In the larval stage of his grift arc JD Vance stepped on the same rail Rufo stepped on here - "You know, the problem with a lot of you people seems to be that you don't want to work, or find the work available beneath you" - but he learned quickly to stop saying that out loud. The mob can't be led and it can't be taught and it can't be constructively criticized. It can only have its grievances reinforced.
Very illuminating, thanks. The punditry that fixates on Trump's "malignant narcissism" can't tell us anything about the bizarre turn that has so many men at the very highest pinnacles of power––Alito and Thomas, Bill Ackman finance types, tech billionaires––so full of furious resentment. But this lens helps explain why there is "inner indignation" not just in incels but a Supreme Court justice like Alito who lashes out as if society has somehow deliberately and personally humiliated him.
It's a great corrective to all the fruitless post-election arguments from liberals that boil down to "if we just shrugged and smiled at racist jokes and averted our eyes from sexual harassment" then liberal parties would be doing just fine.
But it's dispiriting to read this at a moment when certain kinds of analysis––historical, dialectical––are directly under attack. If universities are going to escape the the rising power of mob dispositions, they are probably going to be asked to effectively stamp out all the disciplines that aren't positivistic. And I have a sinking feeling they are going to surrender.
Unfortunately I think you're correct about the coming "surrender", and that pressure is coming from activist donors, board members and trustees of those institutions - who see right now as either a culturally or politically opportune time to take such actions.
But I suspect that window may close sooner than they can anticipate. So much of this reminds me of the 2004 reelection of George W. Bush, where it felt like the country was undergoing a conservative religious and militaristic realignment. But any inertia that realignment had was to gone by the end of 2005 and it found itself reversing by 2008 during the global financial crisis.
I hope you are right that the momentum to curtail or terminate critical thought in universities won't be long lasting. Both my partner and I myself work in a humanities department at different universities. January is the month when the admissions process for PhD programs gets underway and, at both of our schools, administrators are saying things that suggest they have gotten word that the Trump administration will cut off federal funds for research and grad study in the humanities.
Reading Ganz's compelling perspective as it draws on Arendt, Hegel, and Marx made me feel a kind of anticipatory mourning: that kind of lens allows us to conceive and reflect on the world in ways that (to me) are more richly explanatory than 90% of what is on offer right now––and that goes for even left or liberal journalistic analysis in this era of TedTalk and podcast punditry. Is anyone under 30 going to be able to read Hegel and Marx et al in a serious and sustained way and use those thinkers to examine the present?
The American Dream isn’t dead, it’s just changed. It used to be to work hard, get ahead, and do better than your parents did. Now, as you point out, it’s to get something for nothing. If you can sleep with a hooker and not have to pay for it, you’ve lived the dream.
Call me dim, but if you don't pay the, er, sex worker, then she isn't really a sex worker--or a hooker; she's just someone who decided to sleep with you. But, I'm older and may have missed something here. Maybe what I said is the point?
"...if you don't pay the, er, sex worker, then she isn't really a sex worker...."
Perhaps you don't pay the sex worker because you steal her services. If you don't pay Walmart, they don't cease to be a retailer, you just stole their merchandise.
Sex workers offer to trade services for money; their customers routinely try to enjoy the services without paying the agreed upon money. This is one traditional role for pimps, i.e. to go after non-paying johns and enforce the payment agreement. (Sex workers who enjoy legal protection can use the same means of enforcing the contract that Walmart does, i.e. the police and justice system, not merely private security services.)
As long as there have been sex-workers, there have been customers trying to avoid payment. That did not change the nature of the transaction that was advertised and agreed upon.
Another factor — “learn to code” has become as bitter joke.
After a B.A. was no longer an entry ticket to a sold middle-class life, there was always becoming a lawyer. But now JDs are a dime a dozen, and cannot pay off their student loans. So computing was going to be the safe route to a good job, and CS programs enrolled hundreds of thousands.
But that’s all drying up too, with the evaporation accelerated by AI, which is at least good for coding if nothing else.
The rich get ever richer, and the poor have no route out of poverty. It’s going to be an ugly few decades.
This makes for an excellent companion piece to your recent essay on Thiel's op-ed. The contempt for mediating institutions and shared civic projects as mere pretexts for social control, the self-consciously conspiratorial affect, the focus on envy as the basis for all social relations, the stark racism and misogyny-- these seem like qualities that Thiel both possesses himself and works to engender in the masses (albeit in a cruder, more naive form that I'm sure he finds more suitable for the poor rabble at the bottom of his ideal hierarchy). Reading both of these pieces has left me with two questions/comments:
-You write that "The opinion-makers and intellectuals on the center-right were so fixated on the supposed left-wing mobs of the “woke era” that they ignored that they were encouraging and cultivating their own mob, platforming its exponents with affectionate curiosity. Now that mob attacks their benefactors." To me, this passage suggests that you think Republican elites had the chance to take a different approach which could have reigned in the mob. By contrast, Thiel seems to believe that the internet overdetermined this social transformation, since it created new forums for social and political discourse/community-making that weakened the masters of the old forums and empowered a new set of actors (Thiel and his buddies). I don't want to buy into the fascist's self-flattering triumphalism too much, but I unfortunately tend to agree with Thiel that the dislocation of the internet (along with a few other factors such as changes to campaign finance law) basically made this outcome inevitable: these forces have degraded the Republicans' capacity for internal discipline so totally over the last two decades that the party lacked the tools it would have needed to discipline the mob. Q1: Am I reading your thinking on the contingency of this political transformation correctly? If I am, what were the key decision points where you think that Republican elites could have taken us down a different path?
-In this article you used the plural "we" when referring to your own past writing, which I don't think I've noticed you doing in previous blog posts. Is this an acknowledgement of a co-author/editor or just an assertion of one of the privileges that's conferred on an author when their book becomes an NYT bestseller?
IDK if it adds much different to the Arendt quote above, but I found the characterization of the masses and the mob from Menand's The Free World illuminating (I know its lame to quote popular explanations and secondary sources, but whatever its good):
---
"The fall of protecting class barriers walls," Arendt explained, "transformed the slumbering majorities behind all parties into one great unorganized, structureless mass of furious individuals who had nothing in common except their vague apprehension that the hopes of party members were doomed, that, consequently, the most respected, articulate and representative members of the community were fools and that all the powers that be were not so much evil as they were equally stupid and fraudulent..."
The breakdown of social classes produced a second group, which Arendt called 'the mob.' The mob was made up of the refuse of every class: disempowered aristocrats, disillusioned intellectuals, gangsters, denizens of the underworld. The were people who believed that the respectable world was a conspiracy to deny them what they were owed; they were embodiments of the politics of resentment. Arendt thought that the leadership of totalitarian movements came from this group.
...to the mob, everything is a lie anyway. It didn't matter that the charges to which the defendants in the Moscow Trials were transparently bogus, or that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the documents used in the case against Alfred Dreyfus were forgeries. All that mattered was the movement, and the movement was locked onto a inexorable trans-historical force. Totalitarianism was the perverse union of the belief that there is a supreme and unappeasable law of historical development with the belief that nothing is true and everything is possible.
Specifically, I found the following to be really useful for working through my frustration understanding the way that antisemitism works in the current, Trumpist right:
“The Jew stands in for bourgeois society as a whole: the ethical and lawful Jew, the fastidious believer in universal duties and rights, is, in reality, predatory, self-dealing, and hypocritical, a money-grubber. Of course, the mob is not against money, as such: the mob is as greedy and obsessed with its pursuit as it says the Jews are, because money is the only power it recognizes. It is attracted to the same speculative and swindles it associates with Jews”
This seems to really clarify how one can explain how MAGA can be so virulently antisemitic from one perspective while also clearly having a chummy relationship with certain, individual Jewish folks.
Us Jews that toe the line and are in with the mob are acting in the way that the mob EXPECTS “real” Jews to act, acquisitively.
But when, say, Jewish folks act outside of that paradigm to, say, stand up for imperfect institutions, or take progressive stances against the mob then we’re rootless, outsiders that are trying to ruin the mob’s fun.
I haven’t see it put quite the way you discussed in this piece and I appreciate it for giving me some clarity but one of the unfortunate realities I see is that this dynamic is hard to translate into a form less “plugged in” folks care about.
As a personal example, one Thanksgiving ago I tried to explain to my retired Mom why Musk was an antisemite and what the Great Replacement conspiracy theory was. I do not think I was able to get my point across.
Perhaps this piece will help me have more success next time…
I've always pointed to Ann Coulter. Her, uh, oeuvre, is an accurate transcription of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, globally replacing the string "Jew" with "liberal." I'm kind of fond of the triple parentheses trope, which illustrates all the stand-ins for Jews: e.g. (((feminists))), (((professors))), (((journalists))), (((law))), etc.
“… I tried to explain to my retired Mom why Musk was an antisemite and what the Great Replacement conspiracy theory was. I do not think I was able to get my point across….”
If she looked at you with blank incomprehension, then that speaks well for your mother.
By framing your analysis in Arendt's terms, I think you might have missed out on feminism and its weird modern mutant invert: "masculinism." Modern masculinism consists of traditional masculine roles, stripped of the economic "good provider" role. Feminism has taken this role onto all persons. But the good provider role was the main role for most men. This role being stripped of masculinity, only protection remains as an only ideologically acceptable role for masculinists. Think of knights. Of course, violence and danger are the true underliers of knighthood.
If a man's role is to protect, he becomes a law unto himself, or with his buddies. The state cannot protect, else masculinism would have no point. (Indeed, the state becomes a (((girly))) conspiracy.) If a man's role is violence and danger, he can only be a cop, soldier, fireman, or brownshirt--cue the Village People. Any other paying job is for (((girls.)))
Note that this problem will not be fixed if more low-education men get good-paying work. As long as valued work is not coded male, this ideology will persist.
I'm not pissing on your analysis as Arendt's mob. The idea has power, and masculinism does not explain all. January 6 had many participants who were not the lumpenproletariat, although many of the "middle class" insurrectionists were business failures. Similarly, it had some women: not all masculinists like Ashli Babbitt.
But masculinism explains an awful lot. The New Deal suppressed racist rage by catering to the racists. This did not reflect well morally on the New Deal, but it made it possible. In today's left, there has been no catering to the masculinists. And their rage is seething. And I don't know what to do about it.
You might have already mentioned this but one thing that seems to give the mob energy is some promise of excitement always around the next horizon, the thrill that comes from the idea of the unknown. The gambling/crypto/grifty part of the economy also has this element. What Trump is always promising is 'something.' Something is going to happen--you are going to get to kick the shit out of someone or make a huge windfall or pick up the girl of your dreams. It's that promise of the 'big score.'
I always called this method of Trump's the 'magic box' because I would be amazed how readily people would trade what they had or something solid and substantial --an actual policy that would be made real-- for the magic box, which would simply be Trump gesturing into the empty air, telling them that what was in the magic box was so much better, the best thing, much better than anything else that they could possibly get--in the way of healthcare, prosperity, national standing, security, housing, etc., etc.
But that makes sense to people when they're in gambling mode because the thing you can get is boring, since you already know about it, whereas the thing that you might get which is bigger and better but you don't know about it is much more exciting. This sort of reminds me of Schopenhauer's thing about how we peer into the future and satisfying our desire is the only thing that excites us but the future is not real so we are excited by nothing. Then when whatever it is we anticipated comes to pass, and our desire is satisfied, it can only bore and disappoint us. (It's also not real since the present immediately becomes the past.) This is one of the things that makes life terrible, he argues. This is a puzzling claim for people who deeply love someone else, since loving and being loved is not something which is not immediately disappointing to those who experience it. Most people find it satisfying in a more lasting way, even if it doesn't bring you bliss every second.. But of course, for someone like Schopenhauer you will be disappointed, and it's much worse that you ever gave in to such things. Better to face the reality of the Wlll's nothingness all the time than be excited, momentarily happy, then disappointed.
If you can keep people in that state of heightened anticipation, you can capture their minds, I suppose. Isn't that what advertising does? We are trained to be in this state a lot, maybe even to structure a lot of our lives around it.
It's very hard to compete with the big score except to explain to people that the big score is a rip off. The problem is that telling them it is a rip off is shattering because this is the energy driving them forward. If they lose the possibility of the big score, they must be alone with their thoughts. They get very crushed when things don't come to pass, and one sees the qanon people express this sometimes, though they often get jazzed about a new storm up ahead.
It's not surprising to me that gamer-gate, red-pill, and the other dark 'how to pick up girls' mode that the internet went into about 10-15 years ago was the key that unlocked the best method to radicalize so many young men. The big score is 'scoring.' They have woven this idea of scoring into a fascist narrative in a lot of different ways.
The mob gives you a much more palpable feeling you're about to score. They are all there, encouraging each other, and their togetherness makes it seem inevitable. How can they lose?
There's also a fascinating element of conformity to the mob/rabble. This is dudes trying to do what their friends will appreciate. It is so odd to watch them conform to each other--like Zuckerberg is now. It is like watching the boys in high school and college. Especially in college one would see them striving to enter and belong within fraternities, so desperate to prove...something--but only to one another. They would generally prove this by the women they were able to date, which made it seem very perplexing to me that any one of these women would date them. But for the women, somehow being chosen would be an indicator of status as well. It was weird. There wasn't any ground to it except what was perceived by other people.
Sometimes I work backwards, trying to understand why a life in the present that would conceivably provide things like peace and love and contentment is so unappealing to them while they are also promising in their memes a life of future peace and love and contentment--but it has to be IN the future, a thing to be won, and also something taken away from someone else. Have you seen this meme of the blonde people having the picnic on top of the bones of the others they have killed? I think in the background, all the social problems are fixed--the air is clear, the children are happy and healthy, and active.
Do they want this? I doubt they do. It seems more that they want to want something but I suspect if you gave them the thing they want--they would not want it. It is the wanting that they seem to prefer, and the magic box aspect.
I don't think this is a permanent condition of humanity. You have it exactly right that it is caused by the kind of dangling-a-big-score-in-front-of-one's-face that social media and capitalism create. But I do think it makes certain people's constant hope (especially the left) that if you just made everything a little better for the mob, they would calm down, and that the real issue driving their rancor is that their material needs aren't met.
I have this annoying friend that believes this discontent is psychologically permanent, and he's always quoting this Orwell passage. If he's right, we're in trouble but I don't think he could possibly be right. Sometimes people wanted to party at the disco, right? Do some lines, meet some chicks. And it wasn't because all their needs were met. It was because that was the excitement on offer, and it was fun. Social media takes that away, to some degree though how it does this is a mystery to me.
"But because he belonged to the nineteenth century and to a non-military nation and class, he could not grasp the tremendous strength of the old world which was symbolised in his mind by fox-hunting Tories. He was, and still is, quite incapable of understanding that nationalism, religious bigotry and feudal loyalty are far more powerful forces than what he himself would describe as sanity. Creatures out of the Dark Ages have come marching into the present, and if they are ghosts they are at any rate ghosts which need a strong magic to lay them. The people who have shown the best understanding of Fascism are either those who have suffered under it or those who have a Fascist streak in themselves. A crude book like The Iron Heel, written nearly thirty years ago, is a truer prophecy of the future than either Brave New World or The Shape of Things to Come. If one had to choose among Wells’s own contemporaries a writer who could stand towards him as a corrective, one might choose Kipling, who was not deaf to the evil voices of power and military “glory”. Kipling would have understood the appeal of Hitler, or for that matter of Stalin, whatever his attitude towards them might be. Wells is too sane to understand the modern world."
But there's certainly truth in what Orwell says here, even if it's not the continual state of humanity.
I like to think about these big categories, the mob for example, and then introduce real difficulties that middle class and working class experience. For example, I was born in rural Tennessee where my natural fate, not really a bad one, was to become a farmer/livestock trader, but with the New Deal moving to a city and acquiring a university education was possible, as well as homeowning, travel, etc. Now I could not even afford to buy my house, so I empathize with teachers, firemen who cannot even afford to rent in the cities where they work. These members of the work force are tempted, perhaps, to the easy out of the mob. Would more universal education in civics and political science in high school give these workers another pathway, the pathway that I have taken to fight within the current system to change it?
Very good. I would only add that the mob encourages grifters - who have the same social and economic values - that is the kind of guys who realised that posting about Trump and anti-woke got far more engagement than trying to hawk shit or sell bonus advice, and that both drives and is driven by the mob. They ultimately become indistinguishable, like the true Stalinist and the climber in Soviet style societies. Meaning that it is a swarm which colonises communication and forces it to observe its distinctions until it loses any referent to reality
It would seem to me that the Enlightenment may indirectly help to create the mob, in that it often promises more than it can quickly provide (we can't automate everything _yet_) and because it removes the dignity provided by Fate. (You're working a crappy job or dying of a disease not because that is the LORD's Will, but because you're not able enough or Progress hasn't got around to eliminating those evils _yet_.)
I am thinking of Burroughs' claim that only [U.S.]Americans die of embarrassment—everyone else just shrugs and says 'The Universe screwed me.'. Because we are taught that any of us can become a rich, powerful, person, or President, almost all of us is liable to the shame of not being so…and what is a mob if not the machinery of living beyond shame?
In the larval stage of his grift arc JD Vance stepped on the same rail Rufo stepped on here - "You know, the problem with a lot of you people seems to be that you don't want to work, or find the work available beneath you" - but he learned quickly to stop saying that out loud. The mob can't be led and it can't be taught and it can't be constructively criticized. It can only have its grievances reinforced.
Those last two sentences. Exactly that. I haven’t seen it stated so concisely.
Thanks that's kind of you, I wrote a book full of similar brilliant observations, you can probably find it at your library and may enjoy it!
Very illuminating, thanks. The punditry that fixates on Trump's "malignant narcissism" can't tell us anything about the bizarre turn that has so many men at the very highest pinnacles of power––Alito and Thomas, Bill Ackman finance types, tech billionaires––so full of furious resentment. But this lens helps explain why there is "inner indignation" not just in incels but a Supreme Court justice like Alito who lashes out as if society has somehow deliberately and personally humiliated him.
It's a great corrective to all the fruitless post-election arguments from liberals that boil down to "if we just shrugged and smiled at racist jokes and averted our eyes from sexual harassment" then liberal parties would be doing just fine.
But it's dispiriting to read this at a moment when certain kinds of analysis––historical, dialectical––are directly under attack. If universities are going to escape the the rising power of mob dispositions, they are probably going to be asked to effectively stamp out all the disciplines that aren't positivistic. And I have a sinking feeling they are going to surrender.
"The sinking feeling that they are going to surrender" is the best short description of the zeitgeist of this era.
And they will, every time.
Unfortunately I think you're correct about the coming "surrender", and that pressure is coming from activist donors, board members and trustees of those institutions - who see right now as either a culturally or politically opportune time to take such actions.
But I suspect that window may close sooner than they can anticipate. So much of this reminds me of the 2004 reelection of George W. Bush, where it felt like the country was undergoing a conservative religious and militaristic realignment. But any inertia that realignment had was to gone by the end of 2005 and it found itself reversing by 2008 during the global financial crisis.
I hope you are right that the momentum to curtail or terminate critical thought in universities won't be long lasting. Both my partner and I myself work in a humanities department at different universities. January is the month when the admissions process for PhD programs gets underway and, at both of our schools, administrators are saying things that suggest they have gotten word that the Trump administration will cut off federal funds for research and grad study in the humanities.
Reading Ganz's compelling perspective as it draws on Arendt, Hegel, and Marx made me feel a kind of anticipatory mourning: that kind of lens allows us to conceive and reflect on the world in ways that (to me) are more richly explanatory than 90% of what is on offer right now––and that goes for even left or liberal journalistic analysis in this era of TedTalk and podcast punditry. Is anyone under 30 going to be able to read Hegel and Marx et al in a serious and sustained way and use those thinkers to examine the present?
The American Dream isn’t dead, it’s just changed. It used to be to work hard, get ahead, and do better than your parents did. Now, as you point out, it’s to get something for nothing. If you can sleep with a hooker and not have to pay for it, you’ve lived the dream.
Call me dim, but if you don't pay the, er, sex worker, then she isn't really a sex worker--or a hooker; she's just someone who decided to sleep with you. But, I'm older and may have missed something here. Maybe what I said is the point?
"...if you don't pay the, er, sex worker, then she isn't really a sex worker...."
Perhaps you don't pay the sex worker because you steal her services. If you don't pay Walmart, they don't cease to be a retailer, you just stole their merchandise.
Sex workers offer to trade services for money; their customers routinely try to enjoy the services without paying the agreed upon money. This is one traditional role for pimps, i.e. to go after non-paying johns and enforce the payment agreement. (Sex workers who enjoy legal protection can use the same means of enforcing the contract that Walmart does, i.e. the police and justice system, not merely private security services.)
As long as there have been sex-workers, there have been customers trying to avoid payment. That did not change the nature of the transaction that was advertised and agreed upon.
Well, yes, but that goes beyond the context of this thread.
Another factor — “learn to code” has become as bitter joke.
After a B.A. was no longer an entry ticket to a sold middle-class life, there was always becoming a lawyer. But now JDs are a dime a dozen, and cannot pay off their student loans. So computing was going to be the safe route to a good job, and CS programs enrolled hundreds of thousands.
But that’s all drying up too, with the evaporation accelerated by AI, which is at least good for coding if nothing else.
The rich get ever richer, and the poor have no route out of poverty. It’s going to be an ugly few decades.
This makes for an excellent companion piece to your recent essay on Thiel's op-ed. The contempt for mediating institutions and shared civic projects as mere pretexts for social control, the self-consciously conspiratorial affect, the focus on envy as the basis for all social relations, the stark racism and misogyny-- these seem like qualities that Thiel both possesses himself and works to engender in the masses (albeit in a cruder, more naive form that I'm sure he finds more suitable for the poor rabble at the bottom of his ideal hierarchy). Reading both of these pieces has left me with two questions/comments:
-You write that "The opinion-makers and intellectuals on the center-right were so fixated on the supposed left-wing mobs of the “woke era” that they ignored that they were encouraging and cultivating their own mob, platforming its exponents with affectionate curiosity. Now that mob attacks their benefactors." To me, this passage suggests that you think Republican elites had the chance to take a different approach which could have reigned in the mob. By contrast, Thiel seems to believe that the internet overdetermined this social transformation, since it created new forums for social and political discourse/community-making that weakened the masters of the old forums and empowered a new set of actors (Thiel and his buddies). I don't want to buy into the fascist's self-flattering triumphalism too much, but I unfortunately tend to agree with Thiel that the dislocation of the internet (along with a few other factors such as changes to campaign finance law) basically made this outcome inevitable: these forces have degraded the Republicans' capacity for internal discipline so totally over the last two decades that the party lacked the tools it would have needed to discipline the mob. Q1: Am I reading your thinking on the contingency of this political transformation correctly? If I am, what were the key decision points where you think that Republican elites could have taken us down a different path?
-In this article you used the plural "we" when referring to your own past writing, which I don't think I've noticed you doing in previous blog posts. Is this an acknowledgement of a co-author/editor or just an assertion of one of the privileges that's conferred on an author when their book becomes an NYT bestseller?
Haha yeah I get the editorial we
" I don't want to buy into the fascist's self-flattering triumphalism too much, but I unfortunately tend to agree with Thiel..."-
I am reminded of the cinematic masterpiece, "The Big Lebowski".
Jeff Bridges to John Goodman- "You're not wrong, Walter. You're just an asshole".
IDK if it adds much different to the Arendt quote above, but I found the characterization of the masses and the mob from Menand's The Free World illuminating (I know its lame to quote popular explanations and secondary sources, but whatever its good):
---
"The fall of protecting class barriers walls," Arendt explained, "transformed the slumbering majorities behind all parties into one great unorganized, structureless mass of furious individuals who had nothing in common except their vague apprehension that the hopes of party members were doomed, that, consequently, the most respected, articulate and representative members of the community were fools and that all the powers that be were not so much evil as they were equally stupid and fraudulent..."
The breakdown of social classes produced a second group, which Arendt called 'the mob.' The mob was made up of the refuse of every class: disempowered aristocrats, disillusioned intellectuals, gangsters, denizens of the underworld. The were people who believed that the respectable world was a conspiracy to deny them what they were owed; they were embodiments of the politics of resentment. Arendt thought that the leadership of totalitarian movements came from this group.
...to the mob, everything is a lie anyway. It didn't matter that the charges to which the defendants in the Moscow Trials were transparently bogus, or that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the documents used in the case against Alfred Dreyfus were forgeries. All that mattered was the movement, and the movement was locked onto a inexorable trans-historical force. Totalitarianism was the perverse union of the belief that there is a supreme and unappeasable law of historical development with the belief that nothing is true and everything is possible.
---
This essay has many merits, but putting "rich" and "rabble" together is perhaps its finest.
John, thanks as always for your insight.
Specifically, I found the following to be really useful for working through my frustration understanding the way that antisemitism works in the current, Trumpist right:
“The Jew stands in for bourgeois society as a whole: the ethical and lawful Jew, the fastidious believer in universal duties and rights, is, in reality, predatory, self-dealing, and hypocritical, a money-grubber. Of course, the mob is not against money, as such: the mob is as greedy and obsessed with its pursuit as it says the Jews are, because money is the only power it recognizes. It is attracted to the same speculative and swindles it associates with Jews”
This seems to really clarify how one can explain how MAGA can be so virulently antisemitic from one perspective while also clearly having a chummy relationship with certain, individual Jewish folks.
Us Jews that toe the line and are in with the mob are acting in the way that the mob EXPECTS “real” Jews to act, acquisitively.
But when, say, Jewish folks act outside of that paradigm to, say, stand up for imperfect institutions, or take progressive stances against the mob then we’re rootless, outsiders that are trying to ruin the mob’s fun.
I haven’t see it put quite the way you discussed in this piece and I appreciate it for giving me some clarity but one of the unfortunate realities I see is that this dynamic is hard to translate into a form less “plugged in” folks care about.
As a personal example, one Thanksgiving ago I tried to explain to my retired Mom why Musk was an antisemite and what the Great Replacement conspiracy theory was. I do not think I was able to get my point across.
Perhaps this piece will help me have more success next time…
I've always pointed to Ann Coulter. Her, uh, oeuvre, is an accurate transcription of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, globally replacing the string "Jew" with "liberal." I'm kind of fond of the triple parentheses trope, which illustrates all the stand-ins for Jews: e.g. (((feminists))), (((professors))), (((journalists))), (((law))), etc.
“… I tried to explain to my retired Mom why Musk was an antisemite and what the Great Replacement conspiracy theory was. I do not think I was able to get my point across….”
If she looked at you with blank incomprehension, then that speaks well for your mother.
Thank you for your feedback 👍
By framing your analysis in Arendt's terms, I think you might have missed out on feminism and its weird modern mutant invert: "masculinism." Modern masculinism consists of traditional masculine roles, stripped of the economic "good provider" role. Feminism has taken this role onto all persons. But the good provider role was the main role for most men. This role being stripped of masculinity, only protection remains as an only ideologically acceptable role for masculinists. Think of knights. Of course, violence and danger are the true underliers of knighthood.
If a man's role is to protect, he becomes a law unto himself, or with his buddies. The state cannot protect, else masculinism would have no point. (Indeed, the state becomes a (((girly))) conspiracy.) If a man's role is violence and danger, he can only be a cop, soldier, fireman, or brownshirt--cue the Village People. Any other paying job is for (((girls.)))
Note that this problem will not be fixed if more low-education men get good-paying work. As long as valued work is not coded male, this ideology will persist.
I'm not pissing on your analysis as Arendt's mob. The idea has power, and masculinism does not explain all. January 6 had many participants who were not the lumpenproletariat, although many of the "middle class" insurrectionists were business failures. Similarly, it had some women: not all masculinists like Ashli Babbitt.
But masculinism explains an awful lot. The New Deal suppressed racist rage by catering to the racists. This did not reflect well morally on the New Deal, but it made it possible. In today's left, there has been no catering to the masculinists. And their rage is seething. And I don't know what to do about it.
I bring up gender?
Look at your first paragraph.
This is brilliant. Kudos.
You might have already mentioned this but one thing that seems to give the mob energy is some promise of excitement always around the next horizon, the thrill that comes from the idea of the unknown. The gambling/crypto/grifty part of the economy also has this element. What Trump is always promising is 'something.' Something is going to happen--you are going to get to kick the shit out of someone or make a huge windfall or pick up the girl of your dreams. It's that promise of the 'big score.'
I always called this method of Trump's the 'magic box' because I would be amazed how readily people would trade what they had or something solid and substantial --an actual policy that would be made real-- for the magic box, which would simply be Trump gesturing into the empty air, telling them that what was in the magic box was so much better, the best thing, much better than anything else that they could possibly get--in the way of healthcare, prosperity, national standing, security, housing, etc., etc.
But that makes sense to people when they're in gambling mode because the thing you can get is boring, since you already know about it, whereas the thing that you might get which is bigger and better but you don't know about it is much more exciting. This sort of reminds me of Schopenhauer's thing about how we peer into the future and satisfying our desire is the only thing that excites us but the future is not real so we are excited by nothing. Then when whatever it is we anticipated comes to pass, and our desire is satisfied, it can only bore and disappoint us. (It's also not real since the present immediately becomes the past.) This is one of the things that makes life terrible, he argues. This is a puzzling claim for people who deeply love someone else, since loving and being loved is not something which is not immediately disappointing to those who experience it. Most people find it satisfying in a more lasting way, even if it doesn't bring you bliss every second.. But of course, for someone like Schopenhauer you will be disappointed, and it's much worse that you ever gave in to such things. Better to face the reality of the Wlll's nothingness all the time than be excited, momentarily happy, then disappointed.
If you can keep people in that state of heightened anticipation, you can capture their minds, I suppose. Isn't that what advertising does? We are trained to be in this state a lot, maybe even to structure a lot of our lives around it.
It's very hard to compete with the big score except to explain to people that the big score is a rip off. The problem is that telling them it is a rip off is shattering because this is the energy driving them forward. If they lose the possibility of the big score, they must be alone with their thoughts. They get very crushed when things don't come to pass, and one sees the qanon people express this sometimes, though they often get jazzed about a new storm up ahead.
It's not surprising to me that gamer-gate, red-pill, and the other dark 'how to pick up girls' mode that the internet went into about 10-15 years ago was the key that unlocked the best method to radicalize so many young men. The big score is 'scoring.' They have woven this idea of scoring into a fascist narrative in a lot of different ways.
The mob gives you a much more palpable feeling you're about to score. They are all there, encouraging each other, and their togetherness makes it seem inevitable. How can they lose?
There's also a fascinating element of conformity to the mob/rabble. This is dudes trying to do what their friends will appreciate. It is so odd to watch them conform to each other--like Zuckerberg is now. It is like watching the boys in high school and college. Especially in college one would see them striving to enter and belong within fraternities, so desperate to prove...something--but only to one another. They would generally prove this by the women they were able to date, which made it seem very perplexing to me that any one of these women would date them. But for the women, somehow being chosen would be an indicator of status as well. It was weird. There wasn't any ground to it except what was perceived by other people.
Sometimes I work backwards, trying to understand why a life in the present that would conceivably provide things like peace and love and contentment is so unappealing to them while they are also promising in their memes a life of future peace and love and contentment--but it has to be IN the future, a thing to be won, and also something taken away from someone else. Have you seen this meme of the blonde people having the picnic on top of the bones of the others they have killed? I think in the background, all the social problems are fixed--the air is clear, the children are happy and healthy, and active.
Do they want this? I doubt they do. It seems more that they want to want something but I suspect if you gave them the thing they want--they would not want it. It is the wanting that they seem to prefer, and the magic box aspect.
I don't think this is a permanent condition of humanity. You have it exactly right that it is caused by the kind of dangling-a-big-score-in-front-of-one's-face that social media and capitalism create. But I do think it makes certain people's constant hope (especially the left) that if you just made everything a little better for the mob, they would calm down, and that the real issue driving their rancor is that their material needs aren't met.
I have this annoying friend that believes this discontent is psychologically permanent, and he's always quoting this Orwell passage. If he's right, we're in trouble but I don't think he could possibly be right. Sometimes people wanted to party at the disco, right? Do some lines, meet some chicks. And it wasn't because all their needs were met. It was because that was the excitement on offer, and it was fun. Social media takes that away, to some degree though how it does this is a mystery to me.
"But because he belonged to the nineteenth century and to a non-military nation and class, he could not grasp the tremendous strength of the old world which was symbolised in his mind by fox-hunting Tories. He was, and still is, quite incapable of understanding that nationalism, religious bigotry and feudal loyalty are far more powerful forces than what he himself would describe as sanity. Creatures out of the Dark Ages have come marching into the present, and if they are ghosts they are at any rate ghosts which need a strong magic to lay them. The people who have shown the best understanding of Fascism are either those who have suffered under it or those who have a Fascist streak in themselves. A crude book like The Iron Heel, written nearly thirty years ago, is a truer prophecy of the future than either Brave New World or The Shape of Things to Come. If one had to choose among Wells’s own contemporaries a writer who could stand towards him as a corrective, one might choose Kipling, who was not deaf to the evil voices of power and military “glory”. Kipling would have understood the appeal of Hitler, or for that matter of Stalin, whatever his attitude towards them might be. Wells is too sane to understand the modern world."
But there's certainly truth in what Orwell says here, even if it's not the continual state of humanity.
Terrific, revelatory piece!
Congratulations
Typo alert: In paragraph 3, line four, it looks like you meant to say "join" instead of "job.".
I like to think about these big categories, the mob for example, and then introduce real difficulties that middle class and working class experience. For example, I was born in rural Tennessee where my natural fate, not really a bad one, was to become a farmer/livestock trader, but with the New Deal moving to a city and acquiring a university education was possible, as well as homeowning, travel, etc. Now I could not even afford to buy my house, so I empathize with teachers, firemen who cannot even afford to rent in the cities where they work. These members of the work force are tempted, perhaps, to the easy out of the mob. Would more universal education in civics and political science in high school give these workers another pathway, the pathway that I have taken to fight within the current system to change it?
Very good. I would only add that the mob encourages grifters - who have the same social and economic values - that is the kind of guys who realised that posting about Trump and anti-woke got far more engagement than trying to hawk shit or sell bonus advice, and that both drives and is driven by the mob. They ultimately become indistinguishable, like the true Stalinist and the climber in Soviet style societies. Meaning that it is a swarm which colonises communication and forces it to observe its distinctions until it loses any referent to reality
Intensely stimulating
Trumpscum explained.
It would seem to me that the Enlightenment may indirectly help to create the mob, in that it often promises more than it can quickly provide (we can't automate everything _yet_) and because it removes the dignity provided by Fate. (You're working a crappy job or dying of a disease not because that is the LORD's Will, but because you're not able enough or Progress hasn't got around to eliminating those evils _yet_.)
I am thinking of Burroughs' claim that only [U.S.]Americans die of embarrassment—everyone else just shrugs and says 'The Universe screwed me.'. Because we are taught that any of us can become a rich, powerful, person, or President, almost all of us is liable to the shame of not being so…and what is a mob if not the machinery of living beyond shame?