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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.

“BLANCHE: What you are talking about is brutal desire—just—Desire!—the name of that rattle-trap street-car that bangs through the Quarter, up one old narrow street and down another…”

— Arthur Miller, A Streetcar Named Desire

One of the strangest episodes in the still-unfolding Trump saga is the 42nd/44th president’s growing interest in Greenland, a territory controlled by Denmark, which Trump has said he wants to incorporate into the United States.

Trump has had his sights on Greenland since at least 2019. He first floated the idea of “buying” the autonomous Danish territory five years ago, which the president, in typical property-developer fashion, described as “essentially a real estate deal”:

Céleste Albaret (2003). Monsieur Proust. New York Review of Books. (Foreword by André Aciman, translated from the French by Barbara Bray.)

Monsieur Proust is a remarkable socio-historical and literary document, offering a remarkably unvarnished account of a great literary personality’s everyday life. Anyone who cares about Marcel Proust’s writings should read Céleste Albaret’s gripping account of her years as his housekeeper. The book captures Proust’s peculiar, if not outright bizarre, life in Paris around the time of the Great War—which was also, of course, a time of frenzied creative activity, resulting in his monumental work, À la recherche du temps perdu.

Leigh Phillips and Michael Rozworski (2019). The People’s Republic of Walmart: How the World’s Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundation for Socialism. Verso Books.

What makes this cleverly titled book worth returning to five years after its publication? The authors, Leigh Phillips and Michael Rozworski, develop a deceptively simple argument: Pay closer attention to what major corporations like Walmart do, and less to what free-market ideologues say, and you’ll find that most capitalist enterprises operate more like carefully planned command economies than idealized market actors. Centralized planning, far from being relegated to the scrapheap of twentieth-century history, is alive and well at the heart of American capitalism: It lies at the core of what companies like Amazon and Walmart do every day.

Reagan (2024). Directed by: Sean McNamara. Starring: Dennis Quaid, Penelope Ann Miller, Jon Voight. (IMDb)

I must confess that Ronald Reagan’s appeal has always mystified me somewhat. Reagan (2024) the movie goes some way toward filling in the blanks, and anyone interested in thinking critically about U.S. politics would benefit from watching it. Despite being widely panned by critics—it currently holds a putrescent eighteen-percent score on Rotten Tomatoes—the film helps account for the long-standing appeal of conservatism in American society. Perhaps in spite of itself, it also demonstrates just how far conservatism has fallen, to such a degree that Trump’s MAGA movement now bears little resemblance to its ideological forbears.

Zoë Schiffer (2024). Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk’s Twitter. Portfolio. 330 pp.

We all live in Elon Musk’s world now—and as Zoë Schiffer shows in this meticulously researched book on Musk’s 2022 Twitter takeover, it is a bizarre, dysfunctional, and despotic world.

After reading Extremely Hardcore (Musk’s phrase describing the work culture he expected at Twitter), it is extremely difficult to maintain the illusion that Musk is some kind of business genius: Musk spent $44 billion to acquire a company worth only around $25 billion, effectively overpaying $19 billion, or the gross domestic product of a small country. Moreover, Musk has failed to turn Twitter/X into a profitable venture despite a ruthless slash-and-downsize program of corporate austerity. How, then, to make sense of the contrast between the outward myth of genius and the interior corporate dysfunction? Schiffer’s eminently readable blow-by-blow account of Musk’s Twitter acquisition raises the question: Is the world’s richest man still a rational decision-maker?

Today is Election Day in the United States, a defining moment not just for the U.S. but for the world as a whole.

In these final moments, how should we think about Donald Trump’s candidacy? I recently listened to Joe Rogan’s 3-hour interview with Trump (so that you don’t have to), and Rogan is right to point out that Trump has “comedic instincts,” engages in a form of “stand-up,” and often performs with “great timing.” Trump’s flair for self-deprecation no doubt helps explain his political success. He is, at heart, a performer. By comparison, centrist Democrats often feel wooden—the gap between Biden and Trump is the distance between modernist self-seriousness and postmodern playfulness. But with her charisma, Harris has been far more successful at circumventing this obstacle than her predecessors.

The Apprentice (2024). Director: Ali Abbasi. Writer: Gabriel Sherman. Starring: Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, Maria Bakalova. (IMdb)

Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice (2024)—the title playfully plagiarizes the 15-season reality show that made Donald Trump a household name—could hardly be more timely, purporting to tell the story of Trump’s rise from relative obscurity in 1970s Queens, New York to Manhattan moguldom by the mid-1980s.

The Apprentice does so effectively, even if it veers dangerously into aestheticism, devolving at times into an almost celebratory visual spectacle more than a critical biographical film. With all the familiar tropes of the 1980s aesthetic paraded before the audience—the big hair, VHS scan lines, disco needle-drops, cocaine-fueled parties, and the ruthlessly individualistic pursuit of profit and pleasure—The Apprentice largely forgoes deeper analysis of one of the most powerful and dangerous people in recent history, shifting blame instead onto the shadowy master-figure of Roy Cohn.

Civil War (2024). Director/Writer: Alex Garland. Starring: Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny. A24 Films. (Rotten Tomatoes) (IMDb)

Despite occasional glimmers of hope, Civil War (2024) is a terribly depressing movie; but worse still, it is largely an empty movie.

Missing are two crucial elements, which could have compensated for the film’s overall bleakness: situating the U.S. as portrayed in the film within a global system, forcing a reckoning with the possible role played by the American empire in its internal disorders; and a tangible analysis of the domestic political situation leading to the film’s central conflict. Strangely, for a movie about civil war, Civil War is remarkably uninterested in how the war came about, and it shows zero interest in what the rest of the world is doing about it.