On Freedom, page 40
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a lower effective tax rate: Greg Sargent, “The Massive Triumph of the Rich,” Washington Post, December 9, 2019.
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in an emergency: According to Bankrate’s 2023 annual emergency savings report, only 48 percent could do so. See also Jonathan Morduch and Rachel Schneider, The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).
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the consumption patterns of the very wealthy: Paul Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach, Système de la nature (Paris: Chez l’éditeur, 1770), 250–57; see also Andrzej Waśkiewicz, Ludzie-rzeczy-ludzie. O porządkach społecznych, w których rzeczy łączą, a nie dzielą (Warsaw: Universitas, 2020).
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lobbyists they employ: A shamefully direct case is that of former politicians paid by hydrocarbon interests. Rick Noack, “He Used to Rule Germany,” Washington Post, August 12, 2017; Erik Kirschbaum, “Putin’s Apologist?,” Reuters, March 27, 2014.
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This behavior warps the system: See Freeland, Plutocrats, 236 and passim.
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discouraged and demobilized: See Benjamin Newman, Christopher Johnston, and Patrick Lown, “False Consciousness or Class Awareness?,” American Journal of Political Science 59, no. 2 (2014): 326–40; Melissa Schettini Kearney, “Income Inequality in the United States,” testimony before the Joint Economic Committee of the United States Congress, January 16, 2014. See also John Freeman, ed., Tales of Two Americas (New York: Penguin, 2017).
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“At a certain level of inequality”: Raymond Aron, Dix-huit leçons sur la société industrielle (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), 50. Benjamin Constant noted that the poor are judged by people hostile to them, and the rich by their peers and allies. Principes de politique (1806), chap. 17.
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A single value and a single future: On the first page of the preface to her greatest work, Hannah Arendt takes as her premise that “Progress and Doom are two sides of the same medal.” Origins of Totalitarianism, xi, also 144.
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give way to nostalgia: Americans believe that America was great when they were young. See Robbie J. Taylor, Cassandra G. Burton-Wood, and Maryanne Garry, “America Was Great When Nationally Relevant Events Occurred and When Americans Were Young,” Journal of Applied Memory and Cognition 6, no. 4 (2017): 425–33.
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most important politician of eternity: I sketch this out in “Vladimir Putin’s Politics of Eternity,” Guardian, March 16, 2018. For explicit confirmation from the Russian side, see Vladislav Surkov, “Dolgoe gosudarstvo Putina,” Nezavisimaya Gazeta, February 14, 2019.
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A Russian fascist tradition: See citations of Ilyin in the conclusion; also Charles Clover, Black Wind, White Snow (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), esp. 214–23; also Alexander Sergeevich Titov, “Lev Gumilev, Ethnogenesis and Eurasianism” (Ph.D. diss., University College London, 2005); Andreas Umland, “Post-Soviet ‘Uncivil Society’ and the Rise of Aleksandr Dugin” (Ph.D. diss., University of Cambridge, 2007).
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the wealthiest digital oligarch: Simone Weil foresaw ninety years ago the “opposition” between “those who dispose of the machine, and those who are disposed of by the machine.” Weil, Réflexions sur les causes de la liberté.
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as we choose to be less free: Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Penguin, 2005).
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The science of global warming: Joseph Majkut, “John Chafee’s 1986 Climate Hearings,” Niskanen Center, June 15, 2016; Wolfgang Behrenger, A Cultural History of Climate (New York: Polity, 2010); Spencer R. Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003).
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from Sakharov to Havel: Andrei Sakharov in a manifesto translated by the New York Times in 1968 under the title “Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom”; Václav Havel in a lecture at George Washington University in 1993 that was published in the New York Review of Books as “The Post-Communist Nightmare,” May 27, 1993.
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Most of the human-made carbon dioxide: Our World in Data, “Cumulative CO2 Emissions by World Region, 1751–2017.”
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understated the problem of climate change: Meanwhile it had long been established within the relevant milieux as a major problem of national security. See Gordon R. Sullivan et al., “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change” (Alexandra: CNA Corporation, 2007); U.S. Department of the Navy, Vice Chief of Naval Operations, “Navy Climate Change Roadmap,” May 21, 2010; U.S. Department of Defense, Quadrennial Defense Review Report, February 2010.
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opens Twitter to a flood of lies: David Klepper, “Climate Misinformation ‘Rocket Boosters’ on Musk’s Twitter,” AP, January 19, 2023.
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summons a negative future ever closer: Jacques Sémelin helpfully reminds us that politics never stops. Purifier et détruire: Usages politiques des massacres et génocides (Paris: Seuil, 2005).
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the bleakness comes to embrace us: See David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2019).
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a myth of Russian innocence: On Ilyin, see the conclusion. See also Dina Khapaeva, “La Russie gothique de Poutine,” Libération, October 23, 2014. On Christian fascism, see Vladimir Tismaneanu, “Romania’s Mystical Revolutionaries,” in Edith Kurzweil, ed., A Partisan Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 383–92.
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Hitler’s dark fantasy of ecological war: I spell this out in the conclusion to Black Earth. See also Snyder, “Hitler’s World May Not Be So Far Away,” Guardian, September 16, 2015.
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just dispensable details: In his story “Sputnik Sweetheart,” Haruki Murakami remarks that “In an incomplete way of being such as ours, the superfluous also has its place.” Sputnik Sweetheart, trans. Philip Gabriel (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2002).
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a morality play of innocence and guilt: Using another term (“anti-history”), Jill Lepore makes a similar argument in The Whites of Their Eyes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 5, 8, 15, 64, 125. See also Masha Gessen, The Future Is History (New York: Riverside Books, 2017); Shaun Walker, The Long Hangover: Putin’s New Russia and the Ghosts of the Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
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History undoes the politics of eternity: Compare Hannah Arendt: “The last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.” Origins of Totalitarianism, 9.
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“the world” and “the earth”: Kieran Williams, “Václav Havel’s Word to the Class of 2017,” Medium, June 2, 2017.
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Factuality
manipulate and harm us: In Leviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes says that it is “ignorance of causes” that makes some people dependent on others.
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authority on fossils: Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Philadelphia: Mathew Carey, 1794); Keith Thomson, “Jefferson’s Old Bones,” American Scientist 99, no. 3 (2011): 200.
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humans are not the culmination: On the implications of geological time for human self-conception, see Stephen Jay Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987). See also Rebecca Woods, “Telling Time with Mammoths,” Journal for the History of Knowledge 4 (November 2023).
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dignity of knowledge: A point I take from David Denby, Lit Up (New York: Picador, 2018).
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“In the struggle between you and the world”: Franz Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1992). Compare Paul North, The Yield: Kafka’s Atheological Reformation (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2015).
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generate usable fusion: Jason Parisi and Justin Ball, The Future of Fusion Energy (London: World Scientific, 2019).
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need other measures: We will also have to remove methane. See Katherine Bourzac, “Clear the Air,” Science News, November 19, 2023.
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$7 trillion a year: Simon Black et al., “Fossil Fuel Subsidies Data: 2023 Update,” International Monetary Fund Working Paper, August 24, 2023.
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stay in the ground: In his 1938 novel, Ein Mord, den jeder begeht, Heimito von Doderer speaks nicely of “progress reeking of oil.”
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had to discredit scientific solutions: Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s Second Book: The Unpublished Sequel to Mein Kampf, ed. Gerhard L. Weinberg, trans. Krista Smith (New York: Enigma Books, 2010), 16, 21, 74, 103. Stalin promoted discredited agricultural science: Edouard I. Kolchinsky et al., “Russia’s New Lysenkoism,” Current Biology 27, no. 19 (2017): R1042–47.
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They finance propaganda: See Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014).
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the political party that denies: Matthew T. Ballew et al., “Climate Change in the American Mind: Data, Tools, and Trends,” Environment 61 (2019): 4–18.
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answers our frivolous queries: “Since we do not have any way of making computers wise, we ought not to give computers tasks that demand wisdom.” Joseph Weizenbaum quoted in Timothy Garton Ash, Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World (London: Atlantic Books, 2016), 178.
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disproportionately white males: Matthew Ballew et al., “Which Racial/Ethnic Groups Care Most About Climate Change?,” Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, April 16, 2020; Aaron M. McCright and Riley E. Dunlap, “Cool Dudes: The Denial of Climate Change Among Conservative White Males in the United States,” Global Environmental Change 21, no. 4 (2011): 1163–72.
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One reason the election was so close: Traci Burch, “Did Disfranchisement Laws Help Elect President Bush?,” Political Behavior 34, no. 1 (2012): 1–26.
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we are less free: On climate denialism, see Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010); James Laurence Powell, The Inquisition of Climate Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Spencer Weart, “Global Warming: How Skepticism Became Denial,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 67, no. 1 (2011): 41–50.
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spoke of “significant roughness”: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Gedenkausgabe der Werke, ed. Ernst Beutler (Zurich, 1949), 13:1.
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“clamor and combinations”: James Madison, Federalist no. 10, November 23, 1787.
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reversed with vertiginous rapidity: On the attractions of Stalinism, see Marci Shore, Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); François Furet, Le passé d’une illusion (Paris: R. Laffont/Calmann-Lévy, 1995); Richard Crossman, ed., The God That Failed (New York: Harper, 1949).
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think it was a Jewish attack: Victor Klemperer recalled this in I Will Bear Witness 1942–1945: A Diary of the Nazi Years, vol. 2 (New York: Modern Library, 2001). His diaries were originally published in German in 1955.
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Thousands obliged by invading the Capitol: Jian Wang, “The U.S. Capitol Riot: Examining the Rioters, Social Media, and Disinformation” (master’s thesis, Harvard University Division of Continuing Education), January 5, 2022; Mallory Simon and Sara Sidner, “Capitol Hill Insurrection: Decoding the Extremist Symbols and Groups,” CNN, January 11, 2021.
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worried that the stock price: Jeremy W. Peters and Katie Robertson, “Fox Stars Privately Expressed Disbelief About Election Fraud Claims,” New York Times, April 24, 2023.
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three contradictory propositions: Amna Nawaz, Courtney Norris, and Frank Carlson, “How Disinformation Around January 6 Riot Has Downplayed Violence, Divided Americans,” PBS NewsHour, January 5, 2022.
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questioned vote counts: Brandon Tensley, “The Racist Rhetoric Behind Accusing Largely Black Cities of Voter Fraud,” CNN, November 20, 2020.
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Trump’s big lie threatens: On Trump’s continuity of big lying, see Tal Axelrod, “A Timeline of Donald Trump’s Election Denial Claims, Which Republican Politicians Increasingly Embrace,” CNN, September 8, 2022.
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insurrectionists are forbidden: Analysis of the clear language of the Fourteenth Amendment; from all conceivable angles can be found in William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, “The Sweep and Force of Section Three,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 172 (2023). See also my essays on this topic on my Substack Thinking about…
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getting close enough to engineer a coup: I spell out this logic in “Not a Normal Election,” Commonweal, November 2, 2020.
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“free market of ideas”: A classic optimistic formulation is John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859; reprint Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978), 42.
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But it does not: This was made clear to me in Daniel Markovits’s analysis of the tradition in his unpublished dissertation “Toleration” (University of Oxford, 1998).
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outcompetes real news: A crucial case was the 2016 election. See Andrew Guess, Brendan Nyhan, and Jason Reifler, “Selective Exposure to Misinformation: Evidence from the Consumption of Fake News During the 2016 U.S. Presidential Campaign,” Center for the Study of Democratic Politics Working Paper (January 2018), 2, 4, 8; Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow, “Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 31, no. 2 (2017): 232. It remains the case that fake news outcompetes real news.
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and yet believe the most outrageous lies: Cynicism and naïveté are neighbors. Hannah Arendt wrote of a “mixture of cynicism and gullibility” as characteristic of “mob mentality.” Origins of Totalitarianism, xi, also 144.
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“build an environment”: Peter Pomerantsev, lecture at Swedish Academy, March 22, 2023. See also his books This Is Not Propaganda (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019), and How to Win an Information War (New York: Faber & Faber, 2024).
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affix the term big lie to Trump: I was able to do so only because of a push through and therefore access to major media, some of which were the following: my appearance on Reliable Sources, CNN, January 11, 2021; “The American Abyss,” New York Times Magazine, January 9, 2021; my appearance on The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC, January 7, 2021; my January 7, 2021, post on Twitter, (“1/10. The claim that Trump won the election is a big lie…”); my appearance on The Mehdi Hasan Show, MSNBC, January 6, 2021; “Authoritarians Like Trump Need Elections to Hold Power. They Just Don’t Need Votes,” Washington Post, December 12, 2020; “Trump’s Big Election Lie Pushes America Toward Autocracy,” Boston Globe, November 11, 2020.
