What My Book Is About

An Attempt at an Explanation

People sometimes ask me, “What’s your book about?” I’m not very good at answering this question; I usually reply, “American politics in the early 1990s,” which is true enough, but not the whole story. (That answer also usually results in the asker quickly changing the subject or looking around for someone else to talk to.) But I don’t feel comfortable giving answers like, “It’s about how we got here” or “It’s how everything fell apart” or “It’s about American Fascism!” Those might be more arresting but also seem terribly pretentious. Nor do I think calling it a “pre-history of Trumpism” does it full justice either.

Lately, I’ve had some very fruitful conversations with close and careful readers. One of those was with Sam Adler-Bell and Matt Sitman of the Know Your Enemy podcast, who’ve been talking with me since the inception of the project. I think these conversations have really helped me to touch on the underlying theme of the book.

The book is based on an intuition, one that I’ve struggled to articulate fully, but recently I’ve felt like I’m getting close to naming. The intuition is that the seemingly disparate phenomena I tried to catalogue and chronicle were actually reflections of a single underlying phenomenon. The critic Jennifer Szalai recently used Raymond Williams’s term “structure of feeling” to describe what I was identifying in the book. I definitely was trying to identify a certain affect, a public mood, which I called “the politics of national despair.” Williams provides a helpful concept insofar as it attempts to combine vibes with a structure: a bounded shape, an identifiable set of qualities. Sometimes I think of each discrete part as “moments” in the unfolding of a bigger picture, or as elements with elective affinities that crystallized into a larger whole.

It might be helpful to go back to the very beginning of the project. What first grabbed me was the fact that all of these alt-right guys, who had become fascists and were so excited by Trump—to a man—all said their political awakening started with reading Murray Rothbard. Rothbard is Jewish, so it might seem odd that so many of his fans became Neo-Nazis. To add to the strangeness, Rothbard is also a libertarian—an “anarcho-capitalist”—a sworn enemy of the state and collectivism. How could one get from that to one of the most statist, collectivist, authoritarian ideologies ever devised? When the “libertarian to alt-right pipeline” was being written about back then, some said that this was just sociological happenstance: Rothbardian libertarians mingled at the fringes with other members of the far-right so there was inevitable cross-pollination. Another story offered was that since Rothbard happened to be a racist, those attracted to the racist parts of his thought would inevitably seek out more hardcore stuff. I wasn’t satisfied by this merely accidental explanation; it seemed to me there was something more essential going on. I was encouraged in this interpretation by the extreme, biological anti-egalitarianism of Rothbard and his main disciple, Hans-Hermann Hoppe. And by Rothbard’s own suggestion back in 1992 that libertarians should strategically embrace the “right-wing populist insight is that we live in a statist country and a statist world” and turn to a charismatic, strongman-type leader.

This conceptual problem—how you get from libertarianism to authoritarianism—is analogous to one of the main observations of the book: after facing the consequences of unchained market forces, the country seemed to bridle under that regime, but didn’t naturally turn to some solidaristic, egalitarian alternative. Instead, many yearned for a man on horseback, a providential leader who could rescue the country, who’d look out for “our” interests first and, perhaps most importantly, beat the hell out of whomever was holding “us” back or standing in “our” way. Many in the country seemed attracted to “negative solidarity,” a term I got from Hannah Arendt. This also brings us to central historical problematic of the book: How do we get from Reagan to Duke, Buchanan, and eventually to Trump? From the magic of the market to the magic of the mafioso?

The Marxist response to this problematic is straightforward: On some level, they are all really the same thing. To Marxists, there’s no “civil society” as such; the “rule of law” in capitalist society is just a continuation by other means of the Hobbesian state of nature, the law of the jungle, albeit cloaked with ideology. But there is another side of the dialectic: Marxists also say, “Within this war of all against all, there are burgeoning new forms of association and cooperation that we can develop to create a new order of shared prosperity and social peace.” The nationalists and radical libertarians I write about embrace the same reading of capitalist society, but don’t seek to tame the wild beasts like social democrats or replace it with a new Eden like the communists. Instead, they say, “That’s the way things are, they are unfair, it’s a struggle, red in tooth and claw, and ’we’ will win.” Their “we,” their forms of association, can take many shapes: the family, the tribe, the gang, the nation, the race. This strictly bounded or negative solidarity is what unites the mobster and the fascist chieftain. In Capital, Marx writes about capitalism cycling from “fraternal” to “fratricidal” phases, where competition goes from collegial to the cutthroat. Hegel believed that the family and the market were educative: they introduced individuals to ever-widening horizons of mutual cooperation, to broader conceptions of themselves as parts of more universal wholes. But in the worldview I’m describing the widening of universal concern becomes arrested. The national-populist answer is to embrace certain types of limited fraternal bonds as a means to survive a “fratricidal war.”

It’s interesting to me that I’ve received two almost diametrically opposite criticisms of the book so far: one is that I pay too much attention to racism. And the other is that I pay too much attention to economic discontents. I think they are sort of the same thing, under different aspects. Racism is a certain fetishized and distorted way of conceiving and solving for the competitive churn of capitalism: it has a social component, a sharing of the spoils, and a competitive side, the frank acceptance and open embrace of intrinsic and even murderous struggle. As Adam Tooze’s Wages of Destruction makes very clear, the Nazi preoccupation with race was always deeply related to the anxiety about Germany’s place in the capitalist world, conceived not as competitive international rivals but a world of implacable, racial enemies. It shouldn’t be surprising then that the nationalist anxiety about racial purity and demographic make up of the United States comes hand in hand with fears about America’s declining place in the world and need to forcefully secure both its borders and competitive advantages. This fear of falling extends from the national to the domestic level, where racial advantage is to be shored up as a permanent entitlement, a method—as much psychological as material— to prevent falling through the cracks of competitive society. In place of the vicissitudes of fate, it attempts to insert a permanent natural order. Racism creates the possibility of a “heads I win, tails you lose” approach to capitalism: if a certain racialized group is suffering from poverty, then it’s just the order of things: they’ve ended up where they belong, they’re are natural underlings. If they prosper, it is because they are using unfair means to gain an advantage. But race is not the fundamental phenomenon, the underlying structure that I alluded to above. Only racists think that. Instead it is just one manifestation of the underlying issue, an attempt to manage the tensions, both material and psychological, of a competitive society. It seems to offer some stark reality but is just another fetish, a “cope” as they say today.

If race is one fetish, or false solution, so too is the mob. Samuel Francis and Murray Rothbard, major figures in the book, both wrote favorably about the Godfather. Rothbard compares it favorably to Goodfellas, which he thinks depicts the mafia as a meaningless orgy of self-indulgent violence, unconstrained by notions of honor or loyalty. You can see this in Trumpworld too, which is much more Goodfellas than Godfather. The paternalistic bond of Trump to his underlings is highly fungible, it doesn’t usually last long: he ends up stabbing them in the back a lot. Both films portray the character’s turning to the mob as a solution of sorts to modern capitalist society: in Goodfellas, the wise guys are blue collar guys “cutting some corners” to get by. In the Godfather, the mafia family is as an alternative to an unreliable and hypocritical democratic society, which provides neither security, nor protection, nor justice. But in both the Godfather and Goodfellas, all these family bonds get dissolved, too. In Goodfellas, that’s put in a comedic light: these guys are just real fucking scumbags, unable to control themselves. In the Godfather, it’s a tragedy: there’s a terrible logic of fate that leads to the destruction of the Corleone family through its own attempts to secure itself. In both films, the wages of sin are death. The mafia is not an alternative to capitalist alienation, but a representation capitalism in its most brutal and unmediated form. We all know the protection of the racket is not really protection at all. It is coercive even when it pretends to be friendly. All of the talk about “honor” and “loyalty” among mafiosi quickly goes out the window when money is involved. As above, so below.

I suppose one observation of the book is that from step from the market to the mob—in both senses of the word, the lynch mob or the mafia—is just a shot away. Or rather, that the mob is always lurking at the edges of the market, it’s its natural byproduct. The process of orderly exchange, the hustle bustle that contributes to the public weal, is always at risk of breaking out into tumult and violence. But this violence is not revolutionary or redistributive. It reasserts order: punishes violators, menaces competitors, and solves “inefficiencies” in the market by skimming off the top.

The title “When the Clock Broke” comes from a Murray Rothbard speech about breaking the clock of progress and “repealing the twentieth century.” I used it as a play on Francis Fukuyama’s End of History and the Last Man, which was published in 1992. Fukuyama, following Alexandre Kojeve’s reading of Hegel, wrote that history was ending and liberal democracy had triumphed over all its ideological rivals. I saw a different type of end of history envisioned by the protagonists of my book. Instead of liberal democracy, there was the reemergence of narrower political horizons, explicitly anti-universalistic ones. Along with their spatial boundaries, what unites the negative solidarities of the mob and the race is the tendency to view themselves as ahistoric, permanent truths about the essence of man: this is man’s animal nature and there is nothing to be done about it. They deny the possibility of progress. There’s no unfolding of the dialectic: just a perpetual churn of domination. And so history ends, not with universal enlightenment, but without the possibility of transcendence. I don’t believe this is our ultimate fate, a final and inescapable outcome, but it has to be faced as one aspect of our time.