Corporate Thrillers; Orbán's Fall; Élites or Elites?
Reading, Watching 04.19.26
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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.
My friend and collaborator Max Read 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:
