| Depends on how you define “glacial” - America hadn’t been a true democracy long, we only passed the 19th Amendment in 1920, and most ppl wouldn’t define an election where half the population is ineligible as democratic. I first discovered this piece in 2016, in the throes of a deep depression at seeing how the sausage is made on K Street. These two paragraphs are what grabbed me most, as someone who began to form memories as the USSR crumbled: >Mr. A has a life that is established according to a certain form of personal behavior. Although he has no money, his unostentatious distinction and education have always assured him a position. He has never been engaged in sharp competition. He is a free man. I doubt whether ever in his life he has done anything he did not want to do or anything that was against his code. Nazism wouldn’t fit in with his standards and he has never become accustomed to making concessions. >Mr. B has risen beyond his real abilities by virtue of health, good looks, and being a good mixer. He married for money and he has done lots of other things for money. His code is not his own; it is that of his class—no worse, no better, He fits easily into whatever pattern is successful. That is his sole measure of value—success. Nazism as a minority movement would not attract him. As a movement likely to attain power, it would. The real issue IMO is that history is oddly cyclical - probably due to mass media overfocusing on body counts like those in Hitler’s Germany rather than regimes like the GDR which had fax machines, modems, and a secret police who made the Gestapo look like amateurs. We forget how close in history totalitarianism is, partly because of measures like “no child left behind” that ensure kids today won’t have the free time to develop true critical thinking skills. (By accident or design? I couldn’t possibly comment.) - Greg |
Mr. A reminds me of le Guin's Dispossessed, in which an anarchist physicist is surprised (and dismayed) to find his paleo-aristo colleague is one of the few people on his own planet who behaves in a manner our anarchist protagonist would consider free.
Mr. B reminds me of a character from one of the (non-Nazi) Mitford sisters' novels, who did indeed marry for status, just as his spouse married for industry and elbows. Not all Daisy's spurn their Gatsby's.
(and, as the USSR crumbled, should it surprise us that the Gorbi's would be crowded out by Mr. B's? Единая Россия has a strange adjective ["Indivisible"] for a party that claims to be running an антифашистская спецоперация, but as their "presidential debates" seem to have been put on mainly to mock the format, I'm not sure if the irony is entirely unintentional)
I recently learned (from HN?) that Microsoft was already incorporated while Spain was still fascist (by a few months...but still!) and I had an impression, when visiting this century, that discussing Dali was welcome, but discussing the fate of the Republic was a bit "too soon".
[as to the antepenultimate paragraph: I had guessed the young Pound might've been in the never Nazi camp, but time and chance and bitterness indeed led the elder Pound right to Mussolini.]