World Spirit on Feedback

The Attempted Assassination of Candidate Trump, and the “Great Man” Theory of History

Karl Marx once wrote that “the key to aristocracy is zoology”, by which he meant that in order to maintain a dynasty in power one must constantly see to the copulation of its most fertile members (an amusing depiction of this literally biopolitical fact can be found in Sophia Coppola’s 2006 retelling of the life of Marie Antoinette). Our republican democracies have done away with the genetic criterion in their rules of succession, but politics remains no less preoccupied with, and dependent on, the functioning physiology of the bodies of its leading figures. With perhaps a few exceptions for absolute despotries centered upon ancestor cults —Kim Il Sung (1912-1994), for example, is named in the preamble of the constitution of North Korea as “Eternal President”—, it’s hard to rule if you’re dead.

This horizon of mortality poses a particular problem for decadent gerontocracies such as ours. Death is natural, and many of our political leaders are very, very old. In light of this, you might suppose it’s especially natural for them to die, yet from the way their attendants behave you would think the death of a grey political eminence were itself enough to bring nature as a whole to a screeching halt, or at least to sink the ship of state that some old captain had hitherto helmed.

Extreme measures are therefore often taken to keep their bodies alive. After the attempted assassination of James A. Garfield, a man by the name of Dr. Willard Bliss attempted a radical experiment with nutritive enemas inserted into the far end of that unresponsive president’s digestive tract. Garfield died within a month, but not before Dr. Bliss had compiled sufficient experimental observations to publish his groundbreaking Feeding per Rectum: As Illustrated in the Case of the Late President Garfield and Others (1882). In Alekseï German’s excellent film, Khrustalyov, My Car! (1998), we are treated to an excruciating depiction of the final hours of Joseph Stalin, in which the great leader’s lackeys repeatedly order the doctors, under threat of punishment, to “Fart him!” “Fart him again!” by pressing down on the inert Stalin’s stomach and expelling that great leader’s gases.

But then of course, often, no matter how thoroughly they are farted or fed, these old men die anyway. And each time that happens, miraculously, when their desperate hangers-on pause in suspended silence, they notice that the birds are still singing in the trees, and the satellites are still blinking in their orbits, and, somehow, the state is still there. Everyone, but everyone, turns out to be expendable. L’État, c’est moi may be true every time some sovereign moi says it, but moi, like any pronoun, and like any sovereign, is only a placeholder. After a slight tussle, some successor or other always emerges from among the lackeys, or perhaps from the opposing camp, if that has not been outlawed, and the cycle begins again. 

8.7% of US presidents have been assassinated — far from a majority, but still at a level that would be unacceptable in any other line of work. If 8.7% of ketchup-factory workers got sucked into giant vats and boiled alive, you can be sure OSHA would have been on the case long ago. The enormous risk is just part of the job, the calculated cost of entering into world history.

The would-be assassins, unsurprisingly, are as interested in the biology of world leaders, including would-be presidents, as any courtier offering birds-and-bees counsel to a virginal child-monarch ever was. They are interested, namely, in how to put a stop to that biology, how to make the vital signs cease, an interest that compels them to learn at least a thing or two about the location in the body of the main arteries, and about the relative unimportance of those extremities that can at most be non-fatally wounded or grazed.

Just a few days before candidate Trump lost a bit of his ear gristle, I wrote in this space that, in spite of my preponderant interest in large-scale and longue-durée processes, we cannot deny that individual actors, and individual acts, really do make a difference in history. A single pebble on the road can incapacitate a horse and slow down a commanding officer’s arrival at the scene of battle. And a single twitch of the head, milliseconds before impact, can send a bullet through an orator’s ear rather than through his eye-socket and into his brain. I will not allow myself to become a target of the police-bots that, in 2026 or thereabouts, will no doubt begin scouring our online pasts and deplatforming or prosecuting everyone who expressed, in July 2024, a sentiment along the lines of “if only that guy hadn’t missed!” But I will say it is at least interesting to ponder, counterfactually, who the 21st-century descendant of Dr. Bliss might have been in this case, and what sort of extreme measures might have been taken to keep that political animal’s hulking body alive.

But anyhow, that guy did miss, and the political reality we now must face is one shaped by that singular and highly contingent ballistic fact. In the early days after this attempted assassination, one common theme in the discourse has been the sudden elevation of Trump to a new, or at least newly undeniable, role: that of a man of world-historical destiny. Such a man, the familiar idea goes, cannot but change the course of things, no matter how erratic or haphazard his actual decision-making habits really are. A more mystically inflected version of this idea tells us it is a waste of time to entertain counterfactuals when thinking about such men: things can turn out no other way for them than the way they do. There will be no pebbles in their road, or if there are these will only dirempt them down pathways that destine them to even more historical greatness. There can be no other trajectory for the bullet than the one that leaves a handsome battle-scar, and provides an opportunity to don a bandage upon entering Milwaukee. (An eye-patch would have been even more commanding, of course.)

Napoleon has come up frequently in the past days, as well as Hegel’s famous declaration, when he saw that tiny man entering Jena, that he understood at once that what he was seeing was “world Spirit on horseback”.¹ The smarter analysts have followed their recent attempts at a historical rhymoid with the crucial observation that even the most undisputed great men of history always, in the end, turn out to be mere vessels of other forces far greater than themselves. Ross Douthat reminds us of the full context of Hegel’s view, in which such men “‘fall off like empty hulls from the kernel’ when their purpose had been served”. Sam Kriss put a similar point even more starkly when he observed that Trump’s promotion to “great man” in no way makes him a good or worthy man. “Napoleon and Alexander were frantic, thoughtless little perverts too.”

But America, that nation of children, further infantilized with each passing day by the reckless media that do nothing but confirm Americans in their childish beliefs, is unlikely to appreciate the full lesson of the Napoleonic analogy. This much was vividly illustrated by the world’s richest child, Elon Musk, who took to X within hours of seeing Doug Mills’ iconic photos of the shooting to announce his political support: “I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery.” It is of course normal to be impressed by those images. They are aesthetically striking. As the great critic Jason Farago has well explained,² they enter into a register of iconic representation that has long projected significance in Western art. It is infantile to leap from such an impression to a conviction that the man at the center of this new iconography is a suitable leader. And it is sub-Hegelian to fail to recognize that even if world-historical circumstances do end up foisting him upon us, for better or worse, this great man will still turn out to be, ultimately, an empty husk.

I’ve already acknowledged that I see Trump differently now than I did in 2016, and I’ll now acknowledge that that change in perception has only been further solidified in the wake of his shooting. Part of this change means that I no longer think it’s useful or meaningful to call him a charlatan, to insist that he’s “faking it”, that he’s actually a really bad businessman who only pretends to be a successful one on TV, that he’s a common low-end huckster of bad steaks and worthless paraphernalia. All of this implies that there are other actors on the world stage who, by contrast, are the real deal, and unlike in 2016 I just don’t believe that’s the case anymore. The only real grounds for such a distinction between the authentic statesman and the False Dmitri-like impostor is class habitus, and this is something of which, since 2016, I have learned to be very wary.

This is also something that makes some of J. D. Vance’s rhetoric appeal to me — not his ideological positions on particular policies regarding, e.g., immigration, or tariffs on Chinese imports, but his recognition that the sort of power that is concentrated in milieux such as the Yale Law School is rotten to the core. One way of threatening this power, as Vance has understood, is to team up with a trashy real-estate developer from Queens. I understand the new Republican VP candidate’s thought-processes, I mean, in an intuitive way. My own childhood was not as hardscrabble as his —mine was more of a mix of the hardscrabble with real prospects, there from the beginning, for class mobility—, but I am familiar enough with proletarian pathologies to still feel, after all these years, out of place in elite circles.

My first academic job after finishing my Ph.D. at Columbia was at Miami University of Ohio, which has a branch campus in Vance’s hometown of Middletown, where I was sometimes required to go for various events. (Though he did not go there, Vance still looks like a Miami undergrad, from the main campus at Oxford, Ohio, more than like either a Middletown hillbilly or an indigenous Yalie to the Ivy League manor born.) At the time I was still extremely anxious about my class status, I continued to aspire to higher ranks, and I deeply resented my exile to hillbilly territory and despised the people around me, some of whom could have been members of Vance’s extended family. Now, from this strange position in European exile, more than cured of my class anxiety and my desire to climb any higher in this fallen world, I think back and I see them as members of my extended family too. And I feel instinctively the need to defend them, and to bemoan the ruling class’s chronic failure over the past decades to do the same.

Vance is also a frightening ideologue, far too certain of the truth of his —evolving— views to merit a place anywhere near the centers of power. And he is also very smart, and will be able to translate Trump’s sentence fragments and sublinguistic gestures into real human language. This is a significant turn in the history of the MAGA movement.

Vance has taken to describing the tactics of the anti-Trump left as “Schmittian”, that is, along the lines of the Nazi jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt, as reducing all of politics to a friend/enemy distinction, rather than valuing consensus-building and the search for common ground. The generally very smart Michelle Goldberg has said that in this Vance is engaging in “pure projection”, but it seems obvious to me that this really is a case where some both-sidesism is unavoidable: US politics is trapped in a Schmittian vortex, where it is impossible for anyone to seek common ground without being perceived as capitulating to the side of evil. I place the greater part of the blame for this new dynamic on media, both legacy and social.

When Napoleon rode his horse into Jena, news circulated very differently. Hegel was in no position to get a selfie with the Corsican general, or to share his unmediated impressions of that memorable day with others in his diffuse network. Elon Musk’s “Hegel in Jena” moment will play out otherwise. For one thing, it will stir up the vortex and cause it to twist even more violently than before. Real debates about how to improve the lives of alienated and disenfranchised poor Americans of all backgrounds will continue not to be had, as politics transitions ever further into the principal theater of battle of the generalized memetic warfare that is now consuming all of social reality. Doug Mills’ photos of Trump’s bloodied face and pumping fist, the American flag waving behind him, were a major triumph for the Republicans in that theater.

Of course, given that, now more than ever, history really is “one damn thing after another”, it’s almost certain that within, say, three weeks, all of you will have moved on to something else and will have to strain to recall the great and unforgettable thing that happened way back in mid-July. Already, in just the past three days, we have seen a significant decline in the widespread expressions of certitude just last Sunday that “this changes everything”. But history is cumulative, even if most of us only retain a dim awareness of its decisive moments. Its cumulative power is massively enhanced by its absorption into the cybernetic system of the internet.

I am using this term in Norbert Wiener’s original sense, of any system whose momentum is maintained by feedback-looping. Our political life is now a self-sustaining exchange of images, sometimes adorned with simple text, though often dispensing with language altogether. There is no longer even any pretense of an aspiration to deliberative democracy, even if the husk of Joe Biden can still wheeze out a few faint words about how here in America we articulate our differences through argument, resolve them at the ballot-box, &c.

The best hope to get out of this impasse, it has come to seem to me, is to remove ourselves, individually at first but eventually in great numbers, from all the feedback looping, to cultivate new habits based on new values fit for our new technological reality, to reculer pour mieux sauter, and, when the time comes, one hopes, to be able to leap again into the fray, neither in favor of nationalist isolationism nor of liberal neo-imperialism, but of true international solidarity and real work towards the universal human good.

1. A weird and troubling lapsus in my memory caused me to render this famous line, in an earlier version of this essay, which is the version sent out by e-mail, as “world history on feedback/horseback”. Since in the end Hegel’s philosophy of history is one that identifies it with the Weltgeist I’m not cripplingly ashamed of that earlier imprecision, but I did have to update the essay for the sake of accuracy.

2. I give Jason like 25% of the credit for bringing us out of that other variety of American infantilism I’ve often bemoaned here, the “progressive” kind, with his excellent, indeed I think history-making, obliteration of Hannah Gadsby’s risible attempt to “curate” a 2023 exhibition of the works of Pablo Picasso at the Brooklyn Museum.