"The King in Orange: The Magical and Occult Roots of Political Power" is a highly peculiar book written by John Michael Greer (JMG), the former peak oil blogger who seamlessly morphed into your friendly neighborhood occultista a few years ago. The king of the title is Donald Trump, and the highly eclectic work deals with both American politics and the crisis of modern civilization from a broadly "populist" and occult perspective. An intriguing combo, to say the least!
The manuscript must have been written before the 2020 election (which JMG believed Trump would win) and then rewritten in a hurry when Joe Biden carried it. Despite bearing the 2021 publication date, "The King in Orange" feels "so 2016", contains no sustained analysis of Trump´s 2020 debacle, and never mentions the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021. Nor is the COVID pandemic covered, except in brief passing. The book is broadly based on JMG´s essay-like blog posts from the Trump presidency. And despite all the pre-publication hype, it mentions the (bizarre) "Kek Wars" only in one chapter. Despite this, the book *is* worth reading, especially if you are new to JMG´s squamos and rugous corner of the blogosphere. If you are an avid reader of the man´s exotic blogs, you will be thoroughly rehashed as to their content.
As already mentioned, "The King in Orange" covers a lot of ground, and even a summary of its main points is difficult. JMG starts off by describing his former home town in the Appalachians, Cumberland in Maryland. In the author´s neighborhood - relatively poor, working class and multi-racial - 70% of the voters opted for Trump in 2016. Talking to the residents, JMG realized that issues such as opposition to Obamacare, war and de-industrialization were more important for Trump supporters than embrace of "racism" or "sexism". (Obamacare hiked health care costs for most American workers, making the program extremely unpopular. Yes, I know that´s not the standard narrative.) A few voters also wanted to punish the Democratic Party for suppressing Bernie Sanders. The whole thing looked more like an old fashioned class vote than a racist blacklash against Black bodies, or whatever the Clintonite media narrative was at the moment.
The short form of JMG´s analysis is that the United States is dominated by something he dubs "the salary class", which seems to comprise both large sections of the state and corporate establishment, and the vast middle class (that is, middle class by European standards), many of whom are relatively privileged. For the last 50 years or so, the salary class has systematically attacked and impoverished the "wage class", the traditional working class plus low-paid service workers. The *real* grave-diggers of the system, interestingly enough, are middle class people excluded from the salary class (or the more privileged and influential parts thereof). JMG jokingly refer to this excluded middle as "the basement brigade". Trumpism represents the union of these declassed middle strata and the wage class, with the former using the latter as a battering ram against the salary class. JMG doesn´t seem to think this is such a bad thing - although he is careful not to disclose his own preference at the polling station, logically he should vote Trump. He also downplays the racist and sexist elements which undoubtedly *do* exist among Trump´s supporters.
Still, it´s obvious that the Trump phenomenon is highly complex. Trump, after all, managed to capture the GOP nomination against the (overt) will of the party establishment, and in 2020 got 10 million *more* votes than in 2016, including a large proportion of the "Hispanic" vote. On the other hand, there are still many wage workers who held their noses and supported the Democrats in 2016 and 2020, or (in 2016) simply stayed away from the whole thing.
Another important point the author is trying to drive home is that the Trump phenomenon wasn´t an anomaly. It may have been "Incident" that a slightly unstable real estate mogul and reality TV star with a bad orange haircut decided to make a run for president on a populist platform, but it was "Destiny" that it would happen, sooner or later. JMG has a view of history many would perhaps describe as pessimistic (the author himself doesn´t seem to think so, however!) informed by Polybius, Oswald Spengler and "pre-modern" ideas of cyclical time in general. Toynbee´s ideas of how a "creative" minority becomes merely "dominant" also comes to mind. The worldview of the salary class is to a large extent a form of statist, managerial and centrist liberalism which rose to prominence during and after the New Deal, solved some problems for some time, and then inevitably became just another elite - and just another elite to be overturned in its turn by the next round of Young Turks.
Yes, this is "how democracy dies".
It dies due to its inability to fend off plutocracy and special interests, and at some point inevitably excludes large portions of the population, who then turn to whatever smart populist leader comes around and promises them really real change they can believe in. Thus, Caesarism (some would say Bonapartism) inevitably follows a democracy that has degenerated into plutocracy. Julius Caesar was a rich patrician promising reforms to the plebeian masses. In the same way, Orange Julius (Trump) is a well-to-do operator with a substantial support among the wage class. On one point, JMG is an optimist: he doesn´t believe that Caligula, Nero or even Augustus are "Destiny". There are a number of trajectories possible from the inevitable populist challenge to an aristocratic pseudo-democracy. Some are much worse than even Caligula, but if a sector of the old establishment sees the writing on the wall and mend its ways, plutocratic liberalism might give way to something better by peaceful transition (JMG doesn´t say what this could be, but judging by his other writings, a more decentralized, eco-friendly and "isolationist" American polity is high on his wish list).
It struck me when reading "The King in Orange" that Greer isn´t really a populist himself. He explicitly identifies with the basement brigade rather than the wage class, and seem to believe it´s necessary and/or inevitable that the working class is led by a stratum recruited from another class entirely. Absolute equality is a pipe dream, and so is socialism. Marxists will always fail in the United States, since the wage class only care about one thing: that they have decent jobs for decent wages (and perhaps also that they are mostly left alone in the "moral" sphere). While Marxists promise the workers these goodies, they never deliver and are inevitably pushed back into the salary class they came from, where they can pretend to champion the rights of every oppressed group *except* the great majority of the actual working class. And of course, a Marxist regime isn´t likely to leave the wage class (or anyone else) "alone" for long...
With a perspective like this, it comes as no surprise that John Michael Greer doesn´t believe in, ahem, progress. As already mentioned, Oswald Spengler´s "Untergang des Abendlandes" seems to be his favorite get-to when it comes to understanding world history (minus Spengler´s more reactionary obsessions), and he spends several chapters discussing Spenglerian themes such as "pseudomorphosis" and the "Apollonian, Magian and Faustian civilizations". I never managed to read Spengler´s magnum opus, but I have to say that JMG´s exegesis seems fruitful enough. The main take away is that our civilization, the Faustian one, is just one out of many, and that our perspectives, myths and preoccupations (including the belief in never-ending progress) are just as partial, subjective and temporary as those of any other civilization.
And, of course, all those civilizations have one thing in common: they are all gone. Why should ours be any different? JMG speculates that the next great civilization will arise in European Russia, around the river Volga, at some point during the 21st or 22nd century, when Russia finally throws off centuries of "pseudomorphosis" (foreign cultural influence). Interestingly, in this scenario not just Western modernity (which is Faustian) but also Orthodox (Byzantine) Christianity (which is Magian) are seen as pseudomorphoses, suggesting that the next Russian high culture will be neither modern nor "traditional" in the sense thought of today.
Even later, at some point during the 26st century, another great culture will arise, this time in North America, around the Ohio river valley. JMG speculates that it might be based on a kind of American Indian individualism and vision-quest spirituality he calls "tamanous" (that´s Chinook Jargon, btw). Note that climate change is entirely absent from the author´s narrative, probably because he doesn´t believe its effects will be apocalyptic, or at least not apocalyptic enough to change the course of events. (In one of his novels, the characters of a future post-collapse America turn out to be POC´s speaking a futuristic form of English, so perhaps not even mass immigration of climate refugees can stop the tamanous?)
The points raised above may explain why JMG decided to risk the publication of a "2016" book in mid-2021. Biden may have won the elections (if he even won), QAnon may have stormed the Capitol, and Trump may or may not stage a comeback in 2024, but in the larger scheme of things, this is just "Incident". The clock is ticking regardless, American Empire is slowly winding down, and we have all "seen the Orange sign", by which Greer presumably means that Trump exposed the system for what it really is. We are all red-pilled now. There is no turning back to the good ol´ certainties of the Obama and Clinton presidencies, or the Bush ditto if you are a Never Trump GOP-er. Trumpism is even spreading internationally, in the form of Boris Johnson in the UK, and perhaps similar leaders in other nations.
The future belongs to the King in Orange.
