The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvior is a surprisingly entertaining book... ... particularly if you despise Communists and Communism. de Beauvoir stripped away the facade of nobility and concern for the poor that Communists like to put on and revealed that French leftists were - surprise! - spoiled, narcissistic fools.   In my review of The Mandarins, I wrote: Similarly, the only explanation given for the pro-Communist/pro-Soviet attitude is a salve on a guilty conscience, specifically guilt because Henri and his class of intellectuals are rather well-off. We know that they are well-off because they are drinking champagne, going out on the town, living in houses, and not going hungry. When Henri contemplates supporting the Soviet Union - or when he feels guilt or doubt about pointing out that the Soviets have death camps - he explains to himself that only the Soviet Union is likely to feed millions of starving Chinese. According to Henri, "American domination meant the perpetual oppression and undernourishment of all Oriental countries." (p. 242.) Of course, the Communists did have a pesky habit of treating people as things. (p. 241 - 242), Henri ratiocinates his way to supporting Communism by asking "but what does that mean compared to feeding the hungry?" (p. 242.) Nadine, likewise, explains her brief foray into the Communist Party by explaining that if she had been a member of the Communist Party she would not have had to feel guilty about the hungry kids she saw in Portugal during her trip there with Henri. (p. 171.) Likewise, there is a revealing scene where Anne is talking to some Americans about American support for Henry Wallace - FDR's former vice president until he was dumped in favor Harry S Truman because of Wallace's Leftist/Communist sympathies. Anne receives the explanation that "[t]hat man will never create a real leftist party. He's just an alibi for people who want to buy themselves a clear conscience cheaply." (p. 553.) A few pages later, Anne is shocked at finding Americans who don't agree that America will become fascist, and she drops the conversation because she realized that they "wanted to continue leading their comfortable, carefree, esthetes' life; no argument would dent their genteel egotism" (p. 563), which seems like a strange critique coming from a woman flits over to America at whim to have an affair and seems to want nothing more than to continue her comfortable, carefree, esthete's life.

Of course, there are American Mandarins.  A case in point is found in two on-line articles by and concerning American writer Michael Thomas. In this essay for Newsweek, Michael Thomas writes: But it won’t just end with taxes. When the great day comes, Wall Street will pray for another Pecora, because compared with the rough beast now beginning to strain at the leash, Pecora will look like Phil Gramm. Humiliation and ridicule, even financial penalties, will be the least of the Street’s tribulations. There will be prosecutions and show trials. There will be violence, mark my words. Houses burnt, property defaced. I just hope that this time the mob targets the right people in Wall Street and in Washington. (How does a right-thinking Christian go about asking Santa for Mitch McConnell’s head under the Christmas tree?) There will be kleptocrats who threaten to take themselves elsewhere if their demands on jurisdictions and tax breaks aren’t met, and I say let ’em go! Hey, enough with that "New Civility" nonsense. Thomas means business! But when you read this "inside baseball" puff-piece you find out that Thomas is  the kind of wealthy, spoiled, self-indulgent narcissist that Simone de Beauvoir was writing about in the 1940s.   A few excerpts will show this: We were all out by the pool,” Michael’s son William—from his first marriage, to Brooke Hayward—was telling me over the phone from his home in Sag Harbor. It was one of those Southampton summers in the late ’60s/early ’70s; dad was with his second wife, Wendell Adams, then. Her attractive younger sister Jane was always around, looking for a wealthy husband. “Jane was kind of uptight and a little bit prudish, but she had her bikini on and she was kind of showing off her bikini, and my father, right in front of me and my teenage friends and all these other people having the usual cocktail party out by the pool, got up and grabbed her and stripped her bikini off her and threw her in the pool, in front of his wife, too. I’m standing there and I’m holding the Polaroid land camera in my hand but I’m so stunned that I can’t take a picture.” Ha! Ha! Dad sexually assaulted and humiliated a woman in front of his sons. What a cut-up. Then, there's this: It’s a habit that, coupled with his abundant talent and ambition, might explain why he ended up “living my life backward.” By age 31, he was made general partner at Lehman Brothers, making $300,000 a year, which was a lot in those days. After the world of high finance had had enough of him, and he of it, he turned his hand to writing novels. And - Bobby Lehman helped him get a gig as the curatorial assistant in the department of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, making $6,000 a year. He felt like his life was pretty much set. Two years later, he was locking horns with some asshole who was up to no good at the museum. Mr. Lehman asked him if might like to try out finance. How much? Six thousand five hundred. Deal! Then, of course, he had to go tell his father the news that his brilliant son had decided to sell out and take a meaningless job in banking. Because what kid isn't able to flush his first job and go to work for a top line banking business because he's dealing with "some asshole"? And - Distance prevailed even during his tenure at Lehman, when father and son worked in the same building. In those days, the Lehman brothers ate lunch at the round table: “Let’s say there were 35 partners, and some would be out of town, and some would be in the smaller rooms with clients, and there’d be maybe 15 or 25 of us. But, by ’71 or early—yeah, ’71, when Joe Thomas sat down for lunch, he would have two or three martinis. So I’m sitting there, and I don’t drink during the daytime, and so I’m sitting there, and, you know, your father’s at the end of the table, and everybody can see he’s half in the bag. And it’s tough.” Ah, yes, three martini lunches...the common touch. And - And, much like his father, he found the work pretty uncompelling. He compensated for that by enjoying himself a little too much and boasting a little too loudly about the wonderful talents of Madame Claude. “I mean, this was a wonderful time,” he recalled. (At this point in our conversation, he asked his son Francis, who recently graduated from college, to fetch him another Scotch.) “Madame Claude loomed very large; she was the biggest madam in the world, she had the best-looking girls. I remember once when I was at Lehman Brothers, our French partner, Jean Francois Malle, who is now dead, who was the brother of Louis Malle, we were in the bar and this fabulous-looking girl was there, and Jean Francois said to me, ‘She has to come with us now.’ So I called Madame Claude.” Her name was Annabelle. Later he would host a dinner party, eight men and Annabelle. “And she was fabulous,” he said. “Fabulous.” Because who among us isn't on a first name basis with a pimp or doesn't find enjoyable the idea of a "dinner party" with a hooker and eight men? And -

“We used to say if a girl is in a room and she’s better-looking and has good manners and that her conversation is better than any of the other women in the room, the chances are she’s from Madame Claude.”

Not like modern day pimps who barely teach their hookers any refinement.

And -

Mr. Niven recalled a party thrown by Jan Cushing for Arthur Schlesinger to celebrate his book about the Kennedys. Needing to fill a last-minute chair, she called up Michael, who drank three Johnnie Walkers straight up before crashing in.

“When he got there, he saw this girl with enormous tits and immediately went over and started talking to her, and soon enough she was giggling a lot because, as I’m sure you know, Michael can be quite funny.”

The girl with the enormous tits was still giggling when Ms. Cushing tried to get everyone to focus up. She asked Michael to ask Mr. Schlesinger a question. “What’s the capital of South Dakota,” he said. The girl next to him giggled, as did George Plimpton and Mr. Niven.

Ah, the times we had back then... getting bombed, crashing swanky parties, hanging out with Jan Cushing, Arthur Schlessinger and the girl with the enormous tits....

So, the guy who wrote the manifesto calling for the beheading of corrupt Wall Streeters is himself an alcoholic, jaded, rake who made his money on Wall Street.

Sounds a lot like he's trying to buy grace on the cheap just like the narcissistic, wealthy French existenstial leftists of the 1940s.