26 Comments
Feb 21, 2023Liked by John Ganz

That coffee anecdote is so compelling, he really does sound like one of those manic Dostoevsky characters who can't help but view every interaction as a symbol of their imprisonment in an unbearable reality. The difference being that he does not know he sounds absurd...

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Feb 21, 2023Liked by John Ganz

This sentence is so perfect "this Faustian desire of the desiccated scholar for the bloody juices of real-world power ..." It's a LOT of that. This idea deserves a book length treatment. In thinking of desiccated scholars and blood I come up with some on the left--Abmael Guzman, Pol Pot, maybe Lenin depending but are there are on the right really? The gulf between the scholars and the blood letters is much larger on the right.

I am amused by the formulae. You're right about the douche v. nerd but there's an aspect that's just whiney. The desiccated scholar is a master at putting an intellectual spin on his whining. Moldbug is a nerd whiner. Sounds like this guy is a douche whiner. It's masterful the way they find things that are perhaps genuinely annoying and create a fantasy of disappearing that, and getting everything you want.

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Feb 20, 2023Liked by John Ganz

Seems fascist. Fascinating, thank you

And striking to me the ‘hubris-nemesis complex’ might be considered to be at the center of fascist psychology. Acting with both extreme hubris and as nemesis in opposition to others’ perceived hubris, this psychology is incredibly problematic, destructive and difficult to oppose. See:

https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monograph_reports/2005/MR461.pdf

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To me this is very disturbing because my little brother has a copy of this book on his shelf next to like a dozen books by Julius Evola.

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I'm really fascinated by the redefinition of precariat here; the comment about Strauss is almost exactly what Taubes said about Schmitt.

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Feb 21, 2023Liked by John Ganz

This jibes with my particular, suspect, hobby-horse: the fascist follower values heroism, and crushing enemies…freedoms that they know will be denied them, but can be experienced vicariously via the person of the Leader—but freedoms 'superior' even if vicarious, in the fascist mind, to dull civil liberties.

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An excellent analysis. Thank you. I just stumbled on both Blake Smith and BAP when following a link to Tablet, and I would say only that I'm surprised to read in your piece that Smith's writings for places like Tablet are toned down compared to his Substack. A quick perusal of his works on Tablet left me with the impression that Smith's ideology aligns pretty well with the Straussians, albeit maybe not of the Claremont persuasion. I did agree with him about one thing: Yale political scientist Steven Smith is remarkably tedious.

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Feb 22, 2023Liked by John Ganz

I really like your "toy theory" about "the duality between Italian Fascism and Nazism: Nazism has weird loser, creep vibes, while Italian Fascism has douchey, jock vibes. You've written about the creepy, nerdy feel of Nazism before in ways I've found compelling as well. As someone who's also written about Nazism and fascism, I hadn't thought about Italian fascism as having a "douchey Jock" feel before-- they did have their own share of batshit intellectuals and blood drinking aristocrats circling the top.

I'm wondering: are there any really productive ways of taking the "weird loser" aspect of Nazism (or fascism in general) seriously -- and exploring it more deeply? I know you've already done some work in this direction.

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Feb 21, 2023Liked by John Ganz

Good piece.

Last block quote contains a repeated sentence.

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Marc Andreessen, whom we need to listen to for some reason (because he won the lottery once or twice while losing several hundred times), is talking "Bronze Age" eugenics in yesterday's tweet:

https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/1627439413474234371

With the rich, it's never more than a step or two to eugenics. And the calipers are always ready to hand.

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The frustrated nerd, nebbish, or "clerk class" type is the key to this segment of proto-fascism. BAP and others like Cerno or Roosh provide a masculine model for those who haven't done traditionally masculine things like work construction or be infantrymen.

They also think they are smarter than everyone else - hence the belief in eugenics. My orbit has coincided with some of the young GOP, Heritage, AEI apparatchik types in the past. They fit the mold.

Your Oath Keepers vet or building trades guy beleaguered by migrant workers aren't a part of this. Their vision is of a return to their imagined "Constitution" of frontier days, with harsh justice and little regulation, not some Greek tyranny.

Above all, this is a reaction to changes in gender roles and dating and mating norms. Nerds/nebbishes/clerks are by definition the ones working under HR department girlboss oppression and living in the "friend zone" outside of work.

Now would be a good time for the left, and the Democratic Party to start paying attention to the problems of boys at school, men in the workplace and criminal justice system. Won't happen though.

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You have more patience than I.

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I just finished re-reading Walter Lippmann's "Public Opinion," and as this piece passed through that lens, I couldn't resist seeing some similarities. Lippmann's thesis was that the common folk, the masses, represent the biggest obstacle to healthy democracy because most people are stupid and easily-manipulated. As I read your piece, it occurred to me that the ramblings of BAP and the other fascists and "Nazi-curious" men you mention here, arise from a somewhat similar (but more openly contemptuous) view of the masses as obstacle to the society they desire.

Lippmann's proposal would establish a kind of benign technocracy of ruling elite experts to gently shepherd the masses. BAP and the other fascists want to control or remove the masses by any means necessary. Both ideas are frightening, but one is the shadow side of the other. In fact, Lippmann's solution is frightening *because* of what we have come to understand about the shadow side.

The appeal of Lippmann's book is his articulation of the problem — i.e. the genuine ways that mass ignorance and stereotypes and predjudices etc undermine progress towards healthy democracy. I think BAP and his ilk appeal to people (men) because somewhere in the swirl of whining and vitriol that you describe so well, they also point to genuine problems.

I don't know where I'm going with this, but both represent articulations of problems we feel in our gut, although right now it feels like the shadow side is winning.

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Uh, who comes to mind were mostly just Ignatius J. O'Reilly, but with race replacing Rome.

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I recently read Stern’s Cultural Despair on your recommendation, and while I didn’t make the connection to BAP, it definitely feels like we’re in a Lagarde-ian moment: lots of inchoate retrograde anger, surfacing in places that a few years ago would have been unexpected and now seem almost natural. BAP is of a piece with that—as is our media’s collective failure to call it what it is.

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I've thought since Election Night 2016 that the Underground Man and his self-defeating revolt against rationalist modernity was the skeleton key to understanding the far right resurgence. It's a shame that BAP is such an evil crank, though, that passage about seeing fevered conspiracy in the waitress trying to take his coffee cup is high comedy, like that sequence where the Underground Man makes an ass of himself trying to impress the soldier and his friends who he hates anyway

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