Lesson from the man on horseback who rode before
Donald Trump just made history, but what kind of history? Rather than furthering the false prophecies of our pundits, pollsters and official prognosticators, I suggest turning off your TV, going offline and picking up a book, preferably one about a historic moment that the experts got wrong.
A good place to start is The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Karl Marx s brilliant effort to comprehend how in 1852 the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte first became the elected president and then a few years later the self-appointed emperor of France. The opening paragraph eerily echoes our own times:
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce & Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradÂition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.