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This morning I have for you:
Arthur Goldhammer comes to Substack.
Montesquieu and Arendt on Tyranny, Loneliness, and Fear.
Jonathan Mahler’s The Gods of New York
David A. Bell on Polanski and Dreyfus
Hong Sang-soo’s By the Stream
Please welcome Arthur Goldhammer to Substack. Arthur is a novelist, translator, and probably the best commentator on contemporary French politics and society. He’s also a wonderfully elegant writer. I’ve long enjoyed his pieces on the Tocqueville 21 blog. He’s kicked off his newsletter with two great comparisons of Trump to the ancien regime and meditations on the relative importance of character and institutions. The first:
The problem is that structures and institutions can be quickly transformed by a wicked character. When Trump beckoned to James Comey after a meeting and whispered that he expected loyalty not to the institution of the presidency or to the Constitution or to the United States but to himself personally, the jig was up, although it took Trump a few years to figure out how to replace a Comey with a Patel, a Milley or an Esper with a Hegseth, and a Fauci with an RFK Jr.
But now these creatures are in place: I take the term from France's ancien régime, where the king literally created the power he delegated to his créatures. But all the ingenious Madisonian dispersal of powers among different branches and levels of government has proved incapable of halting the poisoning of the polity by an evil character, a fifth-class temperament.
As Voltaire pointed out, Louis's ability to place his créatures in all the key positions of government ultimately undermined him, because he was in fact endowing them with the power to foment intrigues against him. In the United States, however, bureaucratic regularity and the unfortunate consolidation of Republican Party control of all three branches of government largely nullifies the whole intricate edifice of checks and balances. The intrigue is now directed against the system itself rather than the autocrat who oversees it. Character—bad character, malevolent character, selfish and corrupt character—has clearly triumphed over structure. The possibility was always there. It was one of our cardinal errors to minimize it.
The second, on the French moralists’ snipings at the degradations of the royal court:
Sycophancy was a character flaw that La Bruyère knew well, because it was so ubiquitous at the Court of Louis XIV. “People lie prostrate at court,” he wrote, “but self-interest brings them to their feet.” And there is no shortage of self-interested self-seekers at the Court of MAGA. Think of Tim Cook, the steward of Apple's immensely profitable orchards, presenting our unclothed emperor with a 24-karat plaque, or Jason Huang agreeing to share 15 percent of Nvidia's profits on chip sales to China with Uncle Sam in exchange for a needed export license. It's odd how CEOs who would fight tax increases tooth and nail hasten to bestow golden trinkets and golden shares on a tyrant they no doubt privately despise.
These men are no fools. Surely they see how their pursuit of their own interests harms the collective interest. But as La Bruyère saw, “while virtue may lead a few men to take a few steps toward moderation and wisdom, overweening ambition turns them toward the greediest, the most violent in their desires, and the most ambitious.”1
I’ve had similar thoughts recently; we are understandably focused on the 20th century with its truly terrifying regimes, but perhaps the better paradigm for Trump is more classical: old terms like “despot” and “tyrant” come to mind. What we have on our hands is less totalizing and more capricious and arbirtrary than the police states of the last century; it is driven by the unruly passions and mind of a single person. That single person is not possessed of a monomaniacal idea of nature or history that they must act out, but has no idea; there is no throughline except temperament.
Inspired by Jamelle Bouie’s recent column, I returned to The Spirit of the Law, written about in the century after the age of the moralists. For Montesquieu, each regime had its characteristic principle that animates its subjects: for republics, it is virtue—public spiritedness—in monarchies, it’s honor—a desire for rank and distinction, but under despotism, fear dominates. There’s a lot of talk about the crisis of loneliness in our society; Hannah Arendt, in a brilliant commentary on Montesquieu, connects fear and loneliness:
Fear, the inspiring principle of action in tyranny, is fundamentally connected to that anxiety which we experience in situations of complete loneliness. This anxiety reveals the other side of equality and corresponds to the joy of sharing the world with our equals. The dependence and interdependence which we need in order to realize our power (the amount of strength which is strictly our own) becomes a source of despair whenever, in complete loneliness, we realize that one man alone has no power at all but is always overwhelmed and defeated by superior power. If one man alone had sufficient strength to match his power with the power of nature and circumstance, he would not be in need of company. Virtue is happy to pay the price of limited power for the blessing of being together with other men; fear is the despair over the individual impotence of those who, for whatever reason have refused to "act in concert." … Fear as a principle of action is in some sense a contradiction in terms, because fear is precisely despair over the impossibility of action. Fear, as distinct from the principles of virtue and honor, has no self-transcending power and is therefore truly anti-political. Fear as a principle of action can only be destructive or, in the words of Montesquieu, "self-corrupting.”
A lot of commentators have pointed out that Trump is trying to build a “patrimonial” regime based on the logic of the household.
I’ve blurbed Jonathan Mahler’s new book The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990:—
“Jonathan Mahler finds the origins of our own time in the squalor, strife, and sleaze of 1980s New York. Full of pathos and wry humor and replete with a colorful gallery of rogues, winners, losers, dreamers, and killers, The Gods of New York is a triumph of civic humanism. . . . A deeply enviable book.”
It’s a terrific read, and I highly recommend picking it up. Along with being a very entertaining book, I think it’s also an important one: It’s long been my contention that the corruption and dysfunction of ’80s New York politics was a key component of the rise of Trumpism, and Jonathan’s book deepens our understanding of that era.
You can hear Jonathan talk about the book on the Time to Say Goodbye podcast with Jay Caspian Kang and Tyler Austin Harper:
Hello, This week, we have a long talk with an author we both have admired for a while, Jonathan Mahler. His new book, The Gods of New York: Egoists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990, is a chronicle of how a four year stretch in New York City laid down the groundwork for a new city, one that fully separated itself from …
4 days ago · 2 likes · Time To Say Goodbye
I also recommend checking out Jonathan’s recent piece for New York, where he draws a parallel between the 1989 mayoral race and 2025.–
A scandal-plagued incumbent. An Italian American from a working-class outer borough. A progressive front-runner looking to make history — and whom the real-estate community is determined to stop.
I am talking, of course, about New York’s 1989 mayoral race.
Let me briefly set the scene as primary day approached. The incumbent, Ed Koch, running for a fourth term, had led the once great working-class city back from ruin and presided over its transformation into the place we know today, a city whose economy is powered by finance and real estate. But his third term had been consumed by scandal — beginning with the mysterious suicide of the influence-peddling Queens borough president, Donald Manes — and social crises: AIDS, crack, homelessness, and a series of racial incidents whose names still resonate today (Howard Beach, Tawana Brawley, the Central Park jogger, Yusuf Hawkins). The Italian American, Rudy Giuliani, had been Koch’s chief tormentor; in his time as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, his scalps had not only included plenty of city officials but also boldfaced names, including Ivan Boesky, Leona Helmsley, and Imelda Marcos. The front-running progressive, David Dinkins, was vying to be the city’s first Black mayor, promising to lift up those who had been left behind by the boom and to give voice to the voiceless.
Thirty-six years later, the echoes of that mayoral race are hard to ignore. Zohran Mamdani had not yet been born in 1989, but he grew up in the city whose seeds had taken root then, blossoming into what another mayor, Michael Bloomberg, memorably called a “luxury product.” Mamdani is vowing to transform New York once again, to return the power to working people. The choices before us as we approach the November election — status quo or social and economic upheaval — are wildly divergent. The moment may feel novel, even unprecedented. In fact, we’ve been here before. Some of you may even be old enough to remember it.
