The Reign of Crime

Not-So-Talented Mr. Ripleys and Our Scumbag Dypstopia

A shot from Frtiz Lang’s The Testament of Dr. Mabuse

First of all, Happy New Year! Hope everyone has a good year filled with happiness and prosperity. Now back to analyzing the depressing news.

There are two stories in the news at the moment I think are worth thinking about. One of them is pretty funny; the other is more sinister.

The first is the story of George Santos, the incoming Republican congressman from New York 3rd district, covering parts of Queens and Long Island. Turns out Santos, who was born in Brazil, pretty much lied about everything: he said he had worked at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, he had not; he said he had an MBA from NYU, he did not; he claimed to be Jewish and descended from Holocaust survivors, he is not. When it turned out that he was not, in fact, Jewish, he said, “I never said I was Jewish…I said I was Jew-ish,” an all-timer. Unsurprisingly, Santos has a little bit of a criminal past as well: he was under investigation in Brazil for using stolen checks. It now looks like there was some impropriety with his campaign spending, too: there are a lot of expenses listed for exactly $199.99 As it so happens, the Federal Election Commission requires campaigns to provide receipts for spending $200 and above. Surely, the new Republican leadership will repudiate Santos and refuse to seat him! Ha ha. So far, Kevin McCarthy has said nothing about the Santos case. Part of this is out of sheer necessity: McCarthy’s house majority is, as they say, “razor-thin,” so losing even one vote is not something he can really afford, but the other thing is that Santos is not even that big of a freak by present day G.O.P. standards. After all, this is the party of Donald Trump, another outer-borough flimflam man. This leads me to the other story and hopefully closer to my point.

Andrew Tate, former professional kickboxer and man-o-sphere influencer, was arrested in Romania on suspicion of human trafficking and rape. Tate built a vast audience of alienated young men on social media with his “advice,” predicated on extreme, brutal misogyny. As a profile in GQ put it, he “occupies a strange space between pickup artist, scammer, and far-right talking head.” Tate was eventually hounded off social media platforms and then, of course, restored to Twitter under the Musk regime. He has become something of a right-wing cause célèbre. At one point, Tucker Carlson defended him on his program. Well, maybe they just didn’t know, right? The thing is Tate openly bragged about being a pimp and serial abuser of women. That was part of his appeal to his audience. The right is currently obsessed with the problem of sex trafficking, but has an image of it from Disney’s Pinocchio. In real life, crime is much less dramatic and therefore much more insidious. “Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table,” Auden wrote. While it may share our bed and eat at our table, it’s also part of the modern spectacle. In real life, the face of trafficking is Andrew Tate, a common pimp who managed to become a celebrity. All of his “ideas” were just those of pimping—psychological manipulation backed up by threat of violence—turned into a self-help ideology. A lot people acted as if this was some kind of brilliant, novel set of social observations. They apparently could no longer just recognize a gangster when they saw one. Or worse, maybe they could. Santos was being deceptive: he was trying to hide who he really was, but Tate was openly criminal and loved for it.

What both of these stories have in common is the intrusion into public life and politics, especially on the right, of crime and criminals. Of course, political corruption is nothing new in American life. Neither is the worship of criminals, which goes back to at least the Old West. It is not isolated to one political tendency either: neocons used to slam the New Left and counter-culture for glorifying anomie and lawlessness as justifiable rebellion or even inchoate liberation. But changes in quantity have a way of turning into a change in quality: the contemporary right is lousy with figures that are either semi-criminal or fully belong to the kleptocratic demimonde. From one perspective, what the arrival of Trump really represented is the arrival of sneering, openly cynical criminality in politics. And people just absolutely love it. Hell, even I think Trump is funny.

As readers may have noticed, I’ve been trying to think through this whole issue in the last few posts. In fact, It’s actually one of the guiding preoccupations of this entire newsletter. One of my main touchstones in this pursuit is Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, which has been unfairly dismissed by many left-wing intellectuals as middlebrow or a relic of Cold War liberalism. It is certainly should not be read as an empirical history. What is really is is a political theory of the underworld: if Hegel wrote Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Arendt’s book is kind of an Elements of the Philosophy of Wrong. Figures like Tate belong to the sociological category Arendt called “the mob,” whose leaders are typified by their “failure in professional and social life, perversion and disaster in private life.” To understand how she uses the term, imagine an identity between its two senses: an unruly, menace in the streets, and the Mafia, gangsters plotting in their hideouts. In its way, the mob is just the bourgeoisie stripped of hypocrisy—it possesses many of the same views of shared by normal people but “desublimated,” as it were. Respectable society has a certain admiration and even affection for the spirit and gumption of mobsters, as we witness in the occasional public adulation of people like John Gotti. Part of the cultural elite is also fascinated by the mob: to them they supposedly represent life lived with an laudable “honesty,” as opposed the boredom, convenient lies, and drabness of the mainstream. The mob loves strongmen and plebiscites, sees the world in terms secret plots and conspiracies, and turns frequently to forms of social Darwinism or racism to confirm its worldview. To paraphrase a fellow, for domination, veiled by religious and political illusions, the mob substitutes naked, shameless, direct, brutal domination.

For me, this is the real core of the “fascism debate.” What does it mean for society and politics that the mob has exploded into public view and forms part of the political calculus? For Arendt, “the Dreyfus Affair showed that underworld and high society in France were so closely bound together that it was difficult definitely to place any of the ‘heroes’ among the Anti-Dreyfusards in either category.” To me, the Trump phenomenon and all its poisonous offshoots—the growing tolerance of, fascination with and even utilization of the mob by the wealthy and powerful—represents something similar. But why has the mask been cast off now? And why are these figures and attitudes so prevalent in society, and especially on the Right? There are plenty of possible answers, but those will be for future posts.

Once again, have a Happy New Year!