Autocracy in America.
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I have been meaning to recommend this six-part series by Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev from The Atlantic, Autocracy in America.
It details not where we might go (although it does deal with that to some degree), but really is about where we have already been.
It includes discussion of Huey Long, who has come up in the comment section of late.
It is an informative, if depressing, listen.
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I just spent a bit of time reading the Wikipedia entry for Huey Long. I’m not really sure what to think of Long. Wikipedia has this tidbit:
According to T. Harry Williams, Long was “the first Southern mass leader to leave aside race baiting and appeals to the Southern tradition and the Southern past and address himself to the social and economic problems of the present”.
[…]
Williams concluded “the secret of Long’s power, in the final analysis, was not in his machine or his political dealings but in his record—he delivered something”.
Are we going to say this about Trump in years to come?
@Jay L Gischer: I wouldn’t think so. Trump is no Huey Long.
You want to read Alan Brinkley’s Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin and the Great Depression, if you can find it. He does a great job of summarizing all the various -isms floating around during the 1920s and 1930s.
Long was tricky, not a one-dimensional type like Coughlin, and he gave FDR a serious scare as the 1936 election approached. His assassination in 1935 prevented one of the great what-ifs of American history.
