38 Comments
Jan 3, 2023Liked by John Ganz

Andrew Tate is a sinister figure, but he's also amazingly buffoonish. He's like if Brad Pitt's character from Fight Club were played by Brad Pitt's character from Burn After Reading.

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Jan 3, 2023Liked by John Ganz

But during his race for the house Santos would have appeared to voters in his district to just be a respectable bourgeoisie type. Now that he’s been unmasked, he has become celebrated by the deepest and ugliest corners of the online right but it seems unlikely that he could have won election while maintaining this persona. It just suggests that while the right has embraced a sort of mob politics, the electoral appeal of those politics is still extremely suspect.

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founding
Jan 3, 2023Liked by John Ganz

the mob, in both senses, was an important coalition partner in third world anticommunist regimes and played a major role in carrying out the mass killings of the cold war era (eg indonesia '65-66)

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Jan 4, 2023Liked by John Ganz

Although only fully developed in a Cold War context and with the most powerful CP in Europe knocking at the door, post-WWII Italian political culture - culminating with Berlusconi in the 90s - seems the most evolved outcome in market economies of the kind of right-wing confluence you’re describing - state capture by criminal or semi-criminal enterprises, systematic delegitimation of all pubic authorities, adulation of gangsterism in popular culture, and - from, the late-60s to the 80s - “occult” conservative support for right-wing violence to destabilize society, frighten the population, and usher in a fortified security state (the famous “strategia della tensione”, so far not fully developed in the US).

Not sure exactly how all this relates to the US context, but one common thread seems to be: “If we can’t have permanent power, we will seek, by whatever means, to delegitimize the very concept of rational authority tout court.” Not authority as a pure expression of power, just rational forms of authority expressed through the ebb and flow of informed debate, public policy formation, distributist regulatory institutions, and a judicial system guided by concerns for ameliorative justice. Putin’s Russia is perhaps the purest current form of this type of power, with the crucial caveat that it has evolved in the absence of the kind of domestic threat - whether real or perceived - that has defined the evolution of right-wing ideology and practice in the US and Italy.

Anyway, an entertaining portrait of some of these more recondite points is the Michele Placido movie “Romanzo Criminale”, developed from a novel (2002) by ex-judge Giancarlo De Cataldo. It’s about the Roman criminal gang the “Banda della Magliana”, which was also mixed up in right-wing politics, including fascist terror (laundering money and providing weapons to fascist cells, including possibly explosives for the 1980 massacre in Bologna. One conflicted member of the gang offers the jarring line, “non mi sta bene, quello che è successo a Bologna” [“What happened in Bologna, I’m not ok with that”]).

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Jan 8, 2023Liked by John Ganz

'I have watched your career with fascination, Sejanus. It's been a revelation it's been to me! I've never fully realised before how a small mind, allied to unlimited ambition and without scruple, can destroy a country full of clever men. I've seen how frail is the structure of a civilisation before the onslaught of a gust of really bad breath! Yes... But I suppose you are not really the destroyer. No, we must look elsewhere for that. You are merely the putrefaction that spreads after death—the outward and visible sign of its presence! You're a lesson in history to me, Sejanus, proving that, above all, Mankind needs its sense of smell.'—from the BBC' s "I, Claudius"

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Jan 3, 2023Liked by John Ganz

Interesting article! Andrew tate converted to Muslim, which suprised me after his arrest I read some Muslim support. He made videos criticizing christians. Watching some of his video he was trying to show his knowledge to get more attention. But it was clear as you said Mob like strong men. He reminds me italian personality Corona. He ended in jail.

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A nice though minor example of the phenomenon you’re talking about is Tucker Carlson’s interview of Anthony Pellicano in 2021 (easily found online so no link), a couple of years after the latter finished a 15-year stretch in federal prison for wiretapping, racketeering, conspiracy, and wire fraud. There Pellicano is not so much an intruder in public life as he is a man welcomed and celebrated by Carlson as part of the latter’s ongoing effort to groom the American public to accept the necessity for and efficacy of righteous violence directed against groups of people Carlson doesn’t like.

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Your remarks on the "mob" as fun-house mirror inversion of the respectable bourgeoisie put me less in mind of Arendt than of Brecht. Again and again, Brecht presented us with gangsters as the quintessential creatures of capitalist society. Certainly in "Mahagony" but also, and no less brilliantly, in "The Resistible Rise of Artuo Ui."

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One thing worth noting in all this talk about authoritarianism coming home to roost is how many aspects of life in the United States (and indeed Canada and Europe already are thoroughly authoritarian. Consider corporations and other employers. They can be benign, hostile, or any shade in between. But one thing they are not is democratically run. I'm sure there are exceptions, but for the most part this holds true. Many religious institutions are explicitly undemocratic. Even some of the ones that do have elected leaderships of some sort seem to be basically authoritarian. School is the same, maybe a little less so at the college and university level, what with all "the student is king" thinking that seems to go on there. Even in most of our families, if a kid doesn't do more or less as they are told by Mom, Dad or both, there will be punishment, perhaps not the physical punishments of yesteryear, but certainly many a child has experienced last privileges, temporarily confiscated cell phones and the like. In many families, the hand is not heave, but in some others, oh my! This is not even to mention authoritarian-style policing with literally jackbooted cops. And then of course there is the military.

The point of all this is that inmost of our daily lives we are well-conditioned for authoritarianism. It's a wonder, given all this, we are not already happily authoritarian. Such ideas on a national level will always find a market.

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I love how "Happy New Year!" in this context has the same effect as "...The Aristocrats!"

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Was just reading J. Sakai's "The 'Dangerous Class' and Revolutionary Theory - Thoughts on the Making of the Lumpen/proletariat". There's a chapter in there (ch 9) which focuses on the events of Louis Bonaparte's 1852 and Marx's characterisation of it in the 18th Brumaire as a lumpen regime created by an alliance of the lumpenproletariat and lumpenbourgeoisie and, indeed, of creating a kind of lumpen regime. Strong parallels with your reference to Arendt's mob here, I think. The chapter's a short enough read if you can locate a free pdf floating around somewhere

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Santos ran for Congress in 2020 as a Republican non-entity and was crushed. Then came Trump's Big Lie, Jan 6, and the opportunity to cast his lot with a cultish authoritarian neo-fascist whose main call-to-arms is a faux anti-elitism. Trump's imprimatur, and newly arrived mysterious buckets of cash, allowed him to amplify his invented Horatio Alger backstory (always irresistable to a certain kind of American nostalgic)-and the rest is history.

Maybe the singularity here, if there is one, is not so much that buffoons like Santos and sociopaths like Tate exist, but the ease and readiness by which they are taken up, adopted, and put to use by a far right media machine driving the relentless rage engine.

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Happy New Year to you, Mr. Ganz.

I look forward to a 2023 where many criminals receive indictments and sentences.

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Interesting post! Could you fix this one spot: To understand how she uses the term, imagine an identity between its two senses: an unruly, menace in the streets, and the In its way, the mob is just the bourgeoisie stripped of hypocrisy—it possesses many of the same views of shared by normal people but “desublimated,”

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Classic stuff here

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When we say "the mob" do we mean the mafia? Or a mob of people?

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