Trump's Charismatic Succession Plan
It could work. Unfortunately.
You guys, after the last newsletter, I received enough donations to buy three books published by an academic press! So expensive! So needed!
It's becoming more and more difficult to find information online. I know this is the result of manufactured scarcity. The information still exists! It's just been buried by slop + search engines newly programmed to search but never find. But something can be manufactured and still be real, you know?
Anyways.
I am having a much harder time getting research done remotely these days. So I am trying to build up my physical research library. I am so grateful to you. Like, the relief I feel over those three books is palpable. (Three books down - how many to go? Better to not count, probably.)
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Also, I've been staying up all night to write these newsletters - so there are more typos than usual. And there are always typos. More proof that editors are necessary! Obviously! My 15 year old sent me some screenshots of said typos so that I could fix them. And I was like, "Omg! My kid is reading my series about a bunch of plutocrats trying to LARP Rome, 27 BCE?!" And like, life is just really unexpected, pretty much all of the time. This is good and bad, usually at once.
Welcome to the third installment of my series on The New Right, a reactionary movement that wants to overthrow the US government, install one-man rule and ultimately use slavery to order society. And yes, JD Vance is a part of it! Thanks for asking!
Here is the first installment.
Here is the second installment.
That all sounds pretty wild! So I need to establish why I think the New Right could actually succeed at taking over our corner of the world. Three years ago, I wouldn't have considered them a long-term threat. If someone presented me with everything I've presented here so far, I would have said,
Okay! Let me see if I understand what you are saying!
JD Vance is part of the New Right, a coalition that counts a lot of billionaires in its ranks, along with Christian Nationalists who hold government offices and also pretty much any guy who thinks Cassandra got what she deserved.
Through the next Trump term and who knows how many Vance terms, the coalition hopes to use an extremist supreme court to successfully consolidate power under the president until one-man rule is in effect. And they think this will be effective because billionaires know the power of consolidation - their empires were built once the Department of Justice pretty much gave up on stopping vertical consolidation.
All of this will be enabled and enforced through the courts, surveillance, manufactured information scarcity and ever increasing privatization that leaves us ever more reliant on the tech companies owned by the oligarchs that fund - and also often are - the very reactionaries seeking to overthrow the government.
Eventually, most people will be effectively, but also probably officially, disenfranchised. They will become subjects of patronage networks, run by men who have the authority to enslave those who do not show enough obedience and those who they deem ‘natural slaves.’ These patronage networks will be built and enforced through distributed technology.
Wow. That does sound very bad! And since they’ve gotten so much power already, I know the New Right has caused harms and will continue to cause harm. But come on, they’re not going to be able to install a monarch. It’s difficult to install and then sustain absolute rule. Even an absolute sovereign requires some sort of authority to justify their rule. Because ultimately, they need their subjects to spend more time obeying than resisting. And there is no way for absolute rule to derive legitimate authority from the American context.
A few years ago, I fundamentally misunderstood the nature of authority. I thought it existed apart from the men who wield it. But, of course, it does not.
There is nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it establishes canons of taste and value; it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true, and from traditions, perceptions, and judgments it forms, transmits, reproduces. - Edward Said
Despite the claims of many men, authority requires neither reason nor divine right. Instead, authority is just the manufactured legitimization of power. Power is generated and distributed through man-made institutions.
Power is never created or distributed equally. And so neither is authority. But they are not interchangeable. Power is the ability to influence. Authority is power that uses social structures to compel obedience. Authority is the right to dominate.
In every age, there are men who learn which buttons to push to get enough power to create a claim authority. Some people call these men Great. But I can’t see the genius in it. Rats can learn how to push buttons to get what they desire too.
The men funding and leading the New Right have accumulated a great deal of power. They are billionaires (and billionaires' bootlickers) in a capitalist society! They’ve used their capital power to influence at scale! But it’s not enough for them. They don’t just want to influence, they want to dominate.
As flawed as America is, its systems have been resilient enough to deny Peter Thiel and his peers the absolute authority they crave. So they’ve had look outside of legal-rational systems to legitimate their domination.
Two Sources of Authority: Empire and Donald Trump’s Charisma
Empire
The New Right guys talk about Rome a lot - especially the years before and after the Roman Republic transitioned to the Roman Empire. (They’re okay with transitioning if it involves Nero, I guess.) JD Vance likes to say we are in a late Republican period. Yarvin wants to see a Caesar rise and overthrow democracy.
They are very, very into Roman emperors, especially the first one - Octavian, who renamed himself Augustus. It’s just a whole thing for these guys. So from here on out, we’re going to talk a lot about Ancient Rome a lot. But not too much. I promise.
Right now, I just want to talk about Empire as a source of authority.
I used to think the emperor created the empire. But I learned this was wrong after engaging with the work of classicist Mary Beard. It’s really the other way around. The empire creates the emperor. Basically, imperial power and authority are generated by the ever-conquering and ever-consolidating structure of empire.
The Roman Republic was an imperialist empire, conquering people, enslaving people, annexing land. As the empire grew, it required more administration, more defense, more food, more watchfulness against slave rebellions, more subjects always more subjects. The larger the empire grew, the more imperial power it generated.
In the Roman Republic, wealth was the key to influencing the state. You had to have a certain level of wealth to hold public office. And the votes of citizens with more money were weighted more heavily than the votes of citizens with less money. So the very wealthy had a lot of influence. As their individual power grew, it required more administration, more defense, more watchfulness against competition.
Some of the Roman elites built mini-empires within the Roman Republic’s imperial empire. But here was a conflict! Those mini-empires were built while warring and governing, actions that reinforced state authority. But those mini-empires generated a lot of power! And that power threatened state authority.
So the state tried to diminish the elite’s growing power. Which was a problem for the elite, as they needed state authority to keep accumulating power. And it was a problem for the state, as they needed to elite’s power to reinforce Roman authority. And of course, no one cared that it was all a problem for the poor, the conquered, and the enslaved. Which is just … typical.
In the end, the Republic fell - not because of a man or many men - but because it was an imperialist empire and the empire required an emperor.
America has "an empire for every billionaire" problem*
Under capitalism, ownership, or traditional capital, generates power. But in our current form of capitalism, power can also be generated from projected ownership, or future capital. Projected ownership generates power (and capital) faster than regular old ownership. There’s lots of reasons for this, but basically - projected ownership isn’t as constrained by reality.
The borders of an empire used to be measured by what had been annexed, now the borders of an empire are measured by what may be annexed. The power of the billionaires overseeing tech-enabled empires is just really forking staggering. But power is not authority.
The structures of the billionaires’ global tech empires are generating imperial power! But the billionaires do not have imperial authority. Which super bums them out, because Peter Thiel, JD Vance, Kevin Roberts, Marc Andreessen and the rest of the COTC really, really want the authority to force us to obey them.
They’ve got to a find a way to legitimize their power.
*in addition to its regular old empire problem, obviously
Enter Trump, for the last time.
The New Right is betting on what Max Weber called “charismatic authority.” This is when power is “legitimized not he basis of a leader’s exceptional personal qualities…which inspire loyalty and obedience from followers.” Now, “exceptional” doesn’t mean good or virtuous or even valuable. He means the leader has a quality - often difficult to describe - that psychologically compels followers. Donald Trump is a charismatic leader.
Unlike other kinds of authority, charismatic authority is generated through a kind of relationship between the followers and the leader. The followers have to recognize the exceptional quality to confer the authority. (They don’t have to define it! Just sense it!) This is why Donald Trump loves rallies. It’s not just the applause. He is there to have his power legitimized, his authority renewed. The dude is literally powering up!
Charisma can reinforce legal-rational authority! But it’s also accessed when a person needs to source authority from outside legal or traditional boundaries. If you want to impose authoritarian rule on a republic, you better be pretty forking charismatic.
Charismatic authority tends to die with the charismatic person. But charismatic succession exists! The charismatic leader can designate a successor and pass on their charismatic authority - even if the successor has no personal charisma! If the followers really believe the successor was chosen by the charismatic leader, this can really work. And it can be sustained for a while by really leaning into imagery, rhetoric and rituals associated with the deceased charismatic leader. But it will only really hold if the successor can successfully routinize the charismatic authority. Routinization just means transferring the authority to an office, institution or system.
The New Right is exploiting Trump’s charisma. They’re using Trump as a kind of Trojan horse. Trump isn’t really a New Right guy. He’s a Trump guy. Like he wants to be an authoritarian because he thinks his will should dictate everything. But he’s not into building anything beyond himself, because he can’t see beyond himself. Trump wants to have statues of himself in every public square, but he’s not trying to colonize Mars with different iterations of his uploaded consciousness. A perhaps subtle, but important distinction!
The New Right guys are different. They are all obsessed with legacy and living forever and being remembered as Great Men and installing systems that control society long after their memories have been uploaded into a clone. Shockingly, the New Right has a charisma deficit. (Is it shocking though?) This deficit is a problem because what they want to do is so extreme. They need a lot of charisma!
So the plan is get Trump into office one more time, but with Vance as his designated successor. When Trump is no longer fit to serve, the rules of charismatic succession mean the authority of his charisma will be transferred to Vance. He’ll use Project 2025 to begin the routinization of Trump’s charismatic authority in service of the New Right’s authoritarian wet dreams.
I grew up in a church ruled by routinized charismatic authority. The LDS Church was begun by Joseph Smith, a textbook charismatic leader. (Literally textbook as Max Weber studied Smith while developing his ideas about charismatic leadership.) Smith’s successor, Brigham Young, was not charismatic - but a majority of followers believed he’d been given Smith’s charismatic authority.
I grew up in a church led by a prophet
If I followed him, my family would stay together forever
Breakfast can take you quite far
I grew up in a mixed reality
Young routinized Smith’s charismatic authority by developing an arcane priesthood order. It worked. I can testify that the potency of routinized charismatic authority should not be underestimated. I was born into the LDS Church 141 years after Joseph Smith’s death - and his charismatic authority still compelled me to obey, even when it hurt me and others.
Coming up: Meg, you keep saying these people want to enslave us but they talk about liberty a lot! So like…which is it? Are they into liberty or dominion? (BOTH!)
