Trump and Technofascism: The Revenge of the White-Handed Beast

The question “why Trump?” is not meaningless. Just like the questions “why Hitler?” (also a pathologically lying hysteric) or “why Lenin?” (also a hysterical scoundrel). Trump is a familiar type, but the situation with him is different. The question is reasonably reformulated as: “why Trump again?”. After all, everything that is present in Trump today was also present in Trump during his first presidential term. Bob Woodward’s book “Fear: Trump in the White House” contains many characterizations given to Trump at that time by his closest circle.

Rex Tillerson, Secretary of State (2017-2018): “He’s a total moron“.

Reince Priebus, White House Chief of Staff (2017): “Zero capacity for empathy or pity“.

Stephen Bannon, Senior Advisor to Trump (2017): “He doesn’t like professors. He doesn’t like intellectuals. Trump is a guy who never went to classes. Never took notes. Never listened to lectures. The day before exams he comes back from the dorm at midnight, puts a cup of coffee in front of himself, takes your notes, memorizes as much as he can, and at 8:00 goes and gets a 'pass'. And that’s enough. He’s a billionaire“.

However, during Trump’s first term, there was no such mass transformation of US friends into enemies, no such rudeness from White House press secretaries, no such threats to the world order, which is still based on law rather than force. Many (including myself) then viewed America as a show in which American democratic institutions were shortening the hands of a madman whose charisma accidentally resonated with the moods of a crowd frightened by post-industrial reality. Discussions about Trump’s fascism certainly did not dominate, although some had already asked this question, from historian Timothy Snyder to TV host Rachel Maddow. In the second term, answers are given. Snyder: yes; Trump is a fascist, choosing enemies without real threat and using disinformation to divide society. Vladimir Pastukhov shares the same opinion (“This is fascism. Ordinary fascism. Adapted, light, pale, but retaining all its hereditary characteristics”).

And more and more intellectuals (well acquainted with Godwin’s law, which prohibits comparisons with Hitler) will ask themselves whether Trump’s regime should be classified as ur-fascist regimes (following Umberto Eco’s terminology).

So – why again the ur-fascist (?) Trump? Living in Germany, I cannot help but see parallels between him and Hitler. The fight against an independent press. The demand for absolute personal loyalty. Contempt for science (except that which serves war). Ignoring the law. Deification of force. Contempt for minorities. Only whereas Hitler succeeded in everything, Trump is so far only attempting a coup. The idea of a coincidence here does not hold. And I have one hypothesis that explains something.

In Trump’s first term, he had no support except the protest moods of the crowd. Speaking of the Republican Party (which, from a European perspective, is less a party and more an electoral coalition), Trump relied on it technically, but not ideologically. Woodward claims that in 2016 Trump did not expect to win. He assembled his cabinet chaotically, endlessly shuffling advisors whose opinions, if they differed from his own, immediately ceased to interest Trump. Therefore, Trump faced resistance not only from external institutions but also from the White House administration itself (Woodward amusingly describes how advisors horrified by Trump’s ideas hid necessary documents – and Trump immediately forgot about them).

In the second term, behind Trump’s back clearly emerges the face of Musk as a representative of a new class, or rather, a new special order, claiming to become the new architect of the world order. And Trump is needed as a battering ram, a master of chaos and destruction.

My assumption is that the presence of exactly such an extra-systemic order of destroyers of the old and builders of the new is an extremely important feature of fascist regimes, whether classical or “ur-”. Possibly even more important than the signs of Umberto Eco’s “eternal fascism”.

If we overlay the map of classical fascism’s spread on the map of Europe, we will see that before the start of World War II, anti-fascist countries in Europe were rather the exception. Fascism prevailed. From Portugal to the USSR, from Germany to Italy, from Spain to Croatia. In all these countries at the end of the 19th — beginning of the 20th century, phase civilizational transitions accompanied by revolutions were completed. In all these countries, the direct transition from monarchies to democracies failed. Fascism is the adolescent disease of transition. But in the UK and France there was no fascism because democratic transition happened long ago.

A charismatic leader, legitimized by the adoration of the crowd, is an important part of the culture of a failed civilizational transition. But behind this ersatz monarch always stood a political order, not only alien to the previous system (for the Buddenbrooks, the NSDAP was a party of uneducated upstarts) but confident in the exclusive right to build a new world. By racial purity or special national vision, esoteric or class (co)consciousness—it doesn’t matter. Members of the order are convinced that the future belongs to them because they alone can foresee and create it, even if all the old must be destroyed and annihilated. In this sense, Hitler’s circle is congruent with Stalin’s circle: one dreamed of a thousand-year Reich of the Aryan race, the other of communism on a planetary scale.

You see where I am going. To the circle of new millenarians from Silicon Valley. Well, if their understanding of computers, networks, Big Data, AI, applets has brought incredible, insane money (equal to the budgets of entire countries!), if they, like Musk in rocketry, work more efficiently than government offices, then isn’t the future theirs? Isn’t it? And let the old and inefficient perish, with all its bourgeois decencies and leftist games for the poor… And in the hastily made AI cartoon showing how Gaza gets better under Trump (covered with his golden statues), drawn by Elon Musk, he throws money into the crowd just like twenty years ago, teasingly, Pavel Durov really threw it into the crowd from his St. Petersburg office. What’s there to be shy about? Tomorrow belongs to me, as sang the blond boy from the Hitler Youth in the film “Cabaret”…

Here I must honestly admit the weakest point of my reasoning. I can talk not so much about the new ideological realities of the conditional Silicon Valley (I know only a little about them, and there is no single manifesto there), but about the reality of the temptation to turn technical and financial influence into political power. And this temptation is even reflected in the newly emerged word in the Valley: technoutopianism. Musk is undoubtedly both the face and the victim of this temptation. Yes, threatening to cut budgets of specific structures or promising to relocate a million Earthlings to Mars by 2040, Musk simply pulls numbers out of thin air. But in the network flow of his fantasies one thing is clearly traced. The previous life must be completely replaced by the one created by people like him, Musk. When Musk supports the idea of firing 3.4 million American teachers, replacing them with artificial intelligence, I shudder. They might really start firing.

It seems that the creation of “clubs of power” and special orders, when power (or money) suddenly and uncontrollably falls, is a pattern. For example, once Facebook managers who cashed out options created the secret club TNR250, The Nouveau Riche 250. Or take the transformation of Burning Man, the famous desert festival where up to 70 thousand crazy enthusiasts gathered. Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Page began to come there too. However, they were not ready to live in tents, and a luxury zone quickly appeared at Burning Man. It didn’t matter that this contradicted the original democracy.

Biologist Maria Kondratova (winner of the “Enlightener” award — 2024) also drew attention to another thing. Among IT industry leaders, formerly nerdy glasses-wearers, even billionaires, a fashion for neo-masculinity has spread. Zuckerberg participates in jiu-jitsu competitions and hunts boars with a bow. Back in 2023, he challenged the same Musk to a physical fight, with the Roman Colosseum considered as the venue. Durov pays as much attention to his body as to his business. This looks like somewhat painful hypercompensation, notes Kondratova, indicating serious mental problems. I would add that it looks like the revenge of the macho man, the white-handed beast, the unreflective Siegfried, only now with gadgets and applets in muscular hands. Who should be alien to the complex world of gender optics and the European-style fluctuating balance of social interests. But should be close to Trump’s world, where half-tones are destroyed with a single stroke of a pen…

In general, nothing new under the sun.

Robert Paxton, one of the leading historians of fascism, in “The Anatomy of Fascism” (2004) offers the following working definition of fascism: “A form of political behavior characterized by an obsessive preoccupation with public decline, compensated by a cult of unity, energy, and violence, in which a party of nationalist militants pursues goals of internal cleansing and external expansion“.

I’m saying: nothing new – despite gadgets and AI.