The Return of the King

Donald Trump is not exactly Aragorn of Gondor, aka Strider-Ranger-of-the-North, companion of Gandalf and the Hobbits of the Ring. But he is the resurgence of "kingship." The spectacle of him pumping his fist, blood flowing down his face, is straight out of Knights of the Roundtable or Lord of the Rings. The "No Kings" rallies of June testify to this. This resurgence of kingship is a global event: not just the Communist and Islamic worlds but many democracies are legally opting for kingly figures. The absolute and final hegemony of "individualist" free-market, constitutional democracies that was assumed for a few decades after the fall of the Soviets in 1989 is now entirely discredited. We are now post-liberal and post-modern, whatever that means. The famous "Arc of History" of Whig history and Obama is no longer operative. We are not moving ineluctably to greater individual autonomy and freedom. We don't know where we are going at this point. Personally, I like it this way: I prefer chaos to the oppressive monotony of secular-techno-bureaucratic-bourgeois, end-of-history Darwinian/Hegelian/Marxist/Freudian "progress!"

Mary Harrington, with her customary insight and brilliance, is very helpful about this in her recent "The King and the Swarm" in First Things, Aug./Sept. 2025. She contrasts the two pivotal revolutions which created entirely new forms of human consciousness. First, the printing press transitioned us from an oral to a  literate culture. Reading entailed: focus, linear logic, solitude, analysis, the primacy of facts/objectivity and individuation. It provides the foundation for the Protestant Revolution, technology/industrialization, individuation, democracy, and secular disenchantment. The second such revolution is our current shift from the literate to the digital, a kind of reversion back to pre-literacy. She notes that over 50% of American adults have not read a full book in the last year. Internet, phones, social media and AI are creating a new form of human consciousness. It is less linear, logical, analytical; more dispersed, mythical, intuitive.

Surprisingly and refreshingly, Harrington is not the usual gloom-and-doom about these developments. Rather, she sets her critical glace against the entire print-culture,  Enlightenment project of disenchantment. Specifically, modernity as a world view rejected the formal and final causality of the ancient and medieval worlds. Reality no longer had interior forms/essences; it lacked any purpose or finality; it was vacated of transcendent meaning, charm, irony, tragedy, drama, goodness, truth and beauty. Rather, reality becomes small, hard atoms which bounce off each other and somehow (random change, survival of the fittest) combine eventually in complexities including human consciousness. The human eventually is imagined like the primary unit of reality, the atom, as autonomous, isolated, impervious. And the polity of democracy is imagined as a "swarm" of bees as "we the people" formulate our will, independent of any transcendent order of meaning. Devoid of natural order and transcendence, democracy has developed into a technocracy in which anonymous, educated elites engineer our social order in a manner that has become repulsive to the underclass: deep state, privilege of money/education, disparagement of the "deplorables." Harrington bemoans, of course, the enmity between the powerful and the underclass. 

She says almost nothing about Trump in the article, but his "kingship" hovers like a ghost over it. She suggests his appeal is that he is not a bureaucrat, but a person with affections, hurts, angers, purpose. She contrasts this with the Biden regime as the dying gasps of the hegemony of bureaucratic, technocratic, liberal, disenchanted modernity. We now know he was senile and incompetent and handled/micromanaged. But by whom? By an anonymous, invisible, impersonal, covert network of some sort. His cabinet, his designated team, (Harris, Blinken, Yellin, Austin, Garland, Buttigieg, Mayorkas, etc.) was iconic of print culture: probably score in the top 1% in literacy and math. But they are excruciatingly lacking in purpose, confidence, energy, personality, originality, humor, irony, agency, eccentricity. They are algorithmic personalities: interchangeable, atomic units of a mechanistic system. One could easily imagine the Biden regime being directed by an AI unit programed appropriately with: DEI, LGBTQ, avoidance of military force at whatever price, denial of global bad actors, indifference to national debt/deficit, indulgence of unions, professional class, etc.

By sharpest contrast, Donald himself and his "knights of the roundtable" (Vance, Musk, Kennedy, Gabbard, Noem, Hegseth, etc.) are larger-than-life, anti-bureaucratic, superhero protagonists, defiant of "the system." Each lacks credentials of the techno-bureaucracy; which is a credit to them in Trump-world. Each is a personality: eccentric, anarchistic, purposeful, confident, surging with supreme confidence and sense of agency. Each in some way rises above, transcends and disparages "modernity" as systemic, secular, liberal, "scientific" monotony.

When Trump was elected in 2016 I credited him as a father-figure, however deplorable. Now with his reelection in 2024 and Harrington's essay we can see him as the "return of the King." Harrington suggests that we may not return to literal kingship, but some form of it may well the the least bad available. She recalls the Aristotelian idea of friendship, that the ruler is friend of the ruled. We Americans certainly remember FDR, JFK, RR as such friends. She further suggests that effective rulers going forward will need to operate in both registers: "the rational print one and the symbolic digital one."

She sees that the emergent digital, post-print order, whatever its deficits, may well be more open to the symbolic, the meaningful, the transcendent. The digital brain is less logical and focused, but more open to patterns and underlying connections. And so, we see now the attraction of young men of all classes and ethnicities to religion, authority, and strong concepts of masculinity.

Our Catholic faith instructs us that all authority descends from and points to our heavenly Father. So, masculinity as paternity, government at every level, kingship itself are all radiances from heaven, reflecting (however flawed and deficient) the goodness and power of our Creator. 

And so, the digital culture, the demise of print culture, the emergence of Trump and his ilk...with all the dangers and depravities, also offer opportunities for retrieval of an enchanted, symbolic, integral, natural and marvelous social order.