The American celebrity-cum-reality TV ‘star’ Donald Trump, since he became President of the US, has dominated news reporting, week in week out. His daily outrageous and bizarre Tweets match his naive and extremist policies. If ever there is any news item likely to be critical, he actively pre-empts the news coverage by yet another headline-hijacking Tweet. The mass media react with outrage at this unprecedented and uniquely awful phenomenon.
But we would argue that Trump is far from unique. Historically, you can find plenty of examples of individuals very like him.
One of his characteristics is his refusal to obey rules, his flouting of norms and even the law: e.g. his persistent refusal to make public his tax returns; his past sanctions-busting business dealings with Cuba; his past dealings with the Mafia who controlled New York’s cement supplies; his move into Mafia business interests like casinos and hotels, etc.
Over 100 years ago, the poet-playwright Oscar Wilde, in a letter home, wrote that “Americans are great hero-worshippers, and they always take their heroes from the criminal classes“.
An unscrupulous criminal can advance his career in ways not open to the honest man. This is not just an American phenomenon: back in the 19th century, the Russian writer Gogol wrote a great satirical novel, DEAD SOULS, in which the anti-hero – a man without money or connections, stuck in a dead-end clerical job, gets himself noticed and promoted as the only man in the office who did not take bribes. (This was based on a true story.)
More recently, Putin – also stuck in a lowly clerical job and without connections – saw this was the only way to advance his career. In the St Petersburg planning bureaucracy, noted for corruption, he was picked out as the only one who did not take or seek bribes, the only honest man. And his career took off from this. Appearances are deceptive, and Putin the kleptocrat is now creaming it off Russian trade.
Donald Trump was a serial tax-dodger, a ruthless conman, a businessman who routinely shafted any who did jobs for him, even refusing to pay his architects and lawyers. But not to worry. As Shakespeare put it: “Some men are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them” (TWELFTH NIGHT, Act 2).
The 18th century satirist, Fielding, wrote ironically of a certain ‘Great Man’, i.e. ‘criminal’ (the politician Walpole), that he adhered to some basic principles, all of which are very Trumpian,
* Never to do more mischief to another man than was necessary to … effect his purpose …
* Not to trust him who has deceived you, nor who knows he has been deceived by you.
* To shun poverty and distress, and to ally himself as close as possible to power and riches.
* To foment endless jealousies in his gang…
* That many men were undone by not going deep enough into roguery; as in gaming any man may be a loser who doth not play the whole game.
* That the heart was the proper seat of hatred, and the countenance of affection and friendship.
Fielding continued:
“… we see our hero… setting himself at the head of a gang … we view him maintaining absolute power, and exercising tyranny over a lawless crew, contrary to all law but his own will.”
THE HISTORY OF THE LIFE OF THE LATE MR JONATHAN WILD, 1743,
from English Satire, ed. Norman Furlong, 1946
As Trump forced a prolonged, indefinite, government shutdown over the funding of his wall, it was actually only and always about his will, and his absolute refusal to negotiate with or concede to Congress. In this he echoes the absolutism and gangster politics of Putin, Xi of China, al-Sisi in Egypt, and countless other authoritarian kleptocrat dictators.
In past centuries there were many similar ruthless, selfish tyrants. At the dawn of British capitalism, Cardinal Wolsey was satirised by the poet John Skelton:
For all their noble blood,
He plucks them by the hood,
And shakes them by the ear,
And brings them in such fear!
He baiteth them like a bear,
Like an ox or a bull.
Their wits, he saith, are dull;
He saith they have no brain
Their estate to maintain;…
Judges of the King’s laws,
He counteth them fools and daws…
Why Come Ye Not to Court? from Colin Clout, c.1523 – English Satire, pp 46-7
Like Wolsey, Trump cows his political opponents with coarse abuse and scornful nicknames, is noted for his dislike of an independent judiciary, and his contempt even for his own appointed officials.
In the 17th century, Samuel Butler’s poem HUDIBRAS is also revealing. Trump boasts of being “a stable genius“, of knowing more than his generals know about warfare, and in his illiterate ignorance used a coined word ‘covfefe‘. Of Sir Hudibras, Butler wrote:
For he could coin or counterfeit
New words, with little or no wit….
And when with hasty noise he spoke ’em,
The ignorant for current took ’em …
His notions fitted things so well
That which was which he could not tell.
Curiously, this heroic reformer – with such childish ignorance – seemed also to resemble Trump’s uniquely weird hair:
His tawny beard was the’ equal grace
Both of his wisdom and his face;
In cut and dye so like a tile,
A sudden view it would beguile;
Th’ upper part whereof was whey,
The nether orange, mixed with grey.
HUDIBRAS, 1663-78 – English Satire
But mockery and satire by themselves can achieve little. In ON HEROES AND HERO-WORSHIP, AND THE HEROIC IN HISTORY (1843), Thomas Carlyle made more serious arguments about the so-called Great Men of history. Unlike Socialists, Carlyle held that we need to follow great men – Socialists argue that only sheep need leaders but intelligent and class-conscious Socialists don’t.
But Carlyle made some valid points. He argued that all too often those supposed Great Men were nothing of the sort, that there is a big difference between truly serious, public-minded men like Cromwell, and the sham.
He noted the selfless ambition and serious purpose of a truly great man, compared with the sham:
Examine the man who lives in misery because he does not shine above other men; who goes about producing himself, pruriently anxious about his gifts and claims; struggling to force everybody, as it were begging everybody for God’s sake, to acknowledge him a great man, and set him over the heads of other men!
A great man? A poor morbid empty prurient man; fitter for the ward of a hospital than for a throne among men. I advise you to keep out of his way. He cannot walk on quiet paths; unless you will look at him, wonder at him, write paragraphs about him, he cannot live. Because there is nothing in himself, he hungers and thirsts that you would find something in him.
HEROES AND HERO WORSHIP, lecture 6
As we observe Trump’s frantic and incoherent Tweets, his determination to dominate the media conversation, to out-shout all other voices, we can see an embodiment of that “poor morbid empty prurient man“, pathetically demanding our attention. You simply must “look at him, wonder at him, write paragraphs about him“!
Carlyle warns us not to be taken in, to detest quacks: “first discern what is true, we shall then discern what is false“. Compared with Cromwell, a Trump is just a “prurient windbag“. Carlyle argued that “the selfish wish to shine over others“. As for political ambition, “you have two things to take into view. Not the coveting of the place alone, but the fitness of the man for the place withal“.
Of Trump and Fascism
In 1940, a left-wing academic Harold J Laski wrote in his book WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE, a long essay on What Fascism Is. In the way the Fascist leaders came to power, their background, and their exploitation of a sense of grievances to arouse a sense of national prestige, there are obvious parallels with Trump and his backers, and his political ‘base’.
The Fascists in seeking mass support made large promises for the discontented about a renewal of national pride – like Trump’s campaign slogan Make America Great Again:
Fascism begins with the formation of a little band of adventurers, whom no one takes very seriously… at its head a demagogue of genius. Its influence grows because it is able to exploit every grievance of a diseased society. It is careful to have no coherent doctrine… It offers the assurance of a renewal of that national pride which has been humiliated.
(Laski, Penguin ed. 1940, p 51).
Laski also argued that these ‘adventurers’ are of an outlaw, gangsterish type, with contempt for the masses, and at the same time hatred for privilege and for society’s rules. Again, Trump seems to fit that description uncannily well.
The makers of the Fascist movements were fundamentally uneducated men, wholly unconcerned with the building of a logical system. They were men who … were at once driven by ambition, avid of power …. they hated [society’s] rules because these rules stood in the way of their success …
Around a central group there gathered an army of the underworld, men who, in America, would have grouped themselves around the racketeers … They were careful not to put forward any coherent programme… their technique was the simpler one of exploiting grievances and insisting they had sovereign remedies for them. The grievances were whatever men were capable of hating upon a scale wide enough, and with an intensity deep enough, to win support. They personalised their enemies in the sure knowledge that the masses are always interested by concrete symbols of hate
(Ibid., pp 60-61).
As Laski saw it, a Fascist movement was built on hatred. Both a hatred of privilege which made “the rules which condemned them to failure.” and at the same time:
contempt for the masses who accepted a rule in which they got most of the toil, and little of the gain of living; they had contempt for the masses because, as outlaws, they had rejected a rule which normally, confined them to poverty and failure (p63).
It is this contempt you hear in Trump when he refers to people as “losers“. And it was only by evading the law and norms of honest business, by shafting his contractors, workers and creditors, by walking away from an unsuccessful business, a failed casino, from all the conned who had hopefully signed up to join his fraudulent ‘Trump University’– that he could claim to be a successful businessman.
Again, Laski pointed to another feature of the Trump presidency – its lack of a coherent settled policy, its disorder and frequent changes of personnel. One loses count of the many senior appointments which have been replaced, often very fast.
If there is a clear policy, it is to undo any reforms made by previous administrations. An obvious example of this is the dismantling of environmental controls, with water pollution left to the tender mercies of Big Industry and fracking, while experts on climate change find themselves assigned to managing the payroll of the EPA. This in a country whose rotting infrastructure means that rusting water pipes, in many industrial cities like Flint, are delivering water contaminated by lead, mercury, zinc etc.
In his study of Fascism, Laski also explained the Fascists’ lack of policy:
The only values they understood, the only values … which had meaning for them, were those which consisted in the exercise of power by themselves. If it be asked for what end they proposed to exercise power, the answer is for the sake of power itself …
Their view was the simple one …
that, as fear and deception had gained them the state, so fear and deception would maintain them in possession of it
(ibd..pp 64-5).
The logical outcome was a totalitarian state, with a complete obliteration of all independent social institutions – from the press and the media and the trade unions to the independent judiciary. Trump’s authoritarianism, his attacks against the media as “fake news“, his insistence that only his will counts: these are all in that Fascist tradition.
The probability is that the US political traditions will mean that further steps down that path would be resisted. But many of the pre-conditions needed to bring Nazis and Fascists to power, in the hungry inter-war years, are present in impoverished “left behind” groups of workers. Trade policies – such as free trade agreements with Canada and Mexico, which led to factories re-locating and many workers jobless; technological development – increasing use of CAD-CAM, IT, and robots, destroying old-style jobs, e.g. retail jobs replaced by the mechanised and automated Amazon warehouse empire; and increased manufacturing competition from low-wage countries like China and India: all these have contributed to a sense of being “left behind“.
Add to this a witches’ brew of racism and white supremacist entitlement, fed by Trump’s divisive xenophobic rhetoric, and his movement was able to sweep all before them.
But to what end? Imagine all the migrants and asylum-seekers suddenly deported: would that guarantee jobs and prosperity for American workers? No! Workers in all lands face the same wretched problems, how to feed and house and clothe themselves on wages paid by employers, while these same employers benefit from convenient loopholes and concessions in tax laws, and live the life of Riley on the back of their sweat-force, off the unpaid labour of the great unwashed, those that Tsar Trump looks down on as “losers“.
The wage-slave class everywhere is subject to competition: the employers will remove their factories to anywhere they can find a cheaper workforce, a more profitable operation. Though the Chinese workers originally lacked any independent trade union organisation, and still lack any political voice, they are increasingly beginning to organise and demand better wages and working conditions. In time, globalised capitalism will seek out fresh, untapped sources of surplus value to exploit.
Such is the way global capitalism works. And the question of just which set of gangsters controls the state, whether intelligent, highly educated public servants or the uneducated, unscrupulous, self-serving “stable genius” that is Trump, whether democratic or authoritarian, is beside the point.
The real point for workers everywhere is to be conscious of how the capitalist system is one of class exploitation, which simply cannot be made to work in the interests of the working class.
The Trumps of this world rely, for their power and mass support, on aggravating divisive nationalism. But the solution is for the working class to unite, on the basis of our shared class interest, and put an end to the wages system. Nationalism leads to militarism and wars – Socialism alone can mean an end to war, and to class exploitation. And a movement of class-conscious and democratic socialists has no need for any so-called ‘leaders’.
