingernails regrowing in obsolete biological terminology, but it was never used in the English Human Sciences as an adjective to refer to sociopolitical rebirth and renewal. Technically lexicographers declared the word to be “obsolete”.

So I revived it as the word which qualified “ultranationalism”, to signal not just a revolutionary ultranationalism attempting to renew the political system, but seeking to bring about regeneration in every sphere of society, and ultimately human nature itself. It caught on. I wish I’d patented it and got a penny or a dime for every time it was used in English now, because it’s now a standard word in anglophone languages. “Palingenetic”, from palin anew and genesis birth, it just was so neat. Like many intellectuals, I am drawn to slightly jargonous and here I’d created my own piece of jargon. “Palingenetic ultra-nationalism”. It’s simultaneously slightly cryptic and slightly open. With it, I found myself able to define fascism in a single sentence, at the time a unique achievement.

MdiC: And that adjective helps us understand how fascism is at the same time looking back to look forward to a modernizing renewal, rebirth of the nation, almost at an anthropological level of society.

RG: Absolutely. And the beauty is that when you recognize that pattern in a particular fascism, you are forced to look closely at the unique history of the nation where it forms. As a fascist you have to think, well what part of national history are you reviving, what are you renewing? You have to find in your national history a glorious period without which there can be ultranationalism but no fascism. Now if you go to Holland there was the golden age of painting, civil engineering, economic production, the navy, and religious patriotism culture (in a period called the “golden age”. A gift for Dutch fascists. Spain too had a “golden century” and Britain had an Elizabethan age. But a country like America’s got a problem. As a colonizing or settler nation it hasn’t been around a long time: you can have nostalgia for various carefully redacted “heroic” parts of American history and Trump uses this constantly. Well look at him! Going to Mount Rushmore to hint that his face should be up there one as the renewer of American greatness, to find a genuine golden age in America is difficult, and in any case, Trump is not a revolutionary anti-democratic nationalist, but a democratic and liberal reformer. But if you are a neo-Nazi in the US or Germany or Romania, you have to back to Aryan root-races lost in the mists of time. Similarly, Hungarians had to invoke the myth of deriving from warrior tribes of the European steppes, because there was no historic “golden age” to revive. But one way or another a fascist finds a way to anchor the vision of national re-birth in a mythicized golden age or a myth of heroic root races (like the Vikings in Norwegian fascist thought).

So I found my pattern and I’d found my personalized jargon and I found a real sense of vocation from looking at lots of different fascisms in my doctorate, and then, in my first book, surveying the earlier definitional chaos, and explaining why there was chaos (because the experts were all looking for some sort of objective “essence” rather than consciously constructing an “ideal type”. After all, there are no essences in definitions arrived at in the human sciences. At best, all you can have is a heuristically effective definition. You can’t have a true definition. My definition of fascism isn’t true, but it’s proved—thanks to the work of lots of genuine scholars working in the field—really useful for sorting out the fascist goats from the pathological conservative, religious or democratic nationalist or right-wing populist sheep.

MdiC: Well, it was also your Italian in-laws, their real life experiences of life under fascism, that colored your engagement with the subject.

RG: Well, yeah. I mean, in a way, in terms of my life, I was on a sort of magic carpet by now. I had this married life with an Italian I could never have expected. I was learning Italian and entering a new culture. When we were going to her home, we were going to this little village outside, Genoa where I’m sitting at this moment to do the podcast. I was part of a family again. Not only that but my father-in-law been in the war. I could sit on the terrace and try out my theory and learn what how it felt to be a Fascist soldier, and what the they were being told about what they were fighting for by Mussolini’s regime as “modern Romans” (the Italians, like the Germans, had only been united in in the late 19th century. They’d never been a nation-state before that. So you couldn’t have a golden age of the Italian nation to invoke. But if you were a Fascist looking for a glorious past as inspiration of the New Italy, there was the Catholic Church, Vatican, the Renaissance, and above all, you had the Roman era as an infinite source of palingenetic myth.

MdiC: Mussolini was obsessed with Romanità.

My father-in-law was patriotic, but in no way a Fascist in his belief system and never bought into the Roman myth. He was staunchly Catholic and true Catholics never quite internalize the core paganism of Fascism, even though there was a lot of collusion between the Vatican and the regime. Reassuringly, however, he could recognize his own experience in what I was theorizing. He would say: “Yes, now you say that it makes sense of what I went through.” He could remember the frenzy of the crowds in the streets during the speeches of the duce broadcast in town squares and the way they were being encouraged to feel that they were experiencing a national rebirth. And in those moments, Fascism was enabling ordinary people to experience the same populist, mass energy of palingenesis that was unleashed in the beginning of the French Revolution and inspired the lines in William Wordsworth’s poem “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven”. Modern fascism studies now recognizes that all fascism is an attempted national revolution—though of course that’s a position completely rejected by Marxist theories of fascism because for them there can only one true revolution and the populist fervour of the crowds was the result of manipulation by capitalism defending its interests in the fascist state. But I am convinced by my own research that many in the crowds worshipping Hitler in the early days and in the squares adulating Mussolini in the 1930s they really experienced a powerful subjective sense that their nation was being reborn into this extraordinary golden age and that they were part of a great historical event. And even though Trump isn’t fascist, if you watch his early rallies, you can get some little hint of what a palingenetic fervour can be like, even though he’s done it in a very crudely demagogic, trashy, diluted way compatible with democracy.

MdiC: Yeah, it’s so tacky.

RG: My mother-in-law was what’s called a “Little Italian”, a Piccola Italiana, a member of in the female youth organization when she was very really young and she had no idea about politics but liked the games, the uniform, the companionship. But later she experienced Fascism’s dark side. In this village, Campomorone, where I’m being interviewed now, not more than 200 meters away from where I’m sitting, there was a there was a Nazi-Fascist massacre, a reprisal execution of a whole load of local inhabitants of the village. In fact, the street where my wife grew up was called the “street of martyrs” because that’s where they were killed. They were machine gunned outside the local convent because partisans who were in the hills above where I’m sitting had killed some Nazis. And Cravasco, a small village just above us in the hills about 2 miles away, was the scene of another reprisal massacre.

So thanks to my new Italian family I started getting this real sense that the destructiveness of Nazism and Fascism—in Italian it’s called Nazi-Fascism because of the collusion between the two—was motivated by almost religious fervour about protecting the world from the evils of communism and liberalism and what they saw as the decadence of the modern world. And in a way, a wonderful symbiosis took place between my private life, my teaching life—because I could create new undergraduate courses on this and teach them—and my publishing life, and what you see if you see an official account of my life. I was lucky.

These are just the externalities. I am so lucky to have lived a long time as well, and though I’ve written a lot and no longer produce any monographs I still get asked to write more and talk more about my work.

MdiC: Let’s talk about that because over the decades and I’m in this group: people consult you to do interviews. They cite your work. You’re very heavily cited scholar. You’re invited to conferences, but often people find what you have to say disappointing if they’re looking for an expert to confirm, yes Trump is a fascist. Yes, Orban is a fascist. Yes, Modi is a fascist. You have a different way of explaining these modern phenomena, this populism that we discussed earlier based on how you apply your knowledge of fascism to these non-fascist movements.

RG: That’s true, but I’d like to qualify what I’m about to say because, actually, I think the word “fascism” has got such powerful cathartic value if you need to distance yourself from somebody on the right you find repulsive ideologically or almost physically that I’m not going to say someone’s wrong to call Trump a fascist. I utterly understand

that on one level, on an emotive level, he’s a fascist. And to call him an illiberal democrat or de-liberalizing democrat or ethnocratic liberal or anti-liberal ultra-populist or some other jargonous term that sort doesn’t really express what he is emotionally for a liberal, a socialist, a religious humanist. It simply doesn’t resonate with his opponents. So I would say that if you’re going to use the word “fascist” about politicians on the right you hate, then do so in the knowledge that you are using the term not as a piece of forensic political jargon or a precise taxonomic term, but you’re using it in order to emotionally distance yourself from a political enemy and express your disgust and sense of injustice about what he or she represents. In that qualified sense, if you want to call ICE an American equivalent to the fascist Gestapo, that’s absolutely fine.

But it’s fine, with the caveat that it’s absolutely unhistorical. I mean the Gestapo was infinitely more horrific than ICE, and Hitler and what he did in his Third Reich and New European Order in pursuit of his revolutionary goals to create a NEW GERMANY, was infinitely worse than anything that Trump has done to make the US great again using his distorted interpretation of the Constitution of 1787 and US history. So, let’s not censure the term fascist in common parlance as an expletive, but if you want to find a forensically accurate term to communicate the nuances of what Trump is, the word “fascism” really doesn’t cut it. And it doesn’t cut it precisely because of the subtlety of this new attack on freedom and liberal democracy. It does not come from fascists. It comes from democrats who want elections and the liberal freedoms for themselves and those whom they see as “their kind”: true Americans, true Britons, true Slovaks etc. So they are trying to get rid of what they consider to be the corruption of their nation’s democracy by international institutions like the EU or the United Nations or paying for food relief for developing countries, or providing health services for people in the third world, or just those who are liberal and ‘woke” in defending the of rights of minorities and migrants.

On 7 January 2021 Trump resisted the fascist temptation of leading a putsch against the Capitol and returned, I believe, to the democratic process and the constitutional swamp that he sees it as his mission to clean up and drain, but not to replace with a New Order. He’s corrupting the liberal democratic system from within, like an autoimmune disease and not attacking it from outside like a Covid-type virus. In contrast, everything points to the fact that Hitler and Mussolini from the outset only wanted to gain democratic power in order to destroy democracy and replace it with a totalitarian state. Putin is in this sense much closer to fascism in that sense than a populist like Trump of Netanyahu, who reply on a popular electoral mandate in order to turn their nations into rogue states and are prepared to commit crimes against humanity in pursuit of their psychotic visions of their nation’s future power and greatness.

MdiC: Because, well, ultimately fascism is revolutionary, isn’t it? And Trump’s vision of American greatness is not revolutionary.

RG: That’s it. Like a fascist dictator—but without having a fascist ideology of populist palingenesis to implement—Putin has had to effectively destroy democracy in order to make Russia great again as an autocracy masquerading as a constitutional state. Meanwhile, Trump and Netanyahu still depend on electoral support in order to pursue their wars on liberal democracy, internationalism, and humanity.

MdiC: Well, there are a lot of bones to pick out of what you have told us about your highly personal path to an academic career and the positions you hold on fascism and Trumpism. S thank you.

RG: No. Thank. And I apologize for the hour of logorrhoea I have subjected you and your listeners to… I hope something they can take away something solid from all the ramblings…

Read the essay here.

Reflections on 250…

The semiquincentennial arrives with many Americans in a sour mood. Our obscene president has single-handedly ruined the official celebration of the republic’s 250th birthday, and not a day passes without a new revelation about Donald Trump’s staggering corruption, cruelty, or incompetence. More on our “elective King” later in this newsletter.

I am not here to tell you to celebrate, but I encourage you to at least reflect on the meanings of the American Revolution — and what it takes to sustain a republic. Of course, you could just have a fun weekend of beach, BBQ, and cold beer while paying no regard to what’s happening on the National Mall or without reading a biography of Thomas Jefferson. But this once-in-a-generation anniversary should focus our minds, at least for a little while, on our republican legacy.

Maybe read a history book. Watch a documentary. Go to a movie. Or listen to a podcast! Today’s episode of History As It Happens was the eighth installment in my America250 series, featuring an interview with historian Alan Taylor about a day in the life of a Continental Army soldier. (More on the episode later in this newsletter.)

Many ways to reflect

Every July 4, I look over Frederick Douglass’ inspirational speech in 1852: “Notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented, of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery.”

This year I read a new biography of George Washington and attended a screening of “Young Washington” at Mount Vernon. I’m ready now to reflect, not genuflect.

Why? Well, the American Revolution remains the single most important event in the country’s history, as it created a nation founded on ideas that are still contested today. They’ve always been contested. Rights for whom? Freedom for whom? Due process for whom? What is the proper relationship between citizen and government? The American experiment in self-government is a work in progress because the questions of democracy are never settled. They are subject to perpetual argument. Politics never stops. So neither should we stop thinking about these things.

A day in the life of a Continental Army soldier

Art shapes memory.

John Trumbull’s paintings of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the Battle of Bunker Hill do not depict the reality of war. They are nonetheless beautiful and inspiring, creating glorious images of the battle against British tyranny. They are nothing like Alexander Gardner’s grim 1862 photographs of The Dead of Antietam — how could they be?

But both wars were grim. Both were prolonged, violent, miserable affairs that saw men die in agony from bullets, bayonets, cannonballs, and rampant disease. There was little glory and lots of suffering. Photography existed during the Civil War, which is why today no one looks at the carnage at Gettysburg and says, “My what a beautiful photo!”

In today’s episode of History As It Happens, historian Alan Taylor dismantles the popular notion that the American Revolution was orderly and civilized — a notion perpetuated by those remarkable eighteenth-century artists.

“The version of the American Revolution that serves a civics purpose emphasizes the nobility of the patriot cause — to present it as the American cause — and to present the enemy as British tyrants. And the war we often remember through these paintings, where we can’t see the actual grim conditions through any kind of surviving imagery. The paintings tend to present battles as very neat and orderly in their ranks. They tend to show the patriot soldiers as well-uniformed… They tend to focus on the political moments such as the Declaration of Independence. It creates a misleading impression of an orderly revolution when, if we go to the actual documents, the diaries of soldiers, the memoirs of [soldier] Joseph Plumb Martin, the letters of George Washington and other officers, it’s a chaotic war with lots of misery to go around — and not just for the soldiers but also for civilians who are experiencing this war,” says Taylor, a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

Joseph Plumb Martin left the only surviving book-length memoir by a Continental Army soldier, Taylor says. Martin’s experiences should give us pause before valorizing eighteenth-century military service in the cause of American liberty. Soldiers, as well as women, children, and the enslaved, suffered like bastards.

Enlisted men were promised a daily ration of meat and bread. “Are those the rations that are actually delivered to them? No,” says Taylor. “There are days when they get no meat. There are days when they get no bread as well. Joseph Plumb Martin talks about gnawing birch bark off twigs because he’s so hungry. There are stories of them boiling their shoes. So the famous story about the bloody feet of the soldiers in the snow at Valley Forge is completely true. Many of these guys are trudging through the snow with rags around their feet rather than shoes… There are situations where they’re so starving that about the only calories they can get are from boiling their shoes, killing cats and dogs to eat them. And then when the rations are delivered… it turns out it’s rotten horse meat that these guys don’t want to eat.”

Yet the army mostly stayed together — and somehow defeated the British Empire.

Trumpism and the absence of ideology

Are we any closer to answering the question “what is Trumpism?” today than we were eleven years ago, when the reality TV star descended a golden escalator in New York City and into our lives?

It may be easier to define what it isn’t. It’s not fascism. Trumpism is a sort of right-wing populism, although it’s a phony populism as far as the working class is concerned. Trumpism is Trump — shamelessly corrupt and dishonest, endlessly self-pitying and insecure, a tireless braggart and conspiracy theorist with authoritarian instincts. He takes pleasure in cruelty toward the less powerful, as evidenced by the brutalization of immigrants during his second term. He’s able to pull it off with a not insignificant portion of the electorate, even now with his approval ratings in the tank. Imitators may prove less successful. After all, it does take talent to be a good con-man.

MAGA has always been nebulous. This helps explain why Trump’s base mostly sticks with him even when he shatters “promises” such as avoiding unnecessary wars in the Middle East. The man believes in nothing but himself, and that’s good enough for his fans. Trump’s priority is to enrich himself and his family in shady deals replete with conflicts of interest. He practices “global mafia politics” in an age of geo-kleptocracy. Trump manipulates financial markets by, say, announcing tariffs, or his administration awards certain companies government contracts, while making thousands of stock trades to profit off such moves. Quite the public servant!

In Tuesday’s episode, the political scientist Damon Linker returned to discuss a subject we’ve been grappling with since I launched the podcast a half-decade ago. If we can understand what Trumpism is and where it came from, we might be able to tell how long it may endure — or what from Trump’s two non-consecutive terms may last. FDR had his New Deal coalition. Will there be a Trump coalition? If so, based on what?

To Linker, Trump and Trumpism are difficult to corral because they do not spring from a coherent set of ideas. Linker explains what he means by “politics after ideology” in this Substack post.

And in our podcast conversation: “We tend to think of politics in ideological terms… if you’re a Democrat, then you believe in a list of ideas or principles that you’re seeking to advance. And if you’re a Republican, you think of another set of ideas, principles, and policies you’re trying to advance… Trump definitely made alternative ideological appeals on trade and immigration and, to some extent, on foreign policy. Yet, I think it’s also important to recognize that he personally represents a distinctively non-ideological version of a new postliberal set of commitments.”

“The contrast with someone like JD Vance is illuminating. Vance is an ideologue. He’s a graduate of Yale Law School. He thinks in terms of ideas. He might be completely cynical in swapping out one set of ideas for another. As recently as 2019 or 2020, he was more of a standard-issue fusionist, National Review ideologue, and then he sort of turned on a dime in the aftermath of January 6th and adopted a post-liberal set of commitments instead. But in both cases, they were ideological commitments… Whereas Trump will, in a mercenary way, embrace certain commitments in the moment, but in the end, he will never place his commitment to or fidelity to those principles, ideas, or policy positions if it requires a sacrifice of his own good, even for a moment,” Linker says.

Listen to the conversation with Damon Linker here.

Whatever your politics or current mood — and I concede there’s much to be depressed about — enjoy the 4th of July. It’s the weekend. We can go back to depression on Monday.

Okay, let’s tackle this week’s podcasts…

Sean Wilentz on antislavery and the American Revolution

Organized antislavery politics originated in the American colonies. A few days before the battles of Lexington and Concord, a small number of Philadelphians gathered at a tavern and founded the first antislavery society in modern history, according to the historian Sean Wilentz.

The American Revolution birthed and catalyzed antislavery politics, and one long lifetime later, the Thirteenth Amendment abolished human chattel slavery forever. Yet this aspect of the national origin story is badly neglected, says Wilentz, the author of The Rise of American Democracy and No Property in Man.

In Tuesday’s episode of History As It Happens, Wilentz traces the origins of antislavery thinking and political activism, as well as the early achievements. At no point along the way from 1776 to 1865 was the fight against slavery easy. On the contrary, it was an intense conflict over a species of property — human chattel — that had been legal for a long time.

“There were politics inside the Quaker Connection going back to the 1680s, and there were attempts by Quaker abolitionists to get at least the Quaker Connection to drop its association with slavery, which in fact succeeded,” Wilentz says. “It took a while… By 1776, the Quakers had broken their connection with slavery. You cannot be a good Quaker and be a slaveholder at the same time. So in that very narrow but nevertheless influential and important stream, there was anti-slavery politics of a kind going on.”

Wilentz continues: “By the 1760s, within the colonial assembly in Massachusetts, there was debate over getting rid of slavery altogether. There were petitions delivered by enslaved people in Boston even before the Revolution broke out. So there’s a kind of politics, but it doesn’t get as much notice because it’s restricted to particular colonies, as it would have to have been in this period. There’s also agitation against the slave trade. Most of the colonies came up with petitions of one kind or another petitioning the crown to end the slave trade, and of course, the crown denied them because the crown thought the slave trade was just great. So, there was political activity before the revolution, but something happened in 1775 that was going to take it in a different direction.”

Also discussed in the podcast: religious, moral, and philosophical (Enlightenment) opposition to slavery; what defined property and property rights; manumission vs. abolition; ending the slave trade; Thomas Paine; Lord Dunmore’s proclamation; radicalism of northern emancipation; and much else.

H.W. Brands’ George Washington

Is it possible to get close to George Washington, to see the world as he did? Without a time machine, no one can truly see and feel (or smell) life in the late eighteenth century. With Washington, whose mythic presence endures everywhere, it’s even harder to peel away the legend and see a mortal man.

In today’s podcast episode, H.W. Brands, a prolific historian and biographer who’s penned more than 30 books, made his HAIH debut to discuss American Patriarch: The Life of George Washington. This is the seventh episode in my America250 series.

Brands tells Washington’s story by citing long passages from his journals, letters, and official correspondence, as well as the writings of other eyewitnesses to the events we’re all familiar with, such as the Battle of Trenton or Inauguration Day in 1789. The book is almost entirely primary sources. There is no bibliography pointing to secondary literature. Brands says he read no Washington biographies in researching his book.

“I have made a deliberate decision to get my readers as close to the moment, as close to the people that I’m writing about as possible. And the way to do that is to show them the world as it existed in the eyes and the perceptions of my subject. One of the most important things that the historian can do is show what it was like to be alive at a different time. The superpower of the historian is the ability to see the world through other eyes… to understand George Washington, in order to understand his generation, I need to know what it looked like to them… If I accomplish that, then I will have succeeded,” Brands says.

Readers familiar with this history won’t find many new details in American Patriarch, but they may enjoy Brands’ method. Whether you’re an expert or learning about the Revolution for the first time, you’ll come away awed by Washington’s innate leadership and republican virtue. My first reaction was another book about George Washington? The subject doesn’t get old. The issues are still fresh.

George Washington was a mediocre military tactician, says Brands, and as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, he lost more battles than he won. After the war, Washington grew alarmed at the parlous state of the “national government” — the hopeless Confederation Congress. Yet he wanted to live out his days on his plantation, avoiding politics. Here, Brands makes good use of Alexander Hamilton’s letters to his old general, imploring him to save the republic.

Listen to the episode here.

What Alan Greenspan left us

In this week’s bonus episode, historian Nelson Lichtenstein reflects on the legacy of Alan Greenspan, one of the most influential American figures of the past 40 years. Greenspan died earlier this month. He was 100.

When Greenspan stepped down from the Fed chairmanship in 2006, his reputation was sterling. The stock market had boomed under his low-interest-rate policy during the 1990s, and he was credited with deftly managing the economic shocks caused by the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Just two years later, his ideology — a faith in the ability of markets to regulate themselves — was discredited. As Lichtenstein explains in the podcast (and in his 2023 book), Greenspan refused to heed warnings about unregulated derivatives and other red flags. He did not believe it was possible to predict when an asset had reached speculative (or bubble) territory. So he stood aside.

“There had been a big fight in the latter years of the Clinton administration, where a woman named Brooksley Born, who was head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a kind of minor agency, wanted to regulate these derivatives. She put out a concept paper, kind of a thought paper, that they should think about [regulation],” Lichtenstein says.

“And Greenspan… Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and ultimately Clinton himself basically said, ‘No, definitely not. We shouldn’t regulate them. Let the market do it.’ These derivatives became a multi-trillion dollar series of bets that came crashing down in the housing market and beyond in 2008 and ‘09. Greenspan was responsible for that.”

To listen to the entire 23-minute episode, become a subscriber today. For $5 per month or $50 per year, you can support the important work of giving historians like Nelson Lichtenstein a platform to share their insights about timely topics such as Alan Greenspan’s legacy.

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Share History As It Happens

This is the seventh episode in a series marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, America's semiquincentennial.

He was the indispensable American. George Washington held together the Continental Army as its commander-in-chief during the Revolutionary War. Then he answered his countrymen's call to serve as the new nation's first president, setting important precedents over the next eight years. Without him, the new republic might have failed. His leadership and the esteem in which he was held are the stuff of legend. The story is real. George Washington was not a demigod. As a general, he lost more battles than he won. But he was still indispensable to the causes of revolution and nation-building.

In this episode, historian H.W. Brands discusses his new book, American Patriarch: The Life of George Washington.

Further listening (America250 series):

Episode 1 w/ Lindsay Chervinsky Episode 2 w/ Kate Carté Episode 3 w/ Alan Taylor Episode 4 w/ Lindsay Chervinsky Episode 5 w/ Jim Oakes Episode 6 w/ Sean Wilentz

One of the most influential central bankers in U.S. history, Alan Greenspan, who chaired the Federal Reserve for 19 years, died on June 22. He was 100.

Greenspan was once treated as an oracle whose policies and arcane pronouncements moved markets. After the '08 crash, however, his legacy was badly tarnished because he had embraced a quasi-religious faith in markets to regulate themselves — a fantasy that led to ruin shortly after he departed the Fed.

Our guest is historian Nelson Lichtenstein, the author of A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism.

This is the sixth episode in a series marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, America's semiquincentennial.

The American Revolution was deeply rooted in Enlightenment philosophy and inspired by the principle of natural rights. Even before the fighting broke out at Lexington and Concord, some Americans were calling attention to the terrible contradiction of slavery. These few would grow in number and form the first organized antislavery movement in history. In this episode, Sean Wilentz discusses this long-neglected aspect of the American Revolution.

Recommended reading:

No Property in Man by Sean Wilentz

Further listening (America250 series):

Episode 1 w/ Lindsay Chervinsky Episode 2 w/ Kate Carté Episode 3 w/ Alan Taylor Episode 4 w/ Lindsay Chervinsky Episode 5 w/ Jim Oakes

Coming up next!

My ongoing America250 series will deliver two timely episodes to get your mind right before the semiquincentennial.

On Tuesday’s show, the great Sean Wilentz will discuss the rise of antislavery politics and the American Revolution. The first antislavery society in world history was founded in 1775 by Pennsylvania Quakers, as Wilentz notes in No Property Man (2018).

Americans today remain largely unaware of the powerful antislavery impulse that flowed in the revolutionary stream washing over the British colonies in North America. One very long lifetime later, in 1865, the ultimate goal of antislavery politics was met with immediate abolition in the Thirteenth Amendment. Those politics were born in the egalitarian ferment of the prior century.

And next Friday, H.W. Brands will make his HAIH debut to talk about his new book, American Patriarch: The Life of George Washington.

Journalism and Trump

Did the road to the news media’s obsession with Donald Trump begin with the O.J. Simpson murder trial? I’d never given this idea a moment’s thought until speaking with special guest Chuck Todd on Tuesday’s podcast episode. Actually, the news business would be the right term.

Todd now hosts The Chuck ToddCast on YouTube after many years as NBC News’ lead political reporter and moderator of the iconic “Meet the Press.” He generously agreed to talk about the strange, hostile, yet symbiotic relationship between President Trump and the news media, and how and why covering the presidency has changed so dramatically over the decades. You may recall that Trump referred to Todd as a “sleepy son of a bitch” at a rally in 2018, which the journalist learned from his teenage daughter, who spotted the clip online. (For the record, I can’t recall Chuck Todd ever falling asleep on camera as Trump has about 10 times this year).

So, O.J. Simpson? Todd shared his O.J. thesis when I brought up the news media’s unfortunate turn toward covering personal scandals as if the world were coming to an end. This reached its height (or nadir) during the Clinton presidency. Citing historian Nelson Lichtenstein’s 2023 book on Clinton, I mentioned to Todd that, for example, “The Associated Press assigned 25 full-time reporters to the [Monica Lewinsky] story who wrote more than 4100 pieces, an average of 11 a day.” Cable news channels dedicated thousands of hours to the Lewinsky drama.

Here’s Todd in our podcast:

“I have a different theory about how we got there on Monica. It all began with a former football player named O.J. Simpson. And I don’t think we fully appreciate this. The single biggest mistake any mainstream outlet in America made was the decision to go wall-to-wall with the O.J. trial. When CNN made that decision, it started the mainstream news media down a path that essentially culminated with the election of Donald Trump,” he said.

We have to start by remembering Simpson’s enormous presence in our culture, Todd continued.

“The O.J. story was rightfully an obsessive story. Holy cow, everybody loved O.J. I tried to explain it to my 19-year-old son. I told him it’s as if Peyton Manning were accused of double murder. It would be shocking. Look at Peyton Manning. That guy’s not going to kill anybody! Peyton Manning is everybody’s friend. That’s the way we all felt about O.J. He wasn’t just a retired football player. He was the guy who sold Hertz. He was the funny guy in the [Naked Gun] movies… He was that iconic.”

Then one day in 1994, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were found stabbed to death, and the major networks were breaking into programming to show the police “chasing” the suspect — O.J. Simpson!!! — down a Los Angeles highway. (I remember it like yesterday. I was 19 and very unhappy when NBC broke into Game 5 of Knicks-Rockets in the NBA Finals).

“When that happened, it was understandable that it was a feeding frenzy,” Todd continued. “And one of the most important fork-in-the-road moments was the pre-trial coverage. Cable TV had just become this 200-channel monster. There was something called Court TV, and Court TV was covering this stuff wall-to-wall thanks to TV cameras in the courtroom. CNN was getting killed in the ratings. So CNN decides for the very first time in a major news story to cover something that the public wanted, not necessarily that the public needed. It is the beginning of creating reality TV. If you think about it, we didn’t have reality TV before O.J. Now look at Monica Lewinsky through that prism.”

News divisions had never been considered TV network profit-makers.

“Coverage of the O.J. trial made a ton of money for the media. So what did that do to the executives who ran these media companies that owned these news organizations? They said instead of news being a loss leader — which was the accepted premise of General Electric when they owned NBC in the early days, Cap Cities when they owned ABC back in the day, ditto with Westinghouse — O.J. happened and suddenly you [realize] you can make money on the news.”

Also discussed with Chuck Todd: Trump loves the media, especially The New York Times; the time Trump called him (when Todd happened to be in bed) to talk about polls; how Todd got his start in political journalism; early days of digital coverage; where news orgs made mistakes covering Trump; and much else.

The spirit of ‘76 — 1976!

The national mood was dour. Politics was in disarray. Americans were stung by a lost war and a disgraced presidency. The economy struggled to overcome stagflation. Things just didn’t seem right in 1976 as America’s bicentennial appeared on the calendar.

We’re living through strange and distressing times, but the country, Donald Trump’s depredations notwithstanding, seems to be in better shape now than in the aftermath of Watergate and Vietnam. Maybe you disagree — after all, the political system ultimately did remove the Nixon cancer, while we have 31 more months of Trump 2.0 to endure. But there’s more to life than politics, and if you’ve read Rick Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge, you’ll understand just how upside down our culture seemed fifty years ago. Or maybe we don’t need to compare the two eras at all.

In today’s episode of History As It Happens, the historians Jeremi Suri and Jeffrey Engel take us back to the summer of ‘76 to show us what Americans were feeling and thinking as President Gerald Ford implored them to show some patriotic spirit for the Bicentennial. Some called it the Buy-centennial, because everything was commercialized, even bicentennial toilet seats and deodorant. Maybe that wasn’t so strange after all. The stink of Watergate still wafted.

The national mood was dour. Political scandals and a lost war cast long shadows. The economy was mired in stagflation. Americans were losing confidence in the future. It was the summer of '76 — 1976! Yet despite the tough times, millions celebrated the nation's bicentennial, which was both patriotic and a bit schlocky. Historians Jeremi Suri and Jeffrey Engel reflect on that strange summer as many Americans today shrug their shoulders at the coming semiquincentennial.

Jeremi Suri teaches history at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He writes the Democracy of Hope newsletter.

Jeffrey Engel is the founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University.

Further reading:

On the Country's 250th Anniversary, the American People Are in a Sour Mood by Pew Research

Gordon Wood was a star among academics long before millions of ordinary Americans heard his name dropped in “Good Will Hunting,” when Will, played by Matt Damon, humiliates a pompous know-it-all in a bar. Watch the scene here.

What a loss, what a shame, that Gordon Wood did not live to see the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. He died on June 7 after being hit by a car in East Providence. He was 92. Wood did "as much as anyone to deepen understanding and change perceptions of the forces and events that led to the birth of the United States," according to The New York Times obituary.

In this special bonus episode of History As It Happens, the historians Craig Bruce Smith, Daniel Gullotta, and Michael Hattem explain why Wood’s work was so influential. We talk about his books, including the magisterial The Creation of the American Republic and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Radicalism of the American Revolution. Near the end, I read the final page of Empire of Liberty, Wood’s contribution to The Oxford History of the United States.

The historians and I also delve into criticisms of Wood’s treatment of slavery, as well as how he was attacked by mendacious defenders of “The 1619 Project,” The New York Times’ tendentious interpretation of U.S. history. All Wood really did was to state an incontestable fact: the American Revolution was not fought to defend slavery.

Listen to the podcast here.

This bonus episode is available to everyone, subscribers and non-subscribers alike. Normally, non-subscribers may only preview bonus episodes.

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Thank you,

Martin