Reading, Watching 11.24.24
Strange Defeats
Good morning! This is a regular feature for paid subscribers wherein I write a little bit about what I’ve been reading and/or watching. Hope you enjoy!
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I’m also very pleased to announce that When the Clock Broke was featured as one of the Washington Post’s 10 best books of 2024.
First, I highly recommend you read Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s piece in the New Yorker on the pain driving minority voters into the arms of the Trump coalition. She’s talking about something I called in the past “the politics of national despair.” On his Substack, Damon Linker talks about another aspect of this politics of national despair, embodied in Trump’s cabinet picks, what he calls “The Bestial Politics of Masculine Self-Assertion:”
Put in Nietzschean terms, Trumpism is seeking to advance a revolutionary transvaluation of values by inverting the morality that undergirds both traditional conservatism and liberal institutionalism. In this inversion, norms and rules that counsel and enforce propriety, restraint, and deference to institutional authority become vices, while flouting them become virtues. The result is a radical form of political action that gives a central governing role to “bad” men who enjoy provoking the outraged indignation of those incapable of their own similarly bold acts of defiance.
This speaks to what I’ve started to call the “Trumpian cultural revolution” and I think it’s compatible with the accounts I’ve tried to give of “gangster Gemeinschaft” and “enrabblement,” with their kind of deliberate embrace of a Hobbesian state of nature.
I’m going to break my newsletter’s anti-quantitative rule against charts and graphs to give some empirical evidence from The Financial Times that there is a growth in “zero-sum” attitudes:
Here’s the full paper that the FT piece is based on: “Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of US Political Divides.”
On Saturday, French president Emmanuel Macron announced that the historian Marc Bloch would be inducted into the Panthéon. Bloch, a veteran of both World Wars, was one of the founders of the Annales school of historiography, which brought a deep social and economic perspective to historical studies. A Jew of Alsatian origin, he joined the Resistance and was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944, tortured, and ultimately executed. His book Strange Defeat, written after his demobilization in 1940 and published posthumuously in 1946, is perhaps the “postmortem” of all postmortems: a reflection on the collapse of a proud military tradition and a great democracy. For Bloch, the ruling élite of France failed: its generals, the press, the politicians, and its educators “were incapable of thinking in terms of a new war.”
It was not only in the field that intellectual causes lay at the root of our defeat. As a nation we had been content with incomplete knowledge and imperfectly thought-out ideas. Such an attitude is not a good preparation for military success. Our system of government demands the participation of the masses. The destiny of the People is in their own hands, and I see no reason for believing that they are not perfectly capable of choosing rightly. But what effort had been made to supply them with that minimum of clear and definite information without which no rational conduct is possible? To that question the answer is ‘None’. In no way did our so-called democratic system so signally fail. That particular dereliction of duty constituted the most heinous crime of our self-styled democrats. The matter would be less serious if what we had to deplore were merely the lies and half-truths inspired by party loyalties openly avowed. Wicked these may be, but, on the whole, they can be fairly easily discounted. Far graver is the fact that our national Press, claiming to provide an impartial news-service, was sailing under false colours. Many newspapers, even those which openly wore the livery of party beliefs, were secretly enslaved to unavowed and, often, squalid interests. Some of them were controlled by foreign influences. I do not deny that the common sense of the ordinary reader did, to some extent, counterbalance this, but only at the cost of developing an attitude of scepticism to all propaganda, printed and broadcast alike. It would be a great mistake to think that the elector always votes as ‘his’ paper tells him to. I have known more than one humble citizen who votes almost automatically against the views expressed by his chosen rag, and it may be that this refusal to be stampeded by printed insincerities is among the more consoling elements of our con temporary national life. It does, at least, offer some hope for the future. Still, it must be admitted that such an attitude provides a poor intellectual training for those who are called upon to understand what is at stake in a vast world struggle, to judge rightly of the coming storm, and to arm themselves adequately against its violence. Quite deliberately—as one can see by reading Mein Kampf or the records of Rauschning’s conversations— Hitler kept the truth from his servile masses. Instead of intellectual persuasion he gave them emotional suggestion. For us there is but one set of alternatives. Either, like the Germans, we must turn our people into a keyboard on which a few leaders can play at will (but who are those leaders ? The playing of those at present on the stage is curiously lacking in resonance); or we can so train them that they may be able to collaborate to the full with the representatives in whose hands they have placed the reins of government. At the present stage of civilization this dilemma admits of no middle term. . . . The masses no longer obey. They follow either because they have been hypnotized or because they know.
This weekend I also took a look at my great-grandfather Jacques Fourchtein’s memoirs. He was born in Rostov-on-Don, Russia in 1896. In 1905, in the face of pogroms, his family emigrated to France. They apparently only survived due to the intervention of a friendly Cossack chief: