In these pages I have written previously of how Trump – who, with the help of Steve Bannon - aims to “deconstruct” the American rule of law. “Deconstruction” is a term massively popularized by Derrida and his many followers, and it served as a left-wing surrogate for Marxism while that particular ideology waned under the revelations of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, first translated in 1974. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of Soviet Communism in 1991, Derrida’s anti-authoritarian “deconstruction” became de rigeur in academic circles, particularly in theory-starved – and sometimes woefully uncritical - North America.
The term “deconstruction” actually derives from Heidegger’s
concept of “Destruktion”, which, originally appearing in Being and
Time (1927), was likely inspired – if that’s the right word – by the
experiences of the First World War.[1]
Heidegger was quick to point out that
“to bury the past in nullity is not the purpose of destruction; its aim is positive.”[2]
However, in light of his notorious Black Notebooks, published in 2014,
Heidegger may have been dabbling in sophistry here by suggesting that his term was
more evocative of setting “limits” than any actual demolishing.[3]
What appears as a transformative concept for Heidegger, the eventual
Nazi-philosopher king, came to be adopted by the Left under Derrida, with both
sharing fundamental anti-humanistic assumptions. How suitably ironic that today’s academia and
popular media still proudly brandish a term that came to fruition in a war that
profoundly altered the course of world history.
The circle of “deconstruction” is made complete by Trump
when he repeats his mantra that he has “immunity” from any actions stemming
from his provocation of insurrectionary violence on 6 January, 2021. It speaks volumes that the conservative
majority of “justices” at the U.S. Supreme Court, three of whom, in record form
– otherwise known as hook and crook - Trump had brought into office during his
term, is dragging its heels in dealing with the former president’s preposterous
claims. Have they obliterated from
memory the entire Anglo-American legal tradition stemming from the famous Magna
Carta, which determined – so it is said - from even earlier practice that
the Crown was not above the law?
Apparently so! Trump’s claims
should be laughed out of all courts of law. And a great many of his lawyers should be roundly
penalized for their pretenses and helping to legitimate an evident conspiracy
against the American Constitution.
By claiming “immunity”, Trump is not preparing for a wicked
variation on Divine Rule, for which he is sometimes ridiculed, certainly given
his many character and intellectual flaws which make him monstrously too human.
Any aspirations to so-called divinity could invite rival pretenders across the
globe, or in the U.S.A. where anything goes. Rather, Trump’s statement of
“immunity” is made simply to the effect, perhaps a bit like Napoleon who
crowned himself Pope (well in advance of his march on Moscow), that all
authority emanates from his own self.[4] Napoleon had modelled his eponymous Code
on Roman precedents, despite saying otherwise.[5] Put another way: the toga – for example - is
not a part of Trump’s wardrobe, as it was with Napoleon; instead, the former
president’s unadorned “immunity” claims serve as the naked follow-up to a
“deconstruction” of the rule of law as we know it.
If Trump gets re-elected, the chances are more than likely,
to my mind, that he will pardon himself for the events of 6 January (and for everything
else he has done). He thus makes himself
resistant to the written “rule of law” which applies to everyone else,
except himself - for whom any apparent “law” is unwritten. [6] In this regard, he makes himself largely akin
to a traditional Chinese Emperor, save for the fact that a division of powers is
still extant in the U.S.A. Nowadays we
do see aspirations to a “rule by law,” and the Chinese example may serve
best as a living model to Trump, who shows no sign of historical depth.
To return to my earlier theme, Derrida is representative of
a significant split from the humanist tradition among recent French theorists
and philosophers. Thus, prevailing
systems of thought organized around the illiberal principle of nonhumanism – as
exemplified by China – may appear as more fashionable to wannabe supporters of
Trump. Or have we gone full circle in
yet another respect? Did the Destruktion
of the First World War, which spawned the fascism of the Second World War, end
up reviving a latent fascism today which appears implicit in the assumptions
behind Derrida’s “deconstruction”? Has
the cultural memory of fascism, in other words, been prodded by Derrida’s
clear praise for both the Chinese ideogram and the unrepentant Mussolini
supporter Ezra Pound? In any event,
Derrida’s central work, Of Grammatology (translated 1976), celebrates a
“break in the most entrenched Western tradition” for which we are now paying
consequences.[7] The Age of Trump was prefaced by postmodernism, and he could not have asked for a better
introduction to his set of so-called “rules.”
Another way of illustrating my point is to consider Trump -
as I have already hinted - against the light of Roman law. As Fernanda Pirie explains in her book, The
Rule of Laws (2021), “A sense that [Roman] law, ius, represented
higher principles, that it should provide resources for citizen and constrain
the ruler, was not eclipsed by even the most autocratic emperors.”[8]
Thus, Trump is clearly outside the foundations of the Western legal tradition
and stands apart from “a sense law was made by and for Roman citizens and that
it held the promise of justice for all.”[9]
[1]
Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, tr. L. Scott-Fox and J.M.
Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 79.
[2]
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson (New York: Harper, 2008), p. 44.
The index in this book – at least under the heading for Destruktion
– is unworkable.
[3] Ibid.,
p. 44. See also Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, p. 79, as well as
Richard Wolin, Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology (New
Have, Yale, 2022).
[4] To
put Napoleon’s unprecedented move (taking the crown from the Pope in 1804) in greater
context, Charlemagne was crowned by the Pope in the year 800. See Fernanda Pirie, The Rule of Laws: A
4,000-Year Quest to Order the World (New York: Basic Books, 2021), p. 154.
[5] Ibid.,
p. 336, 337.
[6] Ibid.,
pp. 95, 96.
[7]
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
(Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 92. Originally published in French in 1967.
[8]
Pirie, The Rule of Laws, p. 122.
[9] Ibid.,
p. 97.
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