“Critical Totalitarianism,” ‘Trumpism’, and Self-proclaimed Christians
the first term’s coming from Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision (expanded edition, 2004)
Wolin dedicates a chapter of his book to Friedrich Nietzsche. He makes it clear that his intent is to engage with the ‘unreformed’ Nietzsche, the one who is not worthy of being idolized, except perhaps by nihilists. He labels Nietzsche’s intellectual project “critical totalitarianism.”
According to Wolin [all italics are the authors’]:
“As the primordial principle of life, the will-to-power takes diverse forms . . . to the most naked acts of personal or political aggrandizement . . . . In its various manifestations the will-to-power seeks superiority by conquering rival wills. . . . it is striking for its restless, driven character . . . . The most striking characteristic of the critical totalitarian mentality stems from what seems to be a permanent dynamic, continuously in motion and inherently transgressive/aggressive. . . . [The] defining characteristic [of critical totalitarianism] can be described as the moment when the extraordinary marginalizes the normal, usurping its role in order to become the dominant practice [with ‘the extraordinary’ identified by Wolin as ‘what is unconfined to a form’ ]. . . . The normal sustains the skilled activities that assure the everyday operation of society. Critical totalitarianism seeks, literally, to belittle [the normal] . . . it renounces the moral, social, political, scholarly, and aesthetic values it had once prized. . . . a painful struggle that takes [critical totalitarianism] ‘outside’ normal conceptions of right, justice, and punishment . . . . [Wolin quoting Nietzsche] ‘The weak and ill-constituted shall perish: first principle of our philosophy. And one shall help them to do so.’ . . . To be outside all relationships is to go beyond transgression, to follow ‘instincts,’ to consort with the extraordinary. . . . [For a critical totalitarian] the enemy . . . is never given the form of an ‘argument” subject to proof or disproof, to counterclaims. . . . The enemy embodies a way of being, vague in its outlines, shifting in its appearances, and ingenious in its disguises. . . . Marginalizing the normal and attacking common morality are not gratuitous gestures or mere exuberant flourishes. They are essential conditions for the exercise of the forms of power peculiar to critical totalitarianism. . . . [power’s] momentum increases as its grip on reality loosens. Its marginalization of the normal — of what is grounded in everyday reality, what is settled — becomes a necessary condition of its power. The peculiarity of that power is its casual view of formal structures and conventions, seeing them as expedients rather than as limitations, and revealing a will-to-power that is mythic in its indifference to boundaries. . . . ‘What is required,’ Nietzsche wrote, ‘is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance.’ When all is surface or appearance, appearance is by default reality. . . . [Added Sept. 14] Nietzsche rejected the notion that facts had any special status. The idea of a fact is just another construction, another interpretation. By that move power is transferred. Fact becomes a weapon in the arsenal of those with interpretive power and disarms those who had used it to win popular support or promote agreement.”
What is most astonishing to me is that President Trump, whose political persona is without doubt the embodiment of Wolin’s concept of a “critical totalitarian mentality,” can count among his most ardent fans — fans of that persona, not just his anti-liberalism — people who claim to be Christians (while, for any who are unaware, “Christians” are the quintessential example of those who “shall perish” according to Nietzsche).