On Ryan Avent’s Meditations on Trumpism

Pulling this from a year and a half ago out on its own so that I will more easily be able to find it later...

Pulling this from a year and a half ago out on its own so that I will more easily be able to find it later...

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Ryan Avent: What Is Trumpism, Exactly? ‘‘I sat reflecting on the chapter in Brad DeLong’s new book which discusses the rise of fascism. Mussolini… off socialism, impressed by the power of ethno-nationalism, and keen to lead a mass movement… crept and felt his way toward a set of core principles, based in large part on what seemed to work best: another algorithm, learning from incoming data…. Brad flirts with the notion that actually there was never much of anything coherent there: just an algorithmically learning leader exploiting the intoxicating power of nationalism to elevate himself into a position of power.… But even if fascism often is that, it is also something else—and its capacity to attract millions of supporters is the proof…. It is a belief, first, in the fundamental importance of the ethno-nationalist community, appeals to which have a terrible unifying and inspirational power. It is implacably opposed to socialism and to liberalism…. It embraces a certain economic pragmatism and rejects deference to the market…. And yes, it is about the leader…. It is not on its face a particularly alluring set of principles, and its appeal has to be understood in the context of the shortcomings of other ideologies. In the middle of the 20th century, those shortcomings were all too obvious….

That Trump has succeeded in the way that he has tells us something profound about the American electorate. It tells us that our society has within it certain terrible capacities. If Trump goes away, do we imagine that those capacities will too?… It took extraordinary material hardship to create the conditions in which a fascist regime could take power in Germany. Even if we say that Trumpism isn’t fascism, but is more like the half-formed kernel around which an American fascism might coalesce if luck and the flow of history were against us, isn’t that on its own a remarkable thing? Doesn’t that suggest that whatever else our current system is and does, it has within it this extraordinary vulnerability, that some large portion of the population are ready to rip up everything to follow a Trump wherever he goes? Mostly sunny with a chance of afternoon fascism is one hell of a forecast….

Reading Brad’s book, I found myself imagining a future, decades from now, in which people try to understand the events that led to a second Trump term—still a good bet, according to the bookies—and everything which flowed from that. What would they say about us? What choices that we are making would seem unfathomable to them, or unconscionable? What will they think we should have understood, should have seen coming? I don’t know. I don’t know…

What is Trumpism, exactly?

From one perspective, fascism, neo-fascism, and fascism-adjacent are things that go back to the very beginning of democratic politics—back to the election of Andrew Jackson in the U.S. in 1832 and to the election of Louis Bonaparte in France in 1848. It is a short-circuiting of the politics of patron and client, of interests and affinities, and of network connections for something else: a politics of a parasocial connection to someone whom Max Weber called a “charismatic” leader. And as long as the parasocial bonds are maintained, the leader can change course at will and lead the people pretty much anywhere, no matter whether his policies are any good for their material interests or indeed for their former ideal interests.

That Max Weber thought it important enough to include this type of leadership as one of his three "types" tells you how deep he thought it ran in human affairs. And Karl Marx could not believe that the French Revolution of 1848—the one that was supposed to see the rapid advance of socialism, as the bourgeoisie was moved to the back and the proletariat took the driver’s seat—end in the dictatorship of the clown Louis Bonaparte, heading a government “not, as was traditional in France, of mistresses, but of gigolos”. Indeed, Marx’s rant is something to read:

Every observer of average intelligence… must have anticipated that an unheard-of fiasco was in store for the revolution…. The constitution, the national assembly, the dynastic parties, the blue and the red republicans, the heroes from Africa, the thunder from the tribune, the flash-lightnings from the daily press, the whole literature, the political names and the intellectual celebrities, the civil and the criminal law, the “liberte’, egalite’, fraternite’,” together with the [succession of power to take place on the] 2d of May 1852—all vanished like a phantasmagoria before the ban of one man, whom his enemies themselves do not pronounce an adept at witchcraft. Universal suffrage seems to have survived only for a moment, to the end that, before the eyes of the whole world, it should make its own testament with its own hands, and, in the name of the people, declare: “All that exists deserves to perish.”

It is not enough to say, as the Frenchmen do, that their nation was taken by surprise. A nation, no more than a woman, is excused for the unguarded hour when the first adventurer who comes along can do violence to her. The riddle is not solved by such shifts, it is only formulated in other words. There remains to be explained how a nation of thirty-six millions can be surprised by three swindlers, and taken to prison without resistance…

Marx was, in some ways, very traditional and bourgeois indeed.

Marx in the end constructed a convoluted, implausible, and false explanation that Louis Bonaparte could become dictator of France because the landlord-bourgeoisie required a king from the Bourbon dynasty while the mercantile-industrial-bourgeoisie required a king from the Orleans dynasty, and an illegitimate dictator from the Bonapartist dynasty was preferable to each than the candidate of the other faction because he would follow not pro-agriculture or pro-industry policies but would rather compromise.

But that was not it at all.

Marx in the end constructed a theory that Louis Bonaparte could become dictator of France because the industrial proletariat was still too small in numbers, leaving France still dominated by the agricultural proletariat—the peasants—which were not a class able to exert political pressure on their own behalf but rather “a potato-bag… prevent[ed] from generating among them any unity of interest, national connections, and political organization… unable to assert their class interests…represented… [by] their master, as an authority over them, as an unlimited governmental power, that protects them from above, bestows rain and sunshine upon them… [and] subjugates the commonweal to its own autocratic will.”

But in history since 1789, it has been only the peasantry that has ever appeared as an effective class making a political and social revolution.

Marx thought that Louis Bonaparte’s Second French Empire was bound to collapse very quickly

Harassed by the contradictory demands of his situation, and compelled, like a sleight-of-hands performer, to keep, by means of constant surprises, the eyes of the public riveted upon himself as the substitute of Napoleon, compelled, consequently, everyday to accomplish a sort of “coup” on a small scale, Bonaparte throws the whole bourgeois social system into disorder; he broaches everything that seemed unbroachable by the revolution of 1848; he makes one set people patient under the revolution and another anxious for it; he produces anarchy itself in the name of order by rubbing off from the whole machinery of Government the veneer of sanctity, by profaning it, by rendering it at once nauseating and laughable…

But Louis Bonaparte hung on, and gave France internal peace and economic development for two decades, until the charismatic spell was broken by defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.

There is a good deal to be said for Ezra Klein's worry that politics in the age of social media is not the politics of compromise and consensus that sometimes held when we were in the Gutenberg Galaxy—that we have a good thing going, politically, in our common home, and we should decide whether to finish the addition (tack left) or restore the roof by fixing the leaks (tack right). The fear is that politics in the age of social media is one of “do you have the right enemies”, and, as such, is uniquely vulnerable to this kind of charismatic takeover by a government that has skills that are, at best, orthogonal to competent government and focused on making people unhappy by raising internal and external culture war to a rolling boil.

But I reject Ryan’s claim that this shows that our society has an “extraordinary vulnerability”. It is, rather, I think, a standard failure mode of democratic-ish politics.

Indeed, let me give the mic to James Madison:

a pure democracy, by which I mean, a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert, results from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party, or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is, that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives, as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed, that, by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions…

Madison’s view is here inherited from Thucydides, Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle, and also Plutarch and company. The principal historical focuses underlying it are Pericles-Cleon-Alcibiades trying to guide the city of Athens through the Peloponnesian War, and the ease with which Philip of Macedon was able to buy Aeschines and company to spread pro-Macedonian fake news in the runup to the Macedonian Hegemony. While aristocracies and oligarchies have a firm view of what their and the public interest are, and while aristocrats have enough ballast in their souls to maintain independent judgment, a democracy will very easily fall under the charismatic spell—whether that of a wise Pericles, an erratic Alcibiades, or a destructive Cleon.

But it is surely true that all of this gets taken to a higher power and scale with the coming of nationalism, and then again, perhaps, of social media.

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References:

• Advent, Ryan. 2022. “What is Trumpism, exactly?” The Bellows. August 22. <https://ryanavent.substack.com/p/what-is-trumpism-exactly>.

• DeLong, J. Bradford. 2022. Slouching Towards Utopia: The Economic History of the Twentieth Century. New York: Basic Books. <https://www.harvard.com/book/slouching_towards_utopia_an_economic_history_of_the_twentieth_century/>.

• Madison, James. 1787. “The Federalist: Number 10”. New York Daily Advertiser. 22 November. <https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-10-02-0178>

• Marx, Karl. 1852. “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon”. Die Revolution. 1 (Spring). New York: Joseph Wedemeyer. <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/>.