Remembering Anson Rabinbach; Petrarch's Library; Shakespeare vs. Kafka
Reading, Watching 12.14.25
This is a regular feature for paid subscribers wherein I write a little bit about what I’ve been reading and/or watching.
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You can buy When the Clock Broke, now in paperback and available wherever books are sold. If you live in the UK, it’s also available there. It makes a great present for the history buff or politics junkie in your life!
I was very pleased to see that the UK edition made the Top 10 books of the year list on Comment is Freed and was also one of the New Statesman’s books of the year!
After today’s newsletter, posting may slow down somewhat. I want to take a little holiday break and do some reading that’s not just the news. But we’ll see.
In case you missed it, I spoke to historian Jeffrey Herf about his concept of “reactionary modernism” and its applications in the modern world.
Max Read and I had our biweekly live chat, which is available as a video and podcast for our paid subscribers.
In the comments to that video, reader JLM had what I thought was a very astute observation:
There seems to be an accelerating split within the MAGA movement between a (relatively) orderly Murdoch propaganda model, which is top down, donor-funded, pro-Israel, and spouts its bile toward “safe” targets (the left, the Somalis, the muslims...), and a conspiracy propaganda model, which is more bottom up, chaotic and nihilistic, directs bile against anything including what it perceives as elites, is prone to antisemitism and is gaining traction as the other one is weakening. MAGA is trying to save its orderly model by doubling down on the white supremacism, but it may actually strengthen the other side by pushing conservative minorities toward it.
Yes, it seems like the dynamic is that to keep pace with the conspiratorial underbelly, the top-down side has gotten more and more overtly racist to signal “authenticity.”
On Friday, I attended a conference at NYU to commemorate the late historian Anson Rabinbach, who passed away early this year. Rabinbach, a student of the great George Mosse, was one of the leaders of the “cultural turn” in the study of Nazism and fascism that took its ideological and aesthetic components seriously. One of Rabinbach’s key observations was that Nazism was a Gesinnung, a disposition or ethos—“a combination of mood, emotion, cliché along with rituals and orchestration”—more than a coherent doctrine that demanded strict obedience to every point:
Despite the absolutism of the Führerprinzip and the quasi-liturgical status granted to Hitler’s speeches and writings, no single version of“Nazi ideology” ever became hegemonic in the Third Reich. Intellectual fealty to National Socialism required not so much ideological consistency as an ethos or Gesinnung, a willingness to adhere to the general precepts of the worldview which was vague and indistinct enough to embrace a variety of related perspectives.
In his essay, “The temporary alliance of the mob and elite,” drawn from a phrase of Hannah Arendt’s in The Origin of Totalitarianism, Rabinbach points out that the popular and vernacular sides of Nazi propaganda were perhaps more successful than the insistence on Wagnerian aesthetics or Aryan race science:
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