It should not be surprising that Trump and some of the people he has put into his cabinet appear to be narcissistic fools—narcissistic foolery is an occupational disease of billionaires and generals when they forget they’re being kowtowed to by absolutely everybody, and think instead that they’re being treated as friends or even told the truth. But foolishness, by definition, is not understood by fools; you need some smarts and, sometimes, a good deal of background. In order to understand the Trumpian crop fully, for example, you have to know a good bit about the central books of Aristotle’s Metaphysics (VII-IV). The following is therefore a bit abstruse—but as I like to say, the most concrete struggles can require the most abstract thinking.
In the Metaphysics, Aristotle unpacks the nature of Being in terms of ousia—of form in matter. As I argued many years ago in my Metaphysics and Oppression, in natural beings form is active, and exercises a threefold domination over matter: it separates a chunk of it off from other matter (boundary); generates and/or orders everything that goes on within those boundaries (disposition); and controls the exchanges between the being thus constituted and the world outside (initiative). Being itself thus comes to exhibit a two-level structure of leader and led, oppressor and oppressed. This structure, I argued, has been basic not only to Western thought but to Western life ever since Aristotle formulated (and also, less consciously, before). Both sovereignty and freedom, for example, tend to be conceived on its basis, and it has provided the model for many different types of social organization in the western world: families, schools, the Roman Empire, the French railway system, bourgeois households, and more.
Including corporations and armies. A military commander exercises (though in the US under civilian leadership) nearly complete control over the activities of a closely defined set of people. A corporation, too, has a set of boundaries that divide what it owns and whom it employs from what other “legal persons” own and employ; it has a CEO who, (though nominally overseen by a board of directors) organizes both what happens within it and the marketing of its products, i.e. their sale to the outside world. While modern corporations and armies have many ramifications and complexities undreamed of in Aristotle’s time, their basic lineaments come right out of his Metaphysics. They are, we may say in his name, beings par excellence.
Modern corporations prove this by a paradox: Despite the fact that the stock market (and corporate valuations in general) do much better under Democratic presidents, CEO’s today are overwhelmingly Republican. This, if you think about it, is bizarre: what CEO’s (and members of boards of directors, for that matter) supposedly want, above all else, is to make money. So they should clearly prefer Democrats!
But they don’t. So what is going on? Maybe they don’t really want money. Listen to them: the high taxes under Democratic administrations bother them, to be sure—but what really drives them berserk is government regulation. Indeed, what actually bothers them about high taxation is often not that it thins their personal checkbooks, for the money would go first to stockholders anyway; but that paying taxes keeps them from doing certain things they want to do with the business, mainly having to do with expanding it. What business leaders really want, then, is to be able to control their own corporations as an ousiodic form controls its matter, without interference from outside or resistance from below. So money is not at the forefront of their aspirations. If it was, they would all be Democrats. They are trying to fulfill the demands of ousiodic structure, not of their stockholders.
There is, however, one very untraditional fact about the people Trump has put into place to oversee the American government, and it has to do with the modernity of their education. Traditionally—for Plato as well as for Aristotle—to be a form meant to be specific. Over and above the human form, for example, you had in a human being only the relatively undefined human matter—the physical constitution of the human being, not all that different from that of other animals. It was thus up to the form to provide and so to exemplify the characteristic features of the being of which it was the form. Translated into the panoply of ousiodic institutions and practices in the Western world, this meant that leadership status was not transferable: take the pater of one family and put him into control of another family and disaster would ensue. Same for all institutions: the leadership role was, like form itself, specific to the institution.
Modern leaders, by contrast, have been selected for leadership positions in accordance with the basic premises of Cold War philosophy. And Cold War philosophy defines leadership in terms of rational choice: to lead a group or institution is to make decisions for it (George W. Bush, when president, actually referred to himself as the “decider”). Making decisions rationally is a skill transferable from one institution to another, as we see today in the steady migrations of CEO’s from company to company. The result is that the leader is no longer bound to his institution: he is free to leave and find another enterprise to lead. It was much more difficult when the skills involve in leadership were specific to the organization.
How does this apply to Trump and his lads? See § 22.