The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte opens with one of the most famous lines in Marx's corpus:
Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidiere for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851 for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the Nephew for the Uncle.
As was noted four years ago, election day 2016 also happened to fall on the 18th Brumaire. So one naturally wonders what Marx might have said about history's third repetition: Not tragedy or farce, but reality tv?
The parallels, it seems to me, between Napoleon III and Donald Trump, are fairly striking. They both articulate a politics of national greatness, they both deploy (rhetorically) an attack on bourgeois economics, they both emerge out of a heightened conflict between executive power and parliamentary cretinism, and they both build their popular support on some vague kind of intense, populist fervor. Not to mention, of course, their common thorough buffoonery.
Making this kind of comparison is precisely the sort of thing Marx warns us against doing in the next few sentences:
The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from the names, battle-cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language. Thus Luther donned the mask of the Apostle Paul, the revolution of 1789 to 1814 draped itself alternately as the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793 to 1795. In like manner a beginner who has learnt a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he has assimilated the spirit of the new language and can freely express himself in it only when he finds his way in it without recalling the old and forgets his native tongue in the use of the new.
This is a complaint about the inability of revolutions themselves to see themselves as genuinely radically new, and their consequent need to appeal to some more familiar past. The same thing might be said about political commentators. Unable to theorize things freshly or recognize novelty, we insist on assessing the present through historic analogies.
There are better and worse versions of historical analogy. It seems to me that politics today bears no resemblance whatsoever to Weimar Germany, yet that remains the ubiquitous descriptor in the popular (and even more academic) press. A cottage industry of "we now live under fascism" has proved enormously financially successful. There are, it must be said, more sensible versions of making that particular comparison, as my friend the Rock of the Sea, the Tamer of Horses, Aaron Sibarium has recently attempted.
Still, I think the Weimar comparisons are strained at best. Perhaps Napoleon III is better! Probably not.
A few parallels to our time immediately jump out from Marx's 18th Brumaire. Consider, for example, our tortured self-examination of the nature and purpose and character of implicit norms in modern political life. Read that alongside Marx's blistering account of parliamentary dithering and especially of the pathetic attempt to impeach then President Louis Bonaparte.
Striking too is the famous description of Bonaparte's base of support--the alliance of small-holding peasants and the lumpenproletariat.
The core supporters from the lumpenproletariat are described as follows:
Alongside decayed roues 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, 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 boheme.
I can see strained but not very effective comparisons to Trump's base of support. More similar is the description of Bonaparte's deployment of these fanatical supporters as members of his "Society of December 10." Tens of thousands would throng together to celebrate Bonaparte and call for a coup. What's striking isn't just the character of their support, but the way Bonaparte comes to fall for his own illusion of popular support:
At a moment when the bourgeoisie itself played the most complete comedy, but in the most serious manner in the world, without infringing any of the pedantic conditions of French dramatic etiquette, and was itself half deceived, half convinced of the solemnity of its own performance of state, the adventurer, who took the comedy as plain comedy, was bound to win. Only when he has eliminated his solemn opponent, when he himself now takes his imperial role seriously and under the Napoleonic mask imagines he is the real Napoleon, doe she become the victim of his own conception of the world, the serious buffoon who no longer takes world history for a comedy but his comedy for world history.
I think some kind of description along those lines makes sense of Trump and his rallies. The solemn buffoonery and the combination of comedy and severity make him difficult to characterize as any straightforwardly fascist figure.
Parallels can be drawn also to the description of the small-holding peasants (whom Marx disparages as a "sack of potatoes") who form the other pillar of Bonaparte's political support. Today we emphasize the opioid epidemic, the decline of social capital, the collapse of working class communities, etc. for producing a spirit of social isolation and bitterness that fuels Trump. Similar features explain why the small peasants are unable to form radical class consciousness, and continue to long to be ruled by a strongman like Bonaparte.
The small-holding peasants form a vast mass, the members of which live in The small-holding peasants form an enormous mass whose members live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with each other. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse. The isolation is furthered by France’s poor means of communication and the poverty of the peasants. Their field of production, the small holding, permits no division of labor in its cultivation, no application of science, and therefore no multifariousness of development, no diversity of talent, no wealth of social relationships. Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient, directly produces most of its consumer needs, and thus acquires its means of life more through an exchange with nature than in intercourse with society. A small holding, the peasant and his family; beside it another small holding, another peasant and another family. A few score of these constitute a village, and a few score villages constitute a department. Thus the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes. Insofar as millions of families live under 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. Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not constitute a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or 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, an unlimited governmental power which protects them from 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 which subordinates society to itself.
Historical tradition gave rise to the French peasants’ belief in the miracle that a man named Napoleon would bring all glory back to them. And there turned up an individual who claims to be that man because he bears the name Napoleon, in consequence of the Code Napoleon, which decrees: “Inquiry into paternity is forbidden.” After a twenty-year vagabondage and a series of grotesque adventures the legend is consummated, 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.
Similar too is the rhetoric of order and stability. Marx's cheekily observes that The Economist praises Bonaparte as a source of preserving national tranquility just a week before he launched his coup. Today, of course, the press takes Trump as the major source of national chaos and disorder. But clearly Trump has tried to present himself as the choice for those who want to preserve order.
What I take to be most similar is Marx's explanation of how the bourgeoisie (and the church) came to reconcile themselves to the idea of voting for a man like Bonaparte:
When the Puritans of the Council of Constance complained of the dissolute lives of the popes and wailed about the necessity for moral reform, Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly thundered at them: “Only the devil in person can still save the Catholic Church, and you ask for angels.” Similarly, after the coup d’état the French bourgeoisie cried out: Only the Chief of the Society of December 10 can still save bourgeois society! Only theft can still save property; only perjury, religion; bastardy, the family; disorder, order!
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