If you’re not yet a paid subscriber but regularly read, enjoy, or share Unpopular Front, please consider signing up. This newsletter is completely reader-supported and represents my primary source of income. And, at 5 dollars a month, it’s less than most things at Starbucks.

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When the Clock Broke is now out in paperback and available wherever books are sold. If you live in the United Kingdom, it’s also available there. The UK edition is also apparently available all over the world, too! I’ve received reports now of book sightings in places as far as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Christchurch, New Zealand. It seems relatively easy to find in Commonwealth countries and at English-language bookstores abroad.

I also do a film podcast with Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times. On our Patreon, we have a lot of bonus content, including a weekly politics discussion.

First off, I have to address a small controversy.—

I apparently caused a little bit of an upset online due to my teasing comments about English food. I’d theorized that the British people actually enjoy eating bad food: that it’s in keeping with their national character to shun sumptuousness and prefer modesty, and also to show their grit by getting down what others find inedible. This is surely due to some nostalgia for the sacrificing spirit of the War. But I will also remind you that sadomasochism was once known on the Continent as “the English vice” or “the English disease.” I qualified this immediately by saying I knew that there was a lot of great food available in the UK, especially in London, and that I am aware that British cuisine is undergoing a renaissance of sorts, with talented chefs using top-shelf ingredients and putting imaginative spins on pub classics. The thing is, I actually like a lot of British food: I am one of the few Americans who enjoys a full English breakfast, beans and all. A sandwich that’s just bacon on a roll seems rational to me, if in a slightly infantile way. And, of course, there is terrific ethnic food here: I had two of the best Indian meals of my life on this trip—and not in London. I found unassuming pubs in Cambridge with gourmet menus. On Friday, at St. John Bread and Wine in the East End, I had a lunch that consisted of Welsh Rarebit, cod roe with fried potatoes, rabbit offal and lentils, crispy pig’s skin with sorrel and chicory, and finally roast lamb with vegetables in the style of a “Sunday Roast.” It was all delicious. But be that as it may, I’ve also eaten absolutely disgusting and flavorless things on my trips here. I had something called “field mushrooms on toast” at one of the most charming-looking pubs I’d ever been to in London that looked like something that came out of the Exxon Valdez disaster and tasted like it, too. I stared in astonishment at a breakfast sandwich consisting of egg, bacon, and sausage, which somehow managed to have no flavor. Usually, breakfast meats, even at their lowest quality, deliver the cheap satisfactions of salt and savory, but I’ve bitten into bits of bacon here that seemed to have been boiled at length to remove any hint of seasoning. The relationship of British cooks to salt in general is curious: it is totally absent and, then, suddenly, delivered in overpowering concentrations. So, I submit that, yes, while British food has improved a lot, and the British are generally pretty adventurous and cosmopolitan eaters, they do revert, from time to time, at least, to their old, vile comforts.

Also, for what it’s worth, my remarks were meant to be in good fun.

All of New York thrums with Knicks fever. I recommend two essays: one by Vinson Cunningham in The New Yorker on the excitement of these Knicks—

I admit it: I do feel a kind of nativist, automatic kinship with whoever’s wearing the blue and orange, something to do with my everlasting allegiance to the city-state of New York. I try (and, just ask around, often fail) in life to restrain my judgments and act fairly and think before I speak; when the Knicks are on, playing prettily or not, I am a foulmouthed partisan, pumping my fist and pacing the living room, issuing imprecations at the team’s opponents (in the privacy of my home, I speak about the Philadelphia 76ers’ center Joel Embiid in ways that should embarrass me, but don’t), or at whichever Knick is playing poorly and souring my mood. My connoisseurship plays second fiddle to my status as a member of the clan.

—and one in a more elegiac mode by Thomas Beller from several years ago in the same publication about Latrell Sprewell, troubled star of the last Knicks team to reach the Finals:

Using a word as nebulous as “tone” when assessing a basketball player is almost heretical these days. It’s the era of analytics, moneyball, and basketball conferences at M.I.T. I’m confident that the numbers would bear out my claim about Latrell’s significance, at least to a point. But what makes me love him goes beyond basketball.

There was something about Latrell that was from another time. It’s not so much that he had an old soul. It’s more that his game, and especially his game face, was Old Testament. There was something harsh and unforgiving about him. He had a face that had seen the plagues and the Red Sea part. He was leading the Knicks out of the desert.

I somehow got on the subject of Sprewell with the author Scott Spencer, who told me that he had pitched Sprewell as a subject to Jann Wenner back when Sprewell was a Knick. He said that Wenner lowered his forehead to his hand and said, “You’re the fourth middle-aged Jew who has pitched Sprewell to me this week.

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Do I think Platner is actually a Nazi? No, not really. I think he’s an adventurer type and a bit of a lost soul. Exactly the kind of person who might start in a privileged or, at least, genteel milieu and then seek out more authentic and exciting experiences, like, say, joining the military and going to war. Historically, those kinds of people often became Nazis or fascists, but they could also become any number of other things—Communists, high-flying businessmen, international aid workers, etc. I think Simone de Beauvoir nails this type in her Ethics of Ambiguity:

Hoping for no justification, he will nevertheless take delight in living. He will not turn aside from things which he does not believe in. He will seek a pretext in them for a gratuitous display of activity. Such a man is what is generally called an adventurer. He throws himself into his undertakings with zest, into exploration, conquest, war, speculation, love, politics, but he does not attach himself to the end at which he aims; only to his conquest. He likes action for its own sake. He finds joy in spreading through the world a freedom which remains indifferent to its content. Whether the taste for adventure appears to be based on nihilistic despair or whether it is born directly from the experience of the happy days of childhood, it always implies that freedom is realized as an independence in regard to the serious world and that, on the other hand, the ambiguity of existence is felt not as a lack but in its positive aspect.

In other words, the kind of guy who would like to flaunt his lack of respect for the serious world’s norms around Nazi symbols. Moreover, de Beauvoir goes on to show their political flexibility, which comes from the very spirit of adventure: “They do not take politics seriously. They thereby allow themselves to be collaborationists in ‘41 and communists in ‘45, and it is true they don’t give a hang about the interests of the French people or the proletariat.” Again, there were plenty of these types of guys on both sides in the War.

What’s more, the adventurer’s spirit also explains Platner’s attitude towards women and love—his Don Juanism, capriciousness, and recklessness. De Beauvoir: “The taste or conquest is often subtly tied up with the taste for possession. Was seduction all that Don Juan liked? Did he not also like women? Or was he not even looking for a woman capable of satisfying him?” Good questions.

Many people on the left are subcultural bohemians with similar aspirations, and find such an attitude appealing and worth emulating. They like his rejection of the hypocritical standards of taste and behavior of the Beltway dorkwads. But it’s why I feel ambivalent about Platner: I don’t think he’s a very serious person. There’s an air of buffoonery about the whole thing. I’ve met many of these private-school Don Juans in my life, and I don’t particularly like them. They are usually real sons of bitches. Now, that’s not necessarily a bad thing: seriousness itself, the sheer givenness of society’s norms, has to be rejected if you are going to be an authentic person who thinks for yourself. But hopefully, then you ethically dedicate your life also to the freedom of others, not just your own. Does Platner give a shit about anybody except Platner? I guess I don’t buy the performance. Can an adventurer be a good guy to have on your side? Sure, at least they are not cowards. But I don’t entirely trust him. Maybe, because he’s certainly lying about the tattoo.

Attached below is the paper I wrote for “The Past, Present, and Future of the Trump Era: A Mini-Conference.” It is basically a more formalized and academic development of one strand of argument in When the Clock Broke, namely that the Savings & Loan crisis and the recession of the early 1990s demonstrated a lot of the same mechanisms that were visible in a much more stark and drastic way in 2008, and eventually, 2016.

I’d like to thank my commentator David Edgerton of King’s College London for his insightful remarks and Caroline Johnston of Cambridge University for running the terrific discussion. And thank you to all the attendees for your helpful questions and comments. A very special thanks again to Gary Gerstle for the invitation to Cambridge — it was really a wonderful and stimulating event — and we’re all very much looking forward to his next book.

Here’s a sample that summarizes the argument in my paper:

This “first neoliberal crisis,” as one might call it, demonstrated in nuce similar mechanisms we would come to see in the social and political crises that beset the United States in the early twenty-first century: namely, the Great Recession, right-wing populism, and the destabilizing and authoritarian presidencies of Donald J. Trump. First, a speculative bubble caused by deregulation of the financial markets bursts; then, the crisis spreads to the real economy; and finally, there is a political reaction. Rather than manifesting as class struggle per se, these politics took on a populist and plebiscitary form: rage at the perceived and real intermeshing of political and economic elites, as well as the related attack on representatives and even representational government itself as hopelessly corrupt and beholden to “special interests.” The public turned towards expressions of strongman rule that purported to short-circuit the interplay of interest group politics and slow-moving bureaucracy. A former federal financial regulator and the author of a retrospective book on the Savings & Loan collapse presciently wrote, “History repeats, said Karl Marx, discussing the rise of Louis Napoléon; the first time it’s tragedy, and the second time it’s farce. For all the damage done, this tale had a heavy leavening of farce from the beginning. Repetition — and it could happen — would be tragedy.”

If I were to rewrite it today I’d mention in more detail some things I missed or passed over too quickly:—

• There’s a complex story about race here that I did not address. I mention that the House reforms of the 1970s that ultimately assisted in deregulation being passed bypassed the Southern populist Democrat committee chairs who once had so much power, but I did not go into the relationship between the Thrift industry and redlining. Many of the congressmen who were defended the Savings & Loan as a bulwark of community-centered finance against predatory big banks were also ardent segregationists. In addition, when the bailouts came in the early 1990s, there was notably different treatment in institutions that served black communities and white. For instance, while hundreds of banks failed in the early 90s, for some reason, Freedom National Bank of Harlem was treated relatively harshly: it’s depositors were given up to the $100,000 FDIC cap, but this was unusual as federal regulators helped customers at other banks transfer their accounts to new banks so they wouldn’t lose anthing.

• There’s an even closer connection between the mechanism of the S&L crisis and the subprime mortgage crisis than I let on. Lewis Ranieri of Salomon Brothers devised the system of packaging mortgages into bonds specifically as a product to sell to ailing Thrifts. This practice he labeled “securitization” and these were the one-day-to-be infamous Collateralized Mortgage Obligations (CMOs.) There was another round of deregulation in the mid 1980s that facilitated this, which overturned the rule against private banks selling mortgage-backed securities without government oversight.

• I wish I had made stronger connections between finance and the productive economy: the deregulation was partly to deal with the shortage in housing starts that the financial issues of thrifts were causing in the late 70s and early 80s and, ultimately, it resulted to a crisis of overproduction—a glut—in commercial real estate. I think you can tell a pretty orthodox Marxian story about capitalist crises there.

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If you’re not yet a paid subscriber but regularly read, enjoy, or share Unpopular Front, please consider signing up. This newsletter is completely reader-supported and represents my primary source of income. And, at 5 dollars a month, it’s less than most things at Starbucks.

Subscribe now

When the Clock Broke is now out in paperback and available wherever books are sold. If you live in the United Kingdom, it’s also available there. The UK edition is also apparently available all over the world, too! I’ve received reports now of book sightings in places as far as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Christchurch, New Zealand. It seems relatively easy to find in Commonwealth countries and at English-language bookstores abroad.

I also do a film podcast with Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times. On our Patreon, we have a lot of bonus content, including a weekly politics discussion.

And did those feet in ancient time,
Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold:
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.

—William Blake, from the preface to Milton: a Poem

I write to you from Cambridge, England, where I’m set to be a part of a conference put on by the history department on Trump and Trumpism. I arrived a few days early to catch the “The United States of America at 250” event, which was largely dedicated to discussions about the meaning of the Declaration of Independence. The last panel, featuring my friend Jamelle Bouie, was entitled “Does the Declaration of Independence still matter?” I’m not sure how I would answer that, honestly. As I watch the debacle around America’s 250th Anniversary celebrations unfold in the States, the answer seems simultaneously to be “not at all” and “very much so” — no one seems to care about it anymore, but it seems urgent. Particularly that second paragraph, which begins, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…”

I’ve written in the past about this regime’s ideological assault on the Declaration, including Vance’s “Anti-Declaration” and Eric Schmitt’s National Conservatism conference speech. During the discussions, I couldn’t help but think of M.E. Bradford, the Southern Agrarian reactionary who inspired the paleoconservatives, and his take on Jefferson’s document in his 1976 Modern Age essay “The Heresy of Equality”, published the year of the nation’s bicentennial. Bradford was responding to Harry Jaffa’s essay “Equality as a Conservative Principle,” which argued for Abraham Lincoln’s interpretation of the Declaration and that equality of natural rights was the basis of government by consent of the governed. For Bradford, this was all Yankee and Puritanical nonsense, promulgated by dictatorial fiat by the “Caesar” Lincoln. I quote from my own book:

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If you’re not yet a paid subscriber but regularly read, enjoy, or share Unpopular Front, please consider signing up. This newsletter is completely reader-supported and represents my primary source of income. And, at 5 dollars a month, it’s less than most things at Starbucks.

Subscribe now

When the Clock Broke is now out in paperback and available wherever books are sold. If you live in the United Kingdom, it’s also available there. The UK edition is also apparently available all over the world, too! I’ve received reports now of book sightings in places as far as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Christchurch, New Zealand. It seems relatively easy to find in Commonwealth countries and at English-language bookstores abroad.

I also do a film podcast with Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times. On our Patreon, we have a lot of bonus content, including a weekly politics discussion.

Next Tuesday, June 2nd, I will be presenting a paper as part of the The Past, Present, and Future of the Trump Era mini-conference at Cambridge University. My paper is entitled “How the Clock Broke: The Recession of 1990-91 and its Political Consequences.” I’ll share the whole thing after the conference, but for now, here is the final intro:

Shortly before he was first elected in 2016, Donald Trump declared, “If you remember the early ‘90s, other than, I would say, 1928, there was nothing even close. The conditions facing real estate developers in that early ‘90 period were almost as bad as the Great Depression of 1929 and far worse than the Great Recession of 2008. Not even close.” The fact-checkers fell on the statement and pronounced it another one of Trump’s doozies. Looking at the national aggregates they were correct: the peak-to-trough employment contraction in 2007–09 was several times what it had been in 1990–91, and the second downturn lasted longer. But Financial Times columnist Matthew Klein, in a piece that ran a few days later, observed that the fact-checkers had missed what Trump was saying. The period coincided with Trump’s own near-ruinous bankruptcies, and from the parochial perspective of a Manhattan real estate developer such hyperbole was understandable: New York City lost ten percent of its total employment between 1990 and 1992 and did not recover to the pre-recession level until the end of 1998. If you look at a chart of the total non-farm employment in the New York metropolitan area, the supposedly booming 1990s looks like a wide valley. Whatever happened, it was etched permanently in the brain of Donald J. Trump. And, as I will argue, the period left its traces on the nation as a whole, albeit in ways that remained imperceptible.

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Now I have to admit to being wrong. Back in December, I wrote in The Nation:

At long last, President Donald Trump’s grip on the GOP is slipping. There’s no Götterdämmerung, no dramatic denouement, no operatics in the dictator’s bunker. Trump is being dragged down by normal politics: He’s simply unpopular, dogged by a sex scandal and a lousy economy. The laws of gravity, it turns out, apply on Planet Trump. He’s a lame duck, and he’s just plain old. After dominating the news for a decade, he finds himself yesterday’s man. And like the little Nazi in Cabaret, Nick Fuentes and his army of groyper toads are croaking out “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.”

I’ve also commented several times that the normal “Madisonian” dynamics of the US system were asserting themselves, and ambitious politicians would want to get out from under a wobbling Trump. Not so fast, John! I hate being called a pundit, and this is part of the reason why: you always end up with egg on your face when you make predictions.

To demonstrate how strange the present situation is, let’s turn quickly to history. Usually, a low approval rating means lower presidential control of his party and a fracturing caucus and coalition. Truman, with a low 30s approval rating, could not get much of his Fair Deal pushed through despite Democratic control of both houses; LBJ’s massive coattails couldn’t save him as he sank into the quagmire of Vietnam; Democrats couldn’t get far enough from Carter, and one big one, a Kennedy no less, tried to primary him; H.W. Bush faced a strong primary challenge even after a successful war; W.’s second term agenda fell flat as his lame-duckness kicked in fast; and most recently, Biden struggled with his agenda as it became clear to his party how unpopular he was after 2022.

So, what makes Trump special? He really leads a movement more than a party; that movement is the dominant force in the GOP, and his voice still dominates the movement. “I am MAGA,” he once declared, and he’s right. That charismatic domination of his party is part of the reason people like me turned to the fascist precedent when analyzing Trump. But there’s more to the story. “37 percent” means something much different in a world with such a fragmented media environment and polarized politics. Red States and Blue States are culturally different worlds in a way that they were not for most of the 20th century. As you’ve seen, incumbents need to fear a primary from their right much more than the opposing party. You can be close to 90 percent approval in your party and have a shitty national approval because you have zero Democratic support, and all the independents abandoned you. We have something different going on here than the party systems that historians and political scientists studied and made their assumptions about.

On the one hand, Republicans are probably just cruising for a bruising: by sticking with an unpopular president, they are gonna get walloped in the midterms. People like to say blue state liberals are out of touch, but MAGA land may be in for a rude awakening as they find out much of the country really hates their guy. But there are bigger problems afoot here. The system is supposed to ultimately reward the popular will. What’s happening is that the us constitutional order is becoming less and less representative. With the gerrymandering permitted after recent Supreme Court rulings, Democrats may have to run some 4 percent ahead of Republicans for a bare majority in the House. This is undemocratic and even dangerous. We can have a party in power that doesn’t respond to public opinion and is just constantly caught up in its own propaganda and paranoia; Yet another reason to bring up the dictatorships of the past when looking at Trump and his party. For now, the penalty for disobeying Trump looks way higher than obeying—bad stuff if you are worried about Republicans doing something illegal come midterm time.

The big hope now is that the Trump dictatorship within the GOP is simply punished by the voters in November. It’s happened before: Trump has been kind of a Catch-22 for the GOP in the past, where they can’t win without him—can’t get out of a primary without MAGA—but can’t win with him—the MAGA candidate fucking sucks and loses. But if the penalty isn’t high enough, party-dictatorship may become a structural and systematic feature of our politics and the Trumpzeit will linger on, perhaps long after his death.

Here is Part 1, in case you missed it.

If you found this conversation interesting, please sign up to support the Partially Examined Life. It’s a terrific podcast that covers some of the most difficult things ever written in an accessible and generous way—without dumbing it down at all. I’ve listened and learned a ton from them over the years.

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Habermas’s books are famously long and difficult, but I think this is the best and most accessible summation of his project as a whole and how he differed from his direct antecedents and contemporaries. One way to characterize Habermas’s idea of modernity is that it’s the era that is an issue for itself: the specific meaning of the present time becomes important to discover or create. The other way to think about modernity is that it must provide its own criteria; it can’t turn to the models of the past—tradition, religion, authority—as definitive guides for politics, ethics, or art. As Habermas puts it, “it has to create its normativity out of itself.” You might think that sounds extremely abstract and dry, but Habermas actually begins with a discussion of Baudelaire, avant-garde art, and fashion as an entry point into modern consciousness.

Baudelaire the art critic emphasizes an aspect of modern painting: “the ephemeral, the fleeting forms of beauty in the life of our day, the characteristic traits of what, with our reader’s permission, we have called ‘modernity.’” He puts the word “modernity” in quotation marks; he is conscious of his novel, terminologically peculiar use of the term. On this account, the authentic work is radically bound to the moment of its emergence; precisely because it consumes itself in actuality, it can bring the steady flow of trivialities to a standstill, break through normality, and satisfy for a moment the immortal longing for beauty — a moment in which the eternal comes into fleeting contact with the actual.

I first read this book many years ago, just after college, and I wonder if it burrowed into my unconscious. I realized that this description of the modern approach to history, which he calls “effective history,” is exactly what I was trying to do with my book and my study of history in general: “[T]he future-oriented gaze is directed from the present into a past that is connected as prehistory with our present, as by the chain of a continual destiny.”

I hope you enjoy Part 1 of our discussion, and please do sign up for PEL. It’s a terrific podcast that has helped me understand a great deal of very difficult philosophy and theory over the years.

If you’re not yet a paid subscriber but regularly read, enjoy, or share Unpopular Front, please consider signing up. This newsletter is completely reader-supported and represents my primary source of income. And, at 5 dollars a month, it’s less than most things at Starbucks.

Subscribe now

When the Clock Broke is now out in paperback and available wherever books are sold. If you live in the United Kingdom, it’s also available there. The UK edition is also apparently available all over the world, too! I’ve received reports now of book sightings in places as far as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Christchurch, New Zealand. It seems relatively easy to find in Commonwealth countries and at English-language bookstores abroad.

I also do a film podcast with Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times. On our Patreon, we have a lot of bonus content, including a weekly politics discussion.

Unable to find any good examples at the antiquarian book fair, I was reading memoirs about Romantic writers online. Here’s a section from the Journal of the conversations of Lord Byron: noted during a residence with his lordship at Pisa, in the years 1821 and 1822, dealing with the end of his ill-fated affair with Lady Caroline Lamb, that I like for its acerbic wit. Lady Caroline stole into Byron’s apartments when he was absent and wrote “Remember me” in one of his books. Here’s how he responded:

“ Yes! I had cause to remember her; and, in the irritability of the moment, wrote under the two words these two stanzas : —

Remember thee, remember thee!

Till Lethe quench life’s burning stream,

Remorse and shame shall cling to thee,

And haunt thee like a feverish dream!

Remember thee! Ay, doubt it not;

Thy husband too shall think of thee;

By neither shalt thou be forgot,

Thou ***** to him, thou ***** to me!”

In most collected versions of the poem, that line with the asterisks reads "Thou false to him, thou fiend to me,” but it appears His Lordship may have used some stronger language in the heat of the moment. To be fair to the young Lady Lamb, I’m sure Byron, whom she once called “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” was no peach himself

Once again, I’ll be presenting a paper as part of “The Past, Present, and Future of the Trump Era: A Mini-Conference” at the University of Cambridge on June 2nd. Tickets are available online. As I’m working on the paper itself, my roundup this week may be a little shorter; most of my reading time has been consumed by economics papers and FDIC reports that I doubt the casual reader will much enjoy.

I can give a little bit of a sneak preview of the paper’s contents, though. I’m using the opportunity of being in an academic environment to make some arguments about the economy, which were implicit in When the Clock Broke, more formal and explicit. I’m also going to go into more detail about the Savings & Loan, junk bond, and leveraged buy-out manias, which I was only able to touch on in the book. Here’s the thesis so far:

The recession of 1990-91 is not generally thought of a signal event in American history. On paper, it was relatively mild compared to other contractions and crises in the 20th and early 21st centuries: the unemployment rate peaked at 7.8 percent. By official measures, it was short, lasting just 8 months. Only the 2001 downturn would be shorter and less severe, according to the traditional metrics. Although political scientists cite the recession as the primaryu reason for his defeat, it does not figure high in the conventional wisdom about George H.W. Bush’s loss in 1992. Bush’s broken “no new taxes” pledge is what is popularly remembered as the reason the incumbent failed to win reelection. Moreover, the recession is now considered to be a mere blip before the outstanding economic performance of the balance of the decade. I believe this appearance of insignificance is deceptive.

It’s the contention of this paper that the economic downturn of the early 1990s, the larger set of economic problems it bodied forth, and its peculiar set of political effects revealed deep structural issues in the political economy of the United States that were papered over during the prosperous Clinton years. This “first Neoliberal crisis,” as one might call it, demonstrated in nuce similar mechanisms that we would come to see in the social and political crises that beset the United States in the early 21st century: namely, the Greast Recession, right-wing populism, and the destabilizing and authoritarian presidencies of Donald J. Trump. First, a speculative bubble caused by deregulation the financial markets bursts, then, the crisis spreads to the real economy, and finally, there is a political reaction.

The specific form of this political reaction is important to recognize. Rather than manifesting as class struggle per se, these politics took on a populist and plebiscitary form: rage at the perceived and real intermeshing of political and economic elites, as well as the related attack on representatives and even representational government itself as hopelessly corrupt and beholden to “special interests.” In its place, the public turned towards expressions of strongman rule that purported to short-circuit the interplay of interest group politics and slow-moving bureaucracy to make direct interventions in the economy. As a former Federal financial regulator and the author of a retrospective book on the Savings & Loan collapse presciently wrote, “History repeats, said Karl Marx, discussing the rise of Louis Napoléon; the first time it’s tragedy, and the second time it’s farce. For all the damage done, this tale had a heavy leavening of farce from the beginning. Repetition—and it could happen—would be tragedy.”

Speaking of the economy, a reader reminded me that, in addition to the privatizations in the 1930s I discussed in my series on the Nazi economy, there was a prior wave of privatization in Fascist Italy. The same historian who looked at the Nazi case, Germà Bel, wrote a paper called “The First Privatization: Selling SOEs and Privatizing State Monopolies in Fascist Italy (1922-1925.)” You hear the same old thing bout the Fascists in Italy as about the Nazis: they were actually socialists. The evidence in this case appears strong on a superficial level: Mussolini did indeed begin his political career in the Socialist Party, and there was a strong anticapitalist and syndicalist tone to early fascist pronouncements. But they sure changed their tune. Bel writes:

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Welcome back to another Unpopular Front article on my favorite topic: the Nazis!

In Part 1, I looked at the theoretical background and rhetoric of Nazi economics. In this part, we will look at what the Nazis actually did to the German economy.

To briefly recap, in Mein Kampf, Hitler made the distinction between financial, parasitic capitalism and productive, creative capitalism that undergirds Nazi economic thought. As many of my very learned readers have pointed out, that diremption comes from an entire tradition of reactionary thought in Europe, which I don’t have time to get into; see my posts on reactionary modernism. The proximate influence on the party’s economic doctrine was the engineer-turned-monetary-crank Gottfried Feder, who retained a romantic, agrarian anti-capitalist outlook from the völkisch tradition, combined with a belief that technological progress and productivity could be liberated from the shackles of bankers. The glue here, as it would be throughout the Nazi system, was antisemitism. The Jew was identified with parasitic capital, the Aryan with creative capital. Big industrialists—as long as they were not Jewish—were okay because they were productive and creative. Private property was not to be menaced; as Feder wrote, “The fundamental recognition of private property is deeply anchored in the clear awareness of the Aryan spiritual structure.”1

Feder did not get the opportunity to put his rather crackpot proposals into practice; he was sidelined under pressure from a camarilla of pro-Nazi business tycoons and the banker and economist Hjalmar Schacht, who redirected Nazi policy away from völkisch romantic populism. My point here should be clear: Nazi ideology, even at its most “socialist,” never fundamentally threatened the institution of private property, and it believed that German capitalists were an expression of Aryan superiority. Then, in practice, the regime had to abandon even its attack on high finance as a concession to economic reality and its bellicose aims.

The Baseline

Nazi economic policy had two intertwined aims: 1) to get out of the Depression, and 2) to rearm the nation to prepare for war against the Soviet Union and the Western democracies. To accomplish this, they’d require an alliance with heavy industry. This close collaboration of the state and the private sector is one of the features that gets labeled “socialism,” and, yes, it was not the laissez-faire, liberal capitalism of the 19th century, but neither was it totally unusual. Across post-World War I Europe, state-industry cooperation was the norm.

The historian Charles Maier, in his classic study Recasting Bourgeois Europe, argued that the years between 1918 and 1925 saw a fundamental shift in how Western European elites managed capitalist economies. The combination of mass democracy, organized labor, demobilization, and inflation had made pure parliamentary liberalism unworkable. The 19th-century model of hurly-burly free-market capitalism was not coming back. What replaced it was a set of arrangements Maier called “corporatist”: ongoing negotiated relationships among organized capital, organized labor, and the state, in which industries were grouped into peak associations, wages and prices were set through collective bargaining or state mediation, and policy was made through bargaining among these blocs rather than purely through parliament, which could be held hostage by an uncooperative interest group.2

The German prototype was the Stinnes-Legien Agreement of November 1918, signed in the chaos of the immediate post-armistice period. Hugo Stinnes, representing heavy industry, and Carl Legien, representing the trade unions, agreed to recognize each other formally as bargaining partners: industrialists would accept the eight-hour day and recognize unions as legitimate; unions would help suppress the more revolutionary currents of the post-war workers’ movement. The two sides created the Zentralarbeitsgemeinschaft, a peak-level joint body for managing labor relations across German industry.3

Similar arrangements that balanced relations between labor, industry, and the state emerged across Europe. According to Maier, fascism differed only in intensity from the paths chosen by the Western democracies. He writes of fascist Italy: “There were alternative paths to stability in the 1920’s. They all involved new fusions of economics and political power: more consistent state interventions in the market, and a greater role in the formulation of public policy entrusted to industry. Italy adopted a harsher path toward this new stability than did France or Germany, but with many of the same results.”4

So the Nazis did not arrive in a pure free-market environment and then impose their self-devised state-directed system. The baseline of European capitalism was already highly corporatist before the Depression. The Nazis’ putative socialism must be measured against the prevailing practices in Europe—and of course, the United States, which would implement both the New Deal and a highly directed wartime economy.

But let’s turn now to the specifically German approach to the Great Depression.

The Plan

Nazi economics minister Hjalmar Schacht was not from the Bohemian and crackpot milieu of the early NSDAP and certainly no socialist; he was an echt example of bourgeois respectability, onetime president of the Reichsbank, doctor of economics from Kiel, co-founder of the left-liberal German Democratic Party in 1918, and the man widely credited with ending the hyperinflation of 1923 through the introduction of the Rentenmark. Out of frustration with the Weimar Republic, he had moved rightward through the late 1920s, broken with the liberal democrats, and by 1932 was openly campaigning for Hitler’s chancellorship. He had concluded that only Hitler could contain the communist threat and deliver the kind of national-conservative authoritarian government he favored. He was, in other words, exactly the kind of respectable establishment figure whose support gave the Nazi seizure of power its veneer of continuity with the old German Right. When Hitler appointed him Reichsbank president in March 1933 and Minister of Economics in 1934, the message to German industry and to foreign creditors was clear: the wild men of the SA and the cranks of the Feder school would not be running the economy. The grown-ups were in charge.5

Schacht’s toolkit was conventional by the standards of 1930s emergency economics, just applied with more aggression and fewer scruples than his peers elsewhere. The first instrument was deficit-financed public works: the famous Autobahnen, of course, but also drainage projects, public housing, river works, and a vast expansion of the Reichsarbeitsdienst that put unemployed young men into uniformed work brigades. This was Keynesianism before Keynes had finished writing the General Theory, and it was not original to the Nazis: the Nazis inherited a public works program from the previous Schleicher government, and Roosevelt was doing comparable things across the Atlantic.6

The second instrument, and this is where Schacht’s particular cleverness came in, was the financing of rearmament through what amounted to a giant accounting trick. He created a shell company called the Metallurgische Forschungsgesellschaft, or Mefo, which existed for no purpose other than to issue bills of exchange to armaments manufacturers. The manufacturers would deliver weapons to the Wehrmacht and receive Mefo bills in payment; the Mefo bills were guaranteed by the Reichsbank and could be discounted at commercial banks. This kept the true scale of military spending off the official government books—important, since the Treaty of Versailles still nominally restricted German rearmament—and allowed the regime to pump enormous sums into the armaments industry without showing the deficit on the budget.7 By 1938, Mefo bills outstanding totaled around 12 billion Reichsmarks, a substantial fraction of GDP. It was a fiscal time bomb that Schacht assumed would eventually have to be defused, but the regime never defused it; it just kept rolling it forward.

The third instrument was the New Plan of September 1934, Schacht’s reorganization of foreign trade. Germany was chronically short of foreign exchange because rearmament required massive imports of raw materials— iron ore, copper, rubber, oil—and the country had limited exports to pay for them. Schacht’s solution was bilateral trade agreements, mostly with countries in Southeastern Europe and Latin America, in which Germany would buy raw materials in exchange for German-manufactured goods through state-managed clearing arrangements. This effectively created a German-led trade bloc that bypassed the international gold-standard system and allowed Germany to acquire strategic materials without spending hard currency.8 It also gave Berlin enormous economic leverage over its trading partners, which would matter politically as the decade progressed.

None of this—deficit spending, off-balance-sheet financing, bilateral trade controls—is socialism. Public works, exchange controls, and creative central-bank financing were the standard responses to the Depression across the developed world in the mid-1930s. Roosevelt was doing public works. Britain had abandoned the gold standard. France had imposed exchange controls. The Schachtian recovery was a more aggressive variant of policies you could find, in milder form, almost everywhere. What it was was state-directed capitalism in the corporatist mode we just looked at: the German variant of a pan-European phenomenon, run by a conservative banker.

The Labor Front

What was markedly different was the regime’s treatment of labor. In May 1933, less than four months after Hitler became chancellor, the regime moved against the trade unions. On May 2—the day after the regime had cynically celebrated the first ever official “Day of National Labor” on May 1—SA and SS units occupied union offices across Germany, arrested union leaders, and seized union assets. The independent trade union movement, which had been one of the largest and best-organized in Europe, was destroyed in a single coordinated operation.9 In its place, the regime created the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (DAF), the German Labor Front, headed by a drunk, Robert Ley. The DAF was not a union. It was a mass organization that incorporated workers and employers together under party control, with the explicit purpose of preventing class conflict by eliminating the possibility of independent worker action. Strikes were prohibited. Collective bargaining was abolished. Wage rates were set by state-appointed Treuhänder der Arbeit (Trustees of Labor) on a regional basis.10

Interwar corporatism was tripartite: capital, labor, and state in a negotiated relationship, with each side retaining independent organization and bargaining power. The Nazi reorganization of 1933 eliminated one of those three legs. Workers continued to exist, of course, and they continued to be paid wages, but they no longer had any independent institutional voice. The DAF was a transmission belt running from the state to the workforce, not a partner in any meaningful sense.

What this meant in practice was that the recovery was real, but its benefits were unevenly distributed. Real wages stagnated and in some sectors fell through the 1930s; profits rose substantially.11 Workers got full employment and the Kraft durch Freude leisure programs—subsidized vacations, cultural events, the Volkswagen savings scheme that delivered no actual cars—but they did not get rising real incomes, and they had no mechanism to demand them. Capital got a state that built infrastructure, financed armaments orders, suppressed labor costs, and asked relatively little in return except cooperation with rearmament. If socialism is defined as workers’ control over the means of production, this was certainly not socialism. It was, from the perspective of German heavy industry, an extremely good deal.

Privatization

One of the big myths of the “Nazis were socialists” crowd is that the Nazis substantially nationalized and took direct ownership of German industry. In fact, the opposite is the case: the early Nazi regime saw a wave of privatization. As hinted by the title of Germà Bel’s Economic History Review paper, “Against the Mainstream: Nazi Privatization in 1930s Germany,” this was not the prevailing trend in Europe, where nationalization was the norm.

The starting point is Weimar Germany in 1932, which had a much larger state-owned sector than is usually remembered. The Brüning government, scrambling to contain the banking crisis of 1931, had taken majority or substantial minority stakes in the four largest commercial banks — Dresdner, Commerzbank, Deutsche Bank, and the Berliner Handels-Gesellschaft — when those banks would otherwise have collapsed. The state had also acquired control of Vereinigte Stahlwerke (United Steelworks), Germany’s largest steel producer, through a similar emergency intervention. Various shipping firms, including parts of Hamburg-South America Line, had been rescued and brought into state ownership. The Reichsbahn (railways) and Reichspost had been state-owned for decades. Add in municipal utilities, mining concerns, and various Weimar-era holdings, and by 1932 the German state owned or substantially controlled a meaningful chunk of the commanding heights of the economy.12

Between 1934 and 1937, the Nazi regime systematically returned most of this to private hands. Vereinigte Stahlwerke was re-privatized starting in 1934, with major shares going to the Friedrich Flick group. The four large commercial banks were re-privatized between 1936 and 1937, with the state divesting the stakes it had acquired in the 1931 crisis. Several shipping firms were returned to private ownership. Various municipal utilities—electricity, water, transport—were returned to private operation where the regime favored that solution. Bel, who has done the most thorough work on this, argues that the Nazi case represents the first systematic large-scale privatization in modern history, predating Thatcher by half a century. It was deliberate ideological policy, not merely opportunistic asset sales: the regime believed, on principle, that private ownership directed by the state was preferable to direct state ownership.13

Why? Partly because Nazi ideology, despite the “socialist” branding, was genuinely committed to private property as an Aryan virtue, as we saw in Part 1 with Feder’s writings. Partly because the regime needed the active cooperation of German industrialists for rearmament, and that cooperation came more reliably from owners with stakes in the outcome than from civil servants with no skin in the game. And partly because the regime’s leadership —Schacht especially, but also Hitler in his more pragmatic moods—understood that markets allocate capital and manage operations more effectively than ministries do, even when the ultimate direction of the economy is set politically.

The numbers tell the story bluntly. By the late 1930s, after the privatizations were complete, somewhere between 75 and 85 percent of German industrial output came from privately owned firms. The state’s direct ownership share—railways, post, the new Reichswerke Hermann Göring conglomerate, various utilities—was around 15 to 20 percent of industry. This was comparable to contemporary Britain and lower than what postwar West Germany would maintain under Adenauer. To put it as plainly as possible: Nazi Germany at its most “socialist” had a smaller state-owned sector than Christian Democratic West Germany in the 1950s or Fourth Republic France, where the state owned over a quarter of productive capital.14 The Soviet Union, the actually-socialist comparison case, had 100 percent state ownership of large-scale industry by the late 1930s.

It is sometimes asserted that because of the state interventions in the economy, private property. In Nazi Germany was only nominal, but this was not the reality. As Buchheim and Scherner write in their paper “The Role of Private Property in the Nazi Economy: The Case of Industry,” firms retained a great deal of autonomy even under the rearmament drive and in wartime, and freedom of contract was generally respected.15

There were two important counter-currents to the privatization story, and fairness requires noting both.

The first was Reichswerke Hermann Göring, founded in 1937. This was a new state-owned industrial conglomerate built around lower-grade German iron ore that private steelmakers had refused to develop because it wasn’t economical. The regime created Reichswerke to do what the market wouldn’t — to bring strategic raw materials into production for autarky and rearmament purposes, regardless of cost. By 1939, it was already large; by the wartime peak, it had absorbed enormous quantities of plundered industrial capacity from occupied Europe and become arguably the largest industrial enterprise on the continent, with something approaching 600,000 employees. But notice the structure: Reichswerke was created to supplement private industry, not to replace it. The bulk of German steel production stayed in private hands throughout the regime’s existence.16

The second was the Volkswagenwerk, founded in 1937 as a subsidiary of the Deutsche Arbeitsfront. Technically party-owned rather than state-owned, it operated under direct state and party control. It was financed in significant part by forced savings extracted from German workers who paid into the Volkswagen-Sparkarte scheme and never received the cars they were promised — a kind of compulsory regressive taxation dressed up as consumer purchase. Volkswagen is genuinely difficult to classify in conventional public-private terms. It was the regime’s own creation, organized through party rather than state structures, financed through coerced savings of workers. It looks more like a fascist innovation than either capitalism or socialism.17

There’s also a definitional complication worth noting. The regime’s notorious institutional chaos—described in Franz Neumann’s magnum opus Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism—meant overlapping jurisdictions of state ministries, party organs, SS economic enterprises, and personal fiefs of figures like Göring and Himmler, which makes the public-private distinction blurrier in some cases than the formal ownership figures suggest. Was the SS empire of construction firms, quarries, and industrial enterprises — which by the war’s end employed hundreds of thousands of slave laborers — a “state” enterprise? A “party” enterprise? A “private” enterprise of Himmler’s? It was genuinely all three at once, in ways that don’t map onto modern categories.18

But none of this changes the basic picture. Throughout the Nazi period, the majority of German industrial production occurred in privately owned firms, that majority was highest around 1937–1938 after the privatizations were complete, and even at the regime’s wartime peak—when state and party-owned enterprises had grown substantially through Reichswerke expansion and seizure of foreign assets—private firms still accounted for the bulk of industrial output, including most war production.19

The regime did not abolish capitalism. It deliberately preserved capitalism, and in some respects expanded the share of the economy held in private hands compared to what it had inherited from Weimar. What it did instead was reshape the political relationships around capitalism: destroying organized labor, subordinating capital to state direction on questions of investment and output, and bending the entire structure toward rearmament and eventual war.

The Pay Off

So what was Nazi political economy? Not socialism, plainly. The regime preserved private property, returned state holdings to private hands, and ran a smaller public sector than postwar Christian Democratic West Germany. Not laissez-faire capitalism either: Schacht’s apparatus directed credit, controlled foreign exchange, set wages by administrative fiat, and steered investment toward armaments at scales no liberal government would have countenanced. What it was was the corporatist political economy of interwar Europe with one of its three legs hacked off.

This is the point at which a certain kind of reader, usually but not always on the libertarian right, will object: but didn’t Roosevelt do the same thing? Didn’t the New Deal involve massive state direction of the economy? Wasn’t the American war economy of 1942–45 even more “directed” than Hitler’s, with price controls, raw material allocation, wage controls, and the federal government owning something like 40 percent of manufacturing capital by 1945? And the answer is: yes, in raw quantitative terms, much of that is true. By the metric of “how much of the economy was the state allocating?”, the wartime United States matched and in some respects exceeded Nazi Germany.20 The first New Deal’s National Recovery Administration, struck down by the Supreme Court in 1935, was explicitly modeled in part on European corporatism, and its director Hugh Johnson openly admired Mussolini.21 The structural similarities are real, and pretending otherwise would be silly.

The decisive feature of Nazi political economy was not the quantity of state direction; it was the elimination of independent labor and constitutional politics from the corporatist structure. The New Deal moved in exactly the opposite direction on the labor question. The Wagner Act of 1935 federally protected the right to organize, strike, and bargain collectively. Union membership tripled between 1933 and 1940. The American state intervened to empower labor as an independent political force; the Nazi state intervened to destroy it as one. There was a comparable degree of state involvement in the economy, but an opposite vector with respect to labor relations.22

The American wartime economy makes the same point even more sharply. Yes, federal spending hit 40-plus percent of GDP. Yes, the War Production Board allocated raw materials, and the Office of Price Administration imposed comprehensive rationing. Yes, the federal government owned a vast share of manufacturing plant by 1945. But the War Labor Board included union representation. Strikes occurred during the war–major ones, in coal and steel, which Roosevelt could not crush by sending in the SS. Constitutional government persisted. A free press criticized FDR vigorously throughout. There was a competitive election in 1944, in which the incumbent could in principle have lost. The American war economy used some of the same instruments as the Nazi war economy and operated within a fundamentally different political structure.23

This is what is missed when people reach for “fascist economics” as a synonym for state intervention, or “socialism” as a synonym for any limit on capital. The Nazi case was distinctive not because the regime did unusual things to the economy but because of what it had already done to the political sphere before it touched the economy. By the time Schacht was writing Mefo bills and Göring was running the Four-Year Plan, the unions were destroyed, the parties banned, the press muzzled, and the courts gleichgeschaltet. The economic policy was being implemented inside a political vacuum that no democratic state, however interventionist, has ever produced — and inside which the eventual descent into autarky, plunder, and slave labor became not just possible but, given the regime’s animating purposes, almost inevitable.

For the descent—the radicalization after 1936, the wartime exploitation of occupied Europe, the moral abyss of IG Farben at Auschwitz-Monowitz—you can read Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction. The short version is that the regime drove its bipartite-corporatist machine straight into a war it could not win, and the structure that had looked so impressive in 1938 turned out, by 1945, to have been a mechanism for converting Germany and Europe into ashes.

Every so often, there’s a post that goes viral claiming that the Nazis were actually left-wing, anti-capitalist, and socialist. Usually, the main piece of evidence is the full name of the party, which was Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei — National Socialist German Worker’s Party, but sometimes people attempt to bring in putative examples of Nazi policy to “prove” that the Nazis were, in fact, a movement of the left. Now, it must be acknowledged that this is partly to troll lefties, and it does drive us crazy, but some people do seem to believe it sincerely.

The usual left-wing response is to object that the name was specifically designed to bamboozle workers, and then they bring up the Nazis' friendly accord with major German industrialists. But in so doing, they tend to underplay the genuinely anti-capitalist parts of the Nazi ideology and movement. It will not convince anybody, since this “debate” is not really about the facts at all, but I think the real history might shed some light on the theories of economic nationalism that have come back into vogue.

The Economy in Nazi “Theory”

Like few other examples in history, the Nazi party, movement, and state were the brainchild of one man, Adolf Hitler, so it’s to his thought one should turn first. Conveniently, Hitler addresses both the name of the party and his central beliefs on economic matters in a few adjacent paragraphs in Mein Kampf, where he discusses the formation of the NSDAP, whose nucleus was originally called “The German Worker’s Party” or German Labor Party, if you choose to translate it that way:

In our small circle we discussed the project of forming a new party. The leading ideas which we then proposed were the same as those which were carried into effect afterwards, when the German Labour Party was founded. The name of the new movement which was to be founded should be such that of itself, it would appeal to the mass of the people; for all our efforts would turn out vain and useless if this condition were lacking. And that was the reason why we chose the name ‘Social-Revolutionary Party’, particularly because the social principles of our new organization were indeed revolutionary.

But there was also a more fundamental reason. The attention which I had given to economic problems during my earlier years was more or less confined to considerations arising directly out of the social problem. Subsequently this outlook broadened as I came to study the German policy of the Triple Alliance. This policy was very largely the result of an erroneous valuation of the economic situation, together with a confused notion as to the basis on which the future subsistence of the German people could be guaranteed. All these ideas were based on the principle that capital is exclusively the product of labour and that, just like labour, it was subject to all the factors which can hinder or promote human activity. Hence, from the national standpoint, the significance of capital depended on the greatness and freedom and power of the State, that is to say, of the nation, and that it is this dependence alone which leads capital to promote the interests of the State and the nation, from the instinct of self- preservation and for the sake of its own development.

Previously I did not recognize with adequate clearness the difference between capital which is purely the product of creative labour and the existence and nature of capital which is exclusively the result of financial speculation. Here I needed an impulse to set my mind thinking in this direction; but that impulse had hitherto been lacking.

The requisite impulse now came from one of the men who delivered lectures in the course I have already mentioned. This was Gottfried Feder.

For the first time in my life I heard a discussion which dealt with the principles of stock-exchange capital and capital which was used for loan activities. After hearing the first lecture delivered by Feder, the idea immediately came into my head that I had now found a way to one of the most essential pre-requisites for the founding of a new party.1

So, we can see the origin of the “bamboozle the workers” myth. It has some basis in fact: Hitler frankly says that the name of the party was to garner mass appeal, but then he says there is a deeper reason, and so begins his disquisition on economics. At first, it seems that there is something of a “socialist” impulse here, where Hitler demands that capital be subervient to the State, which in his mind is identical with the nation and the race. To your average internet libertarian, that’s socialism, Q.E.D. But then he goes on to distinguish between financial capital and creative or productive capital. He says that he got his ideas from the lectures of Gottfried Feder, an early Nazi party member and the godfather of Nazi economics. Hitler then goes on a rant about the Will and the Man of Destiny and all that nonsense for about a page and a half, and then returns to the economy, concluding:

When I heard Gottfried Feder’s first lecture on ‘The Abolition of the Interest- Servitude’, I understood immediately that here was a truth of transcendental importance for the future of the German people. The absolute separation of stock-exchange capital from the economic life of the nation would make it possible to oppose the process of internationalization in German business without at the same time attacking capital as such, for to do this would jeopardize the foundations of our national independence. I clearly saw what was developing in Germany and I realized then that the stiffest fight we would have to wage would not be against the enemy nations but against international capital. In Feder’s speech I found an effective rallying-cry for our coming struggle. Here, again, later events proved how correct was the impression we then had. The fools among our bourgeois politicians do not mock at us on this point any more; for even those politicians now see - if they would speak the truth - that international stock-exchange capital was not only the chief instigating factor in bringing on the War but that now when the War is over it turns the peace into a hell.

Speculative, financial capital is bad; internationalization — what we might call “globalization” today — is bad, but Hitler is clear: the Nazis oppose those things “without at the same time attacking capital as such,” because the development of productive capital is important for the growth of the nation. And who is responsible for financial capital? You guessed it! The Jews!

A subsequent paragraph shows how clearly Hitler wanted to differentiate his “National Socialism” from Marxism, which was also Jewish and secretly on the same side as the bankers:

I began to study again and thus it was that I first came to understand perfectly what was the substance and purpose of the life-work of the Jew, Karl Marx. His Capital became intelligible to me now for the first time. And in the light of it I now exactly understood the fight of the Social-Democrats against national economics, a fight which was to prepare the ground for the hegemony of a real international and stock-exchange capital.

A couple of possible objections: First, one might say that it’s impossible to have capitalism without finance of some kind, and you might be right—we will get to that—but I’m not here to defend Nazi economic theory, but rather to describe it. Second, one might say, “That’s obviously a piece of demagoguery designed to put capitalists at ease.” Okay, but listen carefully to yourself: that’s the same thing that left-wingers say about the “Worker’s” and “Socialist” bits. In fact, they are both right: the whole thing is just a piece of demagoguery!

As Robert Paxton argues in his The Anatomy of Fascism, Nazism and fascism in general do not have the same relationship to ideas as socialism or liberalism:

The role programs and doctrine play in it is, on closer inspection, fundamentally unlike the role they play in conservatism, liberalism, and socialism. Fascism does not rest explicitly upon an elaborated philosophical system, but rather upon popular feelings about master races, their unjust lot, and their rightful predominance over inferior people. It has not been given intellectual underpinnings by any system builder, like Marx, or by any major critical intelligence, like Mill, Burke, or Tocqueville.

In a way utterly unlike the classical “isms,” the rightness of fascism does not depend on the truth of any of the propositions advanced in its name. Fascism is “true” insofar as it helps fulfill the destiny of a chosen race or people or blood, locked with other peoples in a Darwinian struggle, and not in the light of some abstract and universal reason. The first fascists were entirely frank about this.

He goes on to write:

Hitler did present a program (the 25 Points of February 1920), but he pronounced it immutable while ignoring many of its provisions. Though its anniversaries were celebrated, it was less a guide to action than a signal that debate had ceased within the party. In his first public address as chancellor, Hitler ridiculed those who say “show us the details of your program. I have refused ever to step before this Volk and make cheap promises.”

Several consequences flowed from fascism’s special relationship to doctrine. It was the unquestioning zeal of the faithful that counted, more than his or her reasoned assent. Programs were casually fluid. The relationship between intellectuals and a movement that despised thought was even more awkward than the notoriously prickly relationship of intellectual fellow travelers with communism. Many intellectuals associated with fascism’s early days dropped away or even went into opposition as successful fascist movements made the compromises necessary to gain allies and power, or, alternatively, revealed its brutal anti-intellectualism.2

One of those intellectuals who fell by the way-side was Gottfried Feder, who wrote most of that 25-point program. He was pushed out of his position as chief economist by the Nazis after industrialists got uncomfortable with his anti-capitalism. This was apparent even to contemporary observers. Here’s an article in the New York Times from 1934:

A visible symbol of Dr. Hjalmar Schacht’s victory as economic and financial dictator of Germany was the official announcement today that Gottfried Feder, creator of the National Socialist economic program, had been placed on the retired list.

Herr Feder wrote most of the “unalterable” twenty-five theses that constituted the official party program when the National Socialists were fighting their way to power. Shortly after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor. Herr Feder was appointed Under-Secretary in the Economics Ministry to prepare for the execution of this program. In attempting to do so he came into conflict with Dr. Kirt Schmitt, Minister of Economics, which, it was believed, contributed to Dr. Schmitt’s retirement on “sick leave.” Later Herr Feder was sidetracked to the office of Commissar for Suburban Land Settlement and as his most recent promotion was appointed a professor.

Herr Feder, as one of the intellectual fathers of Nazi ideology, stood for that “economy of blood and soil” espoused by Dr. Richard Walther Darré, Minister of Agriculture, who, at a recent peasant congress at Goslar to which Dr. Schacht was not invited, predicted that all German business and industry would have to bow to the principles of an agricultural estate. These principles include the greatest possible autarchy, strict control of prices, production and distribution and a return to the semi-feudal “hereditary manor idea,” involving not only primogeniture but also restrictions in the use of property by an owner.

Particularly Herr Feder stood for the nationalization of banks, which was rejected in the recent report of the Bank Reform Commission, and for the financing of public works through non-interest bearing treasury notes-”Feder marks.”

…

Herr Feder’s retirement was preceded by the disappearance of the “leader of German business,” planned to educate German business men in Nazi principles, and followed the rather demonstrative withdrawal of support by two outstanding German industrialists. Fritz Thyssen and Dr. Krupp von Bohlen und Hallbach. Herr Thyssen, who largely financed the Nazi movement, went to South America on a prolonged “inspection of his South American interests.” Dr. Krupp, head of the Estate of German Industry, has not been exercising the functions of this office for some months, and Albert Voegler, head of the German Steel Trust, has been acting as his deputy. Dr. Krupp’s resignation is expected soon and Hermann Roechling, Saar industrialist, is already being mentioned as his successor.

Today’s announcement said that Herr Feder’s retirement was “for the present,” which parallels the warning by the Voelkischer Beobachter that capitalism is getting a new chance to prove that it can serve the purposes of the Nazi State and woe to it if it fails.3

Hjalmar Schacht, the man who succeeded Feder as chief architect of the Nazi economy, was no socialist: he was a banker by profession and realized the necessity of finance for a modern economy. And he said so, openly, with the imprimatur of the party. The New York Times records a speech in 1935, which Schacht gave after an all-day conference with Hitler, where Schacht defended the joint-stock company and outlined the “ten commandments” of German industry — SCHACHT DEFENDS CAPITALIST SYSTEM :

In his speech Dr. Schacht took account of the fact that many principles in law and economy and even many individual human rights are being subordinated to new political view points, but, he insisted, capitalism, capital stock companies and especially anonymous and easily sold capital stock shares were essential elements in a modern nation's economy and a necessary foundation even for an army. For this reason he laid down for the benefit of "German Socialists" ten commandments which, he said, must be carried out if the National Socialist State is to master the problems facing it.

Let’s look at those commandments:

“Firstly, legal security in the economic field is essential.

“Secondly, stock companies are a suitable instrument, especially in an economy poor in capital, to build up modern economic enterprises.

“Thirdly, the willing cooperation of the individual entrepreneur is indispensable.

“Fourthly, easy transactions in stocks are necessary for raising needed capital.

Leaders Not Appointed.

“Fifthly, leaders are not appointed; rather they develop and must stand the test.

“Sixthly, business leaders’ responsibility must not be weakened but rather strengthened.

“Seventhly, between the leader of an enterprise and the stockholder must exist a similar relation of trust as between the leader and his following or employes.

“Eighthly, control of accounts as against the business leader is necessary.

“Ninthly, differentiation in purpose and content of various stock enterprises requires a certain freedom in their statutes.

“Tenthly, the new stock law must take just as much account of the tasks of the future as of the faults of the past.”4

In other words, there have to be important elements of a market economy: rule of law and enforceable property rights, mechanisms for pooling private capital, voluntary entrepreneurship, liquid capital markets, leadership selected by performance rather than political appointment, genuine accountability of managers, fiduciary trust between management and owners, independent auditing, freedom of contract and organizational form, and a legal framework that adapts to changing conditions.

We are going from ideas to the actual practice of Nazi economic policy, but before that, I want to be fair and address the most “socialist” wing of the Nazi party. There really was an anti-capitalist current in the movement; The 1920 party program was full of it: nationalization of trusts, profit-sharing in heavy industry, expropriation of land without compensation, the death penalty for “usurers and profiteers.” Feder, who wrote most of it, sincerely believed this stuff, as we’ve seen. And he wasn’t alone.

The most important figures here were Gregor and Otto Strasser, brothers who led the northern, more radical wing of the party in the 1920s. They took the Sozialistische in Nationalsozialistische literally. Otto wanted workers to own 49% of every enterprise, with the state holding another 41%, and the previous owner reduced to a kind of feudal “fief-holder” with 10%.5 Gregor, the more politically powerful of the two, told the Reichstag in May 1932 that the Nazis were “deadly enemies of the present capitalist economic system.”6 And the SA, Ernst Röhm’s three-million-strong brownshirt army, was disproportionately working-class, disproportionately unemployed, and full of men who had joined up expecting an actual revolution against the bosses and the bankers, not a rearmament program run by Hjalmar Schacht.7

These people had a name for what they wanted: the second revolution. The first revolution had brought the Nazis to power in January 1933. The second was supposed to finish the job: purge the old industrial and aristocratic elites, redistribute property, and deliver on the socialist half of National Socialism. Through 1933 and into 1934, Röhm and others said this in public, repeatedly, and with growing impatience. They had not spent a decade fighting communists in the streets to end up with Krupp and Thyssen still running everything.

Hitler had other ideas. On 30 June 1934, he had between 85 and several hundred people murdered, including Röhm and Gregor Strasser, in the infamous “Night of the Long Knives.” The purge was mostly power-political, not ideological, and directed as much against the conservative right as the Nazi left, but, notably, the leaders of the anti-capitalist constituency within the party were eliminated at just around the same time as the Nazis moved towards a more pro-capitalist position.

This is getting long, so I’ll do a second part, where I’ll look at the actual functioning of the Nazi economic system.

If you’re not yet a paid subscriber but regularly read, enjoy, or share Unpopular Front, please consider signing up. This newsletter is completely reader-supported and represents my primary source of income. And, at 5 dollars a month, it’s less than most things at Starbucks.

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When the Clock Broke is now out in paperback and available wherever books are sold. If you live in the United Kingdom, it’s also available there. The UK edition is also apparently available all over the world, too! I’ve received reports now of book sightings in places as far as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Christchurch, New Zealand. It seems relatively easy to find in Commonwealth countries and at English-language bookstores abroad.

I also do a film podcast with Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times. On our Patreon, we have a lot of bonus content, including a weekly politics discussion.

Reminder: I will be presenting a paper as part of “The Past, Present, and Future of the Trump Era: A Mini-Conference” at the University of Cambridge on June 2nd. Tickets are available online.

This morning, I have for you:

• A True Account of a Visit to the Antiquarian Book Fair in New-York

• Irma Brandeis’s The Ladder of Vision: A Study of Dante’s Comedy

• Lina Wertmüller’s film The Seduction of Mimi (1972)

I spent Saturday at the Antiquarian Book Fair at the Armory on Park Avenue. I highly recommend going if you’re in the vicinity. Today is the last day. Most of the items on display are beyond the means of all but the extremely wealthy or the most obsessive collector, but so many of the objects are works of art worth just looking at. There are illuminated manuscripts and codices from the Middle Ages, strange Early Modern guides to alchemy and witchcraft, and all sorts of historical documents and letters. And, of course, all the modern first editions that seem to attract the most collectors: the sheer number of 1984s and Catcher in the Ryes on display seemed to belie their eye-popping prices.

I went in search of my particular antiquarian interest: essays by Romantic critics, mainly William Hazlitt, and memoirs from the writers of that era. At the booth of Jarndyce Antiquarian Booksellers, where I bought my Second Edition of Hazlitt’s Table-Talk in London earlier this spring, a nice older gentleman arrived just before me to swoop up a copy of Lamb and Hazlitt: further letters and records hitherto unpublished, a volume edited by Hazlitt’s son William Carew, that documents the critic’s friendship with his fellow essayist Charles Lamb. I’ve loved this kind of stuff ever since buying Leigh Hunt’s very dishy memoir Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, where Hunt records his vacation from hell with Byron in Italy. But my elder friend came first and got it for around 30 dollars, which made it one of the cheapest things in the whole fair, I’d reckon. He was happy to commune with a fellow Hazlitt fan, who are few and far between, and I congratulated him on his find, while being a little envious. It seems that, for many, this fair is first and foremost an occasion to fraternize with people who share their interests and trade, which, since the vocation of antique books seems to attract shy, solitary, and peculiar characters, might be one of the few times in a year they experience camaraderie. So absorbed were the dealers in chit-chat with each other that I imagined that an enterprising thief might easily make off with the precious goods.

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The news media, the most self-important and self-dramatizing class of people in a nation full of self-important drama queens, would like us to believe this is a Big Moment™. But that’s because it was on their big night. They were there. And they won’t let us forget it. They are all acting like they did a tour of duty in Vietnam if they were at the WHCD. People in professions that are not as “performative,” as the kids say, showed more sangfroid. See, for example, former Goldman Sachs chief Lloyd Blankfein, who grew up in a housing project in East New York—He seemed unfazed.

Now we have to do the whole national soul-searching thing. “Why did he do it? Who are we as a nation? Are we heading towards civil war?” Well, the interesting thing about Cole Tomas Allen—classic three-part assassin name—is that he was not from the extreme left pace attempts to pin this on Hasan Piker. He was not an anarchist or a “Third Worldist,” but a Bluesky denizen, an extremely angry liberal, the kind of Democrat who would fume about Bernie bros spoiling an election. What does this tell us? The normies are furious. Typically, we think that extreme views lead to extreme acts. But, as with Luigi Mangione, he seems to have politics that hovered near the center. Assassination is often a fundamentally conservative or reactionary choice: there’s a threat to an order, so you remove the threat. The most famous assassination in history, that of Julius Caesar, was done by aristocratic conservatives defending the old republican system. John Wilkes Booth, who modeled himself on the killers of Caesar, was a defender of the Old South. And obviously, the murderer of Martin Luther King Jr. did not like the changes he was bringing, etc. Allen viewed himself as a protector of American liberalism attacked by the revolutionary Trump regime. He would do by the gun what Comey and Mueller couldn’t do by law.

Incidentally, Marxists have never been much for terrorism—if you discount the decadent New Left groups of the 1970s, who were either totally ineffective or, in the European case, mainly used as tools by cynical Warsaw Pact intelligence agencies to wreak havoc in the West. As Jeet Heer pointed out on Twitter, Trotsky once dismissed terrorists as “liberals with bombs.” That’s because even the most wild-eyed anarchists share the fundamentally liberal conclusion that if you get rid of certain people, things will change. Marxists wanted mass action with systemic goals. As Trotsky wrote in his 1911 pamphlet, “Why Marxists Oppose Individual Terrorism.”

A strike, even of modest size, has social consequences: strengthening of the workers’ self-confidence, growth of the trade union, and not infrequently even an improvement in productive technology. The murder of a factory owner produces effects of a police nature only, or a change of proprietors devoid of any social significance. Whether a terrorist attempt, even a ‘successful’ one throws the ruling class into confusion depends on the concrete political circumstances. In any case the confusion can only be shortlived; the capitalist state does not base itself on government ministers and cannot be eliminated with them. The classes it serves will always find new people; the mechanism remains intact and continues to function.

But the disarray introduced into the ranks of the working masses themselves by a terrorist attempt is much deeper. If it is enough to arm oneself with a pistol in order to achieve one’s goal, why the efforts of the class struggle? If a thimbleful of gunpowder and a little chunk of lead is enough to shoot the enemy through the neck, what need is there for a class organisation? If it makes sense to terrify highly placed personages with the roar of explosions, where is the need for the party? Why meetings, mass agitation and elections if one can so easily take aim at the ministerial bench from the gallery of parliament?

In our eyes, individual terror is inadmissible precisely because it belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness, reconciles them to their powerlessness, and turns their eyes and hopes towards a great avenger and liberator who some day will come and accomplish his mission. The anarchist prophets of the ‘propaganda of the deed’ can argue all they want about the elevating and stimulating influence of terrorist acts on the masses. Theoretical considerations and political experience prove otherwise. The more ‘effective’ the terrorist acts, the greater their impact, the more they reduce the interest of the masses in self-organisation and self-education. But the smoke from the confusion clears away, the panic disappears, the successor of the murdered minister makes his appearance, life again settles into the old rut, the wheel of capitalist exploitation turns as before; only the police repression grows more savage and brazen. And as a result, in place of the kindled hopes and artificially aroused excitement comes disillusionment and apathy.

You can see all this clearly at work in the Mangione situation, where he sadly has become a cult figure among an impotent left. One should also note a certain irony here in the fact that Trotsky himself fell victim to assassination. Stalin always believed that getting rid of people worked. But I digress.

As I always like to point out in the wake of such events, America is a big country, with a lot of irate and insane people who own a lot of guns. The miracle is that there is actually so little political violence in relation to the wide availability of the means. Especially, if you consider the American past. The 19th century was a vast bloodbath, even if you discount the Civil War or the genocidal campaigns against the Indians. Two presidents were killed within its bounds, and a third barely outside of it. You couldn’t have an election without a city rioting for days, and many of the candidates being bludgeoned before they could take office. Theatrical performances were beset by angry crowds intent on disposing of actors they didn’t like. Mobs pulled preachers from their pulpits for saying maybe we ought not to keep other men in chains. Feuding families picked off each other’s cousins. Irishmen of opposing sorts would turn any parade into an occasion for bloodshed. A southern representative nearly beat a U.S. senator to death on the floor of the Senate chamber. Not to mention the daily horrors inflicted on slaves for the purposes of keeping them in that condition. You know I’m not the type to dismiss the uniquely threatening aspects of this era, but when the New York Times writes, “[T]he violence has engulfed the nation’s entire political system at all levels of government,” my response, like Tim Barker’s, is that they should get a fucking grip.

I don’t mean to be callous; Far from it, but I would just point out that there’s a ton of violence today that’s not really political at all—spree killers deciding to off their classmates and the like—that we mostly now shrug at and consider inevitable. And like all Americans, I think I’m growing slightly inured. When there are so many real occasions to frown, it’s exhausting to do the brow-furrowing ritual.

One last thought, about the Second Amendment: a lot of 2A proponents talk about its necessity to fight against tyranny. But who decides what constitutes a tyranny? The entire point of being armed, it would seem, is that you don’t have to wait for others to come to the same conclusion but can act of your own accord. “But wait, that’s not really a tyranny!” you might protest. Yes, but everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It would then appear, from a Machiavellian point of view, that the threat of assassination would be a feature rather than a bug of our constitutional system. An armed society is a polite society, as they say. I’ve always pointed out that the 1st Amendment and the 2nd Amendment interact in volatile ways: First, you have people with guns exposed to heated rhetoric, and second, you have people with guns exposed to the heated rhetoric of the other guys, which may piss them off. Can we have a civil government with the implied assumption of a state of low-grade civil war? Is freedom of speech and association compatible with the freedom to acquire a small arsenal? These are questions that never seem to come up in our moments of “national soul-searching” in the wake of such events. Instead, we do that very American thing of waffling between being mawkishly sentimental and wanting to Act Now to Fix the Problem and just not giving much of a shit about anybody else.

If you’re not yet a paid subscriber but regularly read, enjoy, or share Unpopular Front, please consider signing up. This newsletter is completely reader-supported and represents my primary source of income. And, at 5 dollars a month, it’s less than most things at Starbucks.

Subscribe now

When the Clock Broke is now out in paperback and available wherever books are sold. If you live in the United Kingdom, it’s also available there. The UK edition is also apparently available all over the world, too! I’ve received reports now of book sightings in places as far as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Christchurch, New Zealand. It seems relatively easy to find in Commonwealth countries and at English-language bookstores abroad.

I also do a film podcast with Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times. On our Patreon, we have a lot of bonus content, including a weekly politics discussion.

I will be presenting a paper as part of “The Past, Present, and Future of the Trump Era: A Mini-Conference” at the University of Cambridge on June 2nd. Tickets are available online.

In case you missed it, and I spoke to and about their new book Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed.

Unpopular Front

Talking to Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian about “Muskism”

Max Read and I spoke to Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian about their fantastic new book Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed. The provocative thesis is that Elon Musk is not just a collection of quirks and tics, but his approach to capitalism and government forms something like an ideology, which, if not coherent exactly, can at least be reconstructed, articulated, and analyzed, much like …

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2 months ago · 56 likes · John Ganz

Also, check out their essay “Muskism as Fordism:”

The first step to extrapolating Muskism from Musk is to counter the most common misreadings of the man and his ideas. One of the easiest to dispel is the notion of Musk as a libertarian. In fact, a core principle of Muskism is public-private fusion; the use of the state as funder, enabler, and backstop for high-risk, high-reward ventures—what we call state symbiosis. One can see this clearly in SpaceX, Starlink, and Tesla. Musk is a stalwart critic of bureaucracy and certain kinds of regulation but certainly not the state as such. On the contrary, he has consistently instrumentalized the state as a source of power and profit. He does so by promising to help governments fulfill their sovereign functions through reliance on his infrastructures: a dynamic we describe as sovereignty-as-a-service.

Another misconception is that Musk’s most high-profile company, Tesla, primarily sells a consumer car product similar to Ford’s—the Model Y as an electrified Model T. In fact, Tesla is not about cars. It’s about a vision of electric autonomy in an era of natural disasters, wars, and social instability. Musk has been able to capitalize on a period of global skepticism about the virtues of interconnected supply chains and offer a scalable model of sovereignty from the nation down to the individual in the home. The move from the Roadster to the Cybertruck tracks a shift from a bright green future of zero-carbon consumerism to a dark green future of climate breakdown and survivalism. At its most successful, Muskism taps into a desire for territorial hardening to external shocks, enemies, and undesirables. In a world of reshoring and rearmament, Muskism offers global infrastructure for national projects.

This worldview is also reflected in his embrace of vertical integration, an industrial model that is uniquely suited to our deglobalizing era. For decades, Musk has attempted to concentrate production as much as possible within his firms and to reduce his reliance on outside suppliers. Under Muskism, the factory is not a node within a global production network but an enclave. This strategy defied the conventional wisdom of the 2000s, the decade when Musk founded SpaceX and became CEO of Tesla, but would look prescient in the 2020s, as “a series of crises in finance, health, energy, and geopolitics… laid bare the risks of extreme global integration,” to quote Canadian prime minister Mark Carney’s remarks at Davos earlier this year.

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For an idea, check out their recent piece “Muskism as Fordism” for the Law and Political Economy project. And, of course, listen to our conversation!

Roberts, of course, was the guy who defended Tucker Carlson for having Nick Fuentes on. Gottfried coined the terms “paleoconservatism” and “alternative right,” and was the erstwhile mentor to white nationalist Richard Spencer. Chronicles is the premier outlet of paleo thought, and it once published Samuel T. Francis, the John the Baptist of MAGA.

Roberts is returning the favor: Chronicles stood up for him during the Tucker imbroglio. Now Roberts wants to help Chronicles “expand its reach.”

In a blog post published this morning, Paul Gottfried has taken exception to the Post’s coverage, particularly its statement that Francis once praised KKK wizard and neo-Nazi leader David Duke. According to Gottfried, I’m one of a group of writers who have “smeared” Francis by giving the impression that his endorsement of Duke’s politics was full-throated. He points to qualifications and criticisms in Francis’s work about Duke. Unfortunately for Gottfried, some of the “countervailing evidence” he cites is also quite damning.

For instance, Gottfried seems to think this passage from Francis’s 1991 Chronicles column “Bad Moon on the Rise” is exculpatory:

Of course, by itself, Mr. Duke’s ability to gain votes does not constitute a revolution, nor does the candidate himself seem to promise much as a serious leader of one. He simply carries too much baggage, and there are persistent rumors about irregularities in his personal life, which, if true, point to serious character flaws and threaten an eventual political embarrassment. Whatever his plans for the future, Mr. Duke and his supporters shouldn’t count on holding high elective office. He can at most be a gadfly, and perhaps the best thing for him to do now would be to institutionalize the movement he has started in a nationwide organization that could exert cultural and indirect political power and radicalize Middle American consciousness still further.

I don’t think encouraging David Duke to “institutionalize the movement he started” is exactly a repudiation. Perhaps Gottfried should get his prescription checked.

Francis’s criticisms of Duke were limited to his political viability as a representative of a coming populist wave, not to his beliefs. The evidence for Francis’s racial politics is nearly endless. And in regard to Duke, Francis seemed to buy his project to clean up white supremacy for a mass audience. After Duke visited the Washington Times offices, Francis wrote a column entitled “Respectable Racism?”

After his visit to the Senate, he dropped in at The Washington Times to explain himself to reporters and editors. The interview he gave suggests that he has not only managed to separate himself from Klan-like racism but also formulated a message new to American politics, a message that might be called “respectable racism.” While Mr. Duke now calls himself a “conservative Republican,” it became clear in the course of his remarks that he espouses a belief in the importance of race that most conservatives would shun.

Then Francis points out that Duke’s racial message may be more effective than a standard conservative one:

It’s interesting that Mr. Helms, despite a close contest with a black opponent, avoided racial issues like affirmative action in his campaign until last week. That may be why his campaign was floundering while Mr. Duke’s flourished. Conventional conservative themes such as Mr. Helms emphasized in most of his campaign may not attract voters anymore the way Mr. Duke’s new racial appeal does.

Francis did not always limit his praise to purveyors of respectability politics either, but was intrigued by what violent extremism heralded, as well. Look at his Chronicles column from 1985, “The End of Bourgeois Conservatism?” which he dedicated to analyzing the political meaning of the rise of neo-Nazi terrorist groups like The Silent Brotherhood, which had murdered Jewish radio host Alan Berg a year earlier:

It is because they are postbourgeois and antibourgeois, because they have so little attraction to the prosaic ambitions of bourgeois civilization and so much scorn for the baubles of the managerial regime, that the new militants or their successors may be able to achieve what no other force on the American right has ever been able to do, to formulate a myth of the right around which it would be possible to mobilize a massive popular challenge to the myth of the left that has animated Western politics for the last two centuries and which has now even insinuated itself into contemporary conservatism. "Myths," wrote Georges Sorel, "are not descriptions of things, but expressions of a determination to act. .. . A myth cannot be refuted, since it is, at bottom, identical with the convictions of a group, being the expression of their convictions in the language of movement; and it is, in consequence, unanalysable into parts which could be placed on the plane of historical descriptions." The frightening significance of the perpetrators of recent right-wing violence does not therefore consist in their "descriptions of things," but in their "determination to act," in the irrefutable power of their convictions, and in the possibility that they may be able to conjure up that most formidable of all specters in the nightmares of establishments, a revolution from the right, a rejection of both bourgeois comforts as well as of managerial humanism and social engineering, and an affirmation of our national identity and its destiny.

Again, the examples are nearly endless. There’s the inconvenient fact that Francis was ultimately fired from The Washington Times in 1995 for appearing at the conference of a white nationalist magazine, American Renaissance, and saying whites must “reassert our identity and our solidarity, and we must do so in explicitly racial terms through the articulation of a racial consciousness as whites. . . . The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people." This was after Francis was already on thin ice at the Times for a column that criticized the Southern Baptist Convention for apologizing for slavery. In that column, he wrote, theologically speaking, “neither ‘slavery‘ nor ‘racism‘ as an institution is a sin.”

What has happened in the centuries since the Enlightenment is the permeation of the pseudo-Christian poison of equality into the tissues of the West, to the point that the mainstream churches now spend more time preaching against apartheid and colonialism than they do against real sins such as pinching secretaries and pilfering from the office coffee pool. The Southern Baptists, because they were fortunate enough to flourish in a region where the false sun of the Enlightenment never shone, succeeded in escaping this grim fate, at least until last week.

This column is helpfully included in a collection published by American Renaissance entitled “Essential Writings on Race: Samuel Francis.”

I could go on and on and on. There’s also all the anecdotal evidence. Like Francis calling himself a “fascist” to a young Michael Lind. Or, as Adrianne Black told me, dining at the home of KKK chieftain and Stormfront founder. Don Black. You get the point.

If you’re not yet a paid subscriber but regularly read, enjoy, or share Unpopular Front, please consider signing up. This newsletter is completely reader-supported and represents my primary source of income. And, at 5 dollars a month, it’s less than most things at Starbucks.

Subscribe now

When the Clock Broke is now out in paperback and available wherever books are sold. If you live in the United Kingdom, it’s also available there. The UK edition is also apparently available all over the world, too! I’ve received reports now of book sightings in places as far as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Christchurch, New Zealand. It seems relatively easy to find in Commonwealth countries and at English-language bookstores abroad.

I also do a film podcast with Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times. On our Patreon, we have a lot of bonus content, including a weekly politics discussion.

My friend and collaborator has a great essay for the Criterion Collection’s “Corporate Thriller” series up on the Criterion site:

From a distance—looking down, say, from a penthouse office in a glass-paned downtown skyscraper—the U.S. economy of the 1990s and early 2000s could feel almost boring. Between Black Monday in 1987 and the Global Financial Crisis twenty years later, growth was steady, markets were mostly stable, and inflation was historically low. The “central problem of depression prevention”—that is, the key aim of economic policymaking since the 1930s—“has been solved,” the Nobel laureate Robert Lucas argued in 2003; dissenters to this rosy view of the dismal science were dismissed as cranks and luddites.

Whoops! Not quite two decades on from the Great Moderation, we find ourselves still stumbling through the social, political, and economic hangover it left behind. Rampant deregulation, accelerating deindustrialization, and an increasingly financialized and computerized economy gave us the GFC, and the vastly unequal economy it left in its wake—channeling gains toward capital, speculators, and a small number of professionals, while leaving workers in the lurch—helped birth the reactionary populism now tearing up global trade.

But how could the economists have known? Well, maybe they should have gone to more movies. In the years between Black Monday and the GFC, Hollywood—itself corporatizing, consolidating, and financializing in a surge of mergers and acquisitions—produced a wave of corporate thrillers driven by anxieties about the economic transformations grinding away in the background of steadily growing GDP. Viewed from the C-suite and the private jet, the economy maey have looked fine. But seen from the movie-theater seat and the Blockbuster aisle, it was quite clear something sinister was happening.

In Equator, an interview with Ivan Krastev on the earthquake in Hungary and the legacy of Orbán:

How innovative was this as a form of statecraft?

This model worked for 16 years. What made it particularly creative was that Orbán constructed an illiberal regime out of the elements of liberal democracy. Brussels struggled to challenge the restrictive media laws he introduced in 2010, for example, because Hungary argued that every single article had a precedent in the media law of another EU member state.

But ultimately, he stayed too long. He had positioned himself as a rebel, and to some extent he was one, particularly during the migration crisis in 2015-2016. But rebels don’t age well. After Trump came to power, Orbán’s private correspondence with Putin, in which he expressed his desire to be a mouse to the lion of Moscow, was leaked – and the image he had so carefully constructed collapsed.

Orbán seemed like a central figure in the illiberal revolution in central and eastern Europe, which is one of your great subjects. Could you talk about the nature of that revolution and its origins in the end of the Cold War?

Nineteen eighty-nine is normally recounted as a liberal revolution, and it was. But it was also a nationalist revolution. There was a coalition between liberals and nationalists who, for different reasons, both wanted to leave the Soviet empire and join the West. But they had different ideas about what kind of West they were joining.

The liberals were drawn to the post-sovereign liberal EU – open borders, rights, pluralism. The nationalists, by contrast – and this was as true of Poland under Jarosław Kaczyński as it was of Hungary – had been dreaming of a specific version of the West: more conservative, strongly anti-communist, nationalist rather than internationalist, religious rather than atheist, family-oriented rather than permissive. The West of the 1950s, essentially.

In the 1990s, the nationalists had a problem: they lacked a language for their belief system. Nationalism was so heavily associated with the Yugoslav wars and Milošević that emerging politicians like Orbán, who from around 1994 began his divorce from liberalism, found it difficult to identify with any part of the ideology. So through the decade they were largely muted.

The deeper resentment stemmed from the fact that the post-1989 transition from communism was experienced by many in the East as unidirectional. The West was not going to change; the East was going to imitate it. You could either migrate individually – move to Germany, Austria, study abroad – or migrate collectively, by joining the EU. Leaders like Orbán display the resentment of the second-generation immigrant: the sense that your identity is not respected, that it goes unrecognised.

During the migration crisis, when Orbán placed himself at the centre of European politics, his message was simple: the East is not going to imitate the West anymore. Now the West is going to imitate us.

To make that case, didn’t Orbán have to become something more than a Hungarian politician?

Orbán distinguished himself from other eastern European leaders by thinking beyond his own country. In that sense, he was for the political right what Castro was for the left: a leader of a small, relatively unimportant nation who harboured global ambitions. For years he commissioned opinion polling in European countries. He believed the EU should be reorganised entirely, with Hungary leading one of its blocs. These are ambitions you would normally associate with France or Germany.

On Friday, I participated in a day-long conference on Elites and Democracy at NYU’s Remarque Institute. I believe the video of my presentation and the entire event will be available soon, and I will share it as soon as I can. The event was centered around the publication of Hugo Drochon’s Elites and Democracy. Natasha Piano’s recent book, Democratic Elitism: The Founding Myth of American Political Science, was also much discussed. Both books, in different ways, take a fresh look at what’s called the Italian School of Elitism and its principal figures, Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923), Gaetano Mosca (1858–1941), and Robert Michels (1876–1936). Mosca gave us the idea of a “ruling class,” Pareto postulated politics and history as driven by the “circulation of elites,” and Michels posited “the iron law of oligarchy,” the tendency of all social organizations to be eventually dominated by a select few.

These “Machiavellian” thinkers are generally regarded as great cynics in political theory, an impression cemented by the fact that all three flirted with Italian fascism. Drochon and Piano want to find more salutary lessons in this tradition: Drochon thinks elites will always be with us, and the Elite Theorists explain how to balance and manage them; Piano thinks that the Elite Theorists are, in fact, trenchant critics of plutocratic elitism who open up paths to a substantive democracy that goes beyond mere elections and representative government. Piano makes the striking claim that democracy and elections are opposed rather than complementary phenomena: representative government was always presented in the republican tradition as an alternative to pure democracy, the representatives are necessarily an elite separate from the masses, and universal suffrage can paradoxically have the effect of undermining public belief in democracy when the masses see the repeated and perhaps inevitable failures in practice of the principle of representation.

Since “elites” and “elitism” are some of the biggest buzzwords of our era, along with the related “populism,” attempts to get some specificity and rigor into their meaning are welcome. A big topic at the conference is whether terms have any analytical and descriptive use whatsoever, or whether they are so freighted with rhetorical and normative content that they are little more than slurs at this point. Sometimes it seems like an “elite” is anybody you don’t like.

Both books are fascinating, worth checking out, and I think they help make sense out of the present morass. In particular, Piano’s treatment of Mosca’s critique of universal suffrage struck me as relevant to my own work, and I wish I had Piano’s book when I was writing my own; it makes sense out of the Gotti chapter and perhaps provides a clue to the Trump phenomenon as a whole:

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If you’re not yet a paid subscriber but regularly read, enjoy, or share Unpopular Front, please consider signing up. This newsletter is completely reader-supported and represents my primary source of income. And, at 5 dollars a month, it’s less than most things at Starbucks.

Subscribe now

When the Clock Broke is now out in paperback and available wherever books are sold. If you live in the United Kingdom, it’s also available there. The UK edition is also apparently available all over the world, too! I’ve received reports now of book sightings in places as far as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Christchurch, New Zealand. It seems relatively easy to find in Commonwealth countries and at English-language bookstores abroad.

I also do a film podcast with Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times. On our Patreon, we have a lot of bonus content, including a weekly politics discussion.

I appeared this week on Mike Pesca’s Not Even Mad podcast to discuss the Iran war, libertarianism, and what generally annoys me, with Reason magazine’s .

On Friday, April 17th, I will be giving a presentation as part of the day-long “Elites and Democracy” event at NYU’s Remarque Institute. You can register online to attend or tune in on Zoom.

After finishing his latest book, my friend and mentor Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland, Before the Storm, and Reaganland, has kicked off a Substack called “Rickipedia.” It’s aptly named because, besides being an enormously entertaining writer, Rick is an absolute treasure trove of information about the right and American history more generally.

Hungarians are heading to the polls today to decide whether or not to end the 16-year reign of the Fidesz Party and its leader, Viktor Orbán, who has brought his country back towards despotism. All civilized people in the world hope ardently for this fleshy tyrant’s defeat: perhaps it will signal the breaking of the right-wing wave. At the very least, it will be a stinging rebuke for fascist wannabes worldwide who have looked to his regime for inspiration. In the New Statesman, Ábel Bede:

Yet Orbán’s campaign focus on geopolitics exposes a vulnerability. Hungary’s economy has stagnated in recent years, with investment falling and headline inflation peaking at around 25 per cent in early 2023. The European Union is withholding roughly €17 billion (£14.8 billion) in funds over rule-of-law concerns – resources that previously underpinned rising living standards. As economic pressures mount, voters appear increasingly focused on domestic conditions rather than international positioning.

This shift is fuelling the rise of Orbán’s challenger, Péter Magyar. On the same day as Vance’s visit, Magyar held seven rallies outside Budapest, drawing large crowds even in small towns. His party, Tisza, now leads in several independent polls, with some suggesting it could even approach a constitutional majority. A former Fidesz insider, Magyar rose rapidly after a 2024 scandal that forced the resignation of President Katalin Novák. Since then, he has consolidated support across the political spectrum, positioning himself not as a liberal reformer but as a pragmatic critic of state decline. His campaign avoids abstract debates about democracy, instead focusing on healthcare, education, infrastructure, and corruption. At rallies, that message appears to resonate strongly. In Dévaványa, a town of 7,000, Magyar filled the main square on a weekday afternoon – an unprecedented turnout for an opposition figure in recent years. Asked why voters are responding differently this time, a local organiser offered a blunt explanation: “Because they are much poorer now.”

Magyar’s speeches frequently draw sharp contrasts between everyday hardship and elite wealth. “In ten years, Lőrinc Mészáros… has become richer than the British monarchy did in 400 years,” he told one crowd – a claim that overstates the comparison, though Mészáros’s wealth has indeed surged dramatically. He couples such rhetoric with vivid, emotional appeals, highlighting failing infrastructure and poverty.

It is not the first time The Democracy, as they used to call the cause writ large, has looked to Hungary for inspiration. I’m reminded of the hero’s welcome Lajos Kossuth received in the United States in the 1850s. He was thronged by adoring crowds, and the country briefly fell under a mania for all things Hungarian. Abraham Lincoln joined other leading citizens of Springfield, Illinois, to call a meeting in honor of Kossuth, and they issued a resolution in support of Hungary’s revolution. Some sources say they met; there’s not much hard evidence for that, but perhaps in the Gettysburg address, there’s an echo of a line in Kossuth’s 1852 speech in Columbus, Ohio—“The spirit of our age is Democracy. All for the people, and all by the people. Nothing about the people without the people – That is Democracy!”

Kossuth wanted to drum up support against the Russians, who had crushed the nascent Hungarian bid for independence, but although Americans had a great deal of affection for the dashing and romantic revolutionary, the political appetite for intervention was not there. Even that great enthusiast Walt Whitman was unswayed, and his remarks later perhaps reflect the country’s mood in a more sober state:

I knew Kossuth—talked with him on several occasions. He still lives, as bright intellectually—the same fine noble soul as ever. When I saw him he was a small man, eloquent to a great height—vivacious. Kossuth made a great mistake after his coming here. He had been almost importuned to come here by officials, by Congress, was brought in an American man-of-war. At that time any one of the nations—Germany, Austria, France, Russia—would have killed him—hung him—if they could have got him in their hands. But Kossuth’s great mistake after he got here was to make an effort to have America range herself in his cause. We all recognized it at once as deplorable. We could not have done it then, could not do it now, ought never to do it. Yet he went up and down through our states, pleading for it. I am even opposed to Congress petitioning the Czar to investigate Siberia—even that is out of our province. We can never be in a position to arbitrate—enforce our arbitrament—in European contests.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels went from great admirers of Kossuth’s “bourgeois revolution” against the reactionary powers of old Europe to bitter critics of what they considered to be his toadying to Napoleon III.

I have to take a small issue with an otherwise very fine piece in the New Yorker by Antonia Hitchens about the groyperfication of the GOP—and which also very generously quotes my book:

Fuentes picked up the mantle, repackaging paleoconservatism for the streaming era. In 2022, he put on a political conference in Florida, where he hosted Peter Brimelow, a paleocon who had pitched an early version of the great-replacement theory. (Brimelow has called immigration to the West “Hitler’s revenge.”) In the nineties, William F. Buckley had tried to keep paleocons like Brimelow and Buchanan out of mainstream conservatism by banning such ideas from the pages of National Review. Fuentes helped make their concerns a mass online phenomenon.

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When the Clock Broke is now out in paperback and available wherever books are sold. If you live in the United Kingdom, it’s also available there. The UK edition is also apparently available all over the world, too! I’ve received reports now of book sightings in places as far as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Christchurch, New Zealand. It seems relatively easy to find in Commonwealth countries and at English-language bookstores abroad.

I also do a film podcast with Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times. On our Patreon, we have a lot of bonus content, including a weekly politics discussion.

Happy Easter and Chag Sameach Pesach to all who celebrate.

Thanks to everyone who came to the Night of Ideas festival at Albertine to see me, Max Read, and Maya Vinokour. I will have video and audio of the event up tomorrow, I think.

I’m focusing today on a single theme: Trump’s threats to bomb Iran back into the “stone ages [sic.]” Sometimes I feel that my job is to be an intellectual historian of idiocy. One might think that there’s no discipline less helpful to understand Trumpism than the history of ideas or culture, since Trump has neither, but as John Maynard Keynes once remarked, “Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”

The phrase “bomb them into the Stone Age” is a ghastly cliché, and so Trump and Hegseth probably just plucked it out of the air, but the actual origins are still instructive. It comes not from an academic scribber, but from Air Force General Curtis LeMay, the mastermind of the fire-bombing campaign that devastated Japan’s cities in World War II. He later served as head of the Strategic Air Command and Air Force Chief of Staff under John F. Kennedy, where he continually advised the President to initiate a preemptive nuclear strike during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He also appears to have taken actions that were designed to provoke the Soviet Union into World War III. He was the model for George C. Scott’s character in Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove and ran as segregationist George Wallace’s VP candidate on the American Independent Party ticket in 1968.

The New Yorker has a great piece by Richard Rhodes on LeMay’s efforts to start WWIII:

In 1954, LeMay remarked to a reconnaissance pilot whose plane had been damaged by a MiG-17 while over the Soviet Union, “Well, maybe if we do this overflight right, we can get World War III started.” The pilot, Hal Austin, told the documentary filmmaker Paul Lashmar that he assumed LeMay was joking, but years later, after LeMay retired, Austin saw him again and “brought up the subject of the mission we had flown. And he remembered it like it was yesterday. We chatted about it a little bit. His comment again was, ‘Well, we’d have been a hell of a lot better off if we’d got World War III started in those days.’ ”

The “Stone Age” quote appears in his 1965 autobiography, Mission with LeMay: My Story. The context is the burgeoning Vietnam War:

The military task confronting us is to make it so expensive for the North Vietnamese that they will stop their aggression against South Viet Nam and Laos. If we make it too expensive for them, they will stop. They don’t want to lose everything they have.

There came a time when the Nazis threw the towel into the ring. Same way with the Japanese. We didn’t bring that happy day about by sparing with sixteen-ounce gloves.

My solution to the problem would be to tell them frankly that they’ve got to shape in their horns and stop that aggression, or we’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age. And we would shove them back into the Stone Age with Air power or Naval power—not with ground forces.

You could tell them that they might not be convinced that you really meant business. What you needed with those characters is convince them that if they continue their aggression, they will have to pay an economic price they cannot afford.

We must throw a punch that really hurts.

For example, we could knock out all their oil. They don’t have oilof their own; it has to come into the country; so there are rich targets, in storage areas sprinkled around.

Knock them all out. This immediately brings a lot of things to a halt: transportation and power particularly. It would be the simplest possible application of strategic bombardment, and you could do the jobwith conventional weapons. You wouldn’t have to get into a nuclear fracas.

That sounds an awful lot like Trump, doesn’t it? It’s essentially the strategy he’s trying to pursue now with the threats against Iran’s infrastructure. Moral questions aside, it’s not clear if it even works. Contra Le May, Nazi Germany did not throw in the towel because of strategic bombing; the Reich had to be invaded at great cost to Allied armies. And Le May’s horrific destruction of Japanese cities did not defeat the Japanese: it took the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some military historians take Nixon’s strategic bombing of North Vietnam as proof of Le May’s concept, but it really achieved very little. The agreement that the US and North Vietnam came to was essentially the same as the principles hammered out before the bombing. “We bombed the North Vietnamese into accepting our concessions," an aide to Henry Kissinger acidly remarked. I’d bet this war ends similarly: unnecessary devastation followed by concessions.

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