I had a student who I suspect was a Rothbard fan a few years back. He liked to make a big show of reading Ayn Rand before class and wore “More Mises, Less Marx” t-shirts. He’s the only student I ever had that openly defended child labor (it was valuable work experience). He wasn’t dumb, but I think he was lonely. Initiated into the political science honor society, he came alone, while the other inductees had friends and family with them. I never saw him talk to another student, sit with a classmate, or even walk alongside someone else to or from class. He graduated and went to George Mason for an economics Masters. Then he planned to move to Singapore.
That last part sparked my curiosity. Was it the financial hub aspect that attracted him, or did he share the common RW male fantasy of marrying the stereotyped “docile” Asian woman? If it’s the latter, and he finds someone, I feel sorry for her.
A late reply, but I had a acquaintance who used to say he wanted to settle in Singapore as it was 'the world's first fully functioning fascist state'. He only half jested. To him Singapore suggested a place of economic liberalism, skyscrapers and electronics, yet cocooned within a severe form of social control. A manifestation of the tech-bossism that John has written of.
This fella was formally intensely bright; and lonely yes, as a Home counties Englishman who due to his parents had found himself in Australia (a truly Benthamite place).
He worked part-time in military intelligence, whilst studying philosophy and engaging in various political machinations (taking over co-ops, or working on the fringes of established right-wing parties whilst simultaneously decrying as boorish the plodding apparartchiks that succeeded in those parties).
He never made it to Singapore. Last I knew of him, he had written a Trumpy speech for a far-right senator he ended up working for. The speech was a clever goad, purely for cheap attention. Yet the senator believed it.
Absolutely fascinating how Rothbardian political morality is, among other things, so perfectly compatible with being obviously, totally, clinically insane. (Apologies for the adverbial overkill, and great job as always in bringing important context to our collective journey to the bottom).
Also remark-worthy that the hawkers of this vision, when the state and its market distortions and distributivist manipulations are all abolished and the natural hierarchy of man assumes its rightful dominion, they, in their imaginings, at the end of it all, are always the Michael, never the Fredo.
People who vote for the Face-Eating Market are not _formally_ irrational!; they each usually gave a 'good' 'reason' to assume their future facial safety….
Part of the joke here is that a political entity is much more likely than a market to judge people by their agreement with its framework.
The path from libertarian to fash is so well trodden, at least in the US, that its almost a rite of passage. When you've had all the fun you can get from sneering down on all lesser beings as a superior individual, I guess it gets lonely after a while. So moving on to huddling together with a group of like-minded misanthropes allows you to rediscover some of the elements of collectivity you previously saw as a weakness, even if it's a collectivity alienated and perverted into "race" or whatever
"While Marx saw modern society divided into two productive classes, bourgeoisie and proletariat, according to Rothbard, drawing on John C. Calhoun, “the Marx of the Master Class,” society is divided into tax-payers and tax-producers, producers and parasites. The free market, if unchained and left alone, would reveal the natural hierarchy of mankind, but the state and its parasites prevent this natural course from taking place."
This is the most succinct summation of the mindset underlying all the seemingly disparate elements that are coalescing into the current far-right. There is a lot to unpack in this statement, but Hannah Arendt already did the heavy lifting.
However, doesn't this also help make perfect sense of why Girard's "philosophy" is so attractive to these folks? This is a great article. However, you made a comment a few articles back that concerned me ("...Girard has much to recommend him"), and I really hope the more you dig into who Rene Girard is and what he teaches, the more you will realize how incredibly shallow it all is.
When fascism is worn on one's sleeve, it is easy to see, but when it is cloaked in layers of academic bs, it can be a bit more difficult to discern, but no less obvious.
I'm currently in Buenos Aires for a short research trip. It's a wonderful city, a kind of simulacrum of Europe of maybe 40 years ago, with ornate buildings, old-school cafés, restaurants with table cloths and waiters in ties and jackets. A dinner costs at most $10. The streets have holes. The windows haven't been cleaned in years. Those $10 buys you dinner if you exchange money on the black market, in my case in a booth in a florists stand, where a machine whips out piles of 1000 peson notes each worth about $1.05. That's after over 100% inflation.
There's a history here of magical politics, mainly social democratic policies called Peronism (after the dictator who supported Franco and let in nazis).Don't ask. It doesn't work because it's not affordable given the resources. They tax exports to keep prices low for Argentines. It's a comodity based economy with all the ups and downs that means.
I hope this doesn't end any worse than Trump left the US, of course with a different starting point. People I know are of course dismayed. OTOH, he beat the Economy Minister who was in charge during this inflation. So it's not surprising. The hope is that the inevitable failure breaks the cycle of magical politics. Of course, it's always true that things can always get worse. Either way, I recommend a trip here now before things heat up.
Milei is a reaction to Peronism, and especially its recent descendent Kirchnerism. I wouldn't call Peronism "social democratic."
When I visited in Jan-Feb 2020, there was a 1973 Peronist poster in the BsAs Museo Bellas Artes which read (in translation) "Enough with Dependency and Exploitation! Peron to Power for the Construction of National Socialism!" So the Peronists themselves called it national socialism. Of course, they might not have meant Nazism explicitly. Maybe the poster is still there.
Peronism is a variety of (left- and right-) populism similar to Nasserism, in which the resentments of the middle and lower classes are mobilized against political opponents. Peron's street mobs referred to themselves as the "descamisados" - the shirtless ones.
Christina Kirchner expanded the mobilization base to include identity groups in the US intersectional sense.
During Christina Kirchner's presidency, a US foreign service officer I know who had served in BsAs recently described her as "the worst person in the world," because of her hypocritical Eva Peron populism masking huge corruption.
The worst of that was possibly covering for Iran and Hezbollah for the 1994 bombing of the Jewish community center in BsAs, which killed EIGHTY-FIVE people and injured around 300. There's a good Netflix series about the very suspicious killing of the lead prosecutor in the case, Alberto Nisman.
Aside from that, she skimmed the value of hundreds of millions of US dollars from public works contracts. She was convicted, but has immunity because she's still Vice President! It's possible Milei was elected just to prevent her political ally, the other candidate, from pardoning her.
Really it's easy to understand why people would vote for Milei, especially since his opponent in the final was a political ally of Kirchner.
It's symptomatic of dysfunction in US media foreign coverage that Kirchner got so little attention for years of abuses, while Milei is now getting so much.
BsAs is a lovely city, hope it doesn't get wrecked further. A friend of mine is going down there next week. I told him to expect preemptory protests from the Kirchnerites and the government workers unions. Inauguration is December 10.
We had a dinner last night with two fellow academics, both define themselves as Peronists. They're both horrified at having Milei. Their explanation of Peronism was to my mind not all that coherent, but they agreed with my belief that it is sui generis to Argentina. Perón wasn't they argued a dictator or anti democratic. He did make huge investments in social programs, with the result that Argentina is a much less unequal society than anywhere else in Latin America. In fact, this relative equality means that their salaries are much less than the equivalents in Brazil or Peru, for example. But the crime is much less. .
Peronism is so hard for outsiders to understand. I never quite understand what my Peronist friends are trying to explain to me about its virtues. It involves a lot of stories. It's like economics woven into a culture.
I resisted for ten days, but this comment demands a response. Argentina’s architecture is not a simulacrum of Europe. It was the result of the influx of Europeans in Argentina’s wealthy period. There were a lot of French and Italians that immigrated to Argentina which had a GDP similar to the US at the time.The architecture comes from these immigrants.
Argentina is a melting pot much like the US, mostly for southern Europe. It took in many refugees from WWII. A black spot is Peron’s profiting off selling Argentine passports to Nazi’s that were evading justice. One should keep in perspective that the US took in over 1600 Nazis and employed some the worst of the torturers and interrogators in the US government. Klaus Barbie and Dr Krunoslav Draganovic, are two examples.
Lastly, magical politics. It sounds like you are referring to populism. If you were talking about US citizens you would accuse them of buying into populist policies. The word magical comes of as diminishing Latin Americans. The first time I heard this kind of comment from someone I thought it was poorly chosen. Over time I began to see that it was sign of prejudice, a minimising of a population. You should ask yourself why you choose this adjective.
I could go on, on subjects like Kissinger, who urged the Argentine dictatorship in the 70s to speed up their executions as time was running out. The US had an obsession with propping up dictators.
I’m a North American I’ve been in Argentina for over a decade now. The government and economy is frustrating, but the people are good people. We need to stop othering and diminishing cultures that are not our culture. We are all human beings. Treat people with respect. I like that John Ganz included the disclaimer that he has a “blind spot when it comes to South America”. His article was reasonable. We should all exercise a bit of humility before prognosticating on a country we are not well informed about. I’ve heard each of these comments from people with little knowledge of Argentina too many times. I feel someone needs to push back on these comments.
I didn't mean to imply that the architecture alone seemed like a simulacrum. It's the impression of someone coming to visit, that's all. As for the politics, there is a longer history of it, which is now more common to many countries, including the US. There's just a longer history of it in Argentina, and we see the results in the long economic decline from when the country was rich. I can't see how you can look at 150% inflation, and a currency exchange black market is evidence of severe economic mismanagement. Then the reaction to this is the election of someone whose response to do completely in the opposite direction with no brakes. That's not even to mention the dog business or VP who excuses the terror of the last military junta.
As for the destructive impact of US quasi-imperialsim, specifically the appalling support of the murderous generals, I agree, but it's not what I was discussing here. I agree, the people I know are as great as any anywhere. I'd say the same for much of the US, of course, and we're moving increasingly in the same direction of magical economics with Trump and the Republicans. But the US is not a resource dependant country, and so the incentives are different.
We all got a glimpse at the kinship between fascism and libertarianism in 2008 when Ron Paul's old newsletters surfaced. Their racist screeds were indistinguishable from something you'd find on Stormfront. The Paul campaign drew out a bunch of Revolutionary War cosplayer kooks, which gave an indication of where our politics was headed.
This time we can’t compare to him to Donald Trump because he seems totally different. He seems similar to some crazy Roman Emperor. The idea of listening to his dogs seems more about ancient lifestyles, He thinks he is in Rome but Argentina is totally different thing.
Thanks for the information on Rothbard. I had heard of him only as a name before your lengthy exposition. As you imply, Rothbard found it very convenient to take advantage of his economic and educational opportunities and then take sole credit for his successes.
I had a student who I suspect was a Rothbard fan a few years back. He liked to make a big show of reading Ayn Rand before class and wore “More Mises, Less Marx” t-shirts. He’s the only student I ever had that openly defended child labor (it was valuable work experience). He wasn’t dumb, but I think he was lonely. Initiated into the political science honor society, he came alone, while the other inductees had friends and family with them. I never saw him talk to another student, sit with a classmate, or even walk alongside someone else to or from class. He graduated and went to George Mason for an economics Masters. Then he planned to move to Singapore.
That last part sparked my curiosity. Was it the financial hub aspect that attracted him, or did he share the common RW male fantasy of marrying the stereotyped “docile” Asian woman? If it’s the latter, and he finds someone, I feel sorry for her.
A late reply, but I had a acquaintance who used to say he wanted to settle in Singapore as it was 'the world's first fully functioning fascist state'. He only half jested. To him Singapore suggested a place of economic liberalism, skyscrapers and electronics, yet cocooned within a severe form of social control. A manifestation of the tech-bossism that John has written of.
This fella was formally intensely bright; and lonely yes, as a Home counties Englishman who due to his parents had found himself in Australia (a truly Benthamite place).
He worked part-time in military intelligence, whilst studying philosophy and engaging in various political machinations (taking over co-ops, or working on the fringes of established right-wing parties whilst simultaneously decrying as boorish the plodding apparartchiks that succeeded in those parties).
He never made it to Singapore. Last I knew of him, he had written a Trumpy speech for a far-right senator he ended up working for. The speech was a clever goad, purely for cheap attention. Yet the senator believed it.
(apologies for such a late response)
Absolutely fascinating how Rothbardian political morality is, among other things, so perfectly compatible with being obviously, totally, clinically insane. (Apologies for the adverbial overkill, and great job as always in bringing important context to our collective journey to the bottom).
Also remark-worthy that the hawkers of this vision, when the state and its market distortions and distributivist manipulations are all abolished and the natural hierarchy of man assumes its rightful dominion, they, in their imaginings, at the end of it all, are always the Michael, never the Fredo.
It’s like the creeps in the jock/creep duality rejected fascism in favor of Scientology.
People who vote for the Face-Eating Market are not _formally_ irrational!; they each usually gave a 'good' 'reason' to assume their future facial safety….
Part of the joke here is that a political entity is much more likely than a market to judge people by their agreement with its framework.
The path from libertarian to fash is so well trodden, at least in the US, that its almost a rite of passage. When you've had all the fun you can get from sneering down on all lesser beings as a superior individual, I guess it gets lonely after a while. So moving on to huddling together with a group of like-minded misanthropes allows you to rediscover some of the elements of collectivity you previously saw as a weakness, even if it's a collectivity alienated and perverted into "race" or whatever
"While Marx saw modern society divided into two productive classes, bourgeoisie and proletariat, according to Rothbard, drawing on John C. Calhoun, “the Marx of the Master Class,” society is divided into tax-payers and tax-producers, producers and parasites. The free market, if unchained and left alone, would reveal the natural hierarchy of mankind, but the state and its parasites prevent this natural course from taking place."
This is the most succinct summation of the mindset underlying all the seemingly disparate elements that are coalescing into the current far-right. There is a lot to unpack in this statement, but Hannah Arendt already did the heavy lifting.
However, doesn't this also help make perfect sense of why Girard's "philosophy" is so attractive to these folks? This is a great article. However, you made a comment a few articles back that concerned me ("...Girard has much to recommend him"), and I really hope the more you dig into who Rene Girard is and what he teaches, the more you will realize how incredibly shallow it all is.
When fascism is worn on one's sleeve, it is easy to see, but when it is cloaked in layers of academic bs, it can be a bit more difficult to discern, but no less obvious.
I'm currently in Buenos Aires for a short research trip. It's a wonderful city, a kind of simulacrum of Europe of maybe 40 years ago, with ornate buildings, old-school cafés, restaurants with table cloths and waiters in ties and jackets. A dinner costs at most $10. The streets have holes. The windows haven't been cleaned in years. Those $10 buys you dinner if you exchange money on the black market, in my case in a booth in a florists stand, where a machine whips out piles of 1000 peson notes each worth about $1.05. That's after over 100% inflation.
There's a history here of magical politics, mainly social democratic policies called Peronism (after the dictator who supported Franco and let in nazis).Don't ask. It doesn't work because it's not affordable given the resources. They tax exports to keep prices low for Argentines. It's a comodity based economy with all the ups and downs that means.
I hope this doesn't end any worse than Trump left the US, of course with a different starting point. People I know are of course dismayed. OTOH, he beat the Economy Minister who was in charge during this inflation. So it's not surprising. The hope is that the inevitable failure breaks the cycle of magical politics. Of course, it's always true that things can always get worse. Either way, I recommend a trip here now before things heat up.
Milei is a reaction to Peronism, and especially its recent descendent Kirchnerism. I wouldn't call Peronism "social democratic."
When I visited in Jan-Feb 2020, there was a 1973 Peronist poster in the BsAs Museo Bellas Artes which read (in translation) "Enough with Dependency and Exploitation! Peron to Power for the Construction of National Socialism!" So the Peronists themselves called it national socialism. Of course, they might not have meant Nazism explicitly. Maybe the poster is still there.
Peronism is a variety of (left- and right-) populism similar to Nasserism, in which the resentments of the middle and lower classes are mobilized against political opponents. Peron's street mobs referred to themselves as the "descamisados" - the shirtless ones.
Christina Kirchner expanded the mobilization base to include identity groups in the US intersectional sense.
During Christina Kirchner's presidency, a US foreign service officer I know who had served in BsAs recently described her as "the worst person in the world," because of her hypocritical Eva Peron populism masking huge corruption.
The worst of that was possibly covering for Iran and Hezbollah for the 1994 bombing of the Jewish community center in BsAs, which killed EIGHTY-FIVE people and injured around 300. There's a good Netflix series about the very suspicious killing of the lead prosecutor in the case, Alberto Nisman.
Aside from that, she skimmed the value of hundreds of millions of US dollars from public works contracts. She was convicted, but has immunity because she's still Vice President! It's possible Milei was elected just to prevent her political ally, the other candidate, from pardoning her.
Really it's easy to understand why people would vote for Milei, especially since his opponent in the final was a political ally of Kirchner.
It's symptomatic of dysfunction in US media foreign coverage that Kirchner got so little attention for years of abuses, while Milei is now getting so much.
BsAs is a lovely city, hope it doesn't get wrecked further. A friend of mine is going down there next week. I told him to expect preemptory protests from the Kirchnerites and the government workers unions. Inauguration is December 10.
We had a dinner last night with two fellow academics, both define themselves as Peronists. They're both horrified at having Milei. Their explanation of Peronism was to my mind not all that coherent, but they agreed with my belief that it is sui generis to Argentina. Perón wasn't they argued a dictator or anti democratic. He did make huge investments in social programs, with the result that Argentina is a much less unequal society than anywhere else in Latin America. In fact, this relative equality means that their salaries are much less than the equivalents in Brazil or Peru, for example. But the crime is much less. .
Peronism is so hard for outsiders to understand. I never quite understand what my Peronist friends are trying to explain to me about its virtues. It involves a lot of stories. It's like economics woven into a culture.
I resisted for ten days, but this comment demands a response. Argentina’s architecture is not a simulacrum of Europe. It was the result of the influx of Europeans in Argentina’s wealthy period. There were a lot of French and Italians that immigrated to Argentina which had a GDP similar to the US at the time.The architecture comes from these immigrants.
Argentina is a melting pot much like the US, mostly for southern Europe. It took in many refugees from WWII. A black spot is Peron’s profiting off selling Argentine passports to Nazi’s that were evading justice. One should keep in perspective that the US took in over 1600 Nazis and employed some the worst of the torturers and interrogators in the US government. Klaus Barbie and Dr Krunoslav Draganovic, are two examples.
Lastly, magical politics. It sounds like you are referring to populism. If you were talking about US citizens you would accuse them of buying into populist policies. The word magical comes of as diminishing Latin Americans. The first time I heard this kind of comment from someone I thought it was poorly chosen. Over time I began to see that it was sign of prejudice, a minimising of a population. You should ask yourself why you choose this adjective.
I could go on, on subjects like Kissinger, who urged the Argentine dictatorship in the 70s to speed up their executions as time was running out. The US had an obsession with propping up dictators.
I’m a North American I’ve been in Argentina for over a decade now. The government and economy is frustrating, but the people are good people. We need to stop othering and diminishing cultures that are not our culture. We are all human beings. Treat people with respect. I like that John Ganz included the disclaimer that he has a “blind spot when it comes to South America”. His article was reasonable. We should all exercise a bit of humility before prognosticating on a country we are not well informed about. I’ve heard each of these comments from people with little knowledge of Argentina too many times. I feel someone needs to push back on these comments.
I didn't mean to imply that the architecture alone seemed like a simulacrum. It's the impression of someone coming to visit, that's all. As for the politics, there is a longer history of it, which is now more common to many countries, including the US. There's just a longer history of it in Argentina, and we see the results in the long economic decline from when the country was rich. I can't see how you can look at 150% inflation, and a currency exchange black market is evidence of severe economic mismanagement. Then the reaction to this is the election of someone whose response to do completely in the opposite direction with no brakes. That's not even to mention the dog business or VP who excuses the terror of the last military junta.
As for the destructive impact of US quasi-imperialsim, specifically the appalling support of the murderous generals, I agree, but it's not what I was discussing here. I agree, the people I know are as great as any anywhere. I'd say the same for much of the US, of course, and we're moving increasingly in the same direction of magical economics with Trump and the Republicans. But the US is not a resource dependant country, and so the incentives are different.
We all got a glimpse at the kinship between fascism and libertarianism in 2008 when Ron Paul's old newsletters surfaced. Their racist screeds were indistinguishable from something you'd find on Stormfront. The Paul campaign drew out a bunch of Revolutionary War cosplayer kooks, which gave an indication of where our politics was headed.
This is horrible news. Unfortunately this is what Steve Bannon wants for the US. Thump is the salesman.
We have a Himmler and a Goering (Bannon and Miller, pick 'em).
And a Hindenburg (Trump).
Plus a Hitler-shaped hole.
This time we can’t compare to him to Donald Trump because he seems totally different. He seems similar to some crazy Roman Emperor. The idea of listening to his dogs seems more about ancient lifestyles, He thinks he is in Rome but Argentina is totally different thing.
It’s going to be enlightening to see how quickly his policies start failing and how rabid he becomes.
Thanks for the information on Rothbard. I had heard of him only as a name before your lengthy exposition. As you imply, Rothbard found it very convenient to take advantage of his economic and educational opportunities and then take sole credit for his successes.
Those last two lines are hot fucking fire
Great piece
Honestly thought that picture was Benny Hill circa 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang' for a second...
Just started reading the book “The Fourth Turning Is Here”. I may be wrong, but events in Argentina seem to fit the author’s predictions.
I just finished a week or so ago. It wouldn’t surprise me if this lunatic turned out to be Argentina’s fourth turning crisis.