Arendt has too many references that most modern Americans lack experience with for her to be widely read. How many Americans are going to understand her reference to Balzac novels?
I think the word bourgeois is complicated in the American political language because we have never really used it and now it often shortened to "bougie" which seems to more or less mean the aesthetic and recreational preferences of upper-middle class college educated professionals or fancy/expensive stuff. There is also the weird fact that the Democrats are becoming the part of the college-educated professionals and there is hot debate over whether this is good or not or inevitable or not. I saw a poll that broke down vote share by income. Harris won the majority of voters who earn under 30K and those who earn over 100k and 200k. Trump won the majority of voters in the 30K-99.9K brackets.
We also have no concept of the petit bourgeois who are probably the real base of the GOP more than the oligarchs/plutocrats. Palin and Joe the Plumber were petit bourgeois types and precursors to Trumpism. Elsie Stefanik is petit bourgeois, her parents were lumber wholesalers who did well enough to send her to school with the children of doctors and lawyers. The petit bourgeois hates those above them (those snooty wineparents with their museum memberships and interests in the arts) and fears being pulled down the ladder by those below them (aka their employees).
I don't know about that point about the petit bourgeois. It is widely discussed how the GOP's most stalwart base in every municipality is basically the local car dealers. Those who don't think of themselves as Capital while holding deeply reactionary, protectionist politics.
I'd like to add, even if it's obvious -- the drive for endless national expansion puts us into danger not only from the resistance of other nations, as in the past, but in our times still more from the vulnerability of global biological and geophysical systems. Refusing to admit this danger is perhaps the most blatantly reality-denying policy of the incoming administration and its supporters.
Here is something I have been pondering. I think there is a broad if unspoken consensus that the American way of work sucks. Or maybe working for the man sucks in general but the left and right respond to this in different ways and I think there are generational differences too.
I was born in 1980 and graduated college amongst the Tech 1.0 bust and then started law school during the Subprime meltdowns. A lot of people I know had their 20s coincide with numerous boom and busts of economy. My cohort and the elder millennials seems to have turned to social democracy because of this. More regulations and laws for life-work balance and a safety net for when the economy gets rough. The crowd born between 1977-1982, give or take a year or two seems to swing more left-liberal than other cohorts socially and economically. They are also a small cohort
The crowd born between 1983-1994 or so can still be socially liberal but they also appear to be extremely practical careerists and workaholics. This is the crowd that learned "A English degree and 5 dollars gets you a coffee." They became the backbone workers of tech 2.0.
The right's variant of being an employee sucks is to get as crushingly rich as quickly as possible so no one can tell you what to do.
Younger Millennials, Gen Z/Gen Alpha seem more seeped in the get rich quick view of how to escape the chains of working for the man. They are fascinated by crypto and think it is an asset that will never depreciate. They also seem skeptical of social democracies promises.
I've lately been thinking that one part of what people think sucks is the end of Fordism. The decline in stability of all kinds in the American economy since the 70s has I think been genuinely part of what has led to more economic growth, and throwing Fordism overboard makes sense individually for both capitalists and workers but the results are a way of work that everyone hates.
The increase in working hours especially for college-educated professionals exempt from wage and hour laws is certainly part of it. The lack of stability for everyone is a part of it.
I don't know if everyone hates it but many do. I also know a lot of workaholics who live for work instead of working to live.
I wonder about these crowds and the “they.” I sense the truth of what you say but if you had to be more specific, who is in that group? Like is white suburban millennials?
I had this vague (fairly negative) image of Arendt as a favourite of that sort of Anne Applebaum-style anti-authoritarianism which viewed it as this undifferentiated process of corruption and ‘misinformation’. The sort of view which implies opposition to liberal democracy can be solved by better civic lessons.
Bought a copy of Origins today and am really surprised at the depth of insight and grappling with these movements as political phenomena. What really gets me is that the blurb on the back of the (UK) edition implies that she thinks scapegoating, terror and propaganda are the ‘origins of totalitarianism’ when almost from the start she critiques them as convenient cop-outs to dismiss its popular support??? Seems even the editors haven’t read her apparently
Great post. I ldo ove arendt, especially when she's critiquing capitalism and expounding her civic republican commitments. But I also think her political commitments read liberal in practice, if not in name. She has a deep skepticism of mass movements (which is earned lol) or really any subordination of the individual...anything that might constrain the individual from engaging in politics as a free, deliberating subject.
Of course, that sounds great! I too long for a civic republic filled with thoughtful subjects committed to deliberation in the political space. But that's not a political program, and in practice I think those commitments are just going to look like liberalism, which is going to accommodate and not confront capitalism. Which I know arendt does not like! No?
Am reading Arendt’s The Human Condition and that civic republicanism and focus upon the individual (yet not the acquisitive individual bent on wealth accumulation) are front and center. She is challenging read because she cannot be pigeonholed but well worth the effort. In THC she is also questioning the role of technology and this was 1958.
I share your general thoughts on Arendt and have thought in the past that her views in The Human Condition could be interestingly coupled with a Deweyan view of democracy as a way of life: as in, the political experience in the agora is not (just) an end in itself, but plays a vitalizing instrumental role or serves as a barometer of the success of a vibrant democratic civil society. (A connection maybe strengthened by the links between the European phenomenological and American pragmatic philosophical traditions.) I think Osita Nwanevu's upcoming book will touch on these sorts of ideas, and I'm looking forward to it.
Sad to say because it’s so ignored, in large part because news media roll on the idea that everything’s new, but *a lot* can be learned by history because when it comes to the big issues, like rapacious greed, nothing’s new.
In the case of the tech bros, they mutated from innovators to sociopathic pigs.
As for Arendt: have read far from enough but what I sense is someone reluctant to being pigeonholed. Dunno about Origins but she can even be kind of humorous. (I’m thinking of a biographical essay she wrote re Walter Benjamin.)
Thank you for this. I wonder if you have read God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning by Meghan O'Gieblyn. There’s an Arendt notion of disenchantment that undergirds that book, which I think helps explain the Tech part of the Oligrachs and their influence.
I suppose what I wonder more and more, not in a cynically way but out of genuine curiosity, is what our ability to analyze serves. There’s often a loneliness or isolating feeling I have when entering these conversations despite the community associated with them. Perhaps I am only wishing for these ideas to have more of an effect on the public space, but they often—even with the fire of their urgency—feel marginal.
As you’ve been out on tour for the book and engaging in this medium, does that feeling persist for you?
I think it’s worth noting the way that the theology of manifest destiny and the secular religion of godlike accumulation find natural partnership here too.
Donald Akenson’s book on covenant and land which includes a section on South Africa, I think is a good link to Arendt’s work here.
I read Origins when Musk acquired Twitter and, while completely unpublishable under modern sensibilities, the passages on South Africans were illuminating.
All that said, MAGA promised isolationism, but now it looks like MAGA is expansionism. What’s the synthesis?
I was reading some Carl Schmitt recently. He had the same analysis: the end of liberalism, an earlier time when the bourgeoisie and economic activity had been detached from politics and the state.
You can see this in Keynes, if you look hard enough. Keynes rejected the social theory of money, and insisted that it was a statal emanation, despite the more advanced monetary thinkers of the time (Simmel, Knapp (who is routinely misread and I think intentionally so by Keynes), and Mitchell-Innes.) It was the weltanschauung of the 1930's. I think it is there in Burnham, as well.
Excellent insight regarding the endless striving of the owners of production and the promoters of consumption. One can envision a four dimensional expansion in the realms of wealth, power, territory, and longevity.
"The tote bags are in the closet with the other unfashionable detritus of the embarrassing resistance era."
Ya know...
There was shock during the election to learn there was nostalgia for 2017-2019, but I wonder if inchoate memories of resistance culture partly contributed to that nostalgia. Not to say the nostalgists participated in that culture or sympathized with it, but it made the times interesting for them. All the protests! All the social media wars and memes! The sense that everything from lesbian soccer players to a superhero movie starring black people was significant! It was the era of "Dirty Computer," "Get Out," the exploding luxury items on "The Good Fight" and Norman Lear's last sitcom. It was the audience I witnessed staying quiet and still at the end of "I Am Not Your Negro." In a strange way, 2024 Trump voters might have wanted something like that -- something preferable to the current dreariness. Or as John Ganz has theorized, boredom is one of their motivations.
To try (somehow) to link this ramble to the above essay, I'll say there's a difference between dismissal and rethinking. And there might still be lessons to be gained from that oh-so-cringey time.
Arendt has too many references that most modern Americans lack experience with for her to be widely read. How many Americans are going to understand her reference to Balzac novels?
I think the word bourgeois is complicated in the American political language because we have never really used it and now it often shortened to "bougie" which seems to more or less mean the aesthetic and recreational preferences of upper-middle class college educated professionals or fancy/expensive stuff. There is also the weird fact that the Democrats are becoming the part of the college-educated professionals and there is hot debate over whether this is good or not or inevitable or not. I saw a poll that broke down vote share by income. Harris won the majority of voters who earn under 30K and those who earn over 100k and 200k. Trump won the majority of voters in the 30K-99.9K brackets.
We also have no concept of the petit bourgeois who are probably the real base of the GOP more than the oligarchs/plutocrats. Palin and Joe the Plumber were petit bourgeois types and precursors to Trumpism. Elsie Stefanik is petit bourgeois, her parents were lumber wholesalers who did well enough to send her to school with the children of doctors and lawyers. The petit bourgeois hates those above them (those snooty wineparents with their museum memberships and interests in the arts) and fears being pulled down the ladder by those below them (aka their employees).
I don't know about that point about the petit bourgeois. It is widely discussed how the GOP's most stalwart base in every municipality is basically the local car dealers. Those who don't think of themselves as Capital while holding deeply reactionary, protectionist politics.
I think local car dealers are ur-members of the petit bourgeois but your mileage may vary
We can read, and also understand, Balzac.
Enlightening, thanks!
I'd like to add, even if it's obvious -- the drive for endless national expansion puts us into danger not only from the resistance of other nations, as in the past, but in our times still more from the vulnerability of global biological and geophysical systems. Refusing to admit this danger is perhaps the most blatantly reality-denying policy of the incoming administration and its supporters.
Here is something I have been pondering. I think there is a broad if unspoken consensus that the American way of work sucks. Or maybe working for the man sucks in general but the left and right respond to this in different ways and I think there are generational differences too.
I was born in 1980 and graduated college amongst the Tech 1.0 bust and then started law school during the Subprime meltdowns. A lot of people I know had their 20s coincide with numerous boom and busts of economy. My cohort and the elder millennials seems to have turned to social democracy because of this. More regulations and laws for life-work balance and a safety net for when the economy gets rough. The crowd born between 1977-1982, give or take a year or two seems to swing more left-liberal than other cohorts socially and economically. They are also a small cohort
The crowd born between 1983-1994 or so can still be socially liberal but they also appear to be extremely practical careerists and workaholics. This is the crowd that learned "A English degree and 5 dollars gets you a coffee." They became the backbone workers of tech 2.0.
The right's variant of being an employee sucks is to get as crushingly rich as quickly as possible so no one can tell you what to do.
Younger Millennials, Gen Z/Gen Alpha seem more seeped in the get rich quick view of how to escape the chains of working for the man. They are fascinated by crypto and think it is an asset that will never depreciate. They also seem skeptical of social democracies promises.
I've lately been thinking that one part of what people think sucks is the end of Fordism. The decline in stability of all kinds in the American economy since the 70s has I think been genuinely part of what has led to more economic growth, and throwing Fordism overboard makes sense individually for both capitalists and workers but the results are a way of work that everyone hates.
The increase in working hours especially for college-educated professionals exempt from wage and hour laws is certainly part of it. The lack of stability for everyone is a part of it.
I don't know if everyone hates it but many do. I also know a lot of workaholics who live for work instead of working to live.
I wonder about these crowds and the “they.” I sense the truth of what you say but if you had to be more specific, who is in that group? Like is white suburban millennials?
They in the first paragraph means people born between 1977-1982, we were just born in a bit of a baby bust.
I had this vague (fairly negative) image of Arendt as a favourite of that sort of Anne Applebaum-style anti-authoritarianism which viewed it as this undifferentiated process of corruption and ‘misinformation’. The sort of view which implies opposition to liberal democracy can be solved by better civic lessons.
Bought a copy of Origins today and am really surprised at the depth of insight and grappling with these movements as political phenomena. What really gets me is that the blurb on the back of the (UK) edition implies that she thinks scapegoating, terror and propaganda are the ‘origins of totalitarianism’ when almost from the start she critiques them as convenient cop-outs to dismiss its popular support??? Seems even the editors haven’t read her apparently
Great post. I ldo ove arendt, especially when she's critiquing capitalism and expounding her civic republican commitments. But I also think her political commitments read liberal in practice, if not in name. She has a deep skepticism of mass movements (which is earned lol) or really any subordination of the individual...anything that might constrain the individual from engaging in politics as a free, deliberating subject.
Of course, that sounds great! I too long for a civic republic filled with thoughtful subjects committed to deliberation in the political space. But that's not a political program, and in practice I think those commitments are just going to look like liberalism, which is going to accommodate and not confront capitalism. Which I know arendt does not like! No?
Am reading Arendt’s The Human Condition and that civic republicanism and focus upon the individual (yet not the acquisitive individual bent on wealth accumulation) are front and center. She is challenging read because she cannot be pigeonholed but well worth the effort. In THC she is also questioning the role of technology and this was 1958.
Yeah, the human condition is exactly what I had in mind. Difficult read (she's so German!), but lots to chew on.
I share your general thoughts on Arendt and have thought in the past that her views in The Human Condition could be interestingly coupled with a Deweyan view of democracy as a way of life: as in, the political experience in the agora is not (just) an end in itself, but plays a vitalizing instrumental role or serves as a barometer of the success of a vibrant democratic civil society. (A connection maybe strengthened by the links between the European phenomenological and American pragmatic philosophical traditions.) I think Osita Nwanevu's upcoming book will touch on these sorts of ideas, and I'm looking forward to it.
Sad to say because it’s so ignored, in large part because news media roll on the idea that everything’s new, but *a lot* can be learned by history because when it comes to the big issues, like rapacious greed, nothing’s new.
In the case of the tech bros, they mutated from innovators to sociopathic pigs.
As for Arendt: have read far from enough but what I sense is someone reluctant to being pigeonholed. Dunno about Origins but she can even be kind of humorous. (I’m thinking of a biographical essay she wrote re Walter Benjamin.)
Thank you for this. I wonder if you have read God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning by Meghan O'Gieblyn. There’s an Arendt notion of disenchantment that undergirds that book, which I think helps explain the Tech part of the Oligrachs and their influence.
I suppose what I wonder more and more, not in a cynically way but out of genuine curiosity, is what our ability to analyze serves. There’s often a loneliness or isolating feeling I have when entering these conversations despite the community associated with them. Perhaps I am only wishing for these ideas to have more of an effect on the public space, but they often—even with the fire of their urgency—feel marginal.
As you’ve been out on tour for the book and engaging in this medium, does that feeling persist for you?
I think it’s worth noting the way that the theology of manifest destiny and the secular religion of godlike accumulation find natural partnership here too.
Donald Akenson’s book on covenant and land which includes a section on South Africa, I think is a good link to Arendt’s work here.
I read Origins when Musk acquired Twitter and, while completely unpublishable under modern sensibilities, the passages on South Africans were illuminating.
All that said, MAGA promised isolationism, but now it looks like MAGA is expansionism. What’s the synthesis?
Thanks John. Very interesting and terrifying.
I was reading some Carl Schmitt recently. He had the same analysis: the end of liberalism, an earlier time when the bourgeoisie and economic activity had been detached from politics and the state.
You can see this in Keynes, if you look hard enough. Keynes rejected the social theory of money, and insisted that it was a statal emanation, despite the more advanced monetary thinkers of the time (Simmel, Knapp (who is routinely misread and I think intentionally so by Keynes), and Mitchell-Innes.) It was the weltanschauung of the 1930's. I think it is there in Burnham, as well.
I think a great example of the bourgeoisie cementing its ownership of the mob is Musk buying Twitter. I mean, it’s an almost literal manifestation.
The triumph of mobbishness over snobbishness
Excellent insight regarding the endless striving of the owners of production and the promoters of consumption. One can envision a four dimensional expansion in the realms of wealth, power, territory, and longevity.
Thanks again, John. You may wish to delete what appears to be some unintentional repetition in a block quote, see here:
“'continents,'” these private practices and devices were gradually ..."
"The tote bags are in the closet with the other unfashionable detritus of the embarrassing resistance era."
Ya know...
There was shock during the election to learn there was nostalgia for 2017-2019, but I wonder if inchoate memories of resistance culture partly contributed to that nostalgia. Not to say the nostalgists participated in that culture or sympathized with it, but it made the times interesting for them. All the protests! All the social media wars and memes! The sense that everything from lesbian soccer players to a superhero movie starring black people was significant! It was the era of "Dirty Computer," "Get Out," the exploding luxury items on "The Good Fight" and Norman Lear's last sitcom. It was the audience I witnessed staying quiet and still at the end of "I Am Not Your Negro." In a strange way, 2024 Trump voters might have wanted something like that -- something preferable to the current dreariness. Or as John Ganz has theorized, boredom is one of their motivations.
To try (somehow) to link this ramble to the above essay, I'll say there's a difference between dismissal and rethinking. And there might still be lessons to be gained from that oh-so-cringey time.