Have they changed, or just become their worst selves

While Trump is unpopular with a majority of Americans, his support among Republicans remains solid. That’s despite blatant corruption, fascist policies and a failure to deliver any of the economic benefits he promised. Faced with this depressing fact, the standard New York Times response has been to send an intrepid reporter to “Trump Country” (rural Kentucky or Midwestern diners) to find out what is going on.

But it would be far more instructive to send them to Long Island, where Trump won both counties in 2024. Long Island voters have given solid support to Republicans at all levels. Even as he was crushingly defeated in New York as a whole, Mitt Romney got close to half the vote in Suffolk and Nassau counties. Trump did a few percentage points better in 2024, winning both. But he would have gone nowhere if not for the solid support of Romney voters

This doesn’t fit at all with the usual stories about Trump voters. The residents of Long Island are not the “left-behinds” routinely described in explanations of Trump’s appeal. The average income is over $100 000 and unemployment rates have long been around 3 per cent. Like most New Yorkers, Long Islanders have been beneficiaries of the globalised economy of which Romney was a symbol. And, if you were to believe Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind they did so because they valued honor, loyalty and purity, qualities Trump routinely trashes.

Democrats from Hillary Clinton on assumed that these contradictions would lead suburban Republicans to abandon Trump in numbers large enough to offset any losses of Democrats attracted by Trump’s racism and misogyny. Evidently this is not the case. Not only have the Republicans who once voted for Romney maintained their support for Trump but they have preferred him to any Republican alternative. And, with few exceptions, they have embraced Trump’s racist and fascist policies, even as he approaches outright Nazism.

What has happened here? Has Trump, as Walter Olson suggests, radicalised his followers leading them to support positions they would once have rejected? Or has he simply allowed them to reveal themselves (or at least their worst selves) as the racists and fascists they always were?

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I’ve held off posting this in the hope of coming up with some kind of positive response, but I haven’t got one.

When I wrote back in November 2024 that Trump’s dictatorship was a fait accompi there was still plenty of room for people to disagree. But (with the exception of an announced state of emergency) it’s turned out far worse than I thought possible.

Opposition politicians and judges have been arrested for doing their jobs, and many more have been threatened. The limited resistance of the courts has been effectively halted by the Supreme Court’s decision ending nationwide injunctions. University leaders have been forced to comply or quit. The press has been cowed into submission by the threat of litigation or harm to corporate owners. Political assassinations are laughed about and will soon become routine. With the use of troops to suppress peaceful protests, and the open support of Trump and his followers, more deaths are inevitable, quite possibly on a scale not seen since the Civil War.

The idea that this process might be stopped by a free and fair election in 2026 or 2028 is absurdly optimistic. Unless age catches up with him, Trump will appoint himself as President for life, just as Xi and Putin have done.

None of this is, or at least ought to be, news. Yet the political implications are still being discussed in the familiar terms of US party politics: swing voters, the centre ground, mobilisation versus moderation, rehashes of the 2024 election and so on. Having given up hope, I have no interest in these debates. Instead, I want to consider the implications for the idea of democracy.

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Many thanks to Hannah for her beautiful post on George Eliot’s Silas Marner and the evacuation of moral purpose from the Protestant work ethic. That resonates with Hijacked, my latest book, which traces the history of the work ethic from 17th century Puritan theologians, through the economic theory and policy debates of the 18th and 19th centuries, to today. I argue that the work ethic split into two versions during the Industrial Revolution. One–the version Max Weber analyzed–expressed the ideological perspective and interests of capitalists, and ultimately led to what we call neoliberalism–or, in a less institutionally articulated form, a version of libertarianism. The other mostly forgotten version expressed the perspective and interests of workers, and ultimately led to social democracy.

Americans inherited the UK’s capitalist work ethic in colonial times, and (not for the first time) put it on steroids from the mid-1970s to today. Scratch an American libertarian, and most likely you’ll find a believer in the capitalist work ethic underneath. However much libertarians talk about universal freedom, at heart they are advancing a deeply authoritarian doctrine tied to capitalist rule. To see this, it’s helpful to relate current policy proposals to 19th century ones, when capitalist proponents of the work ethic were more open about their aims.

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The UK government has signalled its intention to “proscribe” the protest group Palestine Action under anti-terrorism legislation. This will place it in the same legal category as Al Qaeda and Islamic State: it will be illegal to belong to the group, to show public support for it, to arrange a meeting in support for it, and so on. The difference between Palestine Action and Al Qaeda et al, as many commentators have pointed out, is that it has never committed violence against individuals or, as far as we can tell, does it have any plans to do so. It is a protest group which seems to adopt fairly typical strategies of civil disobedience. It seems to have attracted the ire of the government, though, by breaking into a military base and spraying red paint on aircraft (as a protest over the government’s support for Israel).

I am not the first to say this, but: if this is terrorism, then so too was the Greenham Common Peace movement. The women of Greenham Common also (regularly) broke into a military compound and committed criminal damage there. Their stated aim was to force the government to stop storing cruise missiles on the site. But the women of Greenham Common are not usually considered terrorists: in fact, visit the scene now and you will see a public monument to their efforts.

So, can any sense be made of the apparent claim that – quite aside from any purported threat to kill or harm or cause mass panic among civilians, none of which appear to be at stake here – mild damage to physical assets should count as terrorism, in cases where those assets are military in nature? Or is this an instance of absurd legal over-reach, intended to produce a chilling effect on anti-war protestors?

NB: Let’s keep any discussion focused on the nature of terrorism and the question of whether this is a good use of legislation please – there are plenty of opportunities to discuss the conflict(s) in the Middle East elsewhere.

Thursday afternoon I belatedly fulfilled a promise to post a book to Wilcannia. The school day was just finishing and as I left the Post Office I overheard a child around eight years old:

Dad, I was so good today I got FIVE stickers.

Dad was a little distracted, navigating cars and pavements and no doubt the shopping list for tonight’s dinner.

Dad, I was so good at music today I got FIVE STICKERS!

I noticed Dad respond, but I did not hear how. For my part, I wondered what exactly one must do in music to earn FIVE stickers. Were there five different songs? Five instruments? Or was her performance five times the expected quality of a young woman attending Primary School? What unit of account does one sticker represent, that FIVE of them is such a windfall?

Regardless, five stickers was clearly a treasure indeed. A hoardable treasure, surely, for to my knowledge stickers can be traded for neither goods nor services. A store of some sort of value, perhaps, but not one ultimately realised by interest or made liquid via sale of accrued assets. Sure, Tom Sawyer likely would have traded stickers for an old doorknob, a dead rat and a used band-aid (and then for the tokens that in due course would make him CEO of Westpac) but this is 2025.

Even so, it reminded me of Silas Marner, hoarding gold under a brick in the floor of his cottage as a manifestation of the Protestant Ethic:

Spoiler alert – Silas Marner. TBF the book is 164 years old, not just out in cinemas.

George Eliot’s Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe was published in 1861 – six years before Marx’s Das Kapital, which includes a study of money that has some striking parallels to Eliot’s. Obv I’m not accusing anyone of 150+ yo plagiarism. Ideas about money were in the air, which were central to the politics then emerging.

Silas Marner was a weaver. He had a loom, on which he wove cloth. By hand. This was close work that he did for very long hours, so his eyes were not great. By the time Eliot’s story really begins, Silas is a master weaver, known in his small town of Raveloe as Master Marner.

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Please consider donating to this fundraising effort (here) to support Helen de Cruz’s family.

There is no greater joy for a teacher than to see a student develop and grow; and no more satisfaction to a mentor than to be overshadowed professionally by one’s mentee. I have followed Helen’s intellectual development and blossoming professional career with curiosity, pride, admiration, and (of course) wonder. It’s a cruel, unnatural fate to have to write about Helen in the past tense.

My heart goes out to Johan and their kids, Aliénor and Gabriel. Helen was the main breadwinner in the family. And before they were admitted to hospice, Helen asked me to help signal-boost the fund-raising to support them organized by Marcus Arvan. [Please donate here.]

Back in 2010, I started corresponding with Helen de Cruz because they posted a question about the relationship between the PSR and causation on a listserv. I had just moved to my position in Ghent, and I mistakenly thought Helen was a Leibniz scholar at Leuven. I was hoping we could team up to strengthen early modern philosophy in the Low Countries.

A few weeks later, at a philosophy of science conference, I saw Helen give a brilliant, somewhat unusual paper in which they combined Bayesianism with philosophy of archeology. (This was part of a project organized by Igor Douven.) In between Helen received a postdoc from, I think, the Flemish research council. At the conference, we talked, and I got my first glimpse of one the rawest and purest philosophical talents I have ever encountered. Helen was ambitious with a big, magnanimous and musical heart.

After the workshop we met at, Helen and I teamed up to organize a workshop on ‘empirically informed philosophy of social science.’ And thus started a nearly constant fifteen-year conversation mostly mediated by social media, while they was raising a family, dealing with sexism in the academy (looking especially at you Leuven; here’s how they put it once, “They were not a woman-friendly department”), moving jobs to Amsterdam (where we saw each other most frequently in person), the Oxford Brookes University in Oxford (where they hosted me for a talk at Blackwells), and, eventually, as Danforth Chair in St. Louis. In between there were happy stints at Oxford University thanks to postdoctoral fellowships of the British Academy and Templeton residential fellowships. Helen’s website also mentions a FWO postdoctoral fellow at the University of Leeds.

In these English years, they bonded with my wife over their joint anti-Brexit activism. In particular, Helen was a key member of the team that helped create a collection, In Limbo – Our Brexit Testimonies edited by Elena Remigi.

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Hi CT readers, I’m publishing this open letter here so there’s a public record of the letter I’ve co-written and signed about what looks, walks and talks like a good old-fashioned Brussels stitch-up aimed at weakening the EU organisation that oversees data protection in EU institutions. Thank you, Maria (Comments welcome, as with any other post.)

19 June 2025, by e-mail
 
From: Dr. Maria Farrell, Prof. Douwe Korff and Prof. Ian Brown.
To: President Ursula von der Leyen, European Commission.
cc: Commissioner Michael McGrath, European Commissioner for Democracy, Justice, the Rule of Law and Consumer Protection;
Ms. Sirpa Rautio, Director, EU Agency for Fundamental Rights;
Don Javier Zarzalejos, Chair, LIBE committee, European Parliament.
 
Dear President von der Leyen and esteemed colleagues:

We are writing to inform you of procedural irregularities and what appears to be a strongly biased and motivated selection process regarding the appointment of the next European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS), a key institution protecting the fundamental rights of EU citizens.

The EDPS plays a crucial role in ensuring people’s fundamental rights and freedoms, and in particular their right to data protection, are respected by European Union institutions and bodies.[1] However, the manner and potential outcome of the current selection process for the role of the next head of the EDPS appears to be a clear case of maladminstration and political cronyism.

We raise these issues as EU citizens (MF, DK) and resident (IB) with long-standing interests and backgrounds in privacy and technology policy.

The selection process for the next EDPS has been procedurally aberrant, untransparent, and  appears biased and motivated in its selection methods. It is extremely concerning there have been multiple allegations that an element of gender discrimination has swayed the process. It is equally concerning that we have heard repeated allegations that an element of disability discrimination is involved. [click to continue…]

Pro-natalism (the idea that people, or rather, women, should have more babies than they choose to do at present) has become an established orthodoxy,[1]. The central claim is that, unless something changes soon, human populations both global and national, are going to decline rapidly, with a lot of negative consequences. This is simply not true, on any plausible assumptions about fertility[2]

There’s no need for me to do any calculations here. For many decades he Population Division of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs has been producing population projections for the world, and individual countries, under a variety of scenarios. One finding is unambiguous. Short of a drastic decline in fertility, far beyond what we are now seeing there will be more people on Earth at the end of this century than there were at the beginning

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“When diversity, equity and inclusion become ‘threats’ to the order of society,” Judith Butler wrote recently, “progressive politics in general is held responsible for every social ill.” Authoritarians are empowered to oppress vulnerable people in the name of “the nation, the natural order, the family, society or civilization itself”.

The links between sacrificing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and upholding patriarchal white supremacy are clear. This has prompted many to fight harder to preserve DEI.

If only existing DEI wasn’t so crap.

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You may have viewed Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) offering a mock apology for dismissing a constituent’s complaint that the Medicaid cuts she endorses will cause people to die with the flippant remark, “We are all going to die.” She tied her defense of her callousness to Christianity, inviting all who worried about death to convert so they could enjoy eternal life after death. J.D. Vance, too, has defended sharply limited empathy in Christian terms–a theological view for which Pope Francis admonished him. Part of this attack on empathy stems from the resentment of populist voters who feel that empathy is being extended to the wrong people, that they are the ones who deserve empathy, as opposed to various others they despise–immigrants, foreigners, Muslims, blacks, feminists, LGBT people, poor people, etc. Arlie Hochschild, Katherine Cramer, and Justin Gest [link corrected] have written compelling accounts of this. But what does this have to do with Christianity? What happened to “Jesus is love”? 

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A few days ago, I experienced a strange auditive mix-up. My favorite German radio program, Deutschlandfunk, sent a documentary about “platform workers”. Uber, Deliveroo, etc., you might think, but no. This was about workers on oil platforms in Norway: about the oil boom in the North Sea, about the hard work on the oil rigs and as diver, about the many long-term health issues that arouse, and about the long battle for recognition and compensation. The Norwegian parliament has recently set up a compensation scheme for the families of the victims of a particularly egregious neglect of safety standards, which led to the capsizing of a whole platform in 1980, with 123 deaths.

Today, we think of “platform workers” as individuals contracting with online platforms for executing online or offline services, often at lousy pay.

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