No more heroes: or, seeking strong gods

I recently read N.S. Lyons’ interesting essay ‘American Strong Gods: Trump and the end of the Long Twentieth Century’. Yeah, apologies – another Trump piece … though Lyons casts the net wider. Anyway, his essay is kind of apropos to stuff I’ve been thinking and writing about lately, so I’m going to air it here. I’ll refer also to this recent essay from Perry Anderson. To deal in old political money, Lyons is a writer of the new right, while Anderson is the doyen of a ‘new left’ that’s no longer all that new – but a testament at least to his personal staying power in knocking out elegant political essays as he approaches his 90^th year.

Lyons’ thesis in essence is that Trump’s second term is an indicator of the end of a ‘long twentieth century’ that solidified after World War II in the form of the liberal-managerial state, the idea of the open society, globalisation, consumerism, the liberal depoliticization of the public sphere and other such ‘weak gods’ that replaced the ‘strong gods’ of communal identity, connection to place, past, family and faith that, in the eyes of the architects of liberal modernism, had caused such mayhem in the wars and genocides of the early twentieth century. With Trump and his ilk, according to Lyons, we’re back in the domain of the strong gods.

The first part of Lyons’ essay dissects the failure of the liberal-managerial state, the open society and their weak gods quite adroitly. He rightly links its rise to the ‘never again’ mentality of political elites in respect particularly of fascism after the mayhem of World War II. He doesn’t mention that it was also an attempt to rein in the mayhem caused by the unbridled, robber baron-style capitalism that climaxed disastrously in 1929 and also fed into fascism and global war.

It’s a significant omission, but still … although my political background is very much identified with the weak god politics of postwar liberal-modernism, I’ve come to reject that worldview and I found much to agree with in Lyons’ critique. I basically agree that “Today’s populism is more than just a reaction against decades of elite betrayal and terrible governance … it is a deep, suppressed thumotic desire for long-delayed action”.

In my 2023 book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future I likewise wrote about the way that people are animated by ‘mysteries and passions’ in ways that managerialist metrics like longevity, low price, high convenience and so on don’t comprehend. The fierce pushback I got on that point from some progressive quarters seems to me indicative of how off the pace that thinking is, and its electoral impotence in the face of figures like Trump.

So I’m not opposed in principle to the thumotic desire for action. But it does kinda depend on what form that desire takes, and whether populist alternatives to liberal-modernism are truly populist. Here, I found Anderson’s essay helpful. Populism in his view comes in left-wing and right-wing forms, and has three components in total: a critique of oligarchy and elites, a critique of economic inequality, and a critique of immigration. Right-wing populism, says Anderson, typically addresses itself to all three components, which is why it can often look quite radically left-wing on certain political and economic matters. Left-wing populism addresses itself to the first two, but not to the third, which is why – according to Anderson – it usually fares less well with electorates than the right-wing version. One point that Anderson makes, although he doesn’t develop it much, is that the global flow of people (immigration) results from the global flow of capital. A coherent critique of the flow of migrants is hard to do without a critique of the flow of money. More generally, Anderson says that a problem with populism – left and right – is that it knows what it’s against, but it’s not so clear about what it’s for.

Turning to Donald Trump, I’d question Lyons’ identification of him with populism. Trump definitely ticks the anti-immigration box of right-wing populism. But is he really a foe of oligarchy and economic inequality? He sometimes speaks that language, but I’m not convinced that’s really what he’s about.

I think what emerges from the second half of Lyons’ essay is that the direction of travel of Trump’s second administration isn’t a renewal of the old ‘strong gods’. It’s something older for sure, but not that old. Really, it’s a version of bureaucratic liberal-modernism in its most self-destructive form.

Not that Lyons says this directly. He’s far too enamoured of Trump to do that. But it’s present in his analysis clearly enough. In brief, I think there are three main aspects to this. First, nationalism. Lyons doesn’t offer any analysis of what nationalism is, but like many he seems to assume that it involves the survival into the disenchanted present of ancient tribal passions – ‘thumotic desire’ – rather than involving a carefully curated top-down bureaucratic-modernist project of contemporary centralized states, as brilliantly analysed long ago by Perry Anderson’s older brother. This is nationalism of the kind that’s likely to make, for example, someone from Southern California inclined to feel greater kinship with someone from Maine than with someone from Mexico (which their state used to be part of) for reasons that don’t have much to do with their own self-interest. Trump is an unabashed nationalist? I guess so, in that latter sense – using the passions generated by the nationalist project of the liberal-modernist state to push an agenda of centralized state interests.

Second, trade war. As rehearsed ad infinitum by mainstream economists, Trump’s ‘America first’ tariff policies aren’t going to benefit ordinary US citizens within the existing parameters of the global economy. On the contrary, it’s those ordinary citizens who’ll be picking up the tab. Perhaps Joeri Schasfoort’s explanation for the logic behind the tariffs in terms of US ambitions around economic imperialism makes sense. Economic imperialism aligns closely with political imperialism. Trade wars align closely with actual wars. That said, there’s a good case for keeping capital at home.

Third, personalist rule. Lyons writes, correctly I think, that Trump is “instinctual, not actuarial. He is relational, not rationalistic, valuing loyalty and possessing a prickly sense of honor” and that his administration is affirming “the elected Executive’s direct, personal control over the bureaucracy”. Lyons calls the bureaucracy that Trump’s administration is busy dismantling “sheltered” and “proceduralist (i.e. democratically uncontrollable and unaccountable)”. I think that’s fair enough up to a point – I’m with him on that populist critique. Still, the direct personal control over bureaucracy of an elected Executive is a very thin form of democracy, whereas proceduralism (for example, in the form of an independent judiciary, universities etc.) is thicker. Democracy involves a lot more than people just ticking a ballot form every few years, and those of us who rail at the dead hand of the proceduralist state should probably be careful what we wish for.

On this personalist front, Lyons cites Mary Harrington’s view that “we’re watching in real time as figures such as the hero, the king, the warrior, and the pirate; or indeed various types of antihero, all make their return to the public sphere.” Well, are we? If George W. Bush and Tony Blair had agreed to that duel with Mullah Omar back in 2001, I’d have agreed that the politics of the hero, the king and the warrior were returning to the public sphere. But when was the last time a western leader had personalist warrior skin in the game? Here in Britain I’d propose the year 1485, when Richard III became the last British king to die on the battlefield. Maybe in the USA it was later – perhaps when George Washington and Thomas Hamilton rode in to quell the whiskey rebellion in 1794 and put down a tax revolt so they could further centralise state power.

If you want me to believe that the king, the warrior and the hero have really returned to the public sphere on the populist side, then I’d have to see Trump at the head of a militia supporting a tax strike by ordinary people, or something along those lines. Harrington’s notion that “Elon Musk and his ‘warband’ of young tech-bros” are battling against “the destruction of masculine heroism” doesn’t compute. I’d argue rather that the old archetypes of the king, the warrior and the hero are being pressed into service for a modern, centralised, bureaucratic-oligarchic regime that doesn’t care too much about economic inequality and is only opposed to certain elites, not to elites in general. It’s hard to fit this regime into the populist box.

The funny thing about Lyons’ essay is that even as it convinces me not to succumb to the left-wing kneejerk temptation I’ve fallen for in the past (I don’t like Trump, he’s really right-wing, he must be a fascist!) it also convinces me that the parallels with historical fascism at the level of the wider politics involved are stronger than I previously thought – viz. the hyper-nationalism of the bureaucratic centralised state, trade war as prelude to actual war, and personalism. Hence, as I said earlier, Trump’s administration looks like a version of early 20^th century bureaucratic liberal-modernism in its most self-destructive form.

Fascism of the early 20^th century variety failed for various reasons, not least that it couldn’t really resolve the contradiction between serving capital and serving the people. It strikes me that the politics of Trump’s present administration, whatever we choose to call it, will fail even more precipitously, in part because it lacks genuine commitment to serving any but a tiny minority of the people that, whatever else you say about them, 20^th century fascisms did have. Musk as a restorer of masculine heroism? No, he’s just a contemporary version of the 19^th and 20^th century robber-baron capitalists, who stole the dignity of countless men (and women).

If Joeri Schasfoort is right that Trump’s tariff wars are about rebooting what remains of the Bretton Woods agreement into a 21^st century version that tilts the odds more in favour of the USA, I think this too will fail. Bretton Woods was a sweet and self-interested deal for the US at a time when most other countries in the world had weak bargaining positions. Even so, it was actuated by a certain degree of internationalism and long-term ‘pay it forward’ thinking. Today, the US is weaker, other countries are stronger, and Trump’s version of ‘screw you’ nationalism will hole it below the waterline – except perhaps in the case of various economically small-time countries along with the odd larger player cursed with delusional politics, such as Britain. Possibly people in the US genuinely think their country has been hard done by through its international commitments. If so, I suspect they’re about to collide uncomfortably with reality.

But for all that, it’s not as if any other political doctrine across the spectrum of traditional politics, from communism to neoliberalism or conventional conservatism, has good answers for how to keep the global economic juggernaut on the road without its contradictions ultimately tearing it apart. One domain of those contradictions – mentioned neither by N.S. Lyons nor Perry Anderson – is the staple fare of this blog: energy futures, material futures, climate change, land and water security … and ultimately real human community, as opposed to the blandishments of central-state ideologies like nationalism.

When Anderson says populism is defined more by what it’s against than what it’s for, this isn’t really true of my favoured brand of populism – agrarian populism, which is for localism, local community and local agrarianism keyed to a sustainable ecological base. The problem with agrarian populism is that it has no mainstream political traction, because for so long now modernist culture has been lost in its dreamlands of economic ‘development’, urbanisation and high-energy techno-fixing.

Therefore, if our political future is an agrarian populist one, it’s hard to see how that can happen without a very nasty bump, at best.

Yet here is where I believe there’s scope for a new kind of hero to make their appearance in the public sphere. Not the king or the warrior, but the farmer or the householder – as I discussed in this post some time ago, and in my book A Small Farm Future (as well, in a different way, as in my forthcoming book Finding Light in a Dark Age).

I’ll expand on that point in a future post. For now, I’ll just say that people of all kinds – including those who are sympathetic to agrarian populism, localism, householding and small farming – are too easily dismissive of its capacities to humble the power of kings and warriors, especially ersatz modern ones. Let’s not take these self-proclaimed heroes and warriors too seriously. People who don’t know the first thing about how to take care of themselves materially and are dependent on others to provide for their needs aren’t heroes. They’re helpless children.

I’ll concede that the most obvious route for channelling the thumotic desire for long-delayed action and masculine heroism in the MAGA heartlands may not be learning how to grow a garden. Nevertheless, history teaches us that this is sometimes where grandiose dreams of imperial greatness fetch up. But I want to press the point more positively. There are plenty of historical models for the heroic householder, male as well as female. It’s just that we tend to forget or ignore them nowadays. I discuss this in my forthcoming book. Hopefully, I’ll discuss it in a forthcoming post here too.

Indigenous lifeways manifested in local ecological connection – for example, in gardening – often involve such models, and indigeneity figures in a lot of contemporary ‘progressive’ thinking about routes out of the present impasse. It was mentioned, for instance, in Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s recent critique in The Guardian of what they call the ‘death drive’ of administrations like Trump’s. Unfortunately, when you try to articulate the idea of widespread modern local ecological connection, it tends to invite ridicule, or even comparisons with Nazism, from ‘progressives’ too – not least from other Guardian writers wedded to their own alienated techno-fixing death drives.

I discuss briefly in my forthcoming book some of the different modalities of bottom-up indigenous local ecological connection which – again, in old political money – has both left-wing and right-wing manifestations, and I talk about the ‘strong gods’ of those kinds of localism (although I don’t use that phrase specifically). I suspect these various strong god localisms will be humanity’s long-term destiny, but unfortunately it looks like we’re going to have to endure a lot of false strong god-mongering from the political right, but also the political left – both seemingly incapable of extricating themselves from the death throes of the centralised liberal-modernist state – before anybody gets to embrace them.