One of the things I have noticed about a lot of guys (and they are almost always men) who really stand by Trump is that they all kind of imagine themselves as Michael Corleone in the scene where he tells Kaye that is father is just like any other honorable man and ends with her calling naive for thinking Judges and Senators do not have men killed.
The rabble (rich or not) always seem to have a view that liberalism/rule of law are bedtime stories that we tell to children and the real world is very different.
It doesn't seem to occur to a lot of these guys (especially the not rich ones) that they will be grist for the mill in a corrupt and lawless world instead of being Michael Corleone.
Really wish I could understand why so many people who can analyze and describe the problems with modern society with such insight nevertheless recoil at the idea of calling Trumpism a fascist ideology?
I mean, he’s already dispatched the military to quell what was, by any measure, a small-scale “uprising” easily managed by local authorities. I think it’s pretty clear Trump will employ as much violence as necessary as king as it appears in his political interest to do so.
Is it really just a case of not wanting to sound hysterical to regular readers of the New York Times? Jealousy at not reaching the conclusion that what we are witnessing is fascism first?
Enjoyable, as ever. But I think it ends too soon. Not that I know what should have come next. The sense of law as a club to beat one's enemies over the head with - al la Hulk Hogan vs Gawker- is one I wish to see explored further. Although, maybe I should just read Gaddis's A Frolic of His Own, again. Surely the great novel of American law and its contradictions.
Helpful to me to understand who is the enemy within. It is many of us pursuing our naked self interest. Which interestingly enough is the premise of freemarket capitalism. Optimal results are supposed to occur when everybody seeks to maximize their own utility. (I’m a little fuzzy on my Adam Smith, but I think he also pre-supposed moral actors.) This also squares with the population viewing themselves as consumers rather than citizens.
AFAIK, Adam Smith assumed amoral actors whose utility function included the approbation of others. This puts all the pressure on the social mores of the moment. Smith lived in the tail end of an honor society. Today, the approbation seems to come from wealth or fame.
I question the utility of concepts of bourgeois society that were developed in pre-WWII (and often pre-WWI) Europe as having much to say about how Trump and Co are acting especially with their assault on universities. I agree that there are probably various rival cliques fighting for power behind Trump, or at least using Trump as a vessel to get things they ave dreamed about for decades.
Trump is interesting in that he is both a figure that can command a rabble/mob like no other GOP politicians (can anyone imagine the Jan 6 crowd insurrecting for JD Vance?) and he can cower the GOP pols into submission. At the same time, he is clearly just a vessel to people like Miller and Vought who have mastered the correct level of ass-kissing necessary in order to be given carte blanche to do whatever they want and not get thrown under the bus.
On of the reasons, I don't take much amusement in Trump flailing about on Epstein (I agree with Marshall that it is probably a DEFCON 1 scenario behind the scenes) is that it is not exactly slowing or stopping down any of the horribleness coming out of the Trump admin like the Columbia and now potentially Harvard. Japan and the EU and many others are bribing/obeying in advance themselves into Trump's graces or hoping to save something previously apportioned or promised funds (probably from the Biden admin/time).
I think the settlements from Columbia and other deals is basically a Pascal's Wager that Democrats, if/when they get back to power, will not have the willpower, means, or consensus to do anything to punish those who bent the knee. Not even truth and reconciliation commissions or hearings. This could be a very good bet. Most people I know and have read are disgusted by the Columbia settlement. I have seen just enough people (and not just uni admin types) argue that it is not the jobs of universities to resist Trump and litigate for years and years. The role of the university is to educate and research and the the trustees' fiduciary duties* are to ensure this happens. They think there is nothing wrong with settling now and just laying low till the midterms or 2028 election** The settler advocates bring up arguments of endowment funds being tied up in many ways often and not conducting research for a few years will destroy standing.
These arguments all come from people who hate Trump. I don't know if it represents a majority of the Democratic Party (elected officials and voters) but it might represent enough to make a consensus of how to punish the complicit next to impossible. Yet alone, how to de Trumpify the government.
So the people bending the knee go with Trump for now with a bet that future Democratic
governments won't punish them for doing so.
*I would think a fiduciary duty also means don't make a naive assumption that an extortionist running a protection racket would be satisfied with one shake down but this is apparently a position held only by people who have no say in the decision making process.
**FWIW, Trump and the GOP seem to think the midterms will occur under circumstances that are more or less democratic and the results could be very bad for them.
The time to refuse to negotiate with Trump is now. Standing on principle is more important than so—called benefits. Those bullied can find ways and means to carry on. Just try!
Thanks for helping clarify my misgivings with Tooze's assertion that Trump's rule is the opposite of fascism because equating the two, he suggests, assumes some pre-authoritarian liberal 'rule of law' that was inviolate?! Maybe in some theoretical sense I'm not following but this does not correspond with any historical reality I recognize, where some antagonism between the state and capital and, at the same time, 'rule by deal,' 'pay to play,' crony capitalism have always been part of the public/private relationship going back to the 19th century at least. To some degree the state has always been captured by wealth. The issue today appears to be the more threatening, power-grabbing, totalizing reach of that capture. I also find help here with my lingering misgivings about Klein/Thompson's abundance thesis. It's isn't the sclerotic state that is the key obstacle to abundance but the "superabundance" of private wealth rendering the state dysfunctional to thwart democratic state claims on private wealth. From the cheap seats, both the behemoth and leviathan appear as plutocratic monsters asserting cultural forms of tyranny over cooperative norms and the democratic rule of law.
This is the first essay you've written where I don't entirely agree with you. It's not that anything you've said is wrong, it's just that the terms "rabble" and "mob" were also used by Conservative and Liberal analysts of the French Revolution to describe popular politics. It seems to me that they are merely condemnations of anyone who upsets an order that the speaker sees as good. It's also the case that the language of "civic" vs. "bourgeois" interests belongs to an older Marxist historiography of the Revolution that went out with Cobban. That slight objection aside, I agree with your assessment of current politics and prefer your analysis to Tooze's.
Forgive this trivial intrusion, but I have thought basically my whole life that the lyric in Gimme Shelter was “it’s just a shout away,” which of course doesn’t make any sense. I may live long enough to see the downfall of all my beliefs, a terrible thought.
I remember like it was yesterday watching Mick Jagger belt out Gimme Shelter and “Its just a shot away” in a late 80s Stones concert in Atlantic City. It was my first rock concert, and I remember being particularly impressed at the ferocity of adult partying, which was pretty extreme at that show, being a long awaited Stones tour back when they weren’t geriatric. There was a guy in the row in front of me absolutely covered in his own vomit, lol, singing along every word.
I believe the conference center was adjacent to one of Trump’s mobbed-up casinos. This lawlessness has indeed been here the whole time.
My $.02- If the left has has a part in this breakdown, the mobsters taking over the reins pretty much entirely from the ‘citizens’ of the liberal establishment, its that we’ve spent too much energy criticizing the existing, imperfect institutions. We’ve not spent enough bolstering them and building new institutions to counter the robber barons, er I mean mobster oligarchs.
I don’t think any serious scholar of fascism (though lots of unserious ones) has ever argued that fascism represents - or represented - a complete departure from pre-fascist modes of governance.
As eager as Italian fascists were to present themselves as a new “third way”, they were equally keen to claim inspiration, and legitimacy, from everything from Hoover’s Commerce Secretariat to Syndicalism to Taylor’s Scientific Management to Fayolism to mobilization and centralized industrial planning during WWI. Thus “corporatism” used as a synonym for fascism during the period.
The Roman Empire may have provided the aesthetics, but the governance model was seen as an extension, not a departure from contemporary capitalist systems of authority.
I think some people will still be saying shit like "but hey!! at least you all fascists like the silly libs say you are!" as they get helicoptered by one.
Your last couple of sentence remind me of the theory of over production of elites theory, (it was someone at the ft, right?) but it’s a specific section of the elite, the petite bourgeois who are pissed at the political class and the professional managerial class for their screw ups and pompous narrow cliqueness. This is their revenge, and attack the wasp political culture is an easy target, their kinda wimpy after all.
Thank you for this. I started to write a comment on Tooze's blog when I read it, but I was too enraged. Tooze has a habit of snidely dismissing those he disagrees with, but I confess that I can't always figure out his own position. Or, rather, I suspect that his position is a kind of tarted up liberalism, with his references to a "polycrisis" that he thinks is simply beyond the ken of anyone hopeless enough (or brazen enough) to cite Marx—unless they want to bring in Althusser or, on occasion, Perry Anderson.
Maybe I've spent too much time on the local DSA Discord, but I'm reading Tooze as saying, "It's always been this way." The vaunted rule of law has always seen its share of corruption, special pleadings and money/power trumping right, often with ignorance, naivete or bullshit papering over the exceptions.
John seems to be saying that a tipping point has been reached, or is at minimum within sight, where, say, a critical mass of rabble--both rich and poor--are overwhelming the ethic of the citizenry.
It's as if Tooze so wishes to avoid the F-word that he dips a toe into the cynicism of the rabble and almost tries to give it a glow up as the actual "normal" we've been living through.
Which I'm fine with, if his aim is to reinvent the country and world along truly citizen, not bourgeois (let alone rabble) ethics. But not if he just wants restoration of a bougie, neoliberal, hypocritical regime.
One of the things I have noticed about a lot of guys (and they are almost always men) who really stand by Trump is that they all kind of imagine themselves as Michael Corleone in the scene where he tells Kaye that is father is just like any other honorable man and ends with her calling naive for thinking Judges and Senators do not have men killed.
The rabble (rich or not) always seem to have a view that liberalism/rule of law are bedtime stories that we tell to children and the real world is very different.
It doesn't seem to occur to a lot of these guys (especially the not rich ones) that they will be grist for the mill in a corrupt and lawless world instead of being Michael Corleone.
Absolutely right! Even more or less rich ones like Rudy Giuliani who came to ruin due to his embrace of Trump
Really wish I could understand why so many people who can analyze and describe the problems with modern society with such insight nevertheless recoil at the idea of calling Trumpism a fascist ideology?
I mean, he’s already dispatched the military to quell what was, by any measure, a small-scale “uprising” easily managed by local authorities. I think it’s pretty clear Trump will employ as much violence as necessary as king as it appears in his political interest to do so.
Is it really just a case of not wanting to sound hysterical to regular readers of the New York Times? Jealousy at not reaching the conclusion that what we are witnessing is fascism first?
Enjoyable, as ever. But I think it ends too soon. Not that I know what should have come next. The sense of law as a club to beat one's enemies over the head with - al la Hulk Hogan vs Gawker- is one I wish to see explored further. Although, maybe I should just read Gaddis's A Frolic of His Own, again. Surely the great novel of American law and its contradictions.
Helpful to me to understand who is the enemy within. It is many of us pursuing our naked self interest. Which interestingly enough is the premise of freemarket capitalism. Optimal results are supposed to occur when everybody seeks to maximize their own utility. (I’m a little fuzzy on my Adam Smith, but I think he also pre-supposed moral actors.) This also squares with the population viewing themselves as consumers rather than citizens.
AFAIK, Adam Smith assumed amoral actors whose utility function included the approbation of others. This puts all the pressure on the social mores of the moment. Smith lived in the tail end of an honor society. Today, the approbation seems to come from wealth or fame.
I question the utility of concepts of bourgeois society that were developed in pre-WWII (and often pre-WWI) Europe as having much to say about how Trump and Co are acting especially with their assault on universities. I agree that there are probably various rival cliques fighting for power behind Trump, or at least using Trump as a vessel to get things they ave dreamed about for decades.
Trump is interesting in that he is both a figure that can command a rabble/mob like no other GOP politicians (can anyone imagine the Jan 6 crowd insurrecting for JD Vance?) and he can cower the GOP pols into submission. At the same time, he is clearly just a vessel to people like Miller and Vought who have mastered the correct level of ass-kissing necessary in order to be given carte blanche to do whatever they want and not get thrown under the bus.
On of the reasons, I don't take much amusement in Trump flailing about on Epstein (I agree with Marshall that it is probably a DEFCON 1 scenario behind the scenes) is that it is not exactly slowing or stopping down any of the horribleness coming out of the Trump admin like the Columbia and now potentially Harvard. Japan and the EU and many others are bribing/obeying in advance themselves into Trump's graces or hoping to save something previously apportioned or promised funds (probably from the Biden admin/time).
I think the settlements from Columbia and other deals is basically a Pascal's Wager that Democrats, if/when they get back to power, will not have the willpower, means, or consensus to do anything to punish those who bent the knee. Not even truth and reconciliation commissions or hearings. This could be a very good bet. Most people I know and have read are disgusted by the Columbia settlement. I have seen just enough people (and not just uni admin types) argue that it is not the jobs of universities to resist Trump and litigate for years and years. The role of the university is to educate and research and the the trustees' fiduciary duties* are to ensure this happens. They think there is nothing wrong with settling now and just laying low till the midterms or 2028 election** The settler advocates bring up arguments of endowment funds being tied up in many ways often and not conducting research for a few years will destroy standing.
These arguments all come from people who hate Trump. I don't know if it represents a majority of the Democratic Party (elected officials and voters) but it might represent enough to make a consensus of how to punish the complicit next to impossible. Yet alone, how to de Trumpify the government.
So the people bending the knee go with Trump for now with a bet that future Democratic
governments won't punish them for doing so.
*I would think a fiduciary duty also means don't make a naive assumption that an extortionist running a protection racket would be satisfied with one shake down but this is apparently a position held only by people who have no say in the decision making process.
**FWIW, Trump and the GOP seem to think the midterms will occur under circumstances that are more or less democratic and the results could be very bad for them.
Reconstruction time again... but with more follow-through.
The time to refuse to negotiate with Trump is now. Standing on principle is more important than so—called benefits. Those bullied can find ways and means to carry on. Just try!
Thanks for helping clarify my misgivings with Tooze's assertion that Trump's rule is the opposite of fascism because equating the two, he suggests, assumes some pre-authoritarian liberal 'rule of law' that was inviolate?! Maybe in some theoretical sense I'm not following but this does not correspond with any historical reality I recognize, where some antagonism between the state and capital and, at the same time, 'rule by deal,' 'pay to play,' crony capitalism have always been part of the public/private relationship going back to the 19th century at least. To some degree the state has always been captured by wealth. The issue today appears to be the more threatening, power-grabbing, totalizing reach of that capture. I also find help here with my lingering misgivings about Klein/Thompson's abundance thesis. It's isn't the sclerotic state that is the key obstacle to abundance but the "superabundance" of private wealth rendering the state dysfunctional to thwart democratic state claims on private wealth. From the cheap seats, both the behemoth and leviathan appear as plutocratic monsters asserting cultural forms of tyranny over cooperative norms and the democratic rule of law.
This is the first essay you've written where I don't entirely agree with you. It's not that anything you've said is wrong, it's just that the terms "rabble" and "mob" were also used by Conservative and Liberal analysts of the French Revolution to describe popular politics. It seems to me that they are merely condemnations of anyone who upsets an order that the speaker sees as good. It's also the case that the language of "civic" vs. "bourgeois" interests belongs to an older Marxist historiography of the Revolution that went out with Cobban. That slight objection aside, I agree with your assessment of current politics and prefer your analysis to Tooze's.
As I understand the thesis, the approach of fascism changes the rule of the bourgeoisie from covert to overt.
Forgive this trivial intrusion, but I have thought basically my whole life that the lyric in Gimme Shelter was “it’s just a shout away,” which of course doesn’t make any sense. I may live long enough to see the downfall of all my beliefs, a terrible thought.
Really spot on here, thank you.
I remember like it was yesterday watching Mick Jagger belt out Gimme Shelter and “Its just a shot away” in a late 80s Stones concert in Atlantic City. It was my first rock concert, and I remember being particularly impressed at the ferocity of adult partying, which was pretty extreme at that show, being a long awaited Stones tour back when they weren’t geriatric. There was a guy in the row in front of me absolutely covered in his own vomit, lol, singing along every word.
I believe the conference center was adjacent to one of Trump’s mobbed-up casinos. This lawlessness has indeed been here the whole time.
My $.02- If the left has has a part in this breakdown, the mobsters taking over the reins pretty much entirely from the ‘citizens’ of the liberal establishment, its that we’ve spent too much energy criticizing the existing, imperfect institutions. We’ve not spent enough bolstering them and building new institutions to counter the robber barons, er I mean mobster oligarchs.
I don’t think any serious scholar of fascism (though lots of unserious ones) has ever argued that fascism represents - or represented - a complete departure from pre-fascist modes of governance.
As eager as Italian fascists were to present themselves as a new “third way”, they were equally keen to claim inspiration, and legitimacy, from everything from Hoover’s Commerce Secretariat to Syndicalism to Taylor’s Scientific Management to Fayolism to mobilization and centralized industrial planning during WWI. Thus “corporatism” used as a synonym for fascism during the period.
The Roman Empire may have provided the aesthetics, but the governance model was seen as an extension, not a departure from contemporary capitalist systems of authority.
They’re not just robber barons. They’re rabble barons
"silly and simplistic" seems to be how a lot of too-clever-by-half folks want to receive anything some liberals say. Adam's just too saavy, it seems.
I think some people will still be saying shit like "but hey!! at least you all fascists like the silly libs say you are!" as they get helicoptered by one.
Your last couple of sentence remind me of the theory of over production of elites theory, (it was someone at the ft, right?) but it’s a specific section of the elite, the petite bourgeois who are pissed at the political class and the professional managerial class for their screw ups and pompous narrow cliqueness. This is their revenge, and attack the wasp political culture is an easy target, their kinda wimpy after all.
Thank you for this. I started to write a comment on Tooze's blog when I read it, but I was too enraged. Tooze has a habit of snidely dismissing those he disagrees with, but I confess that I can't always figure out his own position. Or, rather, I suspect that his position is a kind of tarted up liberalism, with his references to a "polycrisis" that he thinks is simply beyond the ken of anyone hopeless enough (or brazen enough) to cite Marx—unless they want to bring in Althusser or, on occasion, Perry Anderson.
Maybe I've spent too much time on the local DSA Discord, but I'm reading Tooze as saying, "It's always been this way." The vaunted rule of law has always seen its share of corruption, special pleadings and money/power trumping right, often with ignorance, naivete or bullshit papering over the exceptions.
John seems to be saying that a tipping point has been reached, or is at minimum within sight, where, say, a critical mass of rabble--both rich and poor--are overwhelming the ethic of the citizenry.
It's as if Tooze so wishes to avoid the F-word that he dips a toe into the cynicism of the rabble and almost tries to give it a glow up as the actual "normal" we've been living through.
Which I'm fine with, if his aim is to reinvent the country and world along truly citizen, not bourgeois (let alone rabble) ethics. But not if he just wants restoration of a bougie, neoliberal, hypocritical regime.
But I'm probably missing a lot.