{"id":275,"date":"2025-11-26T06:21:46","date_gmt":"2025-11-26T06:21:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.operamode.com\/?p=275"},"modified":"2025-12-24T05:23:12","modified_gmt":"2025-12-24T05:23:12","slug":"the-will-to-power-in-american-politics-how-trump-accidentally-recreated-mussolinis-anti-ideology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.operamode.com\/index.php\/2025\/11\/26\/the-will-to-power-in-american-politics-how-trump-accidentally-recreated-mussolinis-anti-ideology\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump Accidentally Recreates Mussolini\u2019s Anti-Ideology"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

At Issue<\/strong>: Pundits and historians will eventually look back at the rise of Donald J. Trump and wonder what truly guided it. A recent SKY TV production, Mussolini: Son of the Century<\/em>, offers a striking perspective on Italy\u2019s first\u2014and last\u2014fascist dictator. The series, with its remarkable narrative and production values, presents Mussolini in a strangely cartoonish light, reminiscent of Robert De Niro\u2019s portrayal of Al Capone in The Untouchables<\/em>: a blustering figure spouting nonsense while swinging a bat for dramatic effect. What\u2019s unsettling is how close that caricature may come to our present moment. Is Trump a modern-day Blackshirt, or merely a Black Box\u2014an opaque vessel whose motives historians will need far more time to decipher?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Donald Trump is often mischaracterized as either a populist anomaly or a crude, accidental demagogue who stumbled into power by channeling public grievance. Both views misunderstand the deeper structure of his rise. Trump\u2019s ascent did not come from an ideological awakening nor from policy innovation\u2014it came from a style of politics that mirrors, uncannily, the instincts of Benito Mussolini. The comparison is not one of intellect or brutality; Mussolini was a learned man steeped in Marxist theory, Nietzschean philosophy, and revolutionary syndicalism. Trump, by contrast, is famously uninterested in reading or doctrinal thinking. Yet both men share a fundamental political instinct: the belief that power belongs not to those with ideas, but to those who project vitality, dominate their rivals, and bend institutions to their will.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Mussolini articulated as a philosophy, Trump performs as a personality.
And that is the striking continuity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I. Mussolini\u2019s Legacy: Will Over Ideology<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Mussolini\u2019s political evolution\u2014from socialist firebrand to fascist dictator\u2014was less a journey across the ideological spectrum than a shedding of ideology altogether. He rejected egalitarianism, rejected liberalism, rejected class struggle, and ultimately rejected theory itself. His worldview distilled into a single proposition: strength is legitimacy.<\/strong> A leader succeeds not because his doctrine is correct, but because he asserts his will more forcefully than the institutions or individuals around him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He believed truth was a tool, not a boundary. Politics was a theatre of energy, where victory went to those who projected vitality. Mussolini used philosophy to justify this worldview, but the worldview itself was pre-philosophical\u2014a temperament more than a doctrine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

II. Trump\u2019s Rise: Power as Vibration, Not Vision<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Trump never read Nietzsche, Sorel, or Marx. He didn\u2019t need to.
He arrived at a similar politics through instinct rather than scholarship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trump\u2019s political identity is not built on principles; it is built on dominance rituals<\/strong>. The moment he called Jeb Bush \u201clow energy,\u201d he destroyed the Republican establishment\u2019s aura of legitimacy. Mussolini would have recognized the tactic instantly. Trump reframed politics as a contest of vitality\u2014strong versus weak, winners versus losers. It was Mussolini\u2019s worldview, delivered not through essays in Gerarchia<\/em> but through insults on a debate stage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is why Trump swept aside decades of Republican orthodoxy without breaking a sweat. He didn\u2019t defeat the GOP on policy grounds\u2014he humiliated<\/strong> it. He exposed its leaders as timid, programmed, emotionally bloodless. In a politics defined by energy, they were already defeated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

III. The Strange Vessel: Crudeness as Authenticity<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Here lies the paradox that confounds his critics:
Trump\u2019s crudeness is not a liability\u2014it is the proof of his will.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

People say of him, \u201cHe\u2019s rough, uncouth, even ridiculous\u2014but he\u2019s doing what needs to be done.\u201d This is the same phenomenon that Mussolini understood when he elevated action over refinement. Trump\u2019s lack of polish becomes evidence of authenticity, his shamelessness a form of courage, his belligerence a substitute for competence. The media, perplexed by a figure who refuses to play by the conventional rules, ends up grading him on a curve. If the man has no ideology and no consistency, then nothing counts against him\u2014only the energy of the performance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

IV. Bannon\u2019s Role: Not Teacher, but Interpreter<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Steve Bannon did not give Trump ideology. He gave Trump context<\/em>\u2014a way to translate Trump\u2019s personal grievances into a political narrative. Trump\u2019s resentments toward Manhattan elites, financiers who dismissed him, Democratic power brokers who denied him tax deals, and Republican donors who sneered at his origins became the emotional engine of his political movement. Like Mussolini, Trump\u2019s politics are not the people\u2019s grievances elevated to power; they are his<\/strong> grievances, adopted by millions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

V. MAGA as a Post-Ideological Movement<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

MAGA is not conservatism.
It is not traditional populism.
It is a movement organized around the idea that Trump embodies the national will, in the Mussolinian sense. His supporters do not evaluate his ideas\u2014they evaluate his vigor. Weakness is the greatest sin; strength is the highest virtue. \u201cLow energy\u201d is a death sentence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trumpism is a cult of vitality masquerading as ideology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

VI. The Through-Line<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The astonishing thing is not that Trump resembles Mussolini intellectually\u2014he doesn\u2019t.
The astonishing thing is that Mussolini\u2019s philosophy survived without needing to be read.<\/strong> It re-emerged through temperament, through energy, through instinct.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where Mussolini wrote pages on the primacy of action and the irrelevance of doctrine, Trump simply lived it. He became, accidentally, the modern vessel of a century-old anti-ideology: the politics of will.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And that is why he succeeded.
Not because he read the theory.
But because he is<\/em> the theory\u2014raw, unfiltered, and unencumbered by the burden of intellect.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At Issue: Pundits and historians will eventually look back at the rise of Donald J. Trump and wonder what truly guided it. A recent SKY TV production, Mussolini: Son of the Century, offers a striking perspective on Italy\u2019s first\u2014and last\u2014fascist dictator. The series, with its remarkable narrative and production values, presents Mussolini in a strangely […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":277,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,29],"tags":[31,32,5],"class_list":["post-275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","category-pop-culture","tag-donald-trump","tag-fascism","tag-us-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.operamode.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.operamode.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.operamode.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.operamode.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.operamode.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.operamode.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":289,"href":"https:\/\/www.operamode.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275\/revisions\/289"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.operamode.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.operamode.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.operamode.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.operamode.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}