John B. Judis

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the author of THE POLITICS OF OUR TIME

What’s happening in global politics, and is there a thread that ties it all together?

There is, and it is called populism.

What is populism? And why have populist parties and candidates suddenly sprung up and even gained power in the United States and Western Europe? The emergence of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, France's Marine LePen, Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, and the Alternative for Germany are show more signs that an older consensus about politics and government is breaking down.

John B. Judis, one of America's most respected political analysts, tells us why we need to understand the populist movement that began in the United States in the 1890s and whose politics have recurred on both sides of the Atlantic ever since. The Populist Explosion is essential reading for anyone hoping to grasp a global political system that is only just beginning what will be a long-running and highly consequential readjustment.

Featured as one of "Six Books to Help Understand Trump's (2016) Win" by The New York Times

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My Review: A very interesting read that boils the toxic goo of this moment in history's outrage and grievance into an easy-to-swallow dose. The author's a reputable source of wisdom for leftists for over fifty years. See his Wikipedia page. His take on the issue of seething rage and outrage at being derided, ignored, and exploited among huge swaths of the world's people is well worth your effort to read attentively; it is arguably the reason we are where we are on many fronts.

No one will ever convince me that 45 thought up the campaign that returned him to the White House. There are very, very rich and powerful and canny people who want him where he is. Those are the people who redesigned the way his campaign looked. The slide from populism into fascism, as Judis defines that term, has accelerated. The 2024 man is clearly modeled on Orban and Putin, Cult-of-Personality rulers who have created cadres of supporters who do the leader's bidding. This is something that has developed since this book was written. Judis defines fascism, then says unequivocally in this book that 45 is not one. That is simply not...or no longer is...true.

The truth is, though, understanding the way the people who voted for the redesigned 45 chose this path is something we all need to make the effort to do. The world is not going to end soon. *My* world will; most of my friends' and descendants and countrymen's worlds will too; so I'm quite clearly motivated to be focused on the topic. How we can make the world better for the largest number of people now alive is another strong motivator to get into this topic. I very strongly disapprove of the mental illness of hoarding and greed that constitutes our current economic system. I know this is a common opinion. The canny operators who redesigned the campaign that landed 45 back in power knew there needed to be a hook they could hang a future movement on.

Populism will not survive contact with the stated goals of this group's plan for power. Fascism will.

Learn how we got here, apply these rules to the world to come, and resist. show less

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Why Has Nationalism Come Roaring Back?

Trump in America, Brexit in the U.K., anti-EU parties in Italy, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland, and Hungary, and nativist or authoritarian leaders in Turkey, Russia, India, and China -- Why has nationalism suddenly returned with a vengeance? Is the world headed back to the fractious conflicts between nations that led to world wars and depression in the early 20th Century? Why are nationalists so show more angry about free trade and immigration? Why has globalization become a dirty word?

Based on travels in America, Europe, and Asia, veteran political analyst John B. Judis found that almost all people share nationalist sentiments that can be the basis of vibrant democracies as well as repressive dictatorships. Today's outbreak of toxic "us vs. them" nationalism is an extreme reaction to utopian cosmopolitanism, which advocates open borders, free trade, rampant outsourcing, and has branded nationalist sentiments as bigotry. Can a new international order be created that doesn't dismiss what is constructive about nationalism? As he did for populism in The Populist Explosion, a runaway success after the 2016 election, Judis looks at nationalism from its modern origins in the 1800s to today to find answers.

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My Review: Much like The Populist Explosion, this 2018 book is a higher-level explainer to ground you in the essentials of nationalism's rise and development.

Post-WWII globalist institutions, created to combat the toxic fascist-infected nationalism running rampant today, have come a cropper in combating the nightmarish reality of resurgent and toxic nationalism—ironically because the institutions were using the weapons of the fascists, shame, Othering, and punishment, against them.

The force that is today's nationalist/fascist movement proves the weapons they themselves used ultimately hastened their own end in WWII.

The force of nationalism, like the force of populism, cannot be repressed forever, nor can it be reasoned out of people; it must be accounted for, if not exactly accommodated, in the politics of the twenty-first century. These are emotional responses to triggering events that make followers feel insecure. It cannot be stated enough that facts disproving emotive claims are ineffective in the face of passionately held feelings.

The points made in this book, that nationalists are not all wrong and the liberal elites are not listening to them could not be clearer in 2024. This US election was disastrously mishandled, manipulated by some very clear-sighted and goal-directed people, and need not have resulted in the the awful way that it did. Author Judis is very clear about how we fell into the trap we did; the job now is making the changes, personal, political, and societal, that need making to prevent the incoming administration from throwing US and by extension global society into far worse channels than we're already headed into.

An excellent companion read to The Populist Explosion and a worthy exploration of forces we as a society need to comprehend and harness to productive use. show less

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: John Judis is the author of one of the seminal books about the 2016 election, The Populist Explosion, which has sold 38,000 copies and was named One of six books to help understand Trump's win by The New York Times and The Economist called it "Well-written and well-researched, powerfully argued and perfectly timed." Judis is also the author of The Nationalist Revival, published in 2018, which was highly acclaimed and has sold over 9,000 copies. EJ Dionne show more in The American Prospect called it essential reading.

Both titles have been popular as course adoptions Judis is a veteran political reporter who examines national and global political trends through a nonpartisan lens. He specializes in speaking truth to liberals, wrote EJ Dionne in The Washington Post. Through his long career in progressive journalism, Judis has made a habit of seeing things that others were missing. With his new book examining the new socialism of the left, he once again provides a clarifying look at one of the biggest political trends of our time. Completes Judis's political trilogy explaining the Trump era.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I read this book, and I believed it was true. I do not now know if its analysis of Millennials is accurate, and thus what happened in November 2024 was an anomaly of some sort...read "the results were manipulated like they were in 2016"...or if Author Judis is just like the rest of us elitists on the left who just want to believe as much as Fox Mulder wanted to believe.

Maybe I'm an idiot (stop snickering) but I choose door number optimism.

My generation, like the one before us and the one immediately after, fell for the capitalist lies about socialism = totalitarianism, thus flat refused to see the way socialism rescued capitalism from a full-on leftist rebellion during the Great Depression, and created the most powerful economy in the history of the planet, and reduced immiseration on a scale so epic that the Economic Royalists have spent forty-five years fighting back all the gains made so their power will once again be unchallenged and unshared.

I am deeply distressed that the plan is succeeding still, accelerating even, as they roll out the fascist facets of their controlling regime. All it took was repeating the old lies about Others that regularly succeed in scaring the crap out of the delicate little manbabies who can't tolerate anyone not looking/acting/thinking exactly like them.

So reading this book felt a little like masochism. It also felt a lot like a call to arms, a path marked towards reclaiming the future from the tech scum of the Nerd Reich before it becomes nigh-on impossible.

Don't shirk your part in the battle for the future. #ReadingIsResistance show less

In Genesis, John B. Judis traces the history of Zionism from the mid 19th century to the founding of the State of Israel, with emphasis on the role played by the United States Government, particularly by President Harry S. Truman.

A description of Palestine as “a land without a people for a people without a land” was a mantra of many early Zionists. But the meaning of that clause differed significantly among its adherents. To the followers of Ahad Ha’am (the pen name of the Ukrainian show more Zionist Asher Ginsberg), “without a people” meant “without a single or specific people.” Thus, the fact that Moslems lived among Christians and Jews in Palestine meant that there was no single “people” of that land. Ahad Ha’am’s version of Zionism sought to make Palestine a center of Jewish culture, but not a Jewish state per se.

On the other hand, many Zionists, especially those in the U.S.A. thought (mistakenly) that the land was virtually unpopulated. Other Zionists, primarily followers of Theodor Hertzl and Chaim Weizmann, simply didn’t care about then current inhabitants (overwhelmingly Muslim Arab); they were perceived as mere problems to be disposed of in the formation of a Jewish state. Members of this latter group believed that Palestine was the land of their ancestors from which they had been wrongly expelled by the Romans in the first century C.E. The fact that it had been inhabited by Arabs for about 1300 years was inconsequential. No significance was given to the Canaanites or Philistines who populated the same territory before the Hebrews.

Zionism received a fillip in World War I when the Ottoman Empire (which had ruled Palestine for centuries) sided with the Central Powers, lost the war, and was carved up by the victorious British and French. British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour issued the famous “Balfour Declaration” in which he stated that the British Government “views with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” According to Judis, Balfour seems to have seen the declaration as a way of stemming a rising tide of Jewish immigration into England. In addition, the Declaration itself was a nuanced pronouncement that fell far short of promising a Jewish state. Indeed, it exacerbated a spilt in Zionism between the cultural Zionists like Ahad Ha’am (who were content with building a Jewish community in a bi-national Palestine) and the political Zionists (who insisted on establishing a Jewish state).

In any event, with the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the British were intent on controlling the Middle East with its oil and the Suez Canal, which provided it with somewhat easy access to its prize colony, India. Among the spoils of the First World War, the British received a “mandate” over Palestine, which they proceeded to treat much like any other colony. Later, with the fate of Jews in Europe becoming perilous upon the rise of the Nazis, the British permitted substantial Jewish immigration into Palestine. Nevertheless, Jews remained a distinct minority of the total population. The Arabs had no use for the newcomers, even though the Jews paid full value for the land they settled and provided a substantial stimulus to the region’s economy.

During the years between the world wars, there were numerous outbreaks of violence between the Arabs and Jews of Palestine. By the end of the 1930s the Jews and Arabs were “irreconcilable.” More and more, the Arabs were seen by both the British and the Zionists as “barbarian, savage, and shedders of blood,” an inferior race not worthy of self-government. It did not help that when World War II broke out, the mufti, the religious leader of the Palestinians, sided with the Nazis and took up residence in Berlin. Judis states:

"Over the next decades, even after the Allied victory in World War II and the collapse of Western colonialism…Zionists and later Israelis would continue to view their conflict with the Arabs through [the] prism of higher versus lower races and democracy against fascism and Nazism. They continued to describe Arabs as savages and barbarians, and their leaders as the heirs of Hitler. That included the mufti,…Nasser,… Arafat, and Hamas’s Khaled Meshal. Such a view highlighted Zionism as a national liberation movement for oppressed Jewry and ally of the world’s advanced democracies and obscured its role as a settler-colonial movement that had displaced or driven out a native population.”

World War II nearly bankrupted the British Empire. At the war’s end in 1945, the British were no longer able to maintain the peace in Palestine, but they had no clear plan for what to do once they left the region. The British tried to induce the United States to take their place. Judis asserts:

"There was probably never a time after December 1917 that the Jews and Arabs in Palestine could have agreed on their own to share or divide the country. When the Arabs indicated some willingness to deal in the late 1920s, the Jews backed off; and when the Jews might have agreed to partition in the late 1930s, the Arabs weren’t interested. So if any agreement were possible, it would have had to be imposed by outside powers, and then enforced by them until the Jews and Arabs agreed to abide by it.”

But the United States was not eager to impose such a solution. While these events were transpiring in Palestine, the United States was preoccupied with the new Cold War with the Soviet Union. In particular, Stalin had blockaded West Berlin, and Truman had responded with the Berlin airlift. Communists took over the governments of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. Proxy battles between the East and West were also playing out in Greece, Turkey, and Iran.

The question arose in American foreign policy circles of how to deal with Palestine. Although President Truman was proud of the sign on his desk that read “The Buck Stops Here!,” Judis portrays him as “anything but decisive in dealing with the future of Palestine.” Instead of taking a leading role in settling the Palestinian situation, the United States passively referred the matter to the newly formed United Nations, where it was handled (in Judis’s words) with “unmatched ineptness.”

Plans were proposed to partition the country into Jewish and Arab respective areas, but nearly all the proposals granted the Jews a greater proportion of the country than their residency would merit on a percentage basis. The thought seemed to be, however, that many more Jews would be emigrating to Palestine after the war. The Arabs opposed partition because they still had the majority of the population. The American State Department was against partition, knowing it would cause substantial damage to relations with all Arab countries, and some of those countries controlled enormous supplies of crude petroleum. On the other hand, the Zionist movement was very strong among the American electorate, particularly in New York. President Truman’s political advisors told him he would likely lose the immanent election if he did not side with Jewish interests. Truman’s personal predilections opposed any kind of religious state, but he found himself under tremendous pressure from American Zionists.

Meanwhile, both the Arabs and the Jews attacked each other and the British. Before any plan was agreed to by the interested parties, the British were so strapped for cash that they simply withdrew their troops in 1948. The Jews promptly proclaimed the establishment of the new state of Israel, and a civil war broke out immediately. The Israelis were much better organized, and they prevailed militarily over the Palestinian Arabs rather easily. The governments of neighboring Arab states launched an invasion against the Israelis, but they were too distrustful of one another (with good reason) to work in concert. Moreover, each Arab government was more interested in making a land grab than in helping the others, much less helping the Palestinians. The result was that the Israelis prevailed again, although Transjordan (today’s Jordan), whose “Arab Legion” was the only effective non-Jewish fighting force in the region, was able to take control of what is now known as the West Bank.

Atrocities were committed on both sides of the conflict. The Israelis drove many Arabs from their homes, and many others fled on their own accord in fear of the Israelis. In fact, so many Arabs fled that that Jews now outnumbered the Arabs in the part of Palestine they controlled. For the first time, the Zionists seized Arab land rather than pay for it. David Ben-Gurion and other Israeli leaders recognized the Arab flight as a great advantage to their new state, and refused to allow any Arabs who left to return. The so-called “right of return” for Jews only is a contentious issue between the Israelis and the Palestinians to this day.

Truman was now confronted with the issue of whether to recognize the new state. Again the American State department wanted to withhold recognition, but domestic politics triumphed, and Truman recognized the State of Israel against the urging of his own State Department. Judis asserts that by 1948 the American Zionist movement had been completely co-opted into a propaganda arm of the Israeli government. Judis avers that the American Zionists weren’t interested in conveying an accurate account of what was actually happening in Palestine and that:

"By spreading falsehoods and distortions about an important foreign policy issue, [the American Zionists] did American democracy a disservice. Silver [a leader of the movement] showed how a narrow nationalist agenda had undermined his own moral integrity. The truth had become, in effect, whatever served Israel’s cause at that moment."

Judis does not simply assert conclusions. He gives numerous accounts of meetings between Truman and Zionist leaders and describes their tactics in detail. He cites entries in Truman’s diary where the president complains that he has never been under such severe pressure from “the Jews.” Judis concludes:

"American recognition of Israel has often been heralded as a triumph of Truman’s diplomacy and foresightedness, but it was…a product of political pressure and strategic indecision."

Judis’s thesis can be summarized in two paragraphs that appear near the end of the book:

"After his presidency, Truman gloried in helping to establish a Jewish state, but when all the reasons and rationalizations were put aside—when all the perverse circumstances of history, including the twisted leadership of the Palestinian Arabs, were taken into account, and even when the horrors of the Holocaust were fully acknowledged—Palestine’s Arabs had still gotten screwed, and screwed by people who over the centuries had suffered even worse indignities, yet who had always claimed to stand for better….

And the main lesson of this narrative is that whatever wrongs were done to the Jews of Europe and later to those of the Arab Middle East and North Africa—and there were great wrongs inflicted—the Zionists who came to Palestine to establish a state trampled on the rights of the Arabs who already lived there. That wrong has never been adequately addressed, or redressed, and for there to be peace of any kind between the Israelis and Arabs, it must be.”

There are no heroes on either side of the conflict in Judis’s book.

Discussion: Even before the Holocaust, the situation for Jews in Europe was not optimal. Nevertheless, Herzl’s and Weizmann’s Zionist idea of establishing a Jewish state in the midst of Arabs seems a bit mad. The claim of the Jewish people for that land was based on an apocryphal promise from a tribal god. From a legal coign of vantage, the statute of limitations on the claim must have run after 1900 years; and in any event, the Arabs surely established their claim to the land by 1300 years of adverse possession. However, during and after the Holocaust of World War II, NO country (that includes the United States) welcomed an influx of Jewish refugees. Thus some version of the Zionist project became absolutely necessary. It is a pity that the views of the moderate Zionist Ahad Ha’am did not carry more weight and that the project was carried out in a manner that almost guaranteed a state of permanent warfare.

Evaluation: This book sheds light on many of the issues that still are in contention so many years after modern Jews began immigrating to Palestine. It should be required reading for United States foreign policy analysts.

(JAB) show less