Richard still doubling-down on his bizarre argument that if you think a depiction of Welfare abuse should depict it's most realistic user demographic instead of "Woke" obfuscation of the issue, that you are a white supremacist, or whatever. A long strawman.
Nor can he explain why another demographic group, probably the largest group of net taxpayers, should should be happy with being portrayed as the go-to villain in every media depiction of undesirable characters, when the evidence does not warrant it.
I'm not white yet I'd be upset if a group I was part of was consistently the only acceptable one to portray in a negative light and used in place of other groups in various negative scenarios, the reality being that my group is one of the least or indeed the least likely to actually be involved (e.g. grok claims 2% of welfare users are young white males).
Well there’s more white people in absolute terms so a white perosn does technically represent more welfare recipients. Also there’s a known tendency to call black people lazy, so showing a black person is more likely to spread bad generalization or race hate.
If Richard Hanania wants to assume the mantle for the speakership of the Smart Democrats - he's welcome to try. However, from what he's saying, he seems to see no fault in how the Biden admin ruled...
I’m not sure there’s too much daylight between the left and right here. You’ll struggle to find a left wing plot in which the bad guy doesn’t fit their preferred profile.
I hope you don’t lose the ability to hate everyone. There’s no reason to like the left just because the right sucks. They are both trash, because the average person is trash!
Good stuff, Richard. I think all of this is more or less correct. Racism really is core to the MAGA project, and every pretension to a higher vision is a paper-thin pretense that collapses under the slightest pressure. Anyone who thinks they can show any significant difference between MAGA and the older fascist movements has their work cut out for them.
What is paper-thin is this whole fascist argument. All characteristics aside that might lead a TDS sufferer to buy into the fascist label, fascist regimes don't get thumped in elections by a weak and failing opposition. How can the boy cry fascist wolf at a regime that gets humbled as it is highly likely to be in a month?
Don't conflate ideologies and regimes. We don't currently have a fascist regime because Trump's January 6 coup attempt failed. But MAGA certainly has a fascist ideology in a number of important respects.
Agree with Scott Sumner! The way I would put it is that "fascist" does not mean "unable to lose an election." Fascism means a specific set of things that Richard summarizes pretty well (drawing on Paxton's 2004 book which I haven't read but probably should -- holy shit there's a free pdf version so now I don't have any excuse).
Looking briefly at Paxton's book, he seems to differ from Richard in at least one important respect: Paxton thinks that fascism was invented in the 20th century, while Richard seems to think that fascism represents an ongoing temptation for people who exemplify a specific type of human nature. In other words, if Richard is right, we ought to be able to find earlier examples of fascism-like tendencies in pre-20th century societies.
I think Umberto Eco's relatively brief account of fascism (nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/) is closer to Richard in this respect. Eco thinks that the concept of fascism is inherently a bit fuzzy, but nonetheless lays out the key features of fascism as follows: (1) a cult of tradition; (2) a rejection of modernism; (3) a cult of action for action's sake; (4) a belief that disagreement is treason; (5) racism; (6) appeal to a frustrated middle class; (7) nationalism, plus an obsession with the belief that there is a plot against the nation; (8) the view that enemies of the nation are rich and powerful yet also weak and pathetic; (9) the view that life is a state of permanent warfare; (10) contempt for the weak, with the fascist leader being contemptuous of his own followers (and the leaders at lower levels of the hierarchy being contemptuous of those below them); (11) a cult of heroism and a cult of death; (12) machismo; (13) selective populism (which is a complicated idea I won't even try to summarize; and (14) "use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning."
I think Eco's account (written in 1995) is remarkably predictive of most of Trumpism!
I do not use the word "regime" once in my comments. Neither does Richard in his entire post (you can "control-F" for yourself). You're obsessed with something that nobody is talking about.
Bonaparte (more the "third" than the first) and Julius Cesar have some similarities (except points 1 and 2; but many supporters of Mussolini - Hitler is a different story - were not traditionalists at all)
Anyone who glorifies Marx as a "system builder" - ROTFL! - is disqualified as a political thinker. This essay reads like an updated version of Richard's 10th grade essay, "Why the Jocks at Our School Shouldn't Be Considered Cool, Ackshully, McKenzie," which was roundly vilified at the time. I see his update includes a partial book report from a Marxist. Odd inclusion.
There is a veritable industry producing tendentious literature attempting to deny and obscure the leftist origins and nature of the Fascist movement, and instead to magically discover its symptoms in in whatever ideas or politicians the left currently doesn't like.
Indeed. Richard Hanania should at least have read "Liberal Fascism" by Jonah Goldberg. It gives a fairly good description of fascism, its origins and its different facettes in different countries. At its core, it is progressivist, and strongly modelled on the social, education and industrial policies of the Prussian state - THE model industrial state of the 19th century. Incidentally, that book came out early in 2008, that is before Obama presidency, and before Mr Goldberg became violently anti-Trump.
No. Fascism and Nazism are offshoots of the same leftist ideological roots that produced Marxism and Communism, different sects of the same religion. They are the same underlying phenomenon manifested with different window dressing, as Evan Sayet put it.
There is a tendentious and dishonest movement, especially since the end of WW II, to deny this origin, common nature, and shared heritage between the left, and what they brand as the 'far right,' and project this onto whoever they see as the current enemy, using the sort of shallow rhetoric that Paxton is quoted as using above.
It is like picking two Christian denominations, and declaring that one attends Sunday worship based on sincere, theologically informed, faith, while the other just goes to show off their clothes.
In-group vs. out-group has been at the core of humanity since the first band of humans learned to fight with sticks. The intellectual justifications are all downstream of that.
Not really. The key point in his original book was not whether the right is immune or not immune to totalitarian tendencies. Or about in-group vs out-group.
This isn't just a right-wing talking point, despite what certain follow-up comments might indicate. For a good scholarly-historical discussion of this see Richard Pipes' "Russia under the Bolshevik Regime", which has a chapter on the connections between early Soviet Communism & early-20th-century European Fascism, describing both the structural similarities between Leninist & fascist-party-state constitutions & the common roots of Leninism & Italian Fascism in the pre-WW1 socialist movement. (On the other hand, his attempt to discuss the ideological roots of Nazism are rather less successful, as his description of Hitler relies in large part on Hermann Rauschning, whose book turned out to be largely fake.)
There is a level of reality denial that you just have to nod your head and back away from I guess.
At least all the leftists that got incinerated or shot or thrown out of helicopters can know that "aktualy, pinochet is the real leftist, making me the victor!", and all the conservatives slowly thawing in the permafrost can know that the glorious republic of soviets struck down leftism one and for about five minutes in 1945.
I believe that your current "e-mail-wall" system is a net negative. As a personal gripe, I find reading your e-mails harder than reading the blog, but that's because I'm a Luddite and don't use an e-mail reader that renders HTML. But in regard to the Real World, the problem is that there isn't a "Hanania archive"; only people who've received -- and saved! -- all your past e-mails can actually read your past columns. You've made your work transient.
My man, I love your essays but from now on I shall only read them on the mail, where my eyes cannot be sullied by the comments (this is true for more or less every substack and every media outlet that allows comments).
To quote your Mencken, "No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people."
I would add to that the nastiness and proud ignorance.
Alas. This is one of the huge drawbacks of democracy, which yet remains the only system slightly better than the others. Until something utterly new is devised.
I am in my delirium putting my hope in AI. Untouched by evolutionary urges and decidedly more educated and rational than most, they would make almighty overlords that I can live with.
Agree, AND..."This is where the parallel to culture breaks, in the opposite direction. Culture-matters failed Caplan’s banality test because everyone already granted it. Scale-matters would pass the same test for the reverse reason: almost nobody has actually been forced to answer it. Ask a room of libertarians whether there’s a population size, or a level of internal disagreement, at which their preferred bundle of rights-based conclusions stops being correct. The honest response from most is silence, not a citation."
I'm no fan of Trump, but I'm also no fan of any alternatives to Trump. You can't really criticize one party or one side without applying that equal discernment to the other side. They all clearly work for the same people which is not us. You claim that at least Democrats have a policy, but that policy is to funnel our money offshore through fraud on such a scale that the stolen portions of our tax revenue could actually pay for the programs that you say you want.
Your obviously classic liberal values do not work with modern democrats who have tendencies no less fascist than you claim Trump's are. They all work for the same same people. There's only difference is who gets out stolen money. Does it funnel out to Somalia or into big US corporations. Not a great choice but I would keep it here within our borders where it has the chance of producing or jobs.
“individual liberty must give way to forcing virtue on the public and removing all immigrants”
If the natives rightfully own the roads (if not, who does?), then at least some of the anti-immigration positions are, ironically, more libertarian than your own position, which assumes road communism. You want to force anti-racist virtue and property rights violations on the public.
You are a great example of someone with great intelligence being too smart by half. You can call our government “democratic” or “fascist”; I just want to live in a society where no group is given preference over any other, where private property is sacred and individualism isn’t pushed to the point beyond any sense of propriety or decency. If that means I am a fascist, so be it.
I think that you are relying far too much on Paxton's book. It is not a very convincing differentiation of Fascism from other political movements, so it is not a good basis for understanding politics today.
Paxton’s individual characteristics are not very distinctive. National humiliation, mass mobilization, political violence, hostility to liberal institutions, demonization of enemies, charismatic leadership, and appeals to unity can be found in a wide variety of movements that are not fascist.
Paxton relies on the combination of these characteristics, but he does not systematically test his framework against a broad set of non-fascist cases to see how often it produces false positives.
I would place much greater weight on observable institutional characteristics of totalitarian rule. These include:
1) strong centralization of political and social power,
2) concentration of political authority in a single hierarchical mass party,
3) fusion of Party and State, subordination of the individual to Party-controlled institutions,
4) destruction or absorption of independent organizations, and
5) systematic repression of competing worldviews through coercion or violence.
The key issue is therefore not simply what leaders believe, or whether they resent competing centers of authority. Such attitudes are common.
What matters is what they actually do: whether they eliminate rival parties, subordinate courts and media, destroy independent civic organizations, merge the ruling party with the state, and use organized violence to suppress alternative political or ideological positions.
When you look at the actual historical record, totalitarian regimes of the Left and Right shared strikingly similar political structures and methods.
Richard still doubling-down on his bizarre argument that if you think a depiction of Welfare abuse should depict it's most realistic user demographic instead of "Woke" obfuscation of the issue, that you are a white supremacist, or whatever. A long strawman.
Nor can he explain why another demographic group, probably the largest group of net taxpayers, should should be happy with being portrayed as the go-to villain in every media depiction of undesirable characters, when the evidence does not warrant it.
I'm not white yet I'd be upset if a group I was part of was consistently the only acceptable one to portray in a negative light and used in place of other groups in various negative scenarios, the reality being that my group is one of the least or indeed the least likely to actually be involved (e.g. grok claims 2% of welfare users are young white males).
Interesting, as a white person, I feel absolutely nothing when a white person is in a welfare ad
so you wouldnt have any issue if it was a black person right? i dont see a problem with ads reflecting real demographics
Well there’s more white people in absolute terms so a white perosn does technically represent more welfare recipients. Also there’s a known tendency to call black people lazy, so showing a black person is more likely to spread bad generalization or race hate.
If Richard Hanania wants to assume the mantle for the speakership of the Smart Democrats - he's welcome to try. However, from what he's saying, he seems to see no fault in how the Biden admin ruled...
Anyone who saw that ad and got angry that the person was white needs help.
I’m not sure there’s too much daylight between the left and right here. You’ll struggle to find a left wing plot in which the bad guy doesn’t fit their preferred profile.
I hope you don’t lose the ability to hate everyone. There’s no reason to like the left just because the right sucks. They are both trash, because the average person is trash!
Good stuff, Richard. I think all of this is more or less correct. Racism really is core to the MAGA project, and every pretension to a higher vision is a paper-thin pretense that collapses under the slightest pressure. Anyone who thinks they can show any significant difference between MAGA and the older fascist movements has their work cut out for them.
What is paper-thin is this whole fascist argument. All characteristics aside that might lead a TDS sufferer to buy into the fascist label, fascist regimes don't get thumped in elections by a weak and failing opposition. How can the boy cry fascist wolf at a regime that gets humbled as it is highly likely to be in a month?
Don't conflate ideologies and regimes. We don't currently have a fascist regime because Trump's January 6 coup attempt failed. But MAGA certainly has a fascist ideology in a number of important respects.
LOL
Agree with Scott Sumner! The way I would put it is that "fascist" does not mean "unable to lose an election." Fascism means a specific set of things that Richard summarizes pretty well (drawing on Paxton's 2004 book which I haven't read but probably should -- holy shit there's a free pdf version so now I don't have any excuse).
https://files.libcom.org/files/Robert%20O.%20Paxton-The%20Anatomy%20of%20Fascism%20%20-Knopf%20(2004).pdf
Looking briefly at Paxton's book, he seems to differ from Richard in at least one important respect: Paxton thinks that fascism was invented in the 20th century, while Richard seems to think that fascism represents an ongoing temptation for people who exemplify a specific type of human nature. In other words, if Richard is right, we ought to be able to find earlier examples of fascism-like tendencies in pre-20th century societies.
I think Umberto Eco's relatively brief account of fascism (nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/) is closer to Richard in this respect. Eco thinks that the concept of fascism is inherently a bit fuzzy, but nonetheless lays out the key features of fascism as follows: (1) a cult of tradition; (2) a rejection of modernism; (3) a cult of action for action's sake; (4) a belief that disagreement is treason; (5) racism; (6) appeal to a frustrated middle class; (7) nationalism, plus an obsession with the belief that there is a plot against the nation; (8) the view that enemies of the nation are rich and powerful yet also weak and pathetic; (9) the view that life is a state of permanent warfare; (10) contempt for the weak, with the fascist leader being contemptuous of his own followers (and the leaders at lower levels of the hierarchy being contemptuous of those below them); (11) a cult of heroism and a cult of death; (12) machismo; (13) selective populism (which is a complicated idea I won't even try to summarize; and (14) "use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning."
I think Eco's account (written in 1995) is remarkably predictive of most of Trumpism!
A fascist regime without control, constitutional or otherwise, is not a fascist regime at all.
I do not use the word "regime" once in my comments. Neither does Richard in his entire post (you can "control-F" for yourself). You're obsessed with something that nobody is talking about.
Bonaparte (more the "third" than the first) and Julius Cesar have some similarities (except points 1 and 2; but many supporters of Mussolini - Hitler is a different story - were not traditionalists at all)
Look what happened to Orban
Anyone who glorifies Marx as a "system builder" - ROTFL! - is disqualified as a political thinker. This essay reads like an updated version of Richard's 10th grade essay, "Why the Jocks at Our School Shouldn't Be Considered Cool, Ackshully, McKenzie," which was roundly vilified at the time. I see his update includes a partial book report from a Marxist. Odd inclusion.
I guess political thinkers like Isaiah Berlin and Phillip Tetlock aren't intellectually serious enough for the Substack commentariat, what a shame.
https://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/hedgehog-berlin.pdf
There is a veritable industry producing tendentious literature attempting to deny and obscure the leftist origins and nature of the Fascist movement, and instead to magically discover its symptoms in in whatever ideas or politicians the left currently doesn't like.
Indeed. Richard Hanania should at least have read "Liberal Fascism" by Jonah Goldberg. It gives a fairly good description of fascism, its origins and its different facettes in different countries. At its core, it is progressivist, and strongly modelled on the social, education and industrial policies of the Prussian state - THE model industrial state of the 19th century. Incidentally, that book came out early in 2008, that is before Obama presidency, and before Mr Goldberg became violently anti-Trump.
Goldberg has since walked that back quite a bit.
"The ideological constructs used to defend and proselytize fascist ideologies were instrumental, not elemental, to the cause."
https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/gfile/what-i-got-wrong-about-fascism/
Hanania is correct that fascism is more about affect than ideas. The only idea that matters is in-group vs out-group.
No. Fascism and Nazism are offshoots of the same leftist ideological roots that produced Marxism and Communism, different sects of the same religion. They are the same underlying phenomenon manifested with different window dressing, as Evan Sayet put it.
There is a tendentious and dishonest movement, especially since the end of WW II, to deny this origin, common nature, and shared heritage between the left, and what they brand as the 'far right,' and project this onto whoever they see as the current enemy, using the sort of shallow rhetoric that Paxton is quoted as using above.
It is like picking two Christian denominations, and declaring that one attends Sunday worship based on sincere, theologically informed, faith, while the other just goes to show off their clothes.
None of that matters.
In-group vs. out-group has been at the core of humanity since the first band of humans learned to fight with sticks. The intellectual justifications are all downstream of that.
Not really. The key point in his original book was not whether the right is immune or not immune to totalitarian tendencies. Or about in-group vs out-group.
This isn't just a right-wing talking point, despite what certain follow-up comments might indicate. For a good scholarly-historical discussion of this see Richard Pipes' "Russia under the Bolshevik Regime", which has a chapter on the connections between early Soviet Communism & early-20th-century European Fascism, describing both the structural similarities between Leninist & fascist-party-state constitutions & the common roots of Leninism & Italian Fascism in the pre-WW1 socialist movement. (On the other hand, his attempt to discuss the ideological roots of Nazism are rather less successful, as his description of Hitler relies in large part on Hermann Rauschning, whose book turned out to be largely fake.)
Notable leftist sympathisers, the ... fascists?
There is a level of reality denial that you just have to nod your head and back away from I guess.
At least all the leftists that got incinerated or shot or thrown out of helicopters can know that "aktualy, pinochet is the real leftist, making me the victor!", and all the conservatives slowly thawing in the permafrost can know that the glorious republic of soviets struck down leftism one and for about five minutes in 1945.
I wrote a piece on this using Umberto Eco as a reference. https://lastbluedog.substack.com/p/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about . MAGA is absolutely a fascist movement even though ironically Trump is a kleptocrat more than an ideologue.
I believe that your current "e-mail-wall" system is a net negative. As a personal gripe, I find reading your e-mails harder than reading the blog, but that's because I'm a Luddite and don't use an e-mail reader that renders HTML. But in regard to the Real World, the problem is that there isn't a "Hanania archive"; only people who've received -- and saved! -- all your past e-mails can actually read your past columns. You've made your work transient.
My man, I love your essays but from now on I shall only read them on the mail, where my eyes cannot be sullied by the comments (this is true for more or less every substack and every media outlet that allows comments).
To quote your Mencken, "No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people."
I would add to that the nastiness and proud ignorance.
Alas. This is one of the huge drawbacks of democracy, which yet remains the only system slightly better than the others. Until something utterly new is devised.
I am in my delirium putting my hope in AI. Untouched by evolutionary urges and decidedly more educated and rational than most, they would make almighty overlords that I can live with.
Agree, AND..."This is where the parallel to culture breaks, in the opposite direction. Culture-matters failed Caplan’s banality test because everyone already granted it. Scale-matters would pass the same test for the reverse reason: almost nobody has actually been forced to answer it. Ask a room of libertarians whether there’s a population size, or a level of internal disagreement, at which their preferred bundle of rights-based conclusions stops being correct. The honest response from most is silence, not a citation."
https://delphicmirror.substack.com/p/scale-is-why-politics-is-still-in?r=5d3u3o&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
I'm no fan of Trump, but I'm also no fan of any alternatives to Trump. You can't really criticize one party or one side without applying that equal discernment to the other side. They all clearly work for the same people which is not us. You claim that at least Democrats have a policy, but that policy is to funnel our money offshore through fraud on such a scale that the stolen portions of our tax revenue could actually pay for the programs that you say you want.
Your obviously classic liberal values do not work with modern democrats who have tendencies no less fascist than you claim Trump's are. They all work for the same same people. There's only difference is who gets out stolen money. Does it funnel out to Somalia or into big US corporations. Not a great choice but I would keep it here within our borders where it has the chance of producing or jobs.
“individual liberty must give way to forcing virtue on the public and removing all immigrants”
If the natives rightfully own the roads (if not, who does?), then at least some of the anti-immigration positions are, ironically, more libertarian than your own position, which assumes road communism. You want to force anti-racist virtue and property rights violations on the public.
You are a great example of someone with great intelligence being too smart by half. You can call our government “democratic” or “fascist”; I just want to live in a society where no group is given preference over any other, where private property is sacred and individualism isn’t pushed to the point beyond any sense of propriety or decency. If that means I am a fascist, so be it.
I think that you are relying far too much on Paxton's book. It is not a very convincing differentiation of Fascism from other political movements, so it is not a good basis for understanding politics today.
Paxton’s individual characteristics are not very distinctive. National humiliation, mass mobilization, political violence, hostility to liberal institutions, demonization of enemies, charismatic leadership, and appeals to unity can be found in a wide variety of movements that are not fascist.
Paxton relies on the combination of these characteristics, but he does not systematically test his framework against a broad set of non-fascist cases to see how often it produces false positives.
I would place much greater weight on observable institutional characteristics of totalitarian rule. These include:
1) strong centralization of political and social power,
2) concentration of political authority in a single hierarchical mass party,
3) fusion of Party and State, subordination of the individual to Party-controlled institutions,
4) destruction or absorption of independent organizations, and
5) systematic repression of competing worldviews through coercion or violence.
The key issue is therefore not simply what leaders believe, or whether they resent competing centers of authority. Such attitudes are common.
What matters is what they actually do: whether they eliminate rival parties, subordinate courts and media, destroy independent civic organizations, merge the ruling party with the state, and use organized violence to suppress alternative political or ideological positions.
When you look at the actual historical record, totalitarian regimes of the Left and Right shared strikingly similar political structures and methods.
Looks lilke Shaniqua isn't the only one confused about "per capita."