Returning to Origins

Trump's Inauguration and the Ideology of Endless Expansion

"The Rhodes Colossus"

When Trump was elected in 2016, there was an explosion of interest in books that could help explain what the country was going through. One of these was Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. To say she was widely read back then would be a mistake: she was widely quoted, without having been read. Arendt’s elegant formulations about the nature of propaganda, mass psychology, and the unscrupulous techniques of totalitarian leaders were posted out of context on social media alongside her “iconic” photos, often with cigarette in hand. I believe her image was even put on a tote bag. A writer who would be horrified to be reduced to a sloganeer, like her contemporary James Baldwin, was turned into a meme. The actual content of her work was largely unknown. She became, like so many other figures from the #resistance era, a kind of fetish, an image held up to magically ward off evil.

Then, the inevitable backlash: marxisant intellectuals who took it upon themselves to critique the intellectual deficits of resistance liberalism went after the Arendt cult. It was (re)discovered that she was not a materialist, that her conceptions of politics were overly “psychological,” and that the concept of totalitarianism itself was the product of an imperialistic “Cold War liberalism.” (This last charge is particularly absurd if you are familiar with her skepticism of liberalism, her work during the Cold War, and her thoughts on imperialism.) Then there was the charge, more justified, that she harbored nasty racist attitudes that made her unacceptable to modern sensibilities. She wasn’t much use to the “woke” left and certainly not to the decolonial left. To be fair, there were also honest critical engagements with Arendt that tried to preserve what was valuable in her work. But, her brief iconostasis as a liberal saint aside, she was an awkward fit for the times: not a Marxist, not a liberal, not a feminist, not a reactionary, not a Third Worldist. Now, it’s been declared from on high in pundit heaven that worries about fascism, dictatorship, and so forth, are demodé and obstacles to sober analysis of the present moment. (And obstacles to sinecures and fancy dinner invitations, a more wicked person might add.) As an object of discourse—which is all anything can be anymore—the kind of signal that marks group belonging and attitudes, Arendt is very much out. The tote bags are in the closet with the other unfashionable detritus of the embarrassing resistance era.

It’s a shame she went remarked upon but unread. While watching and listening to the inauguration, I couldn’t help but think of Origins, as I often have this past decade. Not the final part, which describes the fearsomeness of totalitarian regimes, but the first two sections, which discuss precursors to totalitarianism—the books on Antisemitism and Imperialism. (These are where real treasures lie, but they are overlooked in favor of the vatic statements of the final chapter.) I wasn’t the only one apparently, because I saw one quote re-memed over the faces of the billionaire oligarchs at the inauguration: “…businessmen became politicians and were acclaimed as statesmen, while statesmen were taken seriously only if they talked the language of successful businessmen…” It certainly feels apropos but it’s still out of context. This quotation is from the Imperialism section, I’ll reproduce it more fully, with the surrounding text:

Imperialism must be considered the first stage in political rule of the bourgeoisie rather than the last stage of capitalism. It is well known how little the owning classes had aspired to government, how well contented they had been with every type of state that could be trusted with protection of property rights. For them, indeed, the state had always been only a well-organized police force. This false modesty, however, had the curious consequence of keeping the whole bourgeois class out of the body politic; before they were subjects in a monarchy or citizens in a republic, they were essentially private persons. This privateness and primary concern with money-making had developed a set of behavior patterns which are expressed in all those proverbs—“nothing succeeds like success,” “might is right,” “right is expediency,” etc.—that necessarily spring from the experience of a society of competitors.

When, in the era of imperialism, businessmen became politicians and were acclaimed as statesmen, while statesmen were taken seriously only if they talked the language of successful businessmen and “thought in continents,” these private practices and devices were gradually” “continents,” these private practices and devices were gradually transformed into rules and principles for the. conduct of public affairs. The significant fact about this process of revaluation, which began at the end of the last century and is still in effect, is that it began with the application of bourgeois convictions to foreign affairs and only slowly was extended to domestic politics. Therefore, the nations concerned were hardly aware that the recklessness that had prevailed in private life, and against which the public body always had to defend itself and its individual citizens, was about to be elevated to the one publicly honored political principle.

“Bourgeois” is a slippery term in political discourse: it encompasses a lot, but the sense Arendt is using it here is haute bourgeois, the great industrialists, and what we might call today oligarchs—or, rather, oligarchy is what the bourgeoisie becomes when it takes on a political dimension. The entire section furnishes a critique of capitalism and the competitive society and the application of its principles to political affairs. What she takes as characteristic of capitalism is the notion of “expansion for expansion's sake,” the constant accumulation of capital above all other considerations. Imperialism is what happened when the bourgeoisie’s ideology of endless expansion encountered the limits of the nation-state:

Imperialism was born when the ruling class in capitalist production came up against national limitations to its economic expansion. The bourgeoisie turned to politics out of economic necessity; for if it did not want to give up the capitalist system whose inherent law is constant economic growth, it had to impose this law upon its home governments and to proclaim expansion to be an ultimate political goal of foreign policy.

She finds the origin of this ideology not in the theory or practice of politics but in the importation into the political world of commercial notions that began “in the realm of business speculation, where expansion meant the permanent broadening of industrial production and economic transactions characteristic of the nineteenth century.”

When, in Trump’s inaugural, he said, “The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation — one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations, and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons. And we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars,” I couldn’t help but think of the Cecil Rhodes quote that furnishes Arendt with an example of the thought of imperialistic businessmen: “Expansion is everything,..these stars . . . these vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could.” Now the heirs of Cecil Rhodes, South African business titans, share the stage with Trump, a kind of mascot for crude capitalist competition and expansion.

If one reads closely, there is nothing in the ideology of the imperialist bourgeoisie that Arendt describes that is not shared by this new tech-oligarchy. What could explain better the apparent contradiction in the oscillation between their state-phobic libertarianism and sudden interest grasp for the reigns of state power; “What Imperialists actually wanted was expansion of political power without the foundation of a body politic.” Power without public accountability or a common good. And what about the the strange transformation of many of these figures from Utopian “progressives” into dystopian reactionaries? Arendt account for this as well. They are two sides of the same coin:

The imperialist-minded businessman, whom the stars annoyed because he could not annex them, realized that power organized for its own sake would beget more power. When the accumulation of capital “When the accumulation of capital had reached its natural, national limits, the bourgeoisie understood that only with an “expansion is everything” ideology, and only with a corresponding power-accumulating process, would it be possible to set the old motor into motion again. At the same moment, however, when it seemed as though the true principle of perpetual motion had been discovered, the specifically optimistic mood of the progress ideology was shaken. Not that anybody began to doubt the irresistibility of the process itself, but many people began to see what had frightened Cecil Rhodes: that the human condition and the limitations of the globe were a serious obstacle to a process that was unable to stop and to stabilize, and could therefore only begin a series of destructive catastrophes once it had reached these limits.

In the imperialistic epoch a philosophy of power became the philosophy of the elite, who quickly discovered and were quite ready to admit that the thirst for power could be quenched only through destruction. This was the essential cause of their nihilism (especially conspicuous in France at the turn, and in Germany in the twenties, of this century) which replaced the superstition of progress with the equally vulgar superstition of doom, and preached automatic annihilation with the same enthusiasm that the fanatics of automatic progress had preached the irresistibility of economic laws.

Arendt identifies Hobbes, not Locke, the philosopher of overawing fear and endless struggle, as the constitutive philosopher of the bourgeoisie. Hobbes believed that private interest and public were identical and the acquisition of power was the motivating passion of mankind. The bourgeois was not a self-satisfied owner, happy with their gains, but a getter, a striver after more and more:

The so-called accumulation of capital which gave birth to the bourgeoisie changed the very conception of property and wealth: they were no longer considered to be the results of accumulation and acquisition but their beginnings; wealth became a never-ending process of getting wealthier. The classification of the bourgeoisie as an owning class is only superficially correct, for a characteristic of this class has been that everybody could belong to it who conceived of life as a process of perpetually becoming wealthier, and considered money as something sacrosanct which under no circumstances should be a mere commodity for consumption.

And this belief in endless accumulation would eventually necessitate the capture of state power. Their concerns about natality and the growth of the human population, their fascination with cryptocurrency as a wish for “money to beget money” all find their explanation in the ideology of limitless growth. Arendt’s analysis of bourgeois attitudes even gives an insight into the tech-oligarch’s desire to overcome death itself, because death is the one thing that makes purely private interest an irrational goal: “Property owners who do not consume but strive to enlarge their holdings continually find one very inconvenient limitation, the unfortunate fact that men must die. Death is the real reason why property and acquisition can never become a true political principle…The finiteness of personal life is as serious a challenge to property as the foundation of society, as the limits of the globe are a challenge to expansion as the foundation of the body politic.”

The section that immediately follows these quotes is entitled: “The Alliance of the Mob and Capital”—not a bad summary of our current political situation. As I discussed recently in my piece on mob rule, this alliance is possible because of the fundamental identity of these two parts of society, they share an outlook. The mob is just the bourgeoisie stripped of hypocrisy:

This feeling of kinship, the joining together of begetter and offspring, already classically expressed in Balzac’s novels, antedates all practical economic, political, or social considerations and recalls those fundamental psychological traits of the new type of Western man that Hobbes outlined three hundred years ago. But it is true that it was mainly due to the insights acquired by the bourgeoisie during the crises and depressions which preceded imperialism that high society finally admitted its readiness to accept the revolutionary change in moral standards which Hobbes’s “realism” had proposed, and which was now being proposed anew by the mob and its leaders. The very fact that the “original sin” of “original accumulation of capital” would need additional sins to keep the system going was far more effective in persuading the bourgeoisie to shake off the restraints of Western tradition than either its philosopher or its underworld. It finally induced the German bourgeoisie to throw off the mask of hypocrisy and openly confess its relationship to the mob, calling on it expressly to champion its property interests.

What could better describe the sudden discovery of the tech-oligarchs of the “based” world of internet nihilistic mobbishness than the recognition of their offspring, as the final acceptance of paternity for their bastard sons?