Is It Possible Not to Speak Disparagingly to a Basket of Deplorables? A Critique of Menno ter Braak

As the post-2016 boom in the self-diagnostics of toxic liberalism shows, the concept of ressentiment is still one of today's main “ideologemes.” While having a morally disqualifying power, it offers no way out of the political impasse it describes. The author proposes a critique of the 1937 essay by the Dutch writer Menno ter Braak, “National Socialism as a Doctrine of Rancor,” as the basis for a wider critique of “pastoral” discourses on ressentiment. First, the author argues that ressentiment initially names a bourgeois problem and is an articulation of what Rancière has called a “hatred of democracy”: liberal democracy is held to inherently summon forth a bad infinity of emancipatory struggle. Second, the author shows how in discerning ressentiment everywhere, a claim is made to either a more rational or a more authentic relation to one's own ressentiment. Third, the article briefly touches on ways in which other discourses on ressentiment—that of Nietzsche and of the diplomat as invoked by ter Braak at the outset of his essay—seek to overcome this esprit de sérieux.