AMERICA IS A FASCIST STATE
Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.
Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.
Opposed to anarchism, democracy, pluralism, egalitarianism, liberalism, socialism, and Marxism, fascism is at the far right wing of the traditional left–right spectrum.
AMERICA IS A ROGUE STATE
A nation or state regarded as breaking international law and posing a threat to the security of other nations.
Philosophy, Politics
Elections, U.S.
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Donald J. Trump
The tragic reascent of Trump is not an anomaly to democracy but its fatal flaw.
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-eighteenth-brumaire-of-donald-j-trump/
Image: Getty Images
by Peter E. Gordon
November 8, 2024
Boston Review
From 2016 to 2020 Donald J. Trump served as forty-fifth president of the United States; now, he has secured his reelection and will assume office once again as president number forty-seven. It was Marx who left us with the memorable claim that events in history occur twice: “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” But today this slogan, memorable as it is, surely doesn’t apply, since Trump’s first term was already a farce, distinguished most of all as a spectacle of bluster and boasting that, despite his many plans, left the basic institutions of American democracy more or less intact. He said that he would build a wall across the full two thousand miles of the United States’ southern border and Mexico would pay for it. (His sadistic family separation policy destroyed the lives of thousands, but his administration built only about five hundred miles of the wall, much of it reinforcements to existing barriers, and American taxpayers bore the cost.) He said that he would dismantle the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something better. (He didn’t, and the ACA remains among the most popular achievements of the Obama administration.) He said that he would impose a ban on immigrants from Muslim-majority countries. (He tried, with fitful success, though the courts dogged his efforts.) These promises came to us wrapped in the vacuous slogan that he would “Make America Great Again.” (Great? Hardly. It would be more accurate to say that America became an object of great derision and concern. Especially among our European allies, the fear arose that democracy in America, technically among the oldest democracies in the world, was showing signs of backsliding into autocracy.)
Marx understood that powerful countercurrents in history can sweep away political gains like Noah’s flood.
The old Marxist slogan, then, must now be revised. If the first term was farce, Trump’s reelection points toward a tragedy from which we may never recover. Every critic will offer a different postmortem. Some will—convincingly—cast blame on the elitism and inertia of the Democratic party, which cleaved to its habits of liberal centrism and dismissed the grievances of the working class. Others will blame the Democrats for prioritizing issues of sexual or racial identity over the universalism of economic justice; still others will blame the brute misogyny and racism of the American public. Others will blame those groups who, moved by justified anger over the U.S. support for the devastation of Gaza, cast their lot with fringe candidates such as Jill Stein, motivated by a moralist’s belief that “sending a message” was more important than voting for somebody who might actually have won. All of these critics capture at least some share of the truth; social reality is infinitely complex, and our explanatory instruments always shed only a partial light on what we do. But we would be well advised to consider the most obvious fact: that the tragic ascent of Trump is not an anomaly to democracy but its fatal flaw.
This was something that Marx understood. On December 2, 1851, Louis Bonaparte, a nephew of the long-dead Napoleon, seized the reins of the French state and declared himself emperor. The coup d’état should have been long anticipated, since it was hardly his first attempt. He had tried something similar in 1836. “I believe,” he wrote then, “that from time to time, men are created whom I call volunteers of providence, in whose hands are placed the destiny of their countries. I believe I am one of those men. If I am wrong, I can perish uselessly. If I am right, then providence will put me into a position to fulfill my mission.”
When his first effort failed, he fled first to the United States, then to London, where he lived among the wealthy for several years. But in 1840 he crossed the channel, again with the hope that “providence” would guide him to victory. This time, however, his failure was so swift and so spectacular that it provoked less fear than ridicule. “This surpasses comedy,” wrote one newspaper critic. “One doesn’t kill crazy people, one just locks them up.” After a trial, Louis Bonaparte was condemned to life in prison, where, unrepentant, he continued to nourish dreams of his supposed birthright, and even wrote a pamphlet with the utopian title, “The Extinction of Pauperism.” He did not give up. In 1846 he escaped in disguise and fled once again to London, where he remained until France’s 1848 revolution, when the abdication of King Louis Philippe gave way to the Second Republic, establishing universal male suffrage and giving Louis Bonaparte yet another chance to make his bid for power. In the democratic election of December 1848, Napoleon’s nephew finally fulfilled his ambitions: he won the presidency by a wide margin, gaining nearly 75 percent of the vote. But his highest ambition remained just out of reach. By the terms of the new constitution, the president was legally obliged to step down after four years in office, a rule Bonaparte sought to change but failed. Puffed up with dreams of his destiny, he saw no other choice. Like his uncle before him, he annulled the rules and claimed all power for himself.
Marx, living in London at the time, observed the events with fury and wrote an extended essay, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” its title meant as a mockery of the nephew for his ambition to reprise the events that had brought his more famous uncle to power a half-century before. According to the revolutionary calendar, the eighteenth of Brumaire was November 9, 1799, the date when Napoleon had annulled the Directory and declared himself First Consul, a prelude to his even more grandiose act five years later when he claimed the title of emperor. For Marx, the coup d’état of Louis Bonaparte in 1851 was an absurd repetition, the nephew little more than a “grotesque mediocrity,” an “adventurer who hides his trivially repulsive features under the iron death mask of Napoleon.” The essay, which runs to nearly a hundred pages in length, was first published in New York in 1852 by Marx’s colleague Joseph Weydemeyer in a journal called Die Revolution. “The Eighteenth Brumaire” is widely esteemed among Marxists and non-Marxists alike as a masterpiece of rhetoric, known especially for its opening line that events in history occur twice, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” But it also marks a shift in Marx’s mood, and a theoretical acknowledgment that democratic revolutions do not always turn out as one might expect.
Liberalism is an archive of principles that can be burst free of the system from which it was born.
Just three years before, in The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels had expressed themselves with greater optimism, exhorting the working class to seize the moment for their freedom, while also assigning to “bourgeois ideologists” a supportive role as intellectuals who could furnish “fresh elements of enlightenment and progress” to the proletariat. Marx and Engels were alive to the principle of self-reflexivity: that a social theory must explain the conditions of its own emergence. The bourgeois ideologists had untethered themselves from their class; they had “raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.” Marx and Engels were therefore confident—perhaps too confident—that the mass of the oppressed would fulfil its assignment. But the practical task of emancipation belonged to the proletariat itself, the class that needed only to recognize its exploitation and then break the chains that held it in submission.
In practice, however, things did not go as planned. In “The Eighteenth Brumaire,” just several pages in, Marx adopts a newly pessimistic tone:
Universal suffrage seems to have survived for only a moment, in order that with its own hand it may make its last will and testament before the eyes of all the world and declare in the name of the people itself: Everything that exists has this much worth, that it will perish.
In this passage, Marx’s mood has grown so dark that he freely borrows the concluding sentence from Satan, or Mephistopheles, as he is called in Goethe’s Faust. Denn alles was entsteht, / Ist wert, daß es zu Grunde geht; nothing of value remains in the world, and everything might as well pass away. Marx still employs a dialectical argument, but he now uses it with bitter irony to describe a dialectic of destruction rather than forward motion. What in France was called the Party of Order had triumphed over the Party of Movement. The institution of democratic suffrage, a novelty at the time, seems to have come into being only to annul democracy itself.
In my battered old copy of The Marx-Engels Reader, edited long ago by the Princeton political scientist and historian Robert C. Tucker and still used throughout much of the Anglophone world in courses on Marxist theory, the brief excerpt from “The Eighteenth Brumaire” is introduced with an explanatory note: “Louis Bonaparte’s rise and rule have been seen as a forerunner of the phenomenon that was to become known in the twentieth century as fascism.” The Reader does not reprint the essay in its entirety, though the full text can be found in the Collected Works by Marx and Engels. When he first published his anthology in 1978, it was perhaps natural that Tucker would understand fascism as a phenomenon of the distant past, a mere excrescence of an interwar era in political and economic disarray. The stabilization of capitalist democracies after the Second World War made it all too easy for historians to declare that the fascist threat was long behind us and that communism, its totalitarian twin, now loomed as the greater menace. The collapse of brutal regimes in the eastern bloc, socialist in name if not in spirit, gave liberal ideologues in the West a brief moment of exultation to declare the “end of history,” until, as could have been predicted, history kept going as before. All too often, however, history seems to run in reverse, or it disgorges from the past old forms of rule that we might have thought were long gone. Thus Marx’s observation that “the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living”:
And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something entirely new, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle slogans and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language.
What Marx understood—and what too many of us have today forgotten—is that there is always a powerful countercurrent in history that can sweep away like Noah’s flood whatever political gains that seem to have been made. In his fury and frustration Marx damned all the various forces in that flood as a lumpenproletariat with Louis Bonaparte as its charismatic leader:
Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, rogues, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaus [procurers or pimps], brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ-grinders, rag-pickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass thrown hither and thither, which the French term la bohème.
This is, of course, Marx at his worst. His portrait of the lumpenproletariat is a mere caricature that does little to explain why three-quarters of French society voted for Louis Bonaparte in a popular election. When Marx turns to the peasantry (of which a great share also rallied to the Bonapartist cause) he seeks to draw a neat distinction: “The Bonaparte dynasty represents not the revolutionary, but the conservative peasant; not the peasant that strikes out beyond the condition of his social existence, the small holding, but rather the peasant who wants to consolidate it.” In the countryside, Marx concludes, the Bonapartist wing “represents not the enlightenment, but the superstition of the peasant, not his judgment, but his prejudice, not his future, but his past.”
But these distinctions offer more consolation than insight. The difficulty is that Marx does not really reckon with the most painful truth of a democratic regime: that by the logic of universal suffrage, a democracy is only as enlightened as its citizens, who, in exercising their right to popular sovereignty, may just as easily opt for prejudice in place of progress and for charismatic authority in place of enlightenment. Well before today’s long line of right-wing populists—the likes of Bolsonaro, Orbán, and Modi—and outright fascists such as Hitler and Mussolini, it was Marx’s true insight that democratic procedure alone brings no guarantee of progress. In France in early 1848 the bourgeois revolutionaries had introduced a species of universal suffrage (though it was limited only to men); on December 2, the gains of the previous year were, in Marx’s words, “conjured away by a card-sharper’s trick.” It was not the monarchy that was overthrown; instead, the French state was robbed of “the liberal concessions that were wrung from it by century-long struggles.”
Bonapartism was a movement born from the displacement of real interest by mere fantasies of interest.
In this assessment the term “liberal” stands out in bold relief. Today, that word too often appears in derisive polemics that are eager to dismiss all that liberalism has stood for throughout its long and varied career. That it has served as a cover for policies of racism and empire should strike any social critic as obvious; but the further argument that liberalism serves only as an ideological groundwork for neoliberalism has become such a commonplace that few critics ever pause to consider why Marx would have mourned the loss of the “liberal concessions” that had been won, slowly and fitfully, often by popular struggle, during the era of the bourgeois revolutions. The anger that courses through “The Eighteenth Brumaire” is intelligible only if we reckon with his dialectical belief that liberalism is not a mere tissue of falsehoods but an archive of principles that can be transformed and expanded until it bursts free of the system from which it was born. A society in which liberal values have lost all credibility or have never gained sufficient traction in the first place will be inclined toward atavism rather than progress, and it will deploy democracy against itself. This is the poisonous atmosphere in which authoritarianism gains an upper hand. Populism supplants liberalism, and the true face of economic suffering turns into a grimace of nativism and racial hatred.
“The Eighteenth Brumaire” is a puzzling text, poised in an awkward place between social reductionism and political insight. Marx struggled to retain an understanding of the Bonapartist movement that would confirm his sociological conviction that it was the expression of a distinctive class alliance between the lumpenproletariat and the peasantry. More discerning was his claim that in Bonapartism, a new species of modern politics had emerged in which charisma and democratic procedure were fused. Marx was aware, of course, that a great share of the wealthy bourgeoisie was frightened by the popular uprisings of 1848, and that they responded in panic, hoping a powerful leader would save them from the unruly masses. What he could not really explain was why such an overwhelming portion of the French population—not only the bourgeoisie, but also the “masses” themselves—would choose dictatorship over democracy. To evade the real complexity of the matter he resorted to name-calling:
This Bonaparte, who constitutes himself chief of the lumpenproletariat, who here rediscovers in mass form the interests which he personally pursues, who recognizes in this scum, offal, refuse of all classes the only class upon which he can base himself unconditionally, is the real Bonaparte, the Bonaparte sans phrase. An old crafty roué, he conceives the historical life of the nations and their performances as comedy in the most vulgar sense, as a masquerade where the grand costumes, words and postures merely serve to mask the pettiest knavery.
Implicit in this charge, and long before the emergence of authoritarian movements of the twentieth century and our own recent time, Marx glimpsed something different, and far more unsettling. Bonapartism was not a political movement that expressed the interests of a particular class; it was a movement born from the dissolution of class, the displacement of real interest by mere fantasies of interest that grow ever more powerful as the realm of the symbolic takes on a life of its own.
Only this, I believe, can explain why modern forms of right-wing populism have such an uncanny and free-floating quality that they seem to survive with no other content than the fever dream of political solidarity itself. Democracy without content becomes a mere spectacle, a void organized around the two poles of “the leader” and “the people,” filled with nostalgic images of national and racial community. Marx could only have anticipated this political form but did not live long enough to see its efflorescence in the twentieth century. Some Marxists, to be sure, still cling to the consoling thought that even the most extreme forms of right-wing populism can be understood as an angry reflex of the working class. But this interpretation was never wholly convincing.
As Robin D. G. Kelley wrote in these pages back in 2017, not long after Trump’s first victory, the bottommost rungs of the working class are Black and brown, and Trump clearly did not speak for them. Instead, he brought to the surface a species of white nationalism that was violent and unabashed, courting the support of xenophobic movements that swelled with enthusiasm when he instructed them to “stand by.” That Trump apparently made some gains with nonwhite voters in the most recent election should not distract us from the central place of racism in his movement. He never moderated this racism, not during his four-year exile in Mar-a-Lago and not during the 2024 campaign. In language dragged into the light from the worst moments of history and the ugliest corners of the human psyche, he has made it clear that he sees immigrants as “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Some may claim that all these terrible statements should be dismissed as mere rhetoric, that his promise to deport millions of residents should not alarm us because he doesn’t really mean what he says.
But we should consider more closely what is being implied, and excused, when apologists for Trumpism suggest that we should not take its racism seriously. The United States is in its racial and ethnoreligious composition one of the most diverse polities on the planet, and the very idea that it could be transformed back into a whites-only country club (something it never was) is so fantastical it would be a joke if only it didn’t carry such lethal implications. But the fantasy is the point. Racism offers the illusion of an in-group solidarity, built, like a castle in the air, upon nothing more than the idea of a homogeneous community that wishes to expel from its ranks all of those it defines as the enemy. The fantasy mobilizes, it motivates, and it kills, and it does so with all the more vehemence precisely because it is a fantasy that must be imposed, violently, upon a reality that will not comply.
Understanding extreme forms of right-wing populism as an angry reflex of the working class was never wholly convincing.
A democracy evacuated of its content becomes a mere container for this noxious idea, and it remains a democracy only as long as the appeal to “the people” nourishes the fantasy of belonging. In 1851, the result was a democracy without liberalism, opening the way not only to the Third Empire, with its broad boulevards for military display, but to a species of violent and illiberal populism that is now spreading everywhere across the globe. Louis Napoleon was in this respect the harbinger of things to come, an early sign of a political form that cloaks itself in the garments of “greatness” and tradition even while it takes advantage of democratic institutions, only to shut the doors and abolish democracy once it has seized the state.
Whether Trump will take that final step from illiberal democracy to outright fascism we cannot know. But he has made his aspirations altogether clear, and they should be familiar to anyone who has studied the course of history in the modern era. In this regard Trumpism is hardly exceptional, and none of us should find it surprising that American democracy now finds itself all but consumed by the general pathologies that have accompanied the ascent of popular government since its inception. Elevated once again to the Presidency, not by a lumpenproletariat but by the widest assortment of average Americans, Trump has gained a democratic mandate, now largely unchecked by the Supreme Court or Congress, to enact his own Eighteenth Brumaire and to sweep aside the constitutional constraints that inhibited him from realizing the dark vision he sought to pursue during his first term. Since his early rise to prominence on reality television, this unspeakable and incurious mediocrity has cloaked himself like Napoleon the Third in the nostalgic promise of past greatness while he has invented nothing that is truly great. He has only served as our farcical and unflattering mirror, and he has given voice to all of the worst sentiments of the American demos—its xenophobia and its distraction, its racism and its misogyny, and its bizarre myth of a God-given mission to expel the stranger and dominate the world. If he succeeds, now largely unchecked by congressional or judicial opponents, in implementing even the smallest handful of the measures he has announced with such vehemence during his recent campaign, we will only see a vivid illustration of the tragic lesson: democracy spawns its own demagogues just as the sleep of reason produces monsters. The lights are going out.
November 8, 2024
Boston Review
From 2016 to 2020 Donald J. Trump served as forty-fifth president of the United States; now, he has secured his reelection and will assume office once again as president number forty-seven. It was Marx who left us with the memorable claim that events in history occur twice: “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” But today this slogan, memorable as it is, surely doesn’t apply, since Trump’s first term was already a farce, distinguished most of all as a spectacle of bluster and boasting that, despite his many plans, left the basic institutions of American democracy more or less intact. He said that he would build a wall across the full two thousand miles of the United States’ southern border and Mexico would pay for it. (His sadistic family separation policy destroyed the lives of thousands, but his administration built only about five hundred miles of the wall, much of it reinforcements to existing barriers, and American taxpayers bore the cost.) He said that he would dismantle the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something better. (He didn’t, and the ACA remains among the most popular achievements of the Obama administration.) He said that he would impose a ban on immigrants from Muslim-majority countries. (He tried, with fitful success, though the courts dogged his efforts.) These promises came to us wrapped in the vacuous slogan that he would “Make America Great Again.” (Great? Hardly. It would be more accurate to say that America became an object of great derision and concern. Especially among our European allies, the fear arose that democracy in America, technically among the oldest democracies in the world, was showing signs of backsliding into autocracy.)
Marx understood that powerful countercurrents in history can sweep away political gains like Noah’s flood.
The old Marxist slogan, then, must now be revised. If the first term was farce, Trump’s reelection points toward a tragedy from which we may never recover. Every critic will offer a different postmortem. Some will—convincingly—cast blame on the elitism and inertia of the Democratic party, which cleaved to its habits of liberal centrism and dismissed the grievances of the working class. Others will blame the Democrats for prioritizing issues of sexual or racial identity over the universalism of economic justice; still others will blame the brute misogyny and racism of the American public. Others will blame those groups who, moved by justified anger over the U.S. support for the devastation of Gaza, cast their lot with fringe candidates such as Jill Stein, motivated by a moralist’s belief that “sending a message” was more important than voting for somebody who might actually have won. All of these critics capture at least some share of the truth; social reality is infinitely complex, and our explanatory instruments always shed only a partial light on what we do. But we would be well advised to consider the most obvious fact: that the tragic ascent of Trump is not an anomaly to democracy but its fatal flaw.
This was something that Marx understood. On December 2, 1851, Louis Bonaparte, a nephew of the long-dead Napoleon, seized the reins of the French state and declared himself emperor. The coup d’état should have been long anticipated, since it was hardly his first attempt. He had tried something similar in 1836. “I believe,” he wrote then, “that from time to time, men are created whom I call volunteers of providence, in whose hands are placed the destiny of their countries. I believe I am one of those men. If I am wrong, I can perish uselessly. If I am right, then providence will put me into a position to fulfill my mission.”
When his first effort failed, he fled first to the United States, then to London, where he lived among the wealthy for several years. But in 1840 he crossed the channel, again with the hope that “providence” would guide him to victory. This time, however, his failure was so swift and so spectacular that it provoked less fear than ridicule. “This surpasses comedy,” wrote one newspaper critic. “One doesn’t kill crazy people, one just locks them up.” After a trial, Louis Bonaparte was condemned to life in prison, where, unrepentant, he continued to nourish dreams of his supposed birthright, and even wrote a pamphlet with the utopian title, “The Extinction of Pauperism.” He did not give up. In 1846 he escaped in disguise and fled once again to London, where he remained until France’s 1848 revolution, when the abdication of King Louis Philippe gave way to the Second Republic, establishing universal male suffrage and giving Louis Bonaparte yet another chance to make his bid for power. In the democratic election of December 1848, Napoleon’s nephew finally fulfilled his ambitions: he won the presidency by a wide margin, gaining nearly 75 percent of the vote. But his highest ambition remained just out of reach. By the terms of the new constitution, the president was legally obliged to step down after four years in office, a rule Bonaparte sought to change but failed. Puffed up with dreams of his destiny, he saw no other choice. Like his uncle before him, he annulled the rules and claimed all power for himself.
Marx, living in London at the time, observed the events with fury and wrote an extended essay, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” its title meant as a mockery of the nephew for his ambition to reprise the events that had brought his more famous uncle to power a half-century before. According to the revolutionary calendar, the eighteenth of Brumaire was November 9, 1799, the date when Napoleon had annulled the Directory and declared himself First Consul, a prelude to his even more grandiose act five years later when he claimed the title of emperor. For Marx, the coup d’état of Louis Bonaparte in 1851 was an absurd repetition, the nephew little more than a “grotesque mediocrity,” an “adventurer who hides his trivially repulsive features under the iron death mask of Napoleon.” The essay, which runs to nearly a hundred pages in length, was first published in New York in 1852 by Marx’s colleague Joseph Weydemeyer in a journal called Die Revolution. “The Eighteenth Brumaire” is widely esteemed among Marxists and non-Marxists alike as a masterpiece of rhetoric, known especially for its opening line that events in history occur twice, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” But it also marks a shift in Marx’s mood, and a theoretical acknowledgment that democratic revolutions do not always turn out as one might expect.
Liberalism is an archive of principles that can be burst free of the system from which it was born.
Just three years before, in The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels had expressed themselves with greater optimism, exhorting the working class to seize the moment for their freedom, while also assigning to “bourgeois ideologists” a supportive role as intellectuals who could furnish “fresh elements of enlightenment and progress” to the proletariat. Marx and Engels were alive to the principle of self-reflexivity: that a social theory must explain the conditions of its own emergence. The bourgeois ideologists had untethered themselves from their class; they had “raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.” Marx and Engels were therefore confident—perhaps too confident—that the mass of the oppressed would fulfil its assignment. But the practical task of emancipation belonged to the proletariat itself, the class that needed only to recognize its exploitation and then break the chains that held it in submission.
In practice, however, things did not go as planned. In “The Eighteenth Brumaire,” just several pages in, Marx adopts a newly pessimistic tone:
Universal suffrage seems to have survived for only a moment, in order that with its own hand it may make its last will and testament before the eyes of all the world and declare in the name of the people itself: Everything that exists has this much worth, that it will perish.
In this passage, Marx’s mood has grown so dark that he freely borrows the concluding sentence from Satan, or Mephistopheles, as he is called in Goethe’s Faust. Denn alles was entsteht, / Ist wert, daß es zu Grunde geht; nothing of value remains in the world, and everything might as well pass away. Marx still employs a dialectical argument, but he now uses it with bitter irony to describe a dialectic of destruction rather than forward motion. What in France was called the Party of Order had triumphed over the Party of Movement. The institution of democratic suffrage, a novelty at the time, seems to have come into being only to annul democracy itself.
In my battered old copy of The Marx-Engels Reader, edited long ago by the Princeton political scientist and historian Robert C. Tucker and still used throughout much of the Anglophone world in courses on Marxist theory, the brief excerpt from “The Eighteenth Brumaire” is introduced with an explanatory note: “Louis Bonaparte’s rise and rule have been seen as a forerunner of the phenomenon that was to become known in the twentieth century as fascism.” The Reader does not reprint the essay in its entirety, though the full text can be found in the Collected Works by Marx and Engels. When he first published his anthology in 1978, it was perhaps natural that Tucker would understand fascism as a phenomenon of the distant past, a mere excrescence of an interwar era in political and economic disarray. The stabilization of capitalist democracies after the Second World War made it all too easy for historians to declare that the fascist threat was long behind us and that communism, its totalitarian twin, now loomed as the greater menace. The collapse of brutal regimes in the eastern bloc, socialist in name if not in spirit, gave liberal ideologues in the West a brief moment of exultation to declare the “end of history,” until, as could have been predicted, history kept going as before. All too often, however, history seems to run in reverse, or it disgorges from the past old forms of rule that we might have thought were long gone. Thus Marx’s observation that “the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living”:
And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something entirely new, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle slogans and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language.
What Marx understood—and what too many of us have today forgotten—is that there is always a powerful countercurrent in history that can sweep away like Noah’s flood whatever political gains that seem to have been made. In his fury and frustration Marx damned all the various forces in that flood as a lumpenproletariat with Louis Bonaparte as its charismatic leader:
Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, rogues, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaus [procurers or pimps], brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ-grinders, rag-pickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass thrown hither and thither, which the French term la bohème.
This is, of course, Marx at his worst. His portrait of the lumpenproletariat is a mere caricature that does little to explain why three-quarters of French society voted for Louis Bonaparte in a popular election. When Marx turns to the peasantry (of which a great share also rallied to the Bonapartist cause) he seeks to draw a neat distinction: “The Bonaparte dynasty represents not the revolutionary, but the conservative peasant; not the peasant that strikes out beyond the condition of his social existence, the small holding, but rather the peasant who wants to consolidate it.” In the countryside, Marx concludes, the Bonapartist wing “represents not the enlightenment, but the superstition of the peasant, not his judgment, but his prejudice, not his future, but his past.”
But these distinctions offer more consolation than insight. The difficulty is that Marx does not really reckon with the most painful truth of a democratic regime: that by the logic of universal suffrage, a democracy is only as enlightened as its citizens, who, in exercising their right to popular sovereignty, may just as easily opt for prejudice in place of progress and for charismatic authority in place of enlightenment. Well before today’s long line of right-wing populists—the likes of Bolsonaro, Orbán, and Modi—and outright fascists such as Hitler and Mussolini, it was Marx’s true insight that democratic procedure alone brings no guarantee of progress. In France in early 1848 the bourgeois revolutionaries had introduced a species of universal suffrage (though it was limited only to men); on December 2, the gains of the previous year were, in Marx’s words, “conjured away by a card-sharper’s trick.” It was not the monarchy that was overthrown; instead, the French state was robbed of “the liberal concessions that were wrung from it by century-long struggles.”
Bonapartism was a movement born from the displacement of real interest by mere fantasies of interest.
In this assessment the term “liberal” stands out in bold relief. Today, that word too often appears in derisive polemics that are eager to dismiss all that liberalism has stood for throughout its long and varied career. That it has served as a cover for policies of racism and empire should strike any social critic as obvious; but the further argument that liberalism serves only as an ideological groundwork for neoliberalism has become such a commonplace that few critics ever pause to consider why Marx would have mourned the loss of the “liberal concessions” that had been won, slowly and fitfully, often by popular struggle, during the era of the bourgeois revolutions. The anger that courses through “The Eighteenth Brumaire” is intelligible only if we reckon with his dialectical belief that liberalism is not a mere tissue of falsehoods but an archive of principles that can be transformed and expanded until it bursts free of the system from which it was born. A society in which liberal values have lost all credibility or have never gained sufficient traction in the first place will be inclined toward atavism rather than progress, and it will deploy democracy against itself. This is the poisonous atmosphere in which authoritarianism gains an upper hand. Populism supplants liberalism, and the true face of economic suffering turns into a grimace of nativism and racial hatred.
“The Eighteenth Brumaire” is a puzzling text, poised in an awkward place between social reductionism and political insight. Marx struggled to retain an understanding of the Bonapartist movement that would confirm his sociological conviction that it was the expression of a distinctive class alliance between the lumpenproletariat and the peasantry. More discerning was his claim that in Bonapartism, a new species of modern politics had emerged in which charisma and democratic procedure were fused. Marx was aware, of course, that a great share of the wealthy bourgeoisie was frightened by the popular uprisings of 1848, and that they responded in panic, hoping a powerful leader would save them from the unruly masses. What he could not really explain was why such an overwhelming portion of the French population—not only the bourgeoisie, but also the “masses” themselves—would choose dictatorship over democracy. To evade the real complexity of the matter he resorted to name-calling:
This Bonaparte, who constitutes himself chief of the lumpenproletariat, who here rediscovers in mass form the interests which he personally pursues, who recognizes in this scum, offal, refuse of all classes the only class upon which he can base himself unconditionally, is the real Bonaparte, the Bonaparte sans phrase. An old crafty roué, he conceives the historical life of the nations and their performances as comedy in the most vulgar sense, as a masquerade where the grand costumes, words and postures merely serve to mask the pettiest knavery.
Implicit in this charge, and long before the emergence of authoritarian movements of the twentieth century and our own recent time, Marx glimpsed something different, and far more unsettling. Bonapartism was not a political movement that expressed the interests of a particular class; it was a movement born from the dissolution of class, the displacement of real interest by mere fantasies of interest that grow ever more powerful as the realm of the symbolic takes on a life of its own.
Only this, I believe, can explain why modern forms of right-wing populism have such an uncanny and free-floating quality that they seem to survive with no other content than the fever dream of political solidarity itself. Democracy without content becomes a mere spectacle, a void organized around the two poles of “the leader” and “the people,” filled with nostalgic images of national and racial community. Marx could only have anticipated this political form but did not live long enough to see its efflorescence in the twentieth century. Some Marxists, to be sure, still cling to the consoling thought that even the most extreme forms of right-wing populism can be understood as an angry reflex of the working class. But this interpretation was never wholly convincing.
As Robin D. G. Kelley wrote in these pages back in 2017, not long after Trump’s first victory, the bottommost rungs of the working class are Black and brown, and Trump clearly did not speak for them. Instead, he brought to the surface a species of white nationalism that was violent and unabashed, courting the support of xenophobic movements that swelled with enthusiasm when he instructed them to “stand by.” That Trump apparently made some gains with nonwhite voters in the most recent election should not distract us from the central place of racism in his movement. He never moderated this racism, not during his four-year exile in Mar-a-Lago and not during the 2024 campaign. In language dragged into the light from the worst moments of history and the ugliest corners of the human psyche, he has made it clear that he sees immigrants as “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Some may claim that all these terrible statements should be dismissed as mere rhetoric, that his promise to deport millions of residents should not alarm us because he doesn’t really mean what he says.
But we should consider more closely what is being implied, and excused, when apologists for Trumpism suggest that we should not take its racism seriously. The United States is in its racial and ethnoreligious composition one of the most diverse polities on the planet, and the very idea that it could be transformed back into a whites-only country club (something it never was) is so fantastical it would be a joke if only it didn’t carry such lethal implications. But the fantasy is the point. Racism offers the illusion of an in-group solidarity, built, like a castle in the air, upon nothing more than the idea of a homogeneous community that wishes to expel from its ranks all of those it defines as the enemy. The fantasy mobilizes, it motivates, and it kills, and it does so with all the more vehemence precisely because it is a fantasy that must be imposed, violently, upon a reality that will not comply.
Understanding extreme forms of right-wing populism as an angry reflex of the working class was never wholly convincing.
A democracy evacuated of its content becomes a mere container for this noxious idea, and it remains a democracy only as long as the appeal to “the people” nourishes the fantasy of belonging. In 1851, the result was a democracy without liberalism, opening the way not only to the Third Empire, with its broad boulevards for military display, but to a species of violent and illiberal populism that is now spreading everywhere across the globe. Louis Napoleon was in this respect the harbinger of things to come, an early sign of a political form that cloaks itself in the garments of “greatness” and tradition even while it takes advantage of democratic institutions, only to shut the doors and abolish democracy once it has seized the state.
Whether Trump will take that final step from illiberal democracy to outright fascism we cannot know. But he has made his aspirations altogether clear, and they should be familiar to anyone who has studied the course of history in the modern era. In this regard Trumpism is hardly exceptional, and none of us should find it surprising that American democracy now finds itself all but consumed by the general pathologies that have accompanied the ascent of popular government since its inception. Elevated once again to the Presidency, not by a lumpenproletariat but by the widest assortment of average Americans, Trump has gained a democratic mandate, now largely unchecked by the Supreme Court or Congress, to enact his own Eighteenth Brumaire and to sweep aside the constitutional constraints that inhibited him from realizing the dark vision he sought to pursue during his first term. Since his early rise to prominence on reality television, this unspeakable and incurious mediocrity has cloaked himself like Napoleon the Third in the nostalgic promise of past greatness while he has invented nothing that is truly great. He has only served as our farcical and unflattering mirror, and he has given voice to all of the worst sentiments of the American demos—its xenophobia and its distraction, its racism and its misogyny, and its bizarre myth of a God-given mission to expel the stranger and dominate the world. If he succeeds, now largely unchecked by congressional or judicial opponents, in implementing even the smallest handful of the measures he has announced with such vehemence during his recent campaign, we will only see a vivid illustration of the tragic lesson: democracy spawns its own demagogues just as the sleep of reason produces monsters. The lights are going out.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Peter E. Gordon is Amabel B. James Professor of History and Faculty Affiliate in Philosophy and German Languages and Literatures at Harvard. His latest book is A Precarious Happiness: Adorno and the Sources of Normativity.
