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    Seeing a Tide of Fascism: Flee or Fight?

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    More from our inbox:West Point Book BanCooperation on the Environment To the Editor:Re “We Study Fascism, and We’re Leaving the U.S.” (Opinion video, nytimes.com, May 14):As a British historian and the author of a book on totalitarian Russia and the fall of Communism, I am worried that there have been too few coherent warnings of the isolationism and the threats to American democracy posed by the Trump administration — until I saw this eloquent video.Here in France there is talk of demanding that the Statue of Liberty — that beacon of freedom given to the United States by this country — be returned to Europe. As a child of a diplomatic family living in Communist Bulgaria in the 1960s, I witnessed directly the fear that a totalitarian state can induce in a population.I worry for America, and I desperately hope that it can reverse the tide of fascism threatening the independence of its universities, courts and admirable media. This video clearly lays out the challenges posed to the United States, which we Europeans have for so long respected and admired.Myles SandersonParisThe writer is the author of the book “Secret Service in the Cold War.”To the Editor:What Profs. Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley say is undeniably true: The United States is rapidly descending into fascism.Why, then, are they leaving the country? Why aren’t they staying and resisting along with the millions of people who are marching on the streets and refusing to submit?Why aren’t they staying here in solidarity with those who have been unjustly imprisoned and deported, those who have lost their jobs and those who are at risk of losing health care and basic services? Do they think that appearing in a video from The New York Times is sufficient?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Pepe Mujica, the Former Uruguayan President, Removed the Pomp from Politics

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      José “Pepe” Mujica did not have much use for Uruguay’s three-story presidential residence, with its chandeliers, elevator, marble staircase and Louis XV furniture. “It’s crap,” he told me last year. “They should make it a high school.”So when he became president of his small South American nation in 2010, Mr. Mujica decided he would commute from his home: a cluttered, three-room shack the size of a studio apartment, crammed with a wood stove, overstuffed bookcases and jars of pickling vegetables.Before his death on Tuesday, Mr. Mujica lived there for decades with his lifelong partner, Lucía Topolansky — herself a former vice president — and their three-legged dog, Manuela. They farmed chrysanthemums to sell in local markets and drove their sky blue 1987 Volkswagen Beetle to their favorite tango bars. There was no reason, he said, that a new job should require a move.That meant that, after sitting side-by-side with Barack Obama in the Oval Office or lecturing world leaders on the dangers of capitalism at the United Nations, Mr. Mujica would fly home in coach to a life resembling that of a poor farmer.José Mujica and his lifelong partner, Lucía Topolansky, at home last year. Ms. Topolansky served as a vice president of Uruguay.Dado Galdieri for The New York TimesIt was a political masterstroke. His presidency was, by many policy measures, unremarkable. But his austere lifestyle made him revered by many Uruguayans for living like them, while giving him a platform in the international press to warn that greed was eroding society. He insisted it was truly how he wanted to live, but he also recognized that it served to illustrate that politicians had long had it too good.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Vibe Shifts Against the Right

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      Alex Kaschuta’s podcast, “Subversive,” used to be a node in the network between weird right-wing internet subcultures and mainstream conservatism. She hosted men’s rights activists and purveyors of “scientific” racism, neo-reactionary online personalities with handles like “Raw Egg Nationalist” and the Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters. Curtis Yarvin, a court philosopher of the MAGA movement who wants to replace democracy with techno-monarchy, appeared on the show twice. In 2022, Kaschuta spoke at the same National Conservatism conference as Ron DeSantis and Marco Rubio.Finding progressive conventional wisdom hollow and unfulfilling, Kaschuta was attracted to the contrarian narratives and esoteric ideas of the thinkers and influencers sometimes known as the “dissident right.” They presented liberal modernity — with its emphasis on racial and gender equality, global cooperation, secularism and orderly democratic processes — as a Matrix-like illusion sustained by ideological coercion, and themselves as the holders of freedom-giving red pills.For Kaschuta, who lives in Romania, the promise of a more authentic, organic society, freed from the hypocrisies of the existing order, was apparently inviting. “There’s always been something tantalizing about the idea that the world is not how it is presented to you,” she wrote on her blog. “A frontier opens up.”But over the last couple of years, that frontier started seeming to her more like a dead end. Recently, she abandoned the movement. “The vibe is shifting yet again,” Kaschuta wrote on X last week. “The cumulative IQ of the right is looking worse than the market.”Kaschuta is not alone; several people who once appeared to find transgressive right-wing ideas scintillating are having second thoughts as they watch Donald Trump’s administration put those ideas into practice. The writer Richard Hanania once said that he hated bespoke pronouns “more than genocide,” and his 2023 book, “The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics,” provided a blueprint for the White House’s war on D.E.I. But less than three months into Trump’s new term, he regrets his vote, telling me, “The resistance libs were mostly right about him.”Nathan Cofnas, a right-wing philosophy professor and self-described “race realist” fixated on group differences in I.Q., wrote on X, “All over the world, almost everyone with more than half a brain is looking at the disaster of Trump (along with Putin, Yoon Suk Yeol, et al.) and drawing the very reasonable conclusion that right-wing, anti-woke parties are incapable of effective governance.” (Yoon Suk Yeol is South Korea’s recently impeached president.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      El discurso de Trump sobre un tercer mandato desafía la Constitución y la democracia

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      La 22.ª Enmienda es clara: el presidente de EE. UU. tiene que renunciar a su cargo tras su segundo mandato. Pero la negativa de Trump a aceptarlo sugiere hasta dónde está dispuesto a llegar para mantenerse en el poder.Después de que el presidente Donald Trump dijera el año pasado que quería ser dictador por un día, insistió en que solo estaba bromeando. Ahora dice que podría intentar aferrarse al poder incluso cuando la Constitución estipula que debe renunciar a él, y esta vez, insiste en que no está bromeando.Puede que sí y puede que no. A Trump le gusta alborotar el avispero y sacar de quicio a los críticos. Hablar de un tercer mandato inconstitucional distrae de otras noticias y retrasa el momento en que se le considere como un presidente saliente. Sin duda, algunos en su propio bando lo consideran una broma, mientras los líderes republicanos se ríen de ello y los ayudantes de la Casa Blanca se burlan de los periodistas por tomárselo demasiado en serio.Pero el hecho de que Trump haya introducido la idea en la conversación nacional ilustra la incertidumbre sobre el futuro del sistema constitucional estadounidense, casi 250 años después de que el país obtuviera la independencia. Más que en ningún otro momento en generaciones, se cuestiona el compromiso del presidente con los límites al poder y el Estado de derecho, y sus críticos temen que el país se encamine por una senda oscura.Después de todo, Trump ya intentó una vez aferrarse al poder desafiando la Constitución, cuando trató de anular las elecciones de 2020 a pesar de haber perdido. Más tarde pidió la “rescisión” de la Constitución para volver a la Casa Blanca sin una nueva elección. Y en las 11 semanas transcurridas desde que reasumió el cargo, ha presionado los límites del poder ejecutivo más que ninguno de sus predecesores modernos.“En mi opinión, esto es la culminación de lo que ya ha empezado, que es un esfuerzo metódico por desestabilizar y socavar nuestra democracia para poder asumir un poder mucho mayor”, dijo en una entrevista el representante Daniel Goldman, demócrata por Nueva York y consejero principal durante el primer juicio político a Trump.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Weighs In on Marine Le Pen Conviction

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      “FREE MARINE LE PEN!”With this blunt call, a strange one in that the French far-right leader is walking the streets of Paris, President Trump has waded into the politics of an ally, condemning her conviction this week on embezzlement charges and her disqualification from running for public office.The conviction was “another example of European Leftists using Lawfare to silence Free Speech,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social. Elon Musk, his billionaire aide, drove home the point: “Free Le Pen!” Mr. Musk echoed on his social media platform X.More than an extraordinary American intervention in French politics, the statements ignored the overwhelming evidence arrayed against Ms. Le Pen, who was convicted of helping orchestrate over many years a system to divert European taxpayers’ money illicitly to offset the acute financial difficulties of her National Rally party in France.Instead, for the American president and his team, as well as an angry chorus of Le Pen supporters at home, her case has become part of a vigorous campaign to undermine the separation of powers and the rule of law, which have been portrayed by Vice President JD Vance as no more than a means to stifle the far right and to quash democracy in the name of saving it.Ms. Le Pen last year. She became the face of France’s far right after taking over the party from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen.Mauricio Lima for The New York TimesMs. Le Pen will speak at a big National Rally demonstration Sunday in Paris under the banner “Let’s Save Democracy!” The National Rally was founded in 1972 as the National Front, an antisemitic party of fascist roots, by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. It was long seen as a direct threat to the democratic rule of the Fifth Republic, before Ms. Le Pen embarked on a makeover.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Marine Le Pen Could Be Banned From France Election if She’s Found Guilty of Embezzlement

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      A verdict Monday in an embezzlement trial is seen as a test of the country’s democracy — and the rule of law.Marine Le Pen, the French far-right leader, has tried and failed three times to become president. Now, even as her popularity rises, she may be barred from taking part in an election to lead France if she is found guilty of embezzlement on Monday.Such a verdict, far from certain, has been equated by Ms. Le Pen with a “political death” sentence and a “very violent attack on the will of the people.” It would ignite a major political storm at a time when the French Fifth Republic has appeared increasingly dysfunctional.On the one hand stands the principle, as Nicolas Barret, one of the prosecutors, put it in closing arguments last year, that “We are not here in a political arena but a legal one, and the law applies to all.”On the other hand lies the fear, expressed by some leading politicians, that a ban would undermine French democracy by feeding a suspicion that it is skewed against the growing forces of the hard right.“Madame Le Pen must be fought at the ballot box, not elsewhere,” Gérald Darmanin, a former center-right interior minister, wrote on X in November. He is now the justice minister.Ms. Le Pen. 56, has in recent years steered her anti-immigrant party from its antisemitic roots toward the political mainstream. The party, whose name she changed from the National Front to the National Rally, is now the largest single party in the National Assembly with 123 seats.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Thing That Could Be Trump’s Undoing

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      If there are Martian scholars examining the United States right now, they might be puzzling over the great Trump paradox.It’s that President Trump is doing immense long-term damage to the United States by undermining democratic norms, vandalizing the federal government and siding with alleged war criminals in the Kremlin, yet if support for him falls, I doubt it will have anything to do with all this. Rather, it may be … egg prices.American voters have been, to my mind, surprisingly comfortable with a felon who pardons other, violent felons and engages in reckless attacks on our rule of law and the global system that we created in 1945 and that has hugely enriched and empowered us. Trump doubled down on his, er, “cultural revolution” in his speech to Congress a few days ago, and about three-quarters of those who watched the speech approved of it to some degree (largely because those who watched were disproportionately Republican).Attacks by Democrats on Trump as undemocratic never got much traction among working-class voters; they cared less about issues at 30,000 feet and more about economic and cultural concerns at three feet. So in a strange way, what may impede Trump and preserve American democracy is not popular revulsion at the historic damage that he is doing to America but rather alarm at the myriad banal impacts on our daily lives because of Trumpian mismanagement.Trump’s tariffs, even if partly delayed, presumably will raise consumer prices and hurt the financial markets and thus our retirement savings; they will create a mess of supply chains for manufacturing goods. One gauge of what to expect: The latest estimate from the Atlanta Federal Reserve is an astonishing 2.4 percent decline in American G.D.P. in the first quarter of 2025.Americans may put up with a president calling journalists enemies of the people, may even accept a president pardoning felons who club police officers while trying to overturn an election. But historically, they’ve not been very forgiving of presidents who preside over recessions.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Barrage of Trump’s Awful Ideas Is Doing Exactly What It’s Supposed To

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      The first month of the second Trump presidency has put the lie to the widespread wisdom that Donald Trump has no ideology and no ideas, only an insatiable thirst for power and money. Trump has shown that he has ideas. So many ideas. They are just really bad ideas:The United States can own, ethnically cleanse and redevelop Gaza as a luxury resort. The U.S. will buy Greenland and take possession of the Panama Canal. The government will become more efficient by cutting the Department of Education, U.S.A.I.D., medical and science research and many many jobs. D.E.I. caused the collision of an Army helicopter and a passenger plane in the air near Washington, D.C. Immigrants and transgender people are an existential threat to Americans. The president can and should rule by decree. These are all ideas, in the sense that they are opinions, beliefs or expressions of a possible course of action.Some of these ideas would have seemed unthinkable just weeks ago. But now that they have been thought and uttered by the man in possession of the world’s biggest megaphone, all of us are forced to engage with them. Otherwise sane people start debating questions like: Could the U.S. really take over Gaza? Would Egypt or Jordan go along with the ethnic cleansing project? Can trillions of dollars really be cut from the federal budget with a few keystrokes? Is there evidence that D.E.I. caused the crash? Are all immigrants criminals? Do trans people exist? Did the founders intend to check the power of the executive?Flooding the ether with bad ideas isn’t Trump’s unique know-how — it’s standard autocratic fare. Hannah Arendt used the word “preposterous” to describe the ideas that underpinned 20th-century totalitarian regimes. Bad ideas do a lot of the work of building autocracy. By forcing us to engage with them, they make our conversations, our media and our society dumber. By conjuring the unimaginable — radical changes in the geography of human relationships, the government and the world itself as we have known it — they plunge us into an anxious state in which thinking is difficult. That kind of anxiety is key to totalitarian control.Life under autocracy can be terrifying, as it already is in the United States for immigrants and trans people. But those of us with experience can tell you that most of the time, for most people, it’s not frightening. It is stultifying. It’s boring. It feels like trying to see and breathe under water — because you are submerged in bad ideas, being discussed badly, being reflected in bad journalism and, eventually, in bad literature and bad movies.Much has been said about the Democrats’ failure to sound the alarm loudly enough, fast enough or broadly enough as Trump has mounted his campaign of destruction. Some of the criticism is not entirely fair. The American system of checks and balances isn’t designed to move as fast as Trump is moving or to stop a bad-faith individual intent on breaking it. A real problem, though, is that Democrats’ objections to these ideas have been primarily procedural. Trump understands politics as the interplay of power and ideology. His opponents see politics as procedure. The contrast has never been starker — and never has the Democrats’ technocratic, legalistic approach been more detrimental to the cause of democracy. It’s not Trump who doesn’t have ideas; it’s the people who should be fighting to stop Trump’s autocratic breakthrough.It is not enough to say that Trump and his crony Elon Musk are staging a coup, though they are. Many of the people who voted for Trump want to see him smash what he has successfully framed as a useless, wasteful government. It is not enough to say that Trump is destroying American democracy. Many of the people who voted for him did so because they have long felt that the system as it is constituted doesn’t represent their interests — and both Trump and Musk have argued that they are wresting democracy back from unelected bureaucrats. It is not enough to say that Trump’s actions have caused a constitutional crisis or that his executive orders may violate laws passed by Congress. Many of the people who voted for Trump longed to see their frustrations addressed by decisive, spectacular action, which he is delivering.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In First Post-Election Speech, Obama Calls for ‘Forging Alliances and Building Coalitions’

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      “Purity tests are not a recipe for long-term success,” the former president said in the speech in Chicago.In his first speech since the presidential election in November, Barack Obama urged Americans who want democracy to survive to look for ways to compromise, engage with the other side, turn away from identity politics and build relationships with unlikely potential allies.“Pluralism is not about holding hands and singing ‘Kumbaya,’” Mr. Obama said in Chicago on Thursday. “It is not about abandoning your convictions and folding when things get tough. It is about recognizing that, in a democracy, power comes from forging alliances and building coalitions, and making room in those coalitions not only for the woke, but the waking.”He added: “Purity tests are not a recipe for long-term success.”Billed as an address on “the power of pluralism,” the speech — a road map of sorts for political survival for liberals in a second term for Donald J. Trump — was delivered before hundreds of people as part of an annual Democracy Forum put on by the Obama Foundation, a private nonprofit entity that is led by Mr. Obama.Mr. Obama opened the speech with an acknowledgment that when he told friends of the focus of this year’s forum, the topic drew groans and eye rolls.“We’ve just been through a fierce, hard-fought election, and it’s fair to say that it did not turn out as they had hoped,” said Mr. Obama, who had, along with his wife, Michelle, campaigned intensely for Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate, in the final weeks.For Mr. Obama’s friends, he said, talk of bridging differences in a bitterly divided country seemed like an academic exercise.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More