Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at rrbates1951@gmail.com. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.
Wednesday
Poets and novelists in the 1920s and 1930s taught us much of what we need to know about fascism. Yesterday I shared poems by Bertolt Brecht, who had a front row seat for the rise of Hitler. Today I turn to one by William Butler Yeats.
I owe my awareness of “Leaders of the Crowd” to Greg Olear, whose blog Prevail I find indispensable, both for its political analysis and for its use of poetry and fiction in that analysis. Olear turned to Yeats for the title of his 2024 book, which warned about the dangers of a second Trump presidency (Rough Beast: Who Trump Really Is, What He’ll Do If Reelected, and Why Democracy Must Prevail). Olear, of course, has borrowed from “The Second Coming,” with the title (to our sorrow) proving predictive:
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.
In his most recent post, Olear shares what various close observers of fascism have identified as essential tactics for gaining and holding power:
–Demonization of domestic enemies
–Preposterous lies
–Contempt for democratic institutions
He also shares what Columbia professor Robert Paxon sees as the five stages of fascism, which is to say “the phases nations pass through on the road to establishing and expanding a fascist government.” Frighteningly, Trump has checked the boxes of the first four:
–Emerging out of disillusionment
–Establishing legitimacy as a political party
–Gaining power via right-wing partnerships
–Using power to dominate institutions
–Implementing radical reforms
It was during the 2024 campaign that Olear shared Yeats’s “Leaders of the Crowd,” which he says might more aptly be titled “Demagogues.” Note how closely the sonnet describes Trump, especially the way that he rallies his troops with his certainty and how he “pulls down established honor” with his “loose fantasy” (“they’re eating the dogs”). “Helicon” is the home of the muses, and while Trump’s supporters may see his pronouncements as divinely inspired, Yeats would characterize them as “calumny” dredged from the “abounding gutter”:
They must to keep their certainty accuse
All that are different of a base intent;
Pull down established honor; hawk for news
Whatever their loose fantasy invent
And murmur it with bated breath, as though
The abounding gutter had been Helicon
Or calumny a song. How can they know
Truth flourishes where the student’s lamp has shone,
And there alone, that have no Solitude?
So the crowd come they care not what may come.
They have loud music, hope every day renewed
So the crowd come they care not what may come.
They have loud music, hope every day renewed
And heartier loves; that lamp is from the tomb.
There are two lamps in the poem. One is the lamp of truth, which is contemplated in solitude and which guides our great leaders. The demagogue, by contrast, isn’t interested in truth, preferring loud music and cheering crowds (“heartier loves”). As long as the crowds show up, he cares not for what may come.
It is in this sense that, as the poem puts it, hope is “every day renewed.” Hope seems to us a good thing but, in this case, it is a shallow hope. One could just as well say that despair is every day renewed. The crowds make him think that he is something whereas, without their adulation, he would see himself as nothing. It is in this way that the lamp that guides him is from the tomb.
Note how such insecurity makes the leader’s life unbearable. For all that he has achieved, Trump fears that he is nothing if he does not win the Nobel Peace Prize, if he isn’t considered greater than Washington and Lincoln, if his face isn’t carved into Mount Rushmore, if he doesn’t win every golf game he plays, if he is not flattered at every waking moment.
Meanwhile, those Republicans who have struck a Faustian bargain to remain in his good graces are being hollowed out. If voting for his Big Beautiful Bill costs many of them their Congressional seats, as pundits predict, what will they have to look back on? Those Democrats who were “shellacked” after voting for Obamacare in 2010 can look back at all the lives they saved whereas what will the GOP get? A few pats on the head from wealthy donors.
That lamp is from the tomb.
