“Why is Donald Trump doing what he is doing?” This is the question raised by European intelligentsia these days as they try to recover from the shock of the American presidential election which they all believed would be won by the Democrat champion Kamala Harris.
France’s currently fashionable TV philosopher Michel Onfray raises the question in a number of programs as do op-ed writers in newspapers in London, Brussels and Berlin and Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis.
The answer to the question may be simple: Trump is doing what he is doing because he promised to do those things and has a contract with the 78 million Americans who voted for him.
However, a simple answer won’t satisfy an intellectual caste that is used to project prestige via convoluted concepts dished out in a jargon designed to impress if not frighten the plebes.
To find “a deeper answer” Onfray suggests focusing on Elon Musk the current bete-noire of the literati and glitterati in Parisian cafes. He portrays Musk as a man driven by greed who has managed to sell Trump and his supporters a bundle of goods in the name of applying high-tech to political reform.
Varoufakis casts Musk in the role of ringleader for an emerging oligarchy that offers an American version of the autocratic oligarchies in China and Russia.
The ultimate goal of this new oligarchy is to privatize government, a concept that is anathema to European intellectuals who regard the Hobbesian state as an earthly version of divinity.
To Americans, however, the Leviathan though accepted as a necessity has always been regarded as a potential threat to freedoms that their ancestors sought as they fled from European tyrannies.
Today, Trump-bashers in Europe might see his advent as a real version of what London and Sinclair Lewis imagined with Musk as the alter-ego of the Great Leader.
There is, however, a big difference. In London and Lewis, the hyper capitalists tried to create a huge collectivist Leviathan that dictates every aspect of life. Under such a state, sentiments and feelings would be abolished as the Great Benefactor guarantees a synthetic happiness for all dished out through algorithms designed to ensure equality. Such a state would also apply the one-size-fits-all standard to other fields notably science, philosophy, literature and art.
However, the Trump-Musk project is aimed at reducing the size of the Leviathan and preventing its use in the service of a one size-fits-all ideology.
Unlike America where society was supposed to build and develop itself through the free market and individual enterprise Europe, after a brief period during the Victorian Era in England, the task of building and developing society was entrusted to the state. It was the state that directly or indirectly built the infrastructure of schools, universities, railways and highways, ports, standing armies and merchant navies and set the tone for industry and commerce.
In many instances Europe had discovered the concepts of private enterprise and free market before the US. In Britain such concepts played key roles in Adam Smith’s work as the father of modern economics. In France, Guizot and Frederic Bastiat had been early champions of similar ideas. But it was in the US that those European prophets found their rue disciples.
John D Rockefeller, another despicable hyper-capitalist, once said “We don’t want a nation of philosophers, just a nation of workers.”
And it was George Bernard Shaw who quipped: “Those Who Can Do; Those who can’t teach!”
Originally the American university was designed to teach young people how to think not what to think.
During the era of domination by politically correct elites the American university morphed into a secular version of religious seminaries where only authorized thought was allowed while every other thought was banned as apocryphal or subversive.
Herbert Spencer had warned that universities could become factories of absolutist thought with the aim of paving the way for intellectual slavery. Before him Hobbes had spoken of “universities becoming Trojan horses for enemies who regard themselves as superior to infiltrate society” and kill the Leviathan with a thousand cuts.
Thus, theoretically, the Trump-Musk “conspiracy” as Onfray calls it, is aimed at removing restrictions imposed by politically correct gurus on thought and expression and the Bowdlerization even of classical texts to atone for the imaginary guilt of fathers and forefathers of an imaginary “white male majority” thus imposing uniformity in the name of diversity. This conspiracy wants to put the revolutionary method at the service of what might be seen as a restoration with America reclaiming some of its forgotten values.
Onfrey says Trump is “nuts” and Musk is an opportunist. However, Trump has been wise enough to understand what a majority of Americans want. As for Musk being an opportunist is better than masquerading as an arriviste.
Whether their restoration scheme works or not remains to be seen. But to question its legitimacy is a sign of sour grapes by European gurus who witness their politically correct world crumbling around them.
