An Officer and a Spy; Lichtenstein on Mike Davis; Danilo Kiš on Nationalism; Thiel and Girard
Reading, Watching 08.10.25
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You can buy When the Clock Broke, now out in paperback, available wherever books are sold. If you live in the UK, it’s also available there.
Here is how it’s being received across the pond:
"Masterly . . . Ganz spotlights the rage and rancour that spread beneath the surface of American life in a period now remembered for its peace and prosperity." —Kyle Burke, Times Literary Supplement
“[S]pry and superbly written…the best account I have ever read on the origins of Trumpism…Thirty years on, the Republican party is no longer the party of Reagan and the Bushes: Trump rules unopposed. When the Clock Broke is a brilliant explanation of his rise.” —Tomiwa Owolade, The Telegraph
“Ganz, a journalist by trade, is a fine historian; he brings clarity to events we remember but perhaps did not fully understand. Rollicking stories are offered instead of bludgeoning polemic; readers are left to draw their own conclusions.” —Gerard DeGroot, The Times
I spoke with Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, author of the fascinating book The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, for the Intelligence Squared podcast.
This morning, I have for you:
Paul Leslie on René Girard and Peter Thiel for Salmagundi
A great historian on a great historian: Nelson Lichtenstein considers the intellectual life and legacy of Mike Davis for Jacobin.
Yugoslav novelist Danilo Kiš on nationalism and nationalists.
My thoughts on Roman Polanski’s An Officer and a Spy, his 2019 film about the Dreyfus Affair.
In Salmagundi, Paul Leslie has a long essay on Peter Thiel’s (mis)appropriation of French literary theorist René Girard. He noticed something that also caught my eye a few years ago: a thinly veiled endorsement of Oswald Spengler’s vision of Caesarism in Thiel’s essay “The Straussian Moment.”
The real crescendo of “The Straussian Moment” occurs not at its conclusion but earlier, in the section titled “Proceed With Caution.” Here, Thiel aligns himself with the German historical theorist Oswald Spengler’s fatalistic and anti-democratic vision, embedding his core declaration where only the attentive reader might notice.
He writes: “For the Straussian, there can be no fundamental disagreement with Oswald Spengler’s call for action at the dramatic finale of Der Untergang des Abendlandes…”Translated, it reads:
But for us, who have been placed by fate into this culture and this moment of its becoming—in which money celebrates its final victories and its heir, Caesarism, quietly and inexorably approaches—the direction of our will and necessity is marked out within a narrow circle, without which life is not worth living. We do not have the freedom to achieve this or that, but only the freedom to do what is necessary or to do nothing. And a task that has been set by the necessity of history will be accomplished, with the individual or against him. The Fates lead the willing; the unwilling they drag.
This is Thiel’s true dramatic finale and core declaration—a covert call to action embedded within the essay, a dog whistle aligning his manifesto with the work of a strategist intent on dismantling democratic norms in favor of a post-liberal, elitist order. By placing this portentous and deterministic proclamation in an earlier section and cloaking it in untranslated German and Latin, Thiel is employing a Straussian technique of esoteric writing. He signals—to those “in the know”—his alignment with Spengler’s rejection of liberal democracy and embrace of an inevitable authoritarian future, while the casual reader may gloss over this hidden climax.
Thiel’s deliberate emphasis on Strauss’s concept of esoteric writing earlier in the same section reinforces this interpretation. He spends considerable effort explaining how philosophers might conceal dangerous truths within their works, accessible only to the discerning few.
At this point, Thiel takes very little trouble to disguise his goals and aims. His company, Palantir, is now almost a meme stock, closing trading on Friday at a gaudy 621.29 times earnings. You can view the Palantir trade as a bet on the authoritarian development of the Trump administration. Fun fact: the head of Palantir’s UK branch is the grandson of Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists.
In Jacobin, Nelson Lichtenstein reflects on the intellectual journey of the late Mike Davis, essay by essay and book by book:
In 2022, when Mike Davis died at age seventy-six, obituary writers rightly praised his radicalism, his anti-imperialism, his warnings of environmental catastrophe, and the sophisticated yet lucid brand of Marxism with which he observed capitalism’s dystopian transformation of Los Angeles and other cities. Many called him “the prophet of doom.”
His energy was enormous. He had twenty books to his name, and some, including City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear, Late Victorian Holocausts, and Planet of Slums, have become classics with an ever-widening influence. But his rough, tough, working-class persona, forged in the gritty, downscale reaches of the Southern California suburban frontier, has often obscured his relationship to the ideas and texts that he encountered, mastered, revised, and deployed in a forty-year outpouring of work whose vitality and breath continues to astound readers. So how did Mike Davis, the San Diego County redneck, become Mike Davis, the transatlantic intellectual, a man whose first book and his last were histories of the working class?
There are many sources of Davis’s ideas, from his experience in the Congress of Racial Equality, the Students for a Democratic Society, and the California Communist Party to the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) seminars of Robert Brenner and participation in the International Marxist Group (a Trotskyist formation largely active in the United Kingdom). The Brenner seminars of the early 1970s, where students and instructors read Capital in the context of debates within British Marxism on agrarian class struggles and the transition from feudalism to capitalism, were a particularly “exhilarating experience,” Davis remembered. They “gave me the intellectual confidence to pursue my own agenda of eclectic interests in political economy, labor history, and urban ecology.”
But even more formative were the years when Mike Davis lived in the United Kingdom and in particular those he spent as contributor and editor at the New Left Review in the early 1980s, a time when Perry Anderson was the reigning presence. It was at the New Left Review that Davis wrote a series of incisive essays on the history of the US working class, the political economy of post-Fordist America, and the rise of Ronald Reagan. Collected in his first book, Prisoners of the American Dream (1986), they reflect the extent to which Davis stood aside from and sometimes in opposition to the influence of E. P. Thompson, whose nuanced studies of how English subalterns created their own sense of class consciousness was then at its most influential among the younger generation of American labor historians.
Yugoslav novelist Danilo Kiš with a blistering attack on nationalism from his book The Anatomy Lesson — “Nationalism is first and foremost paranoia. Collective and individual paranoia.” :
To be a nationalist is therefore to be an individual with no obligations. It is to be a “coward who will not admit his cowardice; a murderer who represses his murderous proclivities without being able to master them, yet who dares not kill except in effigy, or in the anonymity of the crowd; a malcontent who, fearing the consequences of rebellion, dares not rebel” – the spitting image of Sartre’s anti-Semite. Whence, we wonder, such cowardice, such an attitude, such an upsurge of nationalism, in this day and age? Oppressed by ideologies, on the margin of social changes, crammed and lost between antagonistic ideologies, unequal to individual rebellion because it is denied to him, the individual finds himself in a quandary, a vacuum; although he is a social being, he takes no part in social life; although an individualist, individuality has been refused him in the name of ideology; what is left but to seek his being elsewhere? The nationalist is a frustrated individualist, nationalism is the frustrated (collective) expression of this kind of individualism, at once ideology and anti-ideology…
Which brings us to the Dreyfus Affair…