This popped up on Facebook, but I don’t subscribe to the magazine and can only see this much of the article. It’s about the new book by Johan Norberg, which came out in September. It’s on my TBR shelf.
The Economist, 1 May 2025: How golden ages really start—and end, subtitled “The greatest civilisations of the past 3,000 years were the opposite of MAGA”
The way to start a “golden age” is to erect big, beautiful barriers to keep out foreign goods and people. That, at least, is the view of the most powerful man on the planet. Johan Norberg, a Swedish historian, makes the opposite case. In “Peak Human”, Mr Norberg charts the rise and fall of golden ages around the world over the past three millennia, ranging from Athens to the Anglosphere via the Abbasid caliphate. He finds that the polities that outshone their peers did so because they were more open: to trade, to strangers and to ideas that discomfited the mighty. When they closed up again, they lost their shine.
Just in case anyone still has delusions of grandeur concerning MAGA, or Trump.
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Whereas the US has become an outlaw nation.
The Bulwark, Mona Charen, 6 Jan 2026: We’re the Bad Guys Now, subtitled “America has become the kind of country it used to oppose.”
THE EDITORIAL BOARD OF THE Wall Street Journal has delivered its share of idiocies over the past few years, but its response to the capture of Nicolás Maduro has set a new standard. Calling the military intervention “justified” because Venezuela had allied with “Russia, China, Cuba, and Iran,” the board then declared triumphantly that “Mr. Trump is pursuing the Bush freedom agenda, at least in the Western Hemisphere. Are we all neocons now?”
Also living in a dream world is Sen. John Fetterman, who told Fox News that “We all wanted this man gone, and now he is gone. I think we should really appreciate exactly what happened here.” Fetterman then offered a benediction, saying that he just wanted to “remind everybody that America is a force of good order and democracy, and we are promoting these kinds of values. We are the good guys.”
That’s delusional, and I say that as someone who believed in humanitarian interventions abroad, who supported the Gulf War, the Iraq War, the bombing of Serbia, and the invasion of Grenada. American power has been used for bad ends at times (the Mexican War was unadulterated aggression), but it’s hard to think of a country that has more often extended itself for good purposes around the globe. We had losses and failures—South Vietnam, Afghanistan, Libya—but tens of millions of people in places like Taiwan, Germany, South Korea, Kosovo, Kuwait, Bosnia, and, yes, Iraq owe their freedom and prosperity to American arms. Hundreds of millions more live free from oppression only because the United States armed them against aggressors or threatened to use force if they were attacked. Damn right we were the good guys! As Colin Powell put it in 2003: “We have gone forth from our shores repeatedly over the last hundred years . . . and put wonderful young men and women at risk, many of whom have lost their lives, and we have asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in.”
To imagine that Trump is doing anything remotely like those interventions in Venezuela is risible. …
The writer goes on with examples of what Trump’s said in recent days. And:
Trump has hardly bothered to offer a reason for his intervention in Venezuela, and when his team has come up with some, they don’t bear scrutiny. Was it drugs? That seems unlikely since Trump just issued a pardon to Juan Orlando Hernández, former president of Honduras, who was convicted of drug running. Was it communism? Not if Trump is content to leave the regime intact. Was it immigration? Not when the Trump camp is forgoing a clear chance to restore democratic stability in that country, which would reduce emigration.
The sheer pleasure of bullying seems to be the likeliest explanation, but here again, Trumpland is another planet. None of the reasons that Venezuela is truly guilty seem to interest Trump, but he’s obsessed with the fantasy that they somehow emptied their prisons and insane asylums and shipped the inmates to America.
And then concludes:
The United States under Trump is an outlaw nation, threatening excellent neighbors like Canada with economic devastation, blasting people in fast boats to pieces, withdrawing from international agreements, bullying friends and foes alike, and now kidnapping foreign leaders (however evil). We are becoming the kind of nation against which America used to defend others.
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Again reflecting the Economist item above:
The Bulwark, William Kristol, 7 Jan 2026: MAGA’s Lust for Fascism, subtitled “Trump’s ideologues want a smaller, meaner, whiter America.”
Then scroll down to: The Spirit of Fascism
MAGA is a vulgar, cartoonish, cultish, and incoherent movement.
So, a century ago, was fascism.
And as today’s MAGA more openly and explicitly embraces the spirit of yesteryear’s fascism, it’s perhaps worth noting that it is the era of the rise of fascism to which MAGA looks back with nostalgia and yearning.
In her most recent newsletter, the historian Heather Cox Richardson reminds us of this 2009 statement by Peter Thiel, who as much as anyone could be considered the theorist of Trumpism as an intellectual movement.
In which Thiel claimed that freedom and democracy are incompatible. And so on, about Thiel, and Stephen Miller (“MAGA’s chief propagandist”). And concluding:
As the political scientist Nicholas Grossman remarked, “Imagine looking at the period after WWII and especially after the Cold War as an era of American weakness.” But Grossman sees what lies behind Miller’s complaint: “Unless, I suppose, if becoming the strongest, wealthiest country in history sounds bad to you because some brown people were a part of it, and you’d rather be weaker if it means being whiter.”
The more liberal nation and the liberal world order that we were able to construct after World War II made us stronger. Miller and Thiel—and MAGA—reject that.
So MAGA does not want to make America great again. MAGA does not simply want to correct some of the excesses of modern America or the modern world. MAGA embraces what was most illiberal about the old order. The theorists of MAGA look back longingly to, they yearn for, the ideas and policies that produced the worst of the 1930s.
Or to put it simply: It is fascism that they yearn for.
Yes, the brown people part is the key.
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Authoritarians tend to rewrite recent history to their own advantage.
CNN, 6 Jan 2026: White House rewrites January 6 history and blames police for deadly attack on 5-year anniversary
The White House rolled out a new website Tuesday with a full-blown recast of the historical record of January 6, 2021, hailing the pro-Trump mob who stormed the US Capitol five years ago as “peaceful protesters” who were provoked by law enforcement.
The new site baselessly claims the violence on January 6, 2021, was instigated by law enforcement and then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. It recasts the rioters as the victims that day, and depicts President Donald Trump as a hero for granting sweeping pardons for the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the deadly attack.
Nonsense, of course — WE SAW IT ON TV, LIVE. But if you repeat a lie often enough, people begin to believe it. Thus has history been rewritten and rewritten through the ages. What of history can we trust? Maybe not very much, except for the broad outline of specific facts. Yet it doesn’t stop the religious, who believe that their holy books are literally true. OK, sure, God did it.
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Robert Reich looks at the big picture.
Robert Reich, 6 Jan 2026: This is the Real Danger Posed by Trump subtitled “A direct line connects Trump’s attempted coup five years ago with his incursion into Venezuela last weekend — and his current threats to Colombia, Cuba, and Greenland.”
Trump’s domestic and foreign policies — ranging from his attempted coup against the United States five years ago, to his incursion into Venezuela last weekend, to his current threats against Cuba, Colombia, and Greenland — undermine domestic and international law. But that’s not all.
They threaten what we mean by civilization.
The moral purpose of civilized society is to prevent the stronger from attacking and exploiting the weaker. Otherwise, we’d be permanently immersed in a brutish war in which only the fittest and most powerful could survive.
This principle lies at the center of America’s founding documents: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. It’s also the core of the post- World War II international order championed by the United States, including the UN Charter — emphasizing multilateralism, democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.
But it’s a fragile principle, easily violated by those who would exploit their power.
In contrast to Stephen Miller’s view of the world (quoted here): “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
This is the tribalist’s view of the world. The uncivilized, barbaric view of the world. Something the species has been trying to overcome — and has made great progress doing so in the past few centuries — despite the inevitable regressives. They will always be with us; it’s base human nature, absent education.
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Just the headlines, and brief comments.
- Salon, Russell Payne, 7 Jan 2026: “The only thing she practices is grift”: Meet Trump’s nominee for Surgeon General, subtitled “Casey Means’ promotion of supplements and pseudoscience worry medical professionals”
- Why do they so consistently nominate obviously unqualified people? Because they truly don’t know what qualifications mean, I think. They only understand loyalty.
- Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 7 Jan 2026: Sorry, GOP. There’s no Christian revival, subtitled “Republicans are betting the midterms on mass conversions that aren’t happening”
- The thing about religion is, you can be wrong over and over and over again, but it’s fine because you still have ‘faith’.
- StatNews, 6 Jan 2026 (via JMG): FDA announces sweeping changes to oversight of wearables, AI-enabled devices.
- Because, as JMG notes, “Surgeon General Nominee Sells Wearable Devices.” Once again, this is how they work.
- JMG, 7 Jan 2026: TX Professor Told To Cancel Lessons On “Woke” Plato
- What can we conclude? Anything that challenges the white supremacist worldview of MAGA is woke? Including the majority of all education? All the ancient philosophers?
- Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, 6 Jan 2026: Judge says school must shield kindergartner from all things LGBTQ at Christian dad’s demand
- Christians, and conservatives, would prefer that their children never know about people unlike themselves.
- Right Wing Watch, 6 Jan 2026: Father-Son Christian Nationalist Pseudo-Historians David And Tim Barton Are Shaping The Trump Administration’s War On The Smithsonian
- I use this term very rarely, but I think these people are evil. They are illegitimately imposing their evidence-free worldview on others. They want to exterminate genuine inquiry and conclusions from evidence about the real world. Theirs is a form of religious cleansing, like ethnic cleansing.
