Mourouzis 1
Jack Mourouzis
Professor McGillen
German 85
30 May 2017
God Emperor: The Culture of Trump through the Lens of the Frankfurt School
Throughout the 2016 Presidential Election, it became clear that Donald Trump was not an ordinary political actor, as he continually realized success despite allegations of racism, sexism, ableism, treason, and even sexual assault. Many have mourned his ascension to office as a death knell for America; in connection with this, scholars have drawn links between Trump’s political tendencies and the writings of the Frankfurt School, particularly with regards to Theodor
Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality.1 However, when exploring the other writings of the
Frankfurt School, it becomes clear that their writings on cultural criticism and the nature of capitalist culture in modernity also help to explain the Trump phenomenon. The 2016 election forsook politics and policy issues in a unique way; culture was what paved the way for Trump’s victory, as he ultimately became “as much of a pop-culture phenomenon as he is a political one.”2 Indeed, many of the Frankfurt School’s writings discuss the integral role that culture plays in the development of fascism; clear parallels can be drawn between the Frankfurt School writings and issues such as proliferation of memes, fake news, and even Trump’s own persona – all pillars of the alternative right subculture, which revolves around Donald Trump in a cult-like fashion. The Frankfurt School’s writings on mass culture, its industry, art in modernity, and
1 Peter Gordon, “The Authoritarian Personality Revisited: Reading Adorno in the Age of Trump,” boundary2, 15 June 2016, https://www.boundary2.org/2016/06/peter-gordon-the-authoritarian-personality-revisited-reading- adorno-in-the-age-of-trump/. 2 Alex Ross, “The Frankfurt School Knew Trump Was Coming,” The New Yorker, 5 December 2016, http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-frankfurt-school-knew-trump-was-coming. Mourouzis 2 historical perspectives help to explain the effective proliferation of pro-Trump, alt-right culture, which played an invaluable role in his victory in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election.
Susan Buck-Morss, in a reading of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction,” defines fascism (with the help of Benjamin’s writing) as “a
“violation of the technical apparatus” that parallels fascism’s violent “attempt to organize the newly proletarianized masses” – not by giving them their due, but by “allowing them to express themselves.” The logical result of fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.”3
Her logic regarding aesthetics also holds true with regards to what can only be described as the antics of Donald Trump on the campaign trail. The aesthetics of Donald Trump’s campaign have taken the form of internet and general media memes, which helped to shape the cultural phenomenon of Trump and the alt-right. The term meme was coined by notable scholar Richard
Dawkins and derived from the same Greek root as mimesis4, a concept of cultural representation which was a common focus of the Frankfurt School. The term is currently defined primarily as
“an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture” and secondarily as “an amusing or interesting item (such as a captioned picture or video) or genre of items that is spread widely online especially through social media.”5 Both definitions are of note here; indeed, the dissemination and proliferation of humorous, captioned pictures and videos by the alt-right and its affiliates helped achieve the spread of Trump’s ideas, behavior, and style within and across American society. Their accessibility is highlighted by Walter Benjamin in his discussion of the development of art in modernity when he claims that “the distinction between
3 Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered,” October 62 (1992): 3. 4 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 192. 5 Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. 11th ed. Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, 2003. Also available at http://www.merriam-webster.com/.
Mourouzis 3 author and public is about to lose its axiomatic character… At any moment, the reader is ready to become a writer.”6 This accurately describes the proliferation of memes, as their creation and subsequent dissemination is accessible to anyone with a computer, basic photo manipulation software, and a social media account.
The development of the meme as utilized by Trump’s supporters is explained further by
Buck-Morss, who notes that “Urban-industrial populations began to be perceived as themselves a
“mass” – undifferentiated, potentially dangerous, a collective body that needed to be controlled and shaped into a meaningful form. In one sense, this was a continuation of the autotelic myth of creation ex nihilo, wherein “man” transforms material nature by shaping it to his will.”7 In this parallel, urban-industrial populations are akin to the amalgamation of disillusioned right-leaning individuals who fell behind Trump’s platform; their manipulation of “material” (in the modern age, digital) nature was indirectly transformed by Trump himself. The nature of these digital creations is also reflected by Theodor Adorno, who writes that “works which have not completely mastered their technique, conveying as a result something consolingly uncontrolled and accidental, have a liberating quality.”8 Furthermore, they also exist almost purely as a form of attack against any anti-Trump community or sentiment; they serve to alienate those not involved in the culture by nature of their “Mimetic capacities,” which “rather than incorporating the outside world as a form of empowerment… are used as a deflection against it.”9 Furthermore, memes by nature are unprofessionally and quickly produced, which comes as a result of their reflection of up-to-the-minute current news and events and rapid dissemination on social media.
6 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Reproducibility,” in Walter Benjamin Selected Writings Volume 3, 1935-1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 114. 7 Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics,” 28. 8 Theodor W. Adorno and Thomas Y. Levin, “Transparencies on Film,” New German Critique 24/25 (1981-1982): 199. 9 Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics,” 17. Mourouzis 4
In this sense, they also relate to Kracauer’s discussion of photography in the sense that they
“must be essentially associated with the moment in time at which it came into existence.”10
Memes do not enjoy the benefit of the memory image; they reflect only an immediate current idea and present it in a humorous fashion, conveying the simple message to the viewer as he scrolls past it on his Twitter feed.
Perhaps the most tangible center of the alt-right, pro-Trump contingent is the online message board “r/The_Donald,” a forum of over 400,000 members on the popular social media website Reddit. The influence of r/The_Donald on the election is indeed quite significant, to the point that “Mr. Trump owes some degree of his success to an online mob of rabid, self-organized supporters… The_Donald is something different. Its memes and slang serve as passwords to an internet speakeasy, a secret club whose rules one moderator justified as existing to create a “safe space” for Trump supporters.”11 This sentiment is echoed by Adorno in his thoughts on the collective in Sur l’Eau, where he claims that “It is not man’s lapse into luxurious indolence that is to be feared, but the savage spread of the social under the mask of universal nature, the collective as a blind fury of activity.”12 The collective that is the alt-right, in its blind fury, spreads its so-called truth across the internet with a cult-like devotion to the figure that is Donald
Trump. This also connects with Karl Marx’s thoughts on the phantasmagoria; when memes are considered parallel to commodities, it becomes clear that “They veil the production process, and… encourage their beholders to identify them with subjective fantasies and dreams.”13
Memes constructed a humorous, entertaining narrative surrounding the Trump campaign which,
10 Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography,” in The Mass Ornament Weimar Essays, ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 54. 11 Christine Lagorio-Chafkin, “Reddit and the God Emperor of the Internet,” The New York Times, 19 November 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/reddit-and-the-god-emperor-of-the-internet.html?_r=0. 12 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1951), 156. 13 Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetic and Anaesthetic,” 25. Mourouzis 5 although not always factual, had tangible effects made clear by how Trump supporters
“relentlessly drew attention to the tawdriest and most sensational accusations against Clinton, forcing mainstream media outlets to address topics—like conspiracy theories about Clinton’s health—that they would otherwise ignore.”14 Those who participate in such a culture and contribute to the success of the r/The_Donald community seem to do so due to motivations explained by Adorno, who claims that they “would prefer to get rid of that obligation of autonomy, which they suspect cannot be a model for their lives, and prefer to throw themselves into the melting pot of the collective ego.”15 He also offers more on this idea, describing how
“The individual’s narcissistic instinctual drives, which are promised less and less satisfaction by a callous world and which nonetheless persist undiminished as long as civilization denies them so much, find substitute satisfaction in the identification with the whole.”16 Furthermore, the proliferation of memes within the message board also mirrors Adorno’s thoughts, specifically with regard to his thoughts on the nature of film, as he articulates that “The movements which the film presents are mimetic impulses which, prior to all content and meaning, incite the viewers and listeners to fall into step as if in a parade.”17
One particular example that very accurately parallels the Frankfurt School’s thoughts on the link between culture and fascism is the “Can’t Stump the Trump” video series, which proved to be a significant influence on pro-Trump culture from the early days of the campaign. The video series was released periodically on YouTube beginning in August of 2015 and running up until just following President Trump’s election on November 9, 2016, via an account that
14 Ben Schreckinger, “World War Meme,” Politico, March/April 2017, http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/03/memes-4chan-trump-supporters-trolls-internet-214856. 15 Theodor W. Adorno, “The Meaning of Working Through the Past,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 99. 16 Ibid., 96. 17 Theodor Adorno and Thomas Y. Levin, “Transparencies on Film,” 203. Mourouzis 6 currently holds the name “Comrade Stump.” The channel possesses over 66,000 subscribers, and boasts over ten million total views.18 Here, Siegfried Kracauer’s writings on film production serve as a lens with which to view this specific manifestation of the Trump phenomenon. He writes that “The real world is only one of many possibilities that can be moved back and forth; the game would remain incomplete if one were to accept reality as a finished product.”19 He elaborates further on the disjoint nature of film production, claiming that “The objects that have been liberated from the larger context are now reinserted into it, their isolation effaced and their grimace smoothed over… It is a speckling of images that stem from numerous locations and initially remain unconnected. Their sequence does not follow the order of the represented events… The meaning of the plot emerges only in the finished film.”20 Kracauer’s words accurately describe the production of these videos; their general form consists a short introductory sequence followed by various, context-free clips of Donald Trump “stumping” – in essence, rebuking, or in many cases, outright insulting – his opponents. Through their state as an amalgamation of various unrelated images of Trump, these films serve an end beyond that of the real world, not limiting themselves to Trump’s arguments against his opponents, but rather elevating his persona to an unreal, yet still meaningful and influential, state of existence.
Benjamin echoes this sentiment when he writes (in consideration of film editing techniques based on Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of montage21) that “the way each single image is understood
18 “Comrade Stump,” YouTube, 28 May 2017, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoWIVzxp6oLjsGMGuzzmxig. 19 Siegfried Kracauer, “Calico-World,” in The Mass Ornament Weimar Essays, ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 283. 20 Ibid., 287. 21 Eisenstein himself writes that the very nature of art “is a conflict between natural existence and creative tendency. Between organic inertia and purposeful initiative.” He elaborates further by tying this into montage, making the claim that “this form is most suitable for the expression of ideologically pointed theses.” Sergei Eisenstein, “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form,” in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. Jay Leyda (New York: Meridian Books, 1969), 46/62. Mourouzis 7 seems prescribed by the sequence of all the preceding images.”22
The problematic nature of Trump meme culture can also be attributed to participants’ tendencies toward fascist ideology. Alt-right subculture is often criticized as racist, and parallels are drawn between their platform and the platform of National Socialism; while it is difficult to substantiate that their aims are tantamount, the tendencies of their supporters seem indeed quite similar. Adorno characterizes these supporters as “A breed of men… that hungers for the compulsion and restriction imposed by the absurd persistence of domination.”23 The effects of this sentiment is only magnified by the rapid, anonymous exchange of information facilitated by the internet. Indeed, Adorno addresses this aspect of the fascist dynamic in Late extra, writing that “Faithlessness and lack of identity, pathic subservience to situations, are induced by the stimulus of newness, which, as a mere stimulus, no longer stimulates.”24 The “newness” Adorno discusses is connected to the nature of Trump’s candidacy; the billionaire businessman had never held public office, and often touted the merit of being a Washington outsider while proclaiming his central campaign message of “Drain the Swamp.”25
The general movement of the alt-right is, similarly, authoritarian in its ideology; r/The_Donald’s official rules seem to endorse ideological homogeneity, as they dictate ““No dissenters or S.J.W.s,” as in social justice warriors. “Concern trolling,” or questioning views expressed on the subreddit, is also banned.”26 Adorno discusses this phenomenon in the aphorism Passing muster, writing:
22 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 108. 23 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 123. 24 Ibid., 238. 25 In addition to his claims of being a “Washington outsider” and touting a platform of election and lobbying reform, Trump also broke with tradition in many other ways, such as questioning the legitimacy of the election process and refusing to release his tax returns. Trevor Hughes, “Trump calls to ‘drain the swamp’ of Washington,” USA Today, 18 October 2016, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/2016/10/18/donald-trump-rally- colorado-springs-ethics-lobbying-limitations/92377656/. 26 Christine Lagorio-Chafkin, “Reddit and the God Emperor.” Mourouzis 8
Every differing opinion appears on the system of co-ordinates provided by the pre-
decided purposes without which the practical man is lost, as tiresome resistance,
sabotage, intrigue; all agreement, though it may stem from the basest interests, becomes
support, something of use, a testimony of alliance…This way of reacting, however, the
pattern of all administration and ‘personnel policy,’ tends of its own accord, and in
advance of any education of the political will or commitment to exclusive programmes,
towards Fascism.27
The fascist tendencies of the alt-right and r/The_Donald are indeed manifest in their actions against dissenting opinions, evident in the fact that “A favorite tactic was to direct Trump fans to push deliberately dumb or offensive posts to the front page of Reddit and then laugh at the backlash when users took them seriously.”28 This phenomenon is not a surprise, however, given the nature of Trump himself; it is noted that he “has acknowledged pushing his opponent’s buttons as part of a broader strategy to attract attention.”29 This is further reinforced by the alt- right community’s focus – indeed, reliance – on humor as a critical element of their meme campaign. Internet memes inherently possess a humorous, entertaining element, and their role in what is essentially a marketing campaign – advertising for the candidacy of Donald Trump – is criticized by Adorno and his colleague Max Horkheimer, who write that “Amusement itself becomes an ideal, taking the place of the higher values it eradicates from the masses by repeating them in an even more stereotyped form than the advertising slogans paid for by private
27 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 131. 28 Benjy Sarlin, “How an Army of Pro-Donald Trump Trolls Are Taking Over Reddit,” NBC News, 14 April 2016, http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/how-army-pro-donald-trump-trolls-are-taking-over-reddit-n556036. 29 The article goes on to quote Trump as saying that “I do love provoking people… I love competition, and sometimes competition is provoking people.” Indeed, Trump’s rebukes of opposing candidates, often taking the form of humorous, yet fallacious attacks, are the central focus of the aforementioned “Can’t Stump the Trump” video series. Ibid. Mourouzis 9 interests.”30 Memes, as utilized by the alt-right subculture, epitomize what Adorno and
Horkheimer hold to be one of the fatal flaws of the modern culture industry. This is due in part to the phenomenon described by Walter Benjamin, who describes how “the distracted masses absorb the work of art into themselves. Their waves lap around it; they encompass it with their tide.”31 A problematic notion for the Frankfurt School, distraction (Zerstreuung) of the masses has seemed to result in a morphing of alt-right subculture into the very media it proliferates, rendering the two aspects – mass and art – one and the same.
The writings of the Frankfurt School also see applicability with regards to one of the most puzzling – and disconcerting – aspects of the 2016 campaign: the controversy over fake news. A new phenomenon that first emerged during the 2016 election cycle, “fake news” originally referred to deliberately misleading or downright false news articles proliferated on social media platforms, most notably Facebook.32 Donald Trump, however, took this term and ran with it; it soon became clear that he “appears to have a straightforward definition of fake news: Stories that are critical of him or his presidency are “fake,” while those that praise him are
“real.””33 This ambiguity of the truth, generated by Trump’s focus on fake news among other wild claims, was in fact a noteworthy topic for the thinkers of the Frankfurt School. Theodor
Adorno identifies this phenomenon fairly explicitly in Pseudomenos, writing that “Things have come to pass where lying sounds like truth, truth like lying. Each statement, each piece of news,
30 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 115. 31 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art,“ 119. The 32 Kim LaCapria, “Snopes’ Field Guide to Fake News Sites and Hoax Purveyors,” Snopes, 6 March 2017, http://www.snopes.com/2016/01/14/fake-news-sites/. 33 Petra McGillen, “How the techniques of 19th-century fake news tell us why we fall for it today,” NiemanLab, 11 April 2017, http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/04/how-the-techniques-of-19th-century-fake-news-tell-us-why-we-fall- for-it-today/. Mourouzis 10 each thought has been pre-formed by the centres of the culture industry.”34 In the case of Trump, however, this dynamic is somewhat flipped; it is he who launches pre-formed attacks on pre- formed mainstream news, and “This attack on careful, orderly, prescribed culture is what happens when the culture stops talking about real things – at least what a significant part of the country regards as real and important. Or it is… a sinister onslaught against enlightenment itself.”35 Indeed, this notion played a critical role in Trump’s domination of the media; Adorno goes on to explain the power dynamic at play when truth and lies come into conflict:
The confounding of truth and lies, making it almost impossible to maintain a
distinction… marks the victory in the field of logical organization of the principle that
lies crushed on that of battle. Lies have long leg: they are ahead of their time. The
conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power, a process that truth itself
cannot escape if it is not to be annihilated by power, not only suppresses truth as in earlier
despotic orders, but has attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false,
which the hirelings of logic were in any case diligently working to abolish.36
This interplay paints an accurate picture of both the effectiveness and allure of fake news to
Trump as a tool of influence; his profession to having the ‘true truth’ lent him a type of power that other candidates could not draw upon. In reality, it is not surprising that this phenomenon occurred; it made sense to Trump, as a Republican coming off of eight years of a Democratic president, to appeal to “the damaged collective narcissism” of his supporters – a sentiment which
“lies in wait of being repaired and seizes upon anything that brings the past into agreement with the narcissistic desires, first in consciousness, but that it also, whenever possible, construes
34 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 108. 35 Michael Wolff, “The Trump Establishment’s Cultural Significance, Explained,” Newsweek, 9 January 2017, http://www.newsweek.com/trump-establishment-cultural-significance-explained-540213. 36 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 109. Mourouzis 11 reality itself.”37
Trump’s continued pursuit of power – both over the mainstream media, the election cycle, and ultimately, the presidency – resulted in the utter annihilation of truth in American society. Indeed, this seemed to almost be a central strategy that contributed to his ultimate success; by the time he had won the Republican nomination, it had become clear that “Trump’s attacks on the media served to say that his language, his expressiveness, his ability to connect with the audience was more potent than the media’s… The media, in thrall to the culture establishment – and signed on to its cultural rules and concerns (hence its Pussygate shock) – was inauthentic and he was the real thing.”38 Trump’s insistence on spreading falsehoods reflects his narcissistic nature, and the morphing of this falsehood first into ‘truth’ for himself before filtering down to his followers; Adorno addresses this phenomenon when he writes that “In the forgetting of what has scarcely transpired there resonates the fury of one who must first talk himself out of what everyone knows, before he can then talk others out of it as well.”39
Donald Trump’s ambiguous yet authoritarian ideology has clearly lent itself to distortion of the truth; he has chosen one side of a coin presented by Adorno and Horkheimer, who argue ideology “is split between the photographing of brute existence and the blatant lie about its meaning, a lie which is not articulated directly but drummed in by suggestion.”40 In this regard, blatant lie seems to have taken precedence, and is indeed not directly articulated by Trump, but rather insinuated or proliferated through alt-right meme culture.41 The nature of this phenomenon
37 Theodor W. Adorno, “The Meaning of Working Through the Past,” 96. 38 Michael Wolff, “The Trump Establishment’s Cultural Significance.” 39 Theodor W. Adorno, “The Meaning of Working Through the Past,” 92. 40 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry,” 118. 41 Perhaps the best example of this is President Trump’s rebuke of a CNN reporter by proclaiming “You are fake news!” during a White House press conference. While not directly addressing any specific piece of information or news article, President Trump’s statement suggests to the public that CNN is an unreliable and misleading news source. “‘You are fake news!’ – Trump blackballs CNN’s Acosta,” YouTube, RT, 11 January 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IDF-8khS3w. Mourouzis 12 is further articulated by Adorno in his writings on film as he describes how “In order to capture the consumers and provide them with substitute satisfaction, the unofficial, if you will, heterodox ideology must be depicted in a much broader and juicier fashion than suits the moral of the story; the tabloid newspapers furnish weekly examples of such excess.”42 Online fake news outlets are the modern-day manifestation of these tabloid newspapers, but ultimately go even a step further, going beyond “juicier fashion” and “excess” into the realm of the pure fantasy. This profound distortion of the truth can also be related to Kracauer’s discussion of film and distraction; the proliferation of fake news reflects his idea that “Truth is threatened only by the naïve affirmation of cultural values that have become unreal and by the careless misuse of concepts such as personality, inwardness, tragedy, and so on.”43 Pro-Trump fake news affirms the cultural values of the alt-right, and in doing so, threatens truth on the broad scale of American society.
The meme-based culture of the mass and the proliferation of fake news are not, however, the only logical derivations of the Frankfurt School’s writings with bearing on the Trump phenomenon; perhaps the most key element of this cultural experience is the culturally- constructed persona of Donald Trump himself. Georg Simmel, a sociologist and philosopher whose work informed the developments of the Frankfurt School, notes how “The carrier of man’s values is no longer the “general human being” in every individual, but rather man’s qualitative uniqueness and irreplaceability.”44 While originally an ideal of the Romantic movement, the struggle of this ideal with the metropolis of modernity serves only to highlight its importance with regards to Donald Trump. Indeed, Trump seems to embody this principle, as his
42 Theodor W. Adorno, “Transparencies on Film,” 201. 43 Siegfried Kracauer, “Cult of Distraction,” in The Mass Ornament Weimar Essays, ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 326. 44 Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1950), 423. Mourouzis 13 supporters have built what is almost akin to a cult of personality around his persona.
A strong surface indicator of this phenomenon is the emergence of the title “God
Emperor” used to describe Trump. Though the title’s exact origins with regards to Trump are unclear (it seems to be derived “variously from God Emperor characters in the science fiction series Dune and a tabletop game called “Warhammer 40,000.””45), the term proliferated widely on r/The_Donald and has even come to be used by several high-profile conservative/alt-right pundits, including Ann Coulter46 and Milo Yiannapoulos,47 and the eponymous Facebook page currently boasts nearly 300,000 likes.48 The use of the title God Emperor not only serves to facilitate the pseudo-cult of personality, but also is a clear reflection of the Frankfurt School’s writings on the fascist figure as a historical phenomenon:
Authoritarian personalities identify themselves with real-existing power per se, prior to
any particular contents. Basically, they possess weak egos and therefore require the
compensation of identifying themselves with, and finding security in, great collectives…
It is due rather to the identity of those conformists49 – who before the fact already have a
connection to the levers of the whole apparatus of political power – as potential followers
45 Nico Pitney, “Some Donald Trump Supporters Are Now Calling Him ‘God Emperor,’” The Huffington Post, 29 July 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-god-emperor-creepy- reddit_us_579a6970e4b08a8e8b5d38b5. 46 Scott Morefield, “Ann Coulter calls Trump ‘Emperor-god’ on ‘The View,’” BizPac Review, 2 May 2017, http://www.bizpacreview.com/2017/05/02/ann-coulter-calls-trump-emperor-god-view-havent-hired-woman-yet- 483598. 47 “Milo Yiannopoulos: “I’m referring to the God Emperor [Trump],”” YouTube, God Emperor Trump, 25 March 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUNRQ6aZijk. 48 “God Emperor Trump,” Facebook, accessed 29 May 2017, https://www.facebook.com/GodEmperorTrump/. 49 Politico reporter Matthew MacWilliams identified through a national poll that “education, income, gender, age, ideology and religiosity had no significant bearing on a Republican voter’s preferred candidate.” He came to the conclusion that “Trump’s electoral strength – and his staying power – have been buoyed, above all, by Americans with Authoritarian inclinations.” This phenomenon is in line with Adorno’s notion that the conformists – in this case, authoritarian-inclined voters – have “a connection to the levers of the whole apparatus of political power.” Matthew MacWilliams, “The One Weird Trait That Predicts Whether You’re a Trump Supporter,” Politico, 17 January 2016, http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/01/donald-trump-2016-authoritarian-213533. Mourouzis 14
of totalitarianism.50
This explains how Trump has developed the near-narcissistic ego that he possesses; it is a result of his conformist supporters and the security provided to Trump by this collective.
The construction of this aura of power around Trump by means of the collective power of his supporters informed both his staying power as a cultural/media icon and his ultimate success as a presidential candidate. This collective power is represented well by a r/The_Donald moderator’s post celebrating Trump’s victory: “How does it feel, centipedes? The God Emperor said that we would get tired of winning. Are you tired of winning yet? Feel vindicated, centipedes. It’s over and there is nothing they can do about it. We are the future.”51 Drawing upon slang language indecipherable to the layperson,52,53 this statement speaks to the collective power won by the alt-right community over the course of Trump’s campaign. It also reflects the power of the alt-right, pro-Trump community over Trump himself, a dynamic illustrated by
Walter Benjamin with regards to the screen actor:
While he stands before the apparatus, he knows that in the end he is confronting the
masses. It is they who will control him. Those who are not visible, not present while he
executes his performance, are precisely the ones who will control it. This invisibility
heightens the authority of their control… the cult of the audience reinforces the
50 Theodor W. Adorno, “The Meaning of Working Through the Past,” 94-95. 51 Christine Lagorio-Chafkin, “Reddit and the God Emperor.” 52 “Centipedes” is a term used by r/The_Donald users to refer to Trump supporters, and is derived from the aforementioned “Can’t Stump the Trump” video series. Patrick Howell O’Neill, “BTFO: How to speak like a fanatical Donald Trump Supporter,” The Daily Dot, 2 May 2016, https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/trump-centipede- btfo-cockold/. 53 This statement also draws upon a phrase uttered by Trump in a speech at a rally in 2015; “winning” subsequently became one of the central tenets of Trump’s platform and has been widely utilized by pro-Trump communities. Ian Schwarz, “Trump: “We Will Have So Much Winning If I Get Elected That You May Get Bored With Winning,” Real Clear Politics, 9 September 2015, http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2015/09/09/trump_we_will_have_so_much_winning_if_i_get_elected_that_ you_may_get_bored_with_winning.html#!. Mourouzis 15
corruption by which fascism is seeking to supplant the class consciousness of the
masses.54
One sees how the situation is ultimately akin to that of a Teufelskreis, in which the masses execute some degree of control over the authoritarian figure of Trump, proliferating his authoritarian ideology, while at the same time falling victim to the corruption propagated by his ideology of fascism.
This Trumpian ideology is indeed a critical element in his cultivated persona, and is seen in many different aspects of the Trump phenomenon. One aspect is that of the pro-Trump community’s ideological intolerance of dissenting thought, which Adorno writes about in
Passing muster as a consciousness that “makes its own regression to the behavior patterns of the child, which either likes things or fears them. The a priori reduction to the friend-enemy relationship is one of the primal phenomena of the new anthropology. Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.”55 Indeed, the alt-right relies heavily on ad hominem-style discrediting of its opponents, evident in their prolific use of the word cuck as “an insult against virtually anyone whom they deem weak or spineless… Cuck is applied to almost all of Trump’s political opponents, be they Clinton supporters, liberals, the
Republican establishment, civil-rights activists, Cruz supporters, pro-immigrant activists, social justice warriors, and almost anyone who doubts the Donald.”56 This intolerance to dissenting opinion is a further reflection of the fascist nature of the Trump phenomenon – indeed, as
Benjamin writes, this black-and-white mentality was a key definition of authoritarianism for Carl
54 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 113. 55 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 132. 56 The insult itself is derived from the term cuckold, “a derisive term for a man whose wife sleeps with other people.” Patrick Newell O’Neill, “BTFO.” Mourouzis 16
Schmitt, the philosopher of the State under the Nazi regime.57 The parallels, however, do not stop there. Trump supporters also use the term low energy to describe “any enemy of Trump” while “Any ally or act of support is “high energy.””58 A particularly grim comparison can be drawn here with Adorno’s claim that “Fascism was the absolute sensation: in a statement at the time of the first pogroms, Goebbels boasted that at least the National Socialists were not boring.”59 This dynamism becomes even clearer when Trump is viewed through the lens of the culture war his candidacy represented. The fact that Trump secured “passionate support from the voters most estranged from the social and demographic trends reshaping America, particularly blue-collar, older, non-urban, and evangelical whites”60 speaks to the tension inherent in what
Adorno refers to as “newness,” which “becomes mere evil in its totalitarian format, where all the tension between individual and society, that once gave rise to the category of the new, is dissipated.”61 The alienation of ‘low-energy cucks’ from the supporter base of Donald Trump is this “totalitarian format;” without dissenting opinions, the “tension between individual and society” is alleviated, paving the way for the degradation of newness into evil.
Finally, Trump’s attempt to paint himself as a high-energy, dynamic candidate is reflected in more tangible aspects of his campaign platform, specifically his political platform.
Benjamin writes that “History is the subject of a construction whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled full by now-time.”62 In this sense, Trump’s policy platform was reactionary, focusing fully on the Jetztzeit and generally disregarding historical precedent. This is
57 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 132. 58 Patrick Newell O’Niell, “BTFO.” 59 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 237. 60 Ronald Brownstein, “America’s Cultural Civil War,” The Atlantic, 15 September 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/americas-cultural-civil-war/500087/. 61 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 238. 62 Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Walter Benjamin Selected Writings Volume 4, 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 395. Mourouzis 17 evident in the key issues of his platform: swift and strong action against terrorist organization
ISIS, the construction of a wall to stem illegal immigration from Central and South America, and denial of climate change, amongst many other controversial positions.63 However, Trump’s campaign does actually address history in one particular way. Benjamin goes on to provide the example of the French Revolution in connection with fashion, writing that “The French
Revolution viewed itself as Rome incarnate. It cited ancient Rome exactly the way fashion cites a bygone mode of dress. Fashion has a nose for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is the tiger’s leap into the past. Such a leap, however, takes place in an arena where the ruling class gives the commands.”64 Trump’s citation is not of Ancient Rome, but rather of a mythical, past America; indeed, it is the central message of his campaign: Make
America Great Again. The intense longing – perhaps even mandate – to a return to a nostalgic yet ambiguous time in American history has been seen as problematic by many specifically because of its ambiguity: to what time is Mr. Trump actually referring? In his inaugural address,
Trump refers to five specific adjectives upon which his ideal America would be built: “Together, we will make America Strong… Wealthy… Proud… Safe… and yes, together, we will Make
America Great Again.”65 In the way of fashion, as Benjamin described, Trump utilizes these five topical ideals – closely tied in both with the proposals of his policy platform and a mythically better, bygone state of America – and, as the pinnacle of the ruling class, utilizes this leap into the past to construct his conception of the now-time and to paint himself as America’s one true savior.
63 Gerry Mulany, “Donald Trump on the Issues,” The New York Times, 16 June 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/us/politics/donald-trump-on-the-issues.html. 64 Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 395. 65 “Full text: 2017 Donald Trump inauguration speech transcript,” Politico, 20 January 2017, http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/full-text-donald-trump-inauguration-speech-transcript-233907. Mourouzis 18
Ultimately, exploring the Frankfurt School’s writings on cultural criticism and the politics of fascism in connection with the Donald Trump phenomenon – its ‘art,’ culture, and character – provides a clear explanation into Trump’s success in the 2016 U.S. Presidential
Election. The alt-right, pro-Trump movement utilized cultural phenomena and art forms, including images, film, and the internet, in the construction of a fascist ideology centered around its iconic figure: Donald Trump, their God Emperor. Ultimately, President Trump’s authoritarian ideology, rooted in problematic policies and discriminatory tendencies and which dictated the course of an unprecedentedly unique election cycle, prevailed; the course of the next four years is unpredictable to anyone. Fortunately, the Frankfurt School’s writings on culture act as the perfect lens with which to view and better understand just how this phenomenon occurred – and only through understanding can such occurrences be prevented in the future. The Frankfurt
School may not have known Trump was coming, but his domination of the 2016 Presidential
Election certainly would not have been a surprise.
Mourouzis 19
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