I feel lucky to have acquired an education that taught enough of totalitarian history that I feel I can paraphrase Walter Benjamin.
I’d used to say well we all know “fascism is the aestheticization of politics” because academics helped me to be skeptical about theory and Marxism.
Benjamin saw the logical result of fascism is to introduce aesthetics into political life. A hundred years later we have cultural war politics to serve as spectacle instead of transforming material conditions.
So I’m exactly the sort of person who came to the end of Gramsci’s Long March and wanted to understand Frankfurt School academics viscerally. I like to be on the ground when I learn.
So I am horrified to have spent my New Year’s in Sarajevo only to see a socialist taking on the mayoralty of America’s most important financial center.
To go from seeing the history of a hundred years of European continental war to watching bratty millennial nepotism play act at collective action is frankly not a positive development.
Millions of Europeans did battle with communism and in America we are so coddled the swearing in ceremony of New York City’s democratic socialist mayor is celebrated.
“We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism. – Mayor Zohran Mamdani Inaugural Address
If misery loves company then we should all suffer equally is a less aesthetic way of saying we are all in it together. Or as Sebastian Junger said “It was better when it was bad”