People aware of current geopolitical happenings will agree: History is being made in our time. Now it’s often said that history repeats itself. But I prefer the derivation history rhymes with itself because it better describes the reality I see unfolding in the world. It’s a reality premised on a pattern, certainly, but one just obscure enough to elude the less attentive among us. A pattern that evolves, it progresses, it doesn’t repeat except to return to a refrain, which itself develops; like a song instead of a mantra. This reality is both signal in the noise and changeless flux. It is the oceanic swell of events we all are riding.
The U.S. president, he’s a little wave borne aloft on that swell, but that’s more than most of us, just drops in a vast sea. Whether he reflects on it or not, the president is an old man living in the shadow of his own mortality, and he’s being driven on by that inevitability. The situation is not unique in-and-of-itself, since awareness of life’s finitude is something every individual must reckon with, often by utilizing one form of metaphysical belief or another. The president, however, has agency at a scale other humans can’t access, and his reckoning has taken on proportions suited to his station, but also his temperament, which is more alike to an entertainer than a politician, never mind a dealmaker; he plays the part of a dealmaker - just like old Nero, who would’ve preferred to be a thespian instead of emperor. Less a king; more a kingpin. Or a diva.
It tracks that the president’s end-of-life drama would be played out on a global stage, since he’s been a celebrity in America for decades. And it makes sense that he would attempt to stamp his singular surname on this period in world history, like he might do on a tower or a towel, as a fat fuck-you to the Grim Reaper. But it’s the persistence of one particular trans-historic fact that remains supremely relevant to the propagation of his legacy: The most consequential figures - no matter the era, the society, or arena of human endeavour - overturn the established order of things to set themselves at the head of new regime.
Contextually, this is about transforming government to achieve a populist apotheosis - or to use the president’s idiom, a golden age - in America. But because of the president’s characteristic eccentricities, this transformative power has been expressed as a purge of the federal bureaucracy, estrangement from former geopolitical allies, and a global [trade] war - all in the name of returning America to an idealized past that never existed. Like the president himself, who complains still - even though he is the most powerful person in the world - that he is a victim of oh-so-many forces arrayed against him, so too is America - the most powerful nation in the world - a victim of global economic collusion between hostile nation-states. And as the president’s and the country’s persecution become willfully conflated, witness how history can be moved by a kind of creative ressentiment, or more plainly, by the enacting of deep-seated revengefulness in the here-and-now.
Of course, ressentiment - creative or otherwise - is endemic in this era and shapes the attitudes of many people, whatever political, religious, cultural or economic orientation they may espouse. These days, it can seem like everybody is a victim. Like everybody is being persecuted. Like everybody suffers to an extent others cannot truly comprehend. Like everybody is to blame. The president is the agent and the patron of this ressentiment, and of chaos. Both have profited him greatly.
America, in particular, is vulnerable to a congenital form of ressentiment since the country was founded in large part by individuals who sought freedom from the oppression they experienced in Europe. These founders, too, were persecuted, and arrived in their new homeland nursing a nascent yet virulent ressentiment that would eventually metastasize into the national concept of Manifest Destiny. Consider it: A group of exiles - self-imposed and otherwise - comprised of mercenaries, malcontents, criminals and religious extremists; these people become ancestors to the most powerful nation-state in history of the world. Hasn’t the stage then been set for the realization of a revenge fantasy unlike any other? North America’s indigenous peoples were the first to experience en masse the consequences of this lethal European (or if you like, old world) pathology, the colonizers’ marshalling of ressentiment in the guise of enlightenment values towards genocidal ends. African slaves experienced it soon after; and the consequences of these encounters would echo down through the centuries, spawning their own ressentiment in due time.
America nursed this congenital ressentiment with the purposeful intent that all chosen exceptional nations share; with such intent, in fact, that when the world-at-large was threatened by the Axis powers, scientists working under the auspices of Washington created the device with which humanity could end itself. This, truly, was the apex of American power. The A-bomb unmasked the nation’s congenital ressentiment, exposing all humanity to the gravest, most consequential nihilism that still to this day threatens the life of every person on the planet. All that comes afterwards: nuclear proliferation, the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, the U.N., humanitarian interventions, scientific and technological breakthroughs, the global economy; also rock ‘n’ roll, hip hop, Hollywood; even the Internet are a diminishment after that supreme act of ressentiment - of defiance - that ended World War II.
Ressentiment and its pathological effect have become increasingly diffuse in the 21st century, both as cause and consequence of evolving social norms and discredited institutional authorities. This can be said of the global community in our time as a whole, but it’s especially relevant in America - perhaps the country in which the world sees itself reflected most fully. In place of these authorities, individuals like the president become lightning rods for mass psychic energy; focal points - nexus - for collective archetypal transference, projection, and possibly even possession. The normal rules don’t seem to apply to these individuals; or at least the individuals succeed in persuading others of their infallibility. Their powerful allure, a charisma which imbues them with seemingly supernatural appeal, allows them to commit transgressive and anti-social acts with little or no consequence, for which they are lauded by believers and condemned by the opposition. It strains credulity to call this uncanny affect magic, but there’s something more at work than slight-or-hand, or an outsized grift. But also: It IS an outsized grift...
Just over 100 days have passed since the president took office, and during that time, the blitzkrieg of orders, hirings, firings, attacks, arrests, controversies - and, of course, tariffs - have been unprecedented and relentless. This is as POTUS intended. It’s not hard to imagine America a year, two years, three years from now. when a opportune national crisis emerges from the slurry of disinformation and propaganda created by this administration, precipitating the foreshadowed overturning of presidential two-term limits. And if, in a scenario like this, he’s denied? The last time the president lost an election, a mob stormed the Capitol at his behest. How far would he be willing to go to stay president indefinitely? I have the uncomfortable feeling the answer to that question won’t be long in coming. Why? It rhymes with a history that has come before.
