Ur-Hansonism

And other irresolvable contradictions

Thinking is a form of emasculation. —Umberto Eco (Point 3)

In his 1940 review of Mein Kampf, George Orwell makes one of his typically insightful comments about the authoritarian modus operandi:

Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don't only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably true of Stalin's militarised version of Socialism. All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples.

The marvellous battle that Don Quixote waged against the Biscayan squire.

We all fall prey to it sometimes—as Orwell suggests—but his paragraph helps clarify the force that drives certain political leaders and their adherents: the eternal joylessness that comes from permanently suspecting that if someone is doing okay—let alone if they are happy—it must be because they have taken something from you, personally. Under such circumstances, life should impose “intolerable burdens” on all so that our enemies are punished too.

The milder version is something like Malcolm Fraser’s dictum that life wasn’t meant to be easy. And it has religious cognates, in the lapsed Catholicism of people like me, for example, that the proof of your devotion is in the extent to which your faith costs you some level of comfort. As that Southern Gothic orthodox Catholic, Flannery O’Connor, has said: “What people don't realise is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.”¹

Surely a large part of Trump’s appeal is that Maga-Nation understands that he hates the same people they do, a mindset that elevates personal experience and personal grievance to governing principle. As Amy Remeikis said of Pauline Hanson the other day, “Her views, over 30 years, either in or around politics, have squarely focused on her experiences and the experiences of those around her. She does not care to learn the perspective of others – she assumes, as many in the far-right do, that her experience and view of the world is the only view of the world worth having.”

In his genius essay about Ur Fascism, Umberto Eco outlines 14 resonating characteristics that connect all the forms of authoritarianism we tend to label as fascism. Number 8 no longer holds, it seems to me, but we can construct a version of Orwell’s insight from 7 and 9 in Eco’s typology. “Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one,” he writes in Point 7. “The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.”

And it comes together in Point 9, which is worth quoting in full:

9. For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle. Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare. This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the movement will have control of the world. But such a “final solution” implies a further era of peace, a Golden Age, which contradicts the principle of permanent war. No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament.

All hedonism is suspect. So is socialism. So is welfare. So is government itself.

The idea of government as the collective action of a polity working together towards a better life for all is constantly undermined by the idea that life if struggle, that struggle requires enemies, that the battle must continue. That irresolvable contradiction is not just the heart of Ur-Fascism and Ur-Hansonism, it is at the heart of any politics that relies on division for its forward momentum: and that is most of the politics we think of as normal.

(I guess I could make this really current and throw in a reference to Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, that we have broken “Zeus’s Law”, violating the principle of “sacred hospitality”, but I might save that for another piece.)

Maybe it is irreconcilable, that we must forever pursue happiness, not achieve it. Maybe that is the human condition after all. But I don’t think it means we have to build our institutions to internalise that conflict; or that our media needs to be permanently calibrated to playing one “side” off against the other; that our politics eternally concern itself with parties that have moved beyond being vehicles for a better life and have instead become tools of self-preservation, internalising the logic of the most powerful vested interests.

It may be true that Eco’s idea of “struggle” as an irreconcilable battle with enemies undermines—by definition—the very idea of politics as working towards a better life, but it also resonates with the discussion we had in the previous piece about volunteering, and maybe we should hang onto that.² That if we step outside the constraints of institutions built on Eco’s logic and try instead to reconnect at a community level, we might not resolve the contradiction he (and Orwell) highlight, but we might at least survive the struggle in better shape.

1. This is the tell in JD Vance’s Catholic grift, expounded wonderfully in this essay.

2. Thank you, by the way, for the amazing response to that article, in comments and via email.