This is really good. I've been saying to others since 2017 or so that Trump's moral universe is both pre-modern and that of a mob boss. More vaguely, I've always felt his vibe is very much that of Mid-Atlantic suburban (ethnic) conservatism, which I suppose has more than some overlap with the kind of people who were in or close to the mafia in the 1970s and 1980s. Like I get it might be a horrible stereotype, but the people in Goodfellas (and not just the made men and their violent accomplices) always seemed to me like Trump's base. Maybe not surprising Giuliani has become one of his most deranged supporters (ironically Giuliani was an anti-mafia crusader during the 1980s - I think he features prominently as a talking head in the Netflix doc "Get Gotti")
What is more interesting is the degree to which Trump has succeeded in getting (evangelical) Protestant small town America to totally buy into this ethic. Like I didn't necessarily see the world of Goodfellas (politically) conquering the world of America Gothic at all. A lot more to explore there.
I get what you're saying but Donald Trump isn't a WASP at all. They're a dying breed, so it's easy to forget that WASP means something different than white and born into money. His grandfather was an immigrant. I'd say he's tristate ethnic white authentically, it's just that we don't think of German New Yorkers as a distinct group anymore.
Unfortunately the inchoate anger that led so many to vote for Trump, in order to give the middle finger to "the system," doesn't allow them to see that the alternative to the "the system" would in all likelihood make them much worse off. Of course the American system is unfair to less affluent people and is trending toward oligarchy, but Trump would only accelerate that trend or just lead to anarchy and a Hobbesian nightmare. Why short-sighted billionaires can't see that they, too, would be worse off if the system devolves is beyond me.
I think a lot of Trump voters are more conscious of that than they get credit for. There are true MAGA cultists, but I think for a lot of folks that middle finger to the system is all there really is to it, they don't really need or want to believe that the political process can make things better, they checked that kind of earnestness at the door.
Anger is always the first emotion identified with the Trump phenomenon, and true enough, but cynicism and boredom have always been key ingredients as well.
The promise Trump always has and always will deliver on is to make the libs garment-rendingly upset. That's thin gruel, but many people have a taste for it.
Perhaps reactionary populism isn't really anti-elitism, it's just against specific sets of elites who could be replaced with that Populist's own. Who needs a "system" when your society could degenerate into a monarchistic dynasty instead?
Trump’s buddies in the Kremlin also run a mob. I see this as a particular breed of neofascism, exported from central Asia and stemming from the endemic corruption of the Soviet Union and its security apparatus. I appreciate the excellent analysis of the domestic acceptance of these politics. Trump, at the very least, learned many of his tactics and receives messaging assistance from the Kremlin that motivate voters toward these attitudes.
If you believed in Pizzagate or QAnon, you would also want a wrecking ball in leadership
Oh man, this is great. I know you mentioned that something that didn't make it into "When the Clock Broke" is Sam Francis's overt engagement with Herf's theory of reactionary modernism to in effect just say "yeah, sounds awesome! We want this!" Which fits together interestingly with his - and your - analysis of gangster politics. For a political style that so loudly rejects modernity as presently constituted, rejects the Enlightenment, valorizes what *seems* like a much more atavistic way of constituting society, I really wonder how the pieces fit together here - is even this on some level a fundamentally modernist project? Either because it's a basically ersatz 'antimodernity' made out of the raw material of mass communication and the political technologies of the modern nation-state, or because it's fundamentally defining itself by the atomized legalism it opposes, or because its appearance of being purely reaction against liberal universalism still conceals a positive vision of its own? idk. All questions they asked about historical fascism, too, of course!
This is what I was trying to get at with my comments about Silicon Valley last week - simply through the contradictions and unexamined assumptions in their own thinking, they seem to have naturally and inevitably arrived at functionally the same place: an antirmodernity built from the state of the art
Musk and his contemporaries appear to be finally giving in to the inevitable and joining up with the Trumpist project in earnest, so it will not be very long before it literally is the same project, at least as coherent as the various conflicting factions in Nazism or Italian Fascism ever were
The biggest myth people have about Trump is that they think he cares about them or “fights for them”. The dude betrays anyone who ever put their try’s in him. Thats the big difference between him and a movie gangster form a pulp novel. He has no loyalty to anyone. There is no Gemeinschaft in his world. That’s the biggest question mark I have about his appeal, why people keep insisting that he gives a fuck about them.
as the word 'mob' has two distinct senses--rioting crowd and organized crime--that both apply to trump(ism), so too does 'family business': first of course is the coy euphemism for underworld dealings popularized by the godfather; second, more straightforward and more important, is small and medium sized enterprises under patronymic personalist rule and patrilineal inheritance, often regional firms that cosplay as mom-n-pop shops and tout their made-in-america bona fides
here riley's 'patrimonialism' connects to postone's theories on antisemitism and national socialism: for conservatives, family businesses are a wholesome alternative to corporate capitalism with its cold impersonality, faceless interchangeability, abstract economics and diffusive globalism
it's not just conservatives' morality that's pre-modern and atavistic, it's their economics as well: they want a return to economy as *oikonomia* or household management, to rule by householder. this circles back to trump(ism)'s aristocratic populist, democratic feudalist false promise: if it wasn't for liberal modernity then every property-owning man would get to be king in his own home, to be godfather of his own clan
I was always the one, when my friends were shouting, "Power to the People," on the edge of the crowd muttering, "Which people?" I have played pool in too many Wisconsin and South Dakotan bars to be in any illusion that those folks and I have our politics in common - and I have a great deal of respect for many of them. Some of them were great pool players! :) But I am not surprised at their likely support of TFG. They see him as being kicked around by the elites, the establishment, the system, much as they feel they have been all their lives. Never quite good enough for the raise, for the job even. Always a day late and a dollar short. Always among the usual suspects. Always to blame for something. And I don't think that Biden's accomplishments will be seen as good things for them. These, too, will somehow be out of reach. The thing is, what does TFG offer besides retribution? To these guys, getting even often looks like a bar fight, a trashed car, or threat of personal violence. What kind of political retribution can TFG exert that will satisfy the hunger of the cultural dispossessed?
In my time, starting with the 1968 Presidential Election, criticism of "government" has been endless from every corner of our society regardless of its successes.
It's important to accept the reality that words matter and an endless array of negative words dedicated to dulling Americans belief in their government have over time literally brought about the situation that we live in now: polarization and opposites so entrenched in their worldview that hate leads the way when dealing with the dreaded "others." Their government doesn't care about us...
No good can come from this in as much as it gets progressively worse with each passing day.
Since we're certainly past the break point, only a thorough trouncing of those opposed to democracy can shine a light on a path forward where, for example, if one openly refuses to trust and accept the results of an election, even before an election is held then one ought to be prohibited from being a candidate in an election. If a leader openly lies with glee then such lies ought not be endlessly repeated in the News Media and social media and if the lies are repeated then those involved need their credibility loudly questioned.
If hate is to be contained its cheerleaders must be publicly excoriated in every possible way to the point of making it impossible for their protestations to gain any traction in the commons.
First rate. At this point, all I see is power worship, revenge and sadism against perceived slights. It’s acquired a dynamic of its own. Barely even pays lip service to politics or even ideology any longer. Trumpists may have passed the point of feeling the need to explain or justify themselves. Their aim is to dominate. They just *are*, as the mob just is.
If you can't hurt someone, or at a minimum, are able to hurt someone, you wink out of existence, like a soap bubble.
It's weaponised existentialism.
You can do the hurting yourself. You can get that ability by buying lots of guns.
Failing that, you can club together with other people of similar mindset and obtain that power-to-harm by proxy. That's safer, less work, you don't risk personal retaliation, hell, you don't even have to get off the couch, presuming vote by mail.
So you go into the polls not to choose magistrates and representatives, or to select between competing policy agendas, or alternative theories of government.
You go to hunt up a stick and hit someone you don't like with.
I often feel like the idea of dignity is completely underrated as a driving force in politics. No one wants to be a schmuck, and a lot of people feel like schmucks. If someone has to be a schmuck, Donald Trump says, 'I'll make sure it's the other guy.'
I known a few people, men and women both, whose most irrational and dangerous (to them and others) acts were done in the name of 'not being made a schmuck'…and it never stops, because that can always happen if you were raised not to have a well-grounded sense of dignity…
…which is the usual state, and in the U.S. case it has a lot to do with capitalism—people with solid dignity will not put-up with many of the normal conditions of employment, or nit for long, nor do we need to buy all the crap thrown at us. Turn the sound off and watch the facial expressions of the actors in commercials; you will see every human emotion beside dignified self-possession. Perhaps that last word were the key: self-possession is what you need not to be anyone else's property, which state is that intended for most of us.
I think this is spot on about the appeal of Trumpism, even to normie people who aren't especially enamored of thuggishness. It offers an experience of community belonging that liberalism doesn't offer them. (The same is true for some strains of progressivism that appeal to lefty people who are turned off by DNC liberalism.)
But what seems pertinent to me is that, after the defeat of Reconstruction, democratic politics (citizenship, rule of law, social contract) in the US more or less coincided with the "belonging" feeling that white Americans could find in their communities. Gemeinshaft and Gesellschaft largely overlapped for them, and Black citizenship was negated as not-quite-real citizenship. But that was strained after the Civil Rights movement. And it more or less broke for a lot of people after Obama was elected––as expressed symbolically in the refusal to believe he was a citizen, and thus could not possibly be the man at the apex of the state that was still "we the people."
The "gangster" categories aren't real even if they feel that way, but the "citizenship" categories aren't real enough, at least for a large swath of people.
What is interesting is how disappointment in the system can drive people to far right or far left politics but is hard to figure out who goes where relatively often.
I know plenty of people who despise Trump but also dislike the Democratic Party because it wants to reform the system rather than tear it all down and replace “late stage capitalism” with the something better in their heads
I think there is definitely something to this, but of course (and as I'm sure you know) the reality of mafia life is often far different than this image of organic familial solidarity, of "our thing" against the world would suggest. There's truly no honor among thieves. These guys rat each other out and fuck each other over all the time, all the stuff about the "code" is bullshit. It's a war of all against all just as much as the capitalist gesellschaft is, and that's what makes plebeian identification with a figure like Trump, a man who so palpably loathes even his own family, so tragic.
While of course the mob was involved in construction in NYC back in the day, IMO John’s “have” is straining. The inference is that all builders used concrete from Fat Tony which, you know, didn’t happen. So we’ve got some questionable hyperbole there. And in the case of Trump Tower: it was built in a manner that relied on concrete for the structure which was highly unusual. No builder “had” to do that; only a Roy Cohn buddy would have had to do so.
As for liberal democracy, of course it failed as a direct response to Thatcher and Reagan’s putting us on the neoliberal world. In response to which the DNC (not lower levels of the party), having surrendered to Bill Clinton’s DLC and switched from being and opposition party to something far more in sync with the GOP and its special interests. And here we are.
Like all things conservative these days, they correctly sense something’s wrong then empowers people who exacerbate the problem.
This is really good. I've been saying to others since 2017 or so that Trump's moral universe is both pre-modern and that of a mob boss. More vaguely, I've always felt his vibe is very much that of Mid-Atlantic suburban (ethnic) conservatism, which I suppose has more than some overlap with the kind of people who were in or close to the mafia in the 1970s and 1980s. Like I get it might be a horrible stereotype, but the people in Goodfellas (and not just the made men and their violent accomplices) always seemed to me like Trump's base. Maybe not surprising Giuliani has become one of his most deranged supporters (ironically Giuliani was an anti-mafia crusader during the 1980s - I think he features prominently as a talking head in the Netflix doc "Get Gotti")
What is more interesting is the degree to which Trump has succeeded in getting (evangelical) Protestant small town America to totally buy into this ethic. Like I didn't necessarily see the world of Goodfellas (politically) conquering the world of America Gothic at all. A lot more to explore there.
you should read my book!
i have it on order!
Good point. Trump’s background is so WASP, though, but he speaks TriState ethnic white so fluently.
I get what you're saying but Donald Trump isn't a WASP at all. They're a dying breed, so it's easy to forget that WASP means something different than white and born into money. His grandfather was an immigrant. I'd say he's tristate ethnic white authentically, it's just that we don't think of German New Yorkers as a distinct group anymore.
Exactly. Simplified, Wasp = John Lindsay, Manhattan; Trump = Bridge and tunnel = ethnic.
Unfortunately the inchoate anger that led so many to vote for Trump, in order to give the middle finger to "the system," doesn't allow them to see that the alternative to the "the system" would in all likelihood make them much worse off. Of course the American system is unfair to less affluent people and is trending toward oligarchy, but Trump would only accelerate that trend or just lead to anarchy and a Hobbesian nightmare. Why short-sighted billionaires can't see that they, too, would be worse off if the system devolves is beyond me.
I think a lot of Trump voters are more conscious of that than they get credit for. There are true MAGA cultists, but I think for a lot of folks that middle finger to the system is all there really is to it, they don't really need or want to believe that the political process can make things better, they checked that kind of earnestness at the door.
Anger is always the first emotion identified with the Trump phenomenon, and true enough, but cynicism and boredom have always been key ingredients as well.
The promise Trump always has and always will deliver on is to make the libs garment-rendingly upset. That's thin gruel, but many people have a taste for it.
Short-sighted billionaires know
• that not all flood warnings are followed by floods,
• the floods that come aren't always that deep,
• in the event, they'll drown last
and if they don't drown, they get to go through all the victims' pockets.
Perhaps reactionary populism isn't really anti-elitism, it's just against specific sets of elites who could be replaced with that Populist's own. Who needs a "system" when your society could degenerate into a monarchistic dynasty instead?
All modern populism is elites being Verbal Kint's devil: convincing the world that they do not exist.
What Trump offers is "an" alternative, not "the" alternative.
Fabulous piece, thank you.
Trump’s buddies in the Kremlin also run a mob. I see this as a particular breed of neofascism, exported from central Asia and stemming from the endemic corruption of the Soviet Union and its security apparatus. I appreciate the excellent analysis of the domestic acceptance of these politics. Trump, at the very least, learned many of his tactics and receives messaging assistance from the Kremlin that motivate voters toward these attitudes.
If you believed in Pizzagate or QAnon, you would also want a wrecking ball in leadership
Oh man, this is great. I know you mentioned that something that didn't make it into "When the Clock Broke" is Sam Francis's overt engagement with Herf's theory of reactionary modernism to in effect just say "yeah, sounds awesome! We want this!" Which fits together interestingly with his - and your - analysis of gangster politics. For a political style that so loudly rejects modernity as presently constituted, rejects the Enlightenment, valorizes what *seems* like a much more atavistic way of constituting society, I really wonder how the pieces fit together here - is even this on some level a fundamentally modernist project? Either because it's a basically ersatz 'antimodernity' made out of the raw material of mass communication and the political technologies of the modern nation-state, or because it's fundamentally defining itself by the atomized legalism it opposes, or because its appearance of being purely reaction against liberal universalism still conceals a positive vision of its own? idk. All questions they asked about historical fascism, too, of course!
interesting questions!
This is what I was trying to get at with my comments about Silicon Valley last week - simply through the contradictions and unexamined assumptions in their own thinking, they seem to have naturally and inevitably arrived at functionally the same place: an antirmodernity built from the state of the art
Musk and his contemporaries appear to be finally giving in to the inevitable and joining up with the Trumpist project in earnest, so it will not be very long before it literally is the same project, at least as coherent as the various conflicting factions in Nazism or Italian Fascism ever were
The biggest myth people have about Trump is that they think he cares about them or “fights for them”. The dude betrays anyone who ever put their try’s in him. Thats the big difference between him and a movie gangster form a pulp novel. He has no loyalty to anyone. There is no Gemeinschaft in his world. That’s the biggest question mark I have about his appeal, why people keep insisting that he gives a fuck about them.
“Trust in him”
as the word 'mob' has two distinct senses--rioting crowd and organized crime--that both apply to trump(ism), so too does 'family business': first of course is the coy euphemism for underworld dealings popularized by the godfather; second, more straightforward and more important, is small and medium sized enterprises under patronymic personalist rule and patrilineal inheritance, often regional firms that cosplay as mom-n-pop shops and tout their made-in-america bona fides
here riley's 'patrimonialism' connects to postone's theories on antisemitism and national socialism: for conservatives, family businesses are a wholesome alternative to corporate capitalism with its cold impersonality, faceless interchangeability, abstract economics and diffusive globalism
it's not just conservatives' morality that's pre-modern and atavistic, it's their economics as well: they want a return to economy as *oikonomia* or household management, to rule by householder. this circles back to trump(ism)'s aristocratic populist, democratic feudalist false promise: if it wasn't for liberal modernity then every property-owning man would get to be king in his own home, to be godfather of his own clan
I was always the one, when my friends were shouting, "Power to the People," on the edge of the crowd muttering, "Which people?" I have played pool in too many Wisconsin and South Dakotan bars to be in any illusion that those folks and I have our politics in common - and I have a great deal of respect for many of them. Some of them were great pool players! :) But I am not surprised at their likely support of TFG. They see him as being kicked around by the elites, the establishment, the system, much as they feel they have been all their lives. Never quite good enough for the raise, for the job even. Always a day late and a dollar short. Always among the usual suspects. Always to blame for something. And I don't think that Biden's accomplishments will be seen as good things for them. These, too, will somehow be out of reach. The thing is, what does TFG offer besides retribution? To these guys, getting even often looks like a bar fight, a trashed car, or threat of personal violence. What kind of political retribution can TFG exert that will satisfy the hunger of the cultural dispossessed?
Very good! Doubting that on July 11 that Trump will be “Ready for Freddy..” But you never know.
In my time, starting with the 1968 Presidential Election, criticism of "government" has been endless from every corner of our society regardless of its successes.
It's important to accept the reality that words matter and an endless array of negative words dedicated to dulling Americans belief in their government have over time literally brought about the situation that we live in now: polarization and opposites so entrenched in their worldview that hate leads the way when dealing with the dreaded "others." Their government doesn't care about us...
No good can come from this in as much as it gets progressively worse with each passing day.
Since we're certainly past the break point, only a thorough trouncing of those opposed to democracy can shine a light on a path forward where, for example, if one openly refuses to trust and accept the results of an election, even before an election is held then one ought to be prohibited from being a candidate in an election. If a leader openly lies with glee then such lies ought not be endlessly repeated in the News Media and social media and if the lies are repeated then those involved need their credibility loudly questioned.
If hate is to be contained its cheerleaders must be publicly excoriated in every possible way to the point of making it impossible for their protestations to gain any traction in the commons.
First rate. At this point, all I see is power worship, revenge and sadism against perceived slights. It’s acquired a dynamic of its own. Barely even pays lip service to politics or even ideology any longer. Trumpists may have passed the point of feeling the need to explain or justify themselves. Their aim is to dominate. They just *are*, as the mob just is.
To be, is to be able to hurt someone.
If you can't hurt someone, or at a minimum, are able to hurt someone, you wink out of existence, like a soap bubble.
It's weaponised existentialism.
You can do the hurting yourself. You can get that ability by buying lots of guns.
Failing that, you can club together with other people of similar mindset and obtain that power-to-harm by proxy. That's safer, less work, you don't risk personal retaliation, hell, you don't even have to get off the couch, presuming vote by mail.
So you go into the polls not to choose magistrates and representatives, or to select between competing policy agendas, or alternative theories of government.
You go to hunt up a stick and hit someone you don't like with.
I often feel like the idea of dignity is completely underrated as a driving force in politics. No one wants to be a schmuck, and a lot of people feel like schmucks. If someone has to be a schmuck, Donald Trump says, 'I'll make sure it's the other guy.'
I known a few people, men and women both, whose most irrational and dangerous (to them and others) acts were done in the name of 'not being made a schmuck'…and it never stops, because that can always happen if you were raised not to have a well-grounded sense of dignity…
…which is the usual state, and in the U.S. case it has a lot to do with capitalism—people with solid dignity will not put-up with many of the normal conditions of employment, or nit for long, nor do we need to buy all the crap thrown at us. Turn the sound off and watch the facial expressions of the actors in commercials; you will see every human emotion beside dignified self-possession. Perhaps that last word were the key: self-possession is what you need not to be anyone else's property, which state is that intended for most of us.
I think this is spot on about the appeal of Trumpism, even to normie people who aren't especially enamored of thuggishness. It offers an experience of community belonging that liberalism doesn't offer them. (The same is true for some strains of progressivism that appeal to lefty people who are turned off by DNC liberalism.)
But what seems pertinent to me is that, after the defeat of Reconstruction, democratic politics (citizenship, rule of law, social contract) in the US more or less coincided with the "belonging" feeling that white Americans could find in their communities. Gemeinshaft and Gesellschaft largely overlapped for them, and Black citizenship was negated as not-quite-real citizenship. But that was strained after the Civil Rights movement. And it more or less broke for a lot of people after Obama was elected––as expressed symbolically in the refusal to believe he was a citizen, and thus could not possibly be the man at the apex of the state that was still "we the people."
The "gangster" categories aren't real even if they feel that way, but the "citizenship" categories aren't real enough, at least for a large swath of people.
That sense of community belonging is also known as gang mentality.
What is interesting is how disappointment in the system can drive people to far right or far left politics but is hard to figure out who goes where relatively often.
I know plenty of people who despise Trump but also dislike the Democratic Party because it wants to reform the system rather than tear it all down and replace “late stage capitalism” with the something better in their heads
I mean November Kelly once described Liz Truss as an accidental Marxist-Leninist…
I think there is definitely something to this, but of course (and as I'm sure you know) the reality of mafia life is often far different than this image of organic familial solidarity, of "our thing" against the world would suggest. There's truly no honor among thieves. These guys rat each other out and fuck each other over all the time, all the stuff about the "code" is bullshit. It's a war of all against all just as much as the capitalist gesellschaft is, and that's what makes plebeian identification with a figure like Trump, a man who so palpably loathes even his own family, so tragic.
Very good as usual John. You are the only sophisticated thinker in this space in the US. Bravo.
While of course the mob was involved in construction in NYC back in the day, IMO John’s “have” is straining. The inference is that all builders used concrete from Fat Tony which, you know, didn’t happen. So we’ve got some questionable hyperbole there. And in the case of Trump Tower: it was built in a manner that relied on concrete for the structure which was highly unusual. No builder “had” to do that; only a Roy Cohn buddy would have had to do so.
As for liberal democracy, of course it failed as a direct response to Thatcher and Reagan’s putting us on the neoliberal world. In response to which the DNC (not lower levels of the party), having surrendered to Bill Clinton’s DLC and switched from being and opposition party to something far more in sync with the GOP and its special interests. And here we are.
Like all things conservative these days, they correctly sense something’s wrong then empowers people who exacerbate the problem.
I'm s old I remember when the Democrats were a real social-democratic party, before they sold out to Clinton and the DLC.
Back when Ron Dellums was Speaker of the House, and "Sam Nunn" was just a bogeman we scared the children with.
Wait!
I’m so old that that’s my line!