April 23, 2021 - 4:13pm
Is it too early to reassess the Trump presidency? Let’s try anyway. Back in 2017, a Der Spiegel journalist asked France’s newly-elected philosopher-president Emmanuel Macron whether he believed in Hegel’s idea of the Weltgeist or “World Spirit,” as embodied in the German philosopher’s encounter with Napoleon riding through the streets of Jena— the “world spirit on horseback” as Hegel termed him.
“Do you believe that a single person can, in fact, steer history?” asked the journalist.
“No,” responded the Hegel scholar-turned-politician, because:
Could this be said of Trump, the unwitting force of history against whom Macron was positioned (then, anyway) as the antithesis? No less a thinker than Henry Kissinger seemed to think so, remarking to the Financial Times in 2018 that:
The Biden presidency, even at this early stage, gives weight to this idea. In his actions so far, he has followed Trump’s lead, pursuing through the realm of action an ideological rift with the logic of neoliberalism which Trump was incapable, himself, of manifesting beyond soundbites. Almost everything Trump was condemned for by right-thinking liberal opinion, Biden has brought into being.
It is Biden, and not Trump, who has withdrawn American troops from Afghanistan, rejecting the war-hunger of the DC blob. Biden has accepted the logic of great power competition with China, turning the Cold War framing Trump was vilified for into the central pole of US foreign policy. On immigration, Biden has maintained Trump’s border policies against both migrants coming overland from Latin America and refugees from the troubled countries of the Islamic world. On state capacity, Biden has turned Trump’s tweets into concrete action, pledging vast sums of money to rebuild America’s creaking infrastructure, not least as part of the great competition with China.
Lazy and inept, surrounded by low-calibre staff and courtiers and besieged by a hostile press, Trump was unable to achieve any of his stated core goals, seemingly content to shout into the Twitter ether and enjoy the results. Yet like the boy in the Emperor’s New Clothes, once he unmasked the emperor’s nakedness, there was no going back.
There is no return, now, to the world of Bush and Clinton, or to the hollow ideologies that underwrote their era. We have entered a new stage, which Trump, perhaps entirely unwittingly, was chosen by history to usher in. Future historians will mark his brief, contested reign as a great dividing line in America and the world’s story: it is not absurd then, to view him as history’s ironic agent, the Weltgeist on Twitter.
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SubscribeAccording to Jimmy Dore, who was reading from the NYT, Biden is withdrawing a few troops from Afghanistan but leaving around 13,000 contractors i.e. mercenaries, and ‘advisors’ etc.
To say that Biden’s borders policy is the same as Trump’s seems to be just absurd. One of the main stories in the US in recent weeks has been the overwhelming of the border, accompanied by images of hundreds or thousands of kids in cages. Here is a story from today NY Post on this subject:https://nypost.com/2021/04/23/dhs-whistleblower-border-guards-burned-out-from-biden-policies/
Contrary to the writer’s assertion, Trump achieved more of his core goals than any US or UK politician since Thatcher. All this good work will now be undone as US cities become ever more violent and lawless, aided and abetted by the Democrats and the media.
This article is crazy. False equivalents are fun to make, but not good for anything. What next? An article on how Corbyn is a natural extension of Thatcherite government policy? Or how Thatcher really was just the embodiment of Callaghan’s policy? Cats are just dogs who purr?
I always believed the least interesting thing about Trump is Trump himself. He is both a symptom and a symbol. He’s the primitive id of a huge swathe of the US population utterly disenfranchised by neoliberal economic policies and a society that places individualism on a pedestal and sneers at any sense of common purpose or belief.
He did, indeed, usher in the start of a new era in US (and likely Western) politics and culture. We can hope that, in the long term, this new era will be more friendly to the average person, but it’s also possible that the old order has been destroyed and the new order will bring nothing but chaos and strife.
I agree.
” any sense of common purpose or belief.”
You see to me sneering at that’s not a negative. It is in fact a description of both theocracy and communism, because one is really a descendant of the other.
and would you put ordinary old fashioned love of country in the same bracket?
“It is Biden, and not Trump, who has withdrawn American troops from Afghanistan, rejecting the war-hunger of the DC blob. Biden has accepted the logic of great power competition with China, turning the Cold War framing Trump was vilified for into the central pole of US foreign policy. On immigration, Biden has maintained Trump’s border policies against both migrants coming overland from Latin America and refugees from the troubled countries of the Islamic world. On state capacity, Biden has turned Trump’s tweets into concrete action, pledging vast sums of money to rebuild America’s creaking infrastructure, not least as part of the great competition with China.”
There was a time when a response to reading a paragraph like this would be to ask “what drugs are you taking?” Now, it is “what media are you consuming” and conversely “what media are you purposefully avoiding?” I am dismayed that some people believe this, and more dismayed that there are those actively proliferating such imprecise nonsense.
‘Almost everything Trump was condemned for by right-thinking liberal opinion, Biden has brought into being.”
What? No. The only commonality is the desire to exit Afghanistan. EVERYTHING else, from the concept of having a US border in practice, to fundamental rights enshrined in the US constitution could not be more different between the two men.
Exactly. This article begins with an assertion that is patently false, and is know to be false by anyone with even the slightest interest in US affairs. It is really quite disgraceful. What is this? The New York Times?
And no comment about the woke movement which is gathering speed and destructiveness?
Biden: Sleepwalking the country into disaster, no good long term will ever come of this old man’s reign. God help America.
Biden’s border policy is like Trumps in the same way that say, California is like Alabama.
C’mon man.
If Trump was lazy and inept, what in God’s name is Biden?
Corrupt, lazy and inept.
Demented, corrupt, lazy and inept.
Do not agree. Maybe the writer needs to wait a while longer before giving his Trump-op – at least until the anti-Trump bile has left his system.
No cure has yet been found for TDS.
The author appears to be ascribing sentience to Biden.
“Trump was unable to achieve any of his stated core goals,”
What about big tax cuts, taking the Supreme Court further to the right, bringing jobs back from China/Mexico (only slightly successful, but a start) and reducing unauthorised immigration? If he had had 8 years, like Reagan, we probably would have seen a similar big shift in U.S. politics.
Well, at least the philosopher-president knows his Hegel.
I buy that for foreign affairs, less so for domestic policies.