Just trying to cover all the bases. 

"By the time anything becomes known as an idea, it’s been around for awhile."

I'm going to keep hammering on this. It's embarrassing how little these idiots know about the world. Bungacast and Jäger: like autistic 12 year olds.

The debate over fascism is a debate over the meaning of words as opposed to the meaning of acts. Debating fascism vs Bonapartism as natural kinds in a crisis is an act of evasion. 

When a man tells me he's a fascist it's not worth arguing, and when an Israeli says "not all fascists are Nazis" I agree. We were drinking with a man who says "I used to be a Nazi" and probably still is. And neither of them annoy me as much as the Americans who call themselves "socialists", or even worse "communists." That became our running joke. Will the cast of Aufbunga Bunga, Jäger, and Tooze, ever be subject to an analysis as to whether they're actually "leftists"?  They aren't. So what do they represent? What natural kinds do they manifest? 

Jäger on Badiou's Saint Paul. "People don't realize it but this is one of the best critiques of identity politics ever written"

And he rt's a reply. "Probably the best, especially since he successfully shows how the most consequent realisation of identity politics is Nazism."

Saint Paul is the model for Christian fascists. Badiou still calls himself a Maoist. Is he? Alex Hochuli styles himself "Modernist". Modernism and democracy have never mixed well. Badiou at least tries, in a painfully earnest way, to respond to Israel. No one else above will even go that far. Jewish identity politics n'existe pas. So much for value free science. 

Inaction is a form of action. Since Hochuli and Curtis Yarvin are both writing for Sohrab Ahmari, this, on Rawls and Shklar, and Moyn, is a good fit. 

Remove yourself from the world in order to think about it, and then you worry about the result.  The refusal to participate in the political world is a political act, and an anti-politicalact. The letter and its subject are formed out of denial.

Ahmari. Decadence recognizes itself. 

Tributes are pouring in for Mike Davis, the chronicler of urban apocalypse who died Monday at age 76. Most of these eulogies have focused on the political passions—fellow feeling for the dispossessed, hot-burning rage for their class enemies—that animated Davis’s remarkable life and career. This is fair enough. But attention should also be paid to his form and craft, the mastery of literary nonfiction that gave rise to a body of work that will long endure.

...I devoured City of Quartz, and then I read everything else Davis had written up to that point, and I was left wanting more. Still, it’s City of Quartz that remains my favorite, and that I returned to last summer as I was setting out on my own latest book project—not for any specific piece of research, mind you, but just to get in a writing sort of mood. That’s how important Davis’s craft is to me, and I know I’m not alone in this regard.

repeats from November: T.J. Clark on Davis 

I made a comment on Jäger's piece on Baudrillard that included this

The fascism of reactionary Catholics will fail only because the deeply self-loathing will always be a small minority. It’s a rare thing when ressentiment drives the population of an entire country. It's happening now in Israel. 

There are contradiction in those statements that I'd like to edit out but Bonapartism is not based on ressentiment;it's the foundation of fascism. These idiots think of fascism as something that only exists as a function of the mass: the aggregate. They can't think in specifics because it reminds them that's what they are: individuals, particularities. I've referred dozens of time to fascism as self-hatred but ressentiment is the word these assholes recognize. Technocrats can think in terms of public health, but doctors treat patients. Back to Jerome Groopman.

Peter Mair's Ruling the Void, gets good press. 

The key element within this transformation, whether seen in terms of the location of the parties within the polity, or in terms of the functions parties are expected to perform, is the ascendancy of the party in public offce. Parties have reduced their presence in the wider society and become part of the state. They have become agencies that govern – in the widest sense of the term – rather than represent. They bring order rather than give voice. It is in this sense that we can also speak of the disengagement or withdrawal of the elites. For despite the rhetoric, it seems that they too are heading for the exits, although with this obvious dierence: while the exiting citizens are often headed towards a more privatized or individualized world, the exiting political elites are retreating into an official world – a world of public offices.

The safe havens that are being sought in the wake of the passing of the mass party may be different; the withdrawal is mutual, however, and this is the conclusion that needs to be most clearly underlined. It is not that the citizens are disengaging and leaving hapless politicians behind, or that politicians are retreating and leaving voiceless citizens in the lurch. Both sides are withdrawing, and hence rather than thinking in terms of a linear sequence in which one of the movements leads to the other, and hence in which only one side is assumed to be responsible for the ensuing gap – the crude populist interpretation – it makes much more sense to think of a process of mutual reinforcement. The elites are inclined to withdraw to the institutions as a defence against the uncertainties of the electoral market. Just as state subventions to political parties have compensated for the inability of parties to raise sucient resources from their own members and supporters, so the security of an institutional or procedural role can compensate elites for their vulnerability in dealing with an increasingly disengaged and random electorate. At the same time, citizens withdraw from parties and a conventional politics that no longer seem to be part of their own world: traditional politics is seen less and less as something that belongs to the citizens or to the society, more and more as something done by politicians. There is a world of the citizens – or a host of particular worlds of the citizens – and a world of the politicians and parties, and the interaction between them steadily diminishes. Citizens change from participants into spectators, while the elites win more and more space in which to pursue their own particular interests. The result is the beginning of a new form of democracy, one in which the citizens stay at home while the parties get on with governing.

It's the end of the chapter 3 "The Withdrawal of the Elites". No mention of the withdrawal of a subset of the elite into the ivory tower.

They have become agencies that govern – in the widest sense of the term – rather than represent. They bring order rather than give voice.

To give voice would require a social tie to those you rule, a personal as opposed to impersonal relation. The existence of managers is a given, but they come in different forms. 

This link is as good as any. It covers all the bases.