Part of the explanation of why the country didn't turn toward more egalitarian solidaristic alternatives in that period has to be the collapse of "actually existing socialism" in the USSR and the Eastern bloc. At the time, many democratic leftists hoped its collapse would allow for a new efflorescence of the socialist project, unencumbered by its association with monstrous police states. But that didn't happen. It set the left back for a generation and I think we are still, in many ways, laboring under the burden of that history. Caught between the unchained market on one side and the failure of socialism (or at least of a certain kind of socialism) on the other, it's no wonder people started to look toward various kinds of boundary drawing strategies to deal with their problems.
The lack of real U.S.S.R.-style 'Communists' in our politics deprives us of a length-scale, allowing a Rightist speaker to label anyone to their left a Commie with even less fear of contradiction than before.
Appreciate this summary! I'm reading the book now - it's great! Obviously as a subscriber here I am a fan of your prose (and ideas) - it's been really gratifying as a reader to get to read you in book length! And I'm learning a ton, I didn't know Ross Perot made his money from entitlement programs for example! Or much about Perot, what a weird guy. Also want to echo what Corey said - the historical background you provide to each chapter is much appreciated.
The book is wonderful! A Nixon Agonistes for our time.
The point about the mob lurking at the edge of the market, but not with revolutionary or redistributive violence, is a great one, too. Once saw a literal mob break out at an actual market, in a poor country, when suspected thieves were apprehended. Terrifying.
Reading your book now. Murray Rothbard’s support of fascism seems incredible. As a Jew he knew that if fascism came into power it would lead to his death and all his family. His stand seems pathological and suicidal. Shouldn’t he be viewed as someone with profound mental illness, and treated that way.
Thanks much for this summary. I got your book and just started reading it and this really helps providing a reader’s guide/framework. I think you have revealed something really illuminating here. You have provoked a number of thoughts, among which are:
1. It’s likely that it’s not just right-wing populists who, especially in moments of societal malaise, crisis, etc., crave a “providential leader.” And the way especially presidential elections are contested, even in the nest of times, one or another or both candidates spend much of their time declaiming how terrible things are and how bad things will be. I recently saw a survey that said that in our presidential elections, the person seen as the stronger leader usually wins. Why else the obsession with Biden’s age and seeming fragility when he is actually performing very well as president?
2. Back to Hobbes vs Locke.
3. Makes me think about all of the different forms and traditions of more authoritarian rule. Among those that I am at least somewhat familiar with in today’s world, it may be that Xi and China have the least brutal and most sustainable model. And/or Orban. Perhaps the less brutal authoritarian states (really are our future in a world full of Putins, Kims, and so many other literally cut-throat despots.
The media obsession with Biden's age is likely that the media see Biden as a mirror image of themselves and detest what they see.
Donald Trump, ahead of the pandemic lockdown, had a "worst person you know just made a great point" moment in an interview. He was talking about how much the mainstream media have it in for him because they know he drives ratings and clicks and have to paint him as the villain in order to stay relevant.
Trump left the White House, Joe Biden entered the White House and sure enough, TV ratings tanked and clicks fell off a cliff. Print, broadcast and online news outlets are facing a long winter of falling ad buys, falling attention and vanishing jobs.
Media knew that Trump as an ex-president was driving more engagement than the current Biden White House. The media do want Trump back in the White House because they want the 2017-2021 "Trump bump" to turn around their moribund enterprises.
Thanks for this overview of your book! I haven't finished it yet, but one of the things that stands out to me is its attempt to provide historical explanations of the events and actors that provide the book's focus, and I really appreciate this aspect of it. So, for example, the chapter on David Duke provides a brief account of the strange political history of Louisiana so that we can begin to understand how David Duke became a political possibility. Similarly, the chaper on Rodney King and the LA riots provides a brief history of policing and race in L.os Angeles. Is there an historiographical principle at work here? For example, could it be something as relatively simple as "We must attempt to make sense of the past if we're going to have any chance of understanding the present"? Or, perhaps in a more postmodern vein, is it that the end of history means replacing grand historical narratives of the inevitable triumph of liberalism with a constellation of different historical narratives that help us to see how we got from the the end of the Cold War to wherever we are now?
Thanks for the overview! I just finished your introduction. I teach a course in Labor History to apprentices in my Local. In the future, for my module on "Reagan & NeoLiberalism"...I am going to assign your introduction.
Thank you so much for this summary. I'm very much looking forward to listening to the book on Audible (as soon as I get my next credit!).
I do have to quibble with your assessment of the Corleone family tragedy in The Godfather movies. Of the four great betrayals that contribute to that tragedy in the first two movies--Carlo's participation in the plot against Sonny and Tessio's attempted betrayal of Michael in the first movie, and Fredo's and Frank Pentangeli's attempted betrayal of Michael in the second--the movies depict only one, Tessio's, as motivated solely or even mainly by money (as Tessio insists to Tom before his end, "Tell Michael it was strictly business, nothing personal. I always liked him."). Carlo is depicted as looking for vengeance for his beating by Sonny (who in turn was avenging Carlo's abuse of Sonny's sister), and Freddo confesses his wounded honor to Michael: "Your my kid brother, and you take care of me?" Pentangeli is shown as insulted by Michael's failure to protect him, and his eventual suicide is a ritual cleansing of the stain on his own honor. Honor and avenging/cleansing damaged honor are shown as playing real, indeed principal, motivational roles. Of course, one could say that the appearance of honor as a motive results from a romantic, sepia vision of mob life--but the movies make no secret or apology that that romance IS their vision.
I'm not saying we should imagine honor playing so much of a role, either in the life of the old Mafia, or in Trump's gangster gemeinschaft--a piece that I thought was brilliant and spot-on, incidentally. I'm only talking about the Godfather movies and the world they create, internal to themselves.
Just finished the book last night. I think your idea that all these people and phenomena represent aspects of your “politics of national despair” comes through clearly. The segues from chapter to chapter are well done and help with that a lot, giving the feeling that we’re panning from figure to figure within one Hieronymus Bosh-esque painting rather than flipping through discrete events. Really enjoyed it, congratulations and hope it’s widely read, it deserves to be.
Part of the explanation of why the country didn't turn toward more egalitarian solidaristic alternatives in that period has to be the collapse of "actually existing socialism" in the USSR and the Eastern bloc. At the time, many democratic leftists hoped its collapse would allow for a new efflorescence of the socialist project, unencumbered by its association with monstrous police states. But that didn't happen. It set the left back for a generation and I think we are still, in many ways, laboring under the burden of that history. Caught between the unchained market on one side and the failure of socialism (or at least of a certain kind of socialism) on the other, it's no wonder people started to look toward various kinds of boundary drawing strategies to deal with their problems.
The lack of real U.S.S.R.-style 'Communists' in our politics deprives us of a length-scale, allowing a Rightist speaker to label anyone to their left a Commie with even less fear of contradiction than before.
Appreciate this summary! I'm reading the book now - it's great! Obviously as a subscriber here I am a fan of your prose (and ideas) - it's been really gratifying as a reader to get to read you in book length! And I'm learning a ton, I didn't know Ross Perot made his money from entitlement programs for example! Or much about Perot, what a weird guy. Also want to echo what Corey said - the historical background you provide to each chapter is much appreciated.
The book is wonderful! A Nixon Agonistes for our time.
The point about the mob lurking at the edge of the market, but not with revolutionary or redistributive violence, is a great one, too. Once saw a literal mob break out at an actual market, in a poor country, when suspected thieves were apprehended. Terrifying.
Your book is a feast, but also learning that Duke wrote a “how to please your man” sex manual under a female pseudonym was also a fucking riot.
Excellent work getting a Gimme Shelter reference into a piece that touches on a Scorsese movie.
Reading your book now. Murray Rothbard’s support of fascism seems incredible. As a Jew he knew that if fascism came into power it would lead to his death and all his family. His stand seems pathological and suicidal. Shouldn’t he be viewed as someone with profound mental illness, and treated that way.
I keep thinking about this, too. Yet he was inspiring to so many people.
Thanks much for this summary. I got your book and just started reading it and this really helps providing a reader’s guide/framework. I think you have revealed something really illuminating here. You have provoked a number of thoughts, among which are:
1. It’s likely that it’s not just right-wing populists who, especially in moments of societal malaise, crisis, etc., crave a “providential leader.” And the way especially presidential elections are contested, even in the nest of times, one or another or both candidates spend much of their time declaiming how terrible things are and how bad things will be. I recently saw a survey that said that in our presidential elections, the person seen as the stronger leader usually wins. Why else the obsession with Biden’s age and seeming fragility when he is actually performing very well as president?
2. Back to Hobbes vs Locke.
3. Makes me think about all of the different forms and traditions of more authoritarian rule. Among those that I am at least somewhat familiar with in today’s world, it may be that Xi and China have the least brutal and most sustainable model. And/or Orban. Perhaps the less brutal authoritarian states (really are our future in a world full of Putins, Kims, and so many other literally cut-throat despots.
The media obsession with Biden's age is likely that the media see Biden as a mirror image of themselves and detest what they see.
Donald Trump, ahead of the pandemic lockdown, had a "worst person you know just made a great point" moment in an interview. He was talking about how much the mainstream media have it in for him because they know he drives ratings and clicks and have to paint him as the villain in order to stay relevant.
Trump left the White House, Joe Biden entered the White House and sure enough, TV ratings tanked and clicks fell off a cliff. Print, broadcast and online news outlets are facing a long winter of falling ad buys, falling attention and vanishing jobs.
Media knew that Trump as an ex-president was driving more engagement than the current Biden White House. The media do want Trump back in the White House because they want the 2017-2021 "Trump bump" to turn around their moribund enterprises.
Thanks for this overview of your book! I haven't finished it yet, but one of the things that stands out to me is its attempt to provide historical explanations of the events and actors that provide the book's focus, and I really appreciate this aspect of it. So, for example, the chapter on David Duke provides a brief account of the strange political history of Louisiana so that we can begin to understand how David Duke became a political possibility. Similarly, the chaper on Rodney King and the LA riots provides a brief history of policing and race in L.os Angeles. Is there an historiographical principle at work here? For example, could it be something as relatively simple as "We must attempt to make sense of the past if we're going to have any chance of understanding the present"? Or, perhaps in a more postmodern vein, is it that the end of history means replacing grand historical narratives of the inevitable triumph of liberalism with a constellation of different historical narratives that help us to see how we got from the the end of the Cold War to wherever we are now?
Thanks for the overview! I just finished your introduction. I teach a course in Labor History to apprentices in my Local. In the future, for my module on "Reagan & NeoLiberalism"...I am going to assign your introduction.
The book is fucking fantastic
Thank you so much for this summary. I'm very much looking forward to listening to the book on Audible (as soon as I get my next credit!).
I do have to quibble with your assessment of the Corleone family tragedy in The Godfather movies. Of the four great betrayals that contribute to that tragedy in the first two movies--Carlo's participation in the plot against Sonny and Tessio's attempted betrayal of Michael in the first movie, and Fredo's and Frank Pentangeli's attempted betrayal of Michael in the second--the movies depict only one, Tessio's, as motivated solely or even mainly by money (as Tessio insists to Tom before his end, "Tell Michael it was strictly business, nothing personal. I always liked him."). Carlo is depicted as looking for vengeance for his beating by Sonny (who in turn was avenging Carlo's abuse of Sonny's sister), and Freddo confesses his wounded honor to Michael: "Your my kid brother, and you take care of me?" Pentangeli is shown as insulted by Michael's failure to protect him, and his eventual suicide is a ritual cleansing of the stain on his own honor. Honor and avenging/cleansing damaged honor are shown as playing real, indeed principal, motivational roles. Of course, one could say that the appearance of honor as a motive results from a romantic, sepia vision of mob life--but the movies make no secret or apology that that romance IS their vision.
I'm not saying we should imagine honor playing so much of a role, either in the life of the old Mafia, or in Trump's gangster gemeinschaft--a piece that I thought was brilliant and spot-on, incidentally. I'm only talking about the Godfather movies and the world they create, internal to themselves.
Just finished the book last night. I think your idea that all these people and phenomena represent aspects of your “politics of national despair” comes through clearly. The segues from chapter to chapter are well done and help with that a lot, giving the feeling that we’re panning from figure to figure within one Hieronymus Bosh-esque painting rather than flipping through discrete events. Really enjoyed it, congratulations and hope it’s widely read, it deserves to be.