Blog

The philosopher Hegel once described observing Napoleon riding out from the town of Jena after battling the Prussian army. On horseback, Napoleon, “this world-soul,” in Hegel’s words, was a “wonderful sensation to see.” The conquering French statesman seemed to embody history itself, an overwhelming force “concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse,” who, Hegel wrote, “reaches out over the world and masters it.”

When Trump strode out onto the stage in the Rose Garden—soon reportedly to be paved over, like in a Joni Mitchell song— to announce his “Liberation Day” tariffs on April 2nd, he, too, seemed to embody the zeitgeist of an age: resentful, nationalistic, ludicrous, willing to apply punitive measures against everything from penguin-inhabited islands to the world’s second-biggest economy. This was indeed a (perverse) “world-soul” appearing before a stunned global audience. Concentrated in a single point, the empirical person of Donald J. Trump wielded a terrifying, Napoleonic power, channeled through what may have been an LLM-generated, but at any rate deeply irrational, formula, aimed at taking a wrecking ball to the world economy.

Arlie Russell Hochschild (2024). Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right. The New Press.

Why do people continue to vote for Trump?

Arlie Hochschild is an eminent Berkeley sociologist with half a century’s worth of experience, having invented key concepts like “emotional labor” in a 1983 study of service work, The Managed Heart, and the notion of a “second shift”—the domestic labor that is (still) disproportionately performed by women. More recently, Hochschild has published a 2016 study of the Tea Party movement, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, based on observations and interviews in Louisiana.

The promise of Artificial (General) Intelligence is the greatest hype bubble this side of the new millennium.

Huge checks are being cashed on the promise of AI’s profitability. The chip manufacturer Nvidia currently has a market cap of 3 trillion dollars, making it the second-most valuable company in the world. Its bloated valuation stems in large part from the ongoing AI revolution, which has sent demand for graphics-processing chips like those made by Nvidia soaring. Meanwhile, OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, was valued at an astonishing $340 billion in early 2025. And there’s little sign that investments in the technology are letting up. Four tech titans—Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft—plan on pouring more than $300 billion into AI in 2025 alone. Clearly, there’s lots of loose capital floating around for those willing and able to get aboard the AI hype train.

In mid-March, Trump surprised his political opponents by rejecting a series of last-minute presidential pardons signed by his predecessor Joe Biden, including those, in Trump’s menacing language, offered to “the Unselect Committee of Political Thugs, and many others.”

Posting on Truth Social, Trump declared that Biden’s pardons were “VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OF EFFECT.” As his presidency drew to a close, Biden offered a series of pardons, starting on December 1st with his son, Hunter Biden, and ending in a last-minute series of clemencies on January 19th, including Anthony Fauci, General Mark Miller, members of Congress serving on the Select Committee investigating the January 6 Attack, as well as members of Biden’s immediate family.

Yanis Varoufakis (2023), Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Vintage.

Eva Dou (2025), House of Huawei: Inside the Secret World of China’s Most Powerful Company. Portfolio.

Yanis Varoufakis’s much-touted Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism is essentially built atop hyperbole: Varoufakis subscribes to the peculiar thesis that “capitalism is now dead.” By this he means that “its dynamics no longer govern our economies”—and while that takes some unpacking, in essence Varoufakis appears to believe that capitalism has now been “replaced by something fundamentally different”: the titular technofeudalism.

One frequently invoked explanation among progressives for the resurgence of far-right politics in recent times is inflation: Prices rise, food and energy costs go up, mortgages become more expensive, wages don’t keep up, and, so the story goes, as a consequence, working- and middle-class voters begin casting about for a scapegoat to blame for their economic woes. In short, economic pain pushes ordinary people into the arms of the radical right.

Trump’s chosen ideology is what we might termfluid fascism, a remarkably flexible and adaptive ideological approach that cuts across the political spectrum and familiar divides, allowing the two-term president to engage inpolicy liquefaction: oozing from right to left and back again, fluid fascism...

We’re in the fourth week of the second Trump administration, and as many commentators have noted there is simply so much going on in U.S. politics—and therefore global politics: What happens on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in large measure shapes the world.

Is fascism today essentially internationalist—or is it made up of a series of discrete, nationally bounded projects?

Looking around the world today, it’s hard to escape the sense that fascism has become an internationalist project and one that transcends familiar geopolitical blocs and transnational coalitions: The new Fascist International cuts across NATO and BRICS, the West and the Global South, drawing in actors from all major geopolitical camps to form a multinational coalition of far-right, hardline nationalist, fascist-adjacent and outright fascist political actors.

There’s an old adage attributed to Napoleon: “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”

Trump’s first week back in the White House saw him assert his newly reclaimed authority: The 47th president fired off dozens of executive orders, appeared before a variously starstruck, cowering Davos audience, confidently mapped out his administration’s focus on Fox News’s Hannity, and, after threatening a full-blown trade war, reportedly forced Colombia, the U.S.’s premier ally in South America, to accept planeloads of deported migrants.