I sat down for a Notes from the Circus Live this afternoon with Anthony Scaramucci, just off a flight, generous with his time. We talked about the question that keeps coming up in the corpus and that has been the live methodological dispute on The Fifth Column over the past two weeks: what counts as fascism, and whether the contemporary American right can be honestly called by that name. Anthony made the case that the British school — Katty Kay, Dominic Sandbrook, the only Hitler and Mussolini methodology — is wrong, and that Lawrence Rees’s twelve-chapter framework in The Nazi Mind gives us the right diagnostic apparatus for reading the Trump movement. We worked through Vance and the Pogue piece in Vanity Fair, the splintering of the MAGA coalition, and the question of why the commentariat has not metabolized the fact that the sitting Vice President has, on tape, advocated a constitutional coup.
The conversation then turned to where Anthony and I have a real disagreement, which is the right response to the populist diagnosis we both share. I argued that the salaried-rich versus capital-rich distinction is the philosophical ground on which a serious wealth-tax argument actually stands, and that the pre-1980s estate-tax consensus across both parties was not socialism but a deliberate American refusal of dynastic wealth that the neoliberal era abandoned. Anthony pushed back hard on the implementation — the Sergey Brin / Larry Page founder-control problem, the mark-to-market mechanism, the VAT alternative. We did not resolve it. We were not going to. But the disagreement was substantive, the philosophical ground was conceded on both sides, and we landed where we agreed: the system is corrupt across the spectrum, the Constitution requires renewal, the argument survives the man. Watch it through if you want to see what serious disagreement between people who share a country looks like.
Thank you Jeanne Elbe, Ms. H, Publius, Violet Hunter, Coatney B 🐝, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.
