10. Caesar and Trump
or, The Shape of Eldritch Things to Come
“All of them were Palmer Eldritch. Men and women alike: artificial arm, stainless steel teeth … the gaunt, hollowed-out gray face with Jensen eyes.”
– Philip K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Here, there, everywhere: Donald Trump. The Republican Party might as well be called the Trump Party, for it has come to serve him in all things. But the Democratic Party measures itself by him too: for it has effectively become the not-Trump Party.
In fact, one might ask whether the Republicans and Democrats are actually political parties at all, or if they are simply factions. Factions, that is, of a single party, which has been described elsewhere as the Property Party or Uniparty – but would perhaps best be called the Elite Party, since its primary purpose, over and above all others, is to serve elite interests. In this Elite Party there appears to be considerable agreement between the leaders of its two factions concerning issues that involve great amounts of money or power: financialization of the economy, maintenance of military dominance, deregulation in favor of privatization, limitation of social programs, and control of public discourse, all of which are designed to favor the collective aims of the elite, particularly the accumulation of great wealth by their upper ranks. This is confirmed by the continuity seen between Republican and Democratic administrations, for example concerning Israel and Gaza and foreign policy in general, the privatization of Medicare under programs of “Medicare Advantage”, support for “financial innovation” by “cryptocurrencies”, and other issues of finance and state force. The major differences that do exist between the factions typically concern so-called “social issues”, such as abortion, gun control, diversity, religious expression, gender identity, and so on – none of which involve really large quantities of money or power. One faction simply takes a given side of a social issue, and the other takes the opposing side, but the wealth and position of elites as a whole are not greatly affected by whatever might develop.
Thus the Republican faction appeals to the streak of peasant conservatism in the working class with its position on social issues, while the Democratic faction addresses the more liberal inclinations often seen in the highly educated. Of course, neither faction seeks to advance the material condition of the people as a whole (though they sometimes pretend to). At one time the Democrats often did champion the improvement of conditions for the common people, but those days are long gone (as witness the unyielding opposition of the Democratic leadership to the proposal of “Medicare for All”). However, this has led to a real problem for the Democratic faction, for the majority of voters is of the working class – and while the Republicans offer them its stance on social issues, the Democrats now offer little or nothing, other than continuation of a declining status quo. Nothing, that is, except “not-Trump”. Indeed, during the last three presidential elections, the leading policy position taken by the Democratic candidates seems to have been “I am not Trump”.
And so Donald Trump, with his showmanship, crude forcefulness, and illusory populism, has come to completely dominate the political landscape of the United States, both for and against. In the novel by Philip K. Dick quoted above, Palmer Eldritch came to be everywhere, his three stigmata seen among everyone – the mechanical arm, the steel teeth, the bionic eyes. So too, now, the stigmata of Donald Trump: the orange hair, the MAGA hat, the stream of endless noise which might or might not mean anything.
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How has all this happened? How has the phenomenon of Donald Trump come about? Only a few decades ago it would have been unimaginable; his candidacy would have been seen as a farce, its result would have been insignificant. Something very important would seem to have changed, and a clue to the nature of this change can be seen in the work of Peter Turchin, Jack Goldstone, and their colleagues (as described at some length in the preceding essay).
Turchin’s thesis, presented in his books Ages of Discord and End Times, is that the stage was set for political turmoil in the United States according to three basic principles: labor oversupply, elite overproduction, and the resulting instability of society. Labor oversupply is a condition in which the supply of labor has outstripped demand, due to factors such as immigration, deindustrialization, and so on – in fact, the portion of immigrants in the American population is at an historically high level, matching that seen during the Gilded Age, while entire industries have been exported abroad. The result of this oversupply is a falling share of wages for workers as a portion of economic production. Of course, the other side of the coin is that elites are getting a greater share of economic production, largely as profits, rents, and asset appreciation, which is a powerful draw for others to attempt to enter their ranks and thus increase their number (partly by means of higher education). For example, between 1983 and 2019 households with a net worth above 10 million dollars (in constant 1995 dollars) increased more than ten times. However, such growth in the number of elites eventually results in elite overproduction – more of them must compete for the same resources, causing average elite incomes to actually begin falling (while top elite incomes may continue to skyrocket). Declining prospects for university graduates, accompanied by crushing levels of student debt, constitute one product of this trend.
The result of labor oversupply and elite overproduction is increasing instability in society. Rising inequality and vanishing hopes for a better future breed resentment and unrest among the masses, who may seek some sort of redress through political extremism. An uprising among them will have little chance of success as long as elites remain united; however, elites will tend to become disunited as a result of overproduction in their number, the losers in competition between them being transformed into disaffected “counter-elites”, in Turchin’s terminology. Such counter-elites, in an increasingly desperate struggle for success, will naturally tend to put their own interests first, above those of the nation as a whole, and to adopt dishonest tactics or militant ideologies to order to advance or justify themselves. The end result of all this is the rising tide of polarization and savagery seen among politicians, important individuals, and those whose investment in the American Dream is simply failing – as they all seek to claw out a winning place for themselves in a zero-sum game. To quote an immortal line from Glengarry Glen Ross: “… first prize is a Cadillac El Dorado … Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired.”
And so the ground has been prepared for a major political upheaval in the United States, a symptom of which has been the ascent of Donald Trump, who has had the instinctive cunning and adroitness to exploit the new situation. (In fact, in Turchin’s End Times, the phenomenon of Trump is referred to by name.) But how will this upheaval come to express itself? What will be the ultimate result?
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A further clue to what the future holds can be gained from an entirely different source: namely, the work of Oswald Spengler (again, as treated in some detail in an earlier essay). His methods were radically unlike those of Turchin and company, but had a power of historical explanation in their own right. Thus Spengler predicted the rise of a hegemonic power within the West (which turned out to be the United States, as has been made all too blatantly clear by Trump’s foreign policy), and the death of creativity in Great Art during the transformation of Kultur into Zivilisation (which appears to have commenced in the mid-twentieth century and has since been completed). Another prediction made by Spengler has not, as yet, been completely fulfilled – but concerns upheaval in the West, and the phenomenon of Trump. Namely, what he called the advent of Caesarism.
As Spengler put it in The Decline of the West:
“By the term ‘Caesarism’ I mean that kind of government which, irrespective of any constitutional formulation that it may have, is in its inward self a return to thorough formlessness. It does not matter that Augustus in Rome, and Huang Ti in China, Amasis in Egypt, and Alp Arslan in Baghdad disguised their position under antique forms. The spirit of these forms was dead, and so all institutions, however carefully maintained, were thenceforth destitute of all meaning and weight. Real importance centered in the wholly personal power exercised by the Caesar, or by anybody else capable of exercising it in his place.
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“Once the Imperial Age has arrived, there are no more political problems. People manage with the situation as it is and the powers that be. In the period of the Contending States, torrents of blood had reddened the pavements of all world-cities, so that the great truths of Democracy might be turned into actualities, and for the winning of rights without which life seemed not worth the living. Now these rights are won, but the grandchildren cannot be moved, even by punishment, to make use of them. A hundred years more and even the historians will no longer understand the old controversies.”
Though the work of Turchin and his colleagues has predicted an upheaval of some kind in the United States, it seems doubtful that this will take the form of a civil war or violent revolution. There is currently no utopian ideology of any legitimacy to ignite unrest into an incandescent eruption, as was the case with the Bolshevik Revolution (its rationale actually being discredited by the fall of the Soviet Union). Then too, no issue exists which is comparable to the staggering economic and political implications of the institution of slavery, sectional conflict over which became the primary cause of the American Civil War. Further, the national government of the United States is vastly more powerful now than it was during the antebellum period, and has considerable ability to suppress any violent uprising. So long as the state can maintain at least a minimal level of legitimacy, this will continue to be the case. Therefore, when a final upheaval comes to the political system, it will be of great importance, but likely will be more profoundly pragmatic than violent – such as the advent of an American Caesar, according to the prediction of Spengler.
In actual fact, a prototype of something resembling Caesarism has been already heralded by the second coming of Donald Trump. Under the guise of self-declared “emergencies”, he has issued arbitrary and peremptory decrees concerning the introduction of huge tariffs, deportations without due process, deployment of the National Guard into cities, attacks on universities under sham charges of “anti-semitism”, and creation of a “Department of Government Efficiency” with no authority from Congress, while also calling for the suppression of so-called “hate speech” (that is, free speech he and his followers do not like), “wrongthink” (e.g. anti-capitalism = terrorism), and “antifa” (naturally, fascism aims to destroy anti-fascism). But more importantly, in all these things, little or nothing has been done to stop him. By definition, he is of course permitted anything by the “Trump Party” of Republicans, but even the “not-Trump Party” of Democrats has done practically nothing to rein him in. (In fact, it could also be pointed out that Trump has ordered military interventions and “kill missions” abroad at whim, but this is by no means a novel development, as Congress has steadily surrendered its authority in this regard since the end of the Second World War, and of course Obama implemented his own version of drone warfare…)
What the phenomenon of Donald Trump actually signifies, seen in the harsh light of reality, is a general failure of the political systems of the West. The last three elections for the leader of the hegemon of the West, the President of the United States, have all yielded up only an aging individual of deteriorating mental, executive, and/or moral competence – and such prospective aspirants for the office as currently exist do not seem to hold much more promise. Congress, for its own part, cannot even begin to make up the deficit, for it lacks members of the stature of Sam Rayburn or J. William Fulbright (not to mention Henry Clay or Daniel Webster). Thus the political system of the United States has lately been failing to provide even minimally adequate leadership, and the subordinate realm of Europe has, on the whole, fared scarcely any better, while a surging China and a resurgent Russia present results of a different order. This suggests the possibility of a turn to an alternative political system, one of a more coherent, effective, and (by implication) authoritarian nature, as already insinuated by certain voices, who began to question the suitability of democracy after the first coming of Trump. The current lack of effective action by the Democrats to oppose Trump has been ascribed to a strategy of letting him blow up, and then picking up the pieces – but another motive may well exist, that of embracing a new order of things, in which the Democratic faction of elites will eventually be able to play its own part. Therefore the identity of a prospective Caesar may be in question, but the principle of Caesarism has been accepted.
However, to be clear, Trump himself is not the new Caesar. He lacks both the statesmanship and subtlety for such a part. Julius Caesar was an adept military commander and leader of men, while Augustus supplemented a skillful campaign for ultimate power with a shrewd management of perceptions of that campaign, obscuring his true position under the ambiguous title of “Princeps” (First One), while ensuring that the institutions of the Republic were preserved in outward form (only). What Trump does constitute is a precedent, which establishes much broader boundaries for the exercise of arbitrary personal authority, boundaries which can be widened even further in the future, perhaps in response to a true emergency of great magnitude. When a new Caesar does appear, it is possible that he will be generally hailed as a benefactor or even savior of the nation, governing “by necessity” of decree in the absence of other leadership, even as the external (but ineffectual) structures of Congress, the judiciary, and the Constitution are maintained. His time will have come, just as the time ultimately came for the elevation of Octavian to Augustus.
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The foregoing represents an attempted synthesis of the historical dynamics (or “cliodynamics”) methods of Turchin and Goldstone with the very different approach to history of Oswald Spengler. Given the disparity in the disciplines involved, perhaps some explanation is in order.
The methods of historical dynamics can be described as scientific, objective, quantitative, and rational. Whereas the work of Spengler was above all artistic, subjective, qualitative, and intuitive – a complete opposite in every regard. How is it possible, then, for the two to be combined in any useful way? The answer lies in the different domains to which each can be suitably applied.
The domain of historical dynamics is that which can be numerically measured: populations, prices, economic production, land areas, and so on. Further, certain factors can be measured by proxies, such as elite overproduction by university enrollment and cases of litigation. However, other important factors influencing history would not appear to be amenable to numerical measurement, even by proxy. Such would be the field of art, so fundamentally important to Spengler and his concepts of a creative Kultur and a creatively sterile Zivilisation. What, exactly, constitutes high or great art, and the status of creativity in it? These matters would appear to be entirely subjective – and thus in the domain of Spengler. So also would be what Spengler called the “soul” of a high culture, which might also be termed (in a less metaphysical way) its “worldview”, or aggregate of the worldviews of its individual members. Thus the soul or worldview of the Western high culture seeks “limitlessness”, according to Spengler – which can certainly be seen in its quest for unlimited growth, and its ventures into the infinity of outer space – while the attention of the Classical culture was fixed on an eternal present, and the worldview of ancient Egypt saw the present as simply a threshold between eternities of past and future. Even the existence of high cultures themselves falls within the domain of Spengler, for historical dynamics deals with the rise and fall and secular cycles of individual nations and empires, while for Spengler the various nations of Western Europe, and those founded in its colonies, were all part of a single culture called the West, sharing important elements of a given worldview; a high culture that was born in the tenth century, and has continued until today (though lately as Zivilisation rather than Kultur).
In other words, it might be said that the work of Turchin and Goldstone deals with the external world, while Spengler concentrated on the internal world of the mind, both domains having their importance in an understanding of history. It might also be mentioned that while Spengler developed his view of history through analogy with the past, having little use for any underlying mechanics of causation (so important to scientific theory), a basic mechanism for the rise of a hegemonic Caesarism can nevertheless be proposed: namely, that power always seeks hegemony, sooner or later, since any other source of power constitutes a potential threat, and hence must be absorbed, subordinated, or destroyed. (Again, this idea was treated in an earlier essay on power, under the seventh dictate described in it.) Thus power eventually consolidates in a high culture, as was seen in the rise of Rome as the hegemon of the Classical world, and the United States as the hegemonic power of the West; and then, within the hegemony of the state, ultimate power finally comes to consolidate in the hegemony of an individual: the rule of a Caesar.
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Sources
Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History, by Peter Turchin, published in 2016. Examines history with mathematical modeling, correlated with empirical observation; and applies to the United States, in particular, a demographic structural analysis updated for a modern industrial society.
End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, by Peter Turchin, published in 2023. A work largely directed at a general audience that warns of the increasing danger of social and political disaffection.
The Decline of the West: Sketch of a Morphology of World History, by Oswald Spengler; Volume One: Form and Actuality originally published 1918, revised edition 1923; Volume Two: Perspectives of World-History published 1922; English translation and notes by Charles Francis Atkinson, Volume One published 1926, Volume Two 1928.
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A Personal Afterword
It should be made clear that the prediction of the coming of Caesarism, as presented above, in no way endorses its desirability. In fact, in my personal view, it would (or will) mark a calamitous degeneration in the nature of our world.
The first presidential campaign in the United States that I remember is that of 1960, and the contrast between the political situation of the years that immediately followed it, with the situation of today, is staggering. The monumental threat of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X, the burning of inner cities in huge race riots in Watts, Detroit, Newark, Washington, Baltimore, and Chicago, and to top it all off, the ongoing agony of the war in Vietnam – the sum of all these dire events dwarfs the immediate crises experienced today; yet the nation weathered them, with its institutions and social fabric perhaps altering, but nevertheless remaining intact. The exercise of arbitrary, aberrant, and even vindictive presidential power that has recently been seen was formerly unthinkable, and more to the point, if it had actually occurred, would immediately have met with resistance that would have ended it. Of course, power always seeks more power, and there has been a steady encroachment by executive authority since the Second World War, often in clandestine ways. But now that encroachment has not only accelerated, it is in the open, even celebrated, with little being done to oppose it. The difference between today and the 1960s is that structural problems of inequality and the disaffection of elites have greatly worsened, accompanied by a loss of social solidarity, even though the immediate crises currently being experienced may not be as acute.
So if it is predicted that Caesarism is coming, it is because the present state of affairs suggests it, and history confirms it. The trajectory is not favorable, but it is certainly clear.