What’s always and forever so bloody maddening about these admirers of economically dysfunctional police states is that, in their imagining, *they* are never the ones waiting two hours in line to buy a shitty piece of mystery meat; *they* are never the ones who can’t travel abroad unless they leave a family member behind as hostage; *they* are never the ones who can’t vote about anything; *they* are never the ones facing arrest for dissent; *they* are never the ones watching young men drink themselves to death out of boredom and idleness; *they* are never the ones who give up reading because there’s nothing left to read; *they* are never the ones lurking around the "beriozka" (foreign currency stores) asking foreigners to buy simple household necessities for them that are not available for Soviet citizens; and *they* are never the ones living in a permanent state of fear, ignorance ad paranoia because they’re endlessly told the whole world wants to wipe them out. In their imagining, they are living exactly as they live now, buying anything they want, saying anything they want, travelling anywhere they want, while admiring the orderliness, compliance and good behaviour of the masses around and below them. In their minds, they are always the nomenklatura, they are always running things.
"I can’t really tell if the editors of Compact are intentionally recapitulating the discourse of the 19th and 20th century Far Right or it is just a structural effect of their politics and positioning in the cultural field." --> Personally I suspect the latter
My girlfriend just finished her PhD dissertation on Heidegger's tragic formulation of the political. Her entire fourth chapter was about Jünger's gestalt, how it informed Heidegger's formulation of gestell, and their differing but overlapping ideas of total mobilization and machination. Then her conclusion took a lot of Benoist and Guillaume Faye and how they use these concepts (particularly Heidegger) in their identitarian projects. All this to say, not surprised these kinds of ideas are making it into Compact.
An interesting phenomenon is that in the former East, the far right Alternativ für Deutschland has a lot of electoral success compared to the West. So it's not just an American intellectual phenomenon, but even in the former East where you can vote for people who were actually associated with the former East German socialist party, people pick the far right as their vehicle for Ostalgie.
Hi, I have a couple of mailbag questions, if it’s not too late.
1. On Twitter and elsewhere, you’ve described yourself as having Menshevik politics. Can you say more about what that means?
2. To what extent do you think it’s fair to characterize Arendt as a conservative thinker? To me, it feels uncomfortable. However, her division between polis and oikos, and her resulting real life political stances (e.g. on the civil rights movement), would seem to put her on the right.
Talk about bad conservative/Republican alignment with leftists: supporting a fascist’s unjustifiable invasion of another nation. Whatever legitimate issues Putin had -- and he did -- not a one justified a military intervention of any kind.
As for conservatives who ❤️ the USSR: The USSR despite the talk of workers’ revolution did not in any way empower workers. A compliant work for is where the right and far left overlap.
I think when it comes to these right wing types (or their hard left tankie friends), the answer is always totalitarianism because in the end they are just bullies. And bullies like to bully. For a true bully, a utopia is a place where you can steal kids lunch money, hold a kid down and play the spit-slurp game, give some nerd a wedgie, or better yet a swirlee, and do all this without fear.
It's interesting that what we think of as a straight line from far left to far right is really an incomplete circle, because the far right and the far left often reach similar conclusions for entirely different reasons, as this article points out very clearly.
No one is addressing the root of the cultural leftism/economic rightism problem. Unions in the US are weak and a working class party is non-existent. I really don't know what can be done to bring such a party into existence without the accusation that college educated people are really the ones in charge unless, of course, working class people obtain both the education and the motivation to lead their own movement. This can be done outside of the traditional educational system through study groups. I am not close enough to any movement to provide details. I'm old and retired. I'm putting these ideas out there for younger people who are in a position to influence a new course of action.
Thinking about the nostalgia of the East Germans themselves, I’m reminded of the time my family spent in Paraguay, when I was in the 5th and 6th grades. This was 95-97; Stroessner, Paraguay’s last dictator, had been deposed recently, in 89. Paraguay became very oligarchical after that, and many of the lower class would say things weren’t necessarily better than when there was one big strongman who’d at least beat up on the rich people too. Thankfully, somehow, their quite fragile democracy has stumbled on down to the present, and I think things have much improved since back then.
¨First of all, my Twitter account has been restored.¨
They are going to cancel you again, you know. Elon Musk did not set 44 billion on fire just to let not-Nazis run around just saying things like, ´My Tesla exploded with my kids in the car´, and ´Actually, Hitler sucked' and also, ´Maybe Putin should stop murdering people´ because that would interfere with the freedom of speech of people like Elon Musk. The not-Pepe crowd that isn´t driven off the app because it´s now a shitty app will be forced off - by banning, if need be.
¨First off, Compact itself exists to peddle this sort of hybridization of Left and Right themes, which I have elsewhere called an “unholy alliance.”¨
I just think 🪄 ´Hitler-Stalin Pact´ and any conceptual difficulties with categorization go ✨POOF✨ 🫰🏻 like-a dat.
¨In that essay, he famously remarked that “wearing the cap of a Red army soldier” seemed less dreadful to him than “living on a diet of Hamburgers in Brooklyn.”¨
Surely there is someone in Brooklyn who wears a Red Army cap (or a Mao cap?) all the time and lives off a diet of hamburgers?
¨He was not alone. The sociologist Arnold Gehlen, who had been a supporter of the Nazi regime, later in life came to an admiration of the Soviet Union.¨
Not related, apparently. Then we get to Arnold (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Gehlen) and I got this: ¨Although he joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and made a career as a member of the 'Leipzig School' under Hans Freyer, he was not a Nazi, but rather a political opportunist: his main work Der Mensch appeared in 1940 and was published in English translation in 1987 as Man. His Nature and Place in the World. In contrast to philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, it contains not a single passage which can be classified as Nazi ideology. ¨
I think you should perhaps live your life in such a way as to be categorized as ´not a Nazi' without being labeled ´rather a political opportunist´.
¨But this shifting from signifier to signifier of “Order,” this restless movement from Catholic medievalism to nationalism to admiration for the power of the Reds, this desire for strong collectivity and community without egalitarianism¨
See, to my mind, Arnold up there and Sohrab down here should just be designated as people with no fixed beliefs other than that there should be some tyrant in charge and (presumably) said tyrant should pay them money to spout endless words rationalizing whatever action is taken, tell them how smart they are and stomp people in the head while they sit back and gloat about how tough they are.
That´s the problem with the debate about fascism - you can tell me about various philosopher´s ideological arguments in support of same, but Mussolini´s big idea was that Mussolini should be in charge. Mussolini was also no shirker when it came to political opportunism. Hitler had several large ideas, but they amounted to Hitler should be in charge, conquer and colonize Russia, and also kill all the Jews and the rest was an incessant stream of self-contradictory bullshit.
I don´t care about Heidegger (or this Arnold guy either) - nobody who was in charge of anything at the time was paying them any mind as long as they generated endless spew about the wonders of the asshole in charge. I have a very hard time distinguishing between the spew of Hitler supporters and the spew of Trump supporters (or Ron DeSantis fanboys) because they don´t actually care about anything but being in charge and stomping people in the face, full stop.
All the grasping at isms here feels like it shares psychological roots with groyperism (as you've defined and explored it) along with other phenomena like QAnon, the transgender panic and the weird right wing male self-help movement (Jordan Peterson, Tucker Carlson, Josh Hawley...). I can't help thinking as well about the jock/creep archtypes you've posited.
The people who are drawn to these things talk about order and hierarchy and constraints on decadence, but they have certain personal limitations in common. They tend towards binary thinking. They can't handle ambiguity. They require certainty.
I think 'Much in love with uneaseful Butchness.' might well cover an awful lot of this. In other instances it comes out as the Libertarian Macho Flash, e.g. 'Then they‘ll starve!' and the worship of one figure who never fails to back the most simplistic (that is, least nuanced-hence-feminine) and, if possible, most brutal, solution.
“I can’t really tell if the editors of Compact are intentionally recapitulating the discourse of the 19th and 20th century Far Right or it is just a structural effect of their politics and positioning in the cultural field“
This convergence of far right with Soviet adoration coincides with Putin’s BS rhetoric. Its the remnants of the KGB pushing this as part of their hybrid war on liberality. Their constant propaganda seems to convince a lot of authoritarian types.
What’s always and forever so bloody maddening about these admirers of economically dysfunctional police states is that, in their imagining, *they* are never the ones waiting two hours in line to buy a shitty piece of mystery meat; *they* are never the ones who can’t travel abroad unless they leave a family member behind as hostage; *they* are never the ones who can’t vote about anything; *they* are never the ones facing arrest for dissent; *they* are never the ones watching young men drink themselves to death out of boredom and idleness; *they* are never the ones who give up reading because there’s nothing left to read; *they* are never the ones lurking around the "beriozka" (foreign currency stores) asking foreigners to buy simple household necessities for them that are not available for Soviet citizens; and *they* are never the ones living in a permanent state of fear, ignorance ad paranoia because they’re endlessly told the whole world wants to wipe them out. In their imagining, they are living exactly as they live now, buying anything they want, saying anything they want, travelling anywhere they want, while admiring the orderliness, compliance and good behaviour of the masses around and below them. In their minds, they are always the nomenklatura, they are always running things.
"I can’t really tell if the editors of Compact are intentionally recapitulating the discourse of the 19th and 20th century Far Right or it is just a structural effect of their politics and positioning in the cultural field." --> Personally I suspect the latter
This is really a great example of what you're best at, as a writer. Really underscores how much I'm looking forward to your book.
My girlfriend just finished her PhD dissertation on Heidegger's tragic formulation of the political. Her entire fourth chapter was about Jünger's gestalt, how it informed Heidegger's formulation of gestell, and their differing but overlapping ideas of total mobilization and machination. Then her conclusion took a lot of Benoist and Guillaume Faye and how they use these concepts (particularly Heidegger) in their identitarian projects. All this to say, not surprised these kinds of ideas are making it into Compact.
An interesting phenomenon is that in the former East, the far right Alternativ für Deutschland has a lot of electoral success compared to the West. So it's not just an American intellectual phenomenon, but even in the former East where you can vote for people who were actually associated with the former East German socialist party, people pick the far right as their vehicle for Ostalgie.
Hi, I have a couple of mailbag questions, if it’s not too late.
1. On Twitter and elsewhere, you’ve described yourself as having Menshevik politics. Can you say more about what that means?
2. To what extent do you think it’s fair to characterize Arendt as a conservative thinker? To me, it feels uncomfortable. However, her division between polis and oikos, and her resulting real life political stances (e.g. on the civil rights movement), would seem to put her on the right.
Thanks!
Talk about bad conservative/Republican alignment with leftists: supporting a fascist’s unjustifiable invasion of another nation. Whatever legitimate issues Putin had -- and he did -- not a one justified a military intervention of any kind.
As for conservatives who ❤️ the USSR: The USSR despite the talk of workers’ revolution did not in any way empower workers. A compliant work for is where the right and far left overlap.
I think when it comes to these right wing types (or their hard left tankie friends), the answer is always totalitarianism because in the end they are just bullies. And bullies like to bully. For a true bully, a utopia is a place where you can steal kids lunch money, hold a kid down and play the spit-slurp game, give some nerd a wedgie, or better yet a swirlee, and do all this without fear.
It's interesting that what we think of as a straight line from far left to far right is really an incomplete circle, because the far right and the far left often reach similar conclusions for entirely different reasons, as this article points out very clearly.
No one is addressing the root of the cultural leftism/economic rightism problem. Unions in the US are weak and a working class party is non-existent. I really don't know what can be done to bring such a party into existence without the accusation that college educated people are really the ones in charge unless, of course, working class people obtain both the education and the motivation to lead their own movement. This can be done outside of the traditional educational system through study groups. I am not close enough to any movement to provide details. I'm old and retired. I'm putting these ideas out there for younger people who are in a position to influence a new course of action.
Thinking about the nostalgia of the East Germans themselves, I’m reminded of the time my family spent in Paraguay, when I was in the 5th and 6th grades. This was 95-97; Stroessner, Paraguay’s last dictator, had been deposed recently, in 89. Paraguay became very oligarchical after that, and many of the lower class would say things weren’t necessarily better than when there was one big strongman who’d at least beat up on the rich people too. Thankfully, somehow, their quite fragile democracy has stumbled on down to the present, and I think things have much improved since back then.
¨First of all, my Twitter account has been restored.¨
They are going to cancel you again, you know. Elon Musk did not set 44 billion on fire just to let not-Nazis run around just saying things like, ´My Tesla exploded with my kids in the car´, and ´Actually, Hitler sucked' and also, ´Maybe Putin should stop murdering people´ because that would interfere with the freedom of speech of people like Elon Musk. The not-Pepe crowd that isn´t driven off the app because it´s now a shitty app will be forced off - by banning, if need be.
¨First off, Compact itself exists to peddle this sort of hybridization of Left and Right themes, which I have elsewhere called an “unholy alliance.”¨
I just think 🪄 ´Hitler-Stalin Pact´ and any conceptual difficulties with categorization go ✨POOF✨ 🫰🏻 like-a dat.
¨In that essay, he famously remarked that “wearing the cap of a Red army soldier” seemed less dreadful to him than “living on a diet of Hamburgers in Brooklyn.”¨
Surely there is someone in Brooklyn who wears a Red Army cap (or a Mao cap?) all the time and lives off a diet of hamburgers?
¨He was not alone. The sociologist Arnold Gehlen, who had been a supporter of the Nazi regime, later in life came to an admiration of the Soviet Union.¨
So the name Gehlen made me think of this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhard_Gehlen
Not related, apparently. Then we get to Arnold (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Gehlen) and I got this: ¨Although he joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and made a career as a member of the 'Leipzig School' under Hans Freyer, he was not a Nazi, but rather a political opportunist: his main work Der Mensch appeared in 1940 and was published in English translation in 1987 as Man. His Nature and Place in the World. In contrast to philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, it contains not a single passage which can be classified as Nazi ideology. ¨
I think you should perhaps live your life in such a way as to be categorized as ´not a Nazi' without being labeled ´rather a political opportunist´.
¨But this shifting from signifier to signifier of “Order,” this restless movement from Catholic medievalism to nationalism to admiration for the power of the Reds, this desire for strong collectivity and community without egalitarianism¨
See, to my mind, Arnold up there and Sohrab down here should just be designated as people with no fixed beliefs other than that there should be some tyrant in charge and (presumably) said tyrant should pay them money to spout endless words rationalizing whatever action is taken, tell them how smart they are and stomp people in the head while they sit back and gloat about how tough they are.
That´s the problem with the debate about fascism - you can tell me about various philosopher´s ideological arguments in support of same, but Mussolini´s big idea was that Mussolini should be in charge. Mussolini was also no shirker when it came to political opportunism. Hitler had several large ideas, but they amounted to Hitler should be in charge, conquer and colonize Russia, and also kill all the Jews and the rest was an incessant stream of self-contradictory bullshit.
I don´t care about Heidegger (or this Arnold guy either) - nobody who was in charge of anything at the time was paying them any mind as long as they generated endless spew about the wonders of the asshole in charge. I have a very hard time distinguishing between the spew of Hitler supporters and the spew of Trump supporters (or Ron DeSantis fanboys) because they don´t actually care about anything but being in charge and stomping people in the face, full stop.
elm
all that is ideology melts into air
All the grasping at isms here feels like it shares psychological roots with groyperism (as you've defined and explored it) along with other phenomena like QAnon, the transgender panic and the weird right wing male self-help movement (Jordan Peterson, Tucker Carlson, Josh Hawley...). I can't help thinking as well about the jock/creep archtypes you've posited.
The people who are drawn to these things talk about order and hierarchy and constraints on decadence, but they have certain personal limitations in common. They tend towards binary thinking. They can't handle ambiguity. They require certainty.
I think 'Much in love with uneaseful Butchness.' might well cover an awful lot of this. In other instances it comes out as the Libertarian Macho Flash, e.g. 'Then they‘ll starve!' and the worship of one figure who never fails to back the most simplistic (that is, least nuanced-hence-feminine) and, if possible, most brutal, solution.
Another thoughtful piece, thank you.
“I can’t really tell if the editors of Compact are intentionally recapitulating the discourse of the 19th and 20th century Far Right or it is just a structural effect of their politics and positioning in the cultural field“
This convergence of far right with Soviet adoration coincides with Putin’s BS rhetoric. Its the remnants of the KGB pushing this as part of their hybrid war on liberality. Their constant propaganda seems to convince a lot of authoritarian types.
https://radmod.substack.com/p/clearly-defining-putins-hybrid-wwiii?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
Thank-you, I was afraid it might be a bit much.