I thought about this for a moment, trying to figure out what kind of profound point you were trying to make, then realized it was literally true. Sorry, fixed.
> Somewhere in the ocean hundreds of miles north of the Shirerithian mainland there is a mountainous arctic island upon which thrives an emergent oracular techno-theocracy that calls itself the Shining Garden of Raikoth. Its priests wear a silver spiral around their necks as a sign of their dedication, and in solidarity with them I too wear the spiral. But that is as far as it goes. No deity-worshipping. No speaking to myself in constructed languages. Just the spiral.
Somehow despite being a big fan of Scott's writing and a former Duke and Minister of Shireroth myself, I had never read this post before now. Thank you for finding it.
Aside—this quote aged well: "I think everyone should have the media perform a hatchet job on them at least once."
> A shaken Pendie tells Beek what has happened. “There was something in the room that made me shiver.” She reminds Beek that from the time of the accident they both felt that the President was really two men but she just became aware of a third being. She asks, “What if God sent the Angel Gabriel to do for Judd Hammond what he did for Daniel?” Beek says he thought that Gabriel was a messenger of wrath, and she replies that to some he was a messenger of revelations. “Hmmmm,” Beek muses, “Gabriel over the White House.”
Speaking of Archangels and abandoned plot lines: has anyone figured out what happened to Gabriel after Uriel invented his machine? He doesn't appear in the great battle in the end and it wasn't clear to me what was his metaphorical role while the machine was working.
I recently watched some early Marilyn Monroe movies (which were marketed as Marilyn Monroe movies but actually contained about 3mn of screentime Frome her...). Average movies from that era seemed pretty bad as compared to nowadays.
Anyway, I would recommend "Let's make it legal" which is truly awful, and also inadvertently is the best justification for feminism I've ever seen, and for anyone that actually wants to enjoy themselves, "As young as you feel" which has the same populist feel without the overt fascism, and is at least a 6.5/10. I think Scott would definitely enjoy that last one (if he likes exploring old politics that is weird from a modern point of view, and also likes old schlocky movies), I recommend it thoroughly!
So...any idea if the 1993 movie "Dave" was at all connected or inspired by this? I assume there have been lots of old movies about presidents that I never heard of, but the parallels seem eerily similar. Mediocre president falls ill/dies, and a doppelganger comes in, and through sheer force of will saves the country?
Both movies share an underlying contempt for expertise and trying to really solve problems by talking to people and working on practical solutions. In "Dave", the fake president literally invites his friend in who runs a business and asks him to redesign the federal budget. Like the federal government is just a real big corporation whose only obligation is to balance its books.
I guess this is one of the defining features of fascism, right? That laws and checks and balances are for suckers, and the fundamental problem with government is that the man (inevitably) at the top just lacks the guts to tell the truth and fight for the common man. I've not watched many movies from the 30s or 40s but I watched Mr Smith Goes to Washington and it's kind of the same message. Everyone in the machine is evil and only a single man of pure heart with no obligations or prior taint of governing can fix things.
Came to mention Dave, which was a family favorite (despite the more-obvious-in-hindsite Democrat-affilliation) because all politicians are corrupt bastards (except Ben Kingsley).
OMG, I completely forgot that Ben Kingsley was in Dave.
Frank Langella was wonderfully oily there. He's such a good bad guy.
And I didn't realize that Kevin Dunn from Veep was in that too. An example of a fun film with great actors that I only realized has a terrible message way in hindsight.
Glad someone brought up Dave -- there is also Of Thee I Sing, a near-contemporary of Gabriel Over the White House that is a lot more upbeat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Thee_I_Sing
> In "Dave", the fake president literally invites his friend in who runs a business and asks him to redesign the federal budget.
I'm not going to look it up, but I vaguely recall the friend looking like Fred Willard (RIP) and saying "if I ran my business like this I'd be in jail."
As context for 1993, remember that everyone was really concerned about the budget, because Ross Perot.
Reading that review made me think of your comment about how bad the average older movie was. It's not just the average movie --- the movie reviews are bad too (seriously, read that link, it's *awful*). In fact, I get the sense that modern news in general is far higher-quality, writing rise, than it was 100 years ago.
Is this the case for all media? We have a sort of pseudo-worship of certain older books as being amazingly written and full of timeless wisdom. Is that just the extreme tail of a very wide distribution with a lower median than today's?
The writing of that so-called "review" is incredibly bad! Something like a 6th grade book review from a kid who forgot you were supposed to do more than recount the events of the plot.
I hate to believe that the NYT has improved over the last century, but...
To be fair, when I wrote book reviews in 6th grade... that's totally *exactly* what I did. A bad recounting of the events of the plot, designed to be the minimum length I thought I could get away with.
Part of the problem was that I didn't understand why anyone would ever read a book/movie review. We were never shown a good book review, just told "write a book review" and when I asked what that was, "well it sort of has a summary of the book...".
(This comments serves a dual purpose as a test of if my new avatar shows up. Exciting times!)
I've always assumed that the purpose of a grade-school book report was to provide evidence that you actually read the book, and to get some writing practice in. A plot synopsis works fine for those purposes.
This reminds me of something I've noticed many times.
The worst hand-to-hand combat in media from today is better-choreographed than the best fist fight in movies or tv shows from 20+ years ago. (Ok, maybe not literally best or literally worst, but that gets the idea across)
Like, even a fight from a TV show or a movie from nowadays that doesn't have fighting as part of it's reason to exist seems choreographed pretty well compared to something from 50 years ago.
Yeah, a couple years ago I tried to rewatch Xena, and the combat scenes were terrible compared to modern shows. Blatant use of cutaways to obscure actual blows being exchanged, moves that contradict basic physics, use of cheap sound effects that sometimes don't match the onscreen action, I could go on. I can't blame Lucy Lawless, it's clear she had the ability and skills to do a good fight scene, but instead they have her swing a sword around, do some acrobatic moves, and stitch it together in post production.
I've noticed the same thing with languages. It used to be that in most movies, foreign people would speak English with an accent, or speak total gibberish, but these days, they usually at least attempt to speak the relevant foreign language, or (for fantasy) even tend to attempt to make something like a conlang!
Maybe the conclusion is just that we're all absurdly richer now (in a real sense, not just nominally), and have way more time to devote to things that 100 years ago would have been a total waste. Like constructing elaborate conlangs, or perfecting choreography, or writing book reviews that are more entertaining than the original books.
It might also be that we are just richer in the sense of having a larger Netflix library to browse than we used to have. New things just have a higher bar to meet, because everyone still has all the old stuff available to view - especially now that Netflix (and competitors) give us access to a streaming library of all the old stuff.
The old stuff isn't uniformly bad. It's just that high-quality fight choreography used to be the domain of a few specialist actors like Bruce Lee and Errol Flynn. Nowadays, thanks in large part to those actors, a basic appreciation for martial arts has permeated American culture, so viewer expectations are higher and non-specialist actors have had to up their game to meet them. Before that appreciation spread, most contemporary viewers of those old, bad fight scenes really didn't have a clue how unrealistic they were.
Here's two of those specialist actors in 1940 putting on a scene that's absolutely top-notch even by modern standards: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_hlyLvlqy8. The only thing that really dates it is the Foley work: swords don't *sound* like that.
I think – based on some YouTube videos I vaguely recollect, by 'historical martial arts enthusiasts' (amateur historians), that the actual blades they used for filming are more like Olympic fencing swords (foils?) than any historical blade someone would use in a serious melee.
It's the expectation of the audience: they've been accustomed to swords sounding like banging pots together so that it was it is *supposed* to sound like (same with sound in a vacuum and lens flare for SF movies). Stage fencing is also deliberately a lot flashier than real or competitive fencing, audiences want big showy moves rather than two touches and the bout is over.
Peter Morwood (the SF writer) has a good selection of posts about movie swordfights on his Tumblr, as well as a general really good overall coverage of arms and armour if you want to go searching in the tags: https://petermorwood.tumblr.com/search/swords+on+screen
Good stage fencing contains all the same elements as the historical style being imitated, but exaggerated and slowed down, or else the audience won't be able to see what's going on. I used to be a fencer and I enjoy watching it in-person, but when it's on television at the Olympics I don't bother tuning in, because in a 30fps broadcast most of the action is lost between frames. It's *that* fast.
Meh.... we ain't seen nothing yet. To get decent hand-to-hand combat, 60hz needs to die already [I know that 30hz is still around, but it's dead to me].
120hz and above and you can actually follow quick movements much better.
"The moral of his too easy triumph is perhaps insidiously false ; for it could be argued that the world cannot be regenerated without alterations in capitalistic society far more radical than are indicated here."
I can't find too many information about The Bookman but it doesn't seem to be radically either on the socialist left or fascist right (Chesterton, Yeats and Beckett all published some pieces in it), so this was probably a fairly mainstream sentiment.
> We have a sort of pseudo-worship of certain older books as being amazingly written and full of timeless wisdom. Is that just the extreme tail of a very wide distribution with a lower median than today's?
IMO it's just that. Realistically, there weren't many people existing in the past. And vast majority of them didn't count, culturally, on an individual level - serfs for example.
So amount of people who even were in the position to be artists or intellectuals of any kind was just tiny. Then there's filter of will and talent. They didn't have as much knowledge and past masterpieces to learn from. Tools were more crap where it counted.
Also, audience - feedback was certainly poorer. And, lastly, works were way more fragile. Smaller audience, so more easily forgotten. Not copied very much - and obviously, mostly it was impossible to copy losslessly. And some couldn't even be preserved - theater, musical performances and so on.
It all multiplies together. Claiming 'culture' of the past was great while today it's crap is _outrageously_ wrong, thoughtless. And usually not coupled with walking the walk and actually consuming it over contemporary stuff.
Realistically, more quality-weighted culture is being produced every day in 2020s worldwide than in some of the past centuries. Or something along these lines.
And we're on the brink of AI-assisted or wholly synthetic culture - with coinciding work automation in general. Once that gets going, it probably wouldn't even make sense to speak about 'quantity' of quality culture. Or if it would, the difference between today and this future will be larger than difference between deep past and today.
One more thing, about "Realistically, there weren't many people existing in the past" - it still seems completely weird to me, but apparently amount of humans ever existing to this point was somewhere along 100 billion. Which seems just... unintuitively low compared to amount of humans alive at the present moment.
Thing is Hoover was right: FDR did act in an unprecedented manner, albeit with the support of Congress. But the vast majority of his 1933-37 program was blatantly unconstitutional and tremendously intrusive (on the theory that the free market had created too much competition and thus the NRA was needed to dictate prices and production top down). The Supreme Court struck down most of the abusive agenda, FDR threatened them with packing the court, and they created a whole new constitutional jurisprudence to permit broad expansion of federal power so that FDR wouldn’t go after them. Read Amity Shlaes’s The Forgotten Man or her comic on Schecter Poultry.
I don't think this is correct though. First on the narrow point: from 1933-1936, the Supreme Court kept striking down New Deal programs by 5-4 votes. In 1937, Justice Owen Roberts switched sides and the court stopped overturning things. It was widely believed that Roberts did so in response to the court-packing plan but it is now pretty widely accepted that he actually switched sides before that (discussion of timeline here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_switch_in_time_that_saved_nine)
On the broader view, if the public mood was "Gabriel over the White House" and what FDR actually did was pass popular relief and regulatory programs with the support of congressional supermajorities, he deserves credit for not declaring martial law or whatever.
Yeah, I didn't intend to juxtapose this with the vetocracy post but I think it makes a great contrast. More and more necessary stuff builds up behind the veto chokepoints until people are so angry that you get a strongman who pushes things through by fiat. FDR is probably the best-case scenario, Hitler/Stalin the worst.
This might come off as slightly off-topic here, but I feel it's somewhat relevant (and additionally it's relevant to your old posts about disconnect of policy and public opinion): do you ever plan to respond / engage with Moldbug's new writing (on graymirror substack)? I'm particularly interested in what do you think about "descriptive constitution of the modern regime" post.
Really? The show? The books do have some, with Daenerys trying to quell insurrections by elites in that city she conquered, but I don't think there's much about the "point of view" of her supporters.
The reader usually *occupies* the point of view of her supporter, until the truth about her nature becomes clear far too late. (I think similar things go on with Tyrion and Arya too, but the show played them too one-sidedly good to prove me right about what the books are intending.)
I don't remember her nature becoming 'clear' exactly (in the books). It was definitely becoming _clearer_, but IIRC it was still pretty ambiguous. (I remember the last book in particularly seeming very 'narratively diffuse' as if the plot simply sublimated into trivia.)
Come to think of it, I've always wanted to see a shootout between blocky 1930s tanks under the command of the President's personal secretary and fashionable gangsters holed up in a ritzy Prohibition-Era warehouse.
Good question. What's the material difference between being an archangel, and being possessed by an archangel?
Like, archangels are presumably non-corporeal beings to begin with, so if I assert "this frog is an archangel", surely it means exactly the same thing as "this frog's body is being possessed by an archangel", right?
Possession suggests an impermanent state and independent being of both possessor and possessed before and after the possession. If FDR had been possessed by an archangel, there would still be a meaningful distinction to draw between the archangel and FDR as entities with their own desires and decision-making processes. If FDR were an archangel in fee simple, there would not be a meaningful distinction between the two, as there would be no possessing angel and no host, but simply one being.
It depends on how possession works. In one extreme, the archangel completely destroys or suppresses FDR's personality. In the other extreme, FDR and the archangel blend together seamlessly into a new entity, Kalashtar-style. Somewhere in the middle, both personalities share the body as distinct entities, and are able to communicate and/or negotiate on policy.
I'd kind like to have there be a whole bunch of "If I were in charge" movies made so that people would have a better chance of seeing how much it's all fantasy, but it probably wouldn't work. It would probably just reinforce particular fantasies.
I get the attraction , up to a point- benevolent dictators don't have to do paperwork!- but it seems to go way way beyond that.
Our appetite for simplistic Manichean problems which don't require tradeoffs or compromise or even *careful thought* seems really big now. On some level, we really want it to just. be. simple.
(Both 'weirdly' in my first paragraph and the claim about careful thought in the last one run the risk of being interpreted as boo lights; I intend both denotatively. The initial attraction isn't weird in itself, but it's an order of magnitude stronger than it seems like it should be, and so much harder to talk people out of even if you happen to have great arguments. The lack of careful thought also seems kind of psychologically important- like a drive not just to singlehandedly fix things, but to do it in a way intelligible to System 1.)
I'm curious if this is a result of the complicated, non-ancestral modern world, or if (30%?) of people are always like this and I'm just wired to find it surprising.
I know I'm very very late to this, but I kinda suspect that the equivalent thing nowadays would be alt-history HOI4 mods like "The New Order" or "The Fire Rises" or "Kaiserreich". Living demonstrations of the value of free speech, both because they're very good mods with tons of artistic value, but also because they demonstrate the principle "Sometimes the fastest way to show that someone is crazy is to let them speak up". (A similar thing applies to Trump's tariff insanity; there's no faster way to see the problem with it then seeing it happen.)
The Amazon page is full of five-stars reviews declaring sentiments like "Wow, this movie really holds up! We still need a president like this!" and I think I'm going to close this tab and go read more about the new Mars rover in hopes of counteracting the misanthropic mood this is putting me in.
About halfway through reading this, I was convinced you were doing one of your bait-and-switch-to-make-a-point things and the movie was actually Nazi or Stalinist propaganda or something. But no, this is an actual thing that happened. In America. Wow.
And you know, for all the havering over "Trump was a fascist dictator", this movie shows that he didn't get near what the Populist Strongman fantasy could imagine.
I was curious about the tanks, so I googled, and learned that there is something called the Internet Movie Firearms Database, which lists all the weapons used in this and presumably many other movies. http://www.imfdb.org/wiki/Gabriel_Over_the_White_House Anyway, those aren't tanks. They are extremely unconvincing armored cars. You need treads to be a tank.
I think Scott mis-remebers, contradicts himself and is plain wrong here: "I was struck by his [Hoover's] theory that FDR was part of the same phenomenon as Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin - the US version of a worldwide longing for a fascist strongman who could come in and solve everything." This is wrong, Stalin could not be the result of Russians "longing for a fascist strongman": he inherited the dictatorship from Lenin, who in 1917 overturned the government by other revolutionary socialists from the left running on the platform of more revolution and democracy.
In his review of the book about Hoover Scott wrote thusly about Hoover's theories: "FDR came from the same cloth as Hitler and Stalin. The miseries of the Great Depression, the centralizing tendencies of the age, the rise of mass media, and the collapse of republican virtue were combining all around the world in a monstrous reaction against the cause of liberty." Not a word about "longing for a fascist strongman". So, the latter Scott contradicts the earlier Scott.
Te earlier Scott is also wrong. What republican virtue in Germany, which was a republic for only 17 years before Hitler, or Russia, which was a republic for less than a year? But at least he is less wrong.
I don't think talking about centralizing tendencies, mass media, and the collapse of republican virtue leading to Hitler and Stalin contradicts talking about the longing a fascist strongman. They're two different ways of describing the same thing.
(Stalin was of course communist, which is ideologically different from fascist, but there was the same vibe of "if we centralize all power in a single amazing person who perfectly represents our nation, he can Get Things Done". I am not a historian and may be misreading this.)
From around Prohibition (perhaps earlier) until around 1990, every major city had one or several crime lords whose identity was known to the public but who was often very hard to take down. It must have been extremely frustrating, both on the societal level and the individual level. Some entity can just demand money from your business or menace you and if you go to the cops you probably get killed. And this is just how things are.
It creates an understandable popular impulse: "we all know that Al Capone/John Gotti/Whitey Bulger is an archcriminal. Can't we like, just shoot him?" And it spawned a cinematic desire for vigilantes and Batmans and Boondock Saints and apparently presidential aids leading firing squads in front of the Statue of Liberty. This movie is weird in that congress can just pass an unemployment relief bill without martial law, but the problem of organized crime was really hard to solve and looking back perhaps it's lucky we didn't have some American Duterte.
They always talk about RICO as the law that gets rid of the mafia. I just learned the other day that this law was from 1970, rather than 1930 or so, as I had always expected. I guess that might be relevant? (And one more datapoint for the "everything changed in 1970" theory.)
Yeah, clearly from 1970 - 1990 the influence of the literal mafia, and the influence of organized crime over legitimate business in general, declined a lot. I think everyone agrees RICO is some of that.
I've never really studied this, but I'd offer two more trends. Organized crime derived a lot of low-risk money from illegal lotteries ("the numbers racket"), gambling/sports betting, and loansharking. These were lucrative and the criminal penalties were pretty light. They've been peacefully supplanted by state lotteries, various legal gambling options that didn't exist 50 years ago, and credit cards/payday loans. Illegal drugs are still a lucrative thing, but the criminal penalties are high enough that criminals who get caught will often agree to testify against their bosses, which is destructive to American-based crime hierarchies. Likewise, part of what RICO did was make punishments harsh enough to inspire defections. Striking combination of libertarian and non-libertarian stuff in this paragraph.
Also, my impression is that there really has been a dramatic reduction in police corruption. You read about policing in the era of Serpico or William R. Phillips and it's just amazing, every cop is on the take. Somehow there was a culture change and corrupt cops became the exception. With all the talk of policing these days you'd think you'd read more about this (did the Knapp Commission recommendations work? What happened outside NY?). I have no idea. But corrupt police are important for protecting organized crime, and policing got cleaner.
Wow, I had never thought about the state lottery <-> mafia-breaking connection before. Is there any history that suggests that creating them was a deliberate anti-mafia tactic? That might be the first thing that makes me feel like they're not 100% gross.
Okay, the alderman above is definitely John Powers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Powers_(alderman) and I should not be falling for the nostalgic romanticisation of the time because this is about real violence and killing but dash it all:
"John Powers (February 15, 1852 – May 19, 1930) served as an alderman in Chicago, Illinois (1888-1903, 1904–1927) for the Democratic Party. He was known as Johnny De Pow by his constituents. Along with Bathhouse John Coughlin and Hinky Dink Kenna, Powers was considered one of the leaders of the "Gray Wolves" of Chicago politics".
Johnny De Pow, Bathhouse John, and Hinky Dink Kenna, and those aren't even the criminals (technically) 😁
Yeah, in that linked project I mention above, Chicago was breath-takingly corrupt. The entire city government was rotten, and murder was just another tool in the election campaign box:
"Big Bill" Thompson, two-term mayor of Chicago during the period of prime expansion of Capone's empire, provides a perfect example of political corruption operating at even the highest levels of the city. Thompson himself had connections to the Capone ring--one of his best friends was "Big Jim" Colosimo, head Chicago gangster at the time Capone moved to the city. Colosimo was Chicago's "prostitution czar" and, as we have noted in our Capone Biography, Big Jim was promoted to a police precinct captain by Thompson after swinging a number of voters to Thompson's side (Allsop, 204). As Prohibition historian Kenneth Allsop writes, "Without stretching the logical sequence too far, to Thompson may be attributed Capone's eventual terrorization of Chicago, for it was to protect the new prosperity conferred upon him by the Thompson ring that Colosimo imported Torrio, who in turn imported Capone" (Allsop, 204). Thompson later secured a friend in Congressman Fred Lundin, as corrupt a politician as Thompson himself. The two even tried to take over the city's judiciary, angered by the fact that some judges refused payoffs. The plan failed, however, when they were exposed by the press.
In a few instances, Thompson even turned to violence as a means to impose his political will. Democratic Alderman John Waters, who had controlled the 19th Ward since 1888, decided to run again in 1924. Mayor Thompson, however, had a new agenda: the election of Anthony D'Andrea, a notorious and well-known pimp, into the position. A bomb was thrown into Powers' house, but Powers and his family were unharmed. Powers retaliated with a bomb of his own, thrown by his men into a meeting of D'Andrea's supporters. Powers eventually won the election, but the violence didn't stop there. D'Andrea's men walked the streets with sawed-off shotguns, searching for Powers' people. Death threats were sent to Powers' family. Eventually, Powers struck the final blow--D'Andrea was killed later that year. Throughout all of this, there was no police intervention in any of the incidents, and federal investigation was deferred constantly (Allsop, 208). The cops, clearly, were just as crooked as the politicians, who were just as crooked as the mob. Indeed, during this period, the three seemed to form an interpenetrating web of crime."
Chandler's 1940 novel "Farewell, My Lovely" has a lot of general police corruption (one cop is noted as standing out for being "cunning but honest") and Bay City in the novel is another rotten town with the cops being corrupt and letting crime operate. Seemingly it is based on a real California city:
"Chandler used recognizable locations in Los Angeles as settings, but he created the fictional town of Bay City as a stand-in for Santa Monica, known for its widespread corruption in city government during the Great Depression."
Chandler does have Bay City getting an overdue clean-up:
"As for Brunette, you can't get anything on a guy like Brunette. They'll have him before the Grand Jury and he'll refuse to say anything, on his constitutional rights. He doesn't have to bother about his reputation. But there's a nice shakeup here in Bay City. The Chief has been canned and half the detectives have been reduced to acting patrolmen, and a very nice guy named Red Norgaard, who helped me get on the Montecito, has got his job back. The mayor is doing all this, changing his pants hourly while the crisis lasts."
"Do you have to say things like that?"
"The Shakespearean touch. Let's go riding. After we've had another drink."
Well, if I believe the Wikipedia article, (a) there is scholarly debate as to whether Prohibition did indeed meaningfully create a surge of crime and gang lords (b) bootlegging was a side-operation rather than a mainstay so when that went away the gangs just fell back on the old reliables (c) people had really awesome names back then:
"Opponents of prohibition were fond of claiming that the Great Experiment had created a gangster element that had unleashed a "crime wave" on a hapless America. The WONPR's Mrs. Coffin Van Rensselaer, for instance, insisted in 1932 that "the alarming crime wave, which had been piling up to unprecedented height" was a legacy of prohibition. But prohibition can hardly be held responsible for inventing crime, and while supplying illegal liquor proved to be lucrative, it was only an additional source of income to the more traditional criminal activities of gambling, loan sharking, racketeering, and prostitution. The notion of the prohibition-induced crime wave, despite its popularity during the 1920s, cannot be substantiated with any accuracy, because of the inadequacy of records kept by local police departments."
The WONPR is the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform and Mrs Van Renssalaer was née Lolita Coffin:
"A fashionable wedding on Staten Island, next month, will be that of Miss Lolita Coffin, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Wilbur Coffin of New Brighton, to Mr. Lindsay Van Renssalaer"
There's an argument that organised crime and the big ganglords grew out of Prohibition and had their hey-day *after* it since that was when they became organised, and once Prohibition was repealed they moved on to other profitable vices and things like labour racketeering. They learned their trade during Prohibition but became big fish after it, and it was more the 70s than the 30s that saw the decline of big crime. Capone is the one big name of the time but as stated, he was taken down by RICO and it was because of his huge financial interests that this was possible. He was making so much money from a range of criminal activities, and his bribing and buying of politicians and the law was so widespread and blatant, that he was a huge target for exactly this type of take-down. http://umich.edu/~eng217/student_projects/nkazmers/index1.html
One strange thing I learned recently: my [well-known U.S. city] has [synonym for "chiefs"] who reign over certain city blocks. These are not official positions, but they exercise some hard-to-articulate authority.
A friend of mine was trying to buy an empty lot. He was advised that he should consult with the relevant chief, because if he didn't the chief would immediately be outbid in the forthcoming auction. So he did.
The chief explained that he didn't want that particular lot sold, because it had a productive [plant bearing local fruit on it]. My friend said that he would of course keep it there, and allow the chief to have whatever it grew. But the chief didn't trust him, and suggested that he buy property elsewhere.
I have lived here for over a decade and had never heard of this. I asked some natives, and they said: "oh yeah, the chiefs? Everybody knows you don't cross them."
The area in question is somewhat, uh, blighted. Meaning, there are abandoned lots that the city has seized because nobody's paid taxes on them. The city auctions off these lots periodically, and they usually go for the amount of tax owed.
As I understand it, the "chiefs" tend to formally own several lots in their territory, but not all of them. If some outsider tries to buy one of the lots at auction, the chief will outbid the outsider and become the formal owner of the lot.
Also they might break your legs or something? Nobody would tell me what bad thing would happen if you crossed a chief.
I was at one point scouting out possible sites for the small private school we were part of. For one site I was told that it was worth much more with permission from the city to build, which it had for the present plan, and that such permission depended in practice on the approval of the city council member from that part of the city. What you describe sounds like an informal version of the same system.
Ha, not marijuana. This particular chief just happens to really like [local fruit]. So while the anecdote isn't typical, it seems to illustrate a general phenomenon: there are these people who have informal control over certain territories without any official standing. They're not exactly "gangsters," but they're not exactly not either.
I think I like having insider-only posts. This is exactly the sort of fun stuff you'd see on the old livejournal but that Scott'd feel weird about putting in SSC (especially in later years) because it's too minor/niche to be mainstream.
Thanks a lot for answering this. It makes sense now. (I just lost a relative who was born in 1924 and could tell stories about 1930s, so I was thinking that this would be a really strange way to talk about a human.)
>>I was struck by his theory that FDR was part of the same phenomenon as Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin - the US version of a worldwide longing for a fascist strongman who could come in and solve everything.
I don’t understand your use of “fascist” here. Clearly Mussolini and Hitler were fascists. Stalin and FDR might well have been “strongmen” but in what sense were they fascist? Are you just using “fascist” as an intensifier for “strongman”? You can be a bad awful murderous dictator without being a fascist at least according do how I think fascism is usually defined.
FDR and people around him were admirers of Mussolini early on. Whether what they admired was fascism depends on how you define it. I don't think the initial fascists presented it as "set up a dictatorship and beat up anyone who opposes you." It was something closer to "leave the means of production nominally in private hands but have labor and capital work together under government leadership for the general good of the nation." That's close to the policy of the first New Deal, and one can easily see why many people saw it as attractive.
Interesting about FDR admiring Mussolini "early on" - makes me wonder just when that was. I also still wonder about what sort of definition of fascist would apply to FDR and Stalin - I just finished Paxton's book about fascism (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/128540/the-anatomy-of-fascism-by-robert-o-paxton/) and at least with his definitions FDR and Stalin were in no way fascist, no matter how much you might not like either or both of them.
That's the thing with any 'ontology', e.g. 'fascism versus socialism' or whatever – they can all be (kinda) true, and at the same time, even having 'carved reality at very different joints'.
I've always been sympathetic to a more 'totalitarian vs libertarian' framing/ontology and a big reason is I don't see much of a difference between Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia (even down to the horrific genocides). I prefer not-Hell to either fascist-flavored-Hell or communist-socialist-flavored-Hell.
Wolfgang Schivelbusch's <i>Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939</i> (2006) is an interesting little book. It doesn't accuse Roosevelt of fascism but says that there was a fairly common feeling in all three countries that individualism had failed, capitalism had failed, and bourgeois democracy had failed--and that what was necessary was big, strong government led by a big, strong leader.
This can equally be a left-wing populist fantasy as a right-wing one. Strongman president sweeps away the rich, corrupt, fat-cat cronyism politicians and backroom advisors for the sake of the Little Guy? Institutes major government programmes and spending reforms to help the working-class? Do away with armies and instead use the money saved from the maw of the military-industrial complex on other needs? Legalise recreational drugs and so quash crime and gangsterism? The Constitution should be interpreted on "Loose Constructionism" not "Originalist" grounds and if we need to overturn its strictures to implement the policies addressing the social needs of our day, so be it? All you need is a sufficiently charismatic and determined President to bring about Hope And Change? (and if Congress insists on being a roadblock in his way, well, he's got a phone and a pen...)
So yeah, it's very understandable why a lot of people at the time had a yearning for a clear and simple solution to the problems of the time, and a determined, principled guy who had the pragmatism and willpower to push through the necessary changes, no matter if they were left, right, or centre. It's a seductive explanation, much more tolerable than "well, this is just how things shake out, no conspiracy of fat cats, no easy problem with an easy solution" for ordinary people to be told, yet somehow it always seems to be that the way things shake out leave me poorer and you richer. Whether you're Ayn Rand writing about moochers or Woody Guthrie singing This Land Is Your Land https://www.woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/This_Land.htm (and I have a hundred times more sympathy with Woody than with Ayn), there's an identifiable enemy and a workable solution to the problem that is a lot simpler and easier and more successful than real world messiness.
This movie sounds like a great defence of conservatism - not the "send the tanks in to blow up the gangsters" view of conservatism, but the conservatism that says "Wait a minute, you can't just do that. The courts have a right to rule on this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martial_law_in_the_United_States".
The part with the gangster (before the 'riding in on tanks' bit) chimes with my notion of what will happen with drug legalisation: no, the gangsters are not going to throw up their hands and go "well, now that's destroyed our business, we'd better go do something else". Or if they do go "okay, so now we'll switch to growing avocados", that's not necessarily less criminal: https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2020/02/07/avocados-mexican-drug-cartels
Though mostly this got me wondering about the theology of archangelic possession 😁 I don't know why they picked Gabriel, the model here for "interaction with humans" is Raphael from the Book of Tobit (though fair enough, for many Protestant denominations that's a non-canonical book of the Bible). If you're going to consider the work to be done being of a strong quasi-military leadership kind, then surely it should be Michael? Anyway, whichever archangel you pick, they don't possess humans, not even the dead body of one. Appearing in the form of the President who is actually dead is more likely, and the dead body turning up at the end is just tidying up loose ends.
Other people who should not watch this: me, because the bit about battleships sounds absolutely guaranteed to enrage me. The battleship's obsolescence was at least a decade away, and whoever made the movie had clearly listened to Billy Mitchell, which was a mistake. As for radio control, that was reasonably common for target ships at the time, although they were rarely sunk.
And I wonder why nobody thought of disarmament treaties at the time...
Scott is not particularly convinced about death rays, either. Listen, death rays were all the rage once upon a time. Then when we got functioning lasers, this was it, these were the death rays we had been promised! Star Trek phasers here we come!
Except they never really turned out like that. Anyone with more to go on (like "facts" rather than "hazy impressions") want to write about why no military application of the death ray?
Because getting enough energy at a useful range is really hard. We're actually at the point where there are serious plans to take lasers to sea in the next few years, and the prototype on the USS Ponce gave good service a few years ago. This is on my list of topics to cover, and I've done some work, but haven't found the time to do the sort of deep dive into the technical aspects I need to make the post work.
Death rays – lazers (ha) – are hard to do right, and they don't even look cool like they do in the movies. A good laser is basically invisible and anything that _could_ see it is being fried if it manages to do so.
But they're still being developed. I think the practical obstacles have been mostly related to power and something something about getting them to work reliably in (the very dynamic) atmosphere of our planet.
I have a dvd of this movie I've been meaning to watch. For some reason it's not available to stream. I love 30's and 40's movies - for further political insights try Possessed (1931) and from the Republic point of view The Great McGinty (1940).
By the time I got to the paragraph about the President imposing martial law, I was starting to suspect that this was just a pisstake review of a film that didn't really exist in order to make an ironic point. But it's a real movie! How's that for Poe's Law?
Request unrelated to the article: Could you mark paid content? Just a simple "[Premium]" at the start of the title or something?
Both paid and unpaid show up in RSS. For me that just means having to log in on a different computer, but for people who aren't paying I'd imagine it's even more frustrating.
Everything is unpaid except for things called "hidden open threads, which appear once every week I believe. He went over that in his first or second post.
Scott and many others are qualifying Hammond (and possibly FDR) as fascist. By which yardstick would that be?
Dictators arising in democracies are a tradition dating back to ancient Greece (and they are way older if we're not limiting ourselves to nominal democracies), while *fascist* dictators date back only a hundred years. The most meaningful yardstick by which to assess fascism I've found so far is Eric S. Raymond's http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8310 , whose short list is:
1. One supreme leader beloved by the people
2. State-socialist politics
3. Anti-semitism
4. Heavy-handed propaganda
5. Organs of coercion answering to the party, not to the law
6. Suppression of undesirable speech
7. Confiscation of civilian firearms
ESR's essay highlights how those historical characteristics of fascism are not a "random" package but a strongly mutually-reinforcing package. The #1 has a strong first-order link to #2, #4 and #6, a strong second-order link to #5 and #7, and a complicated link to #3. Together those seven form a coherent organism which, wherever it got entrenched, got dangerous and it took countless lives to bring it down.
This coherent organism is what meaningfully bears the name of fascism. And it is from this cultural memory that the strong aversion to fascism continues into the present day. Which in turn provides ample opportunity for freeloaders to call anything they dislike "fascism" to piggyback on this vital cultural memory and use it as a cheap bludgeon for bashing political opponents.
So which of those seven apply to Hammond and/or to FDR?
#1 seems more prominent for Hammond than for FDR (though it rings at least a tad bit true for a four-terms president-for-life)
#2 is true for both
#3 doesn't appear to be a central issue with either
#4 isn't easy to answer (does *this film itself* count as propaganda?), but I'd still say that they don't hold a candle to the propaganda of actual 20th century fascist regimes nor to the propagandas of both sides of the present-day culture wars
#5 is clearly indicated for Hammond, but it wasn't quite so for FDR
#6 doesn't seem central to either; they're more preoccupied with sending out their messages than suppressing opposing ones
#7 although this qualifier may appear as a peeve particular to ESR, I'm inclined to keep it (in truth it *was* a firm characteristic of fascist regimes, for obvious reasons). FWIW, Hammond appears to be more firmly in the "let's disarm everyone" camp than FDR had been
In all, for whatever FDR might score on the 1+2+4 tendencies, I don't think he scores nearly enough on the 3+5+6+7 tendencies to be meaningfully called a fascist. Hammond doesn't score that much more than FDR. (whereas focusing only on arbitrary subsets of the above tendencies is a form of the "Worst argument in the world")
I'm not quite sure what is a "fascist nation", I'm discussing fascist regimes. The USSR was not based on #3 and had important differences on #5. As a whole, that set it quite apart from fascism.
Ad #3 (Anti-Semitism), it wasn't so much the case in USSR. There seems to have been a reasonable percentage of Jewish people in its middle and higher echelons, and as to whether Jewish religious observance got heckled -- yes it did, and so did Christian religious observance. The only truly permitted religion was that of communism.
Ad #5 (Organs of coercion answering to the party, not to the law), ESR remarks that "Stalin, for example, never bothered with an SS-equivalent". It's important to not confound the secret police with an "SS-equivalent": Stalin of course did rely on a secret police, whereas Hitler's secret police was Gestapo, which was quite distinct from SS. The SS was *by design* very much "in-your-face" rather than "secretive". (ditto for Mussolini's "blackshirts")
That was not the Soviet approach. It's not just that Soviets relied on the secret police rather than an "in-your-face-SS", Soviets also worked on the fusing of the secret police (OGPU) with the "conventional" police (NKVD). This process happened during the 1930s, and resulted in the *regular* police becoming the first-tier guardians of the party-line ketman.
The Soviet approach was superior in this respect, more clever and more robust than the fascist approach; ultimately, history has proven that the Soviet regime had lasted far longer than the various fascist regimes. The fascists mainly understood force, while Soviets also had a good understanding of subversion.
As for Eco's take on fascism, for all of Eco's superior literary merits, I find ESR's *functional* take on that particular coherent organism called "fascism" to be more relevant and testable.
Eco focuses more on the underpinning mythologies of fascism, which are - surprise! - a completely incoherent mess. From the very beginning. Eco's #1 is "cult of tradition", his #2 is "modernist rejection of tradition", and it goes on in that vein. While Eco correctly describes an incoherent mythology in all its incoherence, the resulting bullet points are less useful from a testability perspective (since they are all over the place, and can thus also "prove anything") - but they are also arguably less relevant.
ESR focuses more on the *functional* parts of fascism, which are dangerously coherent, and thus the ones that merit worrying about. Saddam Hussein, who inspired himself by fascism when engineering his dominance, had imported the coherent functional parts of Italian and German fascisms - not their incoherent mythologies.
Meh – I just don't think 'fascism' is a useful term/idea. _Everyone_ has their own pet 'definition', which makes me think it's just too nebulous of a thing to be pinned down.
You don't think [3] is maybe even a _little_ too specific? It's really not 'true fascism' if it's not against one specific religious/ethnic group – not _any_ one specific group, but one specific one?
That seems useless! Just use 'anti-semitic' if that's really a significant criteria, let alone such a precise one.
The list is ESR's, not mine, and I agree that #3 is the weakest-coupled of the seven principles in that list. ESR's list still remains the most relevant comprehensive list I've found so far, not necessarily the best list concievable.
ESR gives some of his rationales as to why #3 had gotten fitted into the historical fascisms; others may give other rationales why it was, but the observation remains that it was. Either way, ESR's list mostly focuses on the *functional* parts of fascism, the "strongly mutually-reinforcing package" which has led that particular organism to become so powerful and dangerous once entrenched.
Bullseye earlier downplayed the relevance of ESR's list because it closely (but incompletely) matches some other organisms, such as the USSR. I agree that match is very close -- matching in everything except #3 and #5 -- but that level of similarity is not surprising when considering the shared origins of those movements. (which ESR also explains at length)
Even many medieval monarchies will match 3 to 5 of ESR's 7 points, for that matter. So I find ESR's list specially relevant when considering what is its true opposite, meaning: what gets a mismatch on all seven out of seven points?
Answer: classical liberalism. By which I mean the original liberalism, as formulated centuries ago - not necessarily all that goes under the name of liberalism in present-day US (and which doesn't exactly score 0/7 on that list). For a good while, classical liberalism was the ideal to which the West aspired. There's a line of thought that says "forget classical liberalism, surely we can take in also 2+4+6+7, and it will all be fine as long as it is For The Good Cause?" Maybe. And maybe it is a slippery slope upon which 1+5 naturally come to follow (even if with Soviet-type tweaks to #5), and then possibly #3 too. Slippery slopes do not slide "in whatever direction" - they slide down to more tightly-bound states. ESR's essay explains why fascism is one.
By about halfway through the review, I was convinced that Scott had made this up as a parable to further discuss Ezra Klein and Vetocracy, and was trying to figure out where he got the photos.
At the end, when Scott started linking to other reviews, I grudgingly updated to "It's probably real," but still sort of feel that it could be a put-on, where people created a Wikipedia page and other supporting material as part of a lunar landing style hoax.
Eh, people make bizarre movies sometimes. That seems unlikely to have changed much, at least since the talkies. (Taking out sound would be a big enough change it might alter this.)
Has Curtis Yarvin seen this movie, or read this review of it? It's very much his interpretation of the historical FDR as the monarch he's always wanted for America.
Dang – I just came back to comment myself that Curtis Yarvin, or his political writing, is a weird, more sophisticated, version of this movie (translated to a series of blogs and posts and definitely not sincere and candid).
The part that made me make the connection (to this post and the movie it reviews):
> Need a king? _Draft_ one. How many Fortune 500 CEOs are under 50? More than two. Just pick one at random. You could do better, but he’ll do fine. He may not be a genius; he is almost certainly not a maniac. If he is, you can tell at a glance. So can anyone else, which is why it’s so unlikely.
And – I'm not a 'monarchist' – but ... when I imagine a random Fortune 500 CEO (under 50) being drafted to be the absolute ruler of the U.S. ... I actually expect it to, overall, go rather well compared to the status quo!
"The New Deal was really Roosevelt’s program for defusing extremism. For a long time, a lot of folks on the left saw the New Deal as preventing communism from arising. Roosevelt really wasn’t that fussed about communism. Roosevelt was very worried about fascism. He was very worried that something like that could happen in the United States."
One hopes that this is not the only alternative to vetocracy.
It’s not 2020 anymore, though.
I thought about this for a moment, trying to figure out what kind of profound point you were trying to make, then realized it was literally true. Sorry, fixed.
What/why is your avatar Scott?
> Somewhere in the ocean hundreds of miles north of the Shirerithian mainland there is a mountainous arctic island upon which thrives an emergent oracular techno-theocracy that calls itself the Shining Garden of Raikoth. Its priests wear a silver spiral around their necks as a sign of their dedication, and in solidarity with them I too wear the spiral. But that is as far as it goes. No deity-worshipping. No speaking to myself in constructed languages. Just the spiral.
From < https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/15/ >, the first in a series of posts on Scott's conworlding.
Somehow despite being a big fan of Scott's writing and a former Duke and Minister of Shireroth myself, I had never read this post before now. Thank you for finding it.
Aside—this quote aged well: "I think everyone should have the media perform a hatchet job on them at least once."
Lol, I can't believe that I forgot about that one !
It even has a *title line*:
From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel_Over_the_White_House#Plot):
> A shaken Pendie tells Beek what has happened. “There was something in the room that made me shiver.” She reminds Beek that from the time of the accident they both felt that the President was really two men but she just became aware of a third being. She asks, “What if God sent the Angel Gabriel to do for Judd Hammond what he did for Daniel?” Beek says he thought that Gabriel was a messenger of wrath, and she replies that to some he was a messenger of revelations. “Hmmmm,” Beek muses, “Gabriel over the White House.”
Someone make a movie about public choice theory.
Maybe not a movie, but there is a TV show. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes_Minister
Speaking of Archangels and abandoned plot lines: has anyone figured out what happened to Gabriel after Uriel invented his machine? He doesn't appear in the great battle in the end and it wasn't clear to me what was his metaphorical role while the machine was working.
I thought the book heavily implied Thamiel killed him, but you can see a fan theory at https://www.reddit.com/r/unsong/comments/5wj2or/the_secret_of_wall_drug_theory_heavy_spoiler/
I recently watched some early Marilyn Monroe movies (which were marketed as Marilyn Monroe movies but actually contained about 3mn of screentime Frome her...). Average movies from that era seemed pretty bad as compared to nowadays.
Anyway, I would recommend "Let's make it legal" which is truly awful, and also inadvertently is the best justification for feminism I've ever seen, and for anyone that actually wants to enjoy themselves, "As young as you feel" which has the same populist feel without the overt fascism, and is at least a 6.5/10. I think Scott would definitely enjoy that last one (if he likes exploring old politics that is weird from a modern point of view, and also likes old schlocky movies), I recommend it thoroughly!
So...any idea if the 1993 movie "Dave" was at all connected or inspired by this? I assume there have been lots of old movies about presidents that I never heard of, but the parallels seem eerily similar. Mediocre president falls ill/dies, and a doppelganger comes in, and through sheer force of will saves the country?
Both movies share an underlying contempt for expertise and trying to really solve problems by talking to people and working on practical solutions. In "Dave", the fake president literally invites his friend in who runs a business and asks him to redesign the federal budget. Like the federal government is just a real big corporation whose only obligation is to balance its books.
I guess this is one of the defining features of fascism, right? That laws and checks and balances are for suckers, and the fundamental problem with government is that the man (inevitably) at the top just lacks the guts to tell the truth and fight for the common man. I've not watched many movies from the 30s or 40s but I watched Mr Smith Goes to Washington and it's kind of the same message. Everyone in the machine is evil and only a single man of pure heart with no obligations or prior taint of governing can fix things.
and then Trump.
Came to mention Dave, which was a family favorite (despite the more-obvious-in-hindsite Democrat-affilliation) because all politicians are corrupt bastards (except Ben Kingsley).
OMG, I completely forgot that Ben Kingsley was in Dave.
Frank Langella was wonderfully oily there. He's such a good bad guy.
And I didn't realize that Kevin Dunn from Veep was in that too. An example of a fun film with great actors that I only realized has a terrible message way in hindsight.
Glad someone brought up Dave -- there is also Of Thee I Sing, a near-contemporary of Gabriel Over the White House that is a lot more upbeat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Thee_I_Sing
Wow, every sentence in that plot summary was crazier than the last.
I've seen it on stage (well, concert version). It's terrific! We've come a long way in 90 years, though arguably France's birthrate is still an issue.
Is there anything as surreal nowadays as that? Whew
> In "Dave", the fake president literally invites his friend in who runs a business and asks him to redesign the federal budget.
I'm not going to look it up, but I vaguely recall the friend looking like Fred Willard (RIP) and saying "if I ran my business like this I'd be in jail."
As context for 1993, remember that everyone was really concerned about the budget, because Ross Perot.
Apparently even at the time, the movie was seen as endorsing fascism. Well, by some people. Wikipedia suggests that The New Republic and The Nation both criticized it as being pro-fascism. A certain other news outlet missed the connection, and you can read the review here: https://www.nytimes.com/1933/04/01/archives/walter-huston-as-a-president-of-the-united-states-who-proclaims.html
Reading that review made me think of your comment about how bad the average older movie was. It's not just the average movie --- the movie reviews are bad too (seriously, read that link, it's *awful*). In fact, I get the sense that modern news in general is far higher-quality, writing rise, than it was 100 years ago.
Is this the case for all media? We have a sort of pseudo-worship of certain older books as being amazingly written and full of timeless wisdom. Is that just the extreme tail of a very wide distribution with a lower median than today's?
The writing of that so-called "review" is incredibly bad! Something like a 6th grade book review from a kid who forgot you were supposed to do more than recount the events of the plot.
I hate to believe that the NYT has improved over the last century, but...
To be fair, when I wrote book reviews in 6th grade... that's totally *exactly* what I did. A bad recounting of the events of the plot, designed to be the minimum length I thought I could get away with.
Part of the problem was that I didn't understand why anyone would ever read a book/movie review. We were never shown a good book review, just told "write a book review" and when I asked what that was, "well it sort of has a summary of the book...".
(This comments serves a dual purpose as a test of if my new avatar shows up. Exciting times!)
I've always assumed that the purpose of a grade-school book report was to provide evidence that you actually read the book, and to get some writing practice in. A plot synopsis works fine for those purposes.
"I didn't understand why anyone would ever read a book/movie review"
Sometimes I still wonder that myself.
Cool profile picture btw!
This reminds me of something I've noticed many times.
The worst hand-to-hand combat in media from today is better-choreographed than the best fist fight in movies or tv shows from 20+ years ago. (Ok, maybe not literally best or literally worst, but that gets the idea across)
Like, even a fight from a TV show or a movie from nowadays that doesn't have fighting as part of it's reason to exist seems choreographed pretty well compared to something from 50 years ago.
Yeah, a couple years ago I tried to rewatch Xena, and the combat scenes were terrible compared to modern shows. Blatant use of cutaways to obscure actual blows being exchanged, moves that contradict basic physics, use of cheap sound effects that sometimes don't match the onscreen action, I could go on. I can't blame Lucy Lawless, it's clear she had the ability and skills to do a good fight scene, but instead they have her swing a sword around, do some acrobatic moves, and stitch it together in post production.
I've noticed the same thing with languages. It used to be that in most movies, foreign people would speak English with an accent, or speak total gibberish, but these days, they usually at least attempt to speak the relevant foreign language, or (for fantasy) even tend to attempt to make something like a conlang!
Maybe the conclusion is just that we're all absurdly richer now (in a real sense, not just nominally), and have way more time to devote to things that 100 years ago would have been a total waste. Like constructing elaborate conlangs, or perfecting choreography, or writing book reviews that are more entertaining than the original books.
It might also be that we are just richer in the sense of having a larger Netflix library to browse than we used to have. New things just have a higher bar to meet, because everyone still has all the old stuff available to view - especially now that Netflix (and competitors) give us access to a streaming library of all the old stuff.
I wonder if there is some analog of the Flynn effect going on here; a rising tide of competence that lifts all boats.
The old stuff isn't uniformly bad. It's just that high-quality fight choreography used to be the domain of a few specialist actors like Bruce Lee and Errol Flynn. Nowadays, thanks in large part to those actors, a basic appreciation for martial arts has permeated American culture, so viewer expectations are higher and non-specialist actors have had to up their game to meet them. Before that appreciation spread, most contemporary viewers of those old, bad fight scenes really didn't have a clue how unrealistic they were.
Here's two of those specialist actors in 1940 putting on a scene that's absolutely top-notch even by modern standards: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_hlyLvlqy8. The only thing that really dates it is the Foley work: swords don't *sound* like that.
Pretty good. I'm not sure when this is set, but those look to me like awfully light blades.
The setting is early 19th century California under Spanish rule, and the swords are these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_sword
I think – based on some YouTube videos I vaguely recollect, by 'historical martial arts enthusiasts' (amateur historians), that the actual blades they used for filming are more like Olympic fencing swords (foils?) than any historical blade someone would use in a serious melee.
It's the expectation of the audience: they've been accustomed to swords sounding like banging pots together so that it was it is *supposed* to sound like (same with sound in a vacuum and lens flare for SF movies). Stage fencing is also deliberately a lot flashier than real or competitive fencing, audiences want big showy moves rather than two touches and the bout is over.
Peter Morwood (the SF writer) has a good selection of posts about movie swordfights on his Tumblr, as well as a general really good overall coverage of arms and armour if you want to go searching in the tags: https://petermorwood.tumblr.com/search/swords+on+screen
Good stage fencing contains all the same elements as the historical style being imitated, but exaggerated and slowed down, or else the audience won't be able to see what's going on. I used to be a fencer and I enjoy watching it in-person, but when it's on television at the Olympics I don't bother tuning in, because in a 30fps broadcast most of the action is lost between frames. It's *that* fast.
As someone who doesn't know anything about fencing, that's pretty good!
I wonder if people at the time saw this and were wondering how come every other movie sucked at this.
Meh.... we ain't seen nothing yet. To get decent hand-to-hand combat, 60hz needs to die already [I know that 30hz is still around, but it's dead to me].
120hz and above and you can actually follow quick movements much better.
Another contemporary review ( https://www.unz.com/print/BookmanUK-1933oct-00034/ ) from the UK magazine The Bookman suggested that the film didn't go far enough:
"The moral of his too easy triumph is perhaps insidiously false ; for it could be argued that the world cannot be regenerated without alterations in capitalistic society far more radical than are indicated here."
I can't find too many information about The Bookman but it doesn't seem to be radically either on the socialist left or fascist right (Chesterton, Yeats and Beckett all published some pieces in it), so this was probably a fairly mainstream sentiment.
> We have a sort of pseudo-worship of certain older books as being amazingly written and full of timeless wisdom. Is that just the extreme tail of a very wide distribution with a lower median than today's?
IMO it's just that. Realistically, there weren't many people existing in the past. And vast majority of them didn't count, culturally, on an individual level - serfs for example.
So amount of people who even were in the position to be artists or intellectuals of any kind was just tiny. Then there's filter of will and talent. They didn't have as much knowledge and past masterpieces to learn from. Tools were more crap where it counted.
Also, audience - feedback was certainly poorer. And, lastly, works were way more fragile. Smaller audience, so more easily forgotten. Not copied very much - and obviously, mostly it was impossible to copy losslessly. And some couldn't even be preserved - theater, musical performances and so on.
It all multiplies together. Claiming 'culture' of the past was great while today it's crap is _outrageously_ wrong, thoughtless. And usually not coupled with walking the walk and actually consuming it over contemporary stuff.
Realistically, more quality-weighted culture is being produced every day in 2020s worldwide than in some of the past centuries. Or something along these lines.
And we're on the brink of AI-assisted or wholly synthetic culture - with coinciding work automation in general. Once that gets going, it probably wouldn't even make sense to speak about 'quantity' of quality culture. Or if it would, the difference between today and this future will be larger than difference between deep past and today.
One more thing, about "Realistically, there weren't many people existing in the past" - it still seems completely weird to me, but apparently amount of humans ever existing to this point was somewhere along 100 billion. Which seems just... unintuitively low compared to amount of humans alive at the present moment.
Thing is Hoover was right: FDR did act in an unprecedented manner, albeit with the support of Congress. But the vast majority of his 1933-37 program was blatantly unconstitutional and tremendously intrusive (on the theory that the free market had created too much competition and thus the NRA was needed to dictate prices and production top down). The Supreme Court struck down most of the abusive agenda, FDR threatened them with packing the court, and they created a whole new constitutional jurisprudence to permit broad expansion of federal power so that FDR wouldn’t go after them. Read Amity Shlaes’s The Forgotten Man or her comic on Schecter Poultry.
I don't think this is correct though. First on the narrow point: from 1933-1936, the Supreme Court kept striking down New Deal programs by 5-4 votes. In 1937, Justice Owen Roberts switched sides and the court stopped overturning things. It was widely believed that Roberts did so in response to the court-packing plan but it is now pretty widely accepted that he actually switched sides before that (discussion of timeline here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_switch_in_time_that_saved_nine)
On the broader view, if the public mood was "Gabriel over the White House" and what FDR actually did was pass popular relief and regulatory programs with the support of congressional supermajorities, he deserves credit for not declaring martial law or whatever.
Yeah, I didn't intend to juxtapose this with the vetocracy post but I think it makes a great contrast. More and more necessary stuff builds up behind the veto chokepoints until people are so angry that you get a strongman who pushes things through by fiat. FDR is probably the best-case scenario, Hitler/Stalin the worst.
Yup. The book How Democracies Die makes that point in some detail.
This might come off as slightly off-topic here, but I feel it's somewhat relevant (and additionally it's relevant to your old posts about disconnect of policy and public opinion): do you ever plan to respond / engage with Moldbug's new writing (on graymirror substack)? I'm particularly interested in what do you think about "descriptive constitution of the modern regime" post.
It sounds as though it would be useful for understanding fascism, understanding the point of view of its supporters.
Game of Thrones is pretty good too, with Daenerys.
Really? The show? The books do have some, with Daenerys trying to quell insurrections by elites in that city she conquered, but I don't think there's much about the "point of view" of her supporters.
The reader usually *occupies* the point of view of her supporter, until the truth about her nature becomes clear far too late. (I think similar things go on with Tyrion and Arya too, but the show played them too one-sidedly good to prove me right about what the books are intending.)
I don't remember her nature becoming 'clear' exactly (in the books). It was definitely becoming _clearer_, but IIRC it was still pretty ambiguous. (I remember the last book in particularly seeming very 'narratively diffuse' as if the plot simply sublimated into trivia.)
Come to think of it, I've always wanted to see a shootout between blocky 1930s tanks under the command of the President's personal secretary and fashionable gangsters holed up in a ritzy Prohibition-Era warehouse.
"What if FDR had been an archangel, but the archangel was Mussolini?"
I think this is missing a "possessed by"?
Good question. What's the material difference between being an archangel, and being possessed by an archangel?
Like, archangels are presumably non-corporeal beings to begin with, so if I assert "this frog is an archangel", surely it means exactly the same thing as "this frog's body is being possessed by an archangel", right?
It depends on what the meaning of the word "is" is.
Possession suggests an impermanent state and independent being of both possessor and possessed before and after the possession. If FDR had been possessed by an archangel, there would still be a meaningful distinction to draw between the archangel and FDR as entities with their own desires and decision-making processes. If FDR were an archangel in fee simple, there would not be a meaningful distinction between the two, as there would be no possessing angel and no host, but simply one being.
It depends on how possession works. In one extreme, the archangel completely destroys or suppresses FDR's personality. In the other extreme, FDR and the archangel blend together seamlessly into a new entity, Kalashtar-style. Somewhere in the middle, both personalities share the body as distinct entities, and are able to communicate and/or negotiate on policy.
Walter Huston really commits to the bit, tho'.
I'd kind like to have there be a whole bunch of "If I were in charge" movies made so that people would have a better chance of seeing how much it's all fantasy, but it probably wouldn't work. It would probably just reinforce particular fantasies.
Yeah, some people seem *weirdly* drawn to this.
I get the attraction , up to a point- benevolent dictators don't have to do paperwork!- but it seems to go way way beyond that.
Our appetite for simplistic Manichean problems which don't require tradeoffs or compromise or even *careful thought* seems really big now. On some level, we really want it to just. be. simple.
(Both 'weirdly' in my first paragraph and the claim about careful thought in the last one run the risk of being interpreted as boo lights; I intend both denotatively. The initial attraction isn't weird in itself, but it's an order of magnitude stronger than it seems like it should be, and so much harder to talk people out of even if you happen to have great arguments. The lack of careful thought also seems kind of psychologically important- like a drive not just to singlehandedly fix things, but to do it in a way intelligible to System 1.)
I'm curious if this is a result of the complicated, non-ancestral modern world, or if (30%?) of people are always like this and I'm just wired to find it surprising.
I know I'm very very late to this, but I kinda suspect that the equivalent thing nowadays would be alt-history HOI4 mods like "The New Order" or "The Fire Rises" or "Kaiserreich". Living demonstrations of the value of free speech, both because they're very good mods with tons of artistic value, but also because they demonstrate the principle "Sometimes the fastest way to show that someone is crazy is to let them speak up". (A similar thing applies to Trump's tariff insanity; there's no faster way to see the problem with it then seeing it happen.)
The Amazon page is full of five-stars reviews declaring sentiments like "Wow, this movie really holds up! We still need a president like this!" and I think I'm going to close this tab and go read more about the new Mars rover in hopes of counteracting the misanthropic mood this is putting me in.
If it helps, surely it must have always been like this, right?
About halfway through reading this, I was convinced you were doing one of your bait-and-switch-to-make-a-point things and the movie was actually Nazi or Stalinist propaganda or something. But no, this is an actual thing that happened. In America. Wow.
And you know, for all the havering over "Trump was a fascist dictator", this movie shows that he didn't get near what the Populist Strongman fantasy could imagine.
I was curious about the tanks, so I googled, and learned that there is something called the Internet Movie Firearms Database, which lists all the weapons used in this and presumably many other movies. http://www.imfdb.org/wiki/Gabriel_Over_the_White_House Anyway, those aren't tanks. They are extremely unconvincing armored cars. You need treads to be a tank.
I think Scott mis-remebers, contradicts himself and is plain wrong here: "I was struck by his [Hoover's] theory that FDR was part of the same phenomenon as Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin - the US version of a worldwide longing for a fascist strongman who could come in and solve everything." This is wrong, Stalin could not be the result of Russians "longing for a fascist strongman": he inherited the dictatorship from Lenin, who in 1917 overturned the government by other revolutionary socialists from the left running on the platform of more revolution and democracy.
In his review of the book about Hoover Scott wrote thusly about Hoover's theories: "FDR came from the same cloth as Hitler and Stalin. The miseries of the Great Depression, the centralizing tendencies of the age, the rise of mass media, and the collapse of republican virtue were combining all around the world in a monstrous reaction against the cause of liberty." Not a word about "longing for a fascist strongman". So, the latter Scott contradicts the earlier Scott.
Te earlier Scott is also wrong. What republican virtue in Germany, which was a republic for only 17 years before Hitler, or Russia, which was a republic for less than a year? But at least he is less wrong.
I don't think talking about centralizing tendencies, mass media, and the collapse of republican virtue leading to Hitler and Stalin contradicts talking about the longing a fascist strongman. They're two different ways of describing the same thing.
(Stalin was of course communist, which is ideologically different from fascist, but there was the same vibe of "if we centralize all power in a single amazing person who perfectly represents our nation, he can Get Things Done". I am not a historian and may be misreading this.)
Stalin, in 1930s, was not the founder of the communist dictatorship in Russia. It was Lenin, in 1917. And that is where we have to look for the its reasons. There were people on the right in Russia in 1917 who wanted a fascist dictator, but the attempt of the putsch from the right against the republic was unsuccessful, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kornilov_Affair . Instead, a few months later, unexpectedly, Lenin and bolsheviks managed to overthrow the government (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Revolution). But they did it under the pretense of working people power (Workers' and Peasants' Soviets, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_All-Russian_Congress_of_Soviets_of_Workers%27_and_Soldiers%27_Deputies), democracy (Constitutional Assembly, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Constituent_Assembly), separate peace with Germany and agrarian reform. They certainly, emphatically, did not run on the law and order platform. At the free elections in 1917, the majority of Russians voted for socialist parties other than bolsheviks, 25% for bolsheviks, and almost nobody for the right law-and-order parties. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Constituent_Assembly#Election_Results_(12/25_November_1917)
The Lenin's dictatorship, in my opinion, is much more similar to Robespierre dictatorship, with the "October revolution" being an equivalent of Jacobins overthrowing Girondins (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution#Political_crisis_and_fall_of_the_Girondins), than to Hitler, Mussolini or Salazar.
The whole crime lord angle has me thinking . . .
From around Prohibition (perhaps earlier) until around 1990, every major city had one or several crime lords whose identity was known to the public but who was often very hard to take down. It must have been extremely frustrating, both on the societal level and the individual level. Some entity can just demand money from your business or menace you and if you go to the cops you probably get killed. And this is just how things are.
It creates an understandable popular impulse: "we all know that Al Capone/John Gotti/Whitey Bulger is an archcriminal. Can't we like, just shoot him?" And it spawned a cinematic desire for vigilantes and Batmans and Boondock Saints and apparently presidential aids leading firing squads in front of the Statue of Liberty. This movie is weird in that congress can just pass an unemployment relief bill without martial law, but the problem of organized crime was really hard to solve and looking back perhaps it's lucky we didn't have some American Duterte.
That's a great point. Did this era end because of the end of Prohibition, or did we do something else right to get rid of the crime lords?
They always talk about RICO as the law that gets rid of the mafia. I just learned the other day that this law was from 1970, rather than 1930 or so, as I had always expected. I guess that might be relevant? (And one more datapoint for the "everything changed in 1970" theory.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeer_Influenced_and_Corrupt_Organizations_Act
Yeah, clearly from 1970 - 1990 the influence of the literal mafia, and the influence of organized crime over legitimate business in general, declined a lot. I think everyone agrees RICO is some of that.
I've never really studied this, but I'd offer two more trends. Organized crime derived a lot of low-risk money from illegal lotteries ("the numbers racket"), gambling/sports betting, and loansharking. These were lucrative and the criminal penalties were pretty light. They've been peacefully supplanted by state lotteries, various legal gambling options that didn't exist 50 years ago, and credit cards/payday loans. Illegal drugs are still a lucrative thing, but the criminal penalties are high enough that criminals who get caught will often agree to testify against their bosses, which is destructive to American-based crime hierarchies. Likewise, part of what RICO did was make punishments harsh enough to inspire defections. Striking combination of libertarian and non-libertarian stuff in this paragraph.
Also, my impression is that there really has been a dramatic reduction in police corruption. You read about policing in the era of Serpico or William R. Phillips and it's just amazing, every cop is on the take. Somehow there was a culture change and corrupt cops became the exception. With all the talk of policing these days you'd think you'd read more about this (did the Knapp Commission recommendations work? What happened outside NY?). I have no idea. But corrupt police are important for protecting organized crime, and policing got cleaner.
Wow, I had never thought about the state lottery <-> mafia-breaking connection before. Is there any history that suggests that creating them was a deliberate anti-mafia tactic? That might be the first thing that makes me feel like they're not 100% gross.
Okay, the alderman above is definitely John Powers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Powers_(alderman) and I should not be falling for the nostalgic romanticisation of the time because this is about real violence and killing but dash it all:
"John Powers (February 15, 1852 – May 19, 1930) served as an alderman in Chicago, Illinois (1888-1903, 1904–1927) for the Democratic Party. He was known as Johnny De Pow by his constituents. Along with Bathhouse John Coughlin and Hinky Dink Kenna, Powers was considered one of the leaders of the "Gray Wolves" of Chicago politics".
Johnny De Pow, Bathhouse John, and Hinky Dink Kenna, and those aren't even the criminals (technically) 😁
Yeah, in that linked project I mention above, Chicago was breath-takingly corrupt. The entire city government was rotten, and murder was just another tool in the election campaign box:
"Big Bill" Thompson, two-term mayor of Chicago during the period of prime expansion of Capone's empire, provides a perfect example of political corruption operating at even the highest levels of the city. Thompson himself had connections to the Capone ring--one of his best friends was "Big Jim" Colosimo, head Chicago gangster at the time Capone moved to the city. Colosimo was Chicago's "prostitution czar" and, as we have noted in our Capone Biography, Big Jim was promoted to a police precinct captain by Thompson after swinging a number of voters to Thompson's side (Allsop, 204). As Prohibition historian Kenneth Allsop writes, "Without stretching the logical sequence too far, to Thompson may be attributed Capone's eventual terrorization of Chicago, for it was to protect the new prosperity conferred upon him by the Thompson ring that Colosimo imported Torrio, who in turn imported Capone" (Allsop, 204). Thompson later secured a friend in Congressman Fred Lundin, as corrupt a politician as Thompson himself. The two even tried to take over the city's judiciary, angered by the fact that some judges refused payoffs. The plan failed, however, when they were exposed by the press.
In a few instances, Thompson even turned to violence as a means to impose his political will. Democratic Alderman John Waters, who had controlled the 19th Ward since 1888, decided to run again in 1924. Mayor Thompson, however, had a new agenda: the election of Anthony D'Andrea, a notorious and well-known pimp, into the position. A bomb was thrown into Powers' house, but Powers and his family were unharmed. Powers retaliated with a bomb of his own, thrown by his men into a meeting of D'Andrea's supporters. Powers eventually won the election, but the violence didn't stop there. D'Andrea's men walked the streets with sawed-off shotguns, searching for Powers' people. Death threats were sent to Powers' family. Eventually, Powers struck the final blow--D'Andrea was killed later that year. Throughout all of this, there was no police intervention in any of the incidents, and federal investigation was deferred constantly (Allsop, 208). The cops, clearly, were just as crooked as the politicians, who were just as crooked as the mob. Indeed, during this period, the three seemed to form an interpenetrating web of crime."
Chandler's 1940 novel "Farewell, My Lovely" has a lot of general police corruption (one cop is noted as standing out for being "cunning but honest") and Bay City in the novel is another rotten town with the cops being corrupt and letting crime operate. Seemingly it is based on a real California city:
"Chandler used recognizable locations in Los Angeles as settings, but he created the fictional town of Bay City as a stand-in for Santa Monica, known for its widespread corruption in city government during the Great Depression."
Chandler does have Bay City getting an overdue clean-up:
"As for Brunette, you can't get anything on a guy like Brunette. They'll have him before the Grand Jury and he'll refuse to say anything, on his constitutional rights. He doesn't have to bother about his reputation. But there's a nice shakeup here in Bay City. The Chief has been canned and half the detectives have been reduced to acting patrolmen, and a very nice guy named Red Norgaard, who helped me get on the Montecito, has got his job back. The mayor is doing all this, changing his pants hourly while the crisis lasts."
"Do you have to say things like that?"
"The Shakespearean touch. Let's go riding. After we've had another drink."
Well, if I believe the Wikipedia article, (a) there is scholarly debate as to whether Prohibition did indeed meaningfully create a surge of crime and gang lords (b) bootlegging was a side-operation rather than a mainstay so when that went away the gangs just fell back on the old reliables (c) people had really awesome names back then:
"Opponents of prohibition were fond of claiming that the Great Experiment had created a gangster element that had unleashed a "crime wave" on a hapless America. The WONPR's Mrs. Coffin Van Rensselaer, for instance, insisted in 1932 that "the alarming crime wave, which had been piling up to unprecedented height" was a legacy of prohibition. But prohibition can hardly be held responsible for inventing crime, and while supplying illegal liquor proved to be lucrative, it was only an additional source of income to the more traditional criminal activities of gambling, loan sharking, racketeering, and prostitution. The notion of the prohibition-induced crime wave, despite its popularity during the 1920s, cannot be substantiated with any accuracy, because of the inadequacy of records kept by local police departments."
The WONPR is the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform and Mrs Van Renssalaer was née Lolita Coffin:
"A fashionable wedding on Staten Island, next month, will be that of Miss Lolita Coffin, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Wilbur Coffin of New Brighton, to Mr. Lindsay Van Renssalaer"
There's an argument that organised crime and the big ganglords grew out of Prohibition and had their hey-day *after* it since that was when they became organised, and once Prohibition was repealed they moved on to other profitable vices and things like labour racketeering. They learned their trade during Prohibition but became big fish after it, and it was more the 70s than the 30s that saw the decline of big crime. Capone is the one big name of the time but as stated, he was taken down by RICO and it was because of his huge financial interests that this was possible. He was making so much money from a range of criminal activities, and his bribing and buying of politicians and the law was so widespread and blatant, that he was a huge target for exactly this type of take-down. http://umich.edu/~eng217/student_projects/nkazmers/index1.html
One strange thing I learned recently: my [well-known U.S. city] has [synonym for "chiefs"] who reign over certain city blocks. These are not official positions, but they exercise some hard-to-articulate authority.
A friend of mine was trying to buy an empty lot. He was advised that he should consult with the relevant chief, because if he didn't the chief would immediately be outbid in the forthcoming auction. So he did.
The chief explained that he didn't want that particular lot sold, because it had a productive [plant bearing local fruit on it]. My friend said that he would of course keep it there, and allow the chief to have whatever it grew. But the chief didn't trust him, and suggested that he buy property elsewhere.
I have lived here for over a decade and had never heard of this. I asked some natives, and they said: "oh yeah, the chiefs? Everybody knows you don't cross them."
What do you mean by "immediately be outbid?" Who is bidding?
The area in question is somewhat, uh, blighted. Meaning, there are abandoned lots that the city has seized because nobody's paid taxes on them. The city auctions off these lots periodically, and they usually go for the amount of tax owed.
As I understand it, the "chiefs" tend to formally own several lots in their territory, but not all of them. If some outsider tries to buy one of the lots at auction, the chief will outbid the outsider and become the formal owner of the lot.
Also they might break your legs or something? Nobody would tell me what bad thing would happen if you crossed a chief.
What do the chiefs do with all of these lots?
Eat [local fruit] from them, apparently?
As best I can tell, they live or work on one of the lots. They buy up the others to keep the riffraff out.
I was at one point scouting out possible sites for the small private school we were part of. For one site I was told that it was worth much more with permission from the city to build, which it had for the present plan, and that such permission depended in practice on the approval of the city council member from that part of the city. What you describe sounds like an informal version of the same system.
So wait, it's not marijuana plants? These guys actually have an apple syndicate or something?
Ha, not marijuana. This particular chief just happens to really like [local fruit]. So while the anecdote isn't typical, it seems to illustrate a general phenomenon: there are these people who have informal control over certain territories without any official standing. They're not exactly "gangsters," but they're not exactly not either.
Look at you with your tinfoil hat on just right – "[local fruit]". I salute you and your diligent opsec!
Look, only certain metro areas have peaches -- wait, dammit.
I think I like having insider-only posts. This is exactly the sort of fun stuff you'd see on the old livejournal but that Scott'd feel weird about putting in SSC (especially in later years) because it's too minor/niche to be mainstream.
The lower comment volume is refreshing. It's easier to keep up with the whole thread and I think the average quality is a little higher.
This is probably a really stupid question, but the first two sentences sounded weird and kept me wondering - is your friend from 1930s a human?
Yes. She's just a person who was raised on 1930s movies and so talks like a 1930s person.
Thanks a lot for answering this. It makes sense now. (I just lost a relative who was born in 1924 and could tell stories about 1930s, so I was thinking that this would be a really strange way to talk about a human.)
Oh. I thought this was just a joke meant to build a narrative arc around the review. ("Framing?" I know there's some proper literature term for this.)
I would like to see more 1930s movie reviews on ACX
Cross this flick with “The Da Vinci Code” and you have a pretty good map for how a *surprising* percentage of people think about politics.
>>I was struck by his theory that FDR was part of the same phenomenon as Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin - the US version of a worldwide longing for a fascist strongman who could come in and solve everything.
I don’t understand your use of “fascist” here. Clearly Mussolini and Hitler were fascists. Stalin and FDR might well have been “strongmen” but in what sense were they fascist? Are you just using “fascist” as an intensifier for “strongman”? You can be a bad awful murderous dictator without being a fascist at least according do how I think fascism is usually defined.
FDR and people around him were admirers of Mussolini early on. Whether what they admired was fascism depends on how you define it. I don't think the initial fascists presented it as "set up a dictatorship and beat up anyone who opposes you." It was something closer to "leave the means of production nominally in private hands but have labor and capital work together under government leadership for the general good of the nation." That's close to the policy of the first New Deal, and one can easily see why many people saw it as attractive.
Interesting about FDR admiring Mussolini "early on" - makes me wonder just when that was. I also still wonder about what sort of definition of fascist would apply to FDR and Stalin - I just finished Paxton's book about fascism (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/128540/the-anatomy-of-fascism-by-robert-o-paxton/) and at least with his definitions FDR and Stalin were in no way fascist, no matter how much you might not like either or both of them.
That's the thing with any 'ontology', e.g. 'fascism versus socialism' or whatever – they can all be (kinda) true, and at the same time, even having 'carved reality at very different joints'.
I've always been sympathetic to a more 'totalitarian vs libertarian' framing/ontology and a big reason is I don't see much of a difference between Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia (even down to the horrific genocides). I prefer not-Hell to either fascist-flavored-Hell or communist-socialist-flavored-Hell.
Wolfgang Schivelbusch's <i>Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939</i> (2006) is an interesting little book. It doesn't accuse Roosevelt of fascism but says that there was a fairly common feeling in all three countries that individualism had failed, capitalism had failed, and bourgeois democracy had failed--and that what was necessary was big, strong government led by a big, strong leader.
This can equally be a left-wing populist fantasy as a right-wing one. Strongman president sweeps away the rich, corrupt, fat-cat cronyism politicians and backroom advisors for the sake of the Little Guy? Institutes major government programmes and spending reforms to help the working-class? Do away with armies and instead use the money saved from the maw of the military-industrial complex on other needs? Legalise recreational drugs and so quash crime and gangsterism? The Constitution should be interpreted on "Loose Constructionism" not "Originalist" grounds and if we need to overturn its strictures to implement the policies addressing the social needs of our day, so be it? All you need is a sufficiently charismatic and determined President to bring about Hope And Change? (and if Congress insists on being a roadblock in his way, well, he's got a phone and a pen...)
That it was a bunch of tycoons that financed it as opinion-forming about their preferred political options is also strangely reminiscent of woke capitalism of today https://www.forbes.com/sites/michelatindera/2020/02/18/here-are-the-billionaires-funding-the-democratic-presidential-candidates/?sh=1930484233f7
So yeah, it's very understandable why a lot of people at the time had a yearning for a clear and simple solution to the problems of the time, and a determined, principled guy who had the pragmatism and willpower to push through the necessary changes, no matter if they were left, right, or centre. It's a seductive explanation, much more tolerable than "well, this is just how things shake out, no conspiracy of fat cats, no easy problem with an easy solution" for ordinary people to be told, yet somehow it always seems to be that the way things shake out leave me poorer and you richer. Whether you're Ayn Rand writing about moochers or Woody Guthrie singing This Land Is Your Land https://www.woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/This_Land.htm (and I have a hundred times more sympathy with Woody than with Ayn), there's an identifiable enemy and a workable solution to the problem that is a lot simpler and easier and more successful than real world messiness.
This movie sounds like a great defence of conservatism - not the "send the tanks in to blow up the gangsters" view of conservatism, but the conservatism that says "Wait a minute, you can't just do that. The courts have a right to rule on this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martial_law_in_the_United_States".
The part with the gangster (before the 'riding in on tanks' bit) chimes with my notion of what will happen with drug legalisation: no, the gangsters are not going to throw up their hands and go "well, now that's destroyed our business, we'd better go do something else". Or if they do go "okay, so now we'll switch to growing avocados", that's not necessarily less criminal: https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2020/02/07/avocados-mexican-drug-cartels
Though mostly this got me wondering about the theology of archangelic possession 😁 I don't know why they picked Gabriel, the model here for "interaction with humans" is Raphael from the Book of Tobit (though fair enough, for many Protestant denominations that's a non-canonical book of the Bible). If you're going to consider the work to be done being of a strong quasi-military leadership kind, then surely it should be Michael? Anyway, whichever archangel you pick, they don't possess humans, not even the dead body of one. Appearing in the form of the President who is actually dead is more likely, and the dead body turning up at the end is just tidying up loose ends.
My Catholic housemate who I discussed the movie with after I saw it also focused on it being the wrong archangel.
See, these are the kind of basic mistakes that make it impossible to take the movie seriously! Relevant Kate Bush video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKJF2wIQUtc
I've always been partial to Raziel :-)
Other people who should not watch this: me, because the bit about battleships sounds absolutely guaranteed to enrage me. The battleship's obsolescence was at least a decade away, and whoever made the movie had clearly listened to Billy Mitchell, which was a mistake. As for radio control, that was reasonably common for target ships at the time, although they were rarely sunk.
And I wonder why nobody thought of disarmament treaties at the time...
Reference: https://www.navalgazing.net/The-Battleship-and-the-Carrier
Scott is not particularly convinced about death rays, either. Listen, death rays were all the rage once upon a time. Then when we got functioning lasers, this was it, these were the death rays we had been promised! Star Trek phasers here we come!
Except they never really turned out like that. Anyone with more to go on (like "facts" rather than "hazy impressions") want to write about why no military application of the death ray?
Because getting enough energy at a useful range is really hard. We're actually at the point where there are serious plans to take lasers to sea in the next few years, and the prototype on the USS Ponce gave good service a few years ago. This is on my list of topics to cover, and I've done some work, but haven't found the time to do the sort of deep dive into the technical aspects I need to make the post work.
To be fair, directed-energy microwave weapons are pretty decent at crowd control:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Denial_System
Death rays – lazers (ha) – are hard to do right, and they don't even look cool like they do in the movies. A good laser is basically invisible and anything that _could_ see it is being fried if it manages to do so.
But they're still being developed. I think the practical obstacles have been mostly related to power and something something about getting them to work reliably in (the very dynamic) atmosphere of our planet.
I have a dvd of this movie I've been meaning to watch. For some reason it's not available to stream. I love 30's and 40's movies - for further political insights try Possessed (1931) and from the Republic point of view The Great McGinty (1940).
By the time I got to the paragraph about the President imposing martial law, I was starting to suspect that this was just a pisstake review of a film that didn't really exist in order to make an ironic point. But it's a real movie! How's that for Poe's Law?
"No," says the President, "there have been enough conferences in rooms".
That's a good line!
Also, the Presidential Yacht was totally a thing. The ship in use at the time would have been Sequoia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Sequoia_(presidential_yacht)), although she was rather small for the Atlantic crossing, and the previous yacht, Mayflower (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Mayflower_(PY-1)) would have been a better choice there. Unfortunately, the president stopped having a yacht back in the 70s.
Request unrelated to the article: Could you mark paid content? Just a simple "[Premium]" at the start of the title or something?
Both paid and unpaid show up in RSS. For me that just means having to log in on a different computer, but for people who aren't paying I'd imagine it's even more frustrating.
Everything is unpaid except for things called "hidden open threads, which appear once every week I believe. He went over that in his first or second post.
... and this post.
Oh. I guess if the person I responded to had said "request related to this article" I might have gotten that. My bad.
Scott and many others are qualifying Hammond (and possibly FDR) as fascist. By which yardstick would that be?
Dictators arising in democracies are a tradition dating back to ancient Greece (and they are way older if we're not limiting ourselves to nominal democracies), while *fascist* dictators date back only a hundred years. The most meaningful yardstick by which to assess fascism I've found so far is Eric S. Raymond's http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8310 , whose short list is:
1. One supreme leader beloved by the people
2. State-socialist politics
3. Anti-semitism
4. Heavy-handed propaganda
5. Organs of coercion answering to the party, not to the law
6. Suppression of undesirable speech
7. Confiscation of civilian firearms
ESR's essay highlights how those historical characteristics of fascism are not a "random" package but a strongly mutually-reinforcing package. The #1 has a strong first-order link to #2, #4 and #6, a strong second-order link to #5 and #7, and a complicated link to #3. Together those seven form a coherent organism which, wherever it got entrenched, got dangerous and it took countless lives to bring it down.
This coherent organism is what meaningfully bears the name of fascism. And it is from this cultural memory that the strong aversion to fascism continues into the present day. Which in turn provides ample opportunity for freeloaders to call anything they dislike "fascism" to piggyback on this vital cultural memory and use it as a cheap bludgeon for bashing political opponents.
So which of those seven apply to Hammond and/or to FDR?
#1 seems more prominent for Hammond than for FDR (though it rings at least a tad bit true for a four-terms president-for-life)
#2 is true for both
#3 doesn't appear to be a central issue with either
#4 isn't easy to answer (does *this film itself* count as propaganda?), but I'd still say that they don't hold a candle to the propaganda of actual 20th century fascist regimes nor to the propagandas of both sides of the present-day culture wars
#5 is clearly indicated for Hammond, but it wasn't quite so for FDR
#6 doesn't seem central to either; they're more preoccupied with sending out their messages than suppressing opposing ones
#7 although this qualifier may appear as a peeve particular to ESR, I'm inclined to keep it (in truth it *was* a firm characteristic of fascist regimes, for obvious reasons). FWIW, Hammond appears to be more firmly in the "let's disarm everyone" camp than FDR had been
In all, for whatever FDR might score on the 1+2+4 tendencies, I don't think he scores nearly enough on the 3+5+6+7 tendencies to be meaningfully called a fascist. Hammond doesn't score that much more than FDR. (whereas focusing only on arbitrary subsets of the above tendencies is a form of the "Worst argument in the world")
This list describes the USSR at least as well as it describes actual fascist nations, which is a major shortcoming for a definition of fascism. I prefer the list written by Umberto Eco, who had firsthand experience with Italian fascism. It begins on page 6 here: https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content/uploads/sites/226/2015/12/Eco-urfascism.pdf
I'm not quite sure what is a "fascist nation", I'm discussing fascist regimes. The USSR was not based on #3 and had important differences on #5. As a whole, that set it quite apart from fascism.
Ad #3 (Anti-Semitism), it wasn't so much the case in USSR. There seems to have been a reasonable percentage of Jewish people in its middle and higher echelons, and as to whether Jewish religious observance got heckled -- yes it did, and so did Christian religious observance. The only truly permitted religion was that of communism.
Ad #5 (Organs of coercion answering to the party, not to the law), ESR remarks that "Stalin, for example, never bothered with an SS-equivalent". It's important to not confound the secret police with an "SS-equivalent": Stalin of course did rely on a secret police, whereas Hitler's secret police was Gestapo, which was quite distinct from SS. The SS was *by design* very much "in-your-face" rather than "secretive". (ditto for Mussolini's "blackshirts")
That was not the Soviet approach. It's not just that Soviets relied on the secret police rather than an "in-your-face-SS", Soviets also worked on the fusing of the secret police (OGPU) with the "conventional" police (NKVD). This process happened during the 1930s, and resulted in the *regular* police becoming the first-tier guardians of the party-line ketman.
The Soviet approach was superior in this respect, more clever and more robust than the fascist approach; ultimately, history has proven that the Soviet regime had lasted far longer than the various fascist regimes. The fascists mainly understood force, while Soviets also had a good understanding of subversion.
As for Eco's take on fascism, for all of Eco's superior literary merits, I find ESR's *functional* take on that particular coherent organism called "fascism" to be more relevant and testable.
Eco focuses more on the underpinning mythologies of fascism, which are - surprise! - a completely incoherent mess. From the very beginning. Eco's #1 is "cult of tradition", his #2 is "modernist rejection of tradition", and it goes on in that vein. While Eco correctly describes an incoherent mythology in all its incoherence, the resulting bullet points are less useful from a testability perspective (since they are all over the place, and can thus also "prove anything") - but they are also arguably less relevant.
ESR focuses more on the *functional* parts of fascism, which are dangerously coherent, and thus the ones that merit worrying about. Saddam Hussein, who inspired himself by fascism when engineering his dominance, had imported the coherent functional parts of Italian and German fascisms - not their incoherent mythologies.
Meh – I just don't think 'fascism' is a useful term/idea. _Everyone_ has their own pet 'definition', which makes me think it's just too nebulous of a thing to be pinned down.
You don't think [3] is maybe even a _little_ too specific? It's really not 'true fascism' if it's not against one specific religious/ethnic group – not _any_ one specific group, but one specific one?
That seems useless! Just use 'anti-semitic' if that's really a significant criteria, let alone such a precise one.
The list is ESR's, not mine, and I agree that #3 is the weakest-coupled of the seven principles in that list. ESR's list still remains the most relevant comprehensive list I've found so far, not necessarily the best list concievable.
ESR gives some of his rationales as to why #3 had gotten fitted into the historical fascisms; others may give other rationales why it was, but the observation remains that it was. Either way, ESR's list mostly focuses on the *functional* parts of fascism, the "strongly mutually-reinforcing package" which has led that particular organism to become so powerful and dangerous once entrenched.
Bullseye earlier downplayed the relevance of ESR's list because it closely (but incompletely) matches some other organisms, such as the USSR. I agree that match is very close -- matching in everything except #3 and #5 -- but that level of similarity is not surprising when considering the shared origins of those movements. (which ESR also explains at length)
Even many medieval monarchies will match 3 to 5 of ESR's 7 points, for that matter. So I find ESR's list specially relevant when considering what is its true opposite, meaning: what gets a mismatch on all seven out of seven points?
Answer: classical liberalism. By which I mean the original liberalism, as formulated centuries ago - not necessarily all that goes under the name of liberalism in present-day US (and which doesn't exactly score 0/7 on that list). For a good while, classical liberalism was the ideal to which the West aspired. There's a line of thought that says "forget classical liberalism, surely we can take in also 2+4+6+7, and it will all be fine as long as it is For The Good Cause?" Maybe. And maybe it is a slippery slope upon which 1+5 naturally come to follow (even if with Soviet-type tweaks to #5), and then possibly #3 too. Slippery slopes do not slide "in whatever direction" - they slide down to more tightly-bound states. ESR's essay explains why fascism is one.
By about halfway through the review, I was convinced that Scott had made this up as a parable to further discuss Ezra Klein and Vetocracy, and was trying to figure out where he got the photos.
At the end, when Scott started linking to other reviews, I grudgingly updated to "It's probably real," but still sort of feel that it could be a put-on, where people created a Wikipedia page and other supporting material as part of a lunar landing style hoax.
Eh, people make bizarre movies sometimes. That seems unlikely to have changed much, at least since the talkies. (Taking out sound would be a big enough change it might alter this.)
More recently:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubba_Ho-Tep
Has Curtis Yarvin seen this movie, or read this review of it? It's very much his interpretation of the historical FDR as the monarch he's always wanted for America.
Dang – I just came back to comment myself that Curtis Yarvin, or his political writing, is a weird, more sophisticated, version of this movie (translated to a series of blogs and posts and definitely not sincere and candid).
His latest 'scene' from his 'adaptation':
- https://graymirror.substack.com/p/killing-the-ghosts
The part that made me make the connection (to this post and the movie it reviews):
> Need a king? _Draft_ one. How many Fortune 500 CEOs are under 50? More than two. Just pick one at random. You could do better, but he’ll do fine. He may not be a genius; he is almost certainly not a maniac. If he is, you can tell at a glance. So can anyone else, which is why it’s so unlikely.
And – I'm not a 'monarchist' – but ... when I imagine a random Fortune 500 CEO (under 50) being drafted to be the absolute ruler of the U.S. ... I actually expect it to, overall, go rather well compared to the status quo!
"The New Deal was really Roosevelt’s program for defusing extremism. For a long time, a lot of folks on the left saw the New Deal as preventing communism from arising. Roosevelt really wasn’t that fussed about communism. Roosevelt was very worried about fascism. He was very worried that something like that could happen in the United States."
— https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/04/05/is-biden-trying-an-fdr-style-presidency-new-deal-historian-sees-surprising-parallels/
(Since people are repeating 1930s-era Republican agitprop and calling FDR fascist, I thought I'd leave this here.)