Trumpism on the Record

In 2015, I pointed out that the most obvious meaning of "Make America Great Again" was a nostalgist return to an era where America was a more straightforward, more self-interested, and (in many ways) more successful Imperial power. This was to me confirmed by Trump's statements that the time when America was great was the period from the early 20th century to the late 1940s: in other words, the effective peak of American Imperial power, when America was an industrial and financial and military powerhouse with colonies and logistical networks stretching around the world and a dominant exporter of both goods and capital to the rest of the world.

It seemed to me, therefore, that the main meaning of Trumpism was a renegotiation of America's status as global hegemon in order to ensure that the American mainland, and not merely elites, profited more from its Imperial status: which meant first and foremost finding similar ways to extract resources from the rest of the world and transfer them to the American mainland.

At the time, many people both left and right reacted with shock to this idea, insisting that Trump was in fact an isolationist whose main goal was to remove America from any involvement with the rest of the world: a vision not only absolutely contradictory to the past eras that Trump idolized, but also impossible to carry out without revolutionary changes to the basic structure of American domestic life and commerce.

Whatever truth there may have been in this, the simple reality is that Trumpism as a domestic policy has been a complete failure. One year into his second term, Trump has effectively abandoned all his ambitious domestic-policy goals, which from the beginning required institutional skill and personnel and concerted action that his coalition lacks. On a macro scale, besides random acts of cruelty and equally random affirmations of the growing American political consensus, Trump has achieved nothing on the domestic policy front except accelerating the existing institutional and social disruption and collapse from the pandemic. And I think he has realized it: which is why he has not tried to do anything on domestic policy for months now. From here on, I think it highly likely that foreign policy will be his first and only priority, as it has already largely been for most of the past year.

Anyway, I now feel that I can state with a very high degree of confidence that this was, has been, and will have been the primary significance of Donald Trump and of Trumpism writ large in history: (1) The return of America to the global stage as an Imperial power (as the recent National Security Strategy document directly stated) openly and overtly dedicated to interfering in every region and every country of the world to promote its own financial interests and maintain its own hegemonic status, (2) The renegotiation of the terms of American power away from dedication to a perceived universal rule of law or rights regime and back towards the governmental-corporate extraction of resources and possession of captive markets for the mutual profit of local and regional and national and trans-national elites the world over, and finally (3) The increasing reliance on America's status as a global hegemon to benefit at least the enfranchised members of mainland American society, and to fund and staff and cause to function nearly all the institutions of mainland American life, through various forms of resource-extraction carried out through concerted governmental-military and corporate-financial action. Again, the recent National Security Strategy document not only directly asserted a "Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine," but also ordered American diplomatic staff to see it as their highest priority to work with American corporations to promote American financial and business interests in the countries under their purview.

This is in truth not nearly as much of a shift from the previous era of American life as its overtness may imply. This vision was already largely in place for American elites under Bush and Obama, although opposed by other, more idealistic strands: and in some form, as Trump correctly perceived, it was more or less the state of affairs during the past eras of greatest American prosperity, and hence helped to shape many of the most basic structural features of contemporary American life, to such an extent that it would be very difficult to envision them functioning with it.

The question of how successful this vision will be is another one entirely. Carried out with some degree of skill, and in a way that actually led to financial profit for American citizens, it would naturally lead to great popularity for Trump and Trumpism; carried out badly, without seeing to that profit, it will become as unpopular as Bush's "forever wars." On the global level, carried out with due attention to the profit of elites in other countries and some kind of basic political and military stability, it is highly likely to be successful; carried out badly on either front, it risks undermining America's global status entirely, and imperiling further the already fragile nature of American domestic economy and institutions. On a more basic level, it is far from clear that Americans have the necessary skills and savvy to carry out this kind of Imperial policy, period.

Perhaps most fundamentally, such an overt reliance on global Empire and hegemony is not without its basic paradoxes for such a large and prosperous country as America: and comes naturally with many, many dangers, not just to the rest of the world, but to America.

Anyway, none of this should be misconstrued as praise for Trump or Trumpism, or indeed, as primarily directed toward blame either. It is simply helpful to know what is happening, and why, particularly when it affects so many so immediately.

Future Political Trends: A Study

Future Political Trends: A Study

For roughly the past six months, I have been repeatedly mentioning, in my posts on this blog, my intention to write up something about current and future political trends. I have not done so for a number of reasons, including (in no particular order) disinterest, boredom, anger, disgust, Lent, Easter, the death of Pope Francis, the election of Pope Leo, my desire to write short stories, a school field trip, my birthday, and the onset of spring. Central to my delays, however, has been the fundamental grimness of the topic itself.

Another thing that happened in the interval, however, was Easter; which is, properly considered, the only thing that has ever really happened. It struck me, on Easter night, that Easter is, perhaps, the best standpoint from which to consider present political realities. It is certainly the best standpoint from which to consider the sweep of human history and human life as a whole. 

In any case, I firmly believe that eternal novelties like Easter are a much better means of understanding than the faded abstractions of political and economic ideology that dominate so much of discourse. 

As Chesterton said in the Daily Herald, quite rightly, political ideologies and analyses nearly always lag at least a half-century behind actual political systems. In the 1910s, he pointed out how profoundly unsuited the 18th and 19th century categories of Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy, and the like were for the era of syndicalism and great strikes and great states and secret societies and global warfare. In a similar vein, but even more so, the categories that we use for unraveling the tangled events of our time are practically all hoary 20th century abstractions such as Fascism, Naziism, Communism, Totalitarianism, Authoritarianism, and the like--when they are not the same, even more faded 19th century abstractions such as Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy, Liberalism, and so forth. 

I would suggest that one of the greatest threats to our political life today, a threat that has again and again allowed evils to burgeon and flourish undetected, is simply the enormous gap between reality and our ability to analyze it. This may seem a rather distant and abstract threat, but is in reality among the most practical causes of the practical evils of our time. The year 2025 does not lack for crimes and tyrants--but it does profoundly, I am tempted to say unprecedentedly, lack for both practical recognition of these evils and practical efforts to counter them. And a foremost reason for this lack, I increasingly think, is simply that people cannot understand these evils, cannot recognize them, frequently do not even seem to notice them, because they happen to fall into gaps in their abstract, categorical understanding of such things. 

For some bizarre reason, the real estate developer, media mogul, and brand icon Donald Trump continues to be analyzed, again and again and at ever greater length and with ever greater portentous seriousness by ever more prestigious intellectuals, entirely by comparison with a mid-20th century Italian movement of ex-socialist, WW1-veteran-populated paramilitary squads turned revanchist dictatorship. Like any historical comparison, there are certainly truths to be drawn from this one--but the gap between reality and analytical abstraction is, nevertheless, so vast that nearly the whole of Trump's actual ideology and program and even legitimate crimes can be, and have been, and continue to be buried within. 

Nevertheless, in carrying out an analysis of present trends, and their likely future results, I would like to be absolutely clear about what I am doing, and why. I am not a historicist, let alone a historical fatalist: I do not believe in memetics, or Hegelian dialectics, or progress. When I speak of trends, I am speaking ultimately of either ideas or habits residing in the actual intellects and wills of actual people: ideas and habits which exercise great power over those people's actions, but never fully determine them. 

People can and do reject ideas they have held, especially when they are ideas that they have never consciously understood, but only passively absorbed from their environments. People can and do change their habits, including habits that have become deeply engrained in their minds and hearts and wills over many years. 

On the most abstract level, I consider history to be first and foremost the study of human actions and the motivations behind them; so that the fundamental historical question is not merely the positivistic query of "What happened?," but the much more intrusive demands "What did they do?" and "Why did they do it?"

What is true for historical actions writ large is even more true for the subset of human actions that make up political systems past and present. Governing, particularly in the modern world, is a highly complex and technical set of actions attempting to shape and respond to constantly shifting conditions. Still, it always depends first and foremost on conscious, considered human action; and conscious, considered human action depends first and foremost on rational ideas and goals. 

Yet people are not always, or perhaps even often, aware of the ideas and goals underlying their own actions, let alone the broader social conditions and trends to which they are responding. It is for this reason, above all, that this kind of analysis is useful. As anyone knows who has ever tried to change a deeply-engrained idea or habit, one of the most important steps is often merely recognizing the actual ideas one unconsciously holds, and the actual habits that one unconsciously possesses. Only then, as a rule, can one then set out to change them.

Hence, while I am engaged in this essay in modestly claiming to understand contemporary trends and their likely future impacts, I am not engaged in actually trying to predict the future. To do so would be to fall under the curse of Chesterton's game of Cheat the Prophet: the game whereby smart people predict the future by extending current trends indefinitely, and the human race thwarts them by the simple expedient of going and doing something else. In this post, I am quite self-consciously teeing up to play a round of this game with the human race, providing them with a helpful listing of the trends they will need to know about in order to defy them. In this, I heartily encourage the human race to cheat me: nay, I demand it. That is, in fact, the entire point of this exercise. If all my predictions are vindicated, I will be deeply, profoundly disappointed in you all.

Of course, the trends I discuss below are not uniformly positive or negative. Some are in my judgment evil, some few are good, some are, in themselves, merely neutral. Nonetheless, my modest claim is merely that if we wish to exercise some control over our collective destinies, it is helpful to know what is happening: only then can we choose to aid what is good, to resist what is evil, and, hopefully and above all, to repent and seek the good. This is my exhortation.

The Big Lie: A Thesis on Modernity and Contemporary Intellectual History

The Big Lie: A Thesis on Modernity and Contemporary Intellectual History

I have recently been reflecting on the overwhelming role that lies play in the contemporary world and contemporary discourse.

When I say this, I do not primarily mean "lies" in a polemical sense, referring to ideas I do not like--though I will, I confess, engage in a great deal of polemics in this essay, in a manner sure to offend nearly everyone. I mean, rather, things that are acknowledged by all, including their creators, to be lies; and, in fact, to a great degree, are valued because they are lies.

In itself, this is not a new phenomenon, but a very basic intellectual and spiritual problem as old as the human race. Lies originate with the human intellect and will; and are therefore often more natively comfortable and congenial to it than truth. Lies provide the illusion of what we want; especially when what we want is merely control, power, freedom, which is to say, escape from the reality and goodness of things and the power they have over us through desire and fear. In its most benign form, this impulse merely leads to fiction; but much more malign forms have been a feature of human culture almost from the beginning. There is a reason why the Scriptures speak of the devil as the "father of lies," and define sin as "loving and making lies." Properly understood, to prefer a lie because it is a lie is only a cogent and philosophical name for Hell. 

Still, there can be little question that, in the year 2025, our cultural fixation with lies has accelerated to a point rarely, if ever, seen before in human civilization. Assorted smart people have, since the year 2016, been talking about our entrance into an allegedly "post-truth" era. In reality, we have been there for a while now, though there is no doubt that the Internet and smart phone proliferation have accelerated the process.

We are a people whose most basic activity, taking up more and more and ever more of our lives, consists in sitting alone and passively absorbing video and text and audio, nearly all of which is false in one sense or another, and nearly all of which we know is false. The characteristic forms of this modern fixation with lies are, as I have said many times before, advertising and pornography, the two (united) pillars of our culture--both of which are valued precisely because they take us into realms where truth simply has no meaning. The supposed "AI revolution" takes this cultural fixation so far that it may actually have permanently broken it, flooding the Internet with lies that are so obvious, so incoherent, and so unattractive that they threaten to undo the system altogether. 

I have more and more begun to suspect, however, that a certain preference for lies over truth is more or less a characteristic feature of modernity as such, going back to its origins. And I think I have perhaps come to understand some of the actual reasons for this preference: the Big Lie, so to speak, behind the lies.

I have put the above in terms of a preference for lies qua lies; and I think this is the most correct and philosophical way to put it. However, what I have called "lies" are a genus that has in the past five hundred years generally gone by other names; and put in its originating philosophical and religious and historical contexts, have very different connotations. To understand the preference, one must understand the context behind it; or, in other words, the Big Lie behind the lies. 

So here is the Big Lie, divided up into its essential nature, is variable embodiments, and various ways to understand and deal with it.

Real Politics: A Manifesto for the 2024 Election

Real Politics: A Manifesto for the 2024 Election (Or Any Other Election)

I recently posted an essay declaring (somewhat exaggeratively) that there are no politics anymore in 2024. I did this by taking a rather harsh look at the current events and activities of mainstream, mass-media based politics, as exemplified by the two Presidential candidates for the two main parties. 

But of course, there is a lot more to politics in 2024 than Trump and Kamala. There is even more to national electoral politics than Trump and Kamala: personally, I plan to vote for Peter Sonski of the American Solidarity Party for President this November. Neither Trump or Kamala, though, has actually done any governing in the last four years, in a nation with massive ongoing social and economic crises and a world with numerous ongoing, extremely bloody wars. These ongoing crises and wars are still in the care of Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron, Vladimir Putin, and (more hopefully) numerous governors, mayors, city councilors, and local school board members throughout the world. When we think of politics in 2024, we should think, first and foremost, of these people: and, speaking ideally, not think of Trump and Kamala at all.

Still, as I argued in the preceding essay, there is certainly less to politics in 2024 America than there has ever been before, as polling and television and the Internet alike all show very clearly: more people than there have ever been before paying rapt attention to only the latest news on the two Presidential candidates for the two main parties, and otherwise not engaging with any political issue or candidate or official at any level at all. And of course, the two trends are nearly correlatives, since the more the mass media is full of stories about Trump and Kamala, the less room there is for anything else: even discussion of the actual laws and officials doing most of the governing for most Americans.

Still, when all is said and done, I feel the need to justify myself from the charge of merely being a political opportunist declaring a plague on both the two largest houses while ignoring the rest of the village entirely--or worse, a centrist. Someone might well say to me what a critic said of Chesterton's Heretics when it was published, that he will defend his own beliefs when he has seen me defend mine. Chesterton responded to this challenge by writing probably the most widely read work of Christian apologetics in the 20th century, Orthodoxy. I can only respond by writing this blog post. 

At the outset I should say that this will not be an attempt to defend the broader, theoretical bases of my own approach to politics. I have done some of that otherwise in this blog, on many occasions and in tedious length and yet without giving what most would regard as a proper exposition of what I think and why. Perhaps I will get to that theoretical exposition one day.

Instead, this essay/blog post/manifesto will be something closer to what I would, ideally, like to see from political candidates in the 2024 election: a list of issues and broad programmes to address them that could actually be implemented politically in America today. As I declared not too long ago, I think that in a democracy political candidates ought to largely be engaged in acknowledging the pressing problems of the citizenry at large and trying to fix them. I firmly believe that all of the below issues are real, pressing issues in American life which ought to be dealt with politically--and which could in fact be meaningfully addressed by the actual American political system in 2024--and which, furthermore, are not issues that are constructed according to the symbolic binaries that presently define American political life, or which would necessarily and intrinsically appeal to only one side of the American political spectrum and alienate the other. Of course, if and when these issues became mainstream political issues, they could and would no doubt be processed in these terms, for basic structural reasons if nothing else.

Please note that the below proposals do not really cover foreign policy, which is not only arguably the most important impact America has on the world, but also is the issue that is most determined by actual Presidential elections. Foreign policy, though, is one of the issues least addressable via democratic means, which is why, even in America, it is run on a basically monarchical model; and, in any case, I have covered the basic issues of present-day American foreign policy elsewhere in this space. The below proposals also do not directly cover immigration policy, which, at least as currently debated, most boils down to more fundamental debates and structural issues with American foreign policy and economic policy. To deal with its complexities fully would take an essay of its own, however.

My own politics are radical enough that the below proposals--though far more radical than anything a major American party has proposed since the New Deal--are actually far less radical than I would ideally aim to achieve if there were no constraints at all on my decision-making (which is of course absurd). I do, however, genuinely want to implement all of the below proposals; and so might you.

Take what you can get; and what you can get here, from me, should not be taken for more than it is worth.

The Triumph of the Cultural Mainstream & the Decline of the American Empire

The Triumph of the Cultural Mainstream and The Decline of the American Empire 

Here's a "personality quiz" of sorts for you:

(1) Which film released in 2010 did you enjoy more: (1) Unstoppable or (2) Alice in Wonderland? Or if you didn't see either, which do you think (based on Wikipedia descriptions and posters) you would enjoy more?

(2) Which song released in 2023 did you enjoy more: (1) Last Night by Morgan Wallern or (2) anti-hero by Taylor Swift?  

(3) Which television show released in 2015 did you enjoy more: (1) The Big Bang Theory or (2) NCIS? 

(4) Knowing nothing more, you are asked to choose between watching either (1) a new Adam Sandler film, or (2) a new Lin-Manual Miranda musical. Which do you pick?

(5) You can choose between watching two shows tonight, (1) a Law & Order series featuring a tough-as-nails black woman as lead prosecutor, or (2) an episode of The Celebrity Apprentice. Which would you enjoy more?

Congratulations: if you can answer these questions, you now know whether you should vote for Donald Trump or Kamala Harris.

Food, Conspiracy, and the Homo Imperialis: A Theoretical Look at the Political Crises of Modernity

Food, Conspiracy, and the Homo Imperialis: A Theoretical Look at the Political Crises of Modernity

Over the last few months, years, and/or decades of my life, I have seen some interesting things, read some interesting books, and come to some conclusions about the crises of modern political life. In the last few months in particular, these conclusions have been sharpened by discussions, debates, and reading and crystallized into a few relatively simple, albeit very broad and rather tentative, theses. 

In Defense of Overly Broad Theoretical Nonsense

I fully recognize that this blog post constitutes in essence a smattering of overly broad theoretical nonsense (see above). However, I would, as a historian, defend the value for history and politics alike of extremely broad theoretical constructions of particular topics, periods, etc. While there is always a great danger that theoretical constructions will overwhelm the actual concrete complexity of different societies, situations, events, persons, etc, in fact this danger is generally less, I think, when the theoretical constructions in question are deliberately broad and explicitly theoretical. No one is likely to mistake a blog post or a Chesterton book about the economic and social problems of humanity en masse for a work of historiography; but they may well mistake an academic-historical theory of life or death or economics or religion or human nature contained in and shaping a history textbook for historiography. Academia is in fact littered with half-baked general theories, littering the footnotes and text of books and articles of esteemed historians and college freshmen alike. I have at least, I hope, had the decency to separate my grand theories out and put them elsewhere to be laughed at.

For the moment, however, I must formally ask you to trust, not only that the below theses are based on many hours and thousands of pages of reading in various historical topics and periods, but that the below theses are not designed to replace such content or such reading, but merely to (hopefully) illuminate it.

These theses, I think, have at least something to say about the disasters unfolding around us, and what to possibly do about them. So here they are.

Varieties of Leftism

Varieties of Leftism

I recently finished a book on the French Syndicalist movement; around the same time, I have been reading "Distributist" columns from G.K. Chesterton as well as newspaper columns from the founder of so-called "Guild Socialism," A.J. Penty. All of this reflects a longstanding interest in what I would call the "non-Marxist Left"--or rather more precisely the "non-Marxist-Leninist Left," or even more precisely the history of various labor and anti-capitalist movements in the 19th and early 20th century, especially those that either preceded or avoided the final reduction of Leftism into Fabian-style democratic socialism and Soviet state socialism.

There are a lot of reasons I find these movements interesting: but the main one is that I think that there are many useful things to be learned from them about modernity, modern economics and society, and where to go from here. If the tendency of the Cold War was to reduce political and economic issues into an ideological, militarist, institutional binary, the tendency of the contemporary Internet age is to reduce those same issues to an ever-proliferating array of binary, absolute symbolic conflicts. As Chesterton argued, this is the real danger of competition, war, and conflict in human life: that they tend to make human life far more uniform than its need to be. After all, as Rene Girard pointed out, most conflicts are created precisely because two people are aiming at the same end, seeking the same desirable object. Fundamentally, conflict or competition is always and inevitably destructive of alternatives and diversity and complexity and fundamentally difference itself.

There is hardly a better example of this than Soviet Communism and American Capitalism. Before the Cold War, before the World Wars, the Left or labor and anti-capitalist movement was a vast, complex, feuding array of different fundamental beliefs and tactics: anarchists and syndicalists and distributists and "non-political" unionists and positivists and guild socialists and Fabians arguing against each other and against capitalists alike. Likewise, the European radical Right was a large and feuding array of Catholics and Calvinists and aristocrats and anti-aristocrat populists and monarchists and radical democrats and Nietzscheans and localists and agrarians and anarchists that overlapped significantly with the Left. Thanks to the Cold War, however, practically all these groups were suppressed, not by force, but simply by pressure, subsumed into the single ideological alternatives of "Communism" and "Capitalism." 

When the Cold War ended, alas, and that simple binary itself faded into the mist, Western political life was left as a very limited and very shallow debate among a few different interest groups that agreed with each on other on more or less 99% of political and economic questions, at least 50% of which would been absolutely astounding and shocking to any other society in history. And then that consensus itself fell to pieces, and we find ourselves in our current uncertain times.

Here, though, is the fundamental lesson that historical conflicts about the shape and tenor society have to teach us. As Chesterton argued, human social, political, and economic arrangements are first and foremost a matter of collective human intellect and will and effort: works of ingenuity and craft and creativity that we shape to serve certain purposes and embody certain values. And the truth that human history demonstrates beyond all doubt is that a vast number of possible arrangements are possible and have been considered desirable by different groups of people throughout time--and many, many more are possible in theory, and could be enacted in practice given sufficient will and desire. We are not trapped into a tiny range of political or economic alternatives by "natural" "scientific" forces; we simply find ourselves, for a variety of reasons, in one highly particular social or economic arrangement among many; and if we wished, we could change it. If we have made our bed badly, we can make it over again. 

All of this is another unnecessarily long intro. What I really wanted to do in this post was to offer a sort of syllabus or personality test of Leftism, presenting the main divisions within the tradition over which anti-capitalists once feuded. As I said earlier, "Leftism" is here a terribly imprecise term: the original Left-Right binary was a division created by and centered on the French Revolution and defined with reference to a few particular French institutions. It has since given way to an American political spectrum that is largely a matter of memes on the Internet. As will become clear, many of the fundamental questions involved in historical "Leftism" are as related if not more to questions on the political "Right," and indeed it is extremely difficult to clearly rule out historical "Right-wing" groups from this discourse. I myself prefer the term "anti-capitalist" and/or "radical" for my own beliefs; I have used "Leftism" here simply because it is a more commonly-used and so straightforward term for most people today.

Fundamentally, all the social and intellectual movements of the historical Left were united by some sort of unhappiness with 19th-20th century Western society, and a desire to alter it "radically," that is, in its roots and foundations. They were also united by a discomfort with "capitalism," or that legal and social order in which absolute private ownership over the means of production--land and factories and machines and workers--is allotted largely or entirely on the basis of the possession and use of liquid capital, in such a manner that society is clearly divided between a tiny minority of "owners" and a large mass of "proletariat," workers who sell their labor in exchange for a wage and who labor with the capital-owner's tools and means of production for the profit of the capital-owner. Historically, the emergence of this social order, in tandem with rapid technological change and industrialization, caused over the 19th and 20th centuries without a doubt the largest series of social and communal disruptions in the history of the human race. As the result of these disruptions, numerous groups were brought to fundamentally question their society, its powers, rulers, and underlying principles. 

That being said, this system and society can and could be opposed from any number of angles. And that is what I would like to chronicle here.

In doing so, I have attempted to lay out these divisions deliberately in terms of conflicts between paired positions. It should be noted, however, that these represent not so much binaries as polarities, and do not involve absolute logical contradiction: in most cases, then, there are not simply two binary extremes, but a great deal of potential positions in the middle.