Quotes: 18 July 2025
Strangers in Their Own Land
Arlie Russell Hochschild
Many Tea Party advocates work in or run small businesses. Yet the politicians they support back laws that consolidate the monopoly power of the very largest companies that are poised to swallow up smaller ones. Small farmers voting with Monsanto? Corner drugstore owners voting with Walmart? The local bookstore owner voting with Amazon? If I were a small business owner, I would welcome lower company taxes, sure, but strengthening the monopolies that could force me out of business? I didn’t get it. Wrapped around these puzzles was a bigger one: how can a system both create pain and deflect blame for that pain?
The most intelligent of the Nazis, the legal theorist Carl Schmitt, explained in clear language the essence of fascist governance. The way to destroy all rules, he explained, was to focus on the idea of the exception. A Nazi leader outmaneuvers his opponents by manufacturing a general conviction that the present moment is exceptional, and then transforming that state of exception into a permanent emergency. Citizens then trade real freedom for fake safety.
Note the use of so many fake “invasions” cited by Trump to justify his actions. He also uses the heretofore exceptional use of the unilateral imposition of tariffs by the president to impose a kaleidoscope of tariff rules. All directly out of the fascist playbook.
Cybersecurity experts emphasize the threats posed to hard infrastructure (e.g., shutting down a nation’s electrical grid), when—in truth—those posed to our human infrastructure (i.e., social cohesion) are far greater.
This insight becomes more apparent daily.
Any nation’s transition from a younger population to an older one creates opportunity for deep integration with the global economy. But even in such success, the social costs are daunting.
The U.S. isn’t in the state of demographic collapse that so many other nations are experiencing: China, Japan, Korea, Russia, much of Europe, and so on. The secret power of the U.S. isn’t a higher birthrate, but immigration. So why is Trump attempting (and succeeding) in blowing up the global economy? Why is he so opposed the the global integration that can now benefit the U.S., even if it’s only been a mixed blessing in the past? And why is he expelling our demographic advantage?
The Origins of Totalitarianism
It is true, ascendancy of the secret police over the military apparatus is the hallmark of many tyrannies, and not only the totalitarian; however, in the case of totalitarian government the preponderance of the police not merely answers the need for suppressing the population at home but fits the ideological claim to global rule.
Isn’t this exactly what’s happening with ICE, now set to expand exponentially? Doesn’t this scare you, more masked individuals roaming the streets kidnapping whomever they please with impunity?
The Origins of Totalitarianism
Hobbes liberates those who are excluded from society—the unsuccessful, the unfortunate, the criminal—from every obligation toward society and state if the state does not take care of them. They may give free rein to their desire for power and are told to take advantage of their elemental ability to kill, thus restoring that natural equality which society conceals only for the sake of expediency. Hobbes foresees and justifies the social outcasts’ organization into a gang of murderers as a logical outcome of the bourgeoisie’s moral philosophy.
Is this what the current regime is seeking to do, cut out a wide swath of those living in the U.S. from participating in society? In denigrating those who are powerless due to birth or poverty? Are we aiming toward a society consisting of the oligarchs and the political elite that they support, the masses, and the excluded (immigrants, the poor, and criminals, other than the president, who is granted immunity from prosecution for his criminal acts?
The transformation of psychoanalysis into a cult of personal health and fulfillment, which occurred more rapidly and went further in America than anywhere else, had already been foreshadowed in Europe, in the early rebellions led by Alfred Adler and Carl Jung. Adler divested Freud’s theories of their sexual content, reinterpreting libido as the “will-to-power.” The “inferiority complex,” not the Oedipus complex, underlay all human actions. The struggle to overcome feelings of inferiority, to attain the “masculine ideal” of “security and conquest,” was the “fundamental fact of human development.” Adler’s stress on interpersonal relations and competition, his social democratic sympathy with the downtrodden, and his identification of the will-to-power with the striving for moral perfection appealed to many Americans.
Populists inherited from earlier political traditions, liberal as well as republican, the principle that property ownership and the personal independence it confers are absolutely essential preconditions of citizenship. In the nineteenth century, the validity of this principle was still widely acknowledged, both in England and in the United States. What was not widely acknowledged was that it no longer corresponded to social practice. Most people—including, regrettably, most members of the “producing classes”—“clung to the idea that wage labor functioned as a temporary incubator,” as Fink puts it, “conditioning the hard-working young man to the qualities necessary to rise to independent status.” Those whom it is appropriate to call populists, on the other hand, looked the facts in the face and decided that the substance of proprietorship could be restored only through the agency of farmers’ and artisans’ cooperatives.
Greek religion was polytheistic; the Greek ‘philosophers’ from Thales onwards almost uniformly preached a monotheistic religion, and in many cases did so in conscious opposition to the current beliefs and institutions of their time. It would hardly be an exaggeration if one should describe the Greek ‘philosophers’ as a dissenting and sometimes persecuted sect of monotheists in a polytheistic society.
Sadly, we grown-ups can’t help these shameful desires. To feel proud of one’s children—this is the drug that every parent hungers after. Only when the kids start to disappoint our expectations, as inevitably happens, do we settle for wanting them to be merely happy.