I just finished reading Sándor Márai's classic novel Embers this week. I will say nothing of the book's suspenseful plot—which mostly unfolds in the form of a reminiscence, over the course of a single long conversation that fills the book's final two-thirds. What I most wanted to reflect on was the nature of the author's famous nostalgia for the world he depicts. The book is set in the time it was written—the 1940s, in the midst of the second world war—but it is told largely through the memories of a man who belongs to an earlier time. The aged general at the center of the story is a product of the pre-war world: the Austro-Hungarian Empire of the period before either of the twentieth century's two global conflagrations.
When we look for the reasons why Márai's protagonist recalls this epoch as such an idyll, we discover that it is largely because he sees it as a Gemeinschaft—the sort of community governed by disinterested ideals and "natural will," in the terminology of the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies—that precedes the modern society or "Gesellschaft" that is governed through relations of mutual self-interest (what Tönnies calls the "rational will"). Márai's depiction of the loyal servant Nini and her relationship to the old general seems straight from the pages of Tönnies, for instance.
Tönnies could be accused of a certain romanticism when he writes of the feudal "servant who shares the weal and woe of the family" and who "enjoys the confidence accorded to a helper or even an adviser" (Loomis trans.), and thereby serves his masters out of "natural will." But Márai depicts precisely such a relation between Nini and the General, with some plausibility. The General's family took Nini in when she was a pregnant teenager outcast from her home due to the prejudices of society. She nursed the young General from the cradle. It is quite plausible, then, and not mere romantic projection, that between such people there might develop a feeling closer to maternal love than a status of mere economic dependence.
Márai's depiction of friendship is equally couched in terms of Gemeinschaft. He emphasizes the notion of friendship as the quintessentially "disinterested" human relationship—it gives freely and asks for nothing in return. Indeed, the General's whole pattern of life—the one he clings to, despite all the ravages of war and modernity—is made up of a series of Gemeinschaft/"natural will"–based relations. He serves his regiment out of a sense of honor, not in exchange for a wage. He remains loyal to friends even when they have rankly betrayed him, because—according to his notion of friendship—the entire essence of its bond is that it demands nothing in exchange—not even a reciprocal devotion.
In short, Márai depicts the pre-war Austro-Hungarian empire as a place where people remain loyal to each other out of "natural will"—they provide service to others, that is to say, for its own sake, not because they have some secondary objective in view. A modern society, by contrast—in Tönnies's framework—is held together by much more fragile bonds of self-interest. People serve one another if at all, in a more atomized society, only because they expect to get something in return.
It's not hard to see the appeal of the Gemeinschaft, or to wish that we lived in one. Human nature is at its most admirable when it seeks cooperation with its fellows for the sake of disinterested altruism, rather than in the expectation of "callous cash payment," as Marx and Engels put it. Gemeinschaft seems, then, like an innocent ideal.
What frightens me so much about the emerging far-right authoritarianism of J.D. Vance, though—is that it all started with a simple and seemingly innocuous nostalgia for this same Gemeinschaft ideal. It would seem, then, that there is a snake somewhere in the garden of the Gemeinschaft Eden. But where?
Ever since he was picked as Donald Trump's running mate, after all, people have been combing Vance's earlier writings. It is clear from the picture that has emerged of his intellectual trajectory that his starting point was a kind of communitarian traditionalist conservatism that would have seemed in no way particularly threatening to me a decade ago.
Back when I was in college, the traditionalist conservative writers—the American Conservative and Front Porch Republic types, say—seemed like they were, if anything, the good conservatives. "Yeah, they're on the right," I would say, "but at least they hate the Iraq War! At least they're against Bush and the Neocons too!" (I wasn't fully appreciating, back then, that there are even worse things in this world than Neocons.)
Plus, their version of right-wing communitarianism seemed refreshing in comparison to the dog-eat-dog Social Darwinism of the "free market" conservatives. There is a version of me, then, that could have made common cause with a version of them. For a time in my life, I rather liked the idea of becoming a "Red Tory," as they are sometimes known in England—the sort of traditionalist who is so repulsed by the cruelties of industrial modernity and its "dark Satanic mills" that he joins forces with the left-wing socialists and anarchists in trying to protect the common people from the depredations of the modern bourgeoisie.
It was by no means obvious to me that this line of thinking necessarily led to fascism. If anything, supposing you had offered me a glimpse in 2012 or so of the future Donald Trump candidacy, I would have thought that the traditionalist conservatives would be the last people to climb on board. I would have expected them to see through Trump's crass demagoguery and vile scapegoating of vulnerable minorities. Indeed, Vance did see through it. His critique of Trump, back in his Hillbilly Elegy era, was exactly the one I thought the American Conservative types would make—namely, that Trump was exploiting people's legitimate grievances to scapegoat the innocent.
I figured that, to real traditionalist conservatives, Trump would represent everything that was most repulsive in the crassly individualistic modernity that they were fighting against. But apparently not. Just about every single "trad-con" writer I was aware of at second-hand in that era has since gotten in bed with Trump. They are all in the tank for his neo-authoritarian experiment—Vance most of all.
And—what is even more sinister—they also seem to think they can ride the tiger of Trump's candidacy to impose something even more far-reaching—a lasting subversion of American democracy. Some of them, after all, are self-described "neo-monarchists" or "Catholic integralists" (one could more accurately call them—theocrats), who genuinely do not believe our republican institutions deserve to survive.
And it all started with a seemingly innocent nostalgia for a more communal world where people took care of each other for its own sake—a Gemeinschaft, in short. Vance never uses the term, as far as I've seen, but it's clearly what he has in mind. He wants society to be structured around families and local communities—and who can blame him? So what's so wrong with that?
I conclude that there's nothing wrong with the Gemeinschaft ideal per se—indeed, it is what we should be striving to build up. As I've argued before, it is no doubt impossible for all of human cooperation in large, modern, bureaucratized societies to be organized through relations of dinstinterested altruism (if I thought that was possible, I'd be an anarchist). There have to be institutions of coercion and economic exchange in a complex society. But we should try to organize life as much as possible, nevertheless, through relations of mutual altruism. And the way to do that is surely to build up families, voluntary associations, local community structures, etc. So, surely it is not wrong to say that our economic and political life should be arranged to make those things possible.
I believe all of that; but the whole essence of Gemeinschaft is that it occurs voluntarily. You cannot force the "natural will" through state coercion, or it ceases to be natural will. If you coerce people, they may do what you say for a time—but it will not be because they want to do so for its own sake; it will be because they are prompted by self-interest to avoid punishment. It will be, that is to say, because they are acting out of "rational will."
The disturbing thing about the Vance agenda, then—which has only grown more openly authoritarian over time—is that it fantasizes about using the state to force people to practice a certain religion or way of life. Whatever one thinks of such a program, it is plainly the antithesis of Gemeinschaft, even as Vance appeals to Gemeinschaft ideals in order to justify it.
I therefore do not think that the traditionalist conservatism of the early 2010s had to lead to Trumpist fascism, by any inherent teleology of its ideas. It's more that the movement in that era—roughly when I was in college—was poised on a precipice. It could have tipped in either direction.
The situation was rather analogous to the position of the traditionalist right in the 1930s. Back then, too—confronted with the rise of fascism—conservatives could have gone in either direction. Someone like Georges Bernanos—who was a radical conservative and traditionalist—saw the appeal of early fascism; but he had become an outspoken critic of it nonetheless by the time of the Spanish Civil War. Roy Campbell, by contrast, became an apologist for Franco. Likewise, in the face of MAGA's rise, the "trad-con" right could have gone in either of these two directions.
The weird thing about Vance is that, in the space of just a few years, he has played both roles. He was a Bernanos in 2016—criticizing Trump as a false prophet and dangerous demagogue. But now he has become a full-on Roy Campbell.
There does not appear to be any intellectual reason for this. Again, I don't think his Gemeinschaft nostalgia had to lead him into the arms of Trump. It's more that the allure of power proved too great to resist. Genuine traditionalist conservatism requires bucking the trends of history. And it appears that none of the so-called "traditionalists" of the 2010s were actually willing to do that, when it counted. Eventually, they all decided they wanted to be on history's winning team. They wanted to ride the tiger of history, to borrow a phrase from a neo-reactionary writer of an earlier generation. They wanted to be part of the new cool thing, and have their own chance to wield the terrible power of the modern state on behalf of their preferred way of life. In the end, therefore, they did not so much reject the "Gesellschaft" as try to seize it for their own cause.
In response to this, the Democratic Party is increasingly invoking values like "liberty" and "individual freedom" that were once seen as the bywords of the American Right. In one recent speech, Walz reportedly said, "I don’t need you telling me what books to read. I don’t need you telling me about what religion we worship. And I sure the heck don’t need you to tell me about my family." He then wrapped up: "There’s a golden rule [...] Mind your own damn business!"
The Vances of the world could criticize this stance as indicative of the atomized individualism of the Gesellschaft. But it can also be seen as just the opposite. After all, the way I hear it is that Walz is saying: keep the government out of the domains of life that should be decided on a voluntary basis (like family, religion, and local community). Walz is not saying that the Gemeinschaft aspects of life don't exist or aren't important. He's not saying anything against family, religion, or community. He's just saying that these things shouldn't be legislated. In other words, Walz is saying: "keep your stinking Gesellschaft out of my Gemeinschaft!"
Walz, then, is offering a potent rejoinder to Vance-style theocracy and authoritarianism that is deeply rooted in American values. He is not rejecting Gemeinschaft; he is rejecting the "neo-monarchism" that seeks to impose a defunct and long-since abandoned feudal hierarchy by force. And by doing so, Walz certainly has traditional American values on his side. This is not because Americans do not believe in Gemeinschaft. It's because we do not want a dictator or monarch telling us what sort of Gemeinschaft we ought to have, or using the tools and instruments of their Gesellschaft to try to coerce a Gemeinschaft into being.
If there's anything that defines the history of this country, it's that we rejected from the very beginning the idea of having a king. And so Vance, with his ideological milieu of neo-monarchists, is not really a part of the American intellectual tradition. For all his claims of "traditionalism," therefore, he is actually offering something that is in no way traditional: something much closer to fascism, which has always been—at its core—a fundamentally modern ideology. Fascism seeks to use the tools of the modern state and economy to enforce ideological conformity and racial exclusivity. And none of these has any root in the "natural will" that would govern in a genuine Gemeinschaft.
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