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Paul North finds a prescient analysis of the (still only possible) end of the American republic in Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte…

An autocrat takes over. Why does the legislature permit him to hijack government, pervert institutions and norms, and unburden them of their legitimate power? Why would a representative body like the US Congress willingly injure its own authority? Karl Marx gave an answer in 1852, in his fiery postmortem for the French Republic, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

Marx’s answer to the question of why the powerful willingly abandon their own power is unusual because it does not find a rational plan behind the move. A legislature, faced with a potential autocrat, is caught between two impulses and ends up following the wrong one—one that is, in fact, self-destructive. That Democratic legislators do not stand up to Trump is one thing, but the litmus test, according to Marx, was not the actions of the centrists or leftists but of the true Right. Putatively at least, the Right is in power, as it was in the French Second Republic. While Democrats may see what’s going on but are cowardly or weak, the Right is either simply blind or making a dangerous but rational calculation. In his century, Marx called the Right blind, for interesting reasons.

It is hard to imagine what drives the Right today to support the Trump regime. Take Tom Cole, the 10th-term Republican from Oklahoma’s fourth district, poster child for conservative principles and head of the Appropriations Committee, arguably the most powerful position in the House—at least formerly. Regarding Social Security, Cole’s website states that his goal is to “sustain and protect the program for current beneficiaries and future retirees.” Yet, as a recent article by Russell Berman demonstrates, “even Tom Cole is defending DOGE,” which has the hallowed safety net in its sights…

… It is common to think of The Eighteenth Brumaire as the chronicle of a self-aggrandizing, power-hungry “serious buffoon,” Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. He had failed twice to take power through coups d’état, in 1836 and again in 1840. No one who knew him could deny that coups were his thing. Then, in the confusion after the revolutions of 1848 and on the strength of his name and dynastic ties to his uncle, Louis Napoleon returned to France and, third try’s the charm, became leader of France. No coup was needed this time—he won the new republic’s first presidential election by a wide margin.

In the years that followed, Louis Napoleon engineered a repeal of universal male suffrage, hobbled parliament, and manipulated ministers and generals to his purposes. When it became clear that the Constituent Assembly would not amend the constitution to extend his term in office, he decided (surprise, surprise) to instigate yet another coup: he had opponents arrested by the thousands, constrained the press, and, in November 1852, became emperor of France…

… A coup d’état in miniature every day, to hold the public gaze—parallels between Louis Napoleon and Donald Trump are vivid and many. Peter Gordon drew out the important ones in an essay for the Boston Review. At the most basic level, Trump and Louis Napoleon dress up restoration in the tunic of revolution: both leaders rode in on the backs of the disenfranchised, and both promised a return to a golden age that never existed.

Yet The Eighteenth Brumaire is not primarily the anatomy of an autocrat. For most of its approximately 100 pages, Marx analyzes in detail how other actors in the republic misidentified Louis Napoleon as good for their interests. He focuses particularly on members of the Constituent Assembly, whose influence flowed directly from the existence of the republic itself. Marx skewers assembly members, ministers, and military leadership for their ignorant, self-destructive complicity. The first lesson of his depressing and hilarious pamphlet is not to focus on the autocrat, since it takes a nation to make one, after all…

… New interests do produce vigorous sap, and that sap needs to flow, vigorously, toward something concrete. If we concentrate, as Marx does, not on the Caesar but on the political parties, their platforms, and their representatives in the Constituent Assembly, we can ask how they failed to foresee the obvious and forestall the republic’s end.

All the drama in The Eighteenth Brumaire happens in the assembly. Louis Napoleon may be farcical, but the legislature is tragic. “The history of the Constituent National Assembly since the June days is the history of the domination and the disintegration of the republican faction of the bourgeoisie,” Marx tells us. To avoid a real republic, right-wing elements circumvented checks and balances, first and foremost the constitution. And then, when Louis Napoleon circumvented the assembly itself in 1851 in order to extend his rule, conservatives suddenly remembered the republic. It was republicanism, they realized, that had brought them to power, and republicanism that had allowed them to exercise it. With its end, they ended.

Just a few years before, the Revolution of 1848 had brought down the French king and introduced liberal freedoms of press, speech, association, and assembly, all secured through a liberal constitution. It also brought about universal, unpropertied male suffrage. Some of these freedoms and entitlements were then progressively taken away by the assembly, the rest by the emperor. It wasn’t Louis Napoleon that caused the demise, however. Parliament dissected itself. It took away the basis of its own power by going around the constitution. Marx’s poignant lines evoke a feeling many of us have today that can only be called “rue.” On one side, Marx rues the way “the collective will of the nation” seeks “its appropriate expression through the inveterate enemies of the interests of the masses, until at length it finds it in the self-will of a freebooter.” The people stood with Louis Napoleon, although he was antithetical to their interests. On the other side, the assembly used its power to do away with its power. Two errors made a fatal combination…

… It is a general truth that an autocrat gets into power not by himself but through those who let him. Louis Napoleon came to power by legal means (at least the third time he tried), but he stayed in power through the complicity of those around him. What did they have to ignore in order to continue in their complicity? Marx does not mince words: “If ever an event has, well in advance of its coming, cast its shadow before, it was Bonaparte’s coup d’état.” The coming coup was so obvious, no one could have denied it and remained honest with themselves. This raises some questions. Why did the Right ignore what was in front of their faces? Why, in the presence of real danger, whose long-term effects would be devastating to their political goals, did this group default? Why did they defer to a lesser danger at the cost of denying the existence of a much greater one?…

… What holds a body of consummately rational actors in such an irrational state that they take losses as victories? What allowed the Right in mid-19th-century France to believe the steps they were taking toward irrelevance were in fact steps toward the triumph of their political vision? Marx has two answers. On one hand, behind the self-deception, he sees a simple wish: the bourgeoisie as a whole “longed to get rid of its own political rule in order to get rid of the troubles and dangers of ruling.” On this view, the Party of Order made a semirational choice—that a roiling populace would be worse for order than an autocratic fool. In the end, assembly members could relinquish governing and go back to the business of making money—which, according to Marx, was their material desire anyway: “[T]he bourgeois madly snorts at his parliamentary republic: ‘Rather an end with terror than terror without end!’”

This is a psychoanalysis not of complicity, however, but of capitulation. Marx may be correct about the way things ended. He is talking about the Right’s eventual acceptance of autocratic rule, after it became a fait accompli. Once it was clear that they had lost, they could say “There’s nothing we could have done. This way is better for business. It is what we wanted.” They could declare their actions to have been rational all along and go back to their farms or their industries. But why had parliament succumbed to this debacle in the first place? How did they catch the peculiar malady cretinism?…

Read on for an answer: “He’s a Cretin but We’ll Manage Him,” from @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social‬. Indeed, eminently worth reading in full.

* “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” – Karl Marx

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As we contemplate capitulation, we might ponder the pre-history of the events in question and spare a thought for Louis Joseph, Dauphin of France (the second child and first son of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette); he died of tuberculosis on this date in 1789 at age 7… 40 days before the storming of the Bastille. At his death, the title of Dauphin passed to his younger brother Louis Charles, Duke of Normandy (1785–1795), who died during the French Revolution, at the Temple prison in Paris.

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