What’s always and forever so bloody maddening about these admirers of economically dysfunctional police states is that, in their imagining, *they* are never the ones waiting two hours in line to buy a shitty piece of mystery meat; *they* are never the ones who can’t travel abroad unless they leave a family member behind as hostage; *they* are never the ones who can’t vote about anything; *they* are never the ones facing arrest for dissent; *they* are never the ones watching young men drink themselves to death out of boredom and idleness; *they* are never the ones who give up reading because there’s nothing left to read; *they* are never the ones lurking around the "beriozka" (foreign currency stores) asking foreigners to buy simple household necessities for them that are not available for Soviet citizens; and *they* are never the ones living in a permanent state of fear, ignorance ad paranoia because they’re endlessly told the whole world wants to wipe them out. In their imagining, they are living exactly as they live now, buying anything they want, saying anything they want, travelling anywhere they want, while admiring the orderliness, compliance and good behaviour of the masses around and below them. In their minds, they are always the nomenklatura, they are always running things.
Spot on. I knew a guy in London who defected from East Germany. They sent his dad to West Germany, where he was living, to try and talk him into coming back, unsuccessfully... after the wall came down, he got a copy of his Stazi file and there was a transcript of his conversation with his dad in it. They'd bugged his flat in West Germany. As far as I know, this guy was just an ordinary bloke (not some resistance fighter), he just wanted to live a free life and that was intolerable to the East German regime.
Anna Funder wrote a wonderful book called “Stasiland”, if you’re interested in a full taste of how perverse the GDR surveillance state was. To its credit, the post-1989 German gov’t made a truly heroic effort to reconstruct thousands upon thousand of shredded Stasi files (literally - they set up a special dept. to have people manually glue shredded files back together) so citizens could see what had been done to them.
Their definition of the best society is both conditioned by their status in this society and is predicated not on everyone's having a good chance at contentment—that would be 'equality', salt for their slug-minds—but rather Justice: the Good enjoy, the Bad suffer.
Quite frankly, I suspect many of them of a near[?]-sexual ecstasy in rapt contemplation of the Abominable Fancy.
EDIT: Clearer: they consider massive inequality a _feature_ rather than a bug, and think it at best the LORD's True Justice (or Darwin's) or at worst just the natural way of the world, a shame, but trying to work against it were as fruitless and damaging as Prohibition.
"I can’t really tell if the editors of Compact are intentionally recapitulating the discourse of the 19th and 20th century Far Right or it is just a structural effect of their politics and positioning in the cultural field." --> Personally I suspect the latter
My girlfriend just finished her PhD dissertation on Heidegger's tragic formulation of the political. Her entire fourth chapter was about Jünger's gestalt, how it informed Heidegger's formulation of gestell, and their differing but overlapping ideas of total mobilization and machination. Then her conclusion took a lot of Benoist and Guillaume Faye and how they use these concepts (particularly Heidegger) in their identitarian projects. All this to say, not surprised these kinds of ideas are making it into Compact.
An interesting phenomenon is that in the former East, the far right Alternativ für Deutschland has a lot of electoral success compared to the West. So it's not just an American intellectual phenomenon, but even in the former East where you can vote for people who were actually associated with the former East German socialist party, people pick the far right as their vehicle for Ostalgie.
See 'Beefsteak Nazi'. Some people seem to come to the table for the authoritarianism and primacy of brutal force, and don't really care about which ideological side-order comes with it.
Hi, I have a couple of mailbag questions, if it’s not too late.
1. On Twitter and elsewhere, you’ve described yourself as having Menshevik politics. Can you say more about what that means?
2. To what extent do you think it’s fair to characterize Arendt as a conservative thinker? To me, it feels uncomfortable. However, her division between polis and oikos, and her resulting real life political stances (e.g. on the civil rights movement), would seem to put her on the right.
Talk about bad conservative/Republican alignment with leftists: supporting a fascist’s unjustifiable invasion of another nation. Whatever legitimate issues Putin had -- and he did -- not a one justified a military intervention of any kind.
As for conservatives who ❤️ the USSR: The USSR despite the talk of workers’ revolution did not in any way empower workers. A compliant work for is where the right and far left overlap.
Is it an alignment other than a magazine's intellectual dance?
There are some erstwhile left writers who create this fulsome genre of take that Trump is some kind of 'working-class' avatar and that he's the result of Democrats abandoning "the working class."
I think it stems from these writers' frustration that within Democrats, there's been more of an emphasis on bourgeois left issues of things like environmentalism, immigration and women's and LBGTQ rights over a more materialist New Deal-style politics.
Piketty notes that the same frustrations have appeared in many Anglo and European democracies as well, where the traditional working class has taken a reactionary turn and the traditional working class parties dabble in bourgeois causes. He thinks this political realignment is due to college education attainment. In wealthy advanced democracies, college educational attainment went up. Also, in a break from the past, where a college degree would make someone wealthier and identify with the right, today higher education increasingly is driving people left.
The seeing Trump as the savior of the working is, FWIW, less of a thing than the shared support for Putin. And put like that, I wonder if conservatives’ support is only performative, a way to beat up on Biden.
As for democracies’ decline, that’s due to what they have in common: capture by neoliberalism with the resulting failure to provide anyone other special interests. Failure to provide for the people is the fertile ground for right wing authoritarianism. I wouldn’t expect Pikeytty to say so in so few words although, IIRC, he kind believes it’s so.
Piketty is a left economist, having actively worked in politics. He's also provided a broad horizon view of economic history, like in Capital in the 21st Century. He's also the one who noted the gradual course of economic conflict shift from class since the industrial revolution to the 20th century to education. Democracies are now sorting themselves into "thinks" and "think-nots" into a way that was, ahem ... unthinkable.
I do believe that every participant in a democracy, from political and economic elites down to the masses, has agency. Especially reactionaries.
The Goldhagen oeuvre about genocidal projects (from "Hitler's Willing Executioners" going forward) all shine a light on human agency in the most horrific of endeavors. It's a very bleak, dispiriting outlook because he argues that no one is truly innocent and even in the worst moments of our lives and history, humans retain agency. They are aware of their surroundings and actions, and ultimately choose to participate in heinous acts if for no other reason than to be given permission to inflict suffering on people they hate.
Even when we're not in an environment of kill-or-be-killed like a war or genocide, no reactionary is truly passive. Even before the moment of a person's reaction, agency against some cause rather than an internalization of authoritarian values, the reactionary had pre-existing authoritarian sentiments and curiosities and were waiting for a moment to align themselves with people who share their values and worldview.
No, conservatives' support for Putin is sincere. We pretty much know Donald Trump caused it, as whatever he had for a foreign policy was just basically carry Russia's water. The GOP and the base fell in line as soon as he won the presidency. It was life imitating Orwell's art of "We've always been at war with Eastasia."
Conservatives made post hoc rationalizations for this Putinian turn. Economist Noah Smith in his Noahpinion Substack has a good summation of the lines of thinking. This was written a month into the Ukraine invasion:
Smith writes: "Another, more subtle theory [...] is something I call Last Bastion Theory. This is the tendency of people in the U.S. and Europe to view Russia as the distant protector of something they hold dear. For traditionalists, Russia can be seen as the last protector of Christianity, or of traditional gender roles. White supremacists might see Russia as the last White empire on the globe. And for leftists who view America as the world’s imperialistic Great Satan, Russia might seem like a bastion of resistance. Of course, the Russian government goes out of its way to encourage such perceptions.
[...]
And yet some people still defend Putin’s war narratives. There must be something else at work here, and I have a guess as to what it is.
The title of this post is a reference to a line from the TV show Game of Thrones, where the scheming nobleman Littlefinger declares that “Chaos is a ladder.” By disrupting the stability of the current regime, he intends to create space to move up in the world. In the same way, I see many of the above-mentioned figures on both the Right and the Left as Chaos Climbers — people who believe that the travails of the liberal order built after World War 2 represent an opening for their own fringe ideologies to advance their power."
Likely true, but I’m not sure about the conservative media and I strongly doubt sincerity among Republicans other than sincerely following Trump and the base.
That said, Putin’s a fascist so of course I’d expect support from the right. But from lefties? Please. Unacceptable and irrational as well as a waste of limited, wasting resources.
There's a segment of the edgelord left, as well as what Noah Smith labels as tankies (a sort of adolescent romanticism of midcentury communism by people born after the dissolution of the USSR), where this is coming from.
Matt Taibbi is the most famous case. Glenn Greenwald is lumped in this group, but he was more of a right-libertarian who happened to be in the anti-Iraq war coalition of the Dubya era. I think for these two in particular, they were frustrated that the Dubya era resistance didn't lead to an ascendant counter-movement and the era ended anti-climactically being undone by the failure of the Iraq war project and the Great Recession. You might label this group the edgelord left.
The DSA and Jacobin, as Smith noted, take their positions because they see NATO as the enforcers of neoliberalism.
The "Trump as working class avatar" frame is usually pushed by dirtbag leftists, who are probably doing it for the dirtbaggery rather than for the leftism. They've also gone in on the freeze peach nonsense.
I think when it comes to these right wing types (or their hard left tankie friends), the answer is always totalitarianism because in the end they are just bullies. And bullies like to bully. For a true bully, a utopia is a place where you can steal kids lunch money, hold a kid down and play the spit-slurp game, give some nerd a wedgie, or better yet a swirlee, and do all this without fear.
Thinking about the nostalgia of the East Germans themselves, I’m reminded of the time my family spent in Paraguay, when I was in the 5th and 6th grades. This was 95-97; Stroessner, Paraguay’s last dictator, had been deposed recently, in 89. Paraguay became very oligarchical after that, and many of the lower class would say things weren’t necessarily better than when there was one big strongman who’d at least beat up on the rich people too. Thankfully, somehow, their quite fragile democracy has stumbled on down to the present, and I think things have much improved since back then.
It's interesting that what we think of as a straight line from far left to far right is really an incomplete circle, because the far right and the far left often reach similar conclusions for entirely different reasons, as this article points out very clearly.
Ah yes, the Huifeisenschema (horseshoe schema) of Otto Strasser's Black Front, raises its head once again. As Jünger, National Conservatism, Armin Mohler & de Benoist are all on topic, this is my excuse for linking this short piece on how all those guys were the origins of the original horseshoe theory https://eidgenossen.medium.com/the-nazi-origins-of-horseshoe-theory-5d9aa0ee277
Armin Mohler is a bit of a pet peeve of mine because his doctoral thesis seems to have been widely accepted "as is" as a piece of historical scholarship, rather than as a political intervention by a Nazi pushing a political agenda. Similarly Otto Strasser's post-war self-mythologising of a "Strasserite" tendency within the NSDAP, while thoroughly debunked in Peter D Stachura's political biography of Otto's big brother Gregor Strasser (a serious figure within the party, but not part of Otto's little games), seems also to be widely accepted as historical fact, rather than fantasy. Like, guys. these people were fucking Nazis, they're worse than junkies, pretty much every word out of their mouths is a lie. Don't accept anything they say on trust. Ever.
No one is addressing the root of the cultural leftism/economic rightism problem. Unions in the US are weak and a working class party is non-existent. I really don't know what can be done to bring such a party into existence without the accusation that college educated people are really the ones in charge unless, of course, working class people obtain both the education and the motivation to lead their own movement. This can be done outside of the traditional educational system through study groups. I am not close enough to any movement to provide details. I'm old and retired. I'm putting these ideas out there for younger people who are in a position to influence a new course of action.
There you have it. The US doesn’t lack a radical populist tradition, but it has always lacked a culturally influential working class socialist tradition. This is the US left’s greatest weakness. It results in the puerile ‘anti establishment’ and disdain for the toil of union and electoral politics which is such a feature of the US left. It is something that needs to be remedied and fast.
¨First of all, my Twitter account has been restored.¨
They are going to cancel you again, you know. Elon Musk did not set 44 billion on fire just to let not-Nazis run around just saying things like, ´My Tesla exploded with my kids in the car´, and ´Actually, Hitler sucked' and also, ´Maybe Putin should stop murdering people´ because that would interfere with the freedom of speech of people like Elon Musk. The not-Pepe crowd that isn´t driven off the app because it´s now a shitty app will be forced off - by banning, if need be.
¨First off, Compact itself exists to peddle this sort of hybridization of Left and Right themes, which I have elsewhere called an “unholy alliance.”¨
I just think 🪄 ´Hitler-Stalin Pact´ and any conceptual difficulties with categorization go ✨POOF✨ 🫰🏻 like-a dat.
¨In that essay, he famously remarked that “wearing the cap of a Red army soldier” seemed less dreadful to him than “living on a diet of Hamburgers in Brooklyn.”¨
Surely there is someone in Brooklyn who wears a Red Army cap (or a Mao cap?) all the time and lives off a diet of hamburgers?
¨He was not alone. The sociologist Arnold Gehlen, who had been a supporter of the Nazi regime, later in life came to an admiration of the Soviet Union.¨
Not related, apparently. Then we get to Arnold (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Gehlen) and I got this: ¨Although he joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and made a career as a member of the 'Leipzig School' under Hans Freyer, he was not a Nazi, but rather a political opportunist: his main work Der Mensch appeared in 1940 and was published in English translation in 1987 as Man. His Nature and Place in the World. In contrast to philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, it contains not a single passage which can be classified as Nazi ideology. ¨
I think you should perhaps live your life in such a way as to be categorized as ´not a Nazi' without being labeled ´rather a political opportunist´.
¨But this shifting from signifier to signifier of “Order,” this restless movement from Catholic medievalism to nationalism to admiration for the power of the Reds, this desire for strong collectivity and community without egalitarianism¨
See, to my mind, Arnold up there and Sohrab down here should just be designated as people with no fixed beliefs other than that there should be some tyrant in charge and (presumably) said tyrant should pay them money to spout endless words rationalizing whatever action is taken, tell them how smart they are and stomp people in the head while they sit back and gloat about how tough they are.
That´s the problem with the debate about fascism - you can tell me about various philosopher´s ideological arguments in support of same, but Mussolini´s big idea was that Mussolini should be in charge. Mussolini was also no shirker when it came to political opportunism. Hitler had several large ideas, but they amounted to Hitler should be in charge, conquer and colonize Russia, and also kill all the Jews and the rest was an incessant stream of self-contradictory bullshit.
I don´t care about Heidegger (or this Arnold guy either) - nobody who was in charge of anything at the time was paying them any mind as long as they generated endless spew about the wonders of the asshole in charge. I have a very hard time distinguishing between the spew of Hitler supporters and the spew of Trump supporters (or Ron DeSantis fanboys) because they don´t actually care about anything but being in charge and stomping people in the face, full stop.
yes, I agree with this 100%. If I may adjust - I have a hard time distinguishing between the spew of Confederate traitors or Jim Crow supporters (to use an English language precedent) and the spew of modern day right wingers.
All the grasping at isms here feels like it shares psychological roots with groyperism (as you've defined and explored it) along with other phenomena like QAnon, the transgender panic and the weird right wing male self-help movement (Jordan Peterson, Tucker Carlson, Josh Hawley...). I can't help thinking as well about the jock/creep archtypes you've posited.
The people who are drawn to these things talk about order and hierarchy and constraints on decadence, but they have certain personal limitations in common. They tend towards binary thinking. They can't handle ambiguity. They require certainty.
I think 'Much in love with uneaseful Butchness.' might well cover an awful lot of this. In other instances it comes out as the Libertarian Macho Flash, e.g. 'Then they‘ll starve!' and the worship of one figure who never fails to back the most simplistic (that is, least nuanced-hence-feminine) and, if possible, most brutal, solution.
“I can’t really tell if the editors of Compact are intentionally recapitulating the discourse of the 19th and 20th century Far Right or it is just a structural effect of their politics and positioning in the cultural field“
This convergence of far right with Soviet adoration coincides with Putin’s BS rhetoric. Its the remnants of the KGB pushing this as part of their hybrid war on liberality. Their constant propaganda seems to convince a lot of authoritarian types.
If you read up on Dugin, who is the ultranationalist ideologue often credited as ‘Putin’s Brain’, the thinking is very much a merging of that old and Soviet Russian imperialism, seeking to overtake Western liberality, and create a dominant new Empire with Moscow as the “3rd Rome”. Dugin recently published the Great Awakening Vs The Great Reset which more or less justifies Russia’s terror as a reaction to Western liberality.
Now, note Michael Flynn’s new Christofascist roadshow is similarly named “The Great ReAwakening Vs The Great Reset” and it calls for Holy War against the Satanists pushing for LGBT rights and so forth.
I don't know, it sure looks like he's been on the "The USSR destroyed Russia, especially by creating sovereign republics out of what was once just Russia" beat for a while:
"If you are interested in my opinion of this person [Lenin], of the doctrine he supposedly represented, then I would say [...] that all this is no more than a beautiful and harmful fairy tale. Harmful because the implementation, or attempt to implement it in the life of our country has caused it enormous damage. And in this regard, I would like to speak about the tragedy we are experiencing today. Namely, the tragedy of the collapse of our state. You can't call it anything but a tragedy. I think it was the leaders of October 17th who laid a time bomb under the foundation of the unitary state called Russia. What did they do? They split our fatherland into separate principalities, which previously did not appear on the world map at all, endowed these principalities with governments and parliaments, and so now we have what we have [...] it's largely those people's fault, whether they wanted it or not." - from an interview in 1991.
"'Lenin’s ideas, in fact, of a confederate state structure, and the slogan of the right of nations to self determination, up to secession, laid the foundations of Soviet statehood,’ says Vladimir Putin. ‘...Here, many questions immediately arise. And the first of them, in fact, is the main one: why, making a grand gesture, did they have to satisfy each of the unlimitedly growing nationalist ambitions on the outskirts of the former empire [...] even giving the republics the right to secede from the unitary state without any conditions?'" - from a speech in 2022.
And sure, you can say "Ah, sure, he hates Lenin...but he loves Stalin!" but Stalin himself was a major figure in the recognition of Ukraine as a sovereign state, even fighting for their admission into the UN. It just doesn't seem very useful to simply characterize things as "USSR = Bad, Putin = Bad, therefore Putin's Russia = USSR."
I didn’t mean to give that characterization! Putin’s Russia is certainly not the USSR. Putin is running a mobster state that has little to do with communism other than its authoritarianism. I think its most accurately called neofascist, imperialist kleptocracy. Putin oversaw the auctioning of enormous national assets for next to nothing, now owns the corrupt oligarchs that control them. They pay him tribute or else.
Stalin was also a mobster. And the criminal influence was always present in the Russian revolution and Soviet state. Putin grew up with nothing in horrible conditions, then a KGB officer in E Germany. It is Stalin’s unbridled authoritarianism and nationalism that Putin adores. And its these same qualities that set in to the elite in the late soviet era that seems to appeal to the far right elsewhere.
What’s always and forever so bloody maddening about these admirers of economically dysfunctional police states is that, in their imagining, *they* are never the ones waiting two hours in line to buy a shitty piece of mystery meat; *they* are never the ones who can’t travel abroad unless they leave a family member behind as hostage; *they* are never the ones who can’t vote about anything; *they* are never the ones facing arrest for dissent; *they* are never the ones watching young men drink themselves to death out of boredom and idleness; *they* are never the ones who give up reading because there’s nothing left to read; *they* are never the ones lurking around the "beriozka" (foreign currency stores) asking foreigners to buy simple household necessities for them that are not available for Soviet citizens; and *they* are never the ones living in a permanent state of fear, ignorance ad paranoia because they’re endlessly told the whole world wants to wipe them out. In their imagining, they are living exactly as they live now, buying anything they want, saying anything they want, travelling anywhere they want, while admiring the orderliness, compliance and good behaviour of the masses around and below them. In their minds, they are always the nomenklatura, they are always running things.
Spot on. I knew a guy in London who defected from East Germany. They sent his dad to West Germany, where he was living, to try and talk him into coming back, unsuccessfully... after the wall came down, he got a copy of his Stazi file and there was a transcript of his conversation with his dad in it. They'd bugged his flat in West Germany. As far as I know, this guy was just an ordinary bloke (not some resistance fighter), he just wanted to live a free life and that was intolerable to the East German regime.
Anna Funder wrote a wonderful book called “Stasiland”, if you’re interested in a full taste of how perverse the GDR surveillance state was. To its credit, the post-1989 German gov’t made a truly heroic effort to reconstruct thousands upon thousand of shredded Stasi files (literally - they set up a special dept. to have people manually glue shredded files back together) so citizens could see what had been done to them.
Thanks, sounds interesting. I'll add it to my nightstand... 😁
Their definition of the best society is both conditioned by their status in this society and is predicated not on everyone's having a good chance at contentment—that would be 'equality', salt for their slug-minds—but rather Justice: the Good enjoy, the Bad suffer.
Quite frankly, I suspect many of them of a near[?]-sexual ecstasy in rapt contemplation of the Abominable Fancy.
EDIT: Clearer: they consider massive inequality a _feature_ rather than a bug, and think it at best the LORD's True Justice (or Darwin's) or at worst just the natural way of the world, a shame, but trying to work against it were as fruitless and damaging as Prohibition.
I love this comment, most of all for "'equality', salt for their slug minds".
"...they are always running things."
It's called Oligarchical Collectivism, as described by the traitor Emmanuel Goldstein .
https://study.com/academy/lesson/emmanuel-goldstein-in-1984.html
<cheap-shot>…or, in the case of Sen. Hawley, just running.</cheap-shot>
"I can’t really tell if the editors of Compact are intentionally recapitulating the discourse of the 19th and 20th century Far Right or it is just a structural effect of their politics and positioning in the cultural field." --> Personally I suspect the latter
This is really a great example of what you're best at, as a writer. Really underscores how much I'm looking forward to your book.
John didn't like this comment. So modest.
My girlfriend just finished her PhD dissertation on Heidegger's tragic formulation of the political. Her entire fourth chapter was about Jünger's gestalt, how it informed Heidegger's formulation of gestell, and their differing but overlapping ideas of total mobilization and machination. Then her conclusion took a lot of Benoist and Guillaume Faye and how they use these concepts (particularly Heidegger) in their identitarian projects. All this to say, not surprised these kinds of ideas are making it into Compact.
An interesting phenomenon is that in the former East, the far right Alternativ für Deutschland has a lot of electoral success compared to the West. So it's not just an American intellectual phenomenon, but even in the former East where you can vote for people who were actually associated with the former East German socialist party, people pick the far right as their vehicle for Ostalgie.
See 'Beefsteak Nazi'. Some people seem to come to the table for the authoritarianism and primacy of brutal force, and don't really care about which ideological side-order comes with it.
Hi, I have a couple of mailbag questions, if it’s not too late.
1. On Twitter and elsewhere, you’ve described yourself as having Menshevik politics. Can you say more about what that means?
2. To what extent do you think it’s fair to characterize Arendt as a conservative thinker? To me, it feels uncomfortable. However, her division between polis and oikos, and her resulting real life political stances (e.g. on the civil rights movement), would seem to put her on the right.
Thanks!
Talk about bad conservative/Republican alignment with leftists: supporting a fascist’s unjustifiable invasion of another nation. Whatever legitimate issues Putin had -- and he did -- not a one justified a military intervention of any kind.
As for conservatives who ❤️ the USSR: The USSR despite the talk of workers’ revolution did not in any way empower workers. A compliant work for is where the right and far left overlap.
Is it an alignment other than a magazine's intellectual dance?
There are some erstwhile left writers who create this fulsome genre of take that Trump is some kind of 'working-class' avatar and that he's the result of Democrats abandoning "the working class."
I think it stems from these writers' frustration that within Democrats, there's been more of an emphasis on bourgeois left issues of things like environmentalism, immigration and women's and LBGTQ rights over a more materialist New Deal-style politics.
Piketty notes that the same frustrations have appeared in many Anglo and European democracies as well, where the traditional working class has taken a reactionary turn and the traditional working class parties dabble in bourgeois causes. He thinks this political realignment is due to college education attainment. In wealthy advanced democracies, college educational attainment went up. Also, in a break from the past, where a college degree would make someone wealthier and identify with the right, today higher education increasingly is driving people left.
The seeing Trump as the savior of the working is, FWIW, less of a thing than the shared support for Putin. And put like that, I wonder if conservatives’ support is only performative, a way to beat up on Biden.
As for democracies’ decline, that’s due to what they have in common: capture by neoliberalism with the resulting failure to provide anyone other special interests. Failure to provide for the people is the fertile ground for right wing authoritarianism. I wouldn’t expect Pikeytty to say so in so few words although, IIRC, he kind believes it’s so.
Piketty is a left economist, having actively worked in politics. He's also provided a broad horizon view of economic history, like in Capital in the 21st Century. He's also the one who noted the gradual course of economic conflict shift from class since the industrial revolution to the 20th century to education. Democracies are now sorting themselves into "thinks" and "think-nots" into a way that was, ahem ... unthinkable.
I do believe that every participant in a democracy, from political and economic elites down to the masses, has agency. Especially reactionaries.
The Goldhagen oeuvre about genocidal projects (from "Hitler's Willing Executioners" going forward) all shine a light on human agency in the most horrific of endeavors. It's a very bleak, dispiriting outlook because he argues that no one is truly innocent and even in the worst moments of our lives and history, humans retain agency. They are aware of their surroundings and actions, and ultimately choose to participate in heinous acts if for no other reason than to be given permission to inflict suffering on people they hate.
Even when we're not in an environment of kill-or-be-killed like a war or genocide, no reactionary is truly passive. Even before the moment of a person's reaction, agency against some cause rather than an internalization of authoritarian values, the reactionary had pre-existing authoritarian sentiments and curiosities and were waiting for a moment to align themselves with people who share their values and worldview.
No, conservatives' support for Putin is sincere. We pretty much know Donald Trump caused it, as whatever he had for a foreign policy was just basically carry Russia's water. The GOP and the base fell in line as soon as he won the presidency. It was life imitating Orwell's art of "We've always been at war with Eastasia."
Conservatives made post hoc rationalizations for this Putinian turn. Economist Noah Smith in his Noahpinion Substack has a good summation of the lines of thinking. This was written a month into the Ukraine invasion:
https://open.substack.com/pub/noahpinion/p/putins-war-and-the-chaos-climbers?r=af1s0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
Smith writes: "Another, more subtle theory [...] is something I call Last Bastion Theory. This is the tendency of people in the U.S. and Europe to view Russia as the distant protector of something they hold dear. For traditionalists, Russia can be seen as the last protector of Christianity, or of traditional gender roles. White supremacists might see Russia as the last White empire on the globe. And for leftists who view America as the world’s imperialistic Great Satan, Russia might seem like a bastion of resistance. Of course, the Russian government goes out of its way to encourage such perceptions.
[...]
And yet some people still defend Putin’s war narratives. There must be something else at work here, and I have a guess as to what it is.
The title of this post is a reference to a line from the TV show Game of Thrones, where the scheming nobleman Littlefinger declares that “Chaos is a ladder.” By disrupting the stability of the current regime, he intends to create space to move up in the world. In the same way, I see many of the above-mentioned figures on both the Right and the Left as Chaos Climbers — people who believe that the travails of the liberal order built after World War 2 represent an opening for their own fringe ideologies to advance their power."
Likely true, but I’m not sure about the conservative media and I strongly doubt sincerity among Republicans other than sincerely following Trump and the base.
That said, Putin’s a fascist so of course I’d expect support from the right. But from lefties? Please. Unacceptable and irrational as well as a waste of limited, wasting resources.
There's a segment of the edgelord left, as well as what Noah Smith labels as tankies (a sort of adolescent romanticism of midcentury communism by people born after the dissolution of the USSR), where this is coming from.
Matt Taibbi is the most famous case. Glenn Greenwald is lumped in this group, but he was more of a right-libertarian who happened to be in the anti-Iraq war coalition of the Dubya era. I think for these two in particular, they were frustrated that the Dubya era resistance didn't lead to an ascendant counter-movement and the era ended anti-climactically being undone by the failure of the Iraq war project and the Great Recession. You might label this group the edgelord left.
The DSA and Jacobin, as Smith noted, take their positions because they see NATO as the enforcers of neoliberalism.
The "Trump as working class avatar" frame is usually pushed by dirtbag leftists, who are probably doing it for the dirtbaggery rather than for the leftism. They've also gone in on the freeze peach nonsense.
I think when it comes to these right wing types (or their hard left tankie friends), the answer is always totalitarianism because in the end they are just bullies. And bullies like to bully. For a true bully, a utopia is a place where you can steal kids lunch money, hold a kid down and play the spit-slurp game, give some nerd a wedgie, or better yet a swirlee, and do all this without fear.
Thinking about the nostalgia of the East Germans themselves, I’m reminded of the time my family spent in Paraguay, when I was in the 5th and 6th grades. This was 95-97; Stroessner, Paraguay’s last dictator, had been deposed recently, in 89. Paraguay became very oligarchical after that, and many of the lower class would say things weren’t necessarily better than when there was one big strongman who’d at least beat up on the rich people too. Thankfully, somehow, their quite fragile democracy has stumbled on down to the present, and I think things have much improved since back then.
It's interesting that what we think of as a straight line from far left to far right is really an incomplete circle, because the far right and the far left often reach similar conclusions for entirely different reasons, as this article points out very clearly.
Ah yes, the Huifeisenschema (horseshoe schema) of Otto Strasser's Black Front, raises its head once again. As Jünger, National Conservatism, Armin Mohler & de Benoist are all on topic, this is my excuse for linking this short piece on how all those guys were the origins of the original horseshoe theory https://eidgenossen.medium.com/the-nazi-origins-of-horseshoe-theory-5d9aa0ee277
The link doesn't work but I found the article. Add a c to the end of the URL and it's there.
Whoops! My bad, I was trimming all the crud you sometimes get hanging off the end of a link (all the ?... forwarding refs and all that junk)
Armin Mohler is a bit of a pet peeve of mine because his doctoral thesis seems to have been widely accepted "as is" as a piece of historical scholarship, rather than as a political intervention by a Nazi pushing a political agenda. Similarly Otto Strasser's post-war self-mythologising of a "Strasserite" tendency within the NSDAP, while thoroughly debunked in Peter D Stachura's political biography of Otto's big brother Gregor Strasser (a serious figure within the party, but not part of Otto's little games), seems also to be widely accepted as historical fact, rather than fantasy. Like, guys. these people were fucking Nazis, they're worse than junkies, pretty much every word out of their mouths is a lie. Don't accept anything they say on trust. Ever.
No one is addressing the root of the cultural leftism/economic rightism problem. Unions in the US are weak and a working class party is non-existent. I really don't know what can be done to bring such a party into existence without the accusation that college educated people are really the ones in charge unless, of course, working class people obtain both the education and the motivation to lead their own movement. This can be done outside of the traditional educational system through study groups. I am not close enough to any movement to provide details. I'm old and retired. I'm putting these ideas out there for younger people who are in a position to influence a new course of action.
There you have it. The US doesn’t lack a radical populist tradition, but it has always lacked a culturally influential working class socialist tradition. This is the US left’s greatest weakness. It results in the puerile ‘anti establishment’ and disdain for the toil of union and electoral politics which is such a feature of the US left. It is something that needs to be remedied and fast.
¨First of all, my Twitter account has been restored.¨
They are going to cancel you again, you know. Elon Musk did not set 44 billion on fire just to let not-Nazis run around just saying things like, ´My Tesla exploded with my kids in the car´, and ´Actually, Hitler sucked' and also, ´Maybe Putin should stop murdering people´ because that would interfere with the freedom of speech of people like Elon Musk. The not-Pepe crowd that isn´t driven off the app because it´s now a shitty app will be forced off - by banning, if need be.
¨First off, Compact itself exists to peddle this sort of hybridization of Left and Right themes, which I have elsewhere called an “unholy alliance.”¨
I just think 🪄 ´Hitler-Stalin Pact´ and any conceptual difficulties with categorization go ✨POOF✨ 🫰🏻 like-a dat.
¨In that essay, he famously remarked that “wearing the cap of a Red army soldier” seemed less dreadful to him than “living on a diet of Hamburgers in Brooklyn.”¨
Surely there is someone in Brooklyn who wears a Red Army cap (or a Mao cap?) all the time and lives off a diet of hamburgers?
¨He was not alone. The sociologist Arnold Gehlen, who had been a supporter of the Nazi regime, later in life came to an admiration of the Soviet Union.¨
So the name Gehlen made me think of this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhard_Gehlen
Not related, apparently. Then we get to Arnold (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Gehlen) and I got this: ¨Although he joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and made a career as a member of the 'Leipzig School' under Hans Freyer, he was not a Nazi, but rather a political opportunist: his main work Der Mensch appeared in 1940 and was published in English translation in 1987 as Man. His Nature and Place in the World. In contrast to philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, it contains not a single passage which can be classified as Nazi ideology. ¨
I think you should perhaps live your life in such a way as to be categorized as ´not a Nazi' without being labeled ´rather a political opportunist´.
¨But this shifting from signifier to signifier of “Order,” this restless movement from Catholic medievalism to nationalism to admiration for the power of the Reds, this desire for strong collectivity and community without egalitarianism¨
See, to my mind, Arnold up there and Sohrab down here should just be designated as people with no fixed beliefs other than that there should be some tyrant in charge and (presumably) said tyrant should pay them money to spout endless words rationalizing whatever action is taken, tell them how smart they are and stomp people in the head while they sit back and gloat about how tough they are.
That´s the problem with the debate about fascism - you can tell me about various philosopher´s ideological arguments in support of same, but Mussolini´s big idea was that Mussolini should be in charge. Mussolini was also no shirker when it came to political opportunism. Hitler had several large ideas, but they amounted to Hitler should be in charge, conquer and colonize Russia, and also kill all the Jews and the rest was an incessant stream of self-contradictory bullshit.
I don´t care about Heidegger (or this Arnold guy either) - nobody who was in charge of anything at the time was paying them any mind as long as they generated endless spew about the wonders of the asshole in charge. I have a very hard time distinguishing between the spew of Hitler supporters and the spew of Trump supporters (or Ron DeSantis fanboys) because they don´t actually care about anything but being in charge and stomping people in the face, full stop.
elm
all that is ideology melts into air
yes, I agree with this 100%. If I may adjust - I have a hard time distinguishing between the spew of Confederate traitors or Jim Crow supporters (to use an English language precedent) and the spew of modern day right wingers.
All the grasping at isms here feels like it shares psychological roots with groyperism (as you've defined and explored it) along with other phenomena like QAnon, the transgender panic and the weird right wing male self-help movement (Jordan Peterson, Tucker Carlson, Josh Hawley...). I can't help thinking as well about the jock/creep archtypes you've posited.
The people who are drawn to these things talk about order and hierarchy and constraints on decadence, but they have certain personal limitations in common. They tend towards binary thinking. They can't handle ambiguity. They require certainty.
I think 'Much in love with uneaseful Butchness.' might well cover an awful lot of this. In other instances it comes out as the Libertarian Macho Flash, e.g. 'Then they‘ll starve!' and the worship of one figure who never fails to back the most simplistic (that is, least nuanced-hence-feminine) and, if possible, most brutal, solution.
Another thoughtful piece, thank you.
“I can’t really tell if the editors of Compact are intentionally recapitulating the discourse of the 19th and 20th century Far Right or it is just a structural effect of their politics and positioning in the cultural field“
This convergence of far right with Soviet adoration coincides with Putin’s BS rhetoric. Its the remnants of the KGB pushing this as part of their hybrid war on liberality. Their constant propaganda seems to convince a lot of authoritarian types.
https://radmod.substack.com/p/clearly-defining-putins-hybrid-wwiii?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
Didn't Putin explicitly state that he was trying to undo what Lenin did and return Russia to its imperial peak?
Yes, but I believe that refers to the catastrophic revolution that so damaged Russia’s prestige and international clout.
Putin is also most directly influenced by Stalin, came up thru the KGB and has spent the past 2 decades rehabilitating Stalin’s image
https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/10/vladimir-putin-russia-rehabilitating-stalin-soviet-past
If you read up on Dugin, who is the ultranationalist ideologue often credited as ‘Putin’s Brain’, the thinking is very much a merging of that old and Soviet Russian imperialism, seeking to overtake Western liberality, and create a dominant new Empire with Moscow as the “3rd Rome”. Dugin recently published the Great Awakening Vs The Great Reset which more or less justifies Russia’s terror as a reaction to Western liberality.
https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Great_Awakening_Vs_the_Great_Reset.html?id=JzyqzgEACAAJ
Now, note Michael Flynn’s new Christofascist roadshow is similarly named “The Great ReAwakening Vs The Great Reset” and it calls for Holy War against the Satanists pushing for LGBT rights and so forth.
I don't know, it sure looks like he's been on the "The USSR destroyed Russia, especially by creating sovereign republics out of what was once just Russia" beat for a while:
"If you are interested in my opinion of this person [Lenin], of the doctrine he supposedly represented, then I would say [...] that all this is no more than a beautiful and harmful fairy tale. Harmful because the implementation, or attempt to implement it in the life of our country has caused it enormous damage. And in this regard, I would like to speak about the tragedy we are experiencing today. Namely, the tragedy of the collapse of our state. You can't call it anything but a tragedy. I think it was the leaders of October 17th who laid a time bomb under the foundation of the unitary state called Russia. What did they do? They split our fatherland into separate principalities, which previously did not appear on the world map at all, endowed these principalities with governments and parliaments, and so now we have what we have [...] it's largely those people's fault, whether they wanted it or not." - from an interview in 1991.
"'Lenin’s ideas, in fact, of a confederate state structure, and the slogan of the right of nations to self determination, up to secession, laid the foundations of Soviet statehood,’ says Vladimir Putin. ‘...Here, many questions immediately arise. And the first of them, in fact, is the main one: why, making a grand gesture, did they have to satisfy each of the unlimitedly growing nationalist ambitions on the outskirts of the former empire [...] even giving the republics the right to secede from the unitary state without any conditions?'" - from a speech in 2022.
And sure, you can say "Ah, sure, he hates Lenin...but he loves Stalin!" but Stalin himself was a major figure in the recognition of Ukraine as a sovereign state, even fighting for their admission into the UN. It just doesn't seem very useful to simply characterize things as "USSR = Bad, Putin = Bad, therefore Putin's Russia = USSR."
I didn’t mean to give that characterization! Putin’s Russia is certainly not the USSR. Putin is running a mobster state that has little to do with communism other than its authoritarianism. I think its most accurately called neofascist, imperialist kleptocracy. Putin oversaw the auctioning of enormous national assets for next to nothing, now owns the corrupt oligarchs that control them. They pay him tribute or else.
Stalin was also a mobster. And the criminal influence was always present in the Russian revolution and Soviet state. Putin grew up with nothing in horrible conditions, then a KGB officer in E Germany. It is Stalin’s unbridled authoritarianism and nationalism that Putin adores. And its these same qualities that set in to the elite in the late soviet era that seems to appeal to the far right elsewhere.
Thank-you, I was afraid it might be a bit much.