This is kind of a hobbyhorse for me, but one of the more interesting things about "Mr. C" is that he was also Black, passing as white; something Thompson likely knew, but that Mr. C's (aka Lawrence Dennis) far-right fellow travellers decidedly didn't.
What Vance and Dennis have in common is a deep-seated, visceral belief that democracy didn’t do anything for them, that they clawed their way out through their own overwhelming merit, and a fascist state with them as a vanguard is better than a democracy formed of hypocritical liberals.
Yep! The book is fine, but there’s definitely scope for a more wide-ranging work on him and his place in interwar American fascism. Fascinating figure with lessons for today.
This is and will always be the best thing written about fascism. Before I read it I couldn't quite grasp how so many people could fall for fascism, but the moment I read it everything just clicked into place.
I just reread that in an another context and also noted the similarity. I suspect Thompson was describing actual people she knew and I wonder who she had in mind.
*Jesus*, that is LITERALLY just Vance. Right down to loathing his new class as well as his old class in unequal measure. Vance wrote a whole book about that loathing!
They all want to retain their Big Fish status but are unable to hack it normally in the wider pond.
So, time to crutch back on relativity and rather than slink back to a smaller pond it's time to cull some 'unfairly' bigger fish. And a whole lot of other fish who look down on them in the process.
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Almost as if they feel the have to overcompensate for not joining the religion earlier, while not fully understanding the core tenets of it.
So, time to crutch back on relativity and rather than slink back to a smaller pond it's time to cull some 'unfairly' bigger fish. And a whole lot of other fish who look down on them in the process.