The Origin of Trump

Christofascism, yes. But also science.

The Trump administration is a farrago of Christofascist goons who have gutted university research funds and hate vaccines. In that context, it’s easy to view our current nightmare as a war between theocrats and empirical science. We’re stuck in the moment when the evangelical anti-Darwin loons finally seized our government to steer it back to the Middle Ages.

Unfortunately, the evangelical apocalypse fanciers do not bear the sole blame for our current nightmare, as Stefanos Geroulanos makes clear at depressing length in The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins.

Geroulanos’ book is a study of the study of prehistory—an account of how naturalists, geologists, anthropologists, archeologists, historians, primatologists, psychologists, and other science-y sorts have spent the last 300 years trying to understand the origins of humanity. That quest for knowledge has been intertwined, Geroulanos argues, with a quest for dominance—seeking the roots of the human is also a search for the justification of power. Secular discourses, like religious ones, have long been marshalled in the service of imperialism and fascism, and even the Christofascists have evolved their particular evil with the help of Darwin.

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Extermination as a natural process

The Invention of Prehistory is organized into chapters based on tropes or ideas—on noble savages, on Neanderthals, on “bomb them back to the stone age,” and so forth. If there’s one key concept that stains the study of prehistory, though, it’s the idea that the past is still alive, embodied in other, more “primitive” cultures. Western theorists and researchers consistently conflated indigenous peoples with past peoples; to journey to Africa or to the Americas or to the Pacific Islands was to go backwards in time, sailing towards the origin of humanity.

The idea that the people over there were also the people back then meant that other cultures were relics, doomed to vanish to make way for the new, the shiny, and the civilized. As Geroulanos writes, “For the most part, Britain and the US [and not just Britain and the US] treated Indigenous peoples as belonging to the past, as active threats to modernity.”

There were various ways to deal with non-white people and indigenous people once you realized that they didn’t really belong in modernity. You could conquer them and educate them to help them advance (though, of course, they could never really catch up to their masters). Or you could exterminate them.

The choice was not usually presented so starkly; instead, Geroulanos explains, the mass murder and genocide of native peoples was spoken of as happening without any real human agency. As the Aborigines Protection Society of London wrote in 1838, “Whilst we hesitate to plead their cause, they [indigenous peoples] cease to exist, and we shall inquire after them in vain.” Time moved on; the people who were trapped in the past disappeared passively, simply vanishing like a sunset.

Some of the people who embraced this genocidal logic were racist cranks. But it was also cosigned by reputable and important scientists—not least Darwin himself. Geroulanos quotes Darwin musing in the Voyage of the Beagle: “there appears to be some more mysterious agency generally at work. Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal.” Darwin went on to assert “The varieties of man seem to act on each other; in the same way as different species of animals—the stronger always extirpating the weaker.”

Darwin made similar comments in The Origin of Species and other works. Sometimes he cast some blame on colonizers and sometimes he blamed the colonized—he suggested that “profligate women” led to societal collapse, in a move that christofascists would find congenial. Ultimately though, Geroulanos concludes: for Darwin indigenous people

“were undomesticated leftovers, fossils who had failed to transform and therefore survive and master the pressures of nature. Their fate might be heartbreaking but it was altogether unsurprising. They were passé, the last ‘living representatives of the early Stone Age.’

Darwin’s racist and eugenicist ideas tend to be glossed over in accounts of his work. In part Geroulanos suggests, this is because “it’s hard to teach evolution or science without heroes.” It’s also probably because evolution is still controversial, and scientists still feel like they need to defend it from its evangelical and Christofascist critics. Admitting that Darwin saw the “struggle of the fittest” as an explicit sanction for genocide would cede too much ground to the enemy.

Science and religion, building racism together

But while religion and science make competing claims in some situations, when it comes to racism they often work hand in hand.

The framing of our current horrific war on immigrants is a case in point. Geroulanos writes that anti-immigrant sentiment is often framed as fear of “hordes” about to “flood” across the borders, overwhelming (much-hyped) European civilization. Though it’s impossible to say who was the first to use these metaphors, Geroulanos points out that the Biblical flood was a common cultural referent for civilization ending apocalypse. Historians also were fascinated with the fall of Rome (supposedly) via barbarian invasion. Geroulanos argues that these religious and academic tropes alchemized into a watery metaphor for the terrifying fall of white Christendom as in the title of Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color: The Threat Against White World Supremacy (1920), or in Victor Orban’s 2018 speech in which he denounced Syrian refugees as “an unprecedented migrant tide.”

Trump has not used the metaphor of “flood of migrants” himself specifically—though it comes up in reporting with some regularity (as in this Politico piece which refers to “the disorganized flood of migrants into border communities.”) Trump has said of immigrants that, “In some case, they’re not people”—a dehumanizing formulation that evokes both the idea of retrograde proto-human savages and natural apocalypses like floods. Millenarian religious terror, anthropological rendering of people over there to a prehuman past, historical fantasies of barbarian invasion, all get stirred together to frame people seeking a better life or fleeing persecution as an existential threat to an “us” defined by Christian community, by whiteness, and by supposed civilizational advancement.

Trump is our present, unfortunately

These civilizational arguments come up when people denounce the Trump administration too. Trump is often said, is taking us “backwards”, or has “hit the reverse button.” These metaphors of civilization in rewinding are meant to suggest a return to a past of ignorance, a breakdown of progress, an abandonment of the light of reason for the benighted past of superstition.

But as Geroulanos shows, the idea that some people living in the present are in fact living in the past is part of the (in part scientific) rhetoric and the (in part scientific) ideology that has enabled the racism and genocidal violence on which Trumpism thrives. It’s important to know about and learn about the past, because the past made the present. But the past doesn’t continue to exist; right now, there’s only the present.

MAGA claims to be invoking yesterday’s greatness to make tomorrow, but Trump, like the rest of us, only exists when we are. Trumpism is a familiar, yet contemporary synthesis of xenophobic and supremacist ideas from Christianity, from eugenics, from Darwin, Stoddard, Orban, and more. It is not a throwback, because there are no throwbacks. There’s just us now, and our neighbors, and how we build a better today in the face of those determined to make a worse one.