Trump's Magic Act Still Dominates GOP

Charles Dickens commences his novel "A Tale of Two Cities," about the French Revolution, vividly:

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."

That was published in 1859, a story about imagined events of 1775. Now we live in an even more best/worst era.

One of the few things that Karl Marx got right was reprising this: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."

Enter farce. As the late French philosopher Guy Debord observed, we live in the Society of the Spectacle.

A Donald Trump superpower? He fully gets this.

Trump lives it.

Or as New York Magazine writer Olivia Nuzzi recently nailed it in her cover story, Chasing Trump: Thirteen weeks on the campaign trail with the Republican also-rans:

"DeSantis is running a campaign and Trump is performing a magic act, and when DeSantis endeavors to cast the same spell, he bungles the delivery. It is as if he has only read about Trump but never seen or heard him, missing entirely the avant-garde quality that makes the whole thing click."

For my left wing readers (both of you!) now rolling their eyes at the concept of Trump's "avant-garde quality" let's note that Kellyanne Conway did not originate the concept of "alternative facts" on "Meet the Press." "Alternative facts" are a postmodernist concept, formerly embraced mostly by the left, hoist on its own petard.

Time for us to brush up on our deconstructionists, neatly summarized by PBS as "the multiplicities and contingencies of human experience necessarily bring knowledge down to the local and specific level, and challenge the tendency to centralize power through the claims of an ultimate truth which must be accepted or obeyed by all."

Trump, who must never, or barely, heard of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault or Debord, has mastered the idiom of the superlative. He thereby dominates the GOP, and perhaps soon again thereby, America.

For those who seek to rival him, and their advisers, mastering Trump's political superpower might begin by contemplating the epigram to Society of the Spectacle, a fragment of Ludwig Feuerbach's preface to the second edition of "The Essence of Christianity:"

"But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence ... illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness."

Approaching the 2024 presidential election we see, as through a glass darkly, a reflection of a cultural revolution that Feuerbach, in the 19^th century, nailed: "Religion has disappeared, and for it has been substituted, even among Protestants, the appearance of religion ..."

Of course, now even the "appearance of religion" is fast dwindling in America. Per Pew Research, in 2022, during my adult lifetime, America has dropped from 90% self-identified Christian (or Catholic) to less than two-thirds and the "unaffiliated" (presumably mostly secular) has risen from 5% to almost one-third of the U.S. population.

This has powerful political implications. I, from the brilliant Walter Truett Anderson's "Reality Isn't What It Used to Be," am one of a tiny handful of archconservative postmodernists, a belief-about-belief system ideologically neutral and perfectly consistent with free markets, peace through strength, and traditional values, the Reagan Trio to which I so happily and bitterly cling.

What we are encountering, now culturally, socially, and politically, is a revolution in America's view of "the nature of being." (Feel free to ignore its official pedantic name: ontology.) What does this creeping agnosticism — about matters both sacred and profane — mean for politicians and politics?

It means that for a candidate to be a good "product/market fit" (as the VCs in Silicon Valley like to couch it), and win, he or she need not study postmodernism. Surely Trump never did!

Presidential candidates do need to recognize that the path to election will require transitioning from "running a campaign" to "performing a magic act." Trump-era politics?

Abracadabra.

Ralph Benko, co-author of "The Capitalist Manifesto" and chairman and co-founder of "The Capitalist League," is the founder of The Prosperity Caucus and is an original Kemp-era member of the Supply-Side revolution that propelled the Dow from 814 to its current heights and world GDP from $11T to $94T. Read Ralph Benko's reports — More Here.