Ugh
I highly recommend this provocative piece by John Judis in Notus even as the header will probably make the hair stand up on the back of your neck a little bit:
I’m sure Lindsey Graham will have that framed for him.
It’s a gross concept but Judis’s thesis is compelling nonetheless and it’s a must read. The thing you have to understand is that if he is an Alexander The Great or a Napoleon it is not a good thing and it says almost nothing about him personally other than he’s willing to break things because he’s too stupid to know the risks. One little excerpt:
Trump’s break with neoliberalism and liberal internationalism perfectly fits Hegel’s profile of the world-historical individual standing at the center of a transition from one era to another. So do his character and leadership. He didn’t merely appear to act out of a “morbid craving” for power and glory; that is at the center of his being. When Napoleon became first consul of the French Republic in 1799, he had one of his successful battles turned into a national commemoration. Trump has put his name on buildings and institutions and lusted after the Nobel Peace Prize. When Napoleon became emperor in 1804, he bestowed titles and riches on his family and supporters. Trump has enriched himself and his family.
Trump, like Hegel’s world-historical individuals, has ignored or repudiated “sacred interests” including the Constitution and its checks and balances. He tried to overturn the 2020 election. He shut down or fired leaders of independent agencies that Congress created. He fabricated pretexts for patently illegal actions by invoking laws that were intended for entirely different purposes — for instance, citing the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, intended to root out French insurrectionists, to justify deporting Venezuelans to a foreign prison without a hearing. His actions — which have included calling Somali immigrants “garbage” and belittling a female reporter as “piggy” — have been, in Hegel’s parlance, “obnoxious” and deserving of “moral reprehension.”
When Caesar vanquished his enemies, Hegel wrote, they “had the form of the constitution, and the power conferred by an appearance of justice, on their side.” Like Caesar, Trump sees himself as above ordinary morality or law. In the wake of his invasion of Venezuela, The New York Times asked Trump if he saw any limits on his global use of power. “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me,” he responded. “I don’t need international law.” This willingness to defy law and morality, and to pursue power and glory relentlessly, has been integral to world-historical individuals — and to their ability to detonate outworn ideas and institutions.
Great. Trump may go to his grave thinking that he’ll be remembered as a world historic figure and maybe he will be. But the odds are that he won’t be remembered fondly.
The thing is that all these prior examples of transformational figures were operating in a world that wasn’t armed with nuclear weapons and facing global climate change. I’m sure those previous transitions were existential for the cultures and peoples involved but this is an existential crisis for the entire planet and the whole human species. The risk is a million times greater. And Trump is a million times dumber.