We Americans
love to trumpet our exceptionalism; for some in the Republican Party, not
proclaiming it from the rooftops is akin to treason. The election of Trump makes it clear: America
is not unique, either in contemporary politics, or in history. For proof, we can look to Europe, where
far-right movements are on the rise, or we can look to history. In our time, we
see antecedents of Trump’s emergence in the election of another blowhard,
enemy-chasing, fear-mongering, foul-mouthed, and sexist, Rodrigo Duterte, as
president of the Philippines. In the saga of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, in the
uncanny similarities between the French tyrant and the new American autocrat,
we can observe the U.S. repeating a gory history. It is unexceptional, and
exceptionally dangerous.
In the
mid-1800s, France was in the throes of legitimacy crises induced by the 1789
Revolution and continued through the Napoleonic Period (1791-1815) and the
Restoration of the monarchy in 1830.
Although the revolution had been prosecuted in the name of the people,
it merely substituted a new ruling class: the bourgeoisie, whose factions--the
industrial segment and the financial class--jostled for legitimacy as the true
representatives of the new order. These factions were driven by economic interests
and grasped at whatever political ideologies -- from republicanism to
monarchism -- that would give them the upper hand against each other. The crisis became acute with the overthrow of
the monarch again in 1848, which saw the restoration of the Republic. But the
republic was not to last. It was supplanted by a coup d’état in December 1851,
as Napoleon’s not-too-smart but rather clever nephew, Louis Napoleon, began his
farcical replay of his uncle’s reign.
Despite the
century-and-a-half that separates them, there are three points of convergence
between mid-nineteenth century France and early twenty-first century America --
between the rise of Louis Napoleon and the ascent of Donald Trump. First, the state of the electorate.
By the time
Louis Napoleon executed his coup d’état in 1851, the electorate was already
sufficiently alienated from the ruling class, and had been internally divided
for long enough that its capacity to resist any pretender was significantly
attenuated. Similarly, the contemporary American electorate has been degraded
enough in the course of the last thirty years, beginning with the all-show,
little-substance regime of Ronald Reagan in 1980, and ending with the
relentless badgering, battering and efforts at undermining Barack Obama’s
presidency over the last eight years.
The
situation has not been helped by the assault on truth and objectivity. On the
right, the culprits are talk radio, Fox News, and think tanks that are geared
always to muddying the waters on objectivity. On the left, it is a particularly
virulent form of nihilism sponsored by less careful post-modernist
popularizers. In an environment in which
truth now comes with inescapable bylines, and criticism is no longer regarded
as coming from fact-based, objective standpoints, it was an easy transition to
a campaign where then-candidate Trump could boast that “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and
shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters”; where a candidate, Trump, lied routinely, peddled
conspiracy theories and embraced his inconsistencies without shame; but it is
his opponent, Hillary Clinton, with a lifetime of public service, who was
deemed untrustworthy.
Louis
Napoleon’s base of support was in the peasantry in a yet-to-be industrialized
France dominated by Catholicism, and in the lumpenproletariat,
the omnibus category Karl Marx created for the castoffs of society: thugs,
vagrants, prostitutes, etc., who were always available as hired hands for
causing mayhem, especially in political struggles among the various classes in
society.
In the
present case, Trump’s base in white rural America mimics the description of the
French peasantry offered by Marx in The
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (1869). “The Bonapartes are the dynasty of the peasants,
i.e., of the mass of the French people.
The chosen hero of the peasantry is not the Bonaparte who submitted to
the bourgeois parliament but the Bonaparte who dispersed it.” Trump may not be able to disperse the
Congress, but there is little doubt that, during the campaign and transition,
he was dismissive of Congress and of the elite of his party. Certainly, his standing with the base of the
Republican party and with America’s rural whites who came out in historic numbers to hand him the presidency, owes
everything to his dismissive attitude towards the “establishment” and
“political correctness”.
Although she
walked back her comments, Hillary Clinton did hint at the lumpenproletariat equivalent in her “basket of deplorables”
characterization of Trump’s supporters.
The second
striking parallel between Bonaparte and Trump: the character of the
candidate. In the aftermath of France’s
turbulent social dislocation, Marx wrote, “historical tradition produced the
French peasants’ belief that a miracle would occur, that a man called Napoleon
would restore all their glory.” Historical tradition in the United States has
engendered a similar belief in white America.
Our country has not lacked social dislocation, either. The malaise of
which Jimmy Carter spoke, the crisis of confidence that doomed his presidency,
produced the miracle worker, Ronald Reagan.
The economic
collapse of 2008 and the anxiety of the white lower classes that they were
being left behind, pushed from the pedestal they had hitherto occupied in the
American structure, kindled in Americans the expectation of a miracle. In 21st century America, as in 18th century
France, an individual, Trump, turned up who pretended to be that man. Republicans and Trump’s other followers’
obsession with the second coming of Reagan coincides with Trump’s obsession
with being America’s savior from what he called in his Inauguration address,
“the carnage”.
From
Reagan’s “it’s morning again in America” to Trump’s “Make America Great Again”,
the pangs of nostalgia, a yearning for what in the French situation was the
many configurations of Restoration—monarchy or republic, it didn’t matter—the
country has found its candidate who “would restore all their glory”.
Trump, too,
has had no difficulty claiming leadership of that class in which he finds what
Marx called “a mass reflection of the interests he himself pursues” as he
“perceives in the scum, the leavings, the refuse of all classes the only class
which can provide him with an unconditional basis.” Recall his declaration: “I love the poorly
educated,” he enthused after winning the Nevada Republican
Caucus.
We are,
beginning to see the outlines of a possible usurpation—NATO exit, unilateral
imposition of tariffs, negotiating trade agreements, removing sanctions on
Russia. Again, the similarities between
Trump and Bonaparte are quite instructive.
Both desire to usurp power. Both
behave “like misunderstood genius[es] proclaimed by all the world to be simpleton[s].” And Trump’s ever-present threat of unleashing
his Twitter hordes on the opposition must not be discounted now that he is
president.
Then, the third
chilling similarity: the situation of the ruling classes in Bonaparte’s moment
and in Trump’s. Bonaparte rode to power as different ruling class factions
jostled for power and on the opposition’s diffidence at alienating the masses
that supported him. In Trump’s case,
Republicans and Democrats alike cowed before “the angry white, largely male,
voter”. The Republican Party helped
create this incubus, the Democratic Party feeds it while beggaring its minority
constituencies—think of its scandalous running away from Obama’s record in the
2014 midterm elections—and the American media pander to it.
Of course,
for all the chilling similarities between Bonaparte and Trump, there are
obvious differences. No doubt, we do not expect Trump to crown himself
"Emperor". And we know that American institutions may have the
resilience to survive the shenanigans of a narcissist Commander-in-Chief. We
should, however, not be too sanguine about how battered and compromised those
same institutions have become in the last thirty years. And therein lies the
wisdom of sleeping with only one eye closed while our current pretender sits in
the Oval Office.
Louis
Napoleon Bonaparte’s reign ended with a humiliating military defeat at the
hands of a new power, the emergent and recently unified Germany. At home, the
Paris Commune led an insurrection and a new era of instability was inaugurated
that lasted decades. How Trump’s reign will end, and how many people will
suffer in the meantime, and in the aftermath, remains to be seen.
