Tooze indeed went off the rails. He strained much too hard to see a forest where there are only some scattered trees. Trump has not even remotely articulated a call for collective, community sacrifice in favor of a better future. Trump's time horizon rarely extends one week.
And he is quite typically not willing to sacrifice anything that would keep him from his regular Sunday afternoon golf game.
Notably, after his little sit down with Zelensky at the Vatican during the Francis funeral ceremonies, the Ukrainians asked for a further session after the funeral. Trump told them he didn't have time - he had to get back to Bedminster, NJ - his golf course!
Trump asking for a turn away from consumerism? This is a guy with one of the most conspicuous consumption outlooks in recent memory. If it can be gilded, he wants it gilded.
(I don't know why he doesn't have a super yacht - perhaps it is his shark phobia.)
I agree with you. You've probably already seen Paul Musgrave's article on Substack "Partial-Equilibrium Trump Fallacies" that describes the process of smart people trying to back-calculate a coherent policy agenda from Trump's actions.
When I was in college, I asked a classmate what his Ph.D. dissertation was about. He started describing it, illustrating with a very complex diagram on a pad of paper. I couldn't follow this at all, so I picked a random part of the diagram and asked what it was. He responded by tearing the sheet off the pad, crumpling it up, and changing the subject. This was his MO. He'd say a bunch of smart-sounding but ultimately meaningless things and people would feel intimidated. (Coda to the story: a) he never finished the Ph.D; b) he founded a company that made him fabulously rich; and therefore c) I'm clearly the fool in this story.)
Tooze is similar. If we let D = the intellectual distance of a topic from the political economy of the Third Reich, then the insights of a Tooze article are proportional to 1/(D^2). You can't be a public intellectual talking about WW II all the time, so Tooze has expanded his reach using a similar process as my extremely wealthy classmate.
I was taken in by Tooze, too. After reading too many weird pieces like the one you've described (or the ones where he liberally quotes someone else interesting, including extensive copy/paste of their illustrations), I should cancel my paid subscription to his Substack and pledge it to yours instead.
Tooze indeed went off the rails. He strained much too hard to see a forest where there are only some scattered trees. Trump has not even remotely articulated a call for collective, community sacrifice in favor of a better future. Trump's time horizon rarely extends one week.
And he is quite typically not willing to sacrifice anything that would keep him from his regular Sunday afternoon golf game.
Notably, after his little sit down with Zelensky at the Vatican during the Francis funeral ceremonies, the Ukrainians asked for a further session after the funeral. Trump told them he didn't have time - he had to get back to Bedminster, NJ - his golf course!
Trump asking for a turn away from consumerism? This is a guy with one of the most conspicuous consumption outlooks in recent memory. If it can be gilded, he wants it gilded.
(I don't know why he doesn't have a super yacht - perhaps it is his shark phobia.)
He had one. Lost it in one of those bankruptcies he claims never to have had. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/andrewkaczynski/set-an-open-course-for-the-virgin-sea
I agree with you. You've probably already seen Paul Musgrave's article on Substack "Partial-Equilibrium Trump Fallacies" that describes the process of smart people trying to back-calculate a coherent policy agenda from Trump's actions.
When I was in college, I asked a classmate what his Ph.D. dissertation was about. He started describing it, illustrating with a very complex diagram on a pad of paper. I couldn't follow this at all, so I picked a random part of the diagram and asked what it was. He responded by tearing the sheet off the pad, crumpling it up, and changing the subject. This was his MO. He'd say a bunch of smart-sounding but ultimately meaningless things and people would feel intimidated. (Coda to the story: a) he never finished the Ph.D; b) he founded a company that made him fabulously rich; and therefore c) I'm clearly the fool in this story.)
Tooze is similar. If we let D = the intellectual distance of a topic from the political economy of the Third Reich, then the insights of a Tooze article are proportional to 1/(D^2). You can't be a public intellectual talking about WW II all the time, so Tooze has expanded his reach using a similar process as my extremely wealthy classmate.
I was taken in by Tooze, too. After reading too many weird pieces like the one you've described (or the ones where he liberally quotes someone else interesting, including extensive copy/paste of their illustrations), I should cancel my paid subscription to his Substack and pledge it to yours instead.