Coastal intellectuals read American politics through Weimar, Gilded Age, and fascism analogies

Evidence

Predictably, this situation has initiated a frantic round of historical analogizing by the coastal intelligentsia. To analysts, the United States is experiencing its own Weimar moment, a return to the Gilded Age, teleporting back to the early Nixon era, or reliving the Old World’s Wars of Religion. Some dominant hermeneutic strands can be sifted here. Since Trump’s éclat in 2016, a host of historians and sub-intellectuals have prophesied the country’s tendential slide into fascism. Stories about terrorized Ohio residents, increased paramilitary activity and exterminationist rhetoric usually make up the argument in question, with the Proud Boys as a return of Freikorps militancy and a party cadre dedicated to Project 2025. Trumpism here presents a contemporary iteration of a far-right threat indigenous to the previous century. — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 17

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Surveillance capitalists parallel Gilded Age industrialists in exploiting law to escape constraints — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 341; The second Gilded Age analogy fails because the movements differ structurally — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization…, 19; Surveillance capitalism’s lawlessness echoes the Gilded Age robber barons — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 339
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Surveillance capitalists parallel Gilded Age industrialists in exploiting law to escape constraints — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 341; The second Gilded Age analogy fails because the movements differ structurally — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization…, 19; Surveillance capitalism’s lawlessness echoes the Gilded Age robber barons — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 339

Broader Connections

• The second Gilded Age analogy fails because the movements differ structurally #complicates (0.78) — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 19