#pressures they experienced and put on themselves and whether they ultimately failed in capturing the war itself

[sea-changed]

"For what they are worth, or for what they may recapture, here they are, period pieces, fairy tales, half-meaningless memories of a time and of attitudes which have gone forever from the world, a sad and jocular recording of a little part of a war I saw and do not believe, unreal with trumped-up pageantry, so that it stands in the mind like the battle pictures of Crécy and Bunker Hill and Gettysburg. And, although all war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal, still there was in these memory-wars some gallantry, some bravery, some kindliness."

John Steinbeck, in the 1958 introduction to his collected 1943 World War II reportage Once There Was a War

[avanneman]

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Donald Trump

On November 9, 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte engineered a coup that made him First Consul and ended republican government in France. By the date of the Republican calendar then in effect in France, the date was 18 Brumaire in the year VIII.1 In 1852, Karl Marx wrote The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, commemorating in contempt the seizure of power of Napoleon’s nephew in the previous year and coining the immortal one-liner, "History, Hegel tells us, repeats itself. He forgot to add, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce." We can only hope that the Eighteenth Brumaire of Donald Trump is only a farce.

Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte was elected the first (and only) president of the Second French Republic in 1848.2 When the French Assembly failed to pass an amendment to the French constitution that would allow him to run for a second term, he organized a successful coup, ultimately styling himself emperor (“Napoleon III”) in the manner of his legendary namesake. He ruled France until 1870 and is famous both for rebuilding Paris and getting France into an unnecessary war with Prussia, resulting in a crushing defeat for France. Napoleon himself suffered the ultimate humiliation for an emperor, being captured on the field of battle.

In his preface, Marx explains his purpose: to “demonstrate how the class struggle in France created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque and mediocre personality to play a hero's part.” Marx saw that Bonaparte’s main basis of support was the French peasantry, a class for which an urban secular Jew3 like Marx would be unlikely to feel much enthusiasm:

“In so far as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. In so far as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests begets no community, no national bond and no political organization among them, they do not form a class. They are consequently incapable of enforcing their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or through a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, as an unlimited governmental power that protects them against the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above. The political influence of the small-holding peasants, therefore, finds its final expression in the executive power subordinating society to itself.

“Historical tradition gave rise to the belief of the French peasants in the miracle that a man named Napoleon would bring all the glory back to them. And an individual turned up who passes himself off as the man because he bears the name of Napoleon, in consequence of the Code Napoleon, which lays down that la recherche de la paternité est interdite [Enquiry into paternity is forbidden]. After 20 years of vagabondage and after a series of grotesque adventures, the legend is fulfilled and the man becomes Emperor of the French. The fixed idea of the Nephew was realized, because it coincided with the fixed idea of the most numerous class of the French people.”

“Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, as an unlimited governmental power that protects them against the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above.” Excuse me, but does that sound familiar?

There are, of course, significant differences between Louis-Napoleon and Donald Trump. For one thing, Louis-Napoleon had a moustache. But there are similarities as well. Trump voters, like Louis-Napoleon’s peasants, want protection. They want protection from free-market globalism, from Mexicans, Muslims, and foreigners in general, from welfare-lovin’ blacks, from mandates handed down from on high by overpaid, gender-fluid, tree-huggin’ bureaucrats, from taxes and transfer payments that take money from “us” and give it to “them”.

As many political observers have, well, observed, the American electorate has been growing increasingly divided along urban/rural lines, with Democrats predominating in the urban states and the Republicans in the rural ones.4 Politicians represent their constituents, and as the Democrats lose the rural districts and Republicans lose in the urban ones, the parties grow further apart. As Hillary Clinton’s victory in the popular vote suggests, urban America is doing okay, if not fantastic. But rural America increasingly feels left behind, its share of the economic pie ever-shrinking and its values either ridiculed or ignored. The “Homosexual Agenda” was imposed on rural America by judicial fiat and the “Trans-Gender Agenda”, which most Americans did not know was a thing, has been effected by bureaucratic memo.

The keystone in the arch of Trump’s electoral victory was of course his wins in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, states where urban as well as rural populations feel they are being left behind. It is Trump’s victories here that link him with Brexit and the reaction against global capitalism in general, a reaction that is in fact confined to the “West”, because the rise of the “East” (and the “South”) simply means that the “West” has lost its once unique economic advantages that allowed its corporations to charge quasi-monopolistic prices, and, thanks largely to union pressure, pay quasi-monopolistic wages. Now the monopoly has ended, and the market rules.5

Whenever latte-sippin’ journalists quizzed true-Trumpers as why they liked their man, they were invariably told “He says what he thinks”, which, to my mind, is simply red state sleight of hand for “I want to go back to the way things used to be, when all the good jobs were reserved for white people right here in the U.S., when black guys shined shoes and carried your luggage, and when Mexicans stayed south of the Rio Grande, where they belonged. And, you know, there are some folks in this world who just need a bullet in the head, no questions asked.”6

Trump supporters don’t like Trump because he says what he thinks but because he says what they think, that all Muslims are terrorists, that all “Mexicans” are criminals, that the black “ghettos” are cauldrons of murder and riot, that the Chinese are stealing us blind, that, above all, one must fight fire with fire, that, surrounded on all sides as we are by “enemies”, we must be worse than they are in order to survive.

In his campaign, over and over again, Donald Trump presented himself as the only man who could “save America”, because he was the only man who would exercise power free from any and all restraint, whether legal or moral. Like the French peasants before them, Trump’s supporters voted, not for a president but a master. We can only hope that his failure to gain even plurality support in the election, and in the manifest confusion, contradiction, and impracticality of his various “policies” will deny him the massive triumphs for which he so clearly hungers.

Afterwords Like Louis-Napoleon, Trump is a builder, though I imagine he would much rather rebuild New York than Washington, which I doubt he considers really a “city”, much less “the city”. It will be interesting to see what form his trillion-dollar infrastructure fantasies actually take.

"Brumaire" ("fog") was the second month of the new calendar, the idea being that it's foggy in the fall (at least in France). The Revolution gave "natural" names to the months--natural, that is, if you assume that what is true for France is true for everyone, which the French still try to do. The Revolutionary calendar has been much ridiculed as an example of rational "folly", but it had an eminently rational purpose: to take control of the calendar away from the Catholic Church, whose liturgical year had shaped the life of France for a millennium. You can't celebrate Easter if you don't know when it is. The Protestants did the same thing, on a less ambitious scale, in the name of “true” Christianity. ↩︎

Bonaparte won over 74 percent of the vote, so great was the magic of his name. Prior to his victory, he led an enormously “colorful” life, experiencing both success and disaster several times. He was imprisoned in 1840 after a failed coup, but escaped in 1846, just in time to take advantage of the flux that followed the revolutions of 1848. ↩︎

I leave epithets like “self-hating Jew” and “anti-Semitic Jew” to others, but the ugliness of Marx’s pamphlet, On the Jewish Question must be experienced to be understood. Update: I orginally linked (unknowingly) to a full text translation posted by a right-wing outfit. The new link takes you to a Marxist site. I am neither right-wing nor Marxist, but I feel more comfortable letting the Marxists translate Marx. The translation of the work that I read was by Thomas ("T.B.") Bottomore, a moderate Marxist. ↩︎

See, for example, this (extensive) take in RealClear Politics by Sean Trende and David Byler, analyzing the presidential vote in the South over the past few decades. ↩︎

For more of this, if you want it, go here. ↩︎

For more on why Trump represents the culmination of long-running Republican impatience with such niceties as due process and majority rule, go here ↩︎