Grotesque Mediocrity
Describing Trump as a "grotesque mediocrity", a line out of Marx's 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, I recently clapped back at the folks using their pedagogic skills to teach us about the "dangers of 'socialism'". His description of the historical events and conditions in France that led to the rise of Bonapartism - a state of political crisis where a strong man takes over when society is seemingly falling apart and who works to "return the state to its former glory" by engaging in vainglorious and ostentatious public works, regaling military might, stupid wars and absolutism - are analogous.
Marx's explanation of materialism notes that "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please. They do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living."
Historical events and conditions allowed for the usurpation of power by Napoleon Bonaparte, and then consequently by Napoleon III's coup of 1851, conditions that had been fulminating for more than eighty years: revolution, 1848; Charles X's flight, 1830; the charter of 1814; Napoleon I, 1804; French Revolution, the Thermidorian Reaction, the terror, etc.
In Brumaire, Marx expands Hegel's historical Darwinism by concluding with his famous line that in allowing for the assumption of power by the brutal and callous Napoleon Bonaparte to be followed by the feckless Napoleon the Third, history had repeated itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Trump embodies both.
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