By Peter E. Gordon, The Boston Review
November 8, 2024
From 2016 to 2020 Donald J. Trump served as forty-fifth president of the United States; now, he has secured his reelection and will assume office once again as president number forty-seven. It was Marx who left us with the memorable claim that events in history occur twice: “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” But today this slogan, memorable as it is, surely doesn’t apply, since Trump’s first term was already a farce, distinguished most of all as a spectacle of bluster and boasting that, despite his many plans, left the basic institutions of American democracy more or less intact. He said that he would build a wall across the full two thousand miles of the United States’ southern border and Mexico would pay for it. (His sadistic family separation policy destroyed the lives of thousands, but his administration built only about five hundred miles of the wall, much of it reinforcements to existing barriers, and American taxpayers bore the cost.) He said that he would dismantle the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something better. (He didn’t, and the ACA remains among the most popular achievements of the Obama administration.) He said that he would impose a ban on immigrants from Muslim-majority countries. (He tried, with fitful success, though the courts dogged his efforts.) These promises came to us wrapped in the vacuous slogan that he would “Make America Great Again.” (Great? Hardly. It would be more accurate to say that America became an object of great derision and concern. Especially among our European allies, the fear arose that democracy in America, technically among the oldest democracies in the world, was showing signs of backsliding into autocracy.)
The old Marxist slogan, then, must now be revised. If the first term was farce, Trump’s reelection points toward a tragedy from which we may never recover. Every critic will offer a different postmortem. Some will—convincingly—cast blame on the elitism and inertia of the Democratic party, which cleaved to its habits of liberal centrism and dismissed the grievances of the working class. Others will blame the Democrats for prioritizing issues of sexual or racial identity over the universalism of economic justice; still others will blame the brute misogyny and racism of the American public. Others will blame those groups who, moved by justified anger over the U.S. support for the devastation of Gaza, cast their lot with fringe candidates such as Jill Stein, motivated by a moralist’s belief that “sending a message” was more important than voting for somebody who might actually have won. All of these critics capture at least some share of the truth; social reality is infinitely complex, and our explanatory instruments always shed only a partial light on what we do. But we would be well advised to consider the most obvious fact: that the tragic ascent of Trump is not an anomaly to democracy but its fatal flaw.
This was something that Marx understood. On December 2, 1851, Louis Bonaparte, a nephew of the long-dead Napoleon, seized the reins of the French state and declared himself emperor. The coup d’état should have been long anticipated, since it was hardly his first attempt. He had tried something similar in 1836. “I believe,” he wrote then, “that from time to time, men are created whom I call volunteers of providence, in whose hands are placed the destiny of their countries. I believe I am one of those men. If I am wrong, I can perish uselessly. If I am right, then providence will put me into a position to fulfill my mission.”
When his first effort failed, he fled first to the United States, then to London, where he lived among the wealthy for several years. But in 1840 he crossed the channel, again with the hope that “providence” would guide him to victory. This time, however, his failure was so swift and so spectacular that it provoked less fear than ridicule. “This surpasses comedy,” wrote one newspaper critic. “One doesn’t kill crazy people, one just locks them up.” After a trial, Louis Bonaparte was condemned to life in prison, where, unrepentant, he continued to nourish dreams of his supposed birthright, and even wrote a pamphlet with the utopian title, “The Extinction of Pauperism.” He did not give up. In 1846 he escaped in disguise and fled once again to London, where he remained until France’s 1848 revolution, when the abdication of King Louis Philippe gave way to the Second Republic, establishing universal male suffrage and giving Louis Bonaparte yet another chance to make his bid for power. In the democratic election of December 1848, Napoleon’s nephew finally fulfilled his ambitions: he won the presidency by a wide margin, gaining nearly 75 percent of the vote. But his highest ambition remained just out of reach. By the terms of the new constitution, the president was legally obliged to step down after four years in office, a rule Bonaparte sought to change but failed. Puffed up with dreams of his destiny, he saw no other choice. Like his uncle before him, he annulled the rules and claimed all power for himself.
Marx, living in London at the time, observed the events with fury and wrote an extended essay, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” its title meant as a mockery of the nephew for his ambition to reprise the events that had brought his more famous uncle to power a half-century before. According to the revolutionary calendar, the eighteenth of Brumaire was November 9, 1799, the date when Napoleon had annulled the Directory and declared himself First Consul, a prelude to his even more grandiose act five years later when he claimed the title of emperor. For Marx, the coup d’état of Louis Bonaparte in 1851 was an absurd repetition, the nephew little more than a “grotesque mediocrity,” an “adventurer who hides his trivially repulsive features under the iron death mask of Napoleon.” The essay, which runs to nearly a hundred pages in length, was first published in New York in 1852 by Marx’s colleague Joseph Weydemeyer in a journal called Die Revolution. “The Eighteenth Brumaire” is widely esteemed among Marxists and non-Marxists alike as a masterpiece of rhetoric, known especially for its opening line that events in history occur twice, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” But it also marks a shift in Marx’s mood, and a theoretical acknowledgment that democratic revolutions do not always turn out as one might expect.
Just three years before, in The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels had expressed themselves with greater optimism, exhorting the working class to seize the moment for their freedom, while also assigning to “bourgeois ideologists” a supportive role as intellectuals who could furnish “fresh elements of enlightenment and progress” to the proletariat. Marx and Engels were alive to the principle of self-reflexivity: that a social theory must explain the conditions of its own emergence. The bourgeois ideologists had untethered themselves from their class; they had “raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.” Marx and Engels were therefore confident—perhaps too confident—that the mass of the oppressed would fulfil its assignment. But the practical task of emancipation belonged to the proletariat itself, the class that needed only to recognize its exploitation and then break the chains that held it in submission.
In practice, however, things did not go as planned. In “The Eighteenth Brumaire,” just several pages in, Marx adopts a newly pessimistic tone:
Universal suffrage seems to have survived for only a moment, in order that with its own hand it may make its last will and testament before the eyes of all the world and declare in the name of the people itself: Everything that exists has this much worth, that it will perish.
In this passage, Marx’s mood has grown so dark that he freely borrows the concluding sentence from Satan, or Mephistopheles, as he is called in Goethe’s Faust. Denn alles was entsteht, / Ist wert, daß es zu Grunde geht; nothing of value remains in the world, and everything might as well pass away. Marx still employs a dialectical argument, but he now uses it with bitter irony to describe a dialectic of destruction rather than forward motion. What in France was called the Party of Order had triumphed over the Party of Movement. The institution of democratic suffrage, a novelty at the time, seems to have come into being only to annul democracy itself.
