Donald Trump: false prophet

The epic disaster that followed Donald  Trump ’s air assault on Iran was the expression of two extreme likelihoods. One concerned the assault itself, which almost everyone knew would empower the Iranians by handing them pretext for shutting the Strait of Hormuz — which is why prior administrations, however much they hated the mullahs, didn’t do it. The second concerned  Trump , whose grandiosity and lack of judgment more or less preordained that he would eventually do something not just monumentally corrupt but practically and irreversibly disastrous.

But, using certain utopian mental adjustments,  Trump ’s elite supporters discounted or dismissed this latter likelihood. By utopian I don’t mean their understanding of  Trump  himself was idealistic or unrealistic. In fact, it was often the opposite. Many of  Trump ’s supporters openly conceded that his character was uniquely bad. Yes, they said,  Trump ’s an unsavoury guy by the ethical standards we uphold in regular life, but politics is not regular life, and, more important, the present moment isn’t regular politics. They believed, circa 2016 and again circa 2020 and 2024, that the hegemony enjoyed and enforced by authoritarian progressives both inside and outside government had grown so total and entrenched, and was so perverse in the beliefs it propounded and protected, that conservatives had to abandon politics as usual in favour of something more transgressive and outrageous.

This is where the utopianism comes in. But, before I go into the specific utopian characteristics of pro- Trump thinking, I want to back up and note the structural similarities between such thinking and more familiar forms of utopian political theory and practice that reach us from the political Left.

The progressive “hegemony” I referred to above has clear parallels with capitalist society as it appears in Left-wing theorising. This thinking grew from Marx’s own “critique of ideology”, the view that people, in effect, could not see and think and govern beyond the stage of economic history in which they found themselves. The critique of ideology came to eclipse economic analysis and dominate the most influential Marxist writing in mid-20th century Europe and America, as capitalism began to look more protean and resilient than Marx had predicted. Needing to account for this resilience, Marxists such as Frankfurt School luminaries Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse began to dwell on the power of capitalism to reproduce itself at the level of ideology, the symbolic and spiritual realm of society and culture in which political imagination and moral belief are formed. In this theorising — which, thanks to some vigorous sloganeers, we now know as “Cultural Marxism” — everything from popular culture to advertising to psychotherapy works to palliate political discontent, to tease up and give benign release to revolutionary energies, to teach that capitalism is everything and the only thing people might hope for.

Thus did these social and cultural forces within capitalism evolve and spread into a hermetic system of political consciousness often called the “totality” or the “social totality” in Leftist theory. For these high theorists, theorising was pretty much all there was left. With the partial exception of Marcuse, they’d lost faith in revolution, partly because it seemed impossible, given the adaptive powers of the capitalist totality, and partly because they’d seen how real revolutions ended up. It was much easier for Marx, working not that long after Hegel and before any “Marxist” revolutions had happened, to write as if some force of History would guide the transition from revolutionary smashing and the dictatorship of the proletariat to an ideal society where the state itself has withered away. Writing in the Forties and Fifties, Adorno could have no such assurance.

The most prominent updating of this tradition of largely academic theorising about the “social totality” is Empire , the 1999 book by American professor Michael Hardt and Italian philosopher and ex-convict Antonio Negri. Empire was something of a surprise hit when it came out, despite its dense academic prose, because its update of the post-Marxist portrait of the social totality gave it a global scale, and everyone was on about “globalisation” at the time. According to Hardt and Negri, the increasingly globalised economy both relied on and supported its own totality, which they called “Empire” — a decentralised and “deterritorialised” system of trading markets, financial circuitry and undemocratic institutions working on behalf of capital, secured by networks of coercive geopolitical power emanating from the Pentagon. What made Empire nearly impossible to oppose is that it was both everywhere and nowhere in particular.

Empire and its illustrious predecessors, then, recast the political challenges facing radical politics so that they look more or less insurmountable. The social totality of mid-ce…