Does Liberal Democracy Satisfy the Thymotic Desire for Recognition? Fukuyama's Confusing Answers

In his 1989 article "The End of History?" Francis Fukuyma seemed to agree with Alexandre Kojeve (in his interpretation of Hegel) that history had reached its end (at the level of ideas) once it became clear that liberal democracy is the only regime in which "all human needs are satisfied."  But while the economic liberty provided by modern liberal democracy surely satisfies the economic needs of human beings for a comfortable self-preservation and a life of consumerism, Fukuyama suggested that this would not satisfy the distinctively human need for recognition--the desire to have one's dignity or worth recognized by others, so that one's self-esteem is confirmed by the esteem of others.  

In the last paragraph of his article, Fukuyama questioned Kojeve's belief in the goodness of the end of history:  "The end of history will be a very sad time.  The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one's life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. . . . I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed. . . . Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again" (18).

Three years after the publication of his article, in his book The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama elaborated his questioning of Kojeve's claim that liberal democracy was the most fully satisfying regime by questioning whether it could satisfy the desire for recognition.  He also explained the desire for recognition as expressing the part of the human soul that Plato called thymos or "spiritedness."

Fukuyama first learned about thymos as a student at Cornell University in Allan Bloom's seminar on Plato's Republic (Fukuyama 2026: 32-34).  This seminar came only about two years after the publication of Bloom's translation of The Republic in 1968.  Bloom was a student of Leo Strauss, and Bloom's translation of The Republic as well as his interpretive essay accompanying the translation relied heavily on Strauss's reading of The Republic in Strauss's City and Man (1964). 

Under the influence of this Straussian interpretation of The Republic, Fukuyama agrees with Plato's Socrates in distinguishing three parts of the human soul: logos or logismos (reason or calculation), thymos (spiritedness), and epithumia (appetite or desire) (Republic, 435b-445e).  Human beings use calculative reasoning (logismos) to devise the best means for satisfying their bodily appetites (epithumia) for the material goods of life.  Fukuyama is clear in affirming that a modern liberal social order serves this economic side of human nature, because liberalism promotes the scientific technological conquest of nature and the capitalist economic growth that make it easier for most human beings to secure the bodily comforts of life.  But Fukuyama is not so clear as to whether modern liberalism can satisfy the thymotic side of the human soul in its longing for the nonmaterial good of recognition.  

Fukuyama explains the relationship between thymos and the desire for recognition:

Thymos is something like an innate human sense of justice: people believe that they have a certain worth, and when other people act as though they are worth less--when they do not recognize their worth at its correct value--then they become angry. . . . Conversely, when other people see that we are not living up to our sense of self-esteem, we feel shame; and when we are evaluated justly (i.e., in proportion to our true worth), we feel pride. . . .

. . . Plato's thymos is therefore nothing other than the psychological seat of Hegel's desire for recognition. . . . It is possible for one to feel thymotic pride in oneself without demanding recognition.  But esteem is not a "thing" like an apple or a Porsche: it is a state of consciousness, and to have subjective certainty about one's own sense of worth, it must be recognized by another consciousness.  Thus thymos typically, but not inevitably, drives men to seek recognition (1992: 165-66).

I suggest that this desire to feel "one's own sense of worth" corresponds to what Rebecca Goldstein calls "the longing to matter."  "We are creatures of matter who long to matter."  We are material beings governed by physical laws of nature that are indifferent to our existence--impersonal natural laws that do not care about or for us.  And yet we are obsessed with the significance or meaning of our lives as something more than mere matter that is destined by the laws of nature to disappear in death.  We want to matter in the sense that we are deserving of attention and truly deserving of all the attention that we must give to ourselves to pursue our lives.  Without that sense that our life matters, our life is not worth living, which is why people who fall into suicidal depression will say, "I don't matter."  We long to prove that we subjectively feel that we matter because we objectively do.  One common way to prove that to ourselves is to be recognized by others as someone who matters, as someone whose life has worth or dignity.

Therefore, if modern liberal social order is to be the most satisfying way of life for most human beings, it must satisfy not only our material needs for physical comfort and pleasure but also our immaterial need to have the moral worth of our lives recognized by others.  Moreover, Fukuyama argues, we must understand that this thymotic desire for recognition can take one of two forms.  Creating two Greek neologisms, he distinguishes between isothymia--the desire to be recognized as the equal of other people--and megalothymia--the desire to be recognized as superior to other people.  Furthermore, megalothymia is Janus-faced or a double-edged sword.  The good face is the striving to be better than other people in the human excellences--in the moral and intellectual virtues, in sports, in the arts, in politics, and so on.  The bad face is the striving to be better than other people in the exercise of tyrannical domination over them.

This creates three possibilities for how liberal democracy accommodates thymos.  Perhaps liberal democracy does not allow for thymos at all.  Or liberal democracy could secure isothymia but not megalothymia.  Or maybe liberal democracy could have both isothymia and the good form of megalothymia.  Fukuyama is confusing in that he seems to affirm all three possibilities.

LIBERAL DEMOCRACY WITH NO THYMOS?

According to Fukuyama, "Hobbes and Locke, the founders of modern liberalism, sought to eradicate thymos from political life altogether, and to replace it with a combination of reason and desire," which would require "changing human nature itself," by creating "a new type of individual" who would have no thymos in his soul.  This new kind of human being would become the bourgeois or Economic Man, "the human being narrowly consumed with his own immediate self-preservation and material well-being, interested in the community around him only to the extent that it fosters or is a means of achieving his private good." 

Locke and the other founders of modern liberalism "hoped to overcome megalothymia altogether by pitting, in effect, the interests of the desiring part of human nature against the passions of its thymotic part."  This required an assault on the social embodiment of megalothymia--the traditional aristocracy.  "The aristocratic warrior did not create wealth, he stole it from other warriors, or more precisely from the peasantry whose surplus he appropriated. . . . War therefore remained central to the aristocratic way of life, and war, as we well know, is 'economically suboptimal.'  Much better, then, to convince the aristocratic warrior of the vanity of his ambitions, and to transform him into a peaceful businessman, whose self-enriching activities would serve to enrich those around him as well" (1992: 160, 185).

Against this Lockean liberal attempt to eradicate thymos, Fukuyama argues, Friedrich Nietzsche sought to revive thymos in the modern world.

The greatest and most articulate champion of thymos in modern times, and the prophet of its revival, was Friedrich Nietzsche, the godfather of present-day relativism and nihilism.  Nietzsche was once described by a contemporary as an "aristocratic radical," a characterization he did not dispute.  Much of his work can be seen, in a certain sense, as a reaction to what he saw as the rise of an entire civilization of 'men without chests,' a society of bourgeois who aspired to nothing more than their own comfortable self-preservation.  For Nietzsche, the very essence of man was neither his desire nor his reason, but his thymos: man was above all a valuing creature, the "beast with red cheeks" who found life in his ability to pronounce the words "good" and "evil." . . . Nietzsche's well known doctrine of the "will to power" can be understood as the effort to reassert the primacy of thymos as against desire and reason, and to undo the damage that modern liberalism had done to man's pride and self-assertiveness (1992: 188-89).

Fukuyama has said that Strauss was "clearly one of the most important intellectual influences in my life, despite the fact that I never met him" (2026: 46).  And, indeed, we can see Strauss's influence in Fukuyama's interpretation of Locke and Nietzsche, and their contribution to what Strauss called "the crisis of liberal democracy."  Strauss interpreted Locke and Lockean liberalism as promoting a degrading conception of life devoted to economic acquisitiveness--the boring life of the bourgeois man who has no moral or intellectual virtues--a life that Strauss called "the joyless quest for joy."  Strauss interpreted Nietzsche as offering an irrefutable moral and intellectual critique of liberalism's flattening of human experience, while also proposing the overcoming of liberalism by the will to power of the Ubermensch (the Superman), which made Nietzsche the godfather of fascism and Nazism.  That the proponents of liberalism had no good answer to Nietzsche--or to Nietzsche's philosophic followers like Martin Heideggr--is what constituted the "crisis of liberal democracy."

It is regrettable that Fukuyama has not recognized how mistaken Strauss was in all of this.  In many previous posts, I have identified Strauss's mistakes.  First, Strauss was mistaken in failing to see how Locke and other liberals like Adam Smith had made powerful arguments for liberalism's moral and intellectual virtues.  One of Strauss's most influential pieces of writing--particularly among the far-right intellectual critics of liberalism--is his interpretation of Locke in Natural Right and History, which presents Lockean liberalism as promoting a vulgar and soul-deadening soft hedonism, which Strauss famously called "a joyless quest for joy."  This is the Locke that "post-liberals" like Patrick Deneen have scorned.

But as I have argued, this ignores much of what Locke wrote about how a free society secures the liberty that allows for the cultivation of moral and intellectual excellence--including the freedom to live the philosophic life (for people like Strauss!).  So, while critics of liberalism like Deneen insist that Lockean liberalism teaches "pursuit of immediate gratification" and the "absence of restraints upon one's desires," he says nothing about how Locke contradicts this claim in Some Thoughts Concerning Education.  In that book, Locke stresses the importance of parents educating their children so that they have a sense of shame in caring about their good reputation (secs. 56, 61, 78).  Locke says that "the great principle and foundation of all virtue and worth is placed in this, that a man is able to deny himself his own desires, cross his own inclinations, and purely follow what reason directs as best though the appetite lean the other way" (sec. 33). "It seems plain to me that the principle of all virtue and excellency lies in a power of denying ourselves the satisfaction of our own desires where reason does not authorize them" (sec. 38). Children must be taught that "covetousness and the desire of having in our possession and under our dominion more than we have need of" is "the root of all evil" (sec. 110). 

Above all, Locke insists, children must be taught and habituated to show "civility"--respect and good will to all people (secs. 66-67, 70, 109, 117, 143-44). Here Locke's emphasis on the need for "civility" is part of what Norbert Elias identified as the "civilizing process" promoted by early modern liberalism to overcome the incivility, violence, and corrupt manners of medieval pre-modern Europe.  Deneen and Strauss are silent about all of this.

Fukuyama recognizes "that Locke gives considerably more scope to pride and spiritedness than is often thought," particularly in Some Thoughts Concerning Education.  But Fukuyama hides this point in the endnotes of his first book (1992: 341, n. 3; 367, n. 15).

Strauss was also mistaken about Nietzsche, and his mistake has shaped Fukuyama's assumption that Nietzsche showed that liberal democracy cannot escape the degradation of human experience that comes with the Last Man--the man with no thymos--and thus liberal democracy has no answer for those illiberal political movements that affirm a thymotic "will to power" as the overcoming of the Last Man.  Strauss's mistake was in failing to see how the "Darwinian aristocratic liberalism" of Nietzsche's middle writings (such as Human, All Too Human) refuted the "Dionysian aristocratic radicalism" of his early and late writings.

The last part of The End of History and the Last Man is entitled "The Last Man."  If you look at the endnotes to this part of the book, you will see that Fukuyama cites Nietzsche's early and late writings--such as The Use and Abuse of History, On the Genealogy of Morals, The Twilight of the Idols, Beyond Good and Evil, and The Will to Power.  But you will see no references to Nietzsche's middle writings--such as Human, All Too Human, Dawn, and The Gay Science.  What this means is that like Strauss, Fukuyama does not allow his readers to see that Nietzsche's endorsement of liberal democracy in the writings of his middle period contradicts the illiberalism in his other writings, and that the liberal political teaching of the middle period is superior--morally, politically, and intellectually--to the illiberal political teaching of the early and late writings, because the teaching of the middle period is rooted in a Darwinian anthropology that supports an aristocratic liberalism that is more defensible than Nietzsche's aristocratic illiberalism.

In his middle writings, Nietzsche sees that a liberal democracy can recognize the equal worth of all men as men while also allowing for the emergence of "free spirits" as "higher men," who constitute a cultural aristocracy.  Thus, Nietzsche sees that liberal democracy can recognize both isothymia and megalothymia.  In some of his writing, Fukuyama sees that as well.

LIBERAL DEMOCRACY WITH ISOTHYMIA BUT WITHOUT MEGALOTHYMIA?

While Fukuyama sometimes says that Lockean liberalism seeks to eradicate the thymotic desire for recognition, at other times he asserts that Lockean liberal democracy satisfies the desire for recognition by allowing people to be recognized as the equals of other people because they are equal in their natural rights.  "The rise of modern democracy is incomprehensible apart from the demand for equal recognition that lies at its core.  In England, there was a progressive shift in the nature of demands for recognition, from the rights of the tribe or village, to the rights of Englishmen, to Locke's rights of man" (2011: 441).

But then Fukuyama suggests that Nietzsche was right to question the value of the equal recognition of all men as men.  "Is recognition that can be universalized worth having in the first place?  Is not the quality of recognition far more important than its universality?  And does not the goal of universalizing recognition inevitably trivialize and de-value it?" (1992: 301).  Even if many people will be satisfied by the equal recognition that comes to them merely by virtue of being human beings, those people who are more more ambitious will want to be recognized as superior human beings.  Moreover, this desire to be recognized as better than others is "the precondition for the creation of anything else worth having in life, whether great symphonies, paintings, novels, ethical codes, or political systems." "Thymos is the side of man that deliberately seeks out struggle and sacrifice, that tries to prove that the self is something better and higher than a fearful, needy, instinctual, physically determined animal.  Not all men feel this pull, but for those who do, thymos cannot be satisfied by the knowledge that they are merely equal in worth to all other human beings" (1992: 304).

LIBERAL DEMOCRACY WITH ISOTHYMIA AND THE GOOD FORM OF MEGALOTHYMIA?

If I am right about the natural desire for social status, human beings desire to be recognized not only as equal in their human dignity, but also as unequal in those traits or achievements that make them superior to others.  This desire for social status is natural because it was formed in the Lockean evolutionary state of nature to become part of the biological nature of human beings.  The meritocracy in a Lockean liberal society satisfies that desire for social status by allowing for the expression of both isothymia and megalothymia.  At its best, liberal democracy secures the equal opportunity to be unequal.  This Lockean liberal meritocracy can also be found in Nietzsche's middle writings--particularly, Human, All Too Human. 

Human beings generally desire social status through comparative social ranking.  This is a human universal found in all human societies.  Human beings' esteem for themselves requires they be esteemed by others whose judgments they respect.  Human beings attain high social status through prestige, fame, or honor within the groups to which they belong.  And they can be ranked differently in different groups.  Although some societies are much less hierarchical than others, all societies rank individuals as higher or lower based on age, sex, kinship, physical formidability, physical attractiveness, social competence, and practical skills.

Individuals become socially dominant through any trait or activity that elicits deference in others.  A few charismatic individuals become heroic leaders because of their extraordinary power to win the respect of the people around them.  

And yet, subordinate individuals can resist excessive or exploitative dominance and thus limit the power of dominant individuals.  Subordinate individuals can form large coalitions to challenge those at the top of the hierarchy, which checks the tyrannical form of megalothymia.

I have also argued that a Lockean meritocracy at its best should be an open and pluralistic meritocracy rather than closed and monistic.  A meritocracy is open when there is no restriction on social mobility up and down the hierarchy, so that the most talented children of lower-class parents are free to rise into the upper ranks of status, wealth, and power, and the less talented children of upper-class parents are allowed to fall into the lower ranks.  A meritocracy is closed when upper-class parents, who may have originally earned their high rank, can secure that high rank for their children even when they are less talented, by giving their children privileges that are denied to the talented children in the lower ranks.

So, for example, parents who as children were admitted to Harvard University based on their cognitive ability and academic achievements might then help their children be admitted to Harvard as "legacy" applicants who are the children of Harvard alumni or as applicants on the "dean's list" because the parents are a big donors to the university.  A closed meritocracy allows this.  An open meritocracy forbids it.

A meritocracy is monistic when merit is measured by only one standard of value.  A meritocracy is pluralistic when merit is measured by many standards of value.  So, for example, we have a monistic meritocracy when the only standard of merit is abstract cognitive ability of the sort that can be measured by an I.Q. test.  We would have a pluralistic meritocracy if we saw merit in many different moral and intellectual virtues and talents.

A good argument for a more pluralistic meritocracy has been made recently by David Goodhart in his book Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect (Free Press, 2020).  To use his vivid terminology, in recent years, we have given too much prestige and reward to Head (cognitive work) and not enough to Hand (manual work) and Heart (care work).  People who excel in manual work or caregiving should derive as much self-esteem and public honor from that as people who excel in knowledge work.  

There should be a meritocracy in each of these three spheres of work, which would reflect the diversity of human excellences.  This is what Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray had in mind when they said (in The Bell Curve) that in a liberal social order there should be a "place for everyone":  everyone should be able to find an honored place for themselves by developing whatever moral or intellectual talents they might have.

In much of his writing, Fukuyama agrees with me about most of this, although he does not see how this can all be rooted in a Lockean or Nietzschean liberal account of human nature.  First, what he calls "recognition" is synonymous with what I call "status":  "Recognition is the acknowledgement of another human being's dignity or worth, or what is otherwise understood to be status" (2011: 441).  

He also agrees that the desire for status is biologically natural for human beings because it was shaped in the evolutionary state of nature in which human nature was formed.  He notes that the biological roots for status-seeking behavior extend even to chimpanzees and other primates who compete for alpha male or alpha female status (2011: 26-48, 438-441).

Fukuyama also agrees with my argument that the desire for social status is best satisfied in a meritocracy that is open and pluralistic.  He sees that meritocracy in a liberal democracy is pluralistic in the sense that there are many different outlets for megalothymia.  He speaks about five arenas for thymotic striving (1992: 315-27).  First is entrepreneurship and other forms of economic activity.  The most successful businesspeople are not just striving to make a lot of money as a means to acquire goods for their personal consumption, because the money is mostly a symbol of their entrepreneurial ability.  They want to be better than their rivals.  They are ambitious.  They want the glory that comes from managing a successful enterprise.  "The classical capitalist entrepreneur described by Joseph Schumpeter is therefore not Nietzsche's last man" (316).  Notice here that in recognizing entrepreneurial excellence, Fukuyama contradicts his typically Straussian scorn for the bourgeois life as boring and degraded.

A second domain of life for thymotic striving in a liberal democracy is electoral politics.  Politics is an outlet for ambitious people competing for public recognition.  On this point, Fukuyama often cites Alexander Hamilton and James Madison writing in The Federalist.  They foresaw that American politics would be largely a contest of ambitious men striving for the glory of holding high public office.  And so the American presidency, for example, might attract men moved by "the love of fame, the ruling passion of the noblest minds."  But they also saw the danger of tyrannical ambition and the need to put institutional checks on power, so that "ambition must be made to counteract ambition."  I have written about Abraham Lincoln's ambition and his warning about those with Napoleonic ambition who might become despots who could overthrow the constitutional order.

A third arena for ambitious striving noted by Fukuyama is modern natural science.  Most scientists are motivated by their natural desire for an intellectual understanding of nature through science.  But they are also moved by a desire to be recognized for their scientific achievements.  They want to put their name on a scientific discovery and win a Nobel Prize.

Beyond the economic, political, and scientific realms in which people can compete for recognition, there are many arenas of competition such as games and sports in which people can strive to be recognized as superior.  In some of these activities, such as auto racing and Alpine mountain climbing, people will even risk their lives or serious injuries in their striving for distinction in their sport.

Finally, Fukuyama identifies the broadest area of life in a liberal democracy that provides the most important recognition for most people--the associational life of private groups such as business corporations, civic associations, professional organizations, churches, schools, and families (the most basic level of associational life).  The recognition of citizens by a liberal democratic state is impersonal.  By contrast, the members of a social group or a family are recognized in a personal way for those individual qualities that make them the people they are.

THE END OF HISTORY?

So to the question of whether liberal democracy satisfies the thymotic desire for recognition, Fukuyama gives three different answers.  To my mind, his third answer is the most persuasive.  Liberal democracy satisfies the natural desire for recognition or status by allowing people to be recognized as equal to others in their human dignity but also as superior to others in being better than others in some domain of life.

But while I agree with Fukuyama that liberal democracy satisfies this natural desire for social status, I see this desire as only one of as many as twenty natural desires.  And I see liberal democracy as the only social order that promotes the satisfaction of all of those natural desires, which means that Fukuyama was right in 1989 in arguing that liberal democracy has emerged as the best regime at the end of history.  

And yet he was wrong in his Nietzschean suggestion that the "bourgeois society" of the "Last Man" could create "centuries of boredom at the end of history" that could "serve to get history started once again."  Here he allowed the illiberalism of Nietzsche's later writings to blind him to the liberalism of Nietzsche's middle writings.

REFERENCES

Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press.

Fukuyama, Francis. 2011. The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Fukuyama, Francis. 2026. In the Realm of the Last Man: A Memoir. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Marco Rubio's Shallow Understanding of "Thymos" in Western Civilization and Liberal Democracy

 

On October 7th, Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave a speech at Athens' Pnyx, the ancient meeting place of the Athenian democratic assembly, with the Acropolis and Parthenon rising behind him.  I assume that the speech was written by a Claremont Straussian who has read some of Francis Fukuyama's works--such as The End of History and the Last Man (1992) or his most recent In the Realm of the Last Man.  I say that for two reasons.  First, he puts his most important, and most controversial, idea in the center of the speech, which is one of the features of Straussian "esoteric" writing.  Second, that central idea is the Platonic concept of thymos (or thumos)--the Greek word for the spirited, passionate, or proud part of the human soul--which Fukuyama learned about from his Straussian teacher, Allan Bloom, at Cornell.  

Fukuyama identified thymos with the natural human desire for recognition as understood by Alexandre Kojeve in his interpretation of Hegel.  Thymos is the desire to be recognized as excellent or great in the most challenging competitive endeavors of life--but especially in war and politics--even to the point of risking one's life in competitive struggle for the sake of a glorious fame after death.

Here is how Rubio describes this ancient Greek thymos as the central theme of Western Civilization:

For the Greeks of antiquity, the pursuit of excellence was the very principle of man’s existence. They organized all of civic life around contest, ambition, competition: in philosophy and poetry, in sculpture and drama, in athletics and art, in war and statecraft. The classical Greek city was an arena for great men to test and prove themselves, to hone their potential through perpetual struggle—to be the best, the strongest, the most beautiful, straining to inch ever closer to perfection.

Now I know that to modern ears, what I just described, this way of life, may sound odd; it may even sound cruel. The ideal of many ideologies in our time has, frankly, become a world of perfect safety, devoid of risk or failure, with neither the glory of victory nor the shame of defeat …

The ancient Greek city-states were filled … with intense passion and rivalry and faction and conflict. But from that constant struggle for distinction—from that came the great flowering of art and philosophy and political and intellectual energy that would transform a collective of Mediterranean cities into the birthplace of the greatest civilization in the world.

The thumos, as the ancient Greeks called it—the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride—is the heart of great civilization. And without it? Without it, nations lose their will to fight, the will to strive, the will to survive.

Fukuyama has responded to Rubio's speech by saying: "Marco Rubio seems to have quoted my work on recognition," but "he doesn't understand it."  Actually, it's hard to understand what Fukuyama has written about the desire for recognition because he's unclear about whether the thymotic desire for recognition can be satisfied in a liberal democracy.

Fukuyama says that Rubio's claim that thymos is the core value of Western Civilization is "correct in some fashion, but Rubio's understanding of the idea is very deficient."  Rubio doesn't understand that there are two kinds of thymos--designated by Fukuyama's two neologisms, isothymia and megalothymia--and he doesn't understand that there are both good and bad sides to megalothymia.

Isothymia is the desire for equal recognition, which is the fundamental principle of modern liberal democracy--that all human beings are equal in their dignity as human beings.  Fukuyama explains: "Human beings universally feel resentful and angry when they are disrespected, when their fundamental dignity is held to be lower  than that of another group or individual.  Today's polarized politics is driven by isothymia: left-wing identity politics by the demand of marginalized groups for equal recognition, and an emerging right-wing version based on a narrative of white or Christian victimization."

By contrast, megathymia--the desire to be recognized as greater than other people--is Janus-faced in having both a good and an evil face.  It is, as Fukuyama says, a "double-edged sword."  So, on the one hand, Rubio is right to see that the striving to be better than other people can be the source of human excellences.  But, on the other hand, Rubio is wrong not to recognize that this desire to be better than other people can promote tyrannical and criminal behavior.  "George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Winston Churchill were clearly driven by megalothymia--but so were Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot," Fukuyama observes.

Rubio does not see that the problem for megalothymia in a liberal democracy is "first, distinguishing between the good and bad forms of megalothymia, and second, channeling this passion into activities that benefit the broader society."

Rubio also does not see that the megalothymia of the American Founders was expressed by their ambitious devotion to isothymia.  Rubio sees megalothymia expressed in "the immortal closing words of the Declaration of Independence of the United States which says, 'We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, or Fortunes, and our sacred Honor."  But he is silent about the fact that they were affirming the Declaration's principle of isothymia--"that all men are created equal."  

Rubio says that "under President Trump, the United States has made its choice" for reviving the thymos of Western Civilization through "the unapologetic pursuit of national power."  Does this imply that Trump himself is expressing his megalothymia in projecting his power over the world?

Fukuyama says: "Trump is a perfect example of unconstrained megalothymia.  He cannot distinguish between good and bad attributes that deserve recognition, nor does he care about the quality of judgment of those recognizing him. . . . He recently showed Maggie Haberman a list of history's most powerful rulers, whom he clearly admired and wished to equal.  The list included Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Napoleon, Mao, and Stalin, and not a single democratic statesman."

Well, I don't see how Trump can be a perfect example of megalothymia if he doesn't care "about the quality of judgment of those recognizing him."  Fukuyama doesn't note that, as reported by Haberman, the list of history's most powerful leaders, and the claim that Trump was more powerful than any of them, came from Gary Player's golf caddie.  A man who is satisfied by the recognition coming from the flattery of a golf caddie is displaying not megalothymia but a pathetically shallow narcissism.

In my next post, I will have more to say about Fukuyama's sometimes confusing account of whether liberal democracy allows for thymos, or whether liberal democracy creates "the realm of the Last Man," in which there can be no thymos.

Trump's Patrimonialism at the End of History: Fukuyama Was Right

Consider these two videos.  The first is one of several political ads praising Trump that were widely broadcast over the past weekend.  It is set to the song "Love Me" by R&B singer JMSN.  I saw one of these ads multiple times during the NFL football games.  Each ad ended with the words: "Paid for by the U.S. Government."  

The second video is from the Republican Midterm Convention in Dallas on September 10.  Trump told the crowd to raise their right hands and repeat after him a Pledge of Allegiance to himself.  "I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the country that loves us so much he can't even breathe, that I will go out with my family, my friends, and vote on November 3."  He later added: "You know what happens if you don't vote?  You go to Hell."  The Pledge concluded with "So help me God."  Trump has asked his supporters to recite a similar Pledge of Allegiance to himself beginning in his first political campaign in 2016.

These two videos illustrate how Trump's second term as president is all about regime change--about Trump trying to change America from a liberal democracy to presidential patrimonialism.  We can foresee that Trump will fail, and that the voters in the upcoming midterm elections will repudiate Trump's patrimonialism because they understand, even if only in some vague way, that it's better for them to live in a liberal democracy rather than under Trump's patrimonial rule.  This will confirm Francis Fukuyama's claim that we live now at the "end of history," where the long debate over thousands of years as to the best way to organize social and political life has come to an end, because we now see that liberal democracy is the most satisfying social order for most human beings.

TRUMP'S PATRIMONIALISM

In the American Pledge of Allegiance, Americans pledge allegiance "to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."  They pledge their allegiance to America--its flag, its political institutions, and its moral principles.  Thus they pledge allegiance to those impersonal symbols, institutions, and principles that are distinctively American.

By contrast, in Trump's Pledge of Allegiance, Americans pledge their personal loyalty to Trump as America's leader.  That's what German sociologist Max Weber--in Economy and Society (1922)--called "patrimonialism."  The Oxford English Dictionary defines patrimonialism as "a system of social organization or government in which a male leader maintains authority through individuals with loyalty to him personally."  This personal loyalty to the leader is based on kinship, personal allegiances, and patron-client relations.  The leader enforces this loyalty by rewarding his friends and punishing his enemies.  For example, organized criminal gangs of mobsters are often patrimonial organizations based on personal loyalty to one's family, to the familial patriarch, and to others bound together by the exchange of favors between patrons and clients.  Political patrimonialism means that the political leader runs the state as if it were his personal property or family business.  That explains why Trump can have his political campaign advertising paid for by American taxpayers: Trump treats the federal treasury as his personal bank account.  (Explaining Trump's presidency as a patrimonial attack on the modern liberal state has been elaborated by Hanson and Kopstein [2024] and Rauch [2025].)

According to Weber, patrimonialism stands in contrast to "rational-legal bureaucracy," in which public administrators and government staff are judged by impersonal standards of merit and efficiency rather than personal loyalty to the leader.  Before Trump became president, the norm was that federal administrators should be hired and advanced based on their expertise, experience, and training.  But under Trump, particularly in his second term, administrators have been judged by their personal loyalty to Trump.  And so, for example, Todd Blanche's only qualification for becoming Attorney General was that he had been Trump's personal lawyer.  Trump appointed him so that he could turn the Department of Justice into Trump's personal law firm, which he has done by firing anyone in the Department who is perceived as disloyal to Trump.

Similarly, Pete Hegseth was appointed Secretary of Defense not because he had the expertise and experience that would have prepared him to manage one of the most complex bureaucracies in the world, but because he pledged his loyalty to Trump.  One example of that loyalty was his attempt to punish Senator Mark Kelly for making a video with five other Democratic lawmakers directed at the military and intelligence community, in which they said "Our laws are clear.  You can refuse illegal orders."  This message enraged Trump, who accused the Democrats of "SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!"  Since Kelly is a retired Captain in the Navy, Hegseth tried to punish him by ordering a military review of his public statements that could result in a reduction of his retirement rank and pension.

Notice what is implied here.  To declare that the military can "refuse illegal orders" from the president is "seditious behavior, punishable by death," because, as Trump has said, "as President, I can do anything I want."  To say that the president's orders could be illegal is to assert that the impersonal rule of law constrains the personal rule of a president.  But Trump's patrimonialism means that the law is whatever he says it is.  That's why Trump relies so much on executive orders by which he makes laws as personal decrees of his will.  He thus invokes the principle of the Stuart monarchs in England--Rex Lex: the King is the law, and therefore the King can do no wrong.

This patrimonialism is rooted in human biological nature, which explains why it appears so often in human history.  Evolutionary biologists explain natural human sociability as based primarily on two principles: kin selection (or inclusive fitness) and reciprocal altruism.  Both principles depend on the kind of personal relationships that support patrimonialism.  Evolution by kin selection inclines human beings to cooperate with genetic relatives (or those thought to be genetic relatives), while being more altruistic toward closer genetic relatives than to more distant relatives.  The evolution of reciprocal altruism inclines human beings to develop relationships of mutual benefit or mutual harm through "tit-for-tat" interactions.  If you have benefited me in some way, then I will benefit you.  But if you have harmed me, then I will harm you.  In these two ways, human beings engage in social cooperation based on personal trust that is generated either by genetic kinship or by social reciprocity.  

Patrimonialism is rooted in these same two principles.  The patrimonial leader (such as a mob boss or a Big Man in a tribal society) supports his family members and his friends who have exchanged favors with him in the past.  They all trust one another based on their history of familial bonding and social reciprocity.  But outside that personal circle of family and friends, the rest of the world cannot be trusted.  It's friends against enemies.  This point about how patrimonialism is grounded in the biological nature of social cooperation through kinship and reciprocity is developed by Fukuyama in his book The Origins of Political Order, where he explains patrimonialism as "the natural human propensity to favor family and friends" (17).

When impersonal institutions for cooperation--such as the rule of law or impartial norms of justice--are weakened, then people will tend to fall back onto the two natural forms of personal cooperation that support patrimonialism.  And so in a patrimonial government like that being built by Trump, the offices of government will be filled by his family members or by those with a history of loyalty to him, regardless of whether these people have the expertise or experience that would make them likely to carry out the duties of their office efficiently.

If Trump's patrimonialism were to succeed in overturning American liberal democracy, that would seem to refute Fukuyama's argument about the triumph of liberal democracy at the end of history.

FUKUYAMA'S END OF HISTORY  

In the summer of 1989, The National Interest published Fukuyama's article "The End of History?"  Fukuyama argued that the end of the Cold War confirmed G. W. F. Hegel's philosophy of history--at least as interpreted by Alexandre Kojeve--according to which history was culminating in the liberal democratic state as the state in which all human needs would be satisfied.  According to Fukuyama, there are two reasons for the triumph of liberal democracy, which he understood as combining a capitalist economy, a liberal society, and a democratic polity.  First, liberalism satisfies the human desire for material security and comfort through the economic productivity of a free-market economy and the scientific conquest of nature.  Second, liberalism satisfies the human desire for recognition of one's moral worth by others through an egalitarian social and political order in which all human beings mutually recognize one another as equal in their dignity and human rights.  Thus, the history of human striving for satisfaction comes to an end when human beings discover that liberal democracy is the only social order that satisfies their deepest longings--the longing for material prosperity and the longing for moral recognition.  In 1992, Fukuyama elaborated his reasoning in a book--The End of History and the Last Man.

This writing made Fukuyama internationally famous, and it provoked a debate over his "End of History" thesis that has continued to the present.  His critics have objected that obviously history has not come to an end because there have been many historical conflicts--wars, revolutions, and social unrest--since 1989, and many of those conflicts have arisen from illiberal movements attacking liberal democracy.  So, for example, the 9/11 terrorist attacks seemed to show the violent challenge of radical Islam to Western liberal democracy.  Then, later, the populist authoritarian regimes (like Victor Orban's Hungary) seemed to present "illiberal democracy" as an alternative to liberal democracy.  And, most recently, Donald Trump's patrimonialism seems to be an attempt to overturn the liberal democratic tradition in American history.

Fukuyama has responded to these criticisms by claiming that his critics have read the title of his article, but they haven't read the article itself, nor have they read his first book.  If they had read the article and his book carefully, they would have seen that he makes two crucial points about the meaning of the end of history.  First, if they had read the last paragraph of the article and the last five chapters of the book, they would have seen that Fukuyama worries that "the end of history will be a very sad time," because it will bring what Nietzsche called the Last Man, a man who desires only a safe and comfortable life of petty pleasures and shallow entertainment with no striving for anything great or transcendent because such grand striving would be too risky and strenuous.  The society of the Last Man will be boring.  This led to the last sentence of Fukuyama's article: "Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again."

The second point ignored by Fukuyama's critics is that when he speaks about the "End of History," he is using the word "history" in a special sense.  In his most recent book--In the Realm of the Last Man: A Memoir--he says that the End of History is not about history as "the flow of day-to-day events around the world" but history "on the level of ideas" (98).  Human history as the unpredictable flow of human events will never end--at least as long as there are living human beings.  But the intellectual history of the human debate over the most desirable social order did come to an end once it became clear that liberal democratic capitalism--as based on the principles of liberty and equality--is the most fully satisfying social order.  

There are still passionate opponents of liberal democracy in the world today.  But they cannot present any coherent and plausible vision of an alternative to liberal democracy that would satisfy human desires better than existing liberal democracies.  We can see that in the failure of Trump's patrimonial authoritarianism to Make America Illiberal Again.  Trump and the intellectual defenders of Trumpist authoritarianism (like those at the Claremont Institute) have failed to offer a persuasive account of a Trumpist authoritarian social order that would be more satisfying than the American liberal democracy established by the American Founders.

A few days ago, at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin, Majorie Taylor Greene declared: "MAGA is dead."  That is surprising considering that Greene was one of the most loyal supporters of Trump in the Congress.  Her break from Trump began last year when he refused to honor his campaign promise to release all the files related to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who was once friends with Trump.  He told Greene that releasing all of the Epstein files would hurt "my friends."  Greene and other MAGA Republicans were outraged that Trump was protecting those rich and powerful people who belonged to the "Epstein class" because they were his friends.  In using the power of the state to protect his friends, Trump acts like the typical patrimonial leader.

It is also typical for a patrimonial leader that Trump has called Greene a "traitor" for criticizing him.  Since he regards himself as the personal embodiment of America, anyone who becomes his enemy becomes the enemy of America, just as Senator Kelly is guilty of sedition and should be executed.

Another reason for Greene and other Republicans to break with Trump is his war on Iran.  This violates Trump's campaign promise that he would have an "America First" foreign policy, so that there would be no more foreign wars, particularly in the Middle East.  When Trump was asked about how this war contradicted his "America First" policy, he answered by saying that since the idea of "America First" was his personal creation, this idea will mean whatever he says it means.  So according to Trump's patrimonialism, "America First" really means "Trump First."

We can also see Trump's patrimonialism in how he decided to go to war with Iran.  Not only did he not consult with Congress, he did not even take seriously the objections to the war coming from the military and intelligence bureaucrats, who warned that there would be no regime change in Iran, that Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz and cause an oil crisis, and that the war would deplete the stock of interceptor munitions.  Trump ignored all these warnings because Benjamin Netanyahu knew how to use flattery to persuade Trump that a U.S. war against Iran would bring a regime change in Iran that would show the world that Trump really is the most powerful human being who has ever lived.

Trump won the popular vote for president for the first time in 2024.  As I have argued previously, Trump's electoral victory came from putting together a multiracial, multiethnic, and multireligious liberal coalition of voters, many of whom were voting against the high inflation reached during Biden's term.  So these voters were not voting for the illiberal patrimonialism that Trump has displayed over the past year and a half.  Those who voted for him in 2024 will have the chance in the upcoming midterm elections to reject his presidential patrimonialism by voting for Democrats.

If that happens, the implicit message will be that most American voters regard liberal democracy as far more desirable than Trump's patrimonialism.  If so, that will confirm Fukuyama's claim that liberal democracy continues to be the most satisfying social order for human beings at the end of history.

REFERENCES

Fukuyama, Francis. 1989. "The End of History?" The National Interest, summer.

Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press.

Fukuyama, Francis. 2011. The Origins of Political Order: From Prehistoric Times to the French Revolution. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Fukuyama, Francis. 2026. In the Realm of the Last Man: A Memoir. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Hanson, Stephen E., and Jeffrey S. Kopstein. 2024. The Assault on the State: How the Global Attack on Modern Government Endangers Our Future. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Rauch, Jonathan. 2025. "One Word Describes Trump." The Atlantic, February 24.

How Roy Cohn Created Donald Trump and His Narcissistic Nihilism

 

In 2018, Donald Trump became enraged because he thought Attorney General Jeff Sessions was not doing enough to protect him from investigations of Russian support for his 2016 presidential campaign.  At one point, he shouted, "Where's my Roy Cohn?"  

Roy Cohn (1927-1986) had been Trump's lawyer and fixer for thirteen years from their first meeting in 1973 to Cohn's death in 1986.  For me, the two best accounts of how Cohn created Trump are Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark's new book American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn's Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump (Scribner, 2026) and the 2024 biographical movie The Apprentice, which is easily available at Amazon Prime Video.  Trump described this film as "a cheap, defamatory, and politically disgusting hatchet job" and described those involved in the film as "human scum."  That means it's totally accurate.

Cohn first gained national prominence as a young Justice Department prosecutor who won the court case that led to the conviction and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for Russian espionage in 1953.  He then became the chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy, the Chair of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, who was attempting to expose government employees who were communist spies or those who were homosexual and thus "security threats" because they could be blackmailed into becoming spies.  

In his work with McCarthy, Cohn became known for his ruthless methods that were often illegal and unethical.  He was also known for his hypocrisy in exposing homosexuals in government.  He was a homosexual although he always denied it publicly.  

From the late 1950s to his death, Cohn was a practicing lawyer in New York City whose clients included the most powerful and prominent people in politics and business as well as organized crime.  He was often prosecuted for his criminal behavior, but he was never convicted.  Finally, however, in 1986, he was disbarred by the New York State Supreme Court for unethical and unprofessional conduct, including misappropriation of clients' funds, lying on a bar application, and falsifying a change to a will.  A few months after his disbarment, he died from the complications from AIDS. 

When Cohn first met Trump in 1973, Trump was working for his father's real estate company.  The Justice Department had just filed a suit against Fred Trump's company charging them with violating the 1968 Fair Housing Act.  According to the Justice Department, thirty-nine Trump-owned apartment buildings in Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island had systematically barred blacks from renting.  Their applications had been marked by a large "C," to identify the applicants as "colored."  Four Trump building superintendents were willing to testify to this.

The Feds proposed that if the Trumps signed a consent decree by which they agreed to integrate their sixteen thousand units, then there would be no fines and no admission of guilt.  But Cohn's legal strategy was always attack, attack, attack.  So he persuaded Trump to countersue the Department of Justice on the grounds of defamation, seeking $100,000 in damages.  Cohn and Trump held a press conference at the New Hilton to announce their suit.  They got a lot of newspaper headlines.  A federal judge dismissed the suit as frivolous, telling Cohn that he was "wasting time and paper."  But that was the point: Cohn's favorite tactic was to file totally bogus lawsuits that would delay the legal process and wear down his opponents.

Cohn dragged out the legal proceedings for twenty-one months.  He charged that FBI agents were coercing witnesses with "gestapo-like interrogation," and they were acting like "stormtroopers."  When the judge reprimanded him for making charges that were "utterly without foundation," Cohn retracted his statement.

Then he filed a contempt motion to have a young prosecutor--Donna Goldstein--removed from the case because she had been calling prospective witnesses in the middle of the night and threatening them with jail time if they didn't testify against Trump.  It was an absurd claim with no evidence to support it, but Goldstein was scared because such a charge could end her legal career.  U.S. District Judge Edward Neaher was forced to halt the main case and hold a hearing on the contempt motion.  A prosecutor spent two hours proving that the charges were baseless.  Cohen was silent throughout.  The judge then spoke to Cohn: "Mr. Cohn, I think it would be in the best interest of everyone if you would just withdraw your motion."  Cohn replied: "Well, I think the girl [Goldstein] has learned her lesson and I'm sure she won't do it again."

Eventually, in June 1975, Trump settled by signing the same consent decree that he could have signed in 1973.  He agreed to advertise his rentals in Black owned newspapers and list vacancies with the Urban League.  In effect, Trump had agreed to adopt an affirmative action program.

Trump and Cohn held a press conference and declared victory.  Trump has often claimed that this was his first great victory in the courts with Cohn as his lawyer.  As Bird and Goldmark have observed: "Trump learned from Cohn that the court of public opinion is far more important than the court of law" (265).

Three years later, the Feds filled another suit claiming that the Trumps were still discriminating against Blacks.  Cohn told reporters that the charges were without "the slightest merit."  But Cohn and Trump signed a new consent decree without admitting wrongdoing.

Bird and Goldmark conclude: "Roy had taught him that the pyrotechnics of publicity were more important than the law. What counted was controlling the images in any narrative" (266).  They quote from Sam Roberts, a New York Times reporter who covered city politics in the 1970s: "Roy was a master of situational morality.  He worked with a three-dimensional strategy, which was: 1. Never settle, never surrender. 2. counterattack, counter-sue immediately. 3. No matter what happens, no matter how deeply into the muck you get, claim victory and never admit defeat."

In all of this, I see four character traits shared by Cohen and Trump: power-seeking, no ideology, narcissism, and nihilism.

1. Power-seeking.  Like Cohn, Trump has sought power--or at least the appearance of power--and it's power for its own sake, not power as a means to any end.  There are only two kinds of people in the world--winners and losers.  The winners are those who are powerful.  The losers are those who are not.  

As I have pointed out in a previous post, Trump's ambition cannot be satisfied by the limited powers granted to the President in the American Constitution.  As he told Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan when they interviewed him on March 16 of this year, it is not even enough for him to be the most powerful president who has ever lived, because he must be "the most powerful man that the planet has ever known," which is what "a historian" had told him he was.  Haberman and Swan later found out that this "historian" was not a professional historian but the long-time caddie for the golfer Gary Player.

But notice that the mere appearance of power is enough for Trump.  For that, all he needs is the testimony of a golf caddie to his world-historical power.

2. No ideology.  Cohn was assumed to be a McCarthyite anti-communist Republican conservative.  Trump has been assumed to be a populist Republican conservative and an "America First" isolationist.  But in fact neither man was devoted to a coherent ideology.  Although Cohn was an informal adviser to both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, he became a powerful member of the Democratic Party machine in New York.  Harvard law school professor Alan Dershowitz knew both Cohn and Trump in the 1980s, and he has said that neither Cohn nor Trump were ideological.  "Roy Cohn didn't really have any ideology, even anti-communist ideology.  He was somebody who rewarded loyalty and punished disloyalty," Dershowitz observed.  He saw that while both Cohn and Trump "wanted to win," they were "among the two least ideological people I knew."

Both Cohn and Trump pretended to have a populist ideology.  But as Bird and Goldmark note, this was a purely opportunistic stance by which they "used their personal resentments to tap into raw populist emotions that have long festered in American society" (382).  This pretense of populist ideology was only an instrument in the pursuit of power for its own sake.  Consequently, their ideology could be set aside if they thought some other position would better serve their pursuit of power.

For example, in all three of Trump's presidential campaigns, one of the preeminent themes was an "America First" foreign policy of isolationism and "no more foreign wars," particularly in the Middle East.  But then many of his most fervent MAGA supporters (such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson) were shocked when he launched his war against Iran.  They thought Trump was committed to an ideology of "American First" foreign policy.  

When Trump was asked by Haberman and Swan how helping Israel fight Iran could be consistent with his theme of "America First," he answered: "Well, considering that I'm the one that developed 'America First,' and considering that the term wasn't used until I came along, I think I'm the one that decides that" (194).  In other words, "America First" means whatever Trump says it means, and his followers will have to accept that.  

Ever since the Iranian Revolution of 1979 that overthrew the Shah of Iran and established the Islamic Republic of Iran, when Trump was 32 years old, Iran has been a thorn in the side of the United States; and Trump throughout those years has complained that America has been humiliated by the failure of every President to defeat Iran.  

Benjamin Netanyahu was the first foreign leader to meet Trump at the White House at the beginning of his second term, and he shrewdly began working on Trump's psychology of power-seeking to persuade him that he could be the first president powerful enough to defeat Iran in cooperation with Israel.  Haberman and Swan report that Trump ignored the warnings of his military and intelligence advisors that Netanyahu's plan for "regime change" in Iran was wildly unrealistic and that going to war with Iran would be a foreign policy blunder of massive proportions.  Trump could not listen to them because Netanyahu had seduced him with the prospect of displaying his power to the whole world by defeating Iran in war.

3. Narcissism.  I have written about Trump's grandiose narcissism.  Cohn showed the same narcissistic personality.  And for both the prominent sign of their narcissism was shamelessness.  Cohn's cousin David Marcus has observed that both men didn't care what other people thought about their behavior.  "Roy would just make light of the fact that people in the family just didn't care about him.  He did not care.  That's the odd thing."  Marcus thought Trump was the same way, but there was a difference.  Trump showed "a narcissism combined with insecurity.  But in Roy it was a total security in who he was--except for the fact that he didn't want people knowing in public he was gay."  Mary Trump--Trump's niece, the daughter of his older brother who died young--has made a similar assessment of Trump as a psychopathic narcissist with the insecurity of a little boy who fears the abusive scorn of his father.

4. Nihilism.  Narcissism is intertwined with nihilism because if one believes the nihilist claim that truth and morality are not real, if they are just fictions of one's own mind, then the narcissist can create his own truth and his own morality.  Gabriel Sherman, who wrote the screenplay for The Apprentice, has Cohn telling the young Trump that "there is no right and wrong.  There is no morality.  There is no Truth with a capital T.  It's a construct.  It's a fiction.  It's man made.  You create your own reality."  Cohn once told an interviewer: "Certain rules are made to be broken.  They're designed to screw the little guy.  I decided long ago to make my own rules, to act according to my own choices, my own judgments, and my own conscience."

Compare this with what Trump recently said in an interview with the New York Times.  He was asked if there were any limits on his global powers.  He answered: "Yeah, there is one thing.  My own morality.  My own mind.  It's the only thing that can stop me."  Notice the emphasis by both Cohn and Trump: my own rules, my own judgments, my own conscience, my own morality, my own mind.  That's narcissistic nihilism.

For Cohn and Trump, their narcissistic nihilism is even expressed in the way they talk, in certain telling phrases.  Roger Stone noticed that Cohn would always say, "If you wanna know the truth," or "I can tell you," or "to be absolutely frank," and then you would know he was going to lie to you.  Listen to Trump when he's speaking casually to reporters or to audiences at his rallies, and you'll hear the same phrases.  Trump's phrases are all Roy Cohn's phrases, and they are always introducing a big lie.

So that's how Roy Cohn created Donald Trump and his narcissistic nihilistic politics.

The day after Trump was first elected president in November of 2016, Roger Stone called him to congratulate him.  At the end of their conversation, Trump said, "Wouldn't Roy love to see this moment?  Boy, do we miss him."

Are MAGA Voters Opposed to Trump's Immigration Crackdown?

 

Representative Maria Elvira Salazar Sends a Message to Trump on His Immigration Crackdown

I have written a series of posts on Trump's unconstitutional crackdown on immigrants.  I have also argued for an open borders immigration policy as rooted in America's Lockean liberal tradition.  And I have suggested that Trump's brutal detention and deportation of immigrants would provoke a backlash even among his MAGA voters because most Americans realize that America's success depends on being open to immigrants.

We're now seeing clear evidence for this because Trump's Republican candidates are losing the support of their voters because they feel betrayed by Trump's immigration crackdown.  Today the most dramatic evidence is a political ad just released by Representative Maria Elvira Salazar, who is running for reelection as a Republican in Florida's 27th Congressional District, which is in South Florida in Miami-Dade County.  She won reelection in 2024 by 20 percentage points.  Trump carried her district two years ago with 57 percent of the vote.  And Trump has given her his endorsement.  So you might think she should be confident of reelection.  But actually polls suggest that she is in a neck-and-neck race with her opponent Democrat Eliott Rodriguez.

Apparently, she has decided that she has lost voter support because of Trump's unpopular immigration policies.  So in this new political ad, she sends a warning directly to Trump:

Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far.  In July, 50 percent of the 50,000 people who were detained had no criminal record.  Be careful what your advisers are telling you about immigration policy.  The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.

This might provoke Trump into withdrawing his endorsement of her.  But that might be what she wants because in this election a Trump endorsement could become a curse.

In recent months, Salazar has proposed legislation in Congress that would give illegal immigrants who have lived in the U.S. for at least five years with no criminal background a path to legal status and work permits.  More than a dozen Republican congressmen have supported her proposal. 

Salazar is implicitly pointing to the incoherence of the MAGA movement as a political coalition of both liberal and illiberal elements.  We saw the triumph of the American liberal tradition in Trump's election and in his Second Inaugural Address.  The American illiberal tradition defends the national cultural homogeneity of a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant America against subversion by both internal and external enemies.  (Consider the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, for example.)  But Trump's electoral victory in 2024 depended on a pluralistic coalition of voters who were racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse.  As opposed to a WASPish illiberal America, it was a culturally heterogeneous liberal America that voted for Trump.  As Trump's presidency has given into his illiberal propensities, he has alienated those MAGA voters.

Many scholars--like historian Stephen Hahn, for example--have argued that the success of the MAGA movement would show the triumph of Illiberal America over Liberal America.  On the contrary, the disintegration of the MAGA movement that we are seeing now shows that Liberal America will always prevail.

"Shall We Let America Die?" David Atwell Zoll and Frank Meyer Debate Order and Freedom in Response to the New Left

The most distinctive feature of the Trump conservatives is their apocalyptic rhetoric--their claim that to save America from being destroyed by Radical Left Democrats, conservatives must set aside their conservative principles of limited government and individual liberty so that Trump can become a Red Caesar and suppress his opponents.   Trump has embraced this rhetoric, such as when he posted an image of Napoleon Bonaparte riding into battle with the text: "He who saves his country violates no law."  Previously, I have written about how Abraham Lincoln warned about the danger of someone like Trump who would thirst for the splendid glory that would come from becoming America's Napoleonic Dictator and thus destroy the American constitutional order.

There are some precedents in the history of American conservatism for using fear-mongering rhetoric to justify authoritarian one-man rule as the only way to save the country.  For example, in its issue of December 16, 1969, National Review published an article by David Atwell Zoll with the title "Shall We Let America Die?"  Zoll warned that in response to the violent revolutionary activity of the New Left, liberalism was showing a death-wish.  To save America from revolutionary overthrow by the New Left, American liberals would have to engage in autocratic repression.  But they refused to do this because this would violate their "libertarian commitments."  Consequently, liberalism was helpless before its enemies.

Zoll wondered whether contemporary conservatism was infected with a similar death-wish.  Conservatism "does share many civilized values with liberalism: most conspicuously, the values connected with libertarianism and legalism."  But if conservatives adhere to the values of libertarianism and legalism, that will hold them back from employing the repressive methods necessary for defeating the New Left revolutionaries.  "The serious conservative will not be pleased with the choice he might then have to make between some crude neo-fascism and the despotism of the new evangels of the Left."  Surely, however, Zoll declared, "a Bismarck is much to be preferred to a Robespierre."

As Chancellor of the German Empire (1871 to 1890), Otto von Bismarck sidelined the Imperial Reichstag and ruled autocratically through a strong bureaucracy with power concentrated in the hands of the Junker elite.  So in pointing conservatives to Bismarck as their model of rule, Zoll was clearly recommending autocratic repression of dissent as the only way to save America from a New Left Jacobin revolution.  He concluded by saying that this would affirm the most basic principle of conservatism--the commitment to order.

The readers of National Review in 1969 would have known that in speaking about "the revolutionaries of the New Left," Zoll was referring particularly to the left-wing militant group known as the "Weathermen," who had first arisen in June of 1969, when they took over the national office of the Students for a Democratic Society, and then began a series of militant activities that included bombings, jailbreaks, riots, and shootings.  The Weathermen justified this primarily as a way of protesting the Vietnam War.  When the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War ended in 1975, the Weathermen Underground slowly began to disband.

A few weeks after the publication of Zoll's article, National Review published Frank Meyer's response to Zoll (December 30, 1969).  Meyer agreed with Zoll that conservatives should see "that the restoration and preservation of order is the outstanding political issue of our present crisis."  But the question at issue here, Meyer insisted, was--what kind of order?

Instead of Zoll's proposal of an authoritarian order that would suppress liberty and civility, Meyer argued that American conservatives should support the American tradition of order--"the tradition of the Constitution and the Founding Fathers"--that would be compatible with individual freedom.  Within the American constitutional order, "there is no contradiction between the defense of order against criminal elements or rampaging mobs and a free polity."  Thus, "the alternative to a Robespierre always present to the consciousness of American conservatism is not a Bismarck but a Washington, not the agent of a Wilhelmine order, but the agent of a free constitutional order."

A few months later, Zoll responded to Meyer (National Review, March 10, 1970).  To Meyer's charge that Zoll was rejecting "the American tradition, the tradition of the Constitution and the Founding Fathers," Zoll pled guilty as charged.  But he observed: "any stabbing sense of guilt on my part is assuaged by the fact that these stentorian platitudes convey very little precise meaning to me, and if I do glean their general purport, one thing is clear enough: They have nothing to do with the intellectual history of conservatism."

Zoll then indicated that his conservatism was "high Toryism."  And the high Tory would see the American crisis created by the revolutionary New Left as a choice "between two forms of social repression: the insurrectionary tyranny of the Left and the primitivistic and irrational retaliations of the Right."  The Tory conservative "must not only confront the dangers of the New Jacobinism, but must also moderate the potential excesses of a right-wing radicalism."

Meyer responded with two more articles in National Review (March 24 and April 7, 1970).  Against Zoll's purely Tory conservatism, Meyer insisted that "we American conservatives" as defending the American constitutional republic "are at the same time both Tory and Whig, both traditionalist and liberty."  That's Meyer's "fusion" of traditionalism and libertarianism (more on that in the next post). 

To Zoll's claim that there are only two alternatives in the present crisis--the "insurrectionary tyranny of the Left" or the "primitivistic and irrational retaliations of the Right"--and that the only role for conservatives is to oppose the Left while seeking to "moderate the potential excesses of a right-wing radicalism," Meyer makes two objections.

First, Meyer says that Zoll is foolish in recommending that Tories "limit themselves to the gentle ministrations of a von Papen or a Hindenburg, ameliorating the excesses of barbarian right-wing radicalism--predictably, with as much success."  That is to say, no success.  Most of the readers of National Review would know that Franz von Papen, a national conservative, pressured German President Paul von Hindenburg to appoint Adolf Hitler as Chancellor and himself as Vice-Chancellor in 1933, with the thought that Hitler could be moderated once he was in government.  Well, we know what came of that.

Meyer's second objection is that Zoll's choice between left-wing tyranny and right-wing tyranny is a false dilemma because there is a third alternative.  "The obvious and desirable course for Americans is the preservation of our constitutional republic by restoring the rule of law and the authority of our institutions."  In doing this, he insisted, "no radical extra-Constitutional steps are necessary," because the "Constitution and the laws on our statute books are generally sufficient, if they are enforced."

Meyer made a few suggestions about what could be done.  Leftist criminals should be punished under the criminal laws.  Organizations engaged in violent insurrectionary attacks on constitutional institutions should be prosecuted.  It might be necessary to ban all outdoor assemblages that are intended to become violent.  Such riotous gatherings do not fall within the constitutional right (in the First Amendment) to "peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

Indeed, over the next five years, hundreds of Weathermen would be arrested and convicted for their crimes.  Many of them became fugitives who were tracked down by the FBI.  Some of the fugitives turned themselves in.  Eventually, the Weather Underground disbanded.  Thus was Meyer vindicated in his foreseeing that the American constitutional order provided all the means necessary for defending America against the New Left revolutionaries without violating the moral and legal principles of a free society.

From this, we can imagine what Meyer would have said to the Trump conservatives who argue that a Trump dictatorship is the only way to save the American way of life from being destroyed by the radical Left.  The election of Biden in 2020 was not a "Flight 93 Election"--a life or death election--because the Biden Democrats did not use their power to kill, imprison, or enslave innocent conservative Republicans.  And when Biden's presidency became unpopular, the constitutional order allowed Trump to return to power through a free, fair, and peaceful election.  Now that Trump's presidency has become unpopular, we can foresee that the Trump Republicans will be defeated in the coming elections.

This shows how the American constitutional system allows peaceful and orderly partisan political competition within an order based on civility and freedom. 

Conservatism After Trump

"God Gave Us Trump."  A Video Displayed by the Republican Nartional Committee at the Dallas Midterm Convention.  

Now that Trumpist conservatism has failed, conservatives need to ask themselves what conservatism after Trump should look like.  In her new book--Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right--Stephanie Slade makes a persuasive argument that conservatives will need to revive the fusionist conservatism of Frank Meyer that once dominated the conservative movement, particularly during the presidency of Ronald Reagan.  Meyer's claim was that in the best society, as was established by the American Founders, government secures individual freedom, which is the condition for human beings to pursue a virtuous life.

I agree with Slade.  But I will argue that Meyer's fusionism needs to be grounded in a Darwinian Lockean liberalism that explains why a free and virtuous society as proposed by Meyer conforms to our evolved human nature.

First, however, I need to indicate why Trumpist conservatism has failed.

WHY TRUMPISM AND THE DISSIDENT RIGHT HAVE FAILED

The essence of Trumpism is captured in three statements by Trump.  In August of 2016, in accepting the Republican nomination for President, Trump said that the system is rigged to favor the elites rather than ordinary Americans, and then he declared: "I alone can fix it."  In his second term, he has said: "As president, I have the right to do anything I want."  Recently, he has said that he is "the most powerful man that the planet has ever known."

All three of these statements are false.  "I alone can fix it" was based on his claim that his success as a businessman showed that he was uniquely qualified to fix what was wrong with America.  Some years ago, I claimed that this fundamental argument in Trump's political campaign rhetoric depended on his myth of himself as the self-made multi-billionaire businessman.  This argument can be put into the form of a syllogism:

Major premise:  Because of stupid politicians, America no longer wins; and America will not win again until a successful businessman who knows how to win is elected president.

Minor premise: Donald Trump is unique in his business success and his shrewdness in knowing how to win, because he is a self-made multi-billionaire.

Conclusion:  Therefore, Americans need to elect Trump president.

Both of the premises are open to dispute.  I have challenged the minor premise by pointing to the evidence that Trump's business career shows many failures from his imprudent decisions, that he was saved from ruin by his father's life-long transfer of money to him, and so he is not the self-made billionaire that he claims to be.  He had a long string of bankruptcies that would have destroyed him were it not for the hundreds of millions of dollars funneled to him from his father.  This started early.  By age 3, the young Donald Trump was earning $200,000 a year in today's dollars as an employee of his father.  By age 8, Donald was a millionaire. 

But now Trump has driven the national debt to over $40 trillion, and he doesn't have his father or anyone else to save the country from bankruptcy.

Trump's claims that as president, he can do anything he wants, and even become the most powerful man in history, are also false.  The Constitution limits the powers of the President and allows the other branches of government to check those powers.

Since American conservatives have generally upheld the constitutional system of limited government, it is hard to understand why any conservative would support Trump's claim of dictatorial power.  But those conservatives who have backed Trump's presidency--Slade calls them the "Dissident Right"--have argued that only a man like Trump with absolute power can save America from being destroyed by the Radical Left.  This argument was first made by Michael Anton in an essay published on September 5, 2016, with the title "The Flight 93 Election."  

Anton was referring to the United Airlines Flight 93 that was hijacked by four al-Qaeda terrorists as part of the 9/11 attacks.  The terrorists had planned to crash the plane into a government building in Washington, DC, perhaps the Capitol Building.  But some of the passengers in the plane had learned by telephone about the hijacked planes that had crashed into the Twin Towers in New York and into the Pentagon in Washington.  So the passengers realized that their plane was probably on a similar suicide mission.  They decided to charge the cockpit, hoping that if they fought off the hijackers, they could take over control of the plane.  To prevent that, the hijacker who was piloting the plane crashed it into a field in Pennsylvania, killing everyone on the plane.

Anton's essay began this way:

2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway.  You--or the leader of your party--may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane.  There are no guarantees.

Except one: if you don't try, death is certain.  To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto.  With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.

If you believe that American politics is a life-or-death struggle between friends and enemies of the American way of life, and the enemies want to destroy that way of life, then you must do anything necessary to defeat those enemies, even if it means electing a man president who could himself bring about the end of that way of life.

A few years later, in his book The Stakes and in a podcast conversation with Curtis Yarvin, Anton suggested that Trump might have to become a "Red Caesar."  His book was about the high stakes in the election of 2020--making it the most important election in over a hundred years.  Anton concluded the book by warning that while his "fondest political dream is for a restoration of the American constitutional order," the conflict between Blue America and Red America could lead to the total collapse of the constitutional order.  Then what?

He considered various possibilities.  One of them was Caesarism.  "Caesarism is a particular form of one-man rule: halfway, as it were, between monarchy and tyranny.  It is monarchical in that a single person rules.  It is tyrannical in that there is no appeal; Caesar's word replaces constitutionalism and even, in the final analysis, law" (341).  Caesarism, therefore, can be defined as "authoritarian one-man rule partially legitimized by necessity," where that necessity is the breakdown of the republican, constitutional order caused by the people becoming so corrupt that they lack the republican virtues required for liberty (342).

Anton explained that Caesarism has five kinds of benefits, which he saw in the history of ancient Rome's Caesars.  First, the benefits of Caesarism to Caesar are obvious--it satisfies his ambition for absolute power.

But there are also at least four benefits for a nation.  Caesarism can hold together a large nation and prevent it from breaking up.  In the case of the Roman Empire, it might have been broken up by factional conflict if Julius Caesar and is successors had not taken command.

Caesarism can also provide stability by preserving most of the formal institutions of the nation.

Caesarism can also calm factional conflict by subordinating all the factions to the rule of Caesar.

And it can preserve and even enhance the cultural and economic achievements of a great civilization, as was the case for Roman civilization under the Caesars.

Of course, Anton admitted, the great cost of Caesarism is the loss of liberty.  And yet when Caesarism comes, it's because liberty has already been lost (342-43).

In 2021, in a podcast conversation with Charles Haywood, Anton suggested that with the election of Biden as president, liberty had indeed been lost, because the Democrats would suppress all their opponents, so that the leftists would never give up their grip on power.  Anton said that he had "very little hope that a Republican can win a national election again, ever."

That prediction was proven false by Trump's election in 2024 to a second term.  Through a free and fair election, power was peacefully transferred from one party to another.  That was not a "Flight 93 Election."  That showed that American political liberty has not been lost.  (That election can be compared with the presidential election of 1800: the country's political polarization was so fierce that many people expected a civil war, and yet power was peacefully transferred from John Adams and the Federalist Party to Thomas Jefferson and the Republican Party.)

This shows that the American liberal democratic system can mediate partisan disputes by shifting power away from a party when it becomes unpopular.  Data from Gallup show this.  During Trump's first term, Trump's Republican Party became unpopular.  When Biden was elected in 2020, 49% of the people leaned more to the Democratic Party as compared with 43% leaning more to the Republican Party.  When Trump was elected in 2024, this was reversed--47% for the Republican Party, 43% for the Democratic Party--because Biden's policies had become unpopular.  But now, after less than two years of Trump's second term, Americans are leaning back towards the Democrats--49% for the Democratic Party, 39% for the Republican Party.  This shows that Trump's attempt to become a "Red Caesar" in his second term has made him even more unpopular than he was in his first term.

Clearly, then, the Trump conservatives have failed to win an overwhelming popular mandate for a Trumpian dictatorship.

To be continued in the next post .  .  .