From 9/11 to President Donald Trump: A Short History of World War IV

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — still a widely misunderstood event, but one that divided the recent history of the world into “before” and “after” — the French philosopher and sociologist Jean Baudrillard floated a hypothesis that many Americans, including some on the left, found shocking or unacceptable. The destruction of the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan, which Baudrillard described as “the ‘mother’ of all events, the pure event uniting within itself all the events that have never taken place,” represented for him the fulfillment of a collective desire, reflecting a “deep-seated complicity” between the dominant world order and those who would destroy it. “The West, in the position of God,” Baudrillard wrote, “has become suicidal, and declared war on itself.”

This idea that “they did it, but we wished for it” did not go over well in an America overcome by patriotic fervor, and preparing to launch into a disastrous decade-plus Middle Eastern war would only make Baudrillard’s diagnosis of suicidal ideation seem more trenchant. After his essay “L’Esprit du terrorisme” was published in English in the February 2002 issue of Harper’s, Baudrillard was accused of offering a moral justification for terrorism and of perceiving the deaths of thousands of people as a symbolic or unreal event, (although he certainly was not alone in comparing the 9/11 attacks to a disaster movie). His essay does neither of those things. Readers either didn’t understand what the author of “Simulacra and Simulation” was trying to say, which was nothing new, or they found his thesis too troubling, too cold-blooded, too dispassionate and simply, to use the contemporary vernacular, too soon.

Read more than 15 years later, Baudrillard’s essay — now available in a different translation, in the 2012 collection “The Spirit of Terrorism” — strikes me as a work of startling, often brilliant insight, almost the only useful attempt to place that traumatic moment in a theoretical context that embraces both psychology and history. Beyond that, his analysis now seems prescient in ways that go well beyond its apparent subject, and provides a framework for understanding more recent events that may appear unrelated, including the political turmoil of the last few years epitomized by the election of Donald Trump.

Although President Trump is clearly an aspect of the Western world’s reaction to Islamic terrorism — or its “abreaction,” to use a psychological term Baudrillard employs in his essay — and has repeatedly vowed to stamp it out, that only underlines the fact that they are closely related phenomena. Like the 9/11 attacks, Trump’s ascendancy was a startling rupture in the official narrative of upward-trending Western civilization. Like the 9/11 attacks, Trump has provoked “prodigious jubilation” in some quarters, along with an unwholesome, libidinal fascination among both the media and the worldwide public.

On several occasions, I have tentatively suggested that the unexpected revival of both left-wing and right-wing populism — broadly speaking, the re-emergence of socialism and fascism, both of which were supposed to be dead — signified a new Age of Revolution, somewhat akin to earlier ones in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries. Perhaps what I was really perceiving was a new phase of what Baudrillard identified in 2002 as a global conflict within the Western world, reflecting a deep crisis in its dominant political and economic order. To put this in the most provocative terms possible, has Donald Trump succeeded Osama bin Laden as the central figure of World War IV?

Yeah, I know: If World War III already happened, how did we miss it? We’ll get back to that. Going back to “L’Esprit du terrorisme” and 9/11, Baudrillard argued that we could not hope to understand terrorism if we insisted on perceiving it as something inflicted on us from outside by hateful but mysterious enemies. From that blinkered perspective, the 9/11 attacks were “a pure accident, a purely arbitrary act, the murderous phantasmagoria of a few fanatics” who simply had to be eliminated to set the world to rights. (American military strategy in the Middle East, it is worth noting, continues to be based on that idiotic presumption, even if nobody believes it anymore.) Terrorism had less to do with a global conflict between Islam and the West, Baudrillard suggested, than with an internal crisis or “fracture” within the dominant Western social and economic order. The “fundamental antagonism” that drove terrorism was a matter of “triumphant globalization battling against itself.” (Emphasis in original.)

In the most famous and most controversial passages of his essay, Baudrillard described the collapse of the Twin Towers as “a fiction surpassing fiction,” a “Manhattan disaster movie” that combined the 20th century’s “two elements of mass fascination”: “the white magic of the cinema and the black magic of terrorism.” He was not denying that real people died in the towers, only saying that nearly all of us consumed that dreadful event as a media spectacle. There are premonitions of a certain reality-show celebrity turned politician who subverted an entire campaign cycle here as well, in the observation that the terrorists exploited the media economy and its “instantaneous worldwide transmission” of spectacle, but that none of us could resist its power: “There is no ‘good’ use of the media; the media are part of the event, they are part of the terror, and they work in both directions.”

One can apply virtually all of this analysis to Trumpism, which may suggest that the Trump movement is a form of terrorism conducted by other means. There is a similar urge among many Americans to explain away the election of Trump as a meaningless or anomalous event, an event that in some sense did not really happen. If it was the result of mass delusion and bigotry, fueled or enabled by the nefarious machinations of Vladimir Putin, then no further explanation is necessary and removing the president from office — preferably before the 2020 election — will at least begin to undo the damage.

I have previously discussed the multiple levels of magical thinking at work here, and the fact that many liberals continue to dream of impeachment (or 25th Amendment scenarios still more fanciful than that) exposes how tenuously such fantasies are connected to political reality. No American president has ever been removed from office through the impeachment process, still less through the bizarre kangaroo-court proceedings envisioned by the 25th Amendment; Democrats currently control neither house of Congress and will never, even in some imaginary Big Rock Candy Mountain era of liberal hegemony, command the 67 votes needed for conviction in the Senate.