Thread by @jeffjarvis

Rereading Arendt is so instructive right now. SS men "were not interested in 'everyday problems' but only 'in ideological questions.'" Nevermind that grandma is dying of COVID and my kids can't get jobs, they're gonna fight for guns and abortions!

Arendt on followers' "radical loss of self-interest, cynical or bored indifference in the face of death [COVID] or other personal catastrophes [unemployment], the passionate inclination toward the most abstract notions as guides for life [guns über alles]..."

"...and the general contempt for even the most obvious rules of common sense." Sounds familiar, eh? She called this the mass. We call this the base.

Arendt: "The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships."

Arendt: In building the NSDAP, Hitler "unburdened the movement of the party's earlier program, not be changing or officially abolishing it, but simply by refusing to talk about it or discuss its points." Sound familiar, GOP?

Arendt: "Mere lust for power combined with contempt for 'talkative' articulation of what they intend to do with it is characteristic of all mob leaders."

Arendt: "In substance, the totalitarian leader is nothing more nor less than the functionary of the masses he leads." And a few rich people and members of Congress.

If Trump loses (pray God) he might disappear but his people will not. Arendt re totalitarian leaders: "Being a mere functionary, he can be replaced at any time, and he depends as much on the 'will' of the masses he embodies as the masses depend on him."

Hitler to the SA: "All that you are, you are through me; all that I am, am through you alone."

Arendt: "It would be rash indeed to discount... the terrifying roster of distinguished men whom totalitarianism can count among its sympathizers, fellow-travelers, and inscribed party members." It's a stretch to call McConnell, Graham et al "distinguished," but the point stands.

Arendt: "The elite went to war with an exultant hope that everything they knew, the whole culture and texture of life, might go down in its 'storms of steel.'" This today, I've written, is the last stand of the old, white man: burning the fields behind them.

Arendt: "To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time."

I wrote this as an op-ed about the last stand of the angry, old, white men but didn't place it anywhere. So here it is on Medium: medium.com/whither-news/t…