Trump has attempted to create a kind of patrimonial and clientelist regime that many commentators have likened to a mafia family.

There’s a conception of the party on the one hand as a national populist movement on behalf of the Middle American working class, led by a Caesarist president, to smash the power of the “globalist” professional and managerial elite; and, on the other, as a radical libertarian project of administrative state demolition behind a populist facade.

According to Francis, Gramsci’s idea “recognizes that political power is ultimately dependent on cultural power—that human beings obey because they share, perhaps unconsciously, many of the assumptions, values, and goals of those who are giving them orders—and, second, that in order to challenge the dominance of any established authority, it is

When New York turned its lonely eyes to John Gotti, it was longing for another kind of authority than the type Giuliani had represented up to that point. It didn’t really want the law, universalism, meritocracy, rationality, bureaucracy, good government, reform, blind justice, and all that bullshit. The institutions had failed, the welfare state

They feared social collapse, a Great Tribulation, but in a sense they were both its products and its agents. Mainstream American society had stopped providing them with a plausible story: army service was demoralizing, the churches had nothing to say to them, materialism could not fill the gap, and all around them were signs of decay. The oldest

The affirmation of national and cultural identity as the core of the new nationalist ethic acquires special importance at a time when massive immigration, a totalitarian and antiwhite multiculturalist fanaticism, concerted economic warfare by foreign competitors, and the forces of antinational political globalism combine to jeopardize the cultural

As always, symbols—actors, rappers, songs, movies, culture—were needed to stand in for complex issues.

The tragedy of the twentieth century was the fruit of the nineteenth century: “Two terrible wars sandwiching a world economic depression revealed man’s real inability to control his life by the nineteenth century’s techniques of laissez-faire, materialism, competition, selfishness, violence, and imperialism.”

This was the age of what the economist Hyman Minsky called “managerial-welfare capitalism” or “paternalistic capitalism”: the corporate behemoth and state leviathan moved harmoniously together; the average man sheltered under them. IBM culture was “cradle to the grave”: it offered lifelong employment and such benefits as free membership in the