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Este blog trata basicamente de ideias, se possível inteligentes, para pessoas inteligentes. Ele também se ocupa de ideias aplicadas à política, em especial à política econômica. Ele constitui uma tentativa de manter um pensamento crítico e independente sobre livros, sobre questões culturais em geral, focando numa discussão bem informada sobre temas de relações internacionais e de política externa do Brasil. Para meus livros e ensaios ver o website: www.pralmeida.org. Para a maior parte de meus textos, ver minha página na plataforma Academia.edu, link: https://itamaraty.academia.edu/PauloRobertodeAlmeida;

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sexta-feira, 31 de julho de 2020

Library of Congress: Brazil: Hispanic Division Country Guide

Library of Congress

Brazil: Hispanic Division Country Guide

https://guides.loc.gov/brazil-country-guide/databases


Agronegócio e meio ambiente: separando o joio e o trigo - Marcos S. Jank

Agronegócio e meio ambiente – separando o joio e o trigo

 

Jornal “O Estado de S. Paulo”, Opinião, 31/07/2020.

 

Marcos S. Jank*

    

Em vez de negar os fatos, é hora de arrumar a casa coibindo o desmatamento ilegal e implementando o Código Florestal.

 

Aprendemos ao longo da vida que os fatos são os fatos e é a partir deles que temos de construir as nossas estratégias e ações.

 

Pois bem, é fato que a preocupação com desmatamento mudou de patamar no mundo, deixando de se limitar à pressão isolada de ONGs ambientais e entrando de forma estrutural na agenda de organizações internacionais, governos, bancos, investidores, 

 

A reação do agronegócio tem sido responder com outro fato, relacionado às conquistas ambientais históricas do País: o elevado estoque de áreas florestadas (dois terços da área do País), a matriz energética limpa e renovável, o Código Florestal rigoroso, as técnicas de agricultura de baixo carbono, os ganhos de produtividade e outros.

 

Esses são os fatos. Mas a questão que está sobre a mesa não é o estoque de conquistas do passado, mas sim o fluxo de problemas do presente e a impacto da percepção negativa sobre eles no futuro.

 

Falhamos em controlar o desmatamento, composto por 95% de conversão ilegal de floresta principalmente sobre terras devolutas (sem destinação). Falhamos na implementação do Código Florestal, que oito anos após sua assinatura continua sendo mais promessa do que prática, sem garantir a segurança jurídica de que precisamos.

 

Falhamos em não regularizar a situação fundiária e ambiental da Região Norte, sabendo que direitos de propriedade e ordenamento do território são pilares de qualquer processo de desenvolvimento. Falhamos nos mecanismos de “comando e controle” que precisam ser exercidos nas bordas do bioma Amazônico. A ideia de pagamento por serviços ambientais ainda é uma ficção, já que até aqui ninguém quer pagar por eles. A floresta em pé tem menos valor que a floresta derrubada, apesar das promessas da bioeconomia.

 

A agenda de política pública da Amazônia é vasta e complexa, acumulando décadas de conflitos e insegurança jurídica. No agro, os dois setores mais expostos são a soja e a pecuária de corte.

 

Por isso as maiores empresas desses setores assumiram compromissos de não adquirir produtos de seus fornecedores diretos que tenham inconformidades nas áreas ambiental e social. A Cargill e o Marfrig deram passos à frente nesse processo, prometendo eliminar completamente o desmatamento de toda a sua cadeia de suprimentos até 2030 (

 

A decisão dessas duas empresas abre a avenida para que grandes empresas do varejo, do processamento de alimentos e da produção agropecuária se unam para construir cadeias produtivas livres de desmatamento, com garantia de originação sustentável e rastreável – do bezerro ao boi terminado, no caso da pecuária.

 

Hoje já há nichos de mercado para soja não transgênica, carnes de origem vegetal e orgânica, certificações de “produtos locais” e de respeito ao bem-estar dos animais e dezenas de outros segmentos.

 

A pressão do consumidor final por produtos “livres de desmatamento” forçará as empresas a reorganizar suas cadeias de suprimento para ofertá-los. Mas ainda não se sabe se o mercado vai, de fato, oferecer um pagamento pelos serviços ambientais do produtor que tenha excedente de vegetação nativa que poderia ser convertido dentro da lei.

 

Também não sabemos se a construção de cadeias produtivas livres de desmatamento proposta por empresas como Cargill e Marfrig vai se tornar “referência” para outros players. Ou se essa será uma iniciativa isolada, com o produto gerado por desmatamento ilegal “escapando” para outros canais de distribuição do mercado doméstico, que é menos exigente.

 

Vale lembrar que a nossa soja é facilmente rastreável e basicamente dirigida à exportação. Já o nosso plantel de bois é enorme, muda de propriedade algumas vezes ao longo do ciclo produtivo e é basicamente destinado ao mercado interno. Não há dúvida que a pecuária é o nosso calcanhar de Aquiles no tema do desmatamento e onde temos de concentrar nossos esforços.

 

Estima-se que menos de 2% dos produtores sejam responsáveis por 62% do desmatamento ilegal na Amazônia e no Cerrado. Ainda que o governo seja o principal responsável pelo combate à ilegalidade, acredito que a pressão de clientes e financiadores falará mais alto. Pesquisa do BCG indica que 95% dos brasileiros esperam que as grandes empresas tenham mais comprometimento com questões ambientais.

 

Por isso, em vez de negar os fatos, é hora de arrumar a casa, começando pela união contra o desmatamento ilegal e a favor da implementação imediata do Código Florestal. Agricultores, empresas e associações do agronegócio deveriam ser os primeiros a carregar com força essa bandeira.

 

(*) Marcos Sawaya Jank é professor de agronegócio global do Insper.

John Lewis Final Letter - The New York Times, July 30, 2020


OPINION

Together, You Can Redeem the Soul of Our Nation

Though I am gone, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe.

 

By 

Mr. Lewis, the civil rights leader who died on July 17, wrote this essay shortly before his death, to be published upon the day of his 

The New York Times

  

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/opinion/john-lewis-civil-rights-america.html

 

While my time here has now come to an end, I want you to know that in the last days and hours of my life you inspired me. You filled me with hope about the next chapter of the great American story when you used your power to make a difference in our society. Millions of people motivated simply by human compassion laid down the burdens of division. Around the country and the world you set aside race, class, age, language and nationality to demand respect for human dignity.

That is why I had to visit Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, though I was admitted to the hospital the following day. I just had to see and feel it for myself that, after many years of silent witness, the truth is still marching on.

Emmett Till was my George Floyd. He was my Rayshard Brooks, Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor. He was 14 when he was killed, and I was only 15 years old at the time. I will never ever forget the moment when it became so clear that he could easily have been me. In those days, fear constrained us like an imaginary prison, and troubling thoughts of potential brutality committed for no understandable reason were the bars.

 

Though I was surrounded by two loving parents, plenty of brothers, sisters and cousins, their love could not protect me from the unholy oppression waiting just outside that family circle. 


Unchecked, unrestrained violence and government-sanctioned terror had the power to turn a simple stroll to the store for some Skittles or an innocent morning jog down a lonesome country road into a nightmare. If we are to survive as one unified nation, we must discover what so readily takes root in our hearts that could rob Mother Emanuel Church in South Carolina of her brightest and best, shoot unwitting concertgoers in Las Vegas and choke to death the hopes and dreams of a gifted violinist like Elijah McClain.


Like so many young people today, I was searching for a way out, or some might say a way in, and then I heard the voice of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on an old radio. He was talking about the philosophy and discipline of nonviolence. He said we are all complicit when we tolerate injustice. 


He said it is not enough to say it will get better by and by. He said each of us has a moral obligation to stand up, speak up and speak out. When you see something that is not right, you must say something. You must do something. Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself.


Ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble. Voting and participating in the democratic process are key. The vote is the most powerful nonviolent change agent you have in a democratic society. You must use it because it is not guaranteed. You can lose it.


You must also study and learn the lessons of history because humanity has been involved in this soul-wrenching, existential struggle for a very long time. People on every continent have stood in your shoes, through decades and centuries before you. The truth does not change, and that is why the answers worked out long ago can help you find solutions to the challenges of our time. 


Continue to build union between movements stretching across the globe because we must put away our willingness to profit from the exploitation of others.

Though I may not be here with you, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe. 


When historians pick up their pens to write the story of the 21st century, let them say that it was your generation who laid down the heavy burdens of hate at last and that peace finally triumphed over violence, aggression and war. So I say to you, walk with the wind, brothers and sisters, and let the spirit of peace and the power of everlasting love be your guide.


John Lewis, the civil rights leader and congressman who died on July 17, wrote this essay shortly before his death.

 

 

 Editorial New York Times, July 17, 2020:


https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/17/opinion/john-lewis.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article

 

 

E já que estamos falando de liberalismo, e de Samuel Moyn... - David Bell (NYRBooks)

The Many Lives of Liberalism

While today’s ideological cleavages are not as wide as those of the 1930s, they are nonetheless more pronounced than at any time since the cold war.


  • Samuel Moyn:
  • James Miller:
  • Helena Rosenblatt:
d_bell_1-011719.jpg

While the collapse of communism

That consensus seemed to hold even after the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia and the September 11 attacks. Now‚ in 2019, however, it is fracturing. Around the world, populist politicians on the right are winning elections by warning demagogically that representative democracy and human rights policies are too weak to protect hardworking, native-born families against threats from beyond their national borders—especially terrorists and migrant hordes. At the same time, a resurgent socialist left is gaining support by warning that liberal social democracy is too fragile to protect ordinary people from the ever more disruptive forces of global capitalism. While today’s ideological cleavages are not as wide as those of the 1930s, they are nonetheless more pronounced than at any time since the cold war.

As always, when the ideological landscape changes, so does our sense of the history behind it. Take, for instance, the subject of human rights. Back in the distant past of 2007—before the financial crisis, before President Trump—the historian Lynn Hunt published a pioneering study that presented the ascent of universal human rights as inexorable.

Three eventful years later, Samuel Moyn directly challenged Hunt’s account. In 

Each of the three books under review makes a renewed case for elements of the liberal ideal, but with a powerfully heightened sense of its fragility and of the contingent factors behind its historical development. James Miller, whose earlier work has ranged from political philosophy to histories of rock and roll to a biography of Michel Foucault, offers 


Strikingly, while the authors 

Taken together, the three books suggest that the Western liberal tradition may indeed have the strength and the resources necessary to withstand the political storms now gathering. But we should not conflate this tradition with the narrower set of mostly Anglo-American ideas that has been conventionally identified as its core, and labeled (mistakenly, according to Rosenblatt) “classical liberalism.” All three authors clearly believe that this narrower tradition has concerned itself too heavily with individual rights—above all, economic rights—as opposed to the common good. It has not paid enough attention to moral values and moral education, and it has not done enough to encourage broad democratic participation. Such arguments are not entirely new, but these books offer impressive new evidence and analyses. And at a moment when liberal democracy has shown itself rather more resilient in France and Germany (even with their current travails) than in Brexit Britain and Trumpist America, the case for looking to Continental sources for inspiration is particularly timely.


For James Miller, 

Nor did Athens launch a durable democratic tradition. After its fall, democracy as a concept fell into long centuries of discredit and eclipse, with most leading Western commentators, up to and including the American Founding Fathers, seeing it as barely superior to mob rule. America, Miller reminds us, was not founded as a democracy but as a republic in which wise elites would restrain unruly expressions of the popular will. Only with the French Revolution did an ideal of egalitarian, participatory government again gain prominence. Miller here singles out the urban 

Miller argues that this French plan represents perhaps the most promising model for democracy ever devised. In a set of short, clear chapters, he holds it up as a model against which to measure various later attempts to give citizens greater participation in governance. These include the British Chartist movement of the 1830s and 1840s, the Paris Commune of 1871, and even, in the West, early-twentieth-century hopes that opinion polling might give ordinary people more of a political voice. Miller also recognizes that today, profound social transformations have left the democratic ideal more imperiled than ever. Increasing inequality makes it more difficult for people to have their voices heard; government secrecy deprives them of the information necessary for political participation; and in an age of globalization many of the most pressing problems, such as climate change, require global, not local, solutions.

America’s current plight spurs Miller (drawing on F. Scott Fitzgerald) to some passionate and anguished prose:

This is what democracy in America often seems like: an elusive fantasy, forever out of reach, forever unrealized, even as its most eloquent bards, trapped in their own prejudices, are “borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

But he still holds out hope that some version of the Condorcetian ideal of local democratic restraints on national governance might yet continue to inspire contemporary democratic movements.


With Helena Rosenblatt’s 

It is this last definition that Rosenblatt takes aim at. She begins by noting that in ancient Rome, the terms “liberal” and “liberality” (

Most of this material is well known, but Rosenblatt builds upon it to argue that even in the nineteenth century, the supposed heyday of “classical liberalism,” the individualistic, laissez-faire ideology discussed in recent decades by so many scholars did not actually exist in anything like a coherent form. While some relatively obscure writers and politicians came close to it (Frédéric Bastiat in France, John Smith Prince in Germany), most self-described “liberals” did not. John Stuart Mill, the author of 

To the extent that a self-conscious “liberal” movement existed, according to Rosenblatt, it was not to be found in Britain and America but on the European continent, starting in the French Revolution. While respectful of individual rights, this liberalism was moralizing, elitist, and concerned with the classic philosophical question of how to construct a stable, enduring, moderate regime. In France, the writers Benjamin Constant and Germaine de Staël, who came to prominence in the Revolution’s last stages, developed a political program that remained much closer to the earlier meanings of “liberty,” with an emphasis on a paternalistic “government of the best.” In the nineteenth century, German thinkers led the way in developing a “liberal” Protestant theology as well as economic ideas that anticipated the policies of modern welfare states. These self-proclaimed liberals, Rosenblatt notes, were emphatically not democrats. They mistrusted the common people and advocated limited suffrage. Nor were they libertarians. They generally did not consider property a core right, and while they warned against government becoming tyrannical, they did not seek to minimize its powers. Constant defended laissez-faire in the economic realm; many others did not.

By the end of the nineteenth century, people who called themselves liberals had mostly made their peace with democracy, but remained deeply divided over other issues, including laissez-faire economics. Prominent British Liberal Party members like Leonard Hobhouse even argued that “true socialism serves to complete rather than to destroy the leading Liberal ideals.” While some liberals decried European imperialism, others defended a version of it that would spread “civilization” to supposedly benighted areas of the globe. Many defended eugenics and opposed women’s suffrage. The uniting factors, insofar as they existed, remained a strong moralism and an emphasis on education as essential to political progress. These same factors also pervaded the American liberalism that took shape in the early twentieth century under the influence of Woodrow Wilson, John Dewey, and the young intellectuals who banded together in 1914 to found 

If this is the true (“lost”) history of liberalism, then where did the idea of liberalism as an individualistic ideology tied to laissez-faire capitalism come from? In a fascinating epilogue, Rosenblatt argues that historians only established this misleading intellectual genealogy very late, in the mid-twentieth century. Critics had long tried to discredit liberalism by associating it with narrow material self-interest, but after World War II liberals themselves, seeking to distinguish their beliefs as sharply as possible from Communist totalitarianism, came close to agreeing with their detractors. Only a strong emphasis on individual rights, argued political philosophers like Isaiah Berlin, could save liberal states from sliding into totalitarian extremism. For the same reason these thinkers downplayed the contributions of French and German liberals, who had shown such a distressing inability to halt extremism in their own countries. Soon, “genealogies based on a canon of great thinkers were constructed and anthologies published. Founding fathers of liberalism were discovered.” And the true, complex history was forgotten.

Rosenblatt has written one of those rare academic books that, for all its brilliance, needed to be longer. For someone seeking to reevaluate Britain’s place in the history of liberalism, she devotes little sustained attention to British thought and politics. Locke, one of the prime targets of her revisionism, gets just three pages of close analysis. The epilogue, at only thirteen pages, cannot be more than suggestive. At times, Rosenblatt’s argument becomes so compressed that she fails to distinguish adequately between the history of the word “liberal” and the ideas we now associate with it. The two are, after all, separable.


Dan Edelstein covers

In a superb, erudite piece of intellectual excavation, Edelstein argues persuasively that already in the late Middle Ages, Catholic theologians had established that humans possessed inalienable rights, and that these rights did not depend on belonging to a particular state. In the sixteenth century, driven by the passions of religious warfare and the spectacle of Spanish conquests in the Americas, another series of writers added that, if necessary, rights could be defended by force, from beyond the boundaries of the state in question. So already by 1572, a conception of human rights broadly similar to what exists today had taken shape.

d_bell_2-011719.jpg

Edelstein’s skill as an intellectual historian lies especially in his ability to situate ideas in their broadest cultural and political setting. He recognizes that, by themselves, ideas possess no inexorable logic dictating how, and for what purposes, they will actually function in political debate. Like tools in a toolkit, ideas can have many different uses, depending on the purposes of the political actors who deploy them. In the sixteenth century, the idea of inalienable universal rights justified revolts against alleged tyrants and even the murder of supposedly unjust kings. Some writers also invoked it to decry the Spanish treatment of Native Americans. The burgeoning African slave trade, on the other hand, drew no condemnations for human rights violations. That would only come two bloody centuries later, in very different circumstances.

The early modern story Edelstein tells about human rights is a complex and surprising one. Although the preservationist regime of rights had come into existence by the late sixteenth century, it did not immediately become dominant in the Western world. To the contrary, many of the most sophisticated and influential writers of the day, associating it with the horrors of Reformation-era religious warfare, sought either to refute it or to establish the right to resist oppression on other, less volatile grounds. Thomas Hobbes argued that we in fact abandon our “natural rights” to a sovereign once we leave the state of nature and enter political society. Locke, by contrast, suggested that on leaving the state of nature we actually “transfer” our rights to the political community as a whole—but still do not preserve them. When American and French revolutionaries declared that men (but not women) possessed inalienable, universal rights, they were not building on Hobbes and Locke. They were reactivating a very different concept of rights that had arisen on the European continent two centuries earlier.

To prove this point, Edelstein conducts a bravura piece of “archaeological” investigation, which challenges a great deal of conventional intellectual history. He shows that in France, the bridge back to the concept of inalienable rights was furnished by the early economic theorists known as the Physiocrats, in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. They entirely rejected Hobbes’s distinction between the state of nature and civil society and returned to the older natural law tradition, but with a more explicit articulation of what were coming to be called “the rights of man.” The point of a proper constitution, they maintained, was not to transcend nature but to establish formal laws and rights as close to those of nature as possible. Americans, meanwhile, arrived at the same destination by an entirely different route. They turned to English legal scholars—especially William Blackstone (1723–1780)—who interpreted the “rights of Englishmen” as natural rights preserved and guaranteed by the unwritten English constitution.

Neither the Physiocrats nor the English lawyers had any desire to challenge the prevailing political order in their countries. But as Edelstein wittily puts it, they could develop ideas “with radical implications precisely because those implications were so far from their minds,” fashioning intellectual tools that revolutionaries would soon put to unexpectedly radical purposes. Edelstein acknowledges that before 1776, Americans chafing at the rule of the mother country frequently invoked Locke’s authority—he was, after all, the most famous English-language philosopher of the century. But in doing so they tended to rewrite Locke in a way that he and his closest followers would not have recognized.

While the French and American revolutionaries did not invent the preservationist rights regime that prevails today, it was their enshrinement of it in their founding documents that sealed its triumph over its Hobbesian and Lockean competitors and established it as a foundation for two centuries of democratic experimentation. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen did less to guarantee individual rights than its American counterparts, since it also stipulated that the sovereign nation could place strict limits on the exercise of those rights. In this respect, it helped to enable the ferocious political repression of the Terror of 1793–1794. Nonetheless, it was this document—and not the American Declaration of Independence or Bill of Rights—that remained the reference point for a vein of international legal scholarship that continued to present human rights as “supranational restraints on government action” through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This scholarship in turn lay directly behind the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and the human rights politics of the present day.

Since the 1970s, the idea of human rights as the basis for how states should behave has profoundly transformed international politics. (Donald Trump is the first American president in decades not to make the idea at least the rhetorical centerpiece of his foreign policy.) But as Edelstein demonstrates, this shift did not actually involve much intellectual innovation. Like the American and French revolutionaries before them, contemporary officials and activists have reached deep into the toolkit of Western political thought and turned old tools to new and more prominent purposes. The rise of human rights politics in the past few decades, in other words, was not, as Samuel Moyn’s work suggests, a seismic break with older political patterns, requiring a seismic correction that will return issues of social equality to a central position in political debate. The “preservationist regime” is not a recent invention. It is part of the intellectual atmosphere that surrounds us, and that we cannot do without.

Anyone reading these three books, particularly in the current grim political moment, will come away convinced of the fragile nature of the ideas underlying rights-based liberal democracy. They will grasp more clearly than ever that this liberal ideal, which seemed to triumph in the late twentieth century, had a tortuous history, with its successes dependent on a host of contingent factors. Readers will also be left in no doubt about some of the less savory things that often accompanied it. Miller pays due attention to the “carnival of atrocities” during the French Revolutionary Terror, even as France undertook its first grand experiment with democracy. Rosenblatt emphasizes the elitist, exclusionary tendencies inherent in the history of liberalism. Edelstein notes that, thanks to the concern with property of both the French Physiocrats and English common lawyers, the ideal of rights that triumphed in the eighteenth century can be seen as “the intellectual forefather of free-market fundamentalism.”

Yet at the same time readers will come away with the realization that the liberal ideal has a much richer, deeper, more varied past than they might imagine from accounts that stress only the supposed Anglo-American path to “classical” liberalism. Perhaps forms of liberal democracy built upon narrowly individualist notions of rights and liberty, and that deny most citizens the chance for meaningful political participation, are indeed too fragile to offer sufficient protection against unfettered capitalism and the rising inequalities we see today around the world, as well as against surges of angry populism. But there are other ways to think about liberal democracy, inspired by constitutional models that strive to maximize democratic participation, by forms of liberal thought that emphasize moral action and the common good, and by a vision of human rights that extends broadly and fully across the globe. The French Revolution, for all its radical excesses, offered one such vision, and a particularly powerful one. Despite its well-documented flaws, its ideals may still be able to inspire those seeking to bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice.

David A. Bell is Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor of History at Princeton. His book “Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolutions” will be published next spring.



References

  1. Inventing Human Rights: A History (Norton, 2007).

This post originally appeared on The New York Review of Books and was published January 17, 2019. This article is republished here with permission.

E já que estamos falando de fascismo - Samuel Moyn (NYRBooks)

The Trouble with Comparisons


The New York Review of Books
Bridgeman Images
Gustave Courbet: 

In the 1980s, German intellectual life was very much agitated by something called the “historian’s dispute” (

As it unfolded, the dispute concerned many things. It started with Nolte’s pernicious suggestion that the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann had declared war in 1939 on Germany on behalf of the Jewish people, as if that licensed what Germany did next. The dispute proceeded through Nolte’s contention that Adolf Hitler had acted in response to Josef Stalin’s prior atrocities, as if two wrongs could make a right. But a major part of the dispute turned on the propriety of comparison. It was about the plausibility of analogizing National Socialism to other phenomena before and after.

When Michiko Kakutani famously made an 

That comparison requires a careful ethic is the lesson three years on, for the sake of understanding and mobilization alike. It is surely fodder for some future ironist that, after our era of fearing Trump’s actions, he appears set in the current pandemic to go down in history for a worse sin of inaction. For all his abuses of the powers accorded the presidency in the prior generation, his failure to deploy them now seems more glaring. His hijinks in flouting the rule of law, though inexcusable, have not concealed the continuity of American governance, for good and for ill. (The Republicans have gotten their conservative judges and tax cuts, just as before.) William Barr is the reincarnation of 

In 2016, the impulse to draw comparisons to some of the worst episodes in European history may have been understandable and even useful. The future was opaque and elites were shaken by the election results. And there were strategic uses to such warnings. The horrors coming were likely, though no one knew their exact form. Sometimes, the sky does not fall in precisely the way the chickens fear, but it is still the right move to cluck.

Yet people forget that analogy had commonly seemed noxious, not necessary, in the previous century. The Weimar syndrome has often led to bad things, and the comparison to fascism had normally been agreed to be dubious. Nolte, for example, had made his name with 

In the midst of the German dispute in 1986, that comparison led him to intolerable excesses, both intellectually and politically. Comparison excused, rather than indicted. Martin Broszat of the Munich Institute for Contemporary History, an 

One of the deepest American critics of such apologetic comparisons at the time was the Harvard University historian Charles Maier. Comparative exercises were crucial, Maier observed, but they were potentially misleading, too—especially when analogies were made without the balance provided by its obverse, disanalogy. “Any genuine comparative exercise emphasizes uniqueness as much as similarity; it establishes what is common in contrast to what is distinctive,” Maier, as master of comparative analysis himself, concluded. “Comparison must be a two-edged sword.” Indeed, as one of the greatest modern historians, the Frenchman Marc Bloch, had argued fifty years earlier, the whole point of comparison, when responsible, is to isolate what is singular and thus in need of new attention. A comparison cannot be about ignoring distinctions, but must isolate them, or it is negligent or reckless.

The Nazi regime did indeed resemble other regimes. It was just that the similarities that conservative Germans cited were trivial. In Germany after 1933, the conductors “von Karajan and Furtwängler produced music; the post office delivered mail,” Maier conceded. So what? Of course, Nazi Germany was similar in some respects to other examples, but that is true of everything in the world—and banal. Everything, after all, shares an indefinite number of traits with everything else, and differs just as much. No two items one might connect are entirely identical, nor utterly distinct. What matters in responsible comparison are the reasons why you want to stress one or another similarity—and whether you take seriously major differences. Without acknowledging differences, comparison is partisanship, and not always in a good cause.

For Maier, the conservative Germans were obfuscating the fact that their ancestors, and no one else, had built the death camps. This made the Nazi project distinctive. In saying so, he wasn’t appealing to some mystical notion that things in general are “incommensurable” in the world, sharing nothing in common with one another. He wasn’t contending at all that comparison itself is never allowed. In fact, almost no one trades on that notion. There is no ban on analogy, which sits at the heart of human reasoning. If there is any risk in our public discussion, indeed, it is the opposite one of a surfeit of comparisons so thick that a day on the Internet does not pass without the shades of multiple pasts haunting every new event. Rather, Maier’s point was that analogy only works responsibly in tandem with disanalogy. The two depend on each other. And too much of the one without enough of the other, Maier insisted, is deceptive and ideological.

Now, on one level, our analogies since 2016 are very different from those made in the historian’s dispute thirty years earlier. Far from relativizing what made Hitler’s Germany special by comparison to other states, we have feared that precisely the distinctive evil of his regime, or of fascist horror generally, was back in our time. And so, one might assume that abnormalizing Trump is innocent of the same intellectual mistakes that normalizing Nazism involved in the historian’s dispute. It isn’t. It has turned out that riotous analogy without disanalogy is an error for those who want to impose stigma, and not only for those who seek to lift it.

For those doubtful about the fascism analogy for Trumpism—and I count myself as one of them—the point is to appreciate both continuity and novelty better than the comparison allows. Abnormalizing Trump disguises that he is quintessentially American, the expression of enduring and indigenous syndromes. A response to what he represents hardly requires a restoration of “normalcy” but a questioning of the status quo ante Trump that produced him. Comparison to Nazism and fascism imminently threatening to topple democracy distracts us from how we made Trump over decades, and implies that the coexistence of our democracy with long histories of killing, subjugation, and terror—including its most recent, if somewhat sanitized, forms of mass incarceration and rising inequality at home, and its tenuous empire and regular war-making abroad—was somehow less worth the alarm and opprobrium. Selective outrage after 2016 says more about the outraged than the outrageous.

It is no contradiction to add to this qualm that comparing our current situation in America to fascism also spares ourselves the trouble of analyzing what is really new about it. For all its other virtues, comparison in general does not do well with the novelty that Trump certainly represents, for all of his preconditions and sources. It is true that in the face of novelty, analogy with possible historical avatars is indispensable, to abate confusion and to seek orientation. But there is no doubt that it often compounds the confusion as the ghosts of the past are allowed to walk again in a landscape that has changed profoundly. Comparison is always a risky tool; it leads to blindness, not just insight.

But keeping us honest is not the only reason that contrasts are essential at every turn. The politics of comparison are routinely bad. The best defense of analogy is that it could help improve our situation, by attracting crucial allies, and plotting next steps. Arguably, comparison served some of those functions in the early Trump years. I confess I found the 

A friend of mine and another Harvard historian, Peter Gordon, 

Another colleague and friend, Jason Stanley, has argued judiciously in his book 

The only real question is whether, when the stirrings of fascism are redefined 

Stanley’s project, precisely because it is so open to the depravities of American history, is also open to political doubts. The choice of the word “fascist” to describe them both trades on the extraordinary horror people feel when that allegation is made and at the same time undermines it by making fascism so quotidian and ordinary in human affairs as to become something like their essence. And while there is no doubt that identifying the oppression at the heart of most US politics to date is worthwhile, it is unclear what the label of fascism adds in practical terms.

It may be unfair to worry that analogies to the collapse of Weimar or the coming of fascism are actually harmful. True, around the world and constantly in American life since the 1940s, politicians have used such comparisons to justify the worst preemptive steps, from ghastly suppressions of local student opposition to even ghastlier responses to global Communist threats. Acts in the name of preserving democracy, not just scuttling it, have been a nasty business. And there is room to argue that, this time around, American analogies with regime collapse have had grievous consequences. Not only have they helped rehabilitate some of those most responsible for Trump himself—like neoconservatives who found a new audience among liberals after losing control of the Republican Party—but they have also helped determine the fate of the Democratic Party, which chose a “Never Trump” candidate over a transformational one.

But the more devastating truth is that bad analogies have been less harmful than useless. Occluding what led to the rise of Trump (who posed as a victims’ candidate) and “Trump-washing” the American political elite before him who led to so much suffering are less serious mistakes than delaying and distorting a collective resolve about what steps would lead us out of the present morass. In no sense have the fascist comparisons made a productive difference in devising them. Charging fascism does nothing on its own. Only building an alternative to the present does, which requires imagining it first.

If, as seems likeliest, Joe Biden wins the presidency, Trump will come to be treated as an aberration whose rise and fall says nothing about America, home of antifascist heroics that overcame him just as it once slew the worst monsters abroad. Those who warned against the coming of fascism will congratulate themselves for saving the home of the free and redeeming the land of the brave, which somehow lurched towards the brink. They will cordon off the interlude, as if it was “an accident in the factory,” as Germans after World War II described their twelve-year mistake. Far from recognizing Trump as not just the product of and verdict on what came before, they will see his passing as the confirmation of the need to restore it. A few will wonder what happened to the discourse of fascism, and remember the disquieting possibility that fascist tendencies lurk everywhere in modern politics. But their books will sell in smaller numbers. Most will consider the danger past. This is, after all, America.

Comparison, even when controlled by the ballast of contrast, is a political act to be judged successful or not. We must clarify not just what is common when we compare, but also what is distinctive. And, in doing so, we must participate in bringing about a better future, not a worse one, if we can. Analogy and disanalogy with the past can assist in analyzing our present, but not if they allow indulging in a melodramatic righteousness, and luxuriating in our fears, all while preparing a terrifyingly normal future.