"Today, very few people still know what state or politics (or "history") is."– Letter from Alexander Kojève to Carl Schmitt (June 28, 1955)
So, the Joker took the White House. And this was not foreseen in the scenario. He did not need a truck full of explosives or a countdown running on a liquid crystal clock. He simply went to the elections, the most democratic in the world, and he won them.
The news was universally received in disbelief, painful for some, joyous for others. It is always an event in this world that a truth comes to light and manifests itself; It is then customary to bury it as quickly as possible under heaps of "comments", "explanations" and other chatter. We revoke the fact that it should not have happened, that it is an accident . The problem is that as the accident becomes the rule, whether Brexit prevails in the UK or bloody Duterte in the Philippines, it is increasingly difficult to mask the unreality of "what should be ". Disqualifying as "fascist" the outcome of procedures that are reputed "democratic" otherwise only adds to dishonesty, and aberration.
The election of Donald Trump to the American presidency, let us rather take it as a moment of truth. Let us formulate the old or new truths that burst into it. Let us see the reality that this lays out, and how to position ourselves henceforth.
1 - The election is not a "democratic" procedure. It has been practiced in all kinds of monarchical regimes. The Pope himself is an elect. Universal suffrage is a plebiscitary procedure. The plebiscite has always been favored by dictators. Thus, the first President of the Republic "democratically elected" in France was the dictator Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte.
2 - Dictatorship is an institution, not the negation of any institution. It was invented by the Roman republic in order to cope as effectively as possible with an emergency situation - a secession of the plebs, for example. If the dictator is given full powers, it is in order to save the Republic or to restore the "normal situation". Dictatorship is a republican institution.
3 - Politics is essentially the art of manipulating appearances, false pretenses, stratagems, three-band games, permanent coup d'etat, bad faith and domination, in short: effective lying. What could be more logical than to elect as president a patent liar? Those who see in this election the triumph of a "post-truth" policy because the victor of the day has never bothered to "respect the facts" are miserably trying to hide the evidence that he won precisely because he embodied the truth of politics, the truth of his lie. What makes the Left everywhere hateful is to lie on lies by making politics with good feelings. Whenever the Left attacked Trump's obscenity, it only gave rise to the false character of his own moralism. The restraint with which the Left relies is as well restrained from the truth, which perpetuates the reign of falsehood. Thus Trump became, for some, the name of the end of the lie. All they lacked was to have read Gracian, who said of the court-man: "When his artifice is known, he refines his concealment, by using the truth even to deceive. He changes his game and battery to change his trick. His artifice is to have none."
4 - If government is reduced today to the exercise of an emergency communication; If politicians do more than play their own role in a kind of entertainment show accessible to all; If they do not endeavor to reject day after day the examination of all the vital questions whose irresolution undermines our existences; If the exercise of State power is only to provide a decoy allowing all those who hold real power, because they have real interests in the world, to continue to serve them; If the government is no longer in government, and if its palaces are empty; Then it is highly rational to elect as president a professional boater from reality TV. A guignol is simply the best candidate to play the lead role in a puppet theater.
5 - Since the "democracy is in crisis", the experts are lost in superfluous considerations on the "vote of adhesion" and the "vote of protest". They would be well advised to add a newcomer to their poor categories: the "vote of contempt". One can not disregard the fact that a whole set of libertarian enemies of any government voted for Donald Trump. To bring a despicable being to a function that one despises, to put a grotesque person at the head of an instance that is judged superfluous, is there any more effective way of manifesting its inanity? To make the void the president is one way to annihilate the presidential function. Nevertheless, it is open to everyone to believe themselves malignant in deploring the triumph of "idiocracy".
6 - The encounter with the white man left an imperishable memory to a certain number of Amerindian peoples, a recollection which was not lost where the peoples in question were exterminated. According to the general opinion, the white man is a vulgar, lying, insensitive, narcissistic, ferocious, hypocritical, avaricious, ignorant of all that surrounds him and for whom nothing is sacred; He is a criminal, a rapist, a nihilist, a sick person, a wretch even in opulence. By giving himself a degenerate of Donald Trump's temper for president of the "Western Hemisphere," the citizens of the United States insisted on making this truth a shining fact, and for some blinding.
7 - Everywhere in the world, the juridico-formal edifice of the State is being dismantled in the name of the police criterion of efficiency, which does not coincide by chance with an ideal of management. Where ends are lacking, what remains as a presentable end than the infinite intensification of pure means? Soviet breaches, real-life repression, mass incarceration, "war against terrorism", state of emergency, "immigration policy", shameless propaganda, "war against drugs", paramilitary massacres and citizens, targeted assassination of opponents without explanation: it is not that "the state of exception becomes the norm", it is that a certain form of governmentality is spreading at high speed throughout the world. President Duterte, the "Filipino Trump", which suggests the number of extra-judicial executions on the streets of the country as a measure of the effectiveness of its policy, and encourages citizens to join in enthusiasm with the bloodbath, indicates a path along with a new paradigm of the exercise of power, all in "transgression". Obviously the most worrying thing about this Filipino paradigm is that there are still human rights associations who publicly question whether it would not be "breaking the rule of law".
8 - Western civilization never ceases to finish. For more than a century now, it has been part of the torture it inflicts on itself; To such an extent that even its most fanatical partisans were no longer interested in it. So they voted for Donald Trump in an immense "Let's finish it!". They literally preferred a terrible end to an endless fright. What is expressed here is, at the same time, a certain Calvinist taste for the Apocalypse, a will for a properly Western catastrophe. There is a way of giving way to vertigo, of ceasing to hold back, of a need for decisive confrontation, or to say that in theological terms a rupture of the katechon which will be followed by effects far beyond the United States.
9 - Since its Greek birth, democracy has essentially worked to ward off civil war - the civil war which gave it birth is no less than that which enables it to maintain itself, but above all civil war as the ultimate reality of the coexistence between the different forms of life, human and non-human. External war is, from Athens, the most banal way of warding off internal war. It is a trait of democracy to treat its enemies as 'enemies of civilization', 'barbarians', 'monsters', 'criminals' and more recently 'terrorists', in short: to reject them outside of: "humanity". It is this way of waging war that Trump "brought back to the house", brought back to the very heart of classical politics, treating Hillary Clinton not as an adversary with whom there would be debate but as a "criminal" he swore to send to prison. Thus, democratic politics has once again become the continuation of war by other means. Between distinguished people, for a long time, we preferred to speak of "pacification" rather than counterinsurgency. This is clearly no longer the case. If democracy is essentially that form of civil war that denies civil war, a number of US citizens wanted it to be now visibly what it essentially is. This is one of the first steps that democracy in America is taking outside the paths foreseen by Tocqueville, preceded in this way by Russia.
10 - Trump's victory comes so obviously as the revenge of the losers of the American Civil War of the 1860s that the risk is great, while finally perceiving the underground continuum of civil war, to see it as that of a curse which must be deplored, and not as a fact to be assumed. This election can function, beyond the puppet character of the US presidency, as a signal of vengeance, such as a blank check given to the police to murder as many blacks and leftists as it sees fit. It is always difficult to forgive the victims of all the evil that has been done to them. And it is true that Trump's supporters seem, on the whole, well armed. But one can also imagine that the manifest madness of the new government puts him face to face with a new war of secession with a reversed front, that the illegitimacy of the new power nourishes an infinite fragmentation of the national territory, an end of the United States of America, where the multiplication of militias would finally answer the multiplication of the communes. What is essentially ineligible in the character could kill, by contact, the function he was to occupy, and the system in which that function was inscribed. The aberration in the center could bring about the end of any centrality. More government, as territories to be covered, or to be avoided. End of hegemonies. Then contagion of discredit among all the Western leaders by simple contact with Trump: how to take seriously a head of state who pretends to take this Donald seriously? A final question for the road: what will happen to the administration of things and the government of men, when they can no longer put on the impersonal mask of the State?
We send you these thoughts from France, dear cousins, to tell you that you are not alone, whatever the fate the electoral system will reserve for us here in a few months or not.