At this point, six months into Donald Trump’s second term and a year after the assassination attempt that made it inevitable, it’s becoming difficult even for the most dyed-in-the-wool rationalist to go on believing that his political career can be understood in the prosaic terms of politics as usual. For a full decade now, the decadent oligarchy that runs the United States and its European satrapies has been trying to exorcise the orange phantom that haunts their premises and their nightmares. Propaganda, media manipulation, rioting, legal charges — as one attempt after another has failed, the mood of Trump’s opponents has shifted from mockery to irritation, then to rage, and most recently to blind panic.
“Always, after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another shape and grows again.” When J.R.R. Tolkien wrote those words, he didn’t have the theories of his contemporary Carl Jung in mind, but the Swiss psychologist’s insights are relevant here. If your every effort to get rid of an enemy simply makes him stronger, it’s a safe bet that he isn’t merely an annoying intrusion from outside your comfortable world, but rather the inevitable consequence of your own attitudes and actions. What Jung called “the Shadow”, the sum total of everything about yourself you refuse to acknowledge, can be a political reality as well as a psychological one. Thus it’s essential to recognise, along with the hard political and economic realities that have lent strength to Trump’s movement, the inner dimension of myth that gives him his extraordinary grip on the collective imagination of our time.
It says something for the acumen of Trump’s opponents that they almost grasp this. The efforts to equate Trump to Hitler aren’t simply shrill propaganda, meant to tar him by association with the most famous name in the political demonology of our age, though of course that has always been part of it. As Jung pointed out in his prescient 1936 essay “Wotan”, much of Hitler’s power over the collective mind of Europe came boiling up out of the realms of myth and archetype. Rationalists in Hitler’s day were consistently confounded by the way he brushed aside obstacles and followed his trajectory to the bitter end. That the trajectory itself could have been anticipated by a glance at the relevant myths simply adds piquance to the result.
Of course, to speak about myth nowadays is to court thoughtless dismissal. According to one of the popular canards of our time, myths were all well and good for the crude, primitive minds of people before the modern age, but we have outgrown them. We don’t have myths, so the theory goes: we have facts. This is a very comfortable belief to those who can make themselves cling to it. Its only downside is that it’s flatly contradicted by the most basic realities of our collective life.
Human rationality is a thin and recently added veneer, perched unsteadily over the top of a tangled mass of drives, instincts, and inborn reactions that we share with other social primates. With fewer exceptions than we like to think about, our behaviour is governed by the same motives that guide baboons and bonobos; the great difference is that these relatives of ours don’t hide behind layers of self-justifying verbiage. Yet the capacity for conceptual thought that distinguishes our species isn’t just there to generate rationalisations. It also provides one of the handful of useful tools we have for seeing beneath the surface.
The ancient Greek word muthos originally meant “narration” or “story”. Later on it came to mean the stories that matter. This doesn’t require such stories to be factual in the evening-news sense. As the philosopher Sallust wrote, myths are things that never happened but always are. They communicate truths rather than facts. Grasp the underlying myth, as Jung did in making sense of the Hitler phenomenon, and you can get a much clearer sense of where things are headed than you would from the collective chatter of your time.
Nowadays, though, there’s a significant obstacle in the way of such insights — the presence and popularity of pseudomyths. A pseudomyth is a fashionable narrative manufactured by the popular culture of a given era, rather than rising from the deep places of the mind as genuine myths do. One great difference between pseudomyths and the real article is that pseudomyths don’t wear well; a few generations, maybe a century at most, and they land in history’s rubbish tip. Another great difference, which goes far to explain the first one, is that predictions based on pseudomyths are inevitably wrong.
I could parade any number of pseudomyths to address the point that needs making here. Let’s cut to the chase, though, and talk about the pseudomyth that frames too many discussions of Donald Trump. It’s especially easy to do this, because the pseudomyth in question has been given one of its classic forms in the pages of J.K. Rowling’s popular Harry Potter novels.
Consider the basic framing story of the Potterverse. There are certain people, you see, who are special. They have marvellous talents the rest of us don’t have, and so they get to live in a wonderful, magical world from which the rest of us are excluded. Most of them come from families that already belong to that world, but a few are recruited into it from outside. The core of the recruitment process is an educational system from which, again, everyone else is shut out.
“Human rationality is a thin and recently added veneer, perched unsteadily over the top of a tangled mass of drives, instincts, and inborn reactions that we share with other social primates.”
There are people who don’t support this state of affairs, to be sure. Some are outside it and some within. The outsiders who dislike and distrust it are crass Philistine thugs like the Dursleys. It’s the dissidents from inside the system who come in for the real vilification, though. In the eyes of the pseudomyth, they’re evil — knowingly, deliberately evil. They call themselves Death Eaters; for all practical purposes, they might as well don t-shirts saying “GENUINE CERTIFIED BAD PERSON™”. The very thought that any one of them might have a reasonable motive or an honest disagreement with the system as it exists is excluded utterly by the pseudomyth.
All this is to say that the Harry Potter stories echo, with remarkable precision, the self-aggrandising ideology of what we may as well call the laptop class, the overeducated and overprivileged caste that monopolises the levers of managerial power across today’s Western. Members of that caste see themselves as special in the full Potteresque sense, set apart from mere Muggles by their talents and training. Anyone from outside their ranks who dares to question their superiority can count on being treated like a Dursley — if you want to hear genuine hate speech these days, one of the best ways to do it is to get a group of laptop-class inmates talking about working class culture — but their real hatred is directed toward those who challenge their authority from within the system. I trust I don’t have to point out who they identify as Death Eaters — or as Lord Voldemort.
Central to narratives of this type is a habit I call moral masturbation. This far-from-solitary vice involves the repetitive stroking of sensitive moral clichés to produce sensations of shuddering delight at one’s own goodness and virtue. It’s a very common habit these days; Hollywood has done very little else for a decade. It has plenty of expressions in today’s official culture, but the one that matters most for our present purposes is the insistence that one side in any collective controversy can only be motivated by pure deliberate evil, and so every decent person must inevitably fall into the ranks of the other side.
In the real world, that’s never true. No matter how obviously hateful a regime appears to its enemies, it will contrive to convince a good share of its populace that it really is the morally superior option. If it fails in that task, it won’t last a week. In genuine myths, by exactly the same token, the strident moral dualism that fills so many modern pseudomyths is notably absent. The gods who contend with giants or titans or asuras to keep the cosmos from crumbling back into chaos are, by and large, no more moral than the powers against which they do battle. In the legends that reflect mythic thinking down onto the human plane, this is even more obviously true: Achilles defeats Hector, and Arjuna defeats Karna, but neither the Iliad nor the Mahabharata vilifies the champion of the losing side as evil incarnate.
This matters for several reasons, but one in particular matters just now, for a reason already hinted at. Pseudomyths lead to bad predictions and thus to failed strategies. The pseudomyth we’ve been discussing is an excellent example here. In all its endless, dreary iterations, once one side has been identified as the “Bad People”, their defeat follows with mechanical inevitability. No matter how overwhelming the power of the Bad People, no matter how absurdly small the chance that they will be defeated by whatever inadequate force the Good People can muster against them, the Good People are guaranteed total victory. The fantasies that empower moral masturbation, like those associated with the other kind, all move with mechanical predictability toward their inevitable climax.
Both these types of fantasy do very poorly when taken as descriptions of the real world. That, in turn, goes far towards explaining the flailing of Trump’s opponents during the last six months or so. They convinced themselves that events had to copy their preferred pseudomyth, and that Trump and his minions would surely be defeated once and for all. It apparently never occurred to them that the electorate would have its own view on the matter, or that Trump and his circle might have used their four-year exile to figure out how best to target the other side’s weaknesses and win one victory after another.
Donald Trump is not Lord Voldemort, and the pseudomyth his opponents deployed so repetitively and uselessly against him thus deserves a rest, if not a decent burial. The question that needs to be addressed, once pseudomyths are set aside, is what sort of mythic figure he actually is, and thus what we can expect as his myth unfolds.
It must be said here that Donald Trump the man is in no way mythic. He’s an ordinary American oligarch with lowbrow tastes and an unusually robust ego. Like similar figures throughout history, he realised that it was possible to snatch power out of the hands of a senile kleptocracy by championing the concerns of those whose voices had been excluded from the collective conversation for too long. Oswald Spengler, who wrote extensively on this process a century ago, referred to it as Caesarism after one of its most famous practitioners, and the implied comparison is worth noting. Caius Julius Caesar was an ordinary Roman oligarch before he took power and made his family name a potent force in the realm of myth.
The man is not the myth. There’s a world of difference between the hardbitten Romano-British warlord who fought against Saxon invaders, and the noble King Arthur whom we created from folk memories of his career. In the same way, the mythic pattern that swept up a banal American real-estate magnate and reality TV star, and turned him into the vehicle for sweeping political and cultural transformations, has nothing to do with his personality. It comes out of the deep places of the collective psyche of our time.
The United States is still a very young culture, and many of its underlying myths still await the poets and storytellers who will give them lasting form. One pattern, though, stands out clearly in the narrative structure of our national history. Three times already, a decaying and dysfunctional governing class has been swept aside in an era of traumatic convulsions, and in each case a single figure rose through the turbulence to become the figurehead of change. None of these men were especially remarkable human beings, but you won’t learn that from their contemporary or posthumous reputations: all three were vilified in extreme terms during their lives and exalted to a secular sainthood after their deaths. I’m talking, of course, about George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
“The United States is still a very young culture, and many of its underlying myths still await the poets and storytellers who will give them lasting form.”
No doubt mentioning those hallowed names will cause outrage among readers. That simply emphasises the point I’m trying to make. These three men were not pulled out of their historic contexts and raised to mythic status in the collective imagination by any unique virtue of their own. They happened to be at the right place and the right time to spearhead one of the major transformations of American history. After they were safely dead, their heirs scrubbed their reputations clean of any suspicion of mere humanity, and turned them into plaster saints. You have to go back to contemporary media to find out just how many Americans saw Washington as an ambitious scoundrel, mocked Lincoln as an ignorant bumpkin — newspaper cartoonists loved to portray him as a baboon — and savaged Roosevelt as a traitor to his nation and his class.
The thought that some similar process of posthumous sanitising will shape Donald Trump’s legacy will doubtless upset a great many people. Nonetheless, it’s far and away the most likely outcome of the current turmoil. The laptop class — less colourfully, the professional-managerial caste that took power with Roosevelt’s New Deal — has gone the way of its predecessors, sinking into the usual morass of greed and dysfunction, and it’s being shoved aside by a rising entrepreneurial class that has no respect for credentials and no time for moral masturbation. That transformation is well under way, and Trump happens to be its political figurehead.
Trump’s posthumous canonisation, probably including a gold-plated Trump Memorial in Washington DC and another face on the side of Mount Rushmore, is fairly likely at this point. As an old man holding down one of the world’s most stressful jobs, he’s also likely to die in office. This will offer cold consolation to his enemies, who will have to endure the rise of a posthumous cult freed from the often awkward realities of the man’s personality and actions. But it’s a worthwhile reminder that we don’t choose our myths. They choose us, and whether we appreciate the results or not is no concern of theirs.
