Ron Berger

This article was originally published on Wise Guys, Jan. 4, 2019.

Last November I was one of two speakers at a forum on “Fascism and the Holocaust in Historical and Contemporary Perspective” that was part of the Baeumler-Kaplan Holocaust Memorial Lecture Series at the University of Minnesota Duluth. I was there to talk about classical European fascism and the Holocaust; and Stas Vysotksy, my colleague in the sociology department at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, was there to talk about contemporary white-supremacist and neo-Nazi groups.

Stas and I spoke for about an hour, after which we entertained questions for about 45 minutes. It was not until the very last question that a young man asked the question that was on a lot of people’s minds (though they were too polite to ask): “Is Donald Trump a fascist?”

This was, to be sure, an unsurprising question, for it has been asked by others since the days of the 2015 Republican presidential primary. In a December 2015 issue of The Week magazine, for example, seven contemporaneous articles were cited from news sites—including The Atlantic, Commentary, Salon, and Slate—that mentioned the “F-word.” Even two of Trump’s rival Republican candidates, …

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Jeff Berger

This article was originally published on Wise Guys, Feb. 23, 2018.

Last January Donald Trump tweeted that immigrants to America should not be allowed to come from “shithole countries” like Haiti and nations in Africa. Instead, he said, he preferred people from countries like Norway. People on Twitter, including some who are actually from Norway, were quick to remark that, for many Norwegians, America may seem to be the shithole. Of course, Donald Trump doesn’t know the first thing about Norway. He probably doesn’t even know its reputation for being a socialist country or the fact that it is part of NATO. To help me better understand Norway myself, I read George Lakey’s Viking Economics: How the Scandinavians Got It Right-and How We Can, Too (2016).

Lakey is a Pennsylvania Quaker who studied in Oslo in 1960, where he married a Norwegian. Lakey taught for a time in both Norway and London. He is known for being an activist, especially as a pacifist dating back to the civil rights protests and anti-Vietnam War movement. Viking Economics is about Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Iceland—especially about his wife’s native country. (Finland is Nordic, but not Viking.) Norway ranks as the happiest nation on t…

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Ron Berger

This article was originally published on Wise Guys, Oct. 23, 3017.

In the latest issue of The American Prospect, long-time Democratic Party pollster Stanley Greenberg weighs in on what he thinks went wrong with Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Greenberg was the lead pollster for the 1992 and 2000 presidential campaigns and a consultant for the 2004 campaign. In his TAP article, he draws upon his experience as a consultant for the 2016 campaign, whose advice was not heeded, and the book, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, by journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes.

Greenberg is of course cognizant of the external factors that influenced the election results, such as Russian interference and James Comey’s announcements of the FBI investigations into Clinton’s emails. He is also aware that Clinton, in her campaign memoir What Happened, admits to some mistakes made by her campaign. Still, Greenberg thinks that Clinton soft-peddles what he calls the “malpractice” of the campaign, and he is particularly critical of campaign manager Robbie Mooks’s overreliance on “data analytics.” This methodology utilizes strategic models built from data on “the country’s 200 million voters, …

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Jeff Berger

This article was originally published on Wise Guys, Apr. 17, 2017

Recently I read an article by Sharon Noguchi in my local newspaper, the San Jose Mercury, about teachers helping students to distinguish between fake news and real news. The article focused on teenagers who naively get their news from the internet. The key paragraph in the article reads: “Lessons on fake news fit right into the state’s Common Core State Standards, which encourage primary-source research, discussion and critical thinking—answering the why questions over the what. Social studies teachers hope the debate will prompt a resurgence in their subject, which has taken a back seat in an era focused on math and English test scores, said Rachel Reinhard, site director of the UC Berkeley History Social Science Project. ‘If there ever were a mandate for meaningful history instruction, we’re in it right now’, she said.”

Knowledge of history is crucial to all analysis of what we read in the news. Without this knowledge, there is virtually no way to determine why something is happening. Everything that happens today is a consequence of the past. And yet, teenagers have very little first hand-experience of the past; and most of t…

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