Explaining the Donald
Peter A Huff finds the rise of Trump can be understood in terms of magic
The King in Orange The Magical and Occult Roots of Political Power
John Michael Greer
Inner Traditions 2021
Pb, 201pp, £12.99, ISBN 9781644112588
Donald Trump may be the ultimate anomalous phenomenon – at least for our age. How did an elderly American real estate and entertainment magnate, with baffling coiffure and no record in public service, rise to the level of what monarchist Buddhists once called a global wheel-turner, changing the course of empire? In their search for answers to that question, pundits of all stripes have been scouring fields from economics and psychology to criminology and theology for nearly five years. John
Michael Greer, no stranger to the seemingly impenetrable, takes the explanatory path less travelled. The Trump phenomenon can never be understood, he says, without serious consideration of the role of magic in contemporary politics.
Greer is a leading figure in American intellectual and occult networks seeking alternatives to establishments both Left and Right. In this book he brings his eclectic powers to bear not so much on Trump as on the Trump supporter, finding shopworn tropes of racism, sexism and deplorableness neither illuminating nor true enough to account for the reality of the ballcap revolution. He draws his title from Robert W Chambers’s The King in Yellow fantasy tales, his notion of magic’s political impact from Ioan Couliano’s Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, and his paradigm of civilisational conflict from Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West.
Greer’s argument, however, is original. Using a version of Crowley’s definition of magic as the “art and science of causing changes in consciousness in accordance with will”, he describes 21st-century American political discourse as a “bubbling cauldron” of incantation, fired by the resentment of an educated underclass and the wishful thinking of a self-righteous privileged class.
Greer situates his argument in a narrative stretching from the colonial period to conceivable transformations of the US in the not-too-distant future. At the heart of the narrative is the convergence of a democratised magic practice and the rapidly evolving online culture of America’s disenfranchised “basement brigade” in the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election. Greer focuses on the cyber intersection of chaos magic variants (the “lite beer” of the occult) with weird coincidences of offbeat comic strip figures, arcane Egyptian deities and numerical improbabilities showing up in politically incorrect post after post – all of which emboldened the alt-right and spooked the liberal mainstream.
Despite the subtitle, most of the book concentrates on the less esoteric contest between the nation’s wage class and its salary class. Greer never addresses Trump’s moral bankruptcy, ignorance of history, flirtation with fascism or inability to do more than campaign. Trump was a population’s “blunt instrument” in an unfinished struggle for survival. Anyone trying to decipher the last half-decade, or augur the next, should read this book.
★★★