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      Strongmen review: a chilling history for one nation no longer under Trump

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      This terrific history of strongmen since Mussolini makes it clear that despite a horrific pandemic and massive economic disruption, ordinary democratic Americans have more to be thankful for this Thanksgiving than ever before.Comparing the gruesome, granular details of the reigns of Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, Gaddafi, Pinochet, Mobuto, Berlusconi and Erdoğan to the acts and aspirations of Donald Trump, New York University professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat makes a powerful argument that on the scary road to fascism, America just came perilously close to the point of no return.Almost everything Trump has done has come straight from the authoritarian playbook. Every dictator, for example, has built on the accomplishments of his predecessors.“Just as Hitler watched Mussolini’s actions carefully,” Ben-Ghiat writes, “so did Gaddafi learn from Lt Col Gamal Abdul Nasser’s 1952 overthrow of the monarchy in Egypt.” Then in the 1980s and 90s, Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich served as models for Europeans looking for “a more radical form of conservatism”. Gingrich’s 1994 Contract with America was echoed a year later by the Front National, with its “contract for France with the French”. Berlusconi’s Contract with Italians followed six years later.In Egypt, Nasser hired “former Nazi propagandists for their expertise in antisemitic messaging”. In Zaire, from 1965, Mobutu Sese Seko’s media handlers reimagined Leni Riefenstahl’s image of Hitler descending from the sky by opening the television news each night with a picture of the dictator’s face, hovering up in the clouds.The parallels between Trump and his role models are endless. Ben-Ghiat writes of “watching Trump retweet neo-Nazi propaganda, call for the imprisonment [of Hillary Clinton] and lead his followers in loyalty oaths at rallies seemed all too familiar”– and how it filled her “with dread”.Before the Putin-Trump bromance there was Putin and Berlusconi, grinning at each other from Zavidovo to Sardinia. The way Trump talked about Mexicans was hardly different from Hitler’s words about the Jews or Berlusconi’s about Africans. The Italian media mogul and prime minister was himself just a pale imitation of Mussolini. In the pre-war period, he was responsible for the deaths of 700,000 Libyans, Eritreans, Somalis and Ethiopians.Every authoritarian regime has seen a crucial alliance between big business and the dictator, from Putin and his oligarchs to Hitler and German industrialists and Trump and the Wall Street elite. The German businessman Ernst von Hanfstaengl, Ben-Ghiat writes, introduced a “cleaned-up Hitler to the moneyed social circles that mattered” – just as Blackstone chief executive Stephen Schwarzman helped legitimize Trump with tens of millions in campaign contributions to him and his Republican allies.Like all his role models, Ben-Ghiat sees in Trump a “drive to control and exploit everyone and everything for personal gain. The men, women and children he governs have value in his eyes only insofar as they … fight his enemies and adulate him publicly. Propaganda lets him monopolize the nation’s attention, and virility comes into play as he poses as the ideal take-charge man.”The US has done so much to promote authoritarianism abroad during the last 100 years, it’s actually surprising it took so long before we had to confront it at home.When Mussolini desperately needed international legitimacy and economic aid in 1926, it was a fascist proselytizer and JP Morgan partner Thomas Lamont who rescued him, brokering a $100m US government loan. Fifty years later, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger told CIA director Richard Helms to make Chile’s “economy scream”, so Gen Augusto Pinochet could overthrow the socialist Salvador Allende. Kissinger and William F Buckley became fervent Pinochet apologists, even as thousands were tortured and disappeared. More

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      The Upswing review – can Biden heal America?

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      So the Biden-Harris ticket has won, but by narrow margins in some of the battleground states. How did partisanship reach such a pitch that Donald Trump’s tribal appeal easily cancelled doubts about his manifest unfitness for office? And what can Joe Biden do to patch together a frayed nation? The political scientists Robert Putnam, author of the acclaimed Bowling Alone, and Shaylyn Romney Garrett provide a wealth of sociologically grounded answers in The Upswing. Although the title is reassuringly buoyant, this is a tale of two long-term trends, one benign, the other a dark descent. An unabashed centrism prevails: political stability, the authors recognise, is a dance that requires a measure of cooperation and disciplined deportment from both parties.At the book’s core is a set of graphs describing the broad contours of American social, political, economic and cultural life over the past 125 years. All the graphs broadly conform to a common hump-like pattern: a growing swell over half a century or so of greater social trust, equality, bipartisanship and civic do-gooding peaking around the 1960s – followed by a marked and steady decline in all these criteria in the subsequent 50 years.The bad news is that we are living through the worst of the downswing, amid gross inequalities, corporate exploitation of the vulnerable and uncompromising hyper-partisanship. The good news is that the US has been here before – in the late 19th-century Gilded Age – and successfully pulled itself out of the mire. An antidote emerged to the robber baron industrialists, social Darwinists and anti-corporate populists of the Gilded Age in the form of the Progressive movement, whose ideals attracted reformers from within both main parties. Indeed, the short-lived Progressive party of the 1910s was an offshoot from Theodore Roosevelt’s “Bull Moose” brand of reformist Republicanism.Although Republican moderates managed to see off this third-party threat, Progressive ideals – the replacement of oligarchy, clientilism and corruption with modern, scientifically informed administration by middle-class professionals – endured as a significant strand in Republican politics. Progressive sentiments informed the New Deal of Roosevelt’s distant Democrat cousin FDR, but also the politics of mid 20th-century accommodationist Republicans such as Wendell Willkie and Thomas Dewey.The finest exemplar of harmonious “Tweedledum-Tweedledee” politics was General Eisenhower who, declining the opportunity to run for president as a Democrat, campaigned as a non-partisan Republican and governed as a big-spending progressive. The “low tide” of partisanship came in the mid-1960s when Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty, the introduction of Medicare and implementation of black civil rights enjoyed support across the aisle from Republicans.Putnam and Garrett perceive an upswing in the position of women and African Americans before the rights revolution of the 60sIn this age of “depolarisation”, the real ideological divisions lay within parties, between liberal Republicans and anti-New Deal conservative isolationists, between unionised northern blue-collar Democrats, many of them Catholic, and southern Democrats – predominantly Protestant segregationists whose cultural values belonged far to the right of liberal Republicans. The authors note that on issues of race and gender progressive Republicans were often to the left of Democrats, and that as late as the 1960s Democrats were more likely to be churchgoers.Politics was, however, only one strand in “the Great Convergence” described by Putnam and Garrett. It was an age not only of growing income equalisation but of volunteering. Americans participated in huge numbers in chapter-based civic associations, such as the Elks and Rotarians, the Knights of Columbus and African American Prince Hall freemasonry. The mainstream Protestant churches themselves converged, favouring an ecumenical, theologically slender, all-American religion of social service and helping out.Staggeringly hard as it is now to believe, the Southern Baptists initially welcomed the pro-choice result in the Roe v Wade abortion case of 1973. Indeed, Putnam and Garrett perceive a long unobtrusive upswing in the position of women and African Americans before the rights revolution of the 60s. The black-to-white income ratio improved 7.7% per decade between 1940 and 1970.But the pendulum had already begun to swing in the other direction. Most of us might guess that it was the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 that initiated the turn to inequality and division. Not so, insist Putnam and Garrett, for the Reagan counter-revolution turns out to be a “lagging indicator”. More ambiguous is the presidency of Richard Nixon, who appears here in strongly contrasting tones: a liberal Keynesian Republican on the policy front, but hard-boiled and amoral when electioneering.Adding a green tinge to progressive Republicanism, Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency and signed a clean air act. Yet ultimately ideals were a front for the harvesting of votes. Cynically alert to Southern Democrat disenchantment with Johnson’s civil rights legislation, Nixon embarked on a Southern strategy to woo the solidly Democratic South for the party of Abraham Lincoln. The process took decades, and explains one of today’s most glaring and historically illiterate ironies: the flying of Confederate flags by rural Republican-supporting northerners.However, as Putnam and Garrett demonstrate, the Great Divergence is about much more than political realignment. The great arc of modern American history concerns economic outcomes, social trends and a range of cultural transitions that the authors describe as an “I-We-I” curve. Things started to go awry on a number of fronts from the 1960s. Both the libertarian New Right and the countercultural New Left offered different routes to personal liberation. But individual fulfilment came at a cost in social capital.Escape from the drab soulless conformity associated with the 1950s ended up all too often in lonely atomisation. A long road led from the straitjacket of early marriage in the 1950s via the freedom of cohabitation to the growing phenomenon of singleton households. Chapter-based voluntary organisations that involved turning up for meetings and activities gave way to impersonal professionally run non-profits whose Potemkin memberships existed only as mass mailing lists. Unions ceased to be focal points of worker camaraderie and sociability, and shrivelled to a core function of collective bargaining.The authors believe that the new group loyalties of Republicans and Democrats are only weakly ideological, and are based rather on emotional allegiances of a tribal natureWhat’s more, the great mid-century levelling of incomes went into reverse. First, the gap grew between the middle and the bottom, then the incomes of the elite raced away from those of struggling middle-earners, and finally, as Putnam and Garrett show, the wealth of the top 0.1% vastly outgrew that of the top 1%.The downswing America described in this book contains some surprising features. Partisan antipathy has risen to a high pitch as – seen over the long term – the intensity of religious and racial hostilities has mellowed. The authors believe that the new group loyalties of Republicans and Democrats are only weakly ideological, and are based rather on emotional allegiances of a tribal nature.Today’s partisans do not simply dislike their opponents: they loathe them, and assign character flaws to their rivals. This helps explain why Trump was able to usurp the Republican party and its followers, while to all intents and purposes jettisoning a whole slew of traditional Republican policieslike a new football manager who changes a team’s style of playwithout losing the allegiance of its hardcore fans. We might be tempted to blame social media for this state of affairs, but Facebook and Twitter have an “ironclad alibi”. The beginnings of the Great Divergence predate the internet by decades.A Biden presidency brings into focus the difficult job of healing and reconciliation. But here Putnam and Garrett run into trouble, for it is impossible to identify a single decisive factor that caused the downswing. Rather the authors identify a range of “entwined” trends “braided together by reciprocal causality”. Just as diagnosis of ultimate causes is treacherous, so too is finding a compelling plan for throwing the Great Downswing into reverse. The authors look for the green shoots of a new Progressive movement in various forms of grassroots activism, but are worried that they have yet to see this take a “truly nonpartisan” form. They try to be upbeat, but the dominant note is wistful.Yet even on their terms the election does present limited grounds for optimism. The energetic campaigning efforts of the Lincoln Project and other Biden-endorsing Republicans shows that the party – though long since abandoned by its liberal progressives – still contains several mansions. Consider the crossover potential of libertarians, Republican-inclined, who offer an unpredictable smorgasbord of options for jaded partisan palates: laissez-faire on morals as well as markets. In tight races in Arizona, Wisconsin and Georgia, Jo Jorgensen, the third-party Libertarian candidate, drew small but significant numbers of disaffected Republicans away from Trump.And what are we to make of the quiet Trump phenomenon, the huge numbers of voters who unostentatiously turned to him, largely, it seems, because of the economy? That electorate – however narrowly self-interested – is at least amenable to reason. Despite all the worrying auguries, the election was not a straightforward scrap between whites and minorities. Trump lost white males to Biden, but gained surprising proportions of Latinx and African-American voters, and won niche groups such as older Vietnamese-Americans. Today’s tribes have not, alas, dissolved, but tomorrow’s seem likely on both sides to be rainbow coalitions.• The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again is published by Swift (£25). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. More

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      Traitor review: American perfidy, from Benedict Arnold to Donald J Trump

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      One of the most important qualities a good reporter can have is a very low threshold for outrage. Useful, critical coverage of your subject becomes impossible once nonchalance or indifference has inured you to scandal.This has become a huge problem during Donald Trump’s presidency. Inside the souls of far too many Washington reporters, a never-ending wave of scandals, crimes, indictments and assorted obstructions of justice has washed away this essential capacity for indignation – just when the republic needs it most.That’s why a book like David Rothkopf’s Traitor still serves a vital purpose, even after dozens of other books and thousands of articles about the president’s felonious behavior. A former senior official in the Clinton administration and editor of Foreign Policy who has taught at Columbia and Georgetown, Rothkopf still has all of the anger a good chronicler of the Trump administration requires.“Trump is despicable,” he writes. “But beyond his defective or perhaps even non-existent character, there are the near-term and lasting consequences of his actions. We must understand these to reverse them, and we must understand how easily Russia achieved its objectives in order to prevent such catastrophes in the future.”Our president is the literal Manchurian Candidate, without the denouement which made the movie feel more like a cautionRussia’s success in putting Trump in office, he writes, “has to be seen as perhaps the most successful international intelligence operation of modern times”. Rothkopf is implying that our president is the literal Manchurian Candidate, without the denouement which made the movie feel more like a caution than a foreshadowing.Drawing on the Mueller report, assorted congressional investigations and the work of the capital’s still-functioning reporters, Rothkopf provides an important roadmap through the massive evidence of collaboration between the Trump campaign and the Russian secret services – including 272 contacts between “Trump team members and Russian-linked individuals, in almost 40 meetings”, noting that “at least 33 high-ranking campaign officials, and Trump advisers” were aware of these contacts, including, of course, Trump himself.In between detailing Trump’s transgressions at the beginning and the end of this compact volume, Rothkopf provides a brisk history of many other Americans rightly or wrongly accused of treason, from Benedict Arnold and Aaron Burr to Robert E Lee and Alger Hiss. He drops in plenty of of interesting historical tidbits, like the fact Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis were born a hundred miles and less than a year apart.He’s particularly good on John Brown, the violent abolitionist who was convicted of treason against the state of Virginia. Victor Hugo called him a hero and predicted that if he wasn’t pardoned, it would “certainly shake the whole American democracy”. But instead of a pardon, there was a prompt hanging – witnessed by both Walt Whitman and John Wilkes Booth. And of course Brown’s death also inspired the writing of what eventually became The Battle Hymn of the Republic. When it was first sung by Union soldiers during the civil war, the essential lines were “John Brown’s body lies a mouldering in the grave, His Soul’s marching on!”Back on the main subject, of our modern traitor, Rothkopf is appropriately harsh about the shortcomings of Robert Mueller, including his failure as special counsel to secure an in-person interview with the president and his refusal to indict the president for any of the crimes his report describes, including as many as 10 counts of obstruction of justice.Mueller was relying on a famous justice department memo of 2000 which rules out the indictment of sitting presidents, but which has never been litigated in federal court.“There is no question in my mind that the memo is wrong,” writes Rothkopf, whose view is shared by the Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe. “But what is salient here is that by embracing its views, Mueller was relieved of the obligation to do what prosecutors do, and that is to make a charging decision.” More

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      Stephen Cohen obituary

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      The scholar of Russian history and politics Stephen Cohen, who has died aged 81 of lung cancer, challenged the orthodox western analysis of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet affairs. In his magisterial book Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives (2009), he demolished the claim that Leninism led inevitably to totalitarian dictatorship under Stalin and that the Soviet system of one-party rule and state ownership of property could never be reformed.He cited three periods when developments could have gone differently from what actually happened: in the late 1920s, when debates within the Politburo came to a head over the New Economic Policy (NEP), which allowed for private enterprise and ownership of land and property; in the early 60s, when Nikita Khrushchev launched key political reforms; and in 1990 and 1991, after Mikhail Gorbachev introduced a mixed economy and social democratic solutions based on political pluralism in place of the Communist party’s monopoly of power.With his sense of humour, gravelly voice and iconoclastic arguments, Cohen entranced generations of students from his academic perch at Princeton University for the three decades from 1968, in which he rose to be professor of politics and Russian studies, and then at New York University (1998-2011).He wrote a column in the Nation, under the byline Sovieticus from 1982 to 1987 and in recent years hosted a weekly radio broadcast on Russian-American relations, which he feared were leading to a new cold war. He blamed Bill Clinton and policymakers in Washington for failing to include Russia in a new European order after the Soviet Union came to an end and for expanding Nato eastwards in a spirit of “we won” triumphalism. George W Bush and Barack Obama compounded the failure by siting US anti-ballistic missile systems on Russia’s borders.During the Soviet period Cohen was unusual among western specialists on Russia in having friends among dissidents as well as reformist intellectuals in the Moscow thinktanks. His book The Victims Return was based on interviews with dozens of survivors of Stalin’s labour camps about their problems in returning to freedom.Amid the new freedoms permitt- ed by Gorbachev after 1985, Cohen and his wife, Katrina vanden Heuvel, the publisher and editor of the Nation, made frequent long trips to Moscow and got to know the new Soviet leader personally. At one of the last May Day celebrations in Red Square, Gorbachev invited them both to stand beside the Lenin mausoleum to watch the parade. More

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      How the South Won the Civil War review: the path from Jim Crow to Donald Trump

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      Heather Cox Richardson’s How the South Won the Civil War is not principally about that war. Instead, it is a broad sweep of American history on the theme of the struggle between democracy and oligarchy – between the vision that “all men are created equal” and the frequency with which power has accumulated in the hands of a few, who have then sought to thwart equality.What she terms the “paradox” of the founding – that “the principle of equality depended on inequality”, that democracy relied on the subjugation of others so that those who were considered “equal”, principally white men, could rule, led to this continuing struggle. She draws a line, more or less straight, between “the oligarchic principles of the Confederacy” based on the cotton economy and racial inequality, western oligarchs in agribusiness and mining, and “movement conservatives in the Republican party”.More specifically, she writes that the west was “based on hierarchies”. California was a free state but with racial inequality in its constitution. Racism was rife in the west, from lynchings of Mexicans and “Juan Crow” to killings of Native Americans and migrants who built the transcontinental railroad but were the target of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.There, aided by migration of white southerners, “Confederate ideology took on a new life, and from there over the course of the next 150 years, it came to dominate America.” This ranged from western Republicans working with southern Democrats on issues like agriculture, in opposition to eastern interests, to shared feelings on race.Does American democracy somehow require the subjugation and subordination of others?Once Reconstruction ended, and with it black voting in the south, Republicans looked west. Anti-lynching and voting rights legislation lost because of the votes of westerners, and new states aligned for decades more “with the hierarchical structure of the south than with the democratic principles of the civil war Republicans”, thanks to their reliance on extractive industries and agribusiness.For Richardson, Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act in 1964 was thus not an electoral strategy but a culmination of a century of history between the south and west, designed to preserve oligarchic government in “a world defined by hierarchies”. Richardson sees Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the reaction against it as “almost an exact replay of Reconstruction”. What she terms the “movement conservative” reaction promoted ideals of individualism – but cemented the power of oligarchies once again.But isn’t America the home of individualism? Richardson agrees, to a point. The images of the yeoman farmer before the civil war and the cowboy afterwards were defining tropes but ultimately only that, as oligarchies sought to maintain power. Indeed, she believes, during Reconstruction, “to oppose Republican policies, Democrats mythologized the cowboy, self-reliant and tough, making his way in the world on his own”, notably ignoring the brutal work required and the fact that about a third of cowboys were people of color.These tropes mattered: “Just as the image of the rising yeoman farmer had helped pave the way for the rise of wealthy southern planters, so the image of the independent rising westerner helped pave the way for the rise of industrialists.” And for Jim and Juan Crow and discrimination against other races and women, which put inequality firmly in American law once again.The flame was never fully extinguished, despite the burdens of inequality on so manyYet ironically, as in the movies, the archetype came to the rescue: “Inequality did not spell the triumph of oligarchy, though, for the simple reason that the emergence of the western individualist as a national archetype re-engaged the paradox at the core of America’s foundation.” In the Depression, “when for many the walls seemed to be closing in, John Wayne’s cowboy turned the American paradox into the American dream.” (Wayne’s Ringo Kid in Stagecoach marked the emergence of the western antihero as hero.)Indeed, the flame was never fully extinguished despite the burdens of inequality on so many. In Reconstruction, the Radical Republicans fought for equality for black people. The “liberal consensus” during and after the second world war promoted democracy and tolerance. Superman fought racial discrimination.In all it is a fascinating thesis, and Richardson marshals strong support for it in noting everything from personal connections to voting patterns in Congress over decades. She errs slightly at times. John Kennedy, not Ronald Reagan, first said “a rising tide lifts all boats” (it apparently derives from a marketing slogan for New England); she is too harsh on Theodore Roosevelt’s reforms; and William Jennings Bryan – a western populist Democrat who railed against oligarchy even as he did not support racial equality – belongs in the story. More

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      A disputed election, a constitutional crisis, polarisation … welcome to 1876

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      As Donald Trump warns inaccurately of voter fraud and polls show the unpopular president staying within touching distance of Democrat Joe Biden, the prospect of an unresolved US election draws horribly near, especially as the impact of the coronavirus is widely seen as likely to delay a result by days, if not weeks.Across the political spectrum, pundits are predicting what may happen should Trump refuse to surrender power. The speculation is tantalising but the short answer is that nobody has a clue.History does provide some sort of guide. There have been inconclusive US elections before. They were resolved, but not by any constitutional mechanism and the consequences of such brutal political contests have been severe indeed.In 2000, the supreme court decided a disputed Florida result and put a Republican, George W Bush, in the White House instead of the Democrat Al Gore. Though of course the justices could not know it, they had put America on the road to war in Iraq, economic crisis, the rise of the evangelical right and a deepening political divide.That case is well within living memory. But an election much further back produced even more damaging results.The campaign of 1876 ended with the electoral college in the balance as three states were disputed. Out of deadlock, eventually, came a political deal, giving the Republican Rutherford Hayes the presidency at the expense of Samuel Tilden, who like Gore, and indeed Hillary Clinton in 2016, won the popular vote.Tilden’s compensation was that his party, the Democrats, were allowed to put an end to Reconstruction, the process by which the victors in the civil war abolished slavery and sought to ensure the rights of black Americans, via the 13th, 14th and 15th constitutional amendments.The awful result was Jim Crow, the system of white supremacy and segregation which lasted well into the 20th century and whose legacy remains crushingly strong in a country now gripped by protests against police brutality and for systemic reform.Eric Foner, now retired from Columbia University, is America’s pre-eminent historian of the civil war, slavery and Reconstruction, a prize-winner many times over. He told the Guardian the US of 2020 is not prepared for what may be around the corner.“In 1877 there were three states, Florida, South Carolina, Louisiana, where two different sets of returns were sent up, one by the Democrats, one by the Republicans, each claiming to have carried the state.“There was no established mechanism and in fact, in the end, we went around the constitution, or beyond the constitution, or ignored the constitution. It was settled by an extralegal body called the Electoral Commission, which was established by Congress to decide who won.” More