Tara Zahra On Anti-Globalization After WWI

Her book is a fascinating look at the interwar years — with many parallels to today.

Tara Zahra is a writer and academic. She’s currently the Hanna Holborn Gray Professor of East European History at the University of Chicago. This week we discuss her hauntingly relevant book, Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars.

For two clips of our convo — on the starving of Germany during and after WWI, and what Henry Ford and Trump have in common — head to our YouTube page.

Other topics: growing up in the Poconos; her parents’ butcher shop; ballet her first career goal; her undergrad course on fascism that inspired grad school; how the Habsburg Dynasty was the EU before the EU; the golden age of internationalism; cutting off trade and migration during WWI; the Spanish flu; the Russian Revolution; pogroms across Europe; scapegoating Jews over globalization and finance; the humiliation at Versailles; Austria-Hungary chopped up and balkanized; Ellis Island as a detention center; massive inflation after the war; the Klan in the 1920s; Keynes; the Great Depression and rise of fascism; mass deportations in the US; autarky; Hitler linking that self-reliance to political freedom; Lebensraum; anti-Semitism; the Red Scare; the WTO and China; the 2008 crash; Trump’s tariff threats; rare earths; reshoring; fracking and energy independence; MAHA; Elon Musk and Henry Ford; Mars as Musk’s Lebensraum; and the longing for national identity.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: trans activist Shannon Minter debating trans issues, Scott Anderson on the Iranian Revolution, and Johann Hari turning the tables to interview me. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

From a fan of last week’s pod with Tom Mallon: “I’ve discovered so many great people through the Dishcast — and I’m putting together a reading list based on your interview with Thomas Mallon (whom I had never heard of).”

From a fan of the episode we did two years ago with James Alison:

I am writing to thank you for your work, which has had a significant impact on me. First you came for my politics, then you came for my atheism! Yes, your work opened me to the conservative political viewpoint, having been left of centre since gaining political consciousness in my late teens/early twenties (I’m turning 50 next year, so almost 30 years). Then, I was quite surprised myself to find myself actually entertaining it.

You weren’t the only influence; I stumbled onto Professor Barry Brownstein on Substack, and after reading Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom upon Brownstein’s recommendation, there was no turning back. I’m firmly right of centre now, and you were the one who opened the door.

Well, if that wasn’t shocking enough to me, then you had Fr James Alison on your podcast. I cannot recall what possessed me to listen to that episode of your many enticing and excellent episodes (I’m more of reader than a podcast listener), but listen I did. And WOW! If that didn’t open me up — no, that’s much too genteel; it smashed me open with Fr James’ entirely new conception of Catholicism.

As I wrote to Fr James, I was raised what I would call “tokenistically Catholic.” In other words, I was completely secular except that we were made to go to church on Sundays, and of course more often at Easter and Christmas. But there was no embodiment of Catholicism, unlike what came so through so incredibly powerfully from both you and James in your podcast. I could not then, nor now, identify any difference in my family’s life and the lives of those around me by virtue of us having being Catholic (other than going to church). Moreover, as a young adolescent, I couldn’t reconcile the stories of Jesus caring for the poor and the BMWs in the church car park. So I jettisoned “that whole thing” in my mid-teens.

From my current vantage point, I can see that my religious … awakening (I’m still grappling to find the right words for what I’ve been experiencing) started with a trickle maybe 15 or so years ago, but in the last year in particular, it’s become a tidal wave. I am engulfed, overtaken. And that podcast with Fr James was pivotal. One part that struck me with particular force, and still does, is when he said, “Reality is actually trying to reach out to you, to open you up to being able to enjoy it more.”

The astonishing thing about podcasts is how they reach people you’ll never know with an intimacy and immediacy hard to find elsewhere. Another fan of the Dishcast has some guest recs:

You continue to keep me coming back by talking to such a wide array of interesting people. You’re in the ranks of Joe Rogan, Bari Weiss, and a few others in terms of interviewing interesting people fairly — mostly fairly ;-). I do think the conversation with Walter Isaacson was quite good, though I think he (like a lot of people) tends to overstate Enlightenment rationality as the progenitor of basically every good thing that figures in the Revolutionary era believed, did, invented, wrote, etc. Deism is a much more nuanced phenomenon than is often recognized.

In view of the themes you’ve been discussing through the years, especially lately, I strongly recommend two interview subjects. First, James Davison Hunter, who teaches at UVA and directs the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. He coined the term “culture wars” in the 1990s with his book by the same title. More recently, he has written a really important book on democracy in American entitled Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis. It has been widely discussed, but not as much in more mainstream discussions, so your podcast could do us a great service.

Another author I recommend is the historian Thomas Kidd, who has written about a wide array of historical events and figures, including Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. (Your discussion with Walter Isaacson made me think of him.) Kidd’s Jefferson book, among others, has been widely praised.

Another responds to last week’s column:

It’s obviously great to hear about the ongoing “Crime Reduction Miracle.” But will the precipitous drop in murders affect what I’ve dubbed “The American Slaughter”?

Every year since 1995, and before that, about 5,000 young black males have been murdered in the USA by other young black males. I’ll help with the math: that’s 150,000 dead young black men in 30 years. Chicago alone has racked up about 10,000 dead YBM since 1995. The numbers are shocking — or would be if anyone ever heard them.

But as I say in my Substack post, black leaders and the national media either don’t realize the scope of the slaughter, or journalists are too chicken to bring up the touchy and politically taboo subject and ask the Obamas and Oprahs and New York Timeses of the land why they aren’t mounting a loud crusade to slow or stop it.

More on the numbers: roughly 60 percent of all U.S. homicide victims are black, as are 90 percent of their killers. When there were 20,000 murders a year in the USA, that means — roughly — about 12,000 victims were black. So more than half, roughly, were young black males — conservatively, 5,000 a year.

I’ve tried to get important pundits and crime experts to publicize the “American Slaughter” and talk about solutions, but so far I’ve had no luck. Given your longtime interest in the ups and downs of crime and violence, maybe you can change that.

I’ve tried to raise awareness of this. The book to be read on the subject is, of course, Facing Reality. When such a tiny sliver of the population is responsible for so much murder, it screams out for investigation, alarm, and concern. But racial politics prevents honesty; and the truth is too difficult for too many to hear. The victims of this liberal prissiness are young and black and male.

Another reader worries about an overcorrection:

I am happy, as you are, to see that the era of “Defund the Police” appears to be over. But we should be wary of a hasty return to the sort of excessively punitive policies that helped create America’s mass incarceration crisis. In the last sentence of your otherwise excellent piece, you wrote, “Bill Clinton won two [elections on the basis of tough-on-crime politics].” Indeed, he did — in part. But at what cost?

Clinton’s 1994 crime bill had a variety of sensible provisions — 100,000 more cops, VAWA, and an assault weapons ban — and some not at all sensible ones. That law enacted the mindless and merciless three-strikes-and-you’re-out policy into federal law. It incentivized states, via billions of dollars of federal funding, into gutting parole (by requiring inmates to serve 85% of their sentences).

Has the impact of the law on mass incarceration been exaggerated? Absolutely. Do many of the law’s detractors miss that some of the calls to intensify the drug war and toughen sentencing laws came from within the Black community? Again, yes. But as Clinton himself has acknowledged, the law really did put excessive numbers of people in prison for excessive amounts of time.

Other actions by Clinton on criminal justice are even harder to justify. As part of his embrace of capital punishment, he signed the AEDPA, which not only curbed death penalty appeals but federal habeas corpus rights in general, drastically increasing the chances of wrongful execution or imprisonment. He also signed the PLRA, which made it extremely difficult for prisoners to challenge brutal and unconstitutional conditions. And then there was the sad and embarrassing case of Ricky Ray Rector’s execution, which you once cited it as an example of Clinton’s “disgusting opportunism.”

There is a difference between effective crime policy and mindless cruelty. Clinton was all too often unable to distinguish the former from the latter. Today’s Democrats should not make the same mistake.

Agreed. But the crime figures under Clinton and after are impressive. Another recommends a book:

As a long-time subscriber, I humbly suggest you read Peter Moskos’ new book, Back from the Brink: Inside the NYPD and New York City’s Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop, and possibly interview him. The book is great, and highlights the importance of not only policing, but cooperation among various groups to reduce crime.

Another writes, “Your thoughts on Stonewall revisionism started giving me flashbacks to one of the earlier film reviews I wrote for my student paper back in the mid-1990s”:

First a bit of background: I grew up in a conservative Christian family — went to Christian schools, etc. — and I didn’t begin to seriously rethink my beliefs on a lot of issues until I had already been at university for a few years. My period of questioning coincided with my getting involved in the student newspaper, which I started writing for partly because it gave me an excuse to interview people and explore some of these ideas in a balanced way. (It was during this period that I got a review copy of Virtually Normal, which made a big impression on me.)

Along the way, I made a point of reviewing films that explored gay themes, including Nigel Finch’s Stonewall — which was supposedly based on Martin Duberman’s book of the same name.

I got a copy from the library as part of my “research” and was surprised to discover that, while the film had focused big-time on drag queens (which were very much in vogue in the 1990s), the book said they weren’t particularly welcome at the Stonewall Inn. As someone who was only newly familiar with the gay subculture, I couldn’t speak with any confidence about what “really happened” back then; I could only point out the discrepancy between the movie and the book that it was based on. And so I did.

Now I’m wondering if what the film did to the history of Stonewall was a precursor to what we’re seeing now, with the mid-1990s popularity of drag queens being imposed on the story the same way the post-2010s push for trans rights is being imposed on the story. Just wondering if you remember this film at all, or what you make of the discrepancy between the book and the film, and whether you think there’s any connection to the current revisionism?

Yep: that has been the line for quite a while now and it is a massive, conscious lie. Ironically, the 2015 movie, Stonewall, was far more accurate — and was assailed as white supremacist garbage by the queers. But even in the 2015 movie, they created a fictional black trans woman to throw the first brick. Gay history — largely because of queer theory — is essentially a series of propagandistic lies. If you took a poll today of gay men, I bet you over 90 percent would say that Matthew Shepard was murdered by two redneck strangers, rather than by his own meth-maddened occasional lover.

Another reader quotes me:

Note that the celebrated fact-checking department at The New Yorker did not check if “a trans woman threw the first brick at Stonewall.” No historian believes that.

The New Yorker could have told a story that would have furthered its “queer” agenda. The first riot in the United States of “LGBT” people was three years before the Stonewall riot. It was the Compton’s Cafeteria riot in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, and it really was a riot by trans women:

But The New Yorker has an even more important agenda than its “queer” agenda: always portraying New York City as the first and most important in everything. Acknowledging that San Francisco preceded NYC by three years simply would not do, so instead it modified Stonewall history to fit its needs.

Lastly this week, here’s a cri de coeur on the state of American politics:

When you suggest that the Democrats should respond to Trump’s overreaches with a kinder, gentler version of deportations, I’m sorry, but I have to ask: Have you forgotten which country this is? You must realize, by now, that there is no longer any good-faith desire to police our borders on the American left. It is no mere oversight that the Dems have never proposed any meaningful solution to this problem, or that they have tolerated the neglect of all manner of traditional left-wing priorities — like labor laws, affordable housing, even a fucking victory over Donald Trump — to keep this going, year after year.

I fear that illegal immigration has gradually become the sine qua non of the American left. Race has been their primary organizing principle since the Civil Rights Movement, when it replaced labor. This is true in a literal sense, with the Democrats’ dependence on racial identity politics to get people to the polls; but also in a deeper and more philosophical sense.

Through the American lens of race, European settlers brought white supremacy to the New World, and subsequent mass immigration by Europeans solidified the US into a predominantly white nation. Now, migration from non-European countries has become the left’s primary hope for expiating the original sin of America’s (artificial, colonial) whiteness. Ergo, the flow of illegal migration can never be reversed, because it is an enormous part of that national cleansing process, and in the pseudo-religion of the American left, the US can only redeem itself by finally extinguishing the whiteness that a white demographic majority must always intrinsically empower.

(To be clear, I am not endorsing a Great Replacement narrative, but it’s something particular to how Americans wrestle, intellectually, with the ghosts of our history.)

This ideological imperative is buffeted, I think, by a more benign mindset, in which less ideological liberals simply accept the narrative that we have always been a nation of immigrants; and (without digging too deeply into the history of immigration) believe it would be inconsistent with the nation’s character to reject any decent person who wishes to come here.

Of these two strands, I believe the ideological one will never let this go. I think many “nation of immigrants” liberals could be persuaded that there ought to be some rules, as long as those rules are based on reasonable goals, and not on bigotry. I am fairly sure that this is what happened when the Biden administration made its belated shift on border policy.

But the ideological left is another story. I went to the New School (and transferred out after 9/11) and graduated from a left-leaning law school in the Northeast. My parents are college-educated products of the 1960s, with blue-collar roots in NYC. I know how the American left thinks, and on this point its committed partisans will never change their minds. Never. What the campus New Left experienced during the Vietnam/Civil Rights Era led many to absolutely hate the American white working class. In short, they expected the union guys to rally to their causes, and when that did not happen, they felt utterly betrayed.

Their heartbreak became resentment, and they have carried this resentment though life. In academia and elsewhere, some have gone out of their way to create spaces where others who shared their resentments could flourish. I believe this explains, in part, how a toxic ideology took root on many American campuses.

When American factories closed and moved to China? Good. The laid-off workers deserved it for being racist and voting Republican. When young, working-class white Americans had fewer options than their parents had enjoyed after World War II? Too bad, so sad. They should have joined the anti-Vietnam War protesters and feminists if they’d wanted a seat at the table. There is a direct line, I think, from these gut feelings of betrayal (and “Fuck You”) among educated American leftists of the 1960s generation (including leading Dems in recent decades) and the callous left-wing indifference to the hardships of ordinary Americans who now compete with migrants for housing, jobs, and social status.

To close the loop: with a post-1960s leftist infrastructure that is divorced from (and often despises) working-class communities, the prospect of finally absolving the nation of its original sin provides a tantalizing ideological imperative to embrace mass migration. Given how aggressively racial the dialogue has become among younger leftists, I am convinced that activists will vilify and obstruct any attempts to slow the pace of migration.

The Democrats know this, and they won’t try. Even Bernie Sanders, who has dedicated his career to working-class issues and understands the inherent antagonism between open-ended mass migration and middle-class economic stability, abandoned the honest discussion of this topic a decade ago. It’s a dead issue for the Democrats, especially because they can always claim that the direct consequences of mass migration — high housing costs, fierce competition for jobs, racial strife — are reasons to elect more Democrats.

The sad truth, I believe, is that we have two incredibly spiteful and ambitious factions vying to control policy, and two parties that have failed to marginalize their worst impulses. The activist left is bitter and vilifies our past; the MAGA right is angry and idealizes our past; but neither side wishes to learn anything that contradicts its favored narratives — and they really do despise each other. As we have seen, each side will sacrifice the wellbeing of the country to stick it to the other.

I had hoped that the 1960s generation might mellow with age — or at least retire from politics on schedule! But it seems that they are hanging on as long as possible, and doing everything they can to bequeath their poison to the next generation.

I don’t know where we go now, as a nation, but I do not expect either side to prioritize the common good in the next few years. Maybe, as we rise, the older Millennials can do better — but first we need to figure out how to pay off our student loans and buy houses. In the meantime, if anyone is going to deal with the migration crisis (and I think we must), I’m afraid that effort will need to come almost exclusively from the right.

I fear you may be right. See you next Friday.

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