Politics is expressed in ideologies based on a territorial basis, but when an ideology moves away from a geographical location to become a universal and generalized ideology that transcends national borders, it becomes “messianic” and its leaders become “idols” of a new religious worldview. Consider the Argentine physician, communist Marxist-Leninist revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara as a typical example of this process.
The cultural shift from one national identity to another, based on a state of consciousness (in fact even on a seizure-alteration of consciousness by a fanatical and irrational belief) expresses the transition from politics to the Post-Politics. Such a Movement also signifies the shift of individual identity from territorially defined nation-states to mental politics. The “Islamic State”, “Al Qaeda” and “Boko Haram” (or “Wilayat Gharb Ifriqiya” – “West African Province”) are contemporary examples.
The “Islamic State of Syria and the Levant”, “Al Qaeda” and “Boko Haram” are contemporary forms of negative regional “Planetization” (i.e. the construction of a unique type of sustainable human society and at the same time symbiosis between humanity and the Earth), formations that have masterfully used the Internet to attract followers. Of course, apart from the religious-political Islamic movements, other forms of transnational activity, such as science, are also inherently intellectually political. In the near and medium-long term, new forms of collective organization will undoubtedly emerge as new global institutions emerge to confront the crisis of declining industrial civilization and the potential for climate collapse.
Nations will increasingly become like organelles within a cell. Our current planetary system of communications satellites supporting our new social media has replaced what in the past were the printed media and the railways for the dissemination of modernity. We must therefore continue to explore and study the evolving new world.
But what role will the very recent winner of the American elections, President Donald Trump, have in this global event? When the citizen of a country, in this case, the USA, experiences a dysphoric reality, when he feels threatened from all sides, when he is systematically deprived of all hope and perspective, realizing at the same time that his well-intentioned tolerance is perceived by those in power as acceptance of their lies or inability to react in any way against the deceitful organized ethnodestructive minorities, then he is rightfully and reasonably led to a choice of a Political Leader capable of acting as a factor in cleansing and restoring things to healthy traditional bases. Then the average citizen emphatically gives his unyielding response. This is what the vast majority of Americans did and brought Donald Trump back to the Presidency.
Populist leaders generally actively present themselves as the voices of the people and appeal to the feeling of resentment and envy for the rich. Here, reviewing the political history of the United States, we automatically think of the largely unknown in Europe, American “left-wing Democrat”, ultra-patriot and populist senator Huey Pierce Long, the youngest, great enemy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt – FDR and enemy of the deep plutocracy state, who was accused of being a “fascist” and assassinated. Donald Trump represents a new kind of cultural emergence. He is a billionaire based in New York, but at the same time he presents himself as the unpretentious ordinary man of the vast American hinterland who “falls in love” with simple solutions. Mexicans, Muslims and sexually active women have sometimes become his scapegoats or even objects of jokes and ridicule.
Trump represents the new American “cultural fascination” with male victorious athletes, which has been created for at least two decades by television as a compensation for the progressive dissolution of natural and social standards: With the serial and repeated false and fraudulent promise of equality and justice, as well as with the constant invocation of the necessary progressivity and modernization, we have reached points of absolute ridiculousness and disgust. We saw at the Olympic Games (the world’s largest sporting event), men participating in… women’s sports, we saw the furious rejection of the institution of the family and the ridiculous contempt for polygamy.
We saw the horrific denial of gender by misguided minors, we saw same-sex marriages and childbearing, we even saw “neutral” toilets for “non-men – non-women” (? !). We saw the well-organized, consolidated suppression, intimidation and subjugation with direct or verbal violence (with the standardized expressions of social pseudo-revolutionaries: liar, homophobic, paid, racist, fascist), so that no opposing point of view could exist. Disparaging and invalidating practices were sanctified and systematized at the level of social slander for any carrier of a different perspective and point of view, with intimidation by the well-paid establishment factions and the variously named mob of woke awakening. Finally, we witnessed the multifaceted hatred of the alleged victims of prejudice and discrimination, hatred mixed with demands for rights and additional privileges, especially for the immediate redress of falsely and unjustly alleged racist inequalities.
Unfortunately, in the former world power USA, in the “land of the brave”, modern politics is just another “Super Bowl”, that is, the most important and popular annual game of American football, which is held between “a – dominant” males. The Super Bowl is first in television ratings every year in the USA and second behind the UEFA Champions League final in annual sporting events worldwide.
Certainly, television (especially American television) is a medium that benefits from aggressive advertising, from “sound bites” (“sound bites” – short recorded statements or slogans, shown on television, especially in conjunction with news reports) and from polarization in voice games, instead of solitary reading and honest reflection.
Within this experiential social context, Donald Trump is what the average self-respecting white working-class American would like to be (the infamous “Joe Six Pack”). The neo-rich aesthetic of a Las Vegas high roller’s suite of residence is reproduced in full in the online photos of Trump’s penthouse apartment. That is, it has exactly the style, the style of residence that a “Joe Six Pack” who has been deprived and miserable for many years would choose… if he won the “Powerball” lottery (the very lucrative American lottery game offered in 45 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands!).
In the peculiar … cohabitation of corporate elites and mass aesthetic vulgarity, the peculiar stamp of Trumpian Republicanism is sufficiently reminiscent of the union of the companies I.G. Farben (I. G. Farbenindustrie AG) and Siemens with the “nationalized” popular masses of the National Socialists in Germany of the 1930s. Then we had the reasonable and just dissatisfaction of the German Nationalists with the blatantly anti-German Treaty of Versailles, and now we have the dissatisfaction of the American Nationalists with the new multicultural America, in which the marginalized and angry white men and women of the working class feel like … aliens in their own country. When Trump says “Make America Great Again,” his supporters understand that the slogan is a coded subliminal rendition of “Make America White Again.”
Ms. Harris, apart from her communication skills, is completely devoid of any real social appeal, as was repeatedly demonstrated by her various rallies and speeches during the campaign. The just-concluded elections are an excellent example of “cultural recovery and restoration” according to the great Canadian philosopher and media theorist Herbert Marshall McLuhan 1 (Herbert Marshall McLuhan, 1911-1980). “Cultural recovery and restoration” of the 1930s, on the one hand with the repetition of the parasocialism of FDR’s “New Deal” (a series of economic measures enacted in the USA, between 1933 and 1938, through presidential decrees and laws passed during his presidency, in response to the homicidal “Great Depression” of 1929) by Harris’ “Democrats” and on the other hand with the repetition of Mussolini’s populist, pro-people and patriotic nationalism by Donald Trump.
McLuhan emphatically said: “The medium is the message!” In this regard, we must remember that in the 1930s, the “hot medium” radio transformed bourgeois politicians such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt-FDR and Winston Churchill into political saviors of their peoples and cultural protectors of their countries, while television transformed the 1960 presidential election with the 4 televised “duels” between the winner John Kennedy and his televised opponent Richard Nixon. Thus, social media and the Internet transformed these 2024 elections with their relentless information campaigns, despite being under regime siege.
The Republican Party came to Donald Trump’s side because it had no coherent intellectual philosophy of governance before him. It simply had a bunch of denials of other people’s ideas, mixed with corporate-style management. But you can’t run a complex, multicultural, nuclear-armed nation-state simply with the right-wing ingrained sense and belief that irresponsible, authoritarian government is bad. So the less evidence we have of that government, the better off we will be. Thus, the Republican Party, (which is opposed to the philosophies of libertarian liberal governance, climate science and evolution in particular, but also science in general), was left unprotected without any spiritual immunity, so that the powerful ideological “contamination” of nativism and the frenzied anger of white men took over completely.
Nativist movements emerge in political life when the “labyrinth” of diverse political and social corridors and paths in a culture becomes unbearably confusing and incoherent. This confusion and incoherence often occurs when a culture shifts from one worldview to another. The “Ghost Land” (“Nanishana”) of the Paiute Indians in the United States (1890) and the “Boxer Rebellion” in China (1899-1901) are classic examples. In successful cultures, intellectuals emerge who help the worldview transition, articulating the new successor worldview. This happened in Europe with the Renaissance and its shift in worldviews from religious medievalism to scientific modernity, from hierarchical kingdoms to bourgeois nation-states.
But even in the case of Europe with the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment, the bloody Thirty Years’ War occurred, and England had to go through a civil war with Cromwell against the Crown in order to create a parliamentary democracy. But England and its American colonies continued to “think,” first with Locke and then with Jefferson. However, even after the American, French, and Irish revolutions, the revolution was followed by bloody civil war.
With the new polarization of the United States between Harris’ multicultural pseudo-social democracy and Trump’s white nativism, the US has entered a dangerous zone of political polarization, which depending on the success or failure of the Trump administration could lead to an undeclared civil war. The US Ocean Coasts express a “transplanetary” multiracial and multicultural consciousness, but the Interior [from Montana to Texas, the Midwest (Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin), as well as the Deep South (Alabama, Virginia, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, North Carolina, Texas, and Florida)] expresses nationalist values.
It is ironic, both fortunate and unfortunate, that this American nativism has found its leader in a determined New York billionaire, an active and cheerful old man, who fortunately shows no signs of senile insanity like his predecessor, Joe Biden. Trump’s politically new nativist movement has emerged powerfully because there is indeed a major problem with institutional multiculturalism, which works against White Protestant America and more generally against White America.
It is time for America to think seriously and thoroughly, to think about science, climate change, illegal and legal immigration, and the operational ideas required to govern a complex multicultural, technological nation-state living within a global economy.
The Greek “polis” emerged in the Assembly of wise old men and capable young men, who could defend Athens with its democratic hoplite formations against the attacks of the Persian Empire. War was no longer the individual heroic display of martial virtue by a warrior in his Homeric “excellence,” but a collective participatory effort of comrades in the “line” of the phalanx.
The Persian Empire was a system of transnational communication, strongly held together by good roads and fast horses with mounted messengers and regular military outposts. An empire, unlike the Greek democratic city, was the territory of vassals. Its regionally concentrated populations were subjects, not citizens. From the dawn of civilizations in ancient Mesopotamia, India, and China, empires had an ethnic and religious binary system of identity of “us” and “them.” Even to this day, the Han Chinese maintain a system of exclusion of “foreign devils” and uphold their identity system, using the Communist Party as a priesthood.
In contrast, the Roman Empire introduced the Hellenistic idea of the citizen, and Saint Paul-Saul, a Syrian, was proud to be a Roman citizen, and used his citizenship as a means to convert a local Palestinian prophetic movement into a universal religion. Classical Rome attempted to use its seductive but unwieldy system of polytheism as a glue for imperial identity, but the attempt was unsuccessful, so Persian Manichaeism, Mithraism, Gnosticism, and Christianity remained attractive alternatives. First with the emperor Constantine and then with Justinian, Christianity proved a simpler and more effective way to hold an empire together. Even after the final collapse of the Roman Empire in 476 AD, Christianity survived and flourished during the Dark Ages, and Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the Pope in 800 AD.
What is happening today is that these two ancient and archetypal forms of empire have returned and are competing for dominance. The so-called “American Empire” has tried to absorb cultures into its multicultural identity. With the Marshall Plan and the post-war Bretton Woods American dollar economy, it first absorbed the devastated Western Europe. Now it is trying to show that Islamic Civilization can also become… American. The Muslim community, the “Ummah” and the barrels of oil can coexist peacefully within a new expanded “we”.
This multicultural America is what Trump wants to eliminate with his nativist movement to return to White Protestant America. In this nativist vision, if immigrants come to America, they should probably … wear blue jeans and American college sweatshirts, speaking rudimentary English. Paradoxically, Trump’s vision is identical to the Han vision of empire and identity, with which China is trying to block the invasions of the World Wide Web.
If the US follows the hallucinatory vision of … “liberated sensualist” Justin Trudeau for a multicultural North America and is able to absorb Islamic Culture, as it previously, in its “childhood” age, absorbed Irish and Italian Catholics and Central European Jews, then the Roman model of empire will emerge, not the Persian one. Indeed, thanks to the Internet and the online politics that the “left” Democratic activist and scholar Bernie Sanders is exploiting so successfully for his fundraising, the Noosphere, initially formulated by the Russian Vernadsky and then by the French Teilhard de Chardin, will emerge as a global Noopolitics.
In the major Western countries that are considered developed, powerful, with cultured societies with different identity systems, based on class and language, people have mostly forgotten their origins. However, the societies of these countries, despite their financial “skeleton”, are not simply interconnected rational actors operating in a market system.
Consider a recent example of a strong challenge to the one-dimensional dominance of money and interest: Despite the outcome of the Brexit vote, Scotland did not leave the United Kingdom and the Scots did not dare to free themselves from the dominant British monarchy. The monarchy is an expression of what the great German linguist and philosopher Hans Hermann Rudolf Gebscher (1905-1973) – who changed his citizenship to Swiss and his name to Jean Gebscher – called the “Magical Structure of Consciousness”. It expresses a system of dominance that we inherited from our ape evolutionary relatives, rather than a system of representation. It was undoubtedly a very useful system for the survival of a collection of warlords and warring tribes, at a higher level of organization, but it is not the most suitable form of government for a modern nation-state. And yet, there are many people in Europe who still cling to this form of thinking. They may no longer believe that the touch of the king cures swine fever (cervical tuberculous lymphadenitis), but they believe that the face of the monarch on their currency ensures it as a fiduciary instrument.
The misanthropic, egotistical and bulimic spirit of the Overlords and the tyrannical psyche of their “entitled” and oppressive followers, move in the same mental framework as Bolshevism. So when every Kamala Harris in the US calls her political opponent a “fascist”, she ultimately finds no receptive ears among the country’s passionate, sensible citizens. Thus, they turned to Donald Trump to confront in the necessary and absolute way the inhuman vision of the corrupt elite, which believes that it will last forever and thinks that the tolerance of its citizens has no limits.
Leaders emerge on the historical stage with diverse and different methods, trajectories, paths and choices. With national, racial, class rivalries,.. with or without divine inspirations…. They triumph, die, succeed or fail, dominate….they suffer….but they present themselves with a fatalistic consistency.
“These shall be the judges of the people” (Exodus 18:22).
