The World-Spirit on a Golf Cart

A few thoughts on our times

I’m going to do something I normally resist doing and offer some hot take thoughts based on recent events. Not on the details of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump specifically (there’s already plenty of that out there), but on what feels like his role in our general moment in time.

In the minutes after Trump dodged a bullet on live television, I joked on Substack Notes that “one does not simply shoot Napoleon.” This proved open to misinterpretation in a few different directions, but what I meant was this:

Napoleon famously led from the front, charging time and again into a hail of bullets and cannon shot, and yet not once was he ever seriously injured. In fact his luck seemed so impervious that he quickly acquired a legendary aura of invincibility. This became part of his overwhelming charisma – meaning not just his social charm but the inexplicable sense of unstoppable destiny that he seemed to exude. This aura proved so captivating to normal men that when he escaped from exile and landed alone in France to… well let’s call it make his “reelection” bid, the army sent to stop him promptly surrendered and switched sides at the mere sight of him.

Napoleon had seemed to become something more than mere mortal: he was a living myth, a “man of destiny” whom Providence had handed some great role to play in history (for good or for ill) and who therefore simply couldn’t be harmed until that role had been fulfilled and the world forever changed. This is why when Hegel witnessed Napoleon he described him with awe as “the world-spirit on horseback”: he seemed truly an “epic” figure, the sweep of history seeming to have become “connected to his own person, [to] occur and be resolved by him” alone, one way or another.  

This, it should be noted, used to be the standard way of explaining how the course of the world’s history was shaped. Thus was Alexander understood; thus was Caesar. Only after the Enlightenment and the onset of rationalistic modernity did this mythic view begin to wither away with the broader disenchantment of the world, to be replaced by a depersonalized and mechanistic view of historical causality.

We’re so back now though. Donald Trump has always been something of a bafflingly lucky man, as even his enemies are prone to admit. But witnessing him, in response to whatever whisper of Providence, tilt his head at precisely the right moment and degree to cheat death, I and it apparently many others can’t help but feel like he may be more than lucky – that he now seems as much myth as man.

And when he emerged, shaking off his bodyguards and streaked with blood, to stand and pump his fist in defiance beneath the American flag (as captured by a photographer who just happened to be there at the perfect place and time to reveal an era-defining symbolic image), this was rightly described by awed watchers in the stands and across the nation as “epic.” Maybe epic is the word that comes to their mind only because it’s become internet parlance for “cool shit.” But I suspect that they may mean more than that, that they may be attempting to describe the deeper charisma of someone who really seems to somehow have become a man of destiny, and that they intuited the scene as truly epochal in its meaning.

I’ve written before that I suspect we’re in a period of change the equivalent of which the world hasn’t seen for five centuries; that the upheaval we’re seeing is not just the tumult of politics and geopolitics as usual but the wider breakdown of Enlightenment liberal modernity. And it seems that Trump, like Hegel’s Napoleon, has somehow become a concentrated symbol of these times – of a world-spirit of a global rebellion; of the end of one epoch and the birth of another; and that he is a figure with an historic role that must be fulfilled, for better or worse, come hell or high water.

If so, it feels obvious in retrospect why we couldn’t have Ron DeSantis or whoever else (as I originally would have preferred) instead of the Great Orange One; why it had to be Trump v. Biden, and no one else. Because history has somehow become “connected to his own person, [to] occur and be resolved by him” alone. Even every obsessive word and action of Trump’s enemies, in their years of raging over his person, seem as if pointed to this looming denouement.

You may of course think all this sounds like irrational nonsense, that Trump wasn’t saved by destiny but just got lucky (again). And maybe he was. Frankly it doesn’t matter in the slightest, however. Trump as concentrated mytho-historical symbol will still function just as powerfully to change the world regardless of logic. I’m afraid the world really is just weird like that sometimes, and at this point we should probably just come to terms with it.

Already, love him or hate him, many of us can sense that the spirit – the zeitgeist – of the moment has somehow shifted significantly, whirling into yet another a new configuration around the figure of Donald Trump. For one thing, the right-wing counter-culture I predicted developing seems to have been crystalized in an instant by Trump’s raised fist.

All the organic energy now appears to be on the political right, because the right’s vibe is now not only “cooler” than the left but indeed does appear somehow “epic,” in the sense that it has come to feel (even to Trump’s enemies) almost as if it echoes the inexorable march of destiny – of History, which has not in fact ended. And, although this vibe is of course not in any way conservative in nature, it must inevitably function as a lethal acid to the progressive left. For one can be progressive only insofar as one has faith that the tide of history is behind you and you alone. Trump’s grinning arrival, astride his gleaming white golf cart, ruins their whole paradigm.

So where are we headed? Where will it all end? I have no idea, and will make no predictions here. We should remind ourselves that Napoleon’s story did not have a happy ending – for him or really for anyone. Hegel saw him as a tragic hero precisely because in the end (like all epochal figures in Hegel’s philosophy) his destiny was purely one of negation, of destruction: to put an end to one era and clear the way for another. What comes next, should Trump’s destiny be to perform some similar role, we cannot yet know.