Current Events & Historical Events
(that's a pretty nondescript title but hopefully you'll keep reading because I think I have a point)
Part I: Trump Is Not Like Hitler. Trump Is Actually More Like Trump.
Returning to the opening passages of Karl Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte for inspiration may seem ironic by the time you reach the end of this section, but sometimes you just need a ladder to kick away when you’re done climbing it.
A lot of Marx’s point is embedded in the title. The title is also likely confusing to contemporary eyes. So, you may ask, who was Louis Bonaparte, what’s a Brumaire, and why did he have eighteen of them?
Louis Bonaparte was Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew. From 1848 to 1851, this nephew was president of the Second French Republic. But in late 1851, he did a coup and turned the Second French Republic into the Second French Empire with himself as emperor. His uncle had been First Consul in the First French Republic, but did a coup that turned the First French Republic into the First French Empire with himself as emperor. Uncle Napoleon did his coup on a date in the French Republican Calendar called the eighteenth of Brumaire in the Year VIII (but we might better understand as the ninth of November 1799).
When the first Napoleon did his coup, it was a tragedy. When his comparatively buffoonish nephew did his, it was a farce, according to a famous line Marx gets out of the way in the second sentence of his Eighteenth Brumaire. A little later on, Marx writes, “Tradition from all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”[1] The French Revolution of 1789 that Napoleon Bonaparte ended with his original, tragic coup drew from Roman history—he was “First Consul” but became an “emperor” to take one example. The revolution of 1848 that brought his nephew to power made frequent reference to that earlier French revolution of 1789.
We look for guidance and precedents. Marx compares this tendency to “a beginner studying a new language [who] always translates it back into his mother tongue.” However, “only when he can use it without referring back, and thus forsake his native language for the new, only then has he entered into the spirit of the new language, and gained the ability to speak it fluently.”[2]
There is currently no shortage of minute-long social media videos where someone tries to show which historical precedent we really need to look at to understand what sort of authoritarian Donald Trump is. Usually, it’s revealed that we’re living in a point-by-point and moment-by-moment recreation of Nazi Germany. January 6, 2021 was Trump’s Beer Hall Putsch and everything that followed since then has an exact corollary. Then another short video explains that he’s more like Mussolini and we’re reliving Italian Fascism. Or he’s not actually a fascist but more of a monarchist who wants absolute authority. Louis XIV said L’etat, c’est moi—I am the state. Trump’s just like that. Or maybe he’s exactly like the corrupt oligarchs who ran Eastern Europe after the Cold War. He’s running a mob-like syndicate through the state to enrich his friends and family while punishing his enemies.
But the historical, political, and economic conditions that produced Trump are different from every one of these examples. He’s greedy, vain, amoral, and vindictive. These are terrible human traits we see throughout history. He will be similar to other awful people who wielded power in awful ways. But a guy who somehow went bankrupt running casinos and saved his name and solvency through reality TV and tweeting relentlessly and then became the leader of a flailing empire with enough nuclear missiles to destroy every living thing on Earth is going to be a new version of greedy, vain, amoral, and vindictive.
It is important to note that it is “tradition” from past generations that “weighs like a nightmare” on the living. Marx analyzes the class divides and material circumstances that allowed Louis Bonaparte to make himself emperor, but sees that “traditions”—cultural touchstones and half-remembered figures from the past—weigh down our brains. There is a thing-in-itself behind our experience, but we interpret that thing through a language fit to describe past events. We misunderstand what’s actually happening because we lack the language to describe our new experience. The owl of Minerva usually flies at dusk, it turns out.
We are experiencing new contradictions and new possibilities. We now carry computers in our pockets that track our every move, but we can also send messages around the world in seconds. There has a been a revolution in communication, but a few billionaires own all the media. We are living through a tumultuous time mediated by systems and devices no one has seen before, undergoing endless changes in service agreements and privacy levels. Meanwhile, a well-funded but poorly trained federal militia that gets to ignore the Constitution is out on the streets executing anyone they find annoying. The U.S. military is already patrolling every other inch of the planet. The United States is not an empire trying to conquer the world. It already did that decades ago. But its control is weakening. There has never been a time like this. And it will never be repeated again, just like the times we keep comparing it to.
There are lessons we can learn from seeing past successes and failures when facing unjust institutions, but we are living a new drama that demands a new vocabulary. If we want to stop translating what we see back into languages we already know, we need to learn the language of the present.
Part II: So, Should We Just Ignore the Past and Push Forward into the Future?
If we can’t look back to find patterns to help us predict “their” next move, why study history at all? Well, it’s how we got where we are, and we’ll never understand what we’re standing on the edge of if we can’t see the trajectory that brought us here.
Take, for just one example, the revolutions of 1848 that brought Louis Bonaparte to the presidency. Even if we can’t find patterns and precedents, we can still learn something useful.
It was the “springtime of the peoples.” There were uprisings in favor of rights-based orders and constitutions all across Europe, from Hungary, to Italy, to Prussia, to Austria, to just about everywhere in between. By 1849, a strong counterrevolutionary movement shut it all down with very few obvious changes taking place. The French King abdicated and the archconservative Austrian Foreign Minister Klemens von Metternich went into exile, but there was little else anyone could point to as a real success.
However, a new type of nationalism became a major force in world history. In the “springtime of the peoples,” the “peoples” demanding representative institutions and constitutions needed to define themselves. Who were all these “peoples” demanding equal protection under the law? For instance, in 1848, there was an Italian peninsula, but Italy the country did not exist. Since the fall of the Western Roman Empire, it had been a patchwork of independent cities, duchies, and kingdoms, many under the rotating control of French kings, Spanish Hapsburgs, or the Holy Roman Empire. When Niccolò Machiavelli was a Florentine diplomat, Florence was besieging Pisa because they were in revolt against Florentine control, all while Cesare Borgia’s army had left the Papal States to conquer everyone else, the results of which depended on how long the King of France would take which side. This was not some sort of Italian civil war. There was no Italy, so these were just wars.
By 1848, the bottom of the Italian boot was The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, up north, the Kingdom of Lombardo-Venetia was part of the Austrian Hapsburg’s domain, and had been ever since the waning days of the original Napoleon’s world domination, which is to say, three decades or so. Sardinia joined Lombardo-Venetia in their fight against the Hapsburgs. Revolts occurred in the Papal States and Naples, while Machiavelli’s Florence was now within Tuscany, just south of the Duchies of Parma and Modena. It was a confusing mess.
To become a “people” that could demand independence, the revolutionaries of 1848 looked into the past to find proof that they were, in fact, “a people.” As Christopher Clark writes in Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-1849, “For patriots, the nation was emphatically not a new invention, but something inherited from the past, something unique but not arbitrary.”[3] In Italy, the “Risorgimento fed on a variety of meta-historical myths, focusing respectively on the pre-historical Etruscans, the ancient Romans, the medieval communes and so on.”[4] Creating national identities in 1848 was an act of collating, consolidating, and improvisationally inventing an imagined past based loosely on the actual past.
A lot of the “traditional clothes” of European nations we see at folk dances were invented by tailors in the 1840s grabbing various elements from the past and pushing them through contemporary styles and materials. The same was true of the “traditional” steps in the dances. It was this era that also saw the birth of the concept of the Italian nonna, a sweet grandmother maintaining traditional foods from long ago. They were out hunting for “traditions” from past generations.
These revolutionary patriots would also often seek a single language to help them stand together against foreign overlords. “Patriots confident in the superiority of their own national civilization sometimes expected the members of other groups to merge with them through a process of linguistic assimilation, seeing this not as an imposition but as the conferral of a benefit.”[5]
This emergent nationalism coalesced unevenly. Centuries of fighting up and down the Italian peninsula (for instance) created local resentments that outweighed disgust over foreign control. Many poor farmers understood themselves as imperial peasants of the Hapsburgs and distrusted these rich locals suddenly demanding they all fight a war together against the empire. National feeling “was an evolving field of awareness, a form of affiliation that had to live alongside others: religious commitments, regional and dynastic attachments, political visions.”[6]
The revolutions largely failed in their goals. Counterrevolutions left almost exactly the same people in charge as in 1847. But the power of “the nation” and “a people” as a unifying force began to get more potent. Prussian nationalists failed to get a constitution in 1848, but the conservative Otto von Bismarck could unify a German nation a few decades later. The revolutions of 1848 on the Italian peninsula are sometimes called The First War of Italian Unification. Both of these nations did their unifying in the early 1870s, and then ended up causing some real problems in the ensuing decades.
Nationalism emerged as a tool of “the good guys” fighting for universal rights and representative government against declining feudal despotism. It quickly transformed into a new tool of cruelty and oppression, with firm borders and an ancient and great “us” who has always existed and needs to violently defend itself against outside pollution and internal deviations.
It’s not like we need to look back and view Italian freedom fighters like Garibaldi and Mazzini as “bad all along.” They did what made sense to them in the times they inhabited. But they unleashed an idea of nations, peoples, and imagined traditions that created an awful situation that puts everyone on Earth in great danger.
We can look back at the tumult of 1848 and learn a lot about the present, not in how history is repeating itself, but in how we got where we are. 1848 is a big part of where nationalism came from. It’s just one example, used in part because it followed nicely from talking about the Eighteenth Brumaire. Understanding history helps us understand where we are. Why is the present the way it is? We will only write the poetry of the future if we speak the language of the present, and we’ll only become fluent if we know what we’re talking about.
[1] Mark Cowling and James Martin, eds., Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, (Post) Modern Interpretations (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 19.
[2] Ibid., 20.
[3] Christopher Clark, Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-1849 (New York: Random House, 2023), 142.
[4] Ibid., 141.
[5] Ibid., 147.
[6] Ibid., 156.