UnHerd: Understanding alt-Right obsessions

Jack London had a fascist strain. The American author was a socialist, sure – but one who, as Orwell noted, was “temperamentally… very different from the majority of Marxists”. He worshipped the natural world, as well as the physical strength of ‘alpha’ males, and he was deeply impressed by the Social Darwinist writers of his day. [...]

Of course, there is always a danger in treating works of fiction – and especially words uttered by fictional characters – as synonymous with the prejudices of their authors. Yet some of the views expressed by Pathurst are of a piece with the Social Darwinist and racialist theories that were popular at the turn of the 20th century – theories which London also subscribed to. In an 1899 letter, London wrote that First Principles – a book by renowned Social Darwinist Herbert Spencer – had “done more for mankind, and through the ages will have done far more for mankind, than a thousand books”.[...]

But such insight was useful. He was the opposite of most contemporary progressive writers: their ‘wokeness’ rests upon their purported moral purity. As a result, fascism is today understood in a theoretical rather than emotional sense. Fascists are treated as if they were born rather than made; they are depicted in popular culture as a motley cast of deplorables who appear on the scene like ghosts, only to vanish again.

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UnHerd: How Farage outflanked everyone

Farage’s new vehicle, the Brexit Party, was only launched six weeks ago but is already a serious force. With more than 100,000 registered supporters, millions in funding and considerable potential in blue and red territory, Farage finally has something that he has never had before: a serious, professional, well-funded and well-organised movement. [...]

Farage’s return is a clear symptom of his opponents’ complete failure to make sense of our post-referendum world. As a result, they are baffled and wrong-footed by his return. Farage has outplayed them all. But rather than meet this moment with imagination, too many in our politics and media have shown that they have no imagination at all. Rather than chart a new course, many have sought shelter in the dusty attic from which they plucked the unsuccessful arguments of 2016.

Instead of meeting Farage-ism head on, his opponents have recycled uninspiring, managerial and incredibly weak arguments about process; about how parties are funded, about Arron Banks, about money. It is telling that this week a former Prime Minister, leader of the Labour Party and political heavyweight, chose to focus his attack against Farage on the issue of PayPal. Ideas have left the building. [...]

Most of them, as we know from several studies, share a cluster of intensely-held concerns; they care deeply about a loss of national sovereignty, the clear lack of control over immigration, a political system that no longer looks or feels responsive to citizens and a wider dismissal of the one thing that they cherish more than anything else: the national community.

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SciShow Psych: Why Do We Still Teach Freud If He Was So Wrong?

Freud is one of the most famous psychologists ever, but a lot of the things he taught are just… well, wrong. So why do we still spend so much time talking about this dude in psychology classes?

Bloomberg: Can a City Shrink and Thrive? It’s Complicated

Dutch researcher Ellis Delken, for example, compared happiness-survey scores in German cities and rural districts that had shrunk, grown or remained stable in population from 1990 through 2005, and found that residents of shrinking areas were on average happier than those in growing ones. In the U.S., Tufts University professor of urban and environmental policy and planning Justin Hollander looked at “neighborhood quality” scores in 38 big U.S. cities in the 1990s and 2000s from the Census Bureau’s American Housing Survey, and found that while growing cities scored higher than shrinking ones on average, there was a lot of heterogeneity, with residents of several cities that lost population over the study period (Atlanta, Boston, Minneapolis, New Orleans) giving high and rising neighborhood ratings.

Such surveys suffer from the limitation that, as Delken put it near the end of her paper, “the people that have left the shrinking cities did not take part in this study,” but they do indicate that life for those that stay behind can be perfectly pleasant (in the German shrinking cities, people reported being especially happy about public transportation and the standard of living). There are also lots of shrinking cities where those who stay behind are quite affluent: A brand-new article by Maxwell Hartt, a lecturer in spatial planning at Cardiff University in Wales, looks at the 886 U.S. cities with 10,000 residents or more as of 2010 where population had peaked before that year, and finds that 27 percent of them had average incomes higher than those of their surrounding regions. [...]

The next stage for Pittsburgh and Buffalo might be an end to population declines, meaning they would no longer be prosperous shrinking cities. The most oft-cited success story in the shrinking-city literature is probably Leipzig in eastern Germany, which started losing population in the 1930s, lost its industrial base after the reunification of Germany in the 1990s, and was lauded by Harvard economist Edward Glaeser in his 2011 book “Triumph of the City” for its “hardheaded policy of accepting decline and reducing the empty housing stock.” Since then, Leipzig has become the nation’s fastest-growing large city, and is even struggling with a housing shortage. As overall population growth slows, sharp turnarounds like that are presumably going to get rarer. From that perspective, where the Pittsburgh and Buffalo metropolitan areas are right now already looks pretty good.

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Politico: Why Pelosi is so good at infuriating Trump

“She’s smarter than him, and she’s tougher than him, and I think that bothers him,” said Rep. Dan Kildee (D-Mich.), a Pelosi ally. “It's hard to get inside that head of his and figure out what drives him, other than an oversized ego and an undersized sense of ethics.”

Trump doesn’t have a condescending nickname for the speaker as he does for other Democrats. He even appears to have a grudging respect for Pelosi, the first woman to serve as House speaker. He treats her as a peer who commands her chamber with a firm hand, and he knows she can deliver on votes, and that she is willing to call any bluff at any time. [...]

It was just the type of explosion that allows Democrats to portray the president as unreliable, tempestuous and impossible to negotiate with. And Trump's refusal to cut any deals with Democrats while they engage in oversight — something every president has to live with — backs up what Democrats have said since the 2016 campaign: Trump is only out for Trump, not the American public. [...]

And for Pelosi, the timing is perfect. As the drumbeat for impeachment grows within her caucus, she can argue that what they’re doing is already working. Trump clearly doesn’t know how to respond to the barrage of Democratic investigations; they’re winning in the courts and he’s throwing fits. So why bother with impeachment, especially when Democrats know that a GOP-run Senate isn’t going to remove him from office?

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