Abstract
We use Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality as a touchstone for comprehending Trump’s appeal and victory. Following Nietzsche’s concerns, the most noteworthy puzzle is that of Trump’s peculiar popularity, especially given his impolitic statements and policy proposals that often appear in tension with the interests of his voter base. While Nietzsche’s discussions of power and resentment would seem obvious starting points to examine the success of Trump and Trumpism, we contend that these provide largely superficial and, at best, incomplete explanations. Instead, informed by Nietzsche’s moral psychology, we analyze Trump’s strategy in the context of the instinctual need for self-preservation. Trump’s amplification of this need through his rhetoric and cultivation of negative emotions, including resentment, has led to a revaluation that diminishes humanity. We conclude by drawing out the implications of Nietzsche’s view, revealing a forceful Nietzschean critique of Trump’s methods and values.
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Notes
- 1.
Popularity here, of course, is relative. Trump was elected with higher unfavorable and lower favorable ratings than even his unpopular opponent Hillary Clinton. Nevertheless, he remained popular enough to win the Electoral College, which in American presidential politics is the name of the game.
- 2.
Trump himself, in a moment of surprising self-awareness, boasted at a rally in Iowa that “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”
- 3.
Andrew Huddleston, review of Nietzsche’s Great Politics, by Hugo Drochon, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, December 18, 2016 http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/nietzsches-great-politics/.
- 4.
Shaw aptly writes that the results have been so diverse one might conclude that Nietzsche’s “ethical and epistemological views do not themselves have any very determinate political consequences.” Tamsin Shaw, Nietzsche’s Political Skepticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 2.
- 5.
We have employed parenthetical citations of Nietzsche’s works using the following abbreviations:
A = The Antichrist, in The Antichrist, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
BGE = Beyond Good and Evil, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Judith Norman, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
EH = Ecce Homo, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1967).
HH = Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
GM = On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1998).
GS = The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff and Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
TI = Twilight of the Idols, in The Antichrist, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Z = Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ed. Adrian Del Caro and Robert Pippin, trans. Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
- 6.
Detwiler offers what might be the most common version of a Nietzschean political theory, which he calls “the politics of aristocratic radicalism.” See Bruce Detwiler, Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
- 7.
Brian Leiter, Nietzsche and Morality (London: Routledge, 2002), 296.
- 8.
“The thirst for equality can express itself either as a desire to draw everyone down to oneself…or to raise oneself and everyone else up” (HH 300). In this vein, Maudemarie Clark argues that democratic institutions are not necessarily bound to values like egalitarianism. “Nietzsche’s Antidemocratic Rhetoric,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 37, no. S1 (1999): 133.
- 9.
See James Conant, “Nietzsche’s Perfectionism: A Reading of Schopenhauer as Educator,” in Nietzsche’s Postmoralism, ed. Richard Schacht (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 226–228.
- 10.
See Hugo Drochon, Nietzsche’s Great Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 1. See also pp. 1–3, 49–51.
- 11.
Peter Wehner, “The Theology of Donald Trump,” New York Times, July 5, 2016, accessed July 28, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/05/opinion/campaign-stops/the-theology-of-donald-trump.html.
- 12.
This seems to be representative of a common view of Nietzsche on Trump vis-a-vis power. Among many other examples, see Damon Linker, “How Nietzsche Explains the Rise of Trump,” The Week, August 11, 2015, accessed July 30, 2017, http://theweek.com/articles/570977/how-nietzsche-explains-rise-donald-trump.
- 13.
Richard Schacht, “Donald Trump and Nietzsche,” New York Times, July 12, 2016, accessed July 28, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/13/opinion/donald-trump-and-nietzsche.html.
- 14.
See Richard Schacht, Nietzsche (New York: Routledge, 1983), esp. Chapter 4; Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), esp. Chapter 7; John Richardson, Nietzsche’s System (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). See also the discussion on the will to power between Clark, Schacht, Richardson, and David Owen in International Studies in Philosophy 32, no. 3 (2000).
- 15.
Bernard Reginster, The Affirmation of Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 126.
- 16.
“What is happiness?” Nietzsche asks. It is “the feeling that power is growing, that some resistance has been overcome” (A 2). See also, BGE 19 and TI “Skirmishes” 38.
- 17.
Reginster, The Affirmation of Life, 136.
- 18.
Reginster, The Affirmation of Life, 138.
- 19.
As a representative example, consider the following: “‘Exploitation’ does not belong to a corrupted or imperfect, primitive society: it belongs to the essence of being alive as a fundamental organic function; it is a result of genuine will to power, which is just the will of life” (BGE 259). Cf., GM II: 12.
- 20.
Admittedly, if we were to be faithful to Nietzsche’s text, the fact of the matter is that Trump is probably, like most people, a mix of the master and the slave type. See BGE 260, where Nietzsche writes, “In fact, you sometimes find [these moralities] sharply juxtaposed – inside the same person even, within a single soul.”
- 21.
Robert Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology, & First Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 118.
- 22.
Jill Filipovic, “The Revenge of the White Man,” Time, November 10, 2016, accessed February 20, 2017, http://time.com/4566304/donald-trump-revenge-of-the-white-man/.
- 23.
Helena Bottemiller Evich, “Revenge of the Rural Voter,” Politico, November 13, 2016, accessed February 20, 2017, http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/hillary-clinton-rural-voters-trump-231266.
- 24.
Matt Vespa, “Losers: Clinton Campaign Ignored Bill’s Advice and Felt White Working Class Voters Weren’t Worth the Time,” Townhall, November 13, 2016, accessed February 20, 2017, https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2016/11/13/losers-clinton-campaign-ignored-bills-advice-and-felt-white-working-class-voters-werent-worth-the-time-n2245095.
- 25.
Nietzsche uses the French ressentiment in his work . When possible, we use ‘ressentiment’ to denote Nietzsche’s specific conception of the more general phenomenon for which we use ‘resentment’.
- 26.
Manfred Frings, introduction to Ressentiment, by Max Scheler (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1994), 5.
- 27.
Bernard Reginster, “Nietzsche on Ressentiment and Valuation,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 57, no. 2 (1997): 286–287.
- 28.
For example, Bittner offers the fable of the fox and sour grapes to illuminate what he takes to be the important aspects of Nietzsche’s view. See Rüdiger Bittner, “Ressentiment,” in Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality, ed. Richard Schacht (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), 130–131.
- 29.
See Reginster, “Nietzsche on Ressentiment and Valuation,” 290–291. Furthermore, Sinhababu contends that treating ressentiment as a form of sour grapes wrongly minimizes the vengefulness of the slaves, See Neil Sinhababu, “Vengeful Thinking and Moral Epistemology,” in Nietzsche and Morality, ed. Brian Leiter and Neil Sinhababu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 268.
- 30.
Katherine J. Cramer, The Politics of Resentment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
- 31.
Green argues that resentment is necessarily unsuccessful because frustration cannot transform the unsatisfied desire, Michael S. Green, “Nietzsche on Pity and Ressentiment,” International Studies in Philosophy 24, no. 2 (1992): 66. We agree with Babich’s response that Nietzsche’s problem with resentment must be precisely that it is successful. See Babette E. Babich, “Commentary: Michael Green, ‘Nietzsche on Pity and Ressentiment’,” International Studies in Philosophy 24, no. 2 (1992): 74.
- 32.
Cramer, The Politics of Resentment, 15, 145, 192.
- 33.
We want to emphasize that our primary question here pertains to whether these scholars are tapping into Nietzsche’s sense of resentment, and not whether they are well-researched and compelling feats of scholarship, which they certainly are.
- 34.
Arlie Russell Hochschild , Strangers in Their Own Land (New York: The New Press, 2016), 135–139.
- 35.
And as Hochschild puts it, Trump “is an ‘emotions candidate.’ More than any other presidential candidate in decades, Trump focuses on eliciting and praising emotional responses from his fans rather than on detailed policy prescriptions.” Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land, 225.
- 36.
R. Jay Wallace, “Ressentiment, Value, and Self-Vindication: Making Sense of Nietzsche’s Slave Revolt,” in Nietzsche and Morality, ed. Brian Leiter and Neil Sinhababu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 116.
- 37.
Wallace, “Ressentiment, Value, and Self-Vindication,” 117.
- 38.
See Wallace, “Ressentiment, Value, and Self-Vindication,” 114.
- 39.
Jeremy Engels, The Politics of Resentment (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015), 127.
- 40.
Individuals will go to the extreme for self-preservation, and this extends to the need for a goal. Humanity would rather “will nothingness than not will” (GM III: 1).
- 41.
The priests are not the only ones to take advantage of the instinct for self-preservation; according to Nietzsche Socrates used a similar strategy. He “understood that the world needed him” for self-preservation, so he offered his own method and cure in order to gain influence (TI “Socrates” 9).
- 42.
Sean Illing, “What Nietzsche’s Philosophy Can Tell Us about Why Brexit and Trump Won,” Vox.com , June 11, 2017, accessed July 10, 2017, https://www.vox.com/conversations/2016/12/20/13927678/donald-trump-brexit-nietzsche-democracy-europe-populism-hugo-drochon.
- 43.
“An article of faith could be refuted to [man] a thousand times; as long as he needed it, he would consider it ‘true’ again and again” (GS 347).
- 44.
Jacob Golomb, “The Case of Nietzsche Against Trump,” The Critique, January 15, 2017 http://www.thecritique.com/articles/nietzsche-against-trump/.
- 45.
“Carlyle … needs noise. A constant, ardent dishonesty towards himself—that is his proprium, that is what makes and keeps him interesting” (TI “Skirmishes” 12).
- 46.
Robert Pippin, review of The Affirmation of Life, by Bernard Reginster, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 77, no. 1 (2008): 289, note 15.
- 47.
Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. 4th ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 252.
- 48.
Pippin, Nietzsche, 118.
- 49.
We owe this basic idea on the relationship between the nature of health and higher health to William Schroeder.
- 50.
Lippitt writes, “Zarathustra is showing the required flexibility and openness to experience, in accepting his need to continually integrate his traits, habits and patterns of action; always remaining open to what his future might bring, and surely, to be able to view this prospect with amusement, he must have attained the practical distance from his own current self necessary to this humorous attitude towards life.” John Lippitt, “Nietzsche, Zarathustra and the Status of Laughter,” British Journal of Aesthetics 32, no. 1 (1992): 45.
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Harper, A., Schaaf, E. (2018). Power, Resentment, and Self-Preservation: Nietzsche’s Moral Psychology as a Critique of Trump. In: Sable, M., Torres, A. (eds) Trump and Political Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74427-8_14
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