A Machine of Affirmations: Fascism in the Age of Trump

ABSTRACT

Nihilism in its classic Nietzschean sense—the ruins of all values—is the general condition of existence of Trumpism. In contrast to Noam Chomsky’s argument that Trump, while authoritarian, is not a fascist, this article analyzes Trumpism in relation to nihilism and argues that Trump is a machine of affirmations for the collapse of all values—democracy, equality, justice . . . caused by the profound alienation of labor in contemporary capitalism. The machinic affirmations produced by the Trump administrative apparatuses—Fox News, Republican National Committee, Newsmax, the Justice Department . . . —are given a political bond and a spiritual coherence by (a nihilistic) fascism. It is a fascism that replaces the “big words” with equally ground-less affirmations (“Make American Great Again”) but, like all fascism, fails to overcome capitalism’s devaluation of all values that has in the words of Marx and Engels, “drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.”

KEYWORDS:

• Fascism
• Marxism
• nihilism
• empiricism

Acknowledgements:

An earlier version of this essay appeared in Left Voice. https://www.leftvoice.org/trump-fascism-and-the-metaphysics-of-democracy.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See Twitter, @HawleyMO, November 3, 2020. “We Are a Working Class Party Now. That’s the Future.” Accessed January 12, 2023. https://twitter.com/hawleymo/status/1323835709753593858?lang = en.

2 See Twitter, @profwolff, January 8, 2021. “What Was Seen in the Capitol Building of Washington on January 6 Was Another Manifestation of Angry Working Class People.” Accessed January 12, 2023. https://twitter.com/profwolff/status/1347740376912650240.

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Rob Wilkie

Rob Wilkie is Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. He is the author of The Digital Condition (Fordham UP) and co-editor of Human, All Too (Post)Human (Lexington Books). He recently co-edited a special issue on Marx’s speeches for the journal Nineteenth-Century Prose and is currently working on a book on the humanities and the ontological turn.