Okay, sure, but I think all this misses the essential feature of Trumpism, which is a focus on Trump himself -- an individual embodying everything good people are supposed to despise. The blatant corruption, delight in cheating, sexual predation, contempt for the weak, insistence on absurd lies, demand for sickening adulation, etc. are central The intellectual features are almost invisible in the glare of this national moral catastrophe.
I think this gets at the important but often unacknowledged contradiction between Trumpism as the form of politics practiced by Trump himself and Trumpism as the sustainable ideological project which the more savvy political actors around him have been trying to construct since 2015 in the hope that it might last past 2029.
Indeed, George Wallace is the best example in my view, but he actually is much more sympathetic to me. He made his amends and renounced his former ways, and in the biography I read of him, it turns out that his rhetoric was not really a reflection of his inner beliefs. I mean, he was re-elected by a majority Black state. He was a real populist, raising teacher's wages. Not to excuse what he said, but... One has to get elected in order to do anything.
Indeed. Trumpism is, on one hand an ideology that's real and in the middle stages of being effectuated. On the other hand, its namesake is a man who lacks ideas, let alone any sort of ideology, beyond his own thirst for attention and validation.
Wouldn’t all variants of fascism ultimately be a psychological study of their respective one-generation leaders? Fascism to Mussolini’s brand of machismo, Nazism to Hitler’s fixations & melodrama, Boulanger and his psychosis, etc. etc.?
National Americanism as expressed through Trumpism would naturally be entirely bent by Trump’s personality and psychosis in a similar fashion.
That Trump is much older than Hitler, Mussolini, Maurras, Boulanger etc., should perhaps be considered much more in his iteration of fascism through National Americanism, and perhaps may be useful in thinking about whatever future may mean for this iteration
Absolutely, a lot of the relevant differences can be explained by his particular traits that are also less-charitable stereotypes about Americans (lazy, rich from a scammy business, loves TV) and that are much more prevalent now than in the 30s
I've been thinking lately about the absence of the "war drive" in the Trump version of fascism. It's like they know, intuitively if nothing else, that their adherents couldn't progress past loving the *concept* of war to actually embrace the physical bravery necessary to do it. The kind of groyper army this movement has raised would either fall for Tokyo Rose's Tiktoks and become traitors to the fatherland en masse, or they'd delude themselves into some techno-fantasy version of war where AI and Elon Robots would do all the fighting.
Trump's open "the troops are losers" affect, which we who remember the post-9/11 era might have thought was a third rail in American politics, is another red flag. Like so many other things, these people think of "war" entirely in rhetorical, WWE-style performative terms. When the actual bullets start flying they'll be too busy pissing their pants to remember to duck.
Definitely true, and not inconsistent with their obvious bloodthirstiness.
Hegseth recently referred to troops as "warfighters" instead of e.g. soldiers (Chapo discussed this on a recent episode). This is telling. There are salutary things about a modern military, at least in principle—civilian control professionalism, self-sacrifice, duty, etc. But all that stuff’s cucked. The cool guys are totally unconstrained and armed to the teeth so as to get more bloodshed without the risk (the chad operator vs the virgin GI; escalation of drone strikes in Trump 1.0).
I believe the use of 'warrior' by our forces, beside being P.R. intended to appeal to adolescent males, is an attempt to square through mystification our supposèd (and in some ways real) individualism with the actual nature of being a soldier (or sailor or air'man') in a much larger fighting force, a cog under many circumstances, and at least usually obeying orders from above.
Sometimes I will respond to a Rightist screed about 'warriors' with 'Perhaps true, but wars are won by _soldiers_.'.
(If you haven't ever, _please_ check-out Bill Mauldin's cartoons from the Second World war, and the prose around them in his collection "Up Front". [His post-war cartoons are a good index to liberal-Democratic viewpoints; his Sen. Bulbous {for 'Bilbo'} is a reminder of how open and absolutely proud bigotry sounded.])
IIRC the 'warfighters' thing is just military jargon, as in military circles you don't call a Navy sailor a soldier, marines != soldiers, etc., and 'warfigher' became the generic term to not annoy any of the branches.
In September 2016, on one of the few times times I was stoned around then, I imagined a poster reading:
THE WORLD IS SHIT.
.......Vote TRUMP.......
He is a living embodiment of there being no Higher Things, nothing more than This, only _more_. This appeals to people who've been scammed in the name of Higher Things and resent it (believers in capitalism), and people who feel their source for H.T.s is the only legitimate supplier and accept that the rest of existence _will_ be evil (the very religious of some stripes). This makes him different to the Thielites: in Gnostic terms, they consider themselves the Perfected Ones, but Trump worships the Demiurge and the evil matter-world He created and would never _want_ to transcend.
For the Silicon Valley right we know that science fiction plays a huge role for them in their conception of the future. I wonder if the same thing isn't true for Donald Trump personally, just he's drawing from a much older form of culture. The concept of a "world of tomorrow" which was prevalent in the 1950s and early 60s, in which technological advancement of the future resembled supercharged advancements from the past, yet the social fabric was entirely unaltered.
Like I'm not saying Trump's entire concept of the future comes from an episode of the Jetsons he half-remembers from 1962, but I guess it wouldn't surprise me if it's rattling around in there.
I drank deeply of all that, and there is a contingent of S.F. fans who scream at current S.F.'s being any different to it—but I imbibed from it, yes, including from _some_ of Heinlein's stuff, the notion that technological change can't _not_ change us, that our Eternal Truths were largely contingent, and that in social matters (to steal from Shaw, and which I knew first from the epigraph to Heinlein's "Glory Road") we easily and barbarously mistake the customs of our tiny islands for the Laws of the Universe.
(I am still basically of that same faith, largely because I see technological progress as the only source of an abundance that could give us a _chance_ at becoming civilised…but when I read '[…]if we were allowed to race science and not held back by “woke” liberal sentimentalism, they could make great strides.' I think of Nazi doctors.) (O! 'race science'—I now See What You Did There)
In the essay that Klein and Taylor mention, Umberto Eco outlines an idea similar to reactionary modernism: he calls it "irrationalism", highlighting that the reaction is against the enlightenment foundations of modernism, rather than anything related to the industrial economy. Thought that was an interesting lens.
I think our host describes Trump-adjacent movements better than Trumpism itself. I've always found it easy to reduce Trumpism to three words: masculinism, racism, ressentiment. All of his messaging to his followers can be captured in one of these words.
i think we can reduce all of trumpism to ressentiment or cluster of related ideas around status anxiety and cultural negativity
if were doing a neat conceptual triumvirate then after gender and race should come the other of the materialist big three which is class ie the petite bourgeois, quasi-feudal rentier class eg patrick wyman's american gentry, small-time rich or small-town elite, local and regional old boy networks, etc
I think we mean the same thing by "racism." "Masculinism" is more specific than gender. It is based on the notion that the world is divided into the good strong, the bad strong, and the weak. The good strong are there to protect the weak from the physical violence of the bad strong and the moral fecklessness of the weak. (The good strong are moral because they are good.) The state really has no role here, because it only gets in the way of the good strong. (Due process is for the weak.) IOW, masculinism is individualistic, violent, and pointedly ignores the economic sphere. Note that gay men can be good strong in this schema. Trans women are obviously weak (and of dubious morality), and trans men are of little interest.
I like your argument for viewing ressentiment as class. But the word "class" implies something like an economic class interest that is distinct from opposing the (((elites.))) I find little of that in Trumpism. There is some anti-corporatism in Trumpism, but the Trumpy mind divides large impersonal firms into good and bad, with the bad firms being the ones dominated by (((elites.)))
Although I know of him re the Historikerstreit, I wasn't familiar with Nolte's "resistance to transcendence" theory. Your account of it made me think of the parallels with Postone's theory of nazi antisemitism as the projection of the "abstraction" element of capital onto Jews. Wasn't aware of that Nolte/Postone parallel before (but google points me towards a Historical Materialism article by Ishay Landa that seems to mention this - altho not yet read in depth).
Again, haven't done the reading to really comment on your interpretation of Jeffrey Herf's view. What I would push against a bit is that it seems the wrong way around to me that the ideological rejection of environmentalism as "feminine" as behind Musk and SV techbros turn towards making common cause with climate denialism. Surely the material interests (space launch CO costs, insane AI megaserverfarm enviro destruction, etc) precede the ideological turn, not the other way around?
I do think the Klein/Taylor thesis has problems. In general I think Klein's work, from No Logo to now, has always suffered in general from a "humanities" approach to theory (understood as the "where are we, what is happening and why is it happening now" question) that relies on a "leitmotif" approach. i.e. find a common thread that seems to tie disparate phenoms together and posit that as root cause. That said, Miller flying a kite for ditching habeus corpus (and the rule of law) in pursuit of illegal deportations does fit Fortress America or "Golden Bunker" notions a lot better than Tooze's enthusiasm for Space X's ability to launch satellites at scale. Whatever
Herf’s work took the idea from Rabinbach who was his good friend at Madison and and Mosse’s most brilkiwnt student. See Rabinbach Staging the Third Reich. Rabinbach wrote in the 70s about Beauty of Labor bureau in NS. “Fascism as a cultural synthesis” of modernity and Volkish reaction was his idea back then. The other fascist preoccupation was Manhood. Of course Theweleit took that on in Male Fantasy (Rabinbach and I did the Introduction for the English edition).
A key part of the right-wing schtick that is not new under Trump/MAGA is the 'tear-it-all-down' rage directed at the people in charge, which is why they always end up sort of flailing when they become the people in charge. Their ineptitude at actually building anything is perhaps a reason it seems like they don't have a positive future vision for their project. Another reason might be the 'anarcho' part of their anarcho-capitalist endgame. Their vision is about removing all barriers and guardrails, and removing stuff is the opposite of building stuff.
If I’ve understood “resistance to transcendence” correctly, it does nicely capture the idea of totalization, which Trumpism certainly shares with historical fascism - there is no reality or source of authority (not even your own intuitions) outside the prescribed and proscribed frame.
How you think about your neighbours, the natural world, the work you do, what you eat and drink, how to treat your pets, the music you listen to, how to think about your own health or raising a kid, now to regard the suffering of others - there is a “position”, an attitude, a posture ready-made and clearly understood for all of it. Doubt is eliminated, contradictions are resolved, there is no transcendence because there is only the world he creates for you.
It’s all just aspirational, of course, it doesn’t work, and people just end up falling to fucking pieces.
(On the Trumpism as anti-war thing, the White House has just declared war on its own society and the fabulist "war-fighters" are just living it vicariously in those public displays of ICE sadism).
I really liked Klein & Taylor's "end times fascism" take but did think their contention that even the Nazis had a horizon, or future, in a way 21st c fascists don't missed the point. Climate change "end times" frames autocratic reaction today in a way not available in the 1930s and 1940s, of course, but that doesn't mean Trump and Musk aren't trying to sell us futures. But K & T do nail the billionaires and bigots coalition that is attracted to the "reactionary modernist," "retro-futurist," techno-feudalist end times fascist future T & M are trying to build right now.
I think the lack of _explicit_ war-drive comes both from Mr Trump's own feelings about fighting for one's country and from his base's feelings about the Afghan and Iraqi adventures, particularly given Sen. Clinton's having voted for the Iraq war and Mr Trump's success at lying about his initial support for it making it a good issue for him in 2015-16. I might be wrong, but I take it that, as per Vietnam, they know they suffered the casualties and believe in a Dolchstoßlegend that 'we could have won it if our "warriors" hadnʼt been held -back by effete Gummint types'.
(Me, I consider a large portion of the population being willing to fight any war on the basis of shouts and relatively few data an attractive nuisance, as is a large standing army filled-out by a poverty draft.)
…but whenever I read of the 'peace-loving' Trump (e.g. from an ex-Sanders person) I remember an interview from 2015 or '16 in which he was asked 'What if the other countries donʼt wantl our trade relationships as you would remake them?' his answer was an immediate 'Weʼll _make_ them.', which is a lot easier to say with the threat of violence noticeably in the background.
Okay, sure, but I think all this misses the essential feature of Trumpism, which is a focus on Trump himself -- an individual embodying everything good people are supposed to despise. The blatant corruption, delight in cheating, sexual predation, contempt for the weak, insistence on absurd lies, demand for sickening adulation, etc. are central The intellectual features are almost invisible in the glare of this national moral catastrophe.
I think this gets at the important but often unacknowledged contradiction between Trumpism as the form of politics practiced by Trump himself and Trumpism as the sustainable ideological project which the more savvy political actors around him have been trying to construct since 2015 in the hope that it might last past 2029.
Trumpism existed before Trump imo
Indeed, George Wallace is the best example in my view, but he actually is much more sympathetic to me. He made his amends and renounced his former ways, and in the biography I read of him, it turns out that his rhetoric was not really a reflection of his inner beliefs. I mean, he was re-elected by a majority Black state. He was a real populist, raising teacher's wages. Not to excuse what he said, but... One has to get elected in order to do anything.
Indeed. Trumpism is, on one hand an ideology that's real and in the middle stages of being effectuated. On the other hand, its namesake is a man who lacks ideas, let alone any sort of ideology, beyond his own thirst for attention and validation.
Wouldn’t all variants of fascism ultimately be a psychological study of their respective one-generation leaders? Fascism to Mussolini’s brand of machismo, Nazism to Hitler’s fixations & melodrama, Boulanger and his psychosis, etc. etc.?
National Americanism as expressed through Trumpism would naturally be entirely bent by Trump’s personality and psychosis in a similar fashion.
That Trump is much older than Hitler, Mussolini, Maurras, Boulanger etc., should perhaps be considered much more in his iteration of fascism through National Americanism, and perhaps may be useful in thinking about whatever future may mean for this iteration
"fascism through National Americanism"
Absolutely, a lot of the relevant differences can be explained by his particular traits that are also less-charitable stereotypes about Americans (lazy, rich from a scammy business, loves TV) and that are much more prevalent now than in the 30s
I've been thinking lately about the absence of the "war drive" in the Trump version of fascism. It's like they know, intuitively if nothing else, that their adherents couldn't progress past loving the *concept* of war to actually embrace the physical bravery necessary to do it. The kind of groyper army this movement has raised would either fall for Tokyo Rose's Tiktoks and become traitors to the fatherland en masse, or they'd delude themselves into some techno-fantasy version of war where AI and Elon Robots would do all the fighting.
Trump's open "the troops are losers" affect, which we who remember the post-9/11 era might have thought was a third rail in American politics, is another red flag. Like so many other things, these people think of "war" entirely in rhetorical, WWE-style performative terms. When the actual bullets start flying they'll be too busy pissing their pants to remember to duck.
Definitely true, and not inconsistent with their obvious bloodthirstiness.
Hegseth recently referred to troops as "warfighters" instead of e.g. soldiers (Chapo discussed this on a recent episode). This is telling. There are salutary things about a modern military, at least in principle—civilian control professionalism, self-sacrifice, duty, etc. But all that stuff’s cucked. The cool guys are totally unconstrained and armed to the teeth so as to get more bloodshed without the risk (the chad operator vs the virgin GI; escalation of drone strikes in Trump 1.0).
I believe the use of 'warrior' by our forces, beside being P.R. intended to appeal to adolescent males, is an attempt to square through mystification our supposèd (and in some ways real) individualism with the actual nature of being a soldier (or sailor or air'man') in a much larger fighting force, a cog under many circumstances, and at least usually obeying orders from above.
Sometimes I will respond to a Rightist screed about 'warriors' with 'Perhaps true, but wars are won by _soldiers_.'.
(If you haven't ever, _please_ check-out Bill Mauldin's cartoons from the Second World war, and the prose around them in his collection "Up Front". [His post-war cartoons are a good index to liberal-Democratic viewpoints; his Sen. Bulbous {for 'Bilbo'} is a reminder of how open and absolutely proud bigotry sounded.])
IIRC the 'warfighters' thing is just military jargon, as in military circles you don't call a Navy sailor a soldier, marines != soldiers, etc., and 'warfigher' became the generic term to not annoy any of the branches.
There is definitely a war drive component to Trumpism. It is aimed against China.
"Say what you want about National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos" Walter Sobchak.
Repeating myself, but re anti-transcendence:
In September 2016, on one of the few times times I was stoned around then, I imagined a poster reading:
THE WORLD IS SHIT.
.......Vote TRUMP.......
He is a living embodiment of there being no Higher Things, nothing more than This, only _more_. This appeals to people who've been scammed in the name of Higher Things and resent it (believers in capitalism), and people who feel their source for H.T.s is the only legitimate supplier and accept that the rest of existence _will_ be evil (the very religious of some stripes). This makes him different to the Thielites: in Gnostic terms, they consider themselves the Perfected Ones, but Trump worships the Demiurge and the evil matter-world He created and would never _want_ to transcend.
For the Silicon Valley right we know that science fiction plays a huge role for them in their conception of the future. I wonder if the same thing isn't true for Donald Trump personally, just he's drawing from a much older form of culture. The concept of a "world of tomorrow" which was prevalent in the 1950s and early 60s, in which technological advancement of the future resembled supercharged advancements from the past, yet the social fabric was entirely unaltered.
Like I'm not saying Trump's entire concept of the future comes from an episode of the Jetsons he half-remembers from 1962, but I guess it wouldn't surprise me if it's rattling around in there.
I drank deeply of all that, and there is a contingent of S.F. fans who scream at current S.F.'s being any different to it—but I imbibed from it, yes, including from _some_ of Heinlein's stuff, the notion that technological change can't _not_ change us, that our Eternal Truths were largely contingent, and that in social matters (to steal from Shaw, and which I knew first from the epigraph to Heinlein's "Glory Road") we easily and barbarously mistake the customs of our tiny islands for the Laws of the Universe.
(I am still basically of that same faith, largely because I see technological progress as the only source of an abundance that could give us a _chance_ at becoming civilised…but when I read '[…]if we were allowed to race science and not held back by “woke” liberal sentimentalism, they could make great strides.' I think of Nazi doctors.) (O! 'race science'—I now See What You Did There)
In the essay that Klein and Taylor mention, Umberto Eco outlines an idea similar to reactionary modernism: he calls it "irrationalism", highlighting that the reaction is against the enlightenment foundations of modernism, rather than anything related to the industrial economy. Thought that was an interesting lens.
I think our host describes Trump-adjacent movements better than Trumpism itself. I've always found it easy to reduce Trumpism to three words: masculinism, racism, ressentiment. All of his messaging to his followers can be captured in one of these words.
i think we can reduce all of trumpism to ressentiment or cluster of related ideas around status anxiety and cultural negativity
if were doing a neat conceptual triumvirate then after gender and race should come the other of the materialist big three which is class ie the petite bourgeois, quasi-feudal rentier class eg patrick wyman's american gentry, small-time rich or small-town elite, local and regional old boy networks, etc
I think we mean the same thing by "racism." "Masculinism" is more specific than gender. It is based on the notion that the world is divided into the good strong, the bad strong, and the weak. The good strong are there to protect the weak from the physical violence of the bad strong and the moral fecklessness of the weak. (The good strong are moral because they are good.) The state really has no role here, because it only gets in the way of the good strong. (Due process is for the weak.) IOW, masculinism is individualistic, violent, and pointedly ignores the economic sphere. Note that gay men can be good strong in this schema. Trans women are obviously weak (and of dubious morality), and trans men are of little interest.
I like your argument for viewing ressentiment as class. But the word "class" implies something like an economic class interest that is distinct from opposing the (((elites.))) I find little of that in Trumpism. There is some anti-corporatism in Trumpism, but the Trumpy mind divides large impersonal firms into good and bad, with the bad firms being the ones dominated by (((elites.)))
Although I know of him re the Historikerstreit, I wasn't familiar with Nolte's "resistance to transcendence" theory. Your account of it made me think of the parallels with Postone's theory of nazi antisemitism as the projection of the "abstraction" element of capital onto Jews. Wasn't aware of that Nolte/Postone parallel before (but google points me towards a Historical Materialism article by Ishay Landa that seems to mention this - altho not yet read in depth).
Again, haven't done the reading to really comment on your interpretation of Jeffrey Herf's view. What I would push against a bit is that it seems the wrong way around to me that the ideological rejection of environmentalism as "feminine" as behind Musk and SV techbros turn towards making common cause with climate denialism. Surely the material interests (space launch CO costs, insane AI megaserverfarm enviro destruction, etc) precede the ideological turn, not the other way around?
I do think the Klein/Taylor thesis has problems. In general I think Klein's work, from No Logo to now, has always suffered in general from a "humanities" approach to theory (understood as the "where are we, what is happening and why is it happening now" question) that relies on a "leitmotif" approach. i.e. find a common thread that seems to tie disparate phenoms together and posit that as root cause. That said, Miller flying a kite for ditching habeus corpus (and the rule of law) in pursuit of illegal deportations does fit Fortress America or "Golden Bunker" notions a lot better than Tooze's enthusiasm for Space X's ability to launch satellites at scale. Whatever
Yes I wanted to bring in the Postone stuff! Herf uses postone to build his conception. Im not sure about the directionality of that other question.
Herf’s work took the idea from Rabinbach who was his good friend at Madison and and Mosse’s most brilkiwnt student. See Rabinbach Staging the Third Reich. Rabinbach wrote in the 70s about Beauty of Labor bureau in NS. “Fascism as a cultural synthesis” of modernity and Volkish reaction was his idea back then. The other fascist preoccupation was Manhood. Of course Theweleit took that on in Male Fantasy (Rabinbach and I did the Introduction for the English edition).
Thank you for suggesting Rabinbach's work, I'm enjoying it a great deal! And your co-authored intro for the Theweleit book as well
There’s - sense of inertia, a great balling-up and coiling of angst, resentment and othering in this modern version of fascism.
I think this picture will become clearer in many minds when Trump stands to salute a cavalcade of military hardware this summer.
“Where should we point all of those weapons? Let’s start with the enemies within.”
A key part of the right-wing schtick that is not new under Trump/MAGA is the 'tear-it-all-down' rage directed at the people in charge, which is why they always end up sort of flailing when they become the people in charge. Their ineptitude at actually building anything is perhaps a reason it seems like they don't have a positive future vision for their project. Another reason might be the 'anarcho' part of their anarcho-capitalist endgame. Their vision is about removing all barriers and guardrails, and removing stuff is the opposite of building stuff.
The inchoate rage angle reminds me of the movie _Network_.
If I’ve understood “resistance to transcendence” correctly, it does nicely capture the idea of totalization, which Trumpism certainly shares with historical fascism - there is no reality or source of authority (not even your own intuitions) outside the prescribed and proscribed frame.
How you think about your neighbours, the natural world, the work you do, what you eat and drink, how to treat your pets, the music you listen to, how to think about your own health or raising a kid, now to regard the suffering of others - there is a “position”, an attitude, a posture ready-made and clearly understood for all of it. Doubt is eliminated, contradictions are resolved, there is no transcendence because there is only the world he creates for you.
It’s all just aspirational, of course, it doesn’t work, and people just end up falling to fucking pieces.
(On the Trumpism as anti-war thing, the White House has just declared war on its own society and the fabulist "war-fighters" are just living it vicariously in those public displays of ICE sadism).
Love that the summary of the Taylor / Klein article is a subtweet of the big Lebowski
“Nihilists dude? Say what you will about the tenants of national socialism dude, at least it’s an ethos.”
I really liked Klein & Taylor's "end times fascism" take but did think their contention that even the Nazis had a horizon, or future, in a way 21st c fascists don't missed the point. Climate change "end times" frames autocratic reaction today in a way not available in the 1930s and 1940s, of course, but that doesn't mean Trump and Musk aren't trying to sell us futures. But K & T do nail the billionaires and bigots coalition that is attracted to the "reactionary modernist," "retro-futurist," techno-feudalist end times fascist future T & M are trying to build right now.
I think the lack of _explicit_ war-drive comes both from Mr Trump's own feelings about fighting for one's country and from his base's feelings about the Afghan and Iraqi adventures, particularly given Sen. Clinton's having voted for the Iraq war and Mr Trump's success at lying about his initial support for it making it a good issue for him in 2015-16. I might be wrong, but I take it that, as per Vietnam, they know they suffered the casualties and believe in a Dolchstoßlegend that 'we could have won it if our "warriors" hadnʼt been held -back by effete Gummint types'.
(Me, I consider a large portion of the population being willing to fight any war on the basis of shouts and relatively few data an attractive nuisance, as is a large standing army filled-out by a poverty draft.)
…but whenever I read of the 'peace-loving' Trump (e.g. from an ex-Sanders person) I remember an interview from 2015 or '16 in which he was asked 'What if the other countries donʼt wantl our trade relationships as you would remake them?' his answer was an immediate 'Weʼll _make_ them.', which is a lot easier to say with the threat of violence noticeably in the background.