Aiden Chia

Absolute must-read text by Emmanuel Todd, one of France's last great "intellectuels", on what he calls "the Trump revolution". As he explains, revolutions are "first and foremost the outcome of internal dynamics and contradictions within the society concerned", but the initial trigger is often military defeats. Examples abound: the Russian revolution of 1917 (after a defeat against Germany), the German revolution of 1918 (after losing WW1), the French revolution (after France's defeat in the Seven Years' War), the collapse of the Soviet system (after losing the arms race, and losing in Afghanistan), etc. In this instance, he says the U.S. suffered what's "fundamentally an economic defeat": as he puts it "the sanctions policy showed that the financial power of the West was far from overwhelming. The Americans had the revelation of the fragility of their military industry. People at the Pentagon know very well that one of the limits to their action is the limited capacity of the American military-industrial complex." Interestingly, he believes that the Americans are ahead of the Europeans in their understanding of this: "this American awareness of defeat contrasts with the non-awareness of Europeans" This is because "Europeans did not organize the war" and they therefore "cannot have full awareness of defeat. To have full awareness of defeat, they would need access to Pentagon thinking. But Europeans do not have access to it." As a result "Europeans situate themselves mentally before the defeat while the current American administration situates itself mentally after the defeat." The fact that it is a revolution can mostly be seen in the breadth of change at play, what Todd calls "a phenomenon of extraordinary violence, a violence that's directed on one hand against allies/vassals - the Europeans, the Ukrainians - but which also expresses itself on the other hand, internally, in American society, through a struggle against universities, against gender theory, against scientific culture, against the policy of including Blacks in the American middle classes, against free trade and against immigration." More than anything, Todd writes, "the collapse of a system is mental as much as economic. What is collapsing in the current West, and first in the United States, is not only economic dominance, but also the belief system that animated it or was superimposed on it. The beliefs that accompanied Western triumphalism are collapsing. But as in any revolutionary process, we do not yet know which new belief is the most important, which is the belief that will emerge victorious from the process of decomposition." He writes that the Trump revolution has some "very reasonable things", stemming from Trump's intuitions. For instance, "Trump's protectionism, the idea that America must be protected to rebuild its industry, results from a very reasonable intuition." Other example, "the idea of immigration control is reasonable, even if the style adopted by the Trump administration in managing immigration is unbearably violent." That being said, Todd writes, "despite the presence of these reasonable elements, I am pessimistic and I think the Trump experience will fail." This is because overall, he sees the primary belief driving the Trump revolution as nihilism - a "deification of emptiness" and a "will to destroy" that manifests in attacks on science, universities, and the very structures needed for the policies Trump claims to champion. One example Todd gives of a "destructive impulse" is that of Trump seeking "to establish customs duties between Canada and the United States", even though "the Great Lakes region constitutes a single industrial system." Another example of what Todd calls a "high-intensity nihilist project" is "the Trumpian fantasy of transforming Gaza, emptied of its population, into a tourist resort." But first and foremost, the "fundamental contradiction of American policy", and the best example of Trump's nihilism, is his approach to protectionism. As Todd explains, "the theory of protectionism tells us that protection can only work if a country possesses the qualified population that would allow it to profit from tariff protections. A protectionist policy will only be effective if you have engineers, scientists, qualified technicians. Which Americans do not have in sufficient numbers. Now I see the United States beginning to hunt down their Chinese students, and so many others, those very ones who allow them to compensate for their deficit in engineers and scientists. This is absurd. The theory of protectionism also tells us that protection can only launch or relaunch industry if the State intervenes to participate in the construction of new industries. Now we see the Trump administration attacking the State, this State that should nourish scientific research and technological progress." Todd concludes that one ought to be "very pessimistic for the United States." To state this conclusion, he goes back to fundamental concepts of anthropology (Todd is originally an anthropologist and demographer, at France's National Institute of Demographic Studies). As he writes, at its root "the model of the English and American family is nuclear, individualist, without even precise rules of inheritance. Freedom of will reigns. The Anglo-American nuclear family is very little structuring for the nation." What was structuring and stood "beside or above this individualist family structure" was "the discipline of Protestant religion, with its potential for social cohesion. Religion, as a structuring factor, was capital for the Anglo-American world." However, in his view, "it has disappeared". He says that he is aware of "these excited evangelists who surround Trump. But all that, for me, is not true religion. It is in any case not true protestantism. The God of American evangelists is a nice guy who distributes financial gifts; he is no longer the severe Calvinist God who demands a high level of morality, who encourages a strong work ethic and favors social discipline." He writes that this "zero state of religion, combined with very little structuring family values does not seem to me an anthropological and historical combination that could lead to stability. It is toward ever greater atomization that the Anglo-American world is heading. This atomization can only lead to an accentuation, without visible limit, of American decadence." He concludes with these words: "My personal fear is that we are not at all at the end, but only at the beginning of a collapse of the United States that will reveal to us things that we cannot even imagine." The full text (translated from French) is in the next post in this thread, together with a link to the original article.