If there is one sacrosanct principle in the American society, it's that the so called elites — or rich people — absolutely under no circumstances can be declared "deplorables" in the polite society, which extends to their ideologies. When tomorrow JD Vance or Elon Musk publicly declare themselves fascists, then "How dare you to use the F word" commentariat of today will seamlessly switch to opinions "It is time to revisit fascism. Have we been brainwashed by Allies' propaganda?"
Yes, ideologically accurate, but I believe what we have is best seen as good old fashioned 19th century reactionary European ideology transplanted to the early 21st century in a colonial settler mode, rather than as early 20th century fascism.
Classical fascism also carried over that same 19th century ideology, and certainly featured settler colonialism, but its historical and geopolitical proximity to the 19th century meant that fascism was a much more organic extension of that century. In addition, there was the specific shock of the military defeat of the old Central European landlord aristocracies who commanded those defeated armies, then also confronted with the specter of "Bolshevism" on their eastern flank. This included Italy, who suffered humiliating military defeats in that war and who got nothing from the peace. See "The Persistence of the Old Regime", Arno Mayer, for the state of the old European ruling class before WW1.
None of those specific conditions obtain in either Europe or North America, the latter with no legacy of a post-feudal landlord aristocracy. Instead the dead "tradition" is that of European settler colonialism and the enslavement of non-Europeans. That featured the white European settler patriarch fathering 12 kids with his household female chattel enslaved to this task - Elon Musk has literally 12 kids via 3 women, and his space fantasies are also an expression of settler colonialism.
This pro-natalism is the core of today's transplanted reactionary ideology. It demands the collective re-enslavement of primarily white women into a collective matrix dedicated to pumping out more white babies. It's that disgustingly brutal.
For Europe is in sharp demographic decline (but so is East Asia, so go figure), while North America is relatively underpopulated by current world standards. North American capitalism could use more cheap labor, and the rational way to supply it is through immigration. But that will not come from Europe, and therefore immigration will not bring "its best people", accelerating the gradual shift of the social basis from white to non-white, eroding also the traditional social base of the Republican Party, sending this to its historical doom. That's what the hysteria is all about.
So it is no accident that the leading ideologues are wealthy white South Africans. Worse yet, the most rapidly growing demographic is in West Africa! Specters of a Black Planet! Revenge of the enslaved!
De Maistre (how he must have treasured that obsolete spelling!), amusingly enough, had an argument against the existence of 'human beings' (as opposed to Germans, Savoyards, Siciluans, &c.) that just as readily might be deployed with modern reactionaries and fascists who insist that they are fighting for 'white people' or 'Europe'.
I mention that white supremacy is one of the three modern incarnations of fascism. It's very syncretic. For one thing, the word racism is coded differently depending on which side of the Atlantic you are on. In the Americas, racism conflates to colorism. In Europe, race is coded for ethnicity and religion. To Americans, we see Europeans as white people. In Europe, the language you speak and which religion gained power in the sectarian warfare between Catholicism and Protestantism defines race. This is how racism could be, depending on the context, conflicts over ethnicities or regional conflicts of northern (cold-weather) Europe vs. Mediterranean Europe, as well as those Europeans hating the Slavic peoples.
With Europe seeing immigration from Muslim, Middle Eastern, North African and sub-Saharan African communities, American-style colorism is starting to take root with Europeans flattening themselves in an American-style whiteness.
The internet allows these factions to communicate, so this colorist tendency has spread from North America to Europe, Australia and New Zealand (where whites view Asian immigrants as invaders and aboriginals as Blacks mounting a challenge from below.) It also touches into unreconstructed apartheidism among South African Boers and heavily settled Latin American nations like Argentina, too.
I've recommended the adoption of the term fashoid to describe these ascendant ideologies. Fashoid is parallel to the opium-opioid contrast.
There are at least three 21st century ideologies that share the anatomy and the "five stages of grief" of fascism, but they are not rooted in nationalism yet desire the same ends: white supremacy (scaling American colorism up to encompass Europe, the Americas, Australia and New Zealand, and white South Africa as a white race with a shared destiny), masculinism (basically, feminism with men as victims and women as oppressors, with LGBTQ politics seen as a divide and conquer strategy) and theocracy (religious fundamentalist movements are politically ascendant throughout the world).
Sometimes the core principle for people who oppose the fascism thesis seems to be "Fascism is the ideology that spawned the Holocaust and World War II and unless I see a clear and obvious path from this expression of politics to events of that magnitude I cannot call something fascism." It's a weird consequentialist diagnosis of ideology.
When we first started to have to discuss the topic seriously, say back when our government was talking about repressing civil liberties and torturing people…for Freedom!…there was a real legacy of people on the Left calling anything the least authoritarian 'fascism', many of whom could have been I though I don't remember doing this. This was analogous to people who treat any increase on the taxes paid by wealthy persons (real and artificial) as a call to open a McGulag in every strip-mall.
This placed a burden-of-proof on anyone using the term, and those who didn't want the term used, regardless of circumstances, revelled in that level of immunity.
But we've now been playing this game for awhile, and away from the odd moment on KPFA or WBAI I haven't heard 'fascist' misused in decades, and the fascists are now bothering with only transparent closets* if at all, so I'm in no mood to bother with them.
*(which you'd think would to them resemble glass booths too closely for comfort)
Love your clarity John. Thank you for not mincing words.
Re-reading Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr Rosewater…and appreciated that Senator Rosewater’s speech hit on these exact same themes.
“I should like to speak of the Emperor Octavian, of Caesar Augustus, as he came to be known. This great humanitarian, and he was a humanitarian in the profoundest sense of the word, took command of the Roman Empire in a degenerate period strikingly like our own. Harlotry, divorce, alcoholism, liberalism, homosexuality, pornography, abortion, venality, murder, labor racketeering, juvenile delinquency, cowardice, atheism, extortion, slander, and theft were the height of fashion. Rome was a paradise for gangsters, perverts, and the lazy working man, just as America is now. As in America now, forces of law and order were openly attacked by mobs, children were disobedient, had no respect for their parents or their country, and no decent woman was safe on any street, even at high noon! And cunning, sharp-trading, bribing foreigners were in the ascendency everywhere. And ground under the heels of the big city money-changers were the honest farmers, the backbone of the Roman Army and the Roman soul.
What could be done? Well, there were soft-headed liberals then as there are bubble-headed liberals now, and they said what liberals always say after they have led a great nation to such a lawless, self-indulgent, polyglot condition: "Things have never been better! Look at all the freedom! Look at all the equality! Look how sexual hypocrisy has been driven from the scene! Oh
boy! People used to get all knotted up inside when they thought about rape or fornication. Now they can do both with glee!"
And what did the terrible, black-spirited, non-fun-loving conservatives of those happy days have to say? Well, there weren't many of them left. They were dying off in ridiculed old age.And their children had been turned against them by the liberals, by the purveyors of synthetic sunshine and moonshine, by the something-for-nothing political strip-teasers, by the people who loved everybody, including the barbarians, by people who loved the barbarians so much they wanted to open all the gates, have all the soldiers lay their weapons down, and let the barbarians come in!
That was the Rome that Caesar Augustus came home to, after defeating those two sex maniacs, Antony and Cleopatra, in the great sea battle of Actium. And I don't think I have to recreate the things he thought when he surveyed the Rome he was said to rule. Let us take a moment of silence. and let each think what he will of the stews of today.
There was a moment of silence, too, about thirty seconds that seemed to some like a thousand years.
And what methods did Caesar Augustus use to put this disorderly house in order? He did what we are so often told we must never, ever do, what we are told will never, ever work: he wrote morals into law, and he enforced those unenforceable laws with a police force that was cruel and unsmiling. He made it illegal for a Roman to behave like a pig. Do you hear me? It became illegal! And Romans caught acting like pigs were strung up by their thumbs, thrown down wells, fed to lions, and given other experiences that might impress them with the desirability of being more decent and reliable than they were. Did it work? You bet your boots it did! Pigs miraculously disappeared! And what do we call the period that followed this now-unthinkable oppression? Nothing more nor less, friends and neighbors, than "The Golden Age of Rome."
Am I suggesting that we follow this gory example? Of course I am. Scarcely a day has passed during which I have not said in one way or another: "Let us force Americans to be as good as they should be." Am I in favor of feeding labor crooks to lions? Well, to give those who get such satisfaction from imagining that I am covered with primordial scales a little twinge of
pleasure, let me say, "Yes. Absolutely. This afternoon, if it can be arranged." To disappoint my critics, let me add that I am only fooling. I am not entertained by cruel and unusual punishments, not in the least. I am fascinated by the fact that a carrot and a stick can make a donkey go, and that his Space Age discovery may have some application in the world of human beings.
And so on. The Senator said that the carrot and the stick had been built into the Free Enterprise System, as conceived by the Founding Fathers, but that do-gooders, who thought people shouldn't ever have to struggle for anything, had buggered the logic of the system beyond all recognition.
In summation: he said:
I see two alternatives before us. We can write morals into law, and enforce those morals harshly, or we can return to a true Free Enterprise System, which has the sink-or-swim justice of Caesar Augustus built into it. I emphatically favor the latter alternative. We must be hard, for we must become again a nation of swimmers, with the sinkers quietly disposing of themselves. I have spoken of another hard time in ancient history. In case
you have forgotten the name of it, I shall refresh your memories: "The Golden Age of Rome,"friends and neighbors, "The Golden Age of Rome."
For those who haven't read the book or have forgot it: Senator Rosewater was born into great wealth started by an earlier Rosewater who'd paid to avoid his place in the Civil War and then started a brooms-factory staffed by cheap-working blinded veterans.
He likely had never broken a sweat ever, but as they'd say in the Golden Age, 'Quod licet Iovi non licet bovi.'.
"let me add that I am only fooling": this so precisely presages the kidding/not kidding/just kidding pattern that Jeff Sharlet documents so well. Thanks for the extended quote. Prophetic in so many ways. Brilliant that Vonnegut saw this in 1965.
I was just reading up on the history of anti-fascist movements in England (and the need for them), from the 30s to the present day. I feel like it's a more overt, concentrated version of what's happened in the US.
About six months ago I saw a video on Instagram where a farmer I know--a woman-- was ranting about how SHE and her fellow farmers were the "real people," and the rest of us (including her customers) could never be as real as she was. She cast herself as a victim, claiming that we made fun of her in high school and college for being aggies. (Note that this woman owns close to a thousand acres of prime farmland in an area where most farms are less than 100 acres.) Another reason for her victimhood was that she had to do things outside in winter while the rest of us were cozy and warm inside, wearing designer clothes.
I emailed her and pointed out that maybe this wasn't the best way to grow your business: to attack your customers (including me) for being somehow not real, overly coddled and spoiled, demanding to be fed by her. I was spending several hundred dollars a month on her products at that time and had been for years. She emailed me back and said that she stood by her video and would not take it down.
IT also took aim at the elites of course: people who were skiing and spotting celebrities while she, the beleaguered real person, was out feeding hay to cattle, to "provide you with the things you think you need." Um, like food? Ok, fine. I don't need YOUR food any more.
The truth is that this woman is far wealthier than most of her customers. Sure, being a farmer is hard work, and you have to go outside in winter, but she could have hired somebody to do some of that stuff. I think she just enjoyed the idea that she was "real" and we were not. It's a short step from there to saying, "I'm human and you're not." What was next? Calling us cockroaches? Well, yes, that's how the Rwandan genocide started.
I am very afraid that this kind of talk about how liberals are not really humans could be taken by some as an invitation to literally start hunting liberals. These guys are armed to the teeth. But of course, they project that onto liberals: Vance recently said that liberals were "coming at us with guns." Oh, hey, I think that's what y'all are doing really. And not just the guys: the mamaws too.
“She cast herself as the victim, claiming that we made fun of her in high school and college for being aggies…” Does it always go back to high school with such people? I suppose —once in a while— back to college? And does it even go back to high school or is it some more fundamental sense of alone-ness or dissatisfaction with the self or confusion about the self that people discover in high school or a narrative they make up about their youth? I was possibly the most outsider of the outsiders in high school, frequently picked-on and harassed. I don’t have any strong feelings about that time except sorry for young people when it happens to them. Likely it affects a person in various ways but seems so long ago, and people are so young then. Almost no one is happy during that time of their lives.
I was puzzled by this too. Her exact words were, "You made fun of us in high school, you made fun of us in college, you said we were wasting our educations..." First, who is "you"? I didn't know her in high school or college. And who is "us"? All the aggies? People who were in 4H and FFA?
I have never been in any setting where anybody ever made fun of people studying agriculture. Either it was considered cool, or a valid field of study like any other. (This person is probably around 60 years old.)
I also thought, "Hey, everybody feels like a misfit in their teen years. Get over it!" Especially given the fact that her business has been so successful, and now she owns so much land. Ok, her husband died unexpectedly, but he left her pretty well off it seems.
It's just some form of narcissism that people on the right seem to think is valid and especially deserved by them. She calls herself The Right Wing Hippie, for reasons I can't quite discern. Ok, she's an evangelical it seems so that's the right wing part, but what's the hippie part? Maybe she likes tie dye or something? She seems to hate people with "designer clothes." I also felt like telling her that all clothes are "designer clothes" really: somebody designs them! She also seems to think that all name-brand clothing is uber elitist and expensive, when really it's not. You can get it at a mall.
In the end I stopped being her customer and found a much better local source of meat.
All this would be laughable if it were not for the fact that this kind of rhetoric--"The Others are not real/human"-actually causes genocides. It really was crypto blood-and-soil type talk. Ironically, I too am a farmer although I don't raise any meat, and I had been outside on the coldest days as well, but I don't consider myself more real than other people. I buy meat from her to supplement the vegetables I grow for myself.
If everybody were "real" like she is, then she wouldn't have any customers because everybody would be outside in the cold feeding hay to their cows. That's the irony of these people's fantasies: they want a country where everybody is exactly like them, but if we all were, who would they sell their products to? (Who would be left to hate and Otherize?) They have this mental image of a nation of down to earth, rural producers who are rugged and self-sufficient. But her business depends on there being a group of more suburban people who don't work in agriculture but provide other services (that she thinks she needs) such as health care, internet, IT equipment so she can post on Instagram, education for her children and grandchildren, retail services such as selling clothes, whether designer or no: all those elitist things.
They really aren't that smart and don't think things through very carefully. Maybe that's why we made fun of them in high school and college.
Congratulations to you on standing up to her bullshit! Unfortunately, it's the newly fashionable bullshit. You see it on Substack and among the more self-consciously transgressive intellectual writers everywhere. They're so tired of the "woke" ideology of the past decade (and not without reason--it requires you to be hypervigilant on personal identity issues and to renounce anything that might be connected to a bloody past while discounting real material issues that bother us all) that they'll take anything that positions itself against it. Even fascism. They just love them some JD Vance over at Compact and Tablet and other intellectual organs of the up-and-coming generation. Liberalism is no longer fashionable. And when they start hunting liberals, and they will, we will see those up-and-coming intellectual writers defend the hunt in much the same way their forebears used to defend the worst excesses of left-wing terrorism.
I wouldn't call this farmer lady an intellectual by any means. But somewhere she picked up this idea of branding other people as elites, and herself as "real."
In a variant of my usual hobby-horse: I'm afraid of the _love_ some will have for those who declare some of us sub-human—it frees them of any obligation of support or compassion or even of barely decent treatment toward us, and that, though we might prefer that it not be so, can be _liberating_, and what were more natural than to love our liberators?
…even, if as in this case (after Johnson), they promise to free us of part of the pain of being human by helping us make beasts of yourselves.
It’s like Vance was custom made for the creep side of the jock/creep theory. I think even some of the other fascists are uneasy about his presentation of the child fetish thing though. Not because of the fetish itself, but because in his case it’s just too obvious that having a kid only became a supreme moral accomplishment when *he* had one. If he discovered sensible shoes he would turn it into a transcendent moral virtue. The infantile narcissism is just too fucking obvious.
I can't remember ever agreeing with Lowry on anything but as I noted before I think the "blood and soil" connection to Vance's convention speech was pretty thin. Not that Vance doesn't deserve a serious interrogation given his associations and language and especially the blurb for this silly "Unhumans" book and its deranged author. But then he's such a dishonest hack does anyone know what he really believes?
I wouldn't be too surprised if it doesn't turn out to be one bridge too far for Civitas and Wiles if the media latch on to it in a big way.
As for the "exhausted democracy" theme, that was something John Adams worried about wasn't it? He found that every democracy "soon wastes exhausts and murders itself". I'm pretty sure the same thought has occurred to most of us more than a few times over the last two decades. The difference between Adams and most of us is that, unlike Thiel and Vance, we're not willing to wield the straight-razor to cut its throat.
I just don't understand how much more evidence you need. The guy repeatedly associates with the nationalist far right, he blurbed the Franco, leftists are not humans book. At some point a picture comes into focus.
You misunderstand me. I largely agree with you about Trump, Vance and the entire cast of misfit toys.
The speech in that context can be construed that way but the general audience doesn't know Carl Schmitt, Mann or Gramsci , etc. or much of the intellectual history or even most of the history you're excavating to make that point. In that context, I simply didn't think the speech did what you believe it did.
But the audience doesn't know the sources of the speech you and others can identify; it doesn't resonate with them in the same way it does for you.
"America the beautiful..."; "from sea to shining sea"; "amber waves of grain"; "We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live..." - Americans are used to thinking of the United States as an idea and bound to geography and in those kinds of terms.
Otherwise I agree with you about the nature of Trump/Vance and the danger they and their movement/cult/party pose.
Lowry is such an enormous mark. Theres a certain amount of real pathos in his personal story, but even after being personally targeted by them, he looks at these fascists and says, “surely not!”
I'd also wager Vance knows more than almost anyone about the out-there theories of the "dark Enlightenment" or whatever glamorous title they are giving themselves. Having been adopted as the in-house politician, he is well versed in the thinking of these guys. So whether or not he read the manuscript, he knows what he is putting his name to.
The poor reception he is getting from most of the public is gratifying, but it is also a little frightening, because personal humiliation on this scale could ignite something in him that goes way beyond Silicon Valley philosophizing.
If there is one sacrosanct principle in the American society, it's that the so called elites — or rich people — absolutely under no circumstances can be declared "deplorables" in the polite society, which extends to their ideologies. When tomorrow JD Vance or Elon Musk publicly declare themselves fascists, then "How dare you to use the F word" commentariat of today will seamlessly switch to opinions "It is time to revisit fascism. Have we been brainwashed by Allies' propaganda?"
If Rich Lowry were honest, he'd say "Vance isn't a quasi-fascist. Not that there's anything wrong with it."
Yes, ideologically accurate, but I believe what we have is best seen as good old fashioned 19th century reactionary European ideology transplanted to the early 21st century in a colonial settler mode, rather than as early 20th century fascism.
Classical fascism also carried over that same 19th century ideology, and certainly featured settler colonialism, but its historical and geopolitical proximity to the 19th century meant that fascism was a much more organic extension of that century. In addition, there was the specific shock of the military defeat of the old Central European landlord aristocracies who commanded those defeated armies, then also confronted with the specter of "Bolshevism" on their eastern flank. This included Italy, who suffered humiliating military defeats in that war and who got nothing from the peace. See "The Persistence of the Old Regime", Arno Mayer, for the state of the old European ruling class before WW1.
None of those specific conditions obtain in either Europe or North America, the latter with no legacy of a post-feudal landlord aristocracy. Instead the dead "tradition" is that of European settler colonialism and the enslavement of non-Europeans. That featured the white European settler patriarch fathering 12 kids with his household female chattel enslaved to this task - Elon Musk has literally 12 kids via 3 women, and his space fantasies are also an expression of settler colonialism.
This pro-natalism is the core of today's transplanted reactionary ideology. It demands the collective re-enslavement of primarily white women into a collective matrix dedicated to pumping out more white babies. It's that disgustingly brutal.
For Europe is in sharp demographic decline (but so is East Asia, so go figure), while North America is relatively underpopulated by current world standards. North American capitalism could use more cheap labor, and the rational way to supply it is through immigration. But that will not come from Europe, and therefore immigration will not bring "its best people", accelerating the gradual shift of the social basis from white to non-white, eroding also the traditional social base of the Republican Party, sending this to its historical doom. That's what the hysteria is all about.
So it is no accident that the leading ideologues are wealthy white South Africans. Worse yet, the most rapidly growing demographic is in West Africa! Specters of a Black Planet! Revenge of the enslaved!
Musk will be blurbing the next reprint of de Maistre.
De Maistre (how he must have treasured that obsolete spelling!), amusingly enough, had an argument against the existence of 'human beings' (as opposed to Germans, Savoyards, Siciluans, &c.) that just as readily might be deployed with modern reactionaries and fascists who insist that they are fighting for 'white people' or 'Europe'.
This is happened right now as we speak.
I mention that white supremacy is one of the three modern incarnations of fascism. It's very syncretic. For one thing, the word racism is coded differently depending on which side of the Atlantic you are on. In the Americas, racism conflates to colorism. In Europe, race is coded for ethnicity and religion. To Americans, we see Europeans as white people. In Europe, the language you speak and which religion gained power in the sectarian warfare between Catholicism and Protestantism defines race. This is how racism could be, depending on the context, conflicts over ethnicities or regional conflicts of northern (cold-weather) Europe vs. Mediterranean Europe, as well as those Europeans hating the Slavic peoples.
With Europe seeing immigration from Muslim, Middle Eastern, North African and sub-Saharan African communities, American-style colorism is starting to take root with Europeans flattening themselves in an American-style whiteness.
The internet allows these factions to communicate, so this colorist tendency has spread from North America to Europe, Australia and New Zealand (where whites view Asian immigrants as invaders and aboriginals as Blacks mounting a challenge from below.) It also touches into unreconstructed apartheidism among South African Boers and heavily settled Latin American nations like Argentina, too.
I've recommended the adoption of the term fashoid to describe these ascendant ideologies. Fashoid is parallel to the opium-opioid contrast.
There are at least three 21st century ideologies that share the anatomy and the "five stages of grief" of fascism, but they are not rooted in nationalism yet desire the same ends: white supremacy (scaling American colorism up to encompass Europe, the Americas, Australia and New Zealand, and white South Africa as a white race with a shared destiny), masculinism (basically, feminism with men as victims and women as oppressors, with LGBTQ politics seen as a divide and conquer strategy) and theocracy (religious fundamentalist movements are politically ascendant throughout the world).
Note that this covers only one, but key, dimension of the 21st century reactionary mind.
Sometimes the core principle for people who oppose the fascism thesis seems to be "Fascism is the ideology that spawned the Holocaust and World War II and unless I see a clear and obvious path from this expression of politics to events of that magnitude I cannot call something fascism." It's a weird consequentialist diagnosis of ideology.
When we first started to have to discuss the topic seriously, say back when our government was talking about repressing civil liberties and torturing people…for Freedom!…there was a real legacy of people on the Left calling anything the least authoritarian 'fascism', many of whom could have been I though I don't remember doing this. This was analogous to people who treat any increase on the taxes paid by wealthy persons (real and artificial) as a call to open a McGulag in every strip-mall.
This placed a burden-of-proof on anyone using the term, and those who didn't want the term used, regardless of circumstances, revelled in that level of immunity.
But we've now been playing this game for awhile, and away from the odd moment on KPFA or WBAI I haven't heard 'fascist' misused in decades, and the fascists are now bothering with only transparent closets* if at all, so I'm in no mood to bother with them.
*(which you'd think would to them resemble glass booths too closely for comfort)
Love your clarity John. Thank you for not mincing words.
Re-reading Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr Rosewater…and appreciated that Senator Rosewater’s speech hit on these exact same themes.
“I should like to speak of the Emperor Octavian, of Caesar Augustus, as he came to be known. This great humanitarian, and he was a humanitarian in the profoundest sense of the word, took command of the Roman Empire in a degenerate period strikingly like our own. Harlotry, divorce, alcoholism, liberalism, homosexuality, pornography, abortion, venality, murder, labor racketeering, juvenile delinquency, cowardice, atheism, extortion, slander, and theft were the height of fashion. Rome was a paradise for gangsters, perverts, and the lazy working man, just as America is now. As in America now, forces of law and order were openly attacked by mobs, children were disobedient, had no respect for their parents or their country, and no decent woman was safe on any street, even at high noon! And cunning, sharp-trading, bribing foreigners were in the ascendency everywhere. And ground under the heels of the big city money-changers were the honest farmers, the backbone of the Roman Army and the Roman soul.
What could be done? Well, there were soft-headed liberals then as there are bubble-headed liberals now, and they said what liberals always say after they have led a great nation to such a lawless, self-indulgent, polyglot condition: "Things have never been better! Look at all the freedom! Look at all the equality! Look how sexual hypocrisy has been driven from the scene! Oh
boy! People used to get all knotted up inside when they thought about rape or fornication. Now they can do both with glee!"
And what did the terrible, black-spirited, non-fun-loving conservatives of those happy days have to say? Well, there weren't many of them left. They were dying off in ridiculed old age.And their children had been turned against them by the liberals, by the purveyors of synthetic sunshine and moonshine, by the something-for-nothing political strip-teasers, by the people who loved everybody, including the barbarians, by people who loved the barbarians so much they wanted to open all the gates, have all the soldiers lay their weapons down, and let the barbarians come in!
That was the Rome that Caesar Augustus came home to, after defeating those two sex maniacs, Antony and Cleopatra, in the great sea battle of Actium. And I don't think I have to recreate the things he thought when he surveyed the Rome he was said to rule. Let us take a moment of silence. and let each think what he will of the stews of today.
There was a moment of silence, too, about thirty seconds that seemed to some like a thousand years.
And what methods did Caesar Augustus use to put this disorderly house in order? He did what we are so often told we must never, ever do, what we are told will never, ever work: he wrote morals into law, and he enforced those unenforceable laws with a police force that was cruel and unsmiling. He made it illegal for a Roman to behave like a pig. Do you hear me? It became illegal! And Romans caught acting like pigs were strung up by their thumbs, thrown down wells, fed to lions, and given other experiences that might impress them with the desirability of being more decent and reliable than they were. Did it work? You bet your boots it did! Pigs miraculously disappeared! And what do we call the period that followed this now-unthinkable oppression? Nothing more nor less, friends and neighbors, than "The Golden Age of Rome."
Am I suggesting that we follow this gory example? Of course I am. Scarcely a day has passed during which I have not said in one way or another: "Let us force Americans to be as good as they should be." Am I in favor of feeding labor crooks to lions? Well, to give those who get such satisfaction from imagining that I am covered with primordial scales a little twinge of
pleasure, let me say, "Yes. Absolutely. This afternoon, if it can be arranged." To disappoint my critics, let me add that I am only fooling. I am not entertained by cruel and unusual punishments, not in the least. I am fascinated by the fact that a carrot and a stick can make a donkey go, and that his Space Age discovery may have some application in the world of human beings.
And so on. The Senator said that the carrot and the stick had been built into the Free Enterprise System, as conceived by the Founding Fathers, but that do-gooders, who thought people shouldn't ever have to struggle for anything, had buggered the logic of the system beyond all recognition.
In summation: he said:
I see two alternatives before us. We can write morals into law, and enforce those morals harshly, or we can return to a true Free Enterprise System, which has the sink-or-swim justice of Caesar Augustus built into it. I emphatically favor the latter alternative. We must be hard, for we must become again a nation of swimmers, with the sinkers quietly disposing of themselves. I have spoken of another hard time in ancient history. In case
you have forgotten the name of it, I shall refresh your memories: "The Golden Age of Rome,"friends and neighbors, "The Golden Age of Rome."
For those who haven't read the book or have forgot it: Senator Rosewater was born into great wealth started by an earlier Rosewater who'd paid to avoid his place in the Civil War and then started a brooms-factory staffed by cheap-working blinded veterans.
He likely had never broken a sweat ever, but as they'd say in the Golden Age, 'Quod licet Iovi non licet bovi.'.
"let me add that I am only fooling": this so precisely presages the kidding/not kidding/just kidding pattern that Jeff Sharlet documents so well. Thanks for the extended quote. Prophetic in so many ways. Brilliant that Vonnegut saw this in 1965.
I was just reading up on the history of anti-fascist movements in England (and the need for them), from the 30s to the present day. I feel like it's a more overt, concentrated version of what's happened in the US.
So amazing. I have to read this book again. I last read it in high school so I am sure there is a lot I missed.
About six months ago I saw a video on Instagram where a farmer I know--a woman-- was ranting about how SHE and her fellow farmers were the "real people," and the rest of us (including her customers) could never be as real as she was. She cast herself as a victim, claiming that we made fun of her in high school and college for being aggies. (Note that this woman owns close to a thousand acres of prime farmland in an area where most farms are less than 100 acres.) Another reason for her victimhood was that she had to do things outside in winter while the rest of us were cozy and warm inside, wearing designer clothes.
I emailed her and pointed out that maybe this wasn't the best way to grow your business: to attack your customers (including me) for being somehow not real, overly coddled and spoiled, demanding to be fed by her. I was spending several hundred dollars a month on her products at that time and had been for years. She emailed me back and said that she stood by her video and would not take it down.
IT also took aim at the elites of course: people who were skiing and spotting celebrities while she, the beleaguered real person, was out feeding hay to cattle, to "provide you with the things you think you need." Um, like food? Ok, fine. I don't need YOUR food any more.
The truth is that this woman is far wealthier than most of her customers. Sure, being a farmer is hard work, and you have to go outside in winter, but she could have hired somebody to do some of that stuff. I think she just enjoyed the idea that she was "real" and we were not. It's a short step from there to saying, "I'm human and you're not." What was next? Calling us cockroaches? Well, yes, that's how the Rwandan genocide started.
I am very afraid that this kind of talk about how liberals are not really humans could be taken by some as an invitation to literally start hunting liberals. These guys are armed to the teeth. But of course, they project that onto liberals: Vance recently said that liberals were "coming at us with guns." Oh, hey, I think that's what y'all are doing really. And not just the guys: the mamaws too.
“She cast herself as the victim, claiming that we made fun of her in high school and college for being aggies…” Does it always go back to high school with such people? I suppose —once in a while— back to college? And does it even go back to high school or is it some more fundamental sense of alone-ness or dissatisfaction with the self or confusion about the self that people discover in high school or a narrative they make up about their youth? I was possibly the most outsider of the outsiders in high school, frequently picked-on and harassed. I don’t have any strong feelings about that time except sorry for young people when it happens to them. Likely it affects a person in various ways but seems so long ago, and people are so young then. Almost no one is happy during that time of their lives.
I was puzzled by this too. Her exact words were, "You made fun of us in high school, you made fun of us in college, you said we were wasting our educations..." First, who is "you"? I didn't know her in high school or college. And who is "us"? All the aggies? People who were in 4H and FFA?
I have never been in any setting where anybody ever made fun of people studying agriculture. Either it was considered cool, or a valid field of study like any other. (This person is probably around 60 years old.)
I also thought, "Hey, everybody feels like a misfit in their teen years. Get over it!" Especially given the fact that her business has been so successful, and now she owns so much land. Ok, her husband died unexpectedly, but he left her pretty well off it seems.
It's just some form of narcissism that people on the right seem to think is valid and especially deserved by them. She calls herself The Right Wing Hippie, for reasons I can't quite discern. Ok, she's an evangelical it seems so that's the right wing part, but what's the hippie part? Maybe she likes tie dye or something? She seems to hate people with "designer clothes." I also felt like telling her that all clothes are "designer clothes" really: somebody designs them! She also seems to think that all name-brand clothing is uber elitist and expensive, when really it's not. You can get it at a mall.
In the end I stopped being her customer and found a much better local source of meat.
All this would be laughable if it were not for the fact that this kind of rhetoric--"The Others are not real/human"-actually causes genocides. It really was crypto blood-and-soil type talk. Ironically, I too am a farmer although I don't raise any meat, and I had been outside on the coldest days as well, but I don't consider myself more real than other people. I buy meat from her to supplement the vegetables I grow for myself.
If everybody were "real" like she is, then she wouldn't have any customers because everybody would be outside in the cold feeding hay to their cows. That's the irony of these people's fantasies: they want a country where everybody is exactly like them, but if we all were, who would they sell their products to? (Who would be left to hate and Otherize?) They have this mental image of a nation of down to earth, rural producers who are rugged and self-sufficient. But her business depends on there being a group of more suburban people who don't work in agriculture but provide other services (that she thinks she needs) such as health care, internet, IT equipment so she can post on Instagram, education for her children and grandchildren, retail services such as selling clothes, whether designer or no: all those elitist things.
They really aren't that smart and don't think things through very carefully. Maybe that's why we made fun of them in high school and college.
Congratulations to you on standing up to her bullshit! Unfortunately, it's the newly fashionable bullshit. You see it on Substack and among the more self-consciously transgressive intellectual writers everywhere. They're so tired of the "woke" ideology of the past decade (and not without reason--it requires you to be hypervigilant on personal identity issues and to renounce anything that might be connected to a bloody past while discounting real material issues that bother us all) that they'll take anything that positions itself against it. Even fascism. They just love them some JD Vance over at Compact and Tablet and other intellectual organs of the up-and-coming generation. Liberalism is no longer fashionable. And when they start hunting liberals, and they will, we will see those up-and-coming intellectual writers defend the hunt in much the same way their forebears used to defend the worst excesses of left-wing terrorism.
I wouldn't call this farmer lady an intellectual by any means. But somewhere she picked up this idea of branding other people as elites, and herself as "real."
In a variant of my usual hobby-horse: I'm afraid of the _love_ some will have for those who declare some of us sub-human—it frees them of any obligation of support or compassion or even of barely decent treatment toward us, and that, though we might prefer that it not be so, can be _liberating_, and what were more natural than to love our liberators?
…even, if as in this case (after Johnson), they promise to free us of part of the pain of being human by helping us make beasts of yourselves.
On the other hand, Blake Masters lost his primary for a seat in the House, so there might be limits to weird.
But these people are super freaky and not in a good way and I think Vance has made comments that we are in Weimar Germany.
Thiel
It’s like Vance was custom made for the creep side of the jock/creep theory. I think even some of the other fascists are uneasy about his presentation of the child fetish thing though. Not because of the fetish itself, but because in his case it’s just too obvious that having a kid only became a supreme moral accomplishment when *he* had one. If he discovered sensible shoes he would turn it into a transcendent moral virtue. The infantile narcissism is just too fucking obvious.
I can't remember ever agreeing with Lowry on anything but as I noted before I think the "blood and soil" connection to Vance's convention speech was pretty thin. Not that Vance doesn't deserve a serious interrogation given his associations and language and especially the blurb for this silly "Unhumans" book and its deranged author. But then he's such a dishonest hack does anyone know what he really believes?
I wouldn't be too surprised if it doesn't turn out to be one bridge too far for Civitas and Wiles if the media latch on to it in a big way.
As for the "exhausted democracy" theme, that was something John Adams worried about wasn't it? He found that every democracy "soon wastes exhausts and murders itself". I'm pretty sure the same thought has occurred to most of us more than a few times over the last two decades. The difference between Adams and most of us is that, unlike Thiel and Vance, we're not willing to wield the straight-razor to cut its throat.
John Adams didn't bring up the Weimar republic
It would have been a neat trick if he did.
I just don't understand how much more evidence you need. The guy repeatedly associates with the nationalist far right, he blurbed the Franco, leftists are not humans book. At some point a picture comes into focus.
You misunderstand me. I largely agree with you about Trump, Vance and the entire cast of misfit toys.
The speech in that context can be construed that way but the general audience doesn't know Carl Schmitt, Mann or Gramsci , etc. or much of the intellectual history or even most of the history you're excavating to make that point. In that context, I simply didn't think the speech did what you believe it did.
The sources of the speech are clear, he was referring to a non-declarationist American nationalism that shades quickly into ethnonationalism.
But the audience doesn't know the sources of the speech you and others can identify; it doesn't resonate with them in the same way it does for you.
"America the beautiful..."; "from sea to shining sea"; "amber waves of grain"; "We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live..." - Americans are used to thinking of the United States as an idea and bound to geography and in those kinds of terms.
Otherwise I agree with you about the nature of Trump/Vance and the danger they and their movement/cult/party pose.
Donald & JD: The Jock And Creep Show
Lowry is such an enormous mark. Theres a certain amount of real pathos in his personal story, but even after being personally targeted by them, he looks at these fascists and says, “surely not!”
genocidal fascist intent is in the title; you dont need to read it to see where the authors are going
I'd also wager Vance knows more than almost anyone about the out-there theories of the "dark Enlightenment" or whatever glamorous title they are giving themselves. Having been adopted as the in-house politician, he is well versed in the thinking of these guys. So whether or not he read the manuscript, he knows what he is putting his name to.
The poor reception he is getting from most of the public is gratifying, but it is also a little frightening, because personal humiliation on this scale could ignite something in him that goes way beyond Silicon Valley philosophizing.