Veblen’s America: The Conspicuous Case of Donald J. Trump

By Sidney Plotkin

Donald Trump’s astonishing rise to the US presidency challenges conventional understandings of American politics, yet he is distinctively American. His biography and family lineage reflect American traditions such as real estate hucksterism and buccaneering salesmanship. But Trump’s pugnacity also reflects the shadow of other darker American traditions of misogyny, racism and xenophobia, patterns that formed what Thorstein Veblen called a “sclerosis of the American soul.” Using Veblen’s theory of American development to explore the nation’s curious fusion of barbarism and liberal democracy, Veblen’s America taps the rich vein of the sociologist’s early twentieth-century insights to shed light on the Trump phenomenon that has overwhelmed and threatened early twenty-first-century American democracy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Dec 28, 2018
• ISBN: 9781783088744

Book preview

Veblen’s America

Veblen’s America

The Conspicuous Case of Donald J. Trump

Sidney Plotkin

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2018

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© Sidney Plotkin 2018

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-872-0 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78308-872-9 (Hbk)

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For Aura

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

A Note on Citations

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This is a study that I never imagined I might write. It was certainly nowhere on my scholarly agenda. The coupling of Donald J. Trump and Thorstein Bunde Veblen did not present itself to me in any abstract way, history did. It began unexpectedly to take root in my mind in 2016. I was in the final stages of editing a collection of essays for Anthem on Veblen’s social theory. One of the volume’s anonymous reviewers was complimentary of the authors’ contributions, but added a note of surprise and disappointment that little in the collection spoke to Veblen’s sense of the American case. Indeed not—the authors’ preoccupations were mainly with Veblen’s social theory, its methods and underpinnings, not with his observations about specific national instances. I made this point in reply and added another. In light of the suddenly strident political success of Donald Trump, I suggested that invoking Veblen’s thoughts on the United States might be an intriguing way both to explore the Trump phenomenon as well as to underscore Veblen’s continuing relevance to an understanding of the contemporary world. What I did not express in that reply was my gnawing perplexity at this disturbing shift in the tenor and thrust of American politics nor my uncertainty about how well Veblen might actually help to clarify matters. With the encouragement of Anthem’s Tej P. S. Sood to follow this lead, I began working anew through Veblen’s treatment of the American case, particularly its linkages to Veblen’s earliest observations about barbarism in The Theory of the Leisure Class. As I proceeded to unravel his idea of the barbaric stand in American liberalism, and to familiarize myself with Trump’s life, the project became more and more imaginable and worthwhile. Readers, of course, will make their own judgments of its value. As for me, the experience of peering through Veblen to find the barbaric image of Donald Trump staring back at me proved to be among the most intellectually rewarding and harrowing of my writing life.

The resulting work is drawn from widely available, mainly journalistic sources on Trump, including the various biographies. Most of the writing was completed in January 2018. And though I have had some opportunities to update certain key developments, the main emphasis here is less on Trump’s presidency than on Veblen’s aid in explaining the life and institutional forces that led to that presidency. My goal has not been to provide new data or evidence but to enrich understanding of Trump by showing how his lineage, behavior, values and business career are understandable within, although not necessarily exclusively, with the help of Veblen’s theoretical frame. The years ahead will find scholars from many fields and disciplines adding much to the academic study of Trump and Trumpism. The present work is but a first stab at making theoretical sense of Trump and what he represents. But it is just as much an attempt to highlight the power of Veblen’s insight into the barbaric forces at work in American development. Naturally, any errors of fact and judgment fall exclusively within my responsibility, and I offer the usual authorial apologies for any and all of these.

The time and freedom to do this work did not spontaneously appear. I want very much to express my gratitude to Vassar College and to my colleagues in the Department of Political Science for permitting me to take an early sabbatical leave in order to develop and complete this work. Without that generous contribution, this study could not have been undertaken. Special gratitude as well to Bill Scheuerman, Russ Bartley and Rick Tilman for their insightful readings and comments on early chapter drafts as well as to Anthem’s anonymous readers for their helpful and supportive notes. My deepest gratitude, however, goes to my wife, Aura, for her gifts of love and friendship, and for her ability to sense before I did that Donald Trump’s candidacy was not to be taken lightly. Indeed, it is to her that this work is lovingly dedicated.

A NOTE ON CITATIONS

To avoid needless repetition, Thorstein Veblen’s writings are cited throughout with abbreviations. Full citations, with abbreviations in parentheses, including date of original publication, are included below:

The Theory of the Leisure Class, introduction by Robert Lekachman (New York: Penguin Books, 1979) (TLC, 1899).

The Theory of Business Enterprise, with a new introduction by Douglas Dowd (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1978) (TBE, 1904).

The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts, with a new introduction by Murray G. Murphey (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1990) (IOW, 1914).

Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution, with an introduction by Joseph Dorfman (New York: Viking Press, 1954) (IG, 1915).

An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of Its Perpetuation (New York: August M. Kelley, 1964) (NOP, 1917).

The Engineers and the Price System, introduction by Daniel Bell (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction 1983) (EPS, 1921).

The Vested Interests and the Common Man (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1964) (VICM, 1919).

The Higher Learning in America, with a new introduction by Ivar Berg (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1993) (THL, 1918).

Absentee Ownership: Business Enterprise in Recent Times; The Case of America, with a new introduction by Marion J. Levy Jr. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1997) (AO, 1923).

Veblen’s essays and reviews appear in three collections. These are cited by title in the notes with abbreviations for the collections in which they appear:

The Place of Science in Modern Civilization (New York: Capricorn Books, 1969). The Capricorn edition was entitled Veblen on Marx, Race, Science and Economics. Citations are from this edition, but are noted in the text as (PSC, 1919).

Economics in Our Changing Order, ed. Leon Ardzrooni (New York: Augustus Kelley, 1964) (ECO, 1934).

Essays, Reviews and Reports: Previously Uncollected Writings, edited with a new introduction by Joseph Dorfman (Clifton, NJ: Augustus M. Kelley, 1973) (ERR, 1973).

Chapter One

INTRODUCTION: DONALD TRUMP THROUGH VEBLEN’S LOOKING GLASS

In order to gain and hold the esteem of men it is not sufficient merely to possess wealth or power. The wealth or power must be put in evidence, for esteem is awarded only on evidence.¹

He boasted of sexual assault. His first wife charged that he raped her. More than a dozen women have come forward to complain that he forcibly kissed or groped them. A porn star claims that he paid her off to keep their extramarital affair secret. A Senate candidate accused of sexual involvements with high school girls won his eager support.² He repeatedly threatened nuclear attack on North Korea, then warmly greeted its murderous leader and called him an honorable man. When a neo-Nazi and white supremacist march resulted in the death of a protester, he equivocated; there are very fine people on both sides, he said.³ After becoming president, he refused to divest his private holdings or to divulge his tax returns. He continues to profit from his private properties, including a hotel near the White House that regularly hosts gatherings of party officials, lobbyists and foreign diplomats.⁴ Members of his immediate family hold key positions in his government.⁵ His idea of sacrifice is to work hard on his own behalf.⁶ Promising to Make America Great Again for the nation’s workers, he appointed the wealthiest and perhaps least competent cabinet in American history. And he accelerated redistribution of income upward through a massive business tax cut.⁷ He has repeatedly lied and dissembled, insulted and harangued, obliterating truth and fact with cavalier disdain. According to the fact-checking website, Politifact, he dissembles 75 percent of the time.⁸ Despite all evidence to the contrary, he claims that, but for massive fraud, he won the popular vote for president. He has declared the US media the enemy of the people, and its jounalism fake news.⁹ He has questioned the legitimacy of his predecessor’s citizenship and urged the jailing of his campaign opponent. He has tried to ban Muslims from the United States, labeled Mexican immigrants rapists and African nations shithole countries; his immigration policy has torn children from their parents and would deny asylum to refugees. He has fractured US trade relations and political alliances, insulted allies, questioned the value of NATO and regularly sung the praises of tyrants, including Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, and the Philippine president, Rodrigo Duterte. He terminated US participation in a global climate accord and has dramatically weakened environmental and financial regulation. He ended a deal with Iran that factually limited its nuclear weapons capacity, while boasting of ending North Korea’s nuclear threat, this without any evidence of the latter’s denuclearization. He regularly impugns the US intelligence community, the FBI and federal judges. He consistently resists claims by his own intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. He has considered formation of an alternative private intelligence service responsible to himself alone.¹⁰ He urges police to treat the accused roughly.¹¹ He fired a respected director of the FBI and has threatened to terminate the special counsel appointed to investigate whether his campaign joined in a conspiracy with Russia to win the presidency for him. Multiple members of his staff, including his former national security director and campaign manager have pled guilty to federal criminal charges resulting from that investigation. His personal lawyer’s residences and offices were raided by a US attorney in New York City and he too has pled guilty to federal charges ranging from tax fraud to campaign finance violations.

The list—and it is but a partial compilation—reads like a catalogue of impossibilities, something beyond the nightmare scenarios dreamed up by Hollywood screenwriters or dystopian novelists. But, of course, these are not impossibilities. They are among the many conspicuous features of the first year and a half of Donald Trump’s tenure as president of the United States. Future scholars, journalists, biographers, historians and artists will plumb the depths of the Trump presidency and personality. How and when his administration may end is, at this writing, an open question. But for now, the political ascendancy of Trump is a disruptive, shattering reality. Efforts to understand it reflect a gnawing sense that American politics has broached a major discontinuity in its development, a brutal rupture of its long-established norms, habits, expectations and limits. The Republican Party he leads seems to have disintegrated morally beneath his twisted leadership, broken into warring factions, unable to resist his entreaties to break with conventional politics. Rejecting Trump’s vicious rhetorical assaults during the 2018 mid-term election campaign, voters repudiated Republican control of the US House of Representatives. Respected Republican senators suggest that the party has made itself into a cult of Trump.¹² Conservative commentator David Brooks expresses the characteristic despair of many traditional conservatives:

Donald Trump never stops asking. First, he asked the party to swallow the idea of a narcissistic sexual harasser and a routine liar as its party leader. Then he asked the party to accept his comprehensive ignorance and his politics of racial division. Now he asks the party to give up its reputation for fiscal conservatism. At the same time, he asks the party to become the party of Roy Moore, the party of bigotry, alleged sexual harassment and child assault […] There is no end to what Trump will ask of his party. He is defined by shamelessness, and so there is no bottom. And apparently there is no end to what regular Republicans are willing to give him. Trump may soon ask them to accept his firing of Robert Mueller, and yes, after some sighing, they will accept that, too.¹³

There will be many efforts to explain the Trump phenomenon. No singular account will suffice. Some will look to the deep strata of economic and social discontent that uplifted his candidacy. Others will follow the trail of the Republican party’s internal fissures, linking Trump to developments reaching as far back as Richard Nixon and earlier extremist forces, such as the John Birch Society. Still others will likely see Trump in terms of his rise as a business celebrity and trace his story through the prism of changes in America’s media and pop culture. Scholars will likewise trace Trump’s rise in relation to the rising arc of authoritarian trends in Europe and Asia. These and many other accounts will add needed detail and insight into what will forever remain a complicated, many-layered and troubling phenomenon. But much has already happened, and the urge for scholars to understand it is compelling. As a political scientist who has taught and written about American politics for nearly four decades, I have felt an unusual urgency to explain Trump to myself. The need was personal as well as professional. Trump’s capture of the White House seemed as mysterious, bizarre and ominous to me as it was improbable. To help my students understand it, I had to make sense of it to myself first. In this struggle, I benefited greatly by my recent exploration of the work of the early twentieth-century American sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen.

On the surface, it may be hard to conjure an odder coupling than Donald Trump and Thorstein Veblen. Though each was the offspring of North European immigrants to the United States, as American types they could not be more different. Trump took the American values of monetary success, power and fame as the natural lodestars of his fantastic journey from Queens, New York, to the White House. Thorstein Veblen, born almost a century before Trump, in rural Wisconsin, went on to become the most original radical voice America ever produced.¹⁴ Far from accepting the values of money, power and fame, Veblen offered a thoroughgoing critique of their barbaric origins and transformations. More than any other American critic of America, Veblen’s evolutionary approach to institutional change forces an encounter with the fact that the nation’s liberalism is deeply tainted by poisonous illiberal legacies of racism, xenophobia and misogyny. These are legacies, he contends, that Americans inherited from a predatory and violent human past.¹⁵

Of course, we see their repressive like in other places than America: Putin’s Russia, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey, to name just a few. But the point here is that hateful traditions unmistakably stamped American development too. There is nothing exceptional about the United States as a case of spilled blood. Its record of slavery and genocide producing on the white population what Veblen diagnosed as a cold, hardened sclerosis of the American soul.¹⁶ In this sense, Trump and his following are far from uniquely American phenomena. They harken back to an ugly primitivism that antedates America and from which its culture and politics were never immune. And just as the barbaric authoritarianism of a Putin, an Orban or an Erdoğan is wrapped in distinctive national garb, Trump’s is clothed in the finery of America’s huckster tradition, replete with its characteristic smile and boast. But Trump’s link to today’s autocrats transcends his distinctively American roots. Deeper, pervasive phenomena are at work. His contemporary version of barbarism is, after all, but one face of an ominous global reversion to political repression, a strikingly powerful movement against democracy, encouraged by deformities common to twenty-first-century civilization, though its specific forms and embodiments vary by national setting and context. While my focus here will be on Trump’s peculiarly American sources, this emphasis should by no means be understood to segregate his dictatorial bent from the twenty-first-century sweep of authoritarianism globally.

In many important ways the authoritarian demiurge of our time is a twisted visceral reaction to consequences and strains resulting from late twentieth-century international neoliberalism, whose guiding force was America’s capitalist state. I will have more to say about this later, but the fuller depths and dangers of this reaction will likely take decades to play out and it will not play out the same way everywhere. Latter-day historians and political scientists will have much to say about its sources, its dynamic and its consequences, assuming of course that people are still allowed to write books about (the subject) in the future.¹⁷ Useful contemporary analyses by John Judis, Timothy Snyder and others point the way.¹⁸ Still, while the sclerosis of which he wrote has become ominously contagious, nothing in Veblen suggests that such sclerosis is beyond healing or repair. However—and this qualification is imperative—everything in his work suggests that cultural remediation of this kind is agonizingly slow, imperfect and uneven at best. It is bound to affect some quarters of the society more deeply and more rapidly than others. Such observations have led me to believe that Veblen’s account of what Stjepan Meštrović has called enlightenment amid barbarism furnishes an illuminating and remarkably prescient conceptual framework for understanding the conspicuous case of Donald Trump.¹⁹

The American Case

Veblen helps us see what he calls the American Plan in its own historical terms, but he also insists that these terms did not arise anew on the North American continent. They borrowed from seventeenth-century England an emergent liberal faith in popular government, law and commerce, but also from more ancient Euro-Asian traditions of irresponsible predation, seizure and coercion. America’s culture is a composite of closely entwined features, modern and archaic, peaceable and coercive, liberal and irresponsible. In this sense, the comparative dimension of my analysis of Trump and Veblen’s analysis of barbarism is among its most essential implicit features. Much of American development in the twentieth century involved episodic struggles to temper and pacify its illiberal strains, to introduce measures of equality, social welfare and justice, democracy, responsibility and enlightenment. Recent assertions of women to demand male accountability for sexual attack are powerful expressions of this episodic sequence. Even before the stimulus of 9/11, however, the illiberal strains reasserted themselves. Patrick Buchanan’s 1992 presidential campaign offers one example; recent American ventures in imperial war and torture suggest more; Sarah Palin’s appearance in 2008 another; and Supreme Court efforts to turn back the clock on voting rights are an especially consequential one. But the nation’s reversion to illiberalism, to its barbaric past, has no more glaring or compelling illumination than the instance of Donald Trump. Trump’s recurrent chant to Make America Great Again is a call to revive the nation’s most barbaric habits. Trump makes Veblen’s emphasis all too contemporary, too tangibly real, frightening and immediate. For these reasons, this study is every bit as much a reflection on the applicability of Veblen’s general theory of enduring barbarism as it is an exploration of Trump. The two are interlocked; they go hand in hand. But before delving deeper into these connections, one possible confusion needs to be addressed.

Donald Trump’s supporters often complain, not without some justice, that critics unfairly label them barbarians for their backing of Trump; or as Hillary Clinton had it, they form a basket of deplorables.²⁰ Trump loyalists correctly understand the terms deplorable or barbarian as social slurs. These are accusatory words, the vocabulary of insult and derogation. They impute ignorance and backwardness to Trump voters, as often as not joined to charges of racism, sexism and misogyny. Veblen’s usage of the term barbarism is fundamentally different. It is not a social slur; rather, it is a social category. His reference point is not a claim about rustic, racist, misogynistic boors. It is to an early human phase of predatory, fighting culture, an epoch whose cumulative and lasting influence wove itself into current institutions in the United States and beyond. Most important, for Veblen, the barbarians and barbarism that matter today come not from outlying rural districts or some marginalized hinterland. They emanate from the highest elite circles of Establishment wealth, privilege and power. In contemporary America, the manifestations of Veblen’s war-drenched barbarism are most visible in corporate boardrooms, Wall Street investment banks and the national security state. Put another way, contemporary barbarism is a defining attribute of militarized capitalism, competitively organized, profit-driven business institutions—the chief centers of absentee ownership—investment banks, hedge funds, corporations, along with the political institutions, public policies and military power that support them. Collectively, such institutions anchor the major inequalities of power, honor and wealth that are touchstones of the American social structure. In short, contemporary barbarism has its gravest and most compelling effects at the apex of US society and among its leading institutions, not in a mysterious deep state, much less in rural backwaters or rust belt industrial towns. Obviously, the capitalist barbarism that Veblen’s theory highlights has gone through many changes and transitions from its brutal beginnings. Its rougher edges have been smoothed down, polished and refined. Presidents win peace prizes. Generals waive doctorates as well as swords. Business titans gather stock bonuses, mansions and private jets, not scalps, hides and bones. Their behavior is considerably more civilized than their violent forbearers would have tolerated. Today’s barbarism is relatively pacified. It has until recently even broadly accommodated what passes for democracy, representative government and rule of law. But it is engraved with the same driving ambition to conquer, dominate, and prevail. It reeks with the same predatory desire to be to be cheered, lauded and honored for successful aggression. The symbols and media of barbarism have changed radically. Its aspirations have changed much less.

Indeed, it is just this channeling of barbaric traits into gentlemanly, businesslike and democratic forms that makes Donald Trump’s rude intervention such a shock to the institutional system—and to many members of his own social class. Insistently rebelling against conformity to mannerly expectation, Trump stands out as a recalcitrantly defiant, rebellious member of the leisure class. He is a man who manifests energy, self-seeking and disingenuousness compounded with miniscule loyalty to his classmates. Indeed, he loves to spit in their face, preferring to cast himself as the everyman’s rich friend […] whose heart (is) aligned with Middle America.²¹ Donald’s abrupt entrance into the high-society enclave of Palm Beach, Florida, is a case in point. He delighted in telling biographer Timothy O’Brien that his decision to convert the fabled Mar-a-Lago mansion into a private club horrified his staid, old-money neighbors. They went fuckin’ nuts about me […] The bottom line is that after litigation […] I ended up winning […] Very traumatic, very long arduous task […] They hated me.²²

Trump’s sneering, thuggish hostility toward expectations and mores among his own social class, all the while ostentatiously parading their rewards, helps explain some, maybe much, of his wider popularity. In his own boisterous way, Trump shreds the pomposity and camouflage that cloaks America’s darker traditions. He magnifies the raw unpolished power and violence that always formed the bedrock of American wealth and class. He entertainingly and cynically exposes a truth about social class that many in the underlying population have themselves come cynically to appreciate. Without the aid of critical theory or close historical analysis, lots of ordinary working people implicitly get the continuities that Veblen sees between older and newer expressions of class. Experience is a fine teacher. C. Wright Mills offered the appropriate political caveat. An elite may try to impose its claims upon the mass public, but this public may not cash them in […] It may be indifferent or even debunk their values, caricature their image, laugh at their claim to be representative men.²³ Trump is the perfect caricature of that popular cynicism; indeed, he is its self-appointed cheerleader, or, more portentously, its emergent demagogue. Trump takes obvious glee from embodying the unbroken truths of unvarnished, unalloyed dominance. Veblen’s particular helpfulness lies in his unusual theoretical capacity to train our eye squarely at the roots and transitions of this unrefined, loathsome past, less to condemn it than to grasp its purchase on so many contemporary sensibilities.

Veblen formed his theory of institutional evolution in the course of dozens of essays and books, many of which treated his ideas in rich comparative perspective. This was nowhere more graphically so than in his comparison of Imperial German militarism and England’s aristocratically dissipated capitalism.²⁴ Not until his last book did Veblen attend specifically to the subject of American capitalism. Though it built on The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904), Veblen’s Absentee Ownership, Business Enterprise in Recent Times: The Case of America (1923) emphasized the nation’s land and resource development as key to the evolution of its particular character and institutions. The latter work also sharpened focus on the speculative financial aspects of American business, its sources thickly entwined in the venerable flimflam of country-town hucksterism. Three generations of Trump men shrewdly and effectively adapted themselves to the changing ways of American business and government. Veblen helps us see how Friedrich Trump, his son Fred, and grandson, Donald exemplify definite social types, men who succeeded in different ways and at different points in the transformations of American enterprise. At the crux of this evolution, this patterning of institutional change, lies what Veblen calls the American Plan. The Trumps made their way by superbly conforming themselves to its available opportunities, exploiting them with impressive effect.

Though its figuring and terms have shifted in response to industrial and organizational change, the basic template of the American Plan has remained intact. The goal of US public policy has forever been to move public resources—be they land, airwaves or the Internet—into private hands as quickly as possible under cover of permissive public law. Under variant conditions, the Trump men admirably deployed their business skills with the help of compliant public authority to exploit shifting opportunities. Friedrich, a self-made masterless man of the pioneer type, exploited flaccid public land laws to build a series of rude country-town hotels that operated at the far margins of the law, serving the appetites of weary Northwest miners for food, alcohol, gambling and women. His son Fred first triumphed in the home-building business during the New Deal and World War II. Tapping ties with local machine politicians and more than a few mobsters, he won contracts to build defense worker housing, learned skills of mass production, kept labor and costs under control and then cleverly exploited federal housing subsidies to become a captain of local industry in New York City home construction. Donald, of course, moved to the more lucrative fields of Manhattan real estate, which became his launching pad for more grandiose excursions into casinos, bankruptcy, branding and entrepreneurial celebrity, culminating in a reality TV show that did more than anything else to convince America of his claims to superior business acumen and financial success. But Donald was no less a creature of his time and opportunity. He came of age amid a specific historical moment of neoliberal ascendancy, when finance returned to its former supremacy in the business system; pecuniary values were ever more widely detached from any material base; and business turned ever more decisively into a confidence game […] to be played according to the rules governing games of that psychological nature.²⁵ The illusions of twenty-first-century finance owed much to the selfsame spirit that prevailed in the country towns of the Middle West, including its shifting of cost to the underlying population.²⁶ In one respect, Donald Trump epitomizes Veblen’s country-town salesman turned out for the age of big-time borrowing and fevered celebrity. For a postmodern era of fantasy capitalism, Donald mastered skills of illusion as his route to celebrity. He made himself a fictive entrepreneurial wizard and master salesman, well fit to thrive in a neoliberal wonderland of financial make-believe and government subsidy. In other ways, however, Trump harkens back to primitively brutal, coercive barbarism. His boasted eagerness to slug his enemies echoes less the salesman than the warlord. Trump seems ever ready to strip the civilized veneer from our reigning barbaric continuities. He collapses time and cultures, fusing the latter-day barbarism of salesmanship and spectacle with its original ferocity, and especially, its misogyny, xenophobia and racism.

Veblen appreciated that America was not all flimflam and fakery. Its technological skills and democratic promise pointed in more enlightened directions. Its embrace of common-sense virtues of hard work, mechanical ingenuity and civil equality harkened back to a handicraft era that challenged warlords and kings with demands for liberalism, equality of opportunity and respect for rights of self-earned property. A powerful version of this assertive democratic liberalism ascended in nineteenth-century America, but not completely, not unilaterally, not fully. All that had gone before was not lost.²⁷ In the emerging political and material cultures of advancing England, as well as in its American offspring, there lingered the older, harsher verities, habits, outlooks and motives. As liberal institutions gained ground, they continued to harbor illiberal motivations and purposes. Erstwhile masterless men continued to lord it over legally subordinated women; they took slaves; and they slaughtered natives for their land and resources. England used trade monopolies to exploit its colonies, and America pushed protectionist barriers to corner domestic markets. The cumulative effect in both places was to contaminate movements toward democracy and laissez-faire with a lingering poison of predatory habits and practices. Liberal democratic capitalism promised security for liberty and equality, afforded by free competition and popular sovereignty. But insistent emulative habits and buccaneering capitalists in both settings favored hierarchy, inequality and privilege. Invidious distinctions of honor and status helped carve inexpungeable lines of class, race, gender and power. Influence over democratic government reflected similar trajectories of inequity. Multiple asymmetries of power and stature eroded the equal dignity of citizens. The civilizing, pacifying effects of liberalism were constrained by a backdraft of antique habits that Veblen identified with lasting legacies of barbarism. No institution captures this barbaric strain more perfectly than the one Veblen identified as the nation’s main and immediate controlling interest, its absentee ownership.²⁸ We can see this most clearly by considering briefly how Veblen used the category of barbarism within his overarching evolutionary framework, particularly its gestation from within the savage life that preceded it.

Brutal Legacies

Far from being natural, barbarism was itself the result of change, the evolutionary outcome of glacial adaptations; of human experience, habit and culture imperceptibly changing. Veblen read the available anthropological evidence of his day to indicate that early humans were overwhelmingly preoccupied by the economic hardship of living day-to-day. The raw challenge of survival overwhelmed everything else. Though gifted with good brains and superior abilities to adapt, early humans had little in the way of accumulated knowledge and technical wherewithal from which to draw. Survival demanded close living, intense cooperation and hard work. Life was impossible on any other terms. Though people had ample reasons to fight over various things, from resources to sex, they lacked the surplus energy required to make fighting more than marginal to their daily activity. Given such limitations, nature commanded social peace as the price of endurance. Veblen called this incipient form of social life savagery, characteristically invoking the term’s Latinate root to suggest not the wildness of human behavior but the directness and intimacy of human exposure to nature’s wild, untamed quality. This savage era proved to be of exceedingly long duration, a prolonged time of learning by trial and error, resulting in a discontinuous string of piecemeal adaptations. Indeed, Veblen believed that it comprised the longest continuous experience of human existence. Its habits of work, cooperation and peace left irreducible traces in humanity’s biological and cultural makeup, in the instinct of workmanship and technical prowess; in the parental bent with its concern for future generations and the good of the species; and in an idle curiosity that prompts inquisitiveness, the search for answers to the many mysteries amid which humans live. These savage affects continue to be felt and expressed in popular movements for democracy, equality, technical efficiency, environmental sanity and peace.

Sluggardly, unhurriedly humans nurtured and enhanced their industrial and technical skills; in time, they fed themselves more easily and amply. And as they fattened themselves, they enjoyed not only surplus energy but material surpluses too. As their available metabolic energy increased, and their technical facilities matured, humans, in their small and distanced settlements, could begin to eye opportunities to grab more than their share of available goods, especially from more removed clans and tribes, alien groups with whom they may have had little commonality. The resulting turn toward war, fighting, aggression and predation was complex. We will probe it more closely in the next chapter. For now, the point is to recognize that material surpluses of energy and goods, combined with a rising technological capacity to forge weapons, spawned a spiritual change in the outlook of primitive humans, especially perhaps among the stouter men, who likely were the first to seize advantages of technical progress in weaponry. This spiritual change looked toward placing personal competition and the fight at the center of cultural significance and value. It involved above all,

the occurrence of an habitual bellicose frame of mind—a prevalent habit of judging facts and events from the point of view of the fight. The predatory phase of culture is attained only when the predatory attitude has become the accredited spiritual attitude for members of the group; when the fight has become the dominant note in the current theory of life.²⁹

Among the most visible implications of this shift was a growth and elaboration of social structure, that is, unequal social relationships that divided the superior class of male warriors from subordinate groupings, who labored and produced essential services and goods. The resulting difference was much more than economic. Prowess at war and predation became the basis of social honor, status and prestige, activities whose success was richly enhanced and illuminated by demands for epithets and titles […] in addressing chieftains, and an accumulation of trophies, icons that spoke eloquently of the chief’s propensity for overbearing violence and an irresistible devastating force. At this point, added Veblen, the naïve, archaic habit of construing all manifestations of force in terms of personality or ‘will power’ greatly fortifies this conventional exaltation of the strong hand.³⁰ Increasingly rigid control of women, their bodies and their roles was another powerfully institutionalized result of the emerging barbarism. By the same token, prestigious male claims to power justified immunity from mundane labor, which increasingly came to be seen in barbaric terms as unworthy of strong, formidable men. Status became associated with a ruling class that was a leisure class, a class sheltered and immunized against economic need by the wealth that it forcibly extracted from alien populations as well from its own underlying working class. In his classic work, The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen charted the ever-so-dilatory ceremonial maturation of this now highly militarized barbarism, which finally reached its apogee in the aristocratic regimes of feudal Europe and Japan, and then slowly wore down, in favor of an emergent bourgeoisie of commercial capitalists.

Enlightened Barbarism

Capitalism, for Veblen, is a more pacific, quasi-peaceable outcome of the fading feudal warrior culture that preceded it. Though in some contexts, such as France, the transition from feudalism was accompanied by political and social revolution, in other settings, such as England, in one version, and Germany, in another, older features such as monarchy and aristocracy persisted, albeit for the English case, in slackened form. In any event, Veblen’s approach, unlike Karl Marx’s, does not privilege revolution as the principal agent of structural change. In fact, Veblen believed social change usually happens ploddingly and in many different ways, gradually and cumulatively, with no specific outcome assured. Political ferment is likely to signal a gathering of long-acting social and technological changes, shifts that disrupt expectations and weaken the institutional fabric, leaving it vulnerable to conflict and stress. Just so, the various cases of feudalism changed at different rates and took diverse paths. Social change featured a host of plural shifts that differentiated national experiences in both Europe and Asia. If England and the Netherlands represent one relatively productive and imperfectly democratic form of transition, Germany and Japan represent another more troubled path, strained, grudging, militaristic and ultimately tragic. For Veblen, America fits within this dualistic pattern only awkwardly. It adopted republican political institutions early on, but it also encouraged an especially aggressive frontier capitalism that favored violent conquest and slavery, much of the violence perpetrated by civilians. As C. Wright Mills acidly observed, violence as a means and even as a value is just a little bit ambiguous in American life and culture.³¹

Gifted with unique historic and geographical advantages, its development punctuated by a popular readiness to use coercion, the United States stampeded toward corporate capitalism faster than any comparable state. But the very rapidity of its development meant that America has had a noticeably hard time growing out of its most bellicose habits. Its ubiquitous firearms exemplify the pattern. With about 4.5 percent of the world’s population, America accounts for about 40 percent of the earth’s civilian weapons. A recent study estimated that Americans own 270 million guns.³² President Trump makes that peaceable maturation harder every day. Then again, these bad habits seem bad only by reference to norms that developed later. In their own barbaric day, the prowess of conquest and mastery were enviable traits. They marked success at predation, which people had learned to accept as a very impressive thing, indeed the very best thing a man could do. In Veblen’s evolutionary scheme, then, conquest, predation, domination and exploit were neither intrinsically bad nor imperfect habits; rather, they were the celebrated traits of a range of barbaric cultures that welcomed fighting and aggression as the eternal framework, the unchanging truculent spirit of all things manly, militaristic and honorific. That such ancient outlooks and practices should have lived on is not so surprising considering the enormous cultural investment committed to their survival and perpetuation. Much of Western and Eastern art, history and myth is resplendent with the martial heroics of conquest. The slow coming of liberal democracy was cumulatively speaking a very powerful force, but it never expunged from honorific accreditation all that came before. As crashing waves of liberalism, democracy and capitalism hit European and American shores, they wiped away much of the surface sand. But archaic institutional patterns continued to influence the moral geography of a changing culture. Factors that Veblen deemed essential to the worldview of barbarism infused themselves into seemingly more recent outlooks. In short, distinctively barbaric elements still churn restlessly within and against American liberalism. To say that American liberal democracy retains these features, that its liberalism remains in key respects barbaric, is, for Veblen as a social scientist, less a criticism than a comment on the grindingly slow cumulative pace of cultural change. This is precisely the standpoint of his institutional evolutionary point of view.

Veblen was quite aware that his usage of the term barbarism to denote modern civilization would disturb or even shock readers, just as much as his equation of savagery with peaceful labor. People habituated to embracing American development as a liberal democratic flowering, many white men and professional scholars, for instance, might prefer to elide such antique and uncivilized remnants. But others in the American story, who have suffered the violence, degradation and exploitation of its forcible habits—African Americans, people of color, women, Native Americans, gay people, the working class—might more readily accept the value of Veblen’s formulation, for much of their encounter with America has precisely been with its punitive barbaric side. Even political scientists have come around to the idea.³³ And yet for all that, Veblen resists linking a specific social experience with a particular interpretation of its meaning. Many who have been victimized by its coercive habits have come away with overwhelmingly positive feelings toward American barbarism, its military heroics especially. Other casualties have less sympathetic attitudes toward the national theatrics of violence. In either case, Veblen warns us, beware the mystery, the puzzle of social consciousness. Much that is cultural and ideological intervenes between experience and perception. The most effective and enduring barbaric societies convinced their underlying populations not only to admire, respect and fear their masters but also, more profoundly and enduringly, to bear honorific witness to the predation that made them masters. Irresponsible power can hurt; it can do terrible damage to people and things. But through lore and legend, through mystery and magic, it can also make itself seem the inexorable expression and reward of individualized claims to prowess that form its peculiarly distinctive inner spirit and psychic potency. Recall Veblen’s point: prowess is not an objective fact but a claim to strength that people learn to perceive and construe in terms of the personality or willpower" of those who claim it. Powerful men are not to be trifled with, except by other powerful men. Long after more authentic barbarians passed away, contemporary versions, carefully adapted to the prevailing forms of American competition, continue to attack each other on football fields, in corporate boardrooms, on trading floors and in the high offices of courtroom and state. To this extent the rise of an authentically barbaric type such as Donald Trump is explainable within American cultural terms—explainable, but by no means inevitable.

Nothing in Veblen’s account of the American case foretold the degradation of its democracy by the rise of a truculent megalomaniac.³⁴ For all that he saw of the cruelty in American development– and there will be no downplaying that factor here—Veblen believed the United States remained wedded to a logic more closely resembling the more peaceable English type than the more aggressive German case. Indeed, Veblen introduced the figure of a truculent megalomaniac in the Germanic, not the American, context.³⁵ American society, while battered by unremitting tensions between modernizing and regressive elements, gradually became a more democratic, quasi-peaceable state, though as a state, it has remained stalwartly militaristic. But then states are the most resolutely atavistic of modern institutions, insisted Veblen, poised always for war.³⁶ They are barbaric institutions at their core, against which interests favoring peaceable democracy and industry have been contentiously struggling for four centuries or more. In all these ways, America is but one example of liberal democracy struggling to contain the violence of its barbaric ancestry. Indeed, for the most part, recent presidents, perhaps Democrats slightly more than Republicans, have tried to assume a relatively more peaceable, diplomatic guise than a churlishly militant one. Considered in this light, Trump’s exceptionally boorish aggressiveness stands out. Veblen would be impressed by his appearance, perhaps a trifle surprised, but not shocked. He understood that within large populations, individual variants will inevitably occur. Some of those variants might even assume an exceptionally regressive barbaric persona.

Arrested Development

Among his more curious observations about modern survivals of prowess, Veblen speculates about a certain rough parallel between social evolution and the maturation of individuals. We have already noted how he treats the rise of barbarism from out of savagery, with its continued transition into the more quasi-peaceable variant of liberal democratic capitalism. The stages of individual psychological and moral growth seem to somewhat resemble this pattern. The child’s life reproduces, temporarily and in miniature, some of the earlier phases of the development of typical adults.³⁷ Most people in a relatively mature industrial society such as the United States are disposed to get along peacefully with their neighbors. This is a habit and skill learned from early infancy, when much of a child’s life displays savage qualities: curiosity and concentrated effort at games and group activity of all sorts. As adults, these qualities come to the fore again, though most people’s concentrated effort tends to be turned toward work and its monetary rewards. Americans live their adult lives conforming to expectations and values embedded in handicraft-era ideas of individual liberty, equality, work and compensation. They generally abide by the moral and legal strictures of society, doing as best they can to honor the Golden Rule, perhaps more by word than deed, but in the main accepting—however fitfully—the essential dignity and worth of others. Such recognition after all is a crucial part of the democratic creed, mutual respect being among the most cherished gifts of the handicraft era. But none of this implies smooth sailing. Those same people, particularly but not only men, reach their imperfect maturity by passing through a crucible of anxiety-ridden adolescence. This is a challenging, often uncomfortable period, in which emotional growth can be vitiated or retarded by the psychic rewards of aggressive, self-centered, even narcissistic behavior. In this teen passage, dignity does not seem to matter very much, especially in contrast with desires to stand out, loom over and rise above. Adolescence, for Veblen, often reeks of barbarism. Most people pass through this phase. They outgrow their heightened belligerence and conceit. They emerge reasonably well suited to requirements of earning a living in a quasi-peaceable business society, where high premiums are placed on cooperative and industrious skills. As individuals who learn to be sensitive to institutional incentives and sanctions, most adults make their particular, unique and however incomplete and problematic transition from teenage barbarian to adult citizen, becoming people capable of functioning in the quasi-peaceable and industrious ways of modernity. But not everyone makes the transition. A small minority tends to retain a preponderance of juvenile barbaric traits throughout life.

Veblen made allowance for the fact that a relatively small number of young people can be stuck in a state of quasi-adolescent barbarism. He does not offer a direct or lucid explanation for this tendency, but it is certainly consistent with his Darwinian belief in the variant character of human personality in large populations. Moreover, if such a temperamentally erratic personality is schooled by special class traditions to adopt a superior and bellicose stance toward others, the resulting state of arrested spiritual development becomes even more understandable.³⁸ Perpetually puerile adolescents of this unfortunate type are prone to display malevolent narcissism and much of the bad behavior that implies. Caught in their arrested state, such people will aggressively scoff at democratic claims to equality. They find the notion of a generalized dignity repulsive. It instantly offends their inflamed and perhaps endangered sense of self. Self-regard being their foremost concern, they target their ample energies on highlighting their own supremacy, especially by magnifying the impoverishment of others, material as well as spiritual. Invidious distinction comes readily to such people.

Donald Trump’s life and behavior fit this Veblenian template with an uncanny faithfulness. Among Trump’s most conspicuously obvious traits, after all, along with his habits of prevarication and mendacity, are his unrelenting bellicosity, his truculence and belligerence, his constant readiness for battle and fight. He warms not only to the imagery of entrepreneurial success but also lays claim to the tough guy pose, the looming stance as a man’s man, someone easily roused to threats and to encouragements of others in the use of their fists. I always loved to fight, he told biographer Michael D’Antonio. He had a youthful exuberance for all types of fights, including physical.³⁹ He lost none of this enthusiastic aggressiveness as he aged. Before taking office, for instance, Trump advised his White House staff to think of each presidential day as an episode of a television show in which he vanquishes rivals.⁴⁰ He constantly uses Twitter as a mass production device for insult, urges his rally crowds to rough up protesters, the police to refrain from civility, and he threatens to rain the fire and fury of nuclear weapons on North Korea. Nor does he have patience with efforts by the National Football League to curb brain injuries by limiting violent tackles. He believes that the crash and collision of two helmeted men is vicious, violent and incredible entertainment, and that instead of being praised, they’re called for a 15-yard penalty […] I think it’s making the NFL really boring.⁴¹

In all these ways, Trump is considerably more and other than a latter-day capitalist barbarian; he harkens back to the untamed rough-hewn original. It is this return, this regression, to an older standard of brutishness, to the simulacra of a wilder, more violent and repressive barbarism, that implicates the alternative structure of institutions that he promises to reestablish. The greatness he wishes to restore is a strong-armed, tough-guy, thuggish greatness. In this vein, among the most remarkable of Trump’s many remarkable observations is his declaration of utter discomfort with the idea of equal dignity and the mutual respect it entails. For the most part, he once observed, you can’t respect people because most people aren’t worthy of respect.⁴² On another occasion, he regaled a crowd with his affection for losers. I have to tell you about losers. I love losers because they make me feel so good about myself.⁴³ Narcissism meets schadenfreude. Trump humiliates others the way most people breathe. It is his inveterate predisposition. Nothing in his manner speaks to a belief in equal dignity. More than anything else, Trump demands the sort of notoriety that warrants genuflection. Consistent invidious disrespect of lesser others is a quintessentially barbaric sentiment, and Trump does remarkably little to conceal his. Indeed, why should he, for he believes that his outlook conforms exactly to the world and people as they are. Man is the most vicious of all animals […] life is a series of battles ending in victory or defeat.⁴⁴ More than anything else, Trump demands the notice and celebrity that warrant genuflection to his self-proclaimed superiority. There can be no surprise in the fact that his first cabinet meeting was a series of supplications to the honor of serving him. Chief of Staff Reince Priebus hit just the right note when he offered a prayer of gratitude for the opportunity and the blessing to serve your agenda. One might be forgiven for thinking he was addressing the almighty, but then in fact he was.

An example from his youth says much about the contrast between Trump’s barbaric self-regard and Veblen’s savage values. In November 1964, just as he began his first year of college at Fordham University, young Donald joined his father at a celebratory opening of the new Verrazano Narrows Bridge, a huge gleaming span linking Brooklyn, near where Fred had built two large apartment complexes, with the city’s most distant borough, Staten Island. The moment also marked master builder Robert Moses’s last grand day in New York City politics. It naturally attracted the usual gaggle of politicians and dignitaries, many of whom had little or no connection to the project, but who readily stood for pro forma rounds of recognition, celebration and applause. The bridge’s architect was also in attendance, an elderly, 85-year-old Swiss-born immigrant, Othmar Hermann Amman. The Verrazano was the world’s largest suspension bridge, but Amman was also responsible for the design work behind such other major New York City landmarks as the George Washington, Whitestone and Throgs Neck bridges. For all his remarkable technical contribution to the city’s transportation network, he was virtually ignored at the Verrazano festivities. He was not asked to stand; he received no applause. Donald took careful notice, however. Not that he felt the injustice of callous indifference to the excellence and contribution of Amman’s virtuosic craft. Donald saw the moment as one of Amman’s supreme personal humiliation. The lesson for Trump, as he recounted it to a reporter years later, was that if you let people treat you how they want, you’ll be made a fool. I realized then and there something I would never forget: I don’t want to be made anybody’s sucker.⁴⁵

Veblen could well understand Trump’s sensitivity to such glaring oversight of the aged architect’s body of work. Sensitiveness to rebuke or approval, after all, is a matter of selective necessity under the circumstances of associated life.⁴⁶ At the same time, most people will tend to feel gratification on completion of a well-executed task, especially a task that demands exceptionally high levels of intelligence and skill, along with deliberation, patience and fortitude. The approval of peers, who understand the technical achievement, is