An obit in the NYT today concerning this “political analyst” who died in a car wreck last week.
As a coincidence, this week I’m reading “The Free World, Art and Thought in the Cold War” by Louis Menand and am at the chapter on Hannah Arendt’s “Origins of Totalitarianism.” There she describes this, that during and after the first world war, in both Germany and Russia:
The breakdown of social classes produced a second group, which Arendt called “the mob.” The mob was made up of the refuse of every class; disempowered aristocrats, disillusioned intellectuals, gangsters, denizens of the underworld. They were people who believed that the respectable world was a conspiracy to deny them what they were owed; they were the embodiment of the politics of resentment. Arendt thought that the leadership of totalitarian movements came from this group.
After reading the obit, and admittedly, nothing else by Codevilla, he seems to fit the profile above of an agent of the aggrieved, about what, I’m not sure, possibly a castrated hawk? This paragraph from the NYT might give a hint:
Running through much of his work, which he continued as a fellow at the Hoover Institution, at Stanford, and later at Boston University, was a belief that American foreign policy was controlled by an insular, mostly liberal elite, which suppressed dissent, promoted groupthink and hamstrung the country’s military.
“The arms control process is really about the unilateral shaping of American military forces by the American foreign policy establishment,” he and Senator Wallop wrote in their book “The Arms Control Delusion” (1987). “Any effect arms control might have on the Soviet Union is of secondary importance.”
Anyone who supports or tolerates Trump fits the above definition of “the mob,” it is Trump’s base, who Arendt described perfectly.
I might have to add Wyoming Senator Wallop to the post about aptonyms, as a hawk, wallop seems an apt name.