US

We are used to a tidy taxonomy of regimes. There are democracies, where power changes hands by election and is restrained by law, and there are dictatorships, where a single man or clique rules without restraint and the population has been stripped of any means of resistance. Most of the world fits somewhere on that line. But the United States has slipped into a condition for which the taxonomy has no ready word — a condition that, to my knowledge, has no real historical precedent. Here is a country that remains, at its core, a functioning democracy: it has independent courts, a parliament that can say no, a press nobody can silence by decree, fifty states with real sovereignty, and a citizenry that is armed. And this democratic country is led by a man and a faction whose views and methods can only be described as fascist — supported, it should be said plainly, by something close to half the population. The result is not a coup and not yet a dictatorship. It is a live, ongoing battle between a still-free nation and a clique that would very much like to make it unfree. And the most honest thing one can say is that the outcome of that battle is genuinely undecided. ...

When the naturalist Georges Buffon accepted his honors, he offered a sentence that has outlived almost everything else he ever wrote: the style is the man. He meant that the way a mind arranges the world is more native to it than any single thing it happens to believe. Two centuries later, a dissident sentenced to exile in the Soviet camps refined the thought into something colder and more useful. He said that his quarrel with Soviet power was not political but stylistic — and that this made it deeper and more irreconcilable than any disagreement over programs could ever be. I have come to think those two remarks, taken together, are the sharpest diagnostic instrument we possess for the present moment. They tell us to stop reading the platforms and start reading the style. And when you do that with the two men who currently hold the levers of global politics in their hands, something uncomfortable comes into focus: beneath their genuine frictions, Trump and Putin are stylistic brothers, and that shared style is the living substance of neo-fascism. ...

There is a lazy reflex, common to people who consider themselves sober, to file every new political ugliness under a familiar heading. We say “populism,” we say “the right turn,” we say “the usual demagoguery,” and having named the thing we feel we have understood it. I want to resist that reflex here, because I am convinced that what we are watching in the United States is not a louder version of something old. It is a genuinely new political organism, and like any new organism it deserves to be looked at directly rather than translated back into the vocabulary we already had. My claim is blunt and I will defend it slowly: Trumpism is a form of fascism. Not a metaphor for fascism, not “fascism-adjacent,” but a real, postmodern variant of the disease — one that has discarded the old machinery of violence and replaced it with an engine of lies, and one that, for the first time in history, has seized control of a country that is genuinely free. ...

Ending Russia’s war against Ukraine requires collective action on multiple fronts. We can categorize possible actions into three levels of impact: First-Order Measures, which are the most direct and high-impact steps; Second-Order Measures, which work indirectly or on a larger scale to weaken the war effort; and Third-Order Measures, which provide crucial support and humanitarian aid. First-Order Measures (Most Effective) These are the most immediate and powerful ways individuals and allies can help Ukraine defeat the invasion. They directly weaken Russia’s ability to wage war or strengthen Ukraine’s ability to fight. ...