A Carnival of Destruction
“The line between brave and foolhardy is vanishingly thin, and Donald Trump weaves across it daily. Step on one side, land on Elon Musk. Step on the other, land the nation with Matt Gaetz.” The writer is Kimberley Strassel who is, on the one hand, clearly right about Trump’s propensity to stray across the line. At the same time, Strassel should hardly be surprised by Donald Trump’s habit of eviscerating the line between bold and brazen. The question is, why do intellectuals and elites like Strassel and Musk continue to hope or to expect that Trump is one of them, a brilliant and daring reformer out to make the country great again through at times daring action. They are unwilling to see that Trump is rather a gangster, criminal, and thug who demands loyalty over either creativity or intelligence.
At the end of her discussion of the “Temporary Alliance Between the Mob and the Elite,” Hannah Arendt argues that once movements seize power they throw off those in the elite who had supported them. All intellectuals and all creative people can support movements before they take power because they are swept up in the power of destruction that movements bring to life. Mass movements are inspired by a hatred of the state. They take aim at corruption and promise to ransack the privileges of those in power. Such a frenzy of destruction is attractive to creative and intellectual elites. But once the totalitarian leader takes power, “Intellectual, spiritual, and artistic initiative is as dangerous to totalitarianism as the gangster initiative of the mob, and both are more dangerous than mere political opposition.” Since total domination does not allow for “free initiative in any field of life,” it must aim to eliminate “any activity that is not entirely predictable.” It is for this reason that “Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”
It is hard not to think about the nominations of Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard, and Pete Hegseth after reading Arendt’s insight into the way intellectuals are sacrificed for acolytes once movements gain power. In a footnote to that line, Arendt offers the cautionary example of the great German jurist Carl Schmitt. Schmitt was a brilliant critic of the paradoxes of liberalism and a defender of authoritarian government. He was a central figure in the rise of the Nazi legal bureaucracy through the mid 1930s, but then was replaced “by the Nazi’s own brand of political and legal theorists, such as Hans Frank, the later governor of Poland.” We might also think of Martin Heidegger, Arendt’s teacher and lover, who joined the Nazi Party in 1932 and lasted less than one year as rector of Freiburg University before he was relieved of his teaching duties. What intellectual supporters of totalitarianism never learned was that one cannot embrace the totalitarian order by accident. In the words of the SS leader: “”Above and beyond the willingness to serve stands the unrelenting necessity of selection that knows neither extenuating circumstances nor clemency.”
Perhaps one of the most under-acknowledged elements of mass movements identified by Arendt is the rise to political and social power of a corrupt business and governing class as well as a class of intellectuals that find corruption funny rather than outrageous. Arendt describes the original reception in 1928 Berlin of Berthold Brecht’s Three Penny Opera:
Brecht’s Jeremiah Peachum is a businessman who organizes the beggars of London and takes a cut of their income. Peachum sees himself as a respectable businessman, compared to the gangster Mack the Knife, who marries Peachum’s daughter. And the Chief of Police is on the take. Brecht hoped to shock by showing the disappearing lines separating respectable professionals and gangsters; instead, Arendt writes, his satirical portrayal of corruption in Weimar society yielded glee.
Arendt is scathing in describing the attraction Brecht’s satire held for the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie suffered under the burden of hypocrisy. They had to maintain their respectability while also winning in the hard-nosed world of business. Brecht’s satirical presentation of the immoral business elite was a release; the applause showed that the German bourgeoisie “could no longer be shocked; it welcomed the exposure of its hidden philosophy.”
It is a testament to the extraordinary scope of The Origins of Totalitarianism that Arendt reveals the hidden philosophy of the bourgeoisie 200 pages earlier in a discussion of Thomas Hobbes, “the only great philosopher to whom the bourgeoisie can rightly and exclusively lay claim.” Boiled down to its essentials, the Hobbesian philosophy of the bourgeoisie is simple: “if man is actually driven by nothing but his individual interests, desire for power must be the fundamental passion of man.” All limits — laws and morals — are bothersome restrictions on the human drive to acquire power.
Hobbes’ idea of man as a power-seeking being finally emerged as reality in the 1870s. In the wake of two deep depressions, markets at home dried up. To keep the engine of the economy going, bourgeois businessmen needed new markets. The answer was imperialism. The bourgeoisie — which had always been apolitical, preferring to focus on business instead of politics — allied itself with governments to secure military backing for its imperialist ventures. In other words, the bourgeoisie entered politics when they needed political support for their imperialist pursuit of money and power.
What Arendt calls the “political emancipation of the bourgeoisie” is the demand that state power secure private investments. It is one thing to make foreign investments; but the bourgeoisie did not want to take risks in their imperialist escapades. “Only when they demanded government protection of their investments [...] did [the bourgeois business class] re-enter the life of the nation.” This led to the rise of a particularly business-oriented vision of “political institutions exclusively as an instrument for the protection of individual property.” In Arendt’s telling, the bourgeoisie’s entry into politics brought with it the brutally cynical claim that politics was about naked power and money.
The naked pursuit of power contradicts the respectability that businessmen desire. Arendt argues that the bourgeois need to accumulate power had long been hidden “by nobler traditions” of respectability and by “that blessed hypocrisy which [Francois de] La Rochefoucauld called the compliment vice pays to virtue.” But in the late 19th century traditional values had evaporated and the “old truths [...] had become pious banalities.” The pretense of respectability became itself a vice, leading “everyone to discard the uncomfortable mask of hypocrisy and to accept openly the standards of the mob.” For Arendt, the reception of Brecht’s play makes manifest the embrace by the business and government elite of mob standards.
Even more than the bourgeoisie, it is the elite’s reaction to the exposure of hypocrisy that draws Arendt’s contempt. The cultural embrace of vulgar satire in the 1920s and 1930s, Arendt writes, is confirmation of a “cynical dismissal of respected standards and accepted theories”; the rise of vulgar satire in Weimar Germany — and in our own time — carries with it a “frank admission of the worst and a disregard for all pretenses which were easily mistaken for courage.” In the normalization and comic internalization of “mob attitudes and convictions,” what Arendt calls vulgar satire embraces the pseudo-honesty apparent in contemporary figures from Milo Yiannoppolous to President Trump, who abandon respectability in the name of fighting hypocrisy. It is hard not to wonder what Arendt would think of the wild success of The Sopranos, House of Cards, and The Daily Show — shows in which the self-proclaimed elite celebrate and laugh at the exposure of the obvious hypocrisy of businessmen who are gangsters and politicians who are businessmen.
The appeal that totalitarianism and fascism can hold for the elite is its claim that society is rotten to the core. It is easy to criticize the excessive nihilist fantasies that respond to the moral corruption of business and government with violent outbursts of “drain the swamp” and “dismantle the system.” We need, Arendt reminds us, to remember “how justified disgust can be in a society wholly permeated with the ideological outlook and moral standards of the bourgeoisie.” One reason that Elon Musk and President Trump are so popular is that their unmasking of political and cultural corruption has a grain of truth.
What the unmaskers too often forget is that every one of us wears a mask that conceals a dark cabinet of hidden vices behind our public personas. A world populated by people unmasked, their secrets exposed, would be one where all immorality is shameless and all claims to respectability are hypocritical. But shame and hypocrisy are essential human drives. The rage against hypocrisy is a rage against civilized life. The danger in mass movements is that the elite’s justified moral disgust at hypocrisy is translated into a carnival of destruction that is just so much fun.