How a brilliant Jewish philosopher anticipated the cult of Donald Trump

By Robert Zaretsky
October 27, 2024

A grim irony of Walter Benjamin’s classic essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” is that it has been mechanically cited and endlessly reproduced since its initial appearance in 1936. It is even more ironic that I am about to commit both sins in this very space. But I plead extenuating circumstances: on the eve of an election which has, as we all seem to agree, existential consequences, I believe Benjamin’s essay is more relevant than ever.

In 1933, Benjamin — the brilliant German Jewish thinker who came of age during the Weimar period — had both the clarity of mind and strength of conviction to quit his native country just months after the Nazis assumed power. Benjamin became a stateless intellectual who, upon arriving in France, faced a nearly insuperable predicament: as a Jew, he could no longer publish in German journals; as a German, he found few French journals willing to publish him. “Things around me have been too bleak and uncertain for me to dare deprive my work of the scarce hours of inner equilibrium,” he wrote to his friend, Gershom Scholem, the scholar of Jewish mysticism. “I am provided with the bare necessities for at most two weeks a month.”

The work that provided that inner equilibrium was the famous Arcades Project, a sprawling manuscript which portrays Paris, the site of the many revolutionary cultural and political movements we identify with modernity, as the “capital of the nineteenth century.” Spinning off this project, like molten rock from a volcano, were several essays. The most spectacular of these essays was, aptly enough, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in which Benjamin riffs on technology’s impact on the nature of spectacle.

In effect, Benjamin invites us to view new technologies like film as the disease for which they might also be the cure. He observes that one consequence of his era’s technological advances is the ability to reproduce — whether on a postcard or pendant, large screen or long-playing record — a work of art. Our ability to endlessly duplicate these sights and sounds undermines their ability to maintain what Benjamin calls its “aura” and we might call their authenticity, even sacredness. What these objects once offered to cultural tradition, social ritual, and most importantly, political authority, has been buried under countless reproductions.

It is no accident that the advent of mass production led to the advent of mass politics. The monumental changes wrought by the West’s industrial and technological revolutions, including the invention of moving pictures, upended the social function of art. “Instead of being founded on ritual,” Benjamin writes, it is now “based on a different practice: politics.” The ideologies par excellence of this new age, Italian fascism and German national socialism, harnessed film to provide a new kind of cultic experience, one embraced by those desperate to express their disaffection and discontent with traditional politics.

Fascism, Benjamin warned, “sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.”

In the interwar period, the camera played a pivotal role in promoting the cult of the leader, whether it was der Führer or il Duce. The impact of Leni Riefenstahl’s documentaries, in which the German people are given a single voice whether they want it or not, is well known. Less well known is the way that Mussolini’s image became ubiquitous in Fascist Italy. In her eye-opening book Fascist Spectacle, the historian Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi reveals a world where the presence of Il Dulce was inescapable. From postcards to posters, swimming suits to sewer plaques, Italians found themselves looking at the jutting chin and fierce gaze of Mussolini.

Must we now add the name of the Donald to the same marquee of fascist movers and shakers like Il Duce and der Führer?

It would seem so.

Last week, The New York Times published an interview with General John Kelly, who served as a chief of staff during the Trump presidency. When asked if he believed his former boss qualified as a fascist, Kelly replied by defining the term: “It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy.” Kelly found that Trump checked all those boxes: “He certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”

Of course, this was not the first time the label “fascist” has been slapped on both Trump and his movement. But it was the first time someone with Kelly’s credentials — a retired Marine general who worked directly under Trump—had done so. The NYT doubled down with a profile on the truly admirable and influential historian Robert Paxton.

In 1972, Paxton made history — in fact, he changed history — with the publication of Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, revealing that the Vichy regime was an eager collaborator in the creation of the Thousand Year Reich and destruction of European Jewry. More than any other single event, the publication of Paxton’s book the following year in France obliged the country to finally confront, after nearly three decades of denial, the reality of the so-called années noires, or dark years.

One of his later books, The Anatomy of Fascism, became a standard reference for the subject. Yet Paxton, though repelled by the man, long refused to qualify Trump as a fascist. A stickler for historical truth and lexicographical accuracy, he worried that the term, charged with such dire meaning, was being used too loosely. But the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, changed his mind. In a column for Newsweek, Paxton announced that the event “removes my objection to the fascist label.” In fact, Trump’s role in winding up the crowd on that day convinced Paxton that the “label now seems not just acceptable but necessary.”

In their interviews, however, neither Kelly nor Paxton alluded to the performative aspect of fascism. Yet in an age where screens are inescapable in both public and private spaces, this may well be one of fascism’s most important traits. In the countless videos that circulate online, Trump exemplifies Benjamin’s diagnosis.

When he reassures his followers that “I am your voice” and “I am your retribution,” when he pumps his fist and shouts “Fight, fight, fight!”, Trump gives the gift of expression to those whose voices have not been heard and have decided to fight, fight, fight by deporting illegal immigrants and banning abortion. These words and gestures trump, as it were, the reality that Trump is, in Benjamin’s phrase, “preserving property” — namely, enriching the rich and impoverishing the poor with tax breaks and tariffs.

The Donald offers yet other gifts that advertise one’s participation in this cult. A bit unnervingly, these literal (and expensive) gifts, whether they are coffee mugs and crypto currency or basketball shoes and windbreakers, feature the same determined jaw and glaring eyes reminiscent of earlier leaders who expressed the voice of the people. Falasca-Zamponi notes that the “ubiquity of Mussolini’s image, words, and action, along with the heroicization of his person and myth of his power, contributed to the deification of the Duce.”

We might find comfort in the absence of a similar deification of Donald Trump. But this is cold comfort when an astonishing number of white evangelical protestants believe this “heathen from Queens,” in the words of one follower, is God’s anointed messenger. Trump did not create the nearly 20% of American voters who firmly believe that God’s prophets continue to walk this world, but Trumpism, our own era’s aestheticization of politics, has won their hearts and minds.

Remarkably, among these men and women are some of my neighbors in this corner of Texas, their porches decorated with Trump banners and their front yards with statues of such Christian figures as Francis of Assisi. While the Christian saint might well be surprised by this turn of events, not so the Jewish exile in France. While Benjamin’s words offer no hope of heavenly salvation, they do offer something more important: the example of intellectual clarity and courage in times of existential threats.