In my previous post I outlined three ways in which political philosophy might relate to contemporary events, the Hegelian, the Kantian (as interpreted by Foucault), and a more activist and diagnostic approach suggested by Marx. Alain Badiou’s recent lectures on Trump give one version of the diagnostic approach. In this post I’ll consider an alternative diagnostic approach to Trump outlined by the political philosopher Hans Sluga, the author of what is to my mind the most sophisticated study of the diagnostic approach in political philosophy, his book Politics and the Search for the Common Good (2014).
In 2017, less than four months after Badiou’s lectures, Sluga delivered a lecture, since published on his blog, addressing Trump as a political phenomenon (http://www.truthandpower.com/blog/blog/diagnosing-donald-trump/). In marked contrast to Badiou, Sluga does not so much as mention capitalism as a background to Trump, and with only a brief discussion likewise dismisses the thought that neo-liberalism is explanatorily relevant. Whereas Badiou gives only a brief description of Trump’s character as “an incoherent billionaire,” Sluga treats Trump’s character as a crucial indicator. After giving an exuberant description of Trump’s formidably repellant character (“a man fearful of contamination, of the danger that lurks in every handshake, terrified by stairs and inclines. . . full of bonhomie at one moment, snarling like a raccoon at the next,” etc.), Sluga identifies Trump as fundamentally a plutocrat, and with four characteristics: (a) he’s a multi-billionaire; (b) “he is in essence a self-made man”; (c) he is a real-estate developer; and (d) he uses his money to gain political influence. The philosophically key features are (c) and (d), which mark him as a representative of plutocracy understood as a political system wherein politics and business are fully integrated. This characterization distinguishes, so Sluga argues, Trumpian plutocracy from neo-liberalism; both integrate and unify the political realm and the economic realm, but neo-liberalism aims simply to eliminate governmental regulations so that business might pursue its self-dictated courses, whereas plutocracy aims to mutually adjust the political and the economic so as to maximally integrate them. And startlingly Sluga explicitly follows Plato and Aristotle in insisting that plutocracy, despite its evident dangers, is not the worst form of government. Still, Sluga acknowledges that the historically distinctive characteristic of contemporary plutocracy is its background against the current “global accumulation of wealth.”
Like Badiou, Sluga thinks the condition of the possibility of the emergence of Trump as a political phenomenon is a kind of cultural disorientation. But whereas Badiou thinks that disorientation arises directly as a result of the loss of the communist ideal and so the loss of any admirable counter-ideal to capitalism, Sluga, following Nietzsche, thinks that our contemporary disorientation is the most basic symptom of our nihilism. And like Nietzsche in the 1880’s, Sluga thinks that our nihilism is ‘incomplete’ in the sense that we as a civilization have still not come to grips with this basic phenomenon and/or we are not suffering from an anomie through holding no values whatsoever. Nihilism for Nietzsche and Sluga is first of all a state wherein ‘the highest values de-value themselves’, so, while we still hold values, we have no way of ranking them, and so no reason to hold onto one rather than another. Consequently all values become phenomena of fashion and are afflicted with a kind of triviality. Secondly, and it seems to me, differing from Nietzsche, Sluga thinks that contemporary nihilism is characterized by the presumption of a reduction of all phenomena to tools of power. Our world of incomplete nihilism is a spectacle of ever-changing brutalisms. This gives Trump his fullest characterization as a philosophical phenomenon: he is a nihilistic plutocrat.
Sluga, then, gives a diagnostic account that is markedly different from Badiou’s, and it is by no means obvious whether the accounts are compatible, and, if not, which is to be preferred. I shall turn to an evaluation of the two accounts in my next blog post.