As we move further toward governance through coercion, we must be prepared to withdraw our consent to be governed by this regime. Image by Koshu Kunii.

Driven by the contradictory demands of his situation, and being at the same time, like a juggler, under the necessity of keeping the public gaze on himself… by springing constant surprises – that is to say, under the necessity of arranging a coup d‘état in miniature every day – [he] throws the whole … economy into confusion, violates everything that seemed inviolable, makes some tolerant of revolution and makes others lust for it, and produces anarchy in the name of order, while at the same time stripping the entire state machinery of its halo, profaning it and making it at once loathsome and ridiculous—Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1851

So ends Marx’s keen-eyed chronicle of the events in France from 1848-1851 that resulted in the brutal crushing of the French proletariat, along with rise of Napoleon III, first as President (very temporarily) and eventually as Emperor. In the midst of our consternation and concern to understand our own present slide into these dark times, we might look to Marx’s analysis for some much-needed guidance. As Marx himself characterized his goal (in an 1869 preface to a second edition) for the series of articles that became the pamphlet, he was not interested in glorifying Bonaparte or telling a “great man of history” kind of tale, but rather he wanted to “demonstrate how the class struggle in France created the circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero’s part.” Sound like anyone/anything we know?

How about this then? Marx, in this passage, was trying to understand how the French peasantry came to play their unlikely, but essential role in Bonaparte’s rise. It reads as an eerily prescient characterization of the MAGA movement as the seemingly unshakeable center of support for the present regime, along with their dangerous susceptibility to its incessant demagoguery:

Insofar as millions of families live under conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection among these [people], and the identity of their interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not constitute a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, an unlimited governmental power which protects them from the other classes [for which we might, of course, read dangerous and unworthy ‘others,’ about which, more in a moment] and sends them rain and sunshine........

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