TODAY’S READING

These are the books I downloaded In the last couple of days – with some explanatory notes - 

Educating the Germans – people and policy in the british zone of Germany 1945-49 

David Phillips (2018). I have a certain fixation about Germany. This is a book about
 the difficulty of making sense of the immediate post-war years in the country
Personal Impressions Isaiah Berlin (2014) Berlin was one of England’s most prolific writers 

and this is a great analysis of some of the key intellectuals of the 20th Century
Our Age – English intellectuals between the Wars – a group portrait Noel Annan (1990) 

Annan was an academic who knew everybody worth knowing 
History in our Time David Cannadine (1991) essays from an English historian
Dashing for the Post – the letters of Leigh-Fermor ed Adam Sisman (2016). Leigh-Fermor 

was you might call an “intrepid traveller” famous for walking through Germany, Austria, 

Romania and Bulgaria in the the 1930s  
Patrick Leigh-Fermor – Encounters between Budapest and Transylvania Michael O’Sullivan 

(2019). New insights on his his classic trilogy 
Joan - the remarkable Life of Joan Leigh-Fermor Simon Fenwick (2025) A debutante 

hardly worth bothering about 

5 Feb

The Death of  Men Allan Massie (1981) Massie (who died this week) was one of my favourite writers
Political English – language and the decay of politics Thomas Docherty (2019) An interesting take
tCulture, Community and Development ed Phillips et al (2020)
The Good Society Alan Draper (2013)
Get Carter a film with Michael Caine which is a classic gangster film
Capitalism – the future of an illusion Fred Block (2018) One of the best
The Progress Illusion – reclaiming our future from the fairlytale of economics 

Jon Erickson (2022) I’m always a sucker for critiques of economics
The Racial basis of Trump Support – important article
Identity Crisis – the 2016 presidential campaign and the battle for the meaning of 

America Michael Tesler (2018) 

The election was also symptomatic of a broader American identity crisis. Issues like immigration, racial discrimination, and the integration of Muslims boil down to competing visions of American identity and inclusiveness. To have politics oriented around this debate—as opposed to more prosaic issues like, say, entitlement reform—makes politics “feel” angrier, precisely because debates about ethnic, racial, and national identities engender strong emotions. It is possible to have a technocratic discussion about how to calculate cost-of-living increases in Social Security payments. It is harder to have such a discussion about whether undocumented immigrants deserve a chance for permanent residency or even citizenship. It is even harder when group loyalties and attitudes are aligned with partisanship, and harder still when presidential candidates are stoking the divisions. Elections will then polarize people not only in terms of party—which is virtually inevitable—but also in terms of other group identities. The upshot is a more divisive and explosive politics.

Authoritarian Nightmare – Trump and his followers J Dean and R Altemeyer (2020) Perhaps the definitive explanation

If you Google “books about Trump,” the answer seems obvious: “You’ve got to be kidding!” But while there are many books about the man and his presidency, favorable and not so favorable, we could find no book that explains why he acts the way he does. Nor are there any books that explain his base, the source of his power. In fact, many observers have thrown up their hands in despair at Trump’s very steadfast supporters. They seem beyond the pale, beyond understanding. Well, give us a chance, for we believe we have solid science-based answers.First things first. Many people have opined there is something seriously wrong, psychologically, with Donald Trump. If you proudly wear a Make America Great Again hat, you may be offended by the suggestion. For you, as for him, Trump should be immortalized on his own Mount Rushmore, maybe renamed Mount Trump, as America’s greatest president. But if you have passed on a twenty-five-dollar official MAGA hat while observing Donald Trump for any time at all, you may believe the man is deeply troubled mentally. Psychiatrists and clinical psychologists have been riveted by his behavior from the outset of his presidential bid. They wondered during the campaign, “Is this an act just to get elected?” But by the time he moved into the White House, many concluded Trump was not “crazy like a fox” but “crazy like a crazy.” This point was made by one of the mental health professionals who wrote the bestselling book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump”, edited by Dr. Bandy Lee of the Yale School of Medicine.

The conclusions of these analysts and therapists varied quite a bit, understandably, since clinical diagnosis remains something of an art. But more than anything, these psychiatrists and psychologists believed that Trump displayed extreme narcissism with more than a touch of psychopathy. He is, as one therapist put it, in a phrase reflecting years of professional training, “a dog with both ticks and fleas.” These professionals have company. Many sophisticated Washington pundits and presidential observers have deep concerns about Trump.

Republican leaders and other influential conservatives who hoped he would grow into the job have often been disappointed. Trump’s interactions with his cabinet and senior advisors led some of them to expose the man, warts, more warts, and even more warts, to journalists such as Bob Woodward, who compiled them in his bestseller, “Fear: Trump in the White House”. One senior official, “Anonymous,” reported strikingly similar information in an op-ed in the New York Times on September 5, 2018, and later, a book, revealing that a group of alarmed officials had quietly banded together to keep some of Trump’s decisions from being enacted. Other aides, competing with one another for the president’s favor, leaked damaging information about their opponents in Trump’s inner circle, which implicitly diss Trump for hiring their opponents. The Trump White House “leaks” more than Nixon’s did when he formed the infamous “Plumbers” unit to shut off the flow. It appears everybody is trying to get even. John Bolton’s book “The Room Where It Happened” revealed just how dysfunctional the White House had become by 2018 and what a terrible manager and decision maker Trump was. During the first five months of the 2016 GOP primaries, the New York Times was so struck by Trump’s demagogic rhetoric they gathered and analyzed “every public utterance” by him, some 95,000 words. They retained historians, psychologists, and political scientists to review the material, and the experts concluded it echoed “some of the [worst] demagogues of the past century.” Trump was campaigning in the traditions of segregationist George Wallace and anticommunist red-baiter Joseph McCarthy, “vilifying groups” and “stoking insecurities of his audiences,” except the Times noted, by contrast, Trump was a more “energetic and charismatic speaker who can be entertaining and ingratiating,” thus more engaging than his predecessors, which the Times found made his demagoguery “more palatable when it is leavened with a smile and joke.” Nonetheless, in words and action, Trump was and is a demagogue, pure and simple, albeit ranked stylistically slightly better by one leading American news organization than his predecessors, like Joe McCarthy and George Wallace (p27). In 1950, they published “The Authoritarian Personality”, nearly one thousand pages filled with psychoanalytic theory and preliminary explorations in the fields of personality and social psychology. A fourth  contributor, Theodor Adorno, was added to the project by its sponsor after the work was nearly finished. Other American researchers at the time believed that what happened in Germany in the 1930s “could happen here” as well. The experience of McCarthyism soon after The Authoritarian Personality was published convinced many social scientists that a large segment of the American public could be stampeded into surrendering the democratic rights the country had just fought to preserve in the war against fascism (p28). Authoritarianism is studied by psychologists, political scientists, and sociologists, with each discipline developing its own focus and definitions while using its preferred methods. We have focused on the psychological research in this field. No one in the media apparently knows about this body of evidence but we do not think it is a secret. Our narrative is largely based on the findings of one academic investigator, who happens to be the person Dean asked to cowrite this book. If that was a mistake, blame him. He, however, believes he has chosen wisely because the data, set forth in the pages that follow, speaks for itself and should not be ignored as America faces the crisis we believe lies immediately ahead.

• “There really is no such thing as ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’ It all boils down to what you can get away with.”

• “One of the most useful skills a person should develop is how to look someone straight in the eye and lie convincingly.”

• “The best skill you can have is knowing the ‘right move at the right time’: when to ‘soft-sell’ someone, when to be tough, when to flatter, when to threaten, when to bribe, etc.”

• “There’s a sucker born every minute, and smart people learn how to take advantage of them.”

• “It is more important to create a good image of yourself in the minds of others than to actually be the person others think you are.”

• “One of the best ways to handle people is to tell them what they want to hear.”

4 February