American hero or American Nero?

Look at the photo at the top of this article. What do you think was going through Trump’s mind at that moment on Saturday, when he was on the ground, having just been shot? What would have gone through your mind?

As I write this diary entry, things remain extremely fluid. We don’t yet know anything about the possible motivation of the would-be assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks. We have seen on social media absolutely disgusting reactions by some on the left, complaining that Trump survived. I’m not going to take those as normative of the left. We have heard many Democratic politicians denounce the act in strong terms. Good. Thank you.

It is possible that this near-death experience will open Trump to transforming grace.

Like many of you, however, I cannot help but wonder why the kind of people — respectable people, not TikTok loons — who have been saying over and over that Trump is an “existential threat” to democracy and to America (as Joe Biden did in February) are surprised that somebody took a shot at Trump. Here is a headline from a Vox story published July 1: “Democrats say Trump is an existential threat. They’re not acting like it.”

Well.

Whatever the motivation of the failed assassin, this was a monumental failure on the part of the Secret Service. How the hell does a gunman climb onto that roof and crawl into place, with multiple people in the crowd screaming, “He’s got a gun!” and trying to warn police, and squeeze off shots at Donald Trump?! There were snipers already in place for just such a possibility. Why were there no Secret Service agents on that roof to begin with? It’s an obvious platform for an assassin, were one to be present. The conspiracy theorists are already going wild on this point, and understandably so. I say “understandably” not to endorse a conspiracy theory, but to say this Secret Service failure gives natural rise to such speculation.

My thoughts as I was falling asleep on the first night, on the political and culture war fact pattern emerging:

• They wouldn’t leave evangelical Christian Jack Phillips alone to bake his cakes and run his business.
• They won’t let parents know if their children are transing themselves in school.
• They won’t let parents remove pornographic books from school libraries.
• They teach little children and teenage minors to hate everything normal — their families, their own bodies, even their very identities.
• They told us that the president of the United States was a Russian Manchurian (Siberian?) candidate and crippled his administration with these lies.
• They told us Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation, though they knew it was not.
• They lied to us about COVID and its origins.
• They told us that we couldn’t have even a semblance of a normal life because of COVID … unless we were going out onto the streets to protest racism or burn the cities down to honor George Floyd.
• “Mostly peaceful” riots.
• They have turned professional journalism into propaganda.
• For example, they ignored obvious signs of Joe Biden’s mental and physical decline into decrepitude, until he choked on live TV — and are now shocked, shocked that the White House deceived them.
• They tried to ruin as a bigot a high school kid who wore a MAGA hat on the National Mall and was set upon by a provocative left-wing activist.
• They have conspired to destroy institutions essential to running society by keeping out the accomplished and the meritorious, for the sake of letting in those who are incapable of doing the work but who possess the favored demographic profile.
• They have divided America and made us fear and loathe each other along racial lines.
• They have demonized white people — especially white males.
• They have destroyed statues and attempted to rewrite American history to reflect ideological convictions.
• They have led near-pogroms against Jews on elite American campuses.
• They secretly pressured, from senior government levels, a policymaking medical organization to abandon scientific considerations to eliminate lower limits on sexually and psychologically mutilating children.
• They passed laws in some states allowing the government to seize minor children from their uncooperative parents, for the sake of sexually and psychologically mutilating them.
• They are destroying women’s sports and making women everywhere more vulnerable to mentally unwell men who think they are women.
• They gaslit us into war in Iraq, and now they’ve gaslit us into an ongoing, unwinnable war against Russia, risking World War III for no plausible national interest.
• They are wrecking the military with “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” such that fewer normal men want to serve.
• They have frightened millions of Americans into silence over fear of cancellation.
• They have left the back door into the United States wide open for migrants, including Hezbollah fighters, likely Chinese agents, and others.
• They shipped America’s manufacturing base overseas and blame Americans for being unhappy with their economic prospects.
• They deregulated Wall Street, and when it blew up in 2008, they managed to avoid punishing anyone for it.
• They failed in Iraq and Afghanistan, but no senior military commander lost his job for it, even though the 2014 Afghanistan Papers report revealed that the Pentagon didn’t know what it was doing and didn’t care.
• All those American soldiers, physically and psychologically maimed by the invasion of Iraq on false pretenses, and by the stupidity of trying to build a liberal democracy in Afghanistan — swept under the rug.
• In a country where you have to show ID to buy beer, last week they tried to defeat a law that would require people to show ID proving they are citizens in order to vote.
• They declared that Americans who dissent from all this are on the “far right” and might be “domestic terrorists” — while mollycoddling Antifa and violent leftists.
• They put Trump through a show trial in Manhattan on flimsy charges to make him easier to remove as a rival to Joe Biden
• And now … they have tried to assassinate Trump.

Who is “they”? The ruling class. The people in power — including some Republicans. It wasn’t Democrats who led the invasions, nor only the Clinton Democrats who bent over for Wall Street. I’m talking about the people who benefit from the system as it is.

No, I’m not saying they (“they”) conspired to kill Donald Trump. This kid who shot Trump is certainly not part of the American elite (though he did appear in a BlackRock commercial when he was in high school). What I’m describing is how the accumulation of these facts makes me feel. I see an order there — an order that does not imply design or conspiracy but rather a collection of facts about events that have created within me a deep disgust with conditions in America today.

So when bloodied but unbowed, Trump shouted, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” on Saturday, I tensed up inside like a fist — and I don’t think it will unclench until Election Day.

And it should not.

An American Caesar for an American empire?

We have moved into the realm of the mythic. I remember arguing with my dad in 1984 about Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale. I was an ardent high school liberal who thought I would win my dad over by showing him that on the things he professed to believe, the Democratic candidate’s positions were closer to his beliefs than Reagan’s. Daddy just looked at me like I had lost my mind. Of course he was voting Reagan. Everybody he knew was. It frustrated me, because I thought Reagan must have some kind of eerie powers of seduction. O sweet Reason! I was so young and had so much to learn. I was too green to understand what Reagan meant mythologically to many Americans then. And I was too young to understand why that mattered in politics.

I’m not saying it’s good or bad. I’m just saying that it is. It can be either good or bad, depending on the context. I know now that Reagan’s image revealed his character as a leader. People who reacted to Reagan as a mythic incarnation of an American past saw something real in him that I did not and could not. In the age of visual, electronic media, that means a lot. That means everything, in fact.

Just as we Americans have the habit of lying to ourselves about the reality of social class in our country, we also have the habit of lying to ourselves about empire.

We all know about the famous instance when people who listened to the Nixon-Kennedy debate on the radio thought Richard Nixon had won, but those who saw it on TV thought it was a John F. Kennedy triumph. They saw how suave and confident JFK looked, versus Nixon and his flop sweat, and that was the story. In that spirit, this meme — there are hundreds of them like this making the rounds — is why the election is over.

So what will Trump do with his power once he’s re-elected? I think the answer has a lot to do with what went through his mind in that photo at the top and how he has processed what happened to him.

In the best-case scenario, he will rise from his symbolic death on that Pennsylvania stage and become an American hero. He will turn to God, opening himself up to a seriousness of purpose and a humility that he has never known, and combine that with stern resolution to “drain the swamp” at last.

I have always imagined Trump a rich-boy bully and coward. I would not have tagged him as someone who could rise up after having been shot and behave the way he did. That told us something about his character. It is possible that this near-death experience will open Trump to transforming grace. It is possible that his ego died on that stage and that he will make of himself the man America needs to confront and defeat all the things on my list above. I had been hearing that Trump had been working behind the scenes to moderate the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. I hope now that having nearly been murdered concentrates his focus and hardens him against the people who have been doing all these horrible things to America over these last two decades.

But there is also the possibility that he will make himself into an American Nero — an emperor whose power is in service to his massive ego. A leader who regards himself as a demigod and who doesn’t govern as much as rules. In other words, Trump could become what his enemies have always said he is: an American Caesar. Graham Pardun writes:

If ever there is an American Byzantium (and I still don’t want there to be), our American Constantine will be revealed suddenly, in a moment like this: A colossus-builder, with ego as colossal as the sun, one foot in Christian or at least Christianized waters, and two hands and two feet clamoring like the pagan strongman of old, to the top of a human dogpile — chin up, defiant, newly awakened to the real reality of divine protection.

It is fashionable now to refer to the West as the “Global American Empire." An empire requires an emperor, which the United States doesn’t have. Yet since the end of World War II, America has behaved much like an empire, though she has been a liberal democracy at home. If you, my fellow American, doubt that America is an empire, come live in Europe for a while, standing outside our country and beholding its material and cultural might.

Ironically, just as that power is waning on the global stage, so too are the domestic conditions that made it possible for the United States to sustain itself as a liberal democracy. In other words, just as America’s empire is crumbling, so too is its republic. As we know from history, it was the demise of the Roman Republic that turned Rome into an empire. America found itself to be a de facto empire after World War II, mostly because there was nobody else but the Soviets. Just as we Americans have the habit of lying to ourselves about the reality of social class in our country, we also have the habit of lying to ourselves about empire.

We have long told ourselves that all we want is for democracy to spread around the world — and most of us are not being cynical when we say that. But foreigners can see through the pretense. True, the American empire has been in most respects a beneficial one (versus, say, the Soviet empire). But come on. It’s an empire.

I commend to you this powerful essay by Mary Harrington, the first of a three-part examination of French philosopher Renaud Camus’ thought. She begins by explaining what he means by “the Great Replacement.” As she observes, a population can be replaced by nonviolent means. Harrington says that if you go to Spain’s Costa del Sol, which is very popular with British tourists, you will find that the built environment and the norms there have been Anglicized to accommodate the massive numbers of Brits who visit there. Here’s Harrington:

On the Costa del Sol, as elsewhere, there is nothing intentionally sinister about this. It’s an organic effect of two peoples coexisting in the same space. Historically, though, changes of people in a place have tended to prompt resistance from the people already in that place. For Camus, the essence of “replacism” is that it anaesthetises such pushback, by denying that any aggregate patterns can be ascribed to a “people” — or insisting that, if such things exist, they are at best unimportant or indefinable.

For replacism, then, “peoples” are not a thing. There are only human individuals, interchangeable regardless of origin, history, heritage, upbringing, ethnicity, language, and so on. And, Camus argues, if you cling stubbornly to the belief that peoples are a thing — eppur si muove — you will face the rhetorical bludgeon he describes as “the second career of Adolf Hitler,” in which any residual acknowledgement of any shared characteristics of any people will be smeared as tantamount to Nazism.

If this is true, though, cultures can have no content. If, as Camus puts it, “a veiled woman with a shaky command of our language, entirely ignorant of our culture” can say to “a native Frenchman with a passionate interest in Roman churches, the finer points of vocabulary and syntax, Montaigne, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Burgundy Wine, and Proust and whose family has for several generations lived in the same little valley of the Vivrais […] ‘I am just as French as you are,’ it follows that ‘being French is nothing.’”

Harrington goes on to explain that the Great Replacement is required by the Global American Empire. She draws in part on the analysis of the leading Chinese intellectual Wang Huning and his book “America Against Itself ” (1993):

In a propositional nation, one of whose governing assumptions has long been that people should be treated solely as individuals, Wang observes that “there is generally no power that can break through faith in individualism and the barriers [surrounding] the private sphere. [But] science and technology have this power.”

To recap, then: what Camus calls “replacism” has flattened and obliterated European cultures, in the name of a “hyperdemocratic” egalitarianism whose moral force derives from the longing to obliterate friend/enemy distinctions. This means no rule is possible save by “the spirit of technicity”: the managerial rule of technology, that promises ultimate relief from the political. And, as Camus observes in “ The Great Deculturation,” this clears all before it, making room only for the free operations of money:

“Chateaubriand believed there were secret affinities between equality and tyranny. There are others between hyperdemocracy […] and the reign of money, submission to the powers of money, and avaricious docility before the laws of the market.”

Taking these implications together, we can conclude that Camus is right to speak of a “genocide by substitution” powered by colonial rule. But attributing this to African or Islamic migrants is a mistake. Mass migration from the Global South into Europe is an effect of replacism, not its cause. The real power driving genocide by substitution throughout Europe is the American empire.

This is, for me, an uncomfortable conclusion. I have a great many friends and professional connections in the United States. But we can perhaps be more specific: the driving force of replacism is not individual Americans or even the legacy American people: that is, the historic, cumulative American culture and folkways. America herself contains many thinkers critical of these forces, and many Americans would likely be appalled by the thought that their nation’s governing ideology is centrally implicated in the destruction of everything that makes the Old World enticing, distinctive, and awe-inspiring to the New. But replacism drives that aspect of American imperial hegemony that has become identified with the “spirit of technicity,” with post-political managerialism, and with the aspiration to radical, universal neutralisation and depoliticisation expressed by these forces. Replacism is also now contested in America itself, not least in disputes over how to manage the southern border.

In Europe, the desire to free the continent from the passions that brought on two catastrophic wars in the 20th century led people to surrender sovereignty to Brussels, which epitomizes the Spirit of Technicity. The rage the Brusselistas feel in the face of Viktor Orban’s refusal to allow Hungary to be assimilated is genuine. Orban’s insistence on Hungarian sovereignty and Hungarian distinctiveness is a flat refutation of the Spirit of Technicity.

I don’t think Americans can fully appreciate how powerful a force Brussels (a synecdoche for the Spirit of Technicity, including post-political managerialism) is in Europe. We tend to think of it as merely reproducing American federalism in Europe. But that’s not true. Everywhere Brussels dominates, you see the spirits of the local cultures under siege.

In part three of her analysis, Harrington discusses the Great Replacement as it applies to human bodies, via surrogacy, transgenderism, and transhumanism. And this, she concludes, is why the United States flies the Pride flag over its embassies:

Thus the seemingly quixotic American fixation on “queering the Donbas,” as Helen Andrews put it, makes perfect sense when you grasp that “globo homo economicus” is the replacist subject par excellence, and the America-led international order is the replacist empire. In “Elegy for Enoch Powell,”Camus characterises this order as “the purely managerial conception of the world and the management of the human park […], economism, financialisation, Davos, and davocracy, this administration of the world by Great Financiers, banks, multinationals, robots, business, Big Tech.”Of course the most potent moral symbol for this order’s vision of the good should be promoted worldwide, at gunpoint if necessary.

It’s not a coincidence that speaking to this is politically taboo….

American democracy is managerial liberalism

OK, I’ve gotten far from the original topic, which is whither Trump. The reason for this excursion is that nearly all the things that people like me have come to hate about the existing American order are so deeply embedded in the system and within its institutions that it is hard to imagine how they can be removed by normal means.

In Europe, “democracy” is when the people of a given country vote the way Brussels wants them to. Though Viktor Orban’s party wins by comfortable majorities, Hungary is not a democracy, according to Brussels. Similarly, Trump is an “existential threat” to democracy, according to Joe Biden and the ruling class.

When you have an ideology that has captured the ruling class and its institutions, then you must wonder what we are supposed to defend.

If by “democracy” you mean managerial liberalism, the Davocracy, and so forth, well then, I wish Trump were a threat to it! He has not really been so far. Maybe, though, that will change. The thing is, I wonder if the corruption has so set into the system that it can’t reform. This was the problem of the late Roman Republic: Its forms could no longer solve the problems of its people and for various reasons could not reform themselves to be fit for purpose. Livy, the historian of the late Roman Republic, observed that “we can endure neither our vices nor their cure.” Soon enough, Rome had a Caesar.

Rome had a Caesar because Julius Caesar recognized the weaknesses of the republic and saw the opportunity there to seize power. The republic had already begun to break down by the time Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 B.C. The civil wars that followed destroyed it. If Julius Caesar had not existed, some other figure like him would have arisen.

In our own time, and at a very small level, consider El Salvador’s Caesar-like President Nayib Bukele. El Salvador’s democracy had proven impotent to solve the intractable problems of that country, most of all the de facto rule by gangs that effectively imprisoned all the decent people of the country. When he took power, Bukele dealt decisively with the gangs: He put them all in prison. Bukele is massively popular now and was just re-elected with a percentage of the vote that you normally don’t see outside North Korea. Even though Bukele was elected, you’d have to be blind not to recognize that he is a Caesarian figure.

What is hard for Americans today to understand is that liberal democracy is not necessarily the best form of government for all peoples. Recall that when George W. Bush was preparing to invade Iraq and impose liberal democracy on that country, some people warned that the Iraqis were not ready for it, having neither the institutions nor the shared mentality necessary to make liberal democracy work. The neocons’ response was to race-bait: Are you saying that the Arabs don’t deserve democracy or aren’t capable of it?

That tended to shut down debate, given the moral sensitivities of 21st-century Americans. The claim was, yes, the Iraqis are not capable of liberal democracy, not because of their ethnicity, but because of their cultural development. Liberal democracy emerged out of a specific historical experience: that of Western Europeans in general and the English-speaking peoples in particular. I’m fond of quoting John Adams, a founding father, when he said that the U.S. Constitution is made for “a moral and religious people” and is inadequate to the governing of any other. His point was that to live in the kind of ordered liberty that the Constitution guarantees, the American people must have a significant degree of internalized order and self-restraint. If they don’t, the Constitution won’t work.

Does post-Christian, post-1960s America still have those internal characteristics that make liberal democracy viable? I doubt it. Heaven knows I don’t want that to be the case, but … well, look around you. The thing is, I think many of these problems could be addressed by normal liberal democratic politics. But why aren’t they being addressed? What is it about us that has resulted in this demoralization and depoliticization? That’s a subject for another time.

My point here is that for all the talk about the Global American Empire, domestically it appears that we are well into a late republic phase of our history. When you have an ideology that has captured the ruling class and its institutions, that actually destroys the institutions and practices needed to keep society running, then you must wonder what we are supposed to defend.

I spoke by phone the other night to an American friend who is living in Europe this summer doing a course of study. She told me she was at a wedding over the weekend and met an older American man who said he is a retired U.S. military officer. He has become deeply alienated from what the U.S. military has become and from the imperialism of U.S. foreign policy. According to my friend, this man described with self-disgust the things he saw and did in Afghanistan and said that if foreign troops did that to us, we would hate them too.

That’s one anecdote. I have plenty of them, many of them having come to me from conservative readers who have lost their faith in America’s leadership elite and who, being military vets and conservatives, are still coping with the shock of that.

I could go on. I didn’t even talk about one of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Republic: the amassing of wealth by elites and the concomitant impoverishment of Roman soldiers who returned from battle to find that their prospects for building a stable, normal life were not what they had expected. We are living through that now, in a somewhat different version. A system that allows the very rich to accumulate more and more wealth, while denying to the masses the opportunity not necessarily to grow rich but simply to build a stable middle-class life — well, what’s in it for the masses?

Which brings us back to Trump as potential American Nero. It is possible that he will fritter away the mythic power he won on the stage in Pennsylvania this past weekend. A single event is not going to radically change the character of a man of 78. But if he holds on to it, and if it doesn’t cause him to repent and to become more Christian and less pagan (pagan in the Roman sense), then this near-death experience might solidify the darker instincts in his psyche and catalyze them.

I am not confident that the termite-chewed framework of the American republic could resist a Neronian Trump. It is not because such a Trump would be Imperial Evil and would set himself against the Republican Good. It’s because the republic has become so weak and corrupt. It’s because the republic has become this:

Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images

Contrast that to the blood and the defiance in the face of death that we saw embodied by Trump this past weekend. Human nature has not changed so much since Ancient Rome. This is the image of a gladiator:

Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

I ask you again: what do you think was on Trump’s mind in the image at the beginning of this article? I also ask: When you see it, what is on yours?

Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally at Rod Dreher’s Diary on Substack.