CROSSPOST: ART GOLDHAMMER: The Unbearable Vacuity of the Moment
Art's subheadline: "When nothing seems to matter". How is it that a creaking republic lets a mediocre strongman and those best described as his Three Stooges commandeer a superpower...
Over and over again I have been told on conferences of the rich and businessy and financial over the past year and a half that Scott Bessent is head and shoulders above everyone else associated with the Trump administration. But Scott Bessent is always the guy whose mental universe is such that it was a natural slip of the tongue for him to talk about Iran’s control over the “Straits of Vermouth” <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/scott-bessents-llm-system-prompt>. Donald Trump is not Louis-Napoleon or Andrew Jackson. And Donald Trump’s “Proud Boys” are not Louis Bonaparte’s “Society of December 10” or Andrew Jackson’s “Hunters of Kentucky” or his “Democracy”—but the family resemblance, and the institutional decay that makes him possible, should scare us…
Goldhammer asks how a constitutional order dense with veto points could be so quickly commandeered by a “madman president” and his Three Stooge-like supporters. But history does rhyme. Things like this have happened before.
We have: Karl Marx in 1852:
Karl Marx (1852): The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm>: ‘The [French] February Revolution [of 1848] was a surprise attack, a seizing of the old society unaware, and the people proclaimed this unexpected stroke a deed of world importance, ushering in a new epoch.
On December 2 [1851] the February Revolution is conjured away as a cardsharp’s trick, and what seems overthrown is no longer the monarchy but the liberal concessions that had been wrung from it through centuries of struggle. Instead of society having conquered a new content for itself, it seems that the state has only returned to its oldest form, to a shamelessly simple rule by the sword and the monk’s cowl. This is the answer to the coup de main of February, 1848, given by the coup de tête of December, 1851. Easy come, easy go….
Every fair observer, even if he had not followed the course of French developments step by step, must have had a presentiment of the imminence of an unheard-of disgrace…. It was enough to hear the complacent yelps of victory with which the democrats congratulated each other on the expectedly gracious consequences of the second Sunday in May, 1852 [when Louis Bonaparte’s term as president would expire]… Weakness… lost all understanding of the present in an inactive glorification of the future that was in store for it and the deeds it had in mind but did not want to carry out yet…. [They] had tied up their bundles, collected their laurel wreaths in advance, and occupied themselves with discounting on the exchange market the republics in partibus [in name only] for which they had already providently organized the government personnel….
December 2 struck them like a thunderbolt from a clear sky….. The constitution, the National Assembly, the dynastic parties, the blue and red republicans, the heroes of Africa, the thunder from the platform, the sheet lightning of the daily press, the entire literature, the political names and the intellectual reputations, the civil law and the penal code, liberté, egalité, fraternité, and the second Sunday in May, 1852—all have vanished like a phantasmagoria before the spell of a man whom even his enemies do not make out to be a sorcerer…. It is not enough to say, as the French do, that their nation was taken unawares. Nations and women are not forgiven the unguarded hour in which the first adventurer who came along could violate them. Such turns of speech do not solve the riddle but only formulate it differently. It remains to be explained how a nation of thirty-six millions can be surprised and delivered without resistance into captivity by three chervaliers of card-sharping…
And we have: Art Goldhammer in 2026:
Art Goldhammer:; <https://arthurgoldhammer356783.substack.com/p/the-unbearable-vacuity-of-the-moment>: ‘f we believe that this confidence in ultimate vindication explains our torpor in the face of such extraordinary events, we owe it to ourselves to explain why we seem able to shake off our somnolence long enough to protest vociferously the lapses of judgment on the part of the young activists who recruited a candidate as flawed as Graham Platner to run for the Senate in Maine. Of course, if we lose Maine, our chances of retaking the Senate plunge dramatically, and if we don’t retake the Senate, what chance have we of halting the “irresponsible imperial behavior by a madman president”?
Could an empire of this magnitude—”like nobody has ever seen before,” as the “mad” president likes to say—really have been brought this low by a handful of twenty- and thirty-somethings drunk on the notion that the way to the People’s heart is to find a candidate who can put on a flannel work shirt and swear like a sailor? Isn’t the more pertinent question to ask how a polity with a constitution like that of the United States, with its myriad veto points, and a central government structure designed to place numerous institutional hurdles in the way of any executive, no matter how mad or irresponsible, could have been so thoroughly and rapidly commandeered by this lamentable band of rogues? Were they exceptionally ruthless and cunning, or have the termites been eating away for decades now at barriers that once seemed as solid as the doors of the Capitol before January 6, 2021? I incline toward the latter theory; the rogues in question, with a few notable exceptions, resemble the Three Stooges, not Ocean’s Eleven.
If institutional decay has brought us to this pass, we need to know more about where the wormholes have developed...
Similar sentiments, no?
Here is Art’s whole thing, well worth reading:
CROSSPOST: ART GOLDHAMMER: The Unbearable Vacuity of the Moment
<https://arthurgoldhammer356783.substack.com/p/the-unbearable-vacuity-of-the-moment>
On the New York Times Opinion page today, an extraordinary moment occurs in a conversation between Michelle Cottle, David French, and David Wallace-Wells. With remarkable equanimity the three opinion writers readily agree that the United States has just lost a war with Iran: “We learned that Iran, with its cheap drones, could match the U. S. military. … We’ve learned something about the humbling of the American empire and what we can do in the world.” Fair enough. But then Wallace-Wells observes that the public—We the People, in other words, we sensitive arbiters of the res publica who so magisterially rose in righteous anger over the price of eggs under Biden and the bailout of bankers under Obama, empowering the populist revolt—remain strangely unmoved by this “humbling” wound to our imperial amour-propre: “It is not a Topic A conversation on the news,” Wallace-Wells rightly remarks. “It’s not the leading item in newspapers like ours. It is not dominating social media. And you see a sort of growing awareness that this is the kind of bad imperial behavior that the U.S. engages in without any real outrage about it.”
This is extraordinary, but it’s by no means the most extraordinary comment in this piece on our contemporary torpor. Wallace-Wells goes on to say this:
That alone is a kind of depressing, distressing development: that the public could come to hold those two thoughts in their head at once, to say, “We understand that this is irresponsible imperial behavior by a madman president, and we’re not even paying all that close attention to it” [emphasis added]…
To which Cottle responds: “Yeah, we just shrug. ‘Yeah, whatever.’”
Let me be clear. I’m not disagreeing at all with this view, shocking though it is. I agree that the United States has just lost a war with Iran. I agree that this loss was the result of “irresponsible imperial behavior.” And I agree that this irresponsible behavior was authorized and intermittently overseen by a president who, while he may not be a “madman” in any sense recognized by DSM-5, is nevertheless so feckless, corrupt, ignorant, and consumed by petty grudges and grandiose obsessions that a mad king might well be preferable to the concupiscent kingpin with whom we are currently saddled.
And yet, and yet … We the People remain strangely unmoved. We just shrug. Perhaps this is because we are convinced that retribution is just around the corner, that the democratic process that has brought us to this juncture will soon correct itself—doesn’t it always?—and reintroduce the vaunted checks and balances that have lately gone missing.
And yet if we believe that this confidence in ultimate vindication explains our torpor in the face of such extraordinary events, we owe it to ourselves to explain why we seem able to shake off our somnolence long enough to protest vociferously the lapses of judgment on the part of the young activists who recruited a candidate as flawed as Graham Platner to run for the Senate in Maine. Of course, if we lose Maine, our chances of retaking the Senate plunge dramatically, and if we don’t retake the Senate, what chance have we of halting the “irresponsible imperial behavior by a madman president”?
Could an empire of this magnitude—”like nobody has ever seen before,” as the “mad” president likes to say—really have been brought this low by a handful of twenty- and thirty-somethings drunk on the notion that the way to the People’s heart is to find a candidate who can put on a flannel work shirt and swear like a sailor? Isn’t the more pertinent question to ask how a polity with a constitution like that of the United States, with its myriad veto points, and a central government structure designed to place numerous institutional hurdles in the way of any executive, no matter how mad or irresponsible, could have been so thoroughly and rapidly commandeered by this lamentable band of rogues? Were they exceptionally ruthless and cunning, or have the termites been eating away for decades now at barriers that once seemed as solid as the doors of the Capitol before January 6, 2021? I incline toward the latter theory; the rogues in question, with a few notable exceptions, resemble the Three Stooges, not Ocean’s Eleven.
If institutional decay has brought us to this pass, we need to know more about where the wormholes have developed. This strikes me as a question in regard to which liberals and conservatives might find common ground. No one, right or left, has an interest in licensing irresponsible behavior by an unhinged executive. Everyone, right and left, has an interest in rousing the public from its dogmatic slumbers, its complacent belief that “democracy will provide,” as if We the People don’t from time to time need to hear words of wisdom whispered in our ears, even if the whisperer isn’t wearing a flannel shirt or sporting a pectoral tattoo. Perhaps the problem lies not with the judgment of the candidate recruiters but rather with widespread beliefs about what kind of candidate needs to be recruited. Donald Trump won the working-class vote despite, not because of, his sartorial choices and suspect grammar.
<https://arthurgoldhammer356783.substack.com/p/the-unbearable-vacuity-of-the-moment>
Brad DeLong here: There have been a number of smart things said about Neofascist Trumpism today in the context of the mid-1800s National Populism of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte and Andrew Jackson. Here are my favorites: ten of them:
Rather than asking whether Trump “is like” Louis Bonaparte, one should see him as a symptom of a long Bonapartist drift, as increasingly opaque bureaucratic and coercive powers coexist with plebiscitary, media‑driven leaders claiming to incarnate “the people”… See: Chris Cutrone URL: https://platypus1917.org/2025/06/01/bonapartism-is-not-bonaparte/
Louis-Bonapartism promised “order” after revolutionary turmoil, Trumpism, by contrast, feeds on permanent and transparently ginned-up crisis, using constant institutional brinkmanship (including election denialism) as a substitute for the Bonapartist promise of a new, stable settlement that respected the popular and populist gains of the Great French Revolution. Jackson harnessed a frontier military heroism to legitimate his politics, but Trump’s lack of martial record and use of the paramilitary‑adjacent evoke a more Bonapartist relationship to “street muscle”.…
See: Pablo Bustinduy URL: https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/01/the-18th-brumaire-of-donald-trumpTrump most closely resembles Napoleon III as a “grotesquely mediocre emperor” whose regime rests on propaganda, plebiscitary claims to embody “the people,” and nostalgia for glory, but who lacks the real institutional and military achievements. In contrast to Napoleon I and III, who remade legal codes, urban space, and the state apparatus, Trump is a militantly partisan Republican advancing tax cuts and deregulation. The lack of any state‑building project marks a crucial disanalogy with classic Bonapartism. But both grasp the importance of modern “media emperorship”—self‑curated myth‑making through bulletins, portraits, or social media. However, Trump’s image as a successful businessman is largely fictive in a way that makes him even more hollow than Napoleon III… See: Jan‑Werner Müller URL: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-napoleon-caesarism-analogy-ultimately-flawed-by-jan-werner-mueller-2025-03
Both Trump and Jackson ride waves of anti‑establishment resentment and promise to restore power to “the people,” but Jackson’s war on the Second Bank channeled that anger into a coherent institutional project, whereas Trump’s attacks on central‑bankers and “globalists” are largely symbolic and self‑contradictory… See: Manuel Balce Ceneta URL: https://www.usnews.com/opinion/op-ed/articles/2017-02-13/beware-the-similarities-between-donald-trump-and-andrew-jackson
Jackson and Trump are both close to Hamilton’s and Jefferson’s nightmares: both are both close to the demagogue Hamilton feared (flattering angry debtors and mobs) and close to the would‑be Caesar Jefferson dreaded (refusing to accept electoral defeat and claiming the election was stolen)… But Trump’s mass January 6 pardons and systematic purge of the bureaucracy look less like Jackson’s spoils system and more like a Burr‑style insurrectionary project… See: Jeffrey Rosen URL: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/11/shays-rebellion-hamilton-jefferson-political-ideologies/684319/
Trump’s “autonomization” of the executive—bypassing Congress on tariffs, weaponizing the Justice Department, and treating the state as a personal fief—is Bonapartist in flavor, but it operates within a context where what we might as well call a very strong bourgeoisie—lower taxes on the rich, regulatory rollback—still largely gets its way, unlike mid‑nineteenth‑century France, where Napoleon III was confident that his hold on a large and strong majority by virtue of his name and his uncle’s legacy gave him great and entrenched authory… See: Samuel Farber URL: https://againstthecurrent.org/atc241/on-donald-trump-the-u-s-ruling-class-bonapartism-in-america/
Trump is not a twenty-first‑century Andrew Jackson, because Jackson was a nation‑builder with a coherent political program rooted in his era’s party system, whereas Trump is a media‑driven, institution‑light populist whose politics are far more personalist and improvisational… See: Mark R. Cheathem URL: https://www.oah.org/tah/february-3/donald-trump-is-not-a-twenty-first-century-andrew-jackson/
Jackson built a spoils system that actually enhanced presidential control over the state. Trump’s hollowing‑out of policy capacity and failure to staff the government has produced “incompetent Bonapartism”. Trump’s presidency is best seen not as a sui generis political-system rupture like Louis-Napoleon but as the GOP’s late‑Reaganite synthesis pushed to incompetently maximalist extremes: standard right‑wing judicial, tax, and deregulatory agendas, executed with historically low administrative capacity and contempt for norms… See: Richard M. Skinner URL: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/trump-a-conventional-republican-president-but-an-incompetent-one/
Measured by temperament and style—thin‑skinned, vengeful, contemptuous of elites—Trump and Jackson are cousins, but Trump lacks Jackson’s military credibility and willingness to take personal physical risks, which mattered greatly in nineteenth‑century political legitimacy… See: Jane Coaston URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/02/opinion/trump-andrew-jackson-and-ourselves.html
Unlike Jackson, whose coalition realigned institutions for decades, Trump’s polarizing style seems to harden partisan affect without building durable governing capacity, producing a presidency that is historically divisive but institutionally brittle… See: Gregory Eady, Justin S. Vaughn, Brandon Rottinghaus URL: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/comparing-trump-to-the-greatest-and-the-most-polarizing-presidents-in-u-s-history/
Regarding Bessent, it's good to look at his record running his own hedge funds rather than the titans he worked for. He is a magnificent sycophant more than financier.
The apt analogy for Trump isn't Jackson, but an Oswald Cobblepot who aspires to be the Joker.
I prefer Tim Snyder's formulation: "History doesn't repeat, and it doesn't rhyme either, but it does expand your notions of the possible". To which I would add: that only holds if you don't react by saying "that could never happen here".
Anyway, you might enjoy this review by Jack Dickens of Edward Shawcross's book "The People’s Emperor: The Unlikely Rise and Spectacular Fall of Napoleon III" https://engelsbergideas.com/reviews/the-unlikely-triumph-of-napoleon-iii/