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A thread on Hannah Arendt and how different her approach to fascism was from that of today's analysts.
2/ In dealing with the question of fascism and Nazism and totalitarianism, Arendt had one big advantage over her followers today: The enormity of what had happened during WWII. When she chided her fellow contemporaries for failing to take in the enormity of the camps, when
3/ she sympathetically reproached them for falling back on their commonsensical approaches to politics and not appreciating the lunacy of the Nazis, she was able to say, without exaggeration, we've just gone through an experience that none of us would have dreamed of in our worst
4/ nightmares and yet it was all too real. She didn't have to point to hypothetical futures or possibilities or worrying trends; she could begin with Auschwitz, Treblinka, and the gulag. And then the question became: how could it have happened. So her work was inevitably a work
5/ of reconstruction, oriented to the past, so she could point to the elements of the past that had "crystalized" (her word) in the present. She didn't fear an invocation of past precedents for present horrors because, again, she didn't have to make the horrors anything worse
6/ than they were; the only battle she had to fight was to persuade people that these horrors didn't come out of nowhere. And that's why her book is concerned with the origins of racism and imperialism; in fact, for some years, she was thinking of calling OT "Race Imperialism."
7/ Today's discourse works in a completely different way (though it often invokes all of Arendt's tropes and gestures). Having warned of a far more cataclysmic reality over the last four years than the one we wound up getting, the Arendtian inspired analysts look far less
8/ to the past—indeed, some of them feel that those of us who do point to past precedents are somehow excusing the present—but instead try to conjure the elements of the present into an account of a possible terrible future. Arendt did do this once (in a throwaway line about how
9/ some future Molotov-type figure might be worse than Stalin), but it was not her characteristic gesture.
This is why I find @lionel_trolling's claims re the failure of common sense to guide us today (again, a very Arendtian move) to be unpersuasive. https://twitter.com/lionel_trolling/status/1338118372077297666
This is why I find @lionel_trolling's claims re the failure of common sense to guide us today (again, a very Arendtian move) to be unpersuasive. https://twitter.com/lionel_trolling/status/1338118372077297666
10/ The irony of John's thoughtful and meditative thread is that we're almost in a reverse Arendtian moment. The things that John thinks are so spectral and lunatic as to defy commonsensical thinkers today have long been realities of the American right. The idea that denying
11/ reality is a form of fascist will: this was the essence of Ronald Reagan's regime, not as observed by analysts thirty years after the fact, but as observed by analysts at the time (see Rogin's Ronald Reagan, the Movie, or the many discussions of Nancy Reagan's astrologer).
12/ The new documentary on the Reagans is actually really good on this; there's all the same discussion we see hear today about the inability to distinguish fact from fiction, the desire to live in an entirely fictive world. Or consider Karl Rove's famous interview with Suskind.
13/ So where Arendt could rely on the fantastical reality of her own time to say common sense has defeated us, it's time to revisit the past with new eyes, her followers today have to conjure a fantastical hypothesis of the future in order to say that common sense has defeated
14/ us, and thus, in their eyes, it's time to, not deny, but perhaps overlook all the ways in which the past already has defeated us and simply become the common sense of the now.
