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The Second Coming. Part One: The Resurrection.
The resurrection of Donald Trump is all but complete. Despite all the controversy he stirs, he has regained the Presidency in large part with support of the working people of America. Was he always feted to return, or is something more fundamental at play that can tell us why the working people have voted for him; a vote that would seem to be a vote against their own best interests?
‘I believe that from time to time, men are created whom I call volunteers of providence, in whose hands are placed the destiny of their countries. I believe I am one of those men. If I am wrong, I can perish uselessly. If I am right, then providence will put me into a position to fulfil my mission.’
Louis Bonaparte, 1836. The nephew of Napoleon, and failed leader of a coup that same year. After escaping a deathly fate, and following a few years of imprisonment, he subsequently succeeded in 1851 when, having seized the Presidency of the Second Republic in 1848 after winning some 75% of the votes, he unilaterally annulled the Constitution and declared himself Emperor.
Quote from ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Donald J. Trump,’ and the mind of Peter E. Gordon, The Boston Review, November 8, 2024.
The Resurrection
Karl Marx was living in London when Louis Bonaparte seized power, calling him derisively, a ‘grotesque mediocrity,’ little more than an ‘adventurer who hides his trivially repulsive features under the iron death mask of Napoleon.’
These comments were made by Marx in a long essay he transcribed called ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,’ (1) which was published a year later in New York by his friend Joseph Weydemeyer in, what was at the time, a new political quarterly entitled, ‘Die Revolution.’ Marx’s ‘Eighteenth Brumaire,’ which his friend, Friedrich Engels, later called ‘a work of genius,’ comprised the entirety of the first edition.
In the short preface to the Second Edition a few years later, Marx criticised Victor Hugo and one time…
