Trumpism, Fascistic Excess, and the Accursed Share

What would Georges Bataille say about America now?

Georges Battaile, Untitled Drawing (1925)

If we are going to find an answer to the new American Fascism, we must reckon with the irrational force of its magnetism. The Twentieth Century — which faced the totalitarian menace and temporarily defeated it — has left us many profound reflections on this topic. Today, I want to look at this particularly through the work of Georges Bataille (1897–1962), a French writer — one of my favorites — who explored excess, sacrifice, eroticism, transgression, and the Sacred. Bataille’s ideas can help us understand the shadow side of what’s happening now.

Liberal critics and sociologists have often tried to analyze why poor and working-class Americans support right-wing politics that harm or even kill them. In What's the Matter with Kansas?, Thomas Frank argued that the Right redirected class resentment away from economic elites and toward cultural elites, turning outrage over inequality into a weapon against liberalism. Cultural and religious grievances — emotional issues; their sense of dignity — matter far more to many people than rational self-interest.

Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land focuses on working class people in Louisiana who live in an area that has been poisoned by heavy industries to such an extent that many of them die from cancers in their forties. The older people remember a beautiful natural area that is now decimated. They can’t swim in the local river or eat fish because of toxic sediments, and the forest has died. Yet they passionately support candidates who fight for corporations, not for them, who accelerate the destruction of their world and cause the early deaths of their children.

We need to realize, at this point, that the idea of a rational society based on science and progress — the Enlightenment and liberal dream — is in free fall. We are experiencing an upsurge of the irrational, the daimonic, rising up from the deeper strata of the collective unconscious. The situation is a bit ironic for me. A lot of my work focuses on seemingly irrational topics such as psychedelic mysticism, the paranormal, and the occult. I have studied subjects like crop circles, extraterrestrials, and the Apocalypse. I try to find a creative synthesis, balancing the rational and irrational (or arational) together, so the conscious mind can hold it without collapsing from contradictions.

Anne Applebaum, one of our greatest scholars on totalitarianism, believes we are in the grips of something she calls “the New Obscurantism.” In “The New Rasputins: Anti-science mysticism is enabling autocracy around the globe,” she writes: “For Americans, the merging of pseudo-spirituality with politics represents a departure from some of our deepest principles: that logic and reason lead to good government; that fact-based debate leads to good policy; that governance prospers in sunlight; and that the political order inheres in rules and laws and processes, not mystical charisma.” At this point, I feel we must remember we are, cognitively, no different from aboriginal or indigenous people who often held irrational and mythological views that allowed them to perform human sacrifice — even on a very large scale, with a culture like the Aztecs. A worker in Louisiana will support a Far Right anti-abortion candidate because they believe, due to their local Church’s interpretation of The Bible, that this is more important for them if they want to get to Heaven than any rational calculation. They believe in this Biblical Heaven because they have been told they must have faith.

In contrast to the Enlightenment’s ideal of rational, law-based democratic governance, a new form of unreason has taken root across the political spectrum, embracing irrationality, superstition, and fear over clarity and reason. This "New Obscurantism" gathers together disparate figures and movements: wellness influencers turned political aspirants, adherents of the QAnon conspiracy and its offshoots, and political actors across the U.S. and Europe who combine anti-vaccine sentiment, pro-Russian sympathies, and mystical nationalism. Throughout Central Europe, we find folkloric symbolism—runes, pagan rituals—used in both left-wing neo-shamanic revivalism and right-wing xenophobia.

“Spiritual leaders are becoming political, and political actors have veered into the occult,” she writes. “Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who has become an apologist for Russian aggression, has claimed that he was attacked by a demon that left “claw marks” on his body.” The melding together of magical thinking and political extremism leads to a radical retreat from Enlightenment ideals into something far more turbulent, inchoate, and dangerous: a politics of enchantment where politicians indulge in the irrational in order to weaponize it.

The recent meeting between Trump and El Salvador’s autocratic president Nayib Bukele displayed this new disturbing politics of irrationality, obscurantism, and enchantment. Spectacle — political theater- displaces logic and reason. Inauthenticity is no longer a guilty pleasure, but direct lies are actively flaunted as a tool of social control. Trump and Bukeley defended their refusal to retrieve an innocent man from an El Salvadoran concentration camp through a nonsensical loop of circular reasoning. By cynically maintaining an utterly illegal injustice, they demonstrate their control over the social body. Stephen Miller’s inversion of the Supreme Court ruling—Miller told the media the Supreme Court decision validates the Trump administration when in fact they directly contradicted it—was a ritual expression: A performance of power, humiliating the other branches of government by maintaining an outright contradiction of fact.

The archetypal Sovereign, the dictator, is meant to stand above and outside of the truth, among any other limitations. What matters is his ability to dominate the symbolic field. Holding to the lie becomes a show of force. This is the fascination of fascism in action: irrationality has a kind of mesmerizing power. It numbs our capacity to respond.

Though marginal in his own time, Bataille has become increasingly influential in recent decades, particularly among philosophers like Michel Foucault, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacques Derrida. Trained as a librarian and medievalist, Bataille wrote essays, transgressive and scatological novels (The Story of the Eye), theological tracts, economic treatises. Deeply influenced by Nietzsche, he developed a form of thinking that encompassed transgression, excess, and the sacred—concepts that modern rationalism tried to suppress. Bataille’s work is difficult, often intentionally obscure. He was obsessed with everything that gets suppressed and cast out of modern discourse: Death, decay, ecstasy, eroticism, sadism, refuse.

Bataille believed that our efforts to understand the world and the universe with our reason avoided the lacunae, the gap, at the center. For instance, the symbol of Enlightenment reason was the Sun: The Sun’s rays — the light of reason — illuminate the world. But when you turn your eyes away from what the Sun lights up to scrutinize the source of illumination, you go insane from its obliterating brightness. “In practice the scrutinized sun can be identified with a mental ejaculation, foam on the lips, and an epileptic crisis. In the same way that the preceding sun (the one not looked at) is perfectly beautiful, the one that is scrutinized can be considered horribly ugly,” he wrote in his essay, “Rotten Sun”.

One of Bataille’s main ideas is “the accursed share” (la part maudite). In a three-volume tome, Bataille proposed a radical reinterpretation of economics—not as the science of scarcity, but of excess. According to Bataille, every society produces a surplus of energy and wealth beyond what they need for survival. The accursed share is what must be spent outside of any rational form of exchange or economy.

This surplus must be expended: How it is expended determines a society’s character and symbolic structure. Some cultures channel their excess into art, mass ritual, or gift-exhanges (potlatch). Bataille called these “glorious” forms of expenditure.

Other societies — like are own — are blocked from finding authentic catharsis, due to their inherent ideologies or prejudices. In this case, the “accursed share” gets used for destruction and self-destruction: wars, conquest, cruelty, or internal repression. This is what I find with the “manosphere”: A kind of reduction and distortion of masculine energy, channeling the masculine current into misogyny, greed, contempt, reductive economic self-interest, technological sterility, and militarism. The manosphere exacerbates the negative aspects of the masculine, ignoring positive aspects, such as the masculine capacity for sacrifice, or the pursuit of knowledge and truth. This opens the gates for the Fascist collapse.

Bataille’s insight is that when surplus is not acknowledged and ritually expended, it returns in catastrophic form. In this light, fascism is not just a political ideology—it is a form of sacrificial economy, a way of transforming the excess or rejected “other” through violence, myth, and symbolic power.

The fascist leader is a kind of inverted sovereign, an archetypal figure (Trump is often associated with Loki, the dark trickster of Norse mythology) that allows society to enacts its need to witness and participate in irrational spectacle and, also, transgressive rituals that often have an erotic or sadistic character. Tragically, this can lead to genocides and wars of conquest, as we saw in Nazi Germany.

This framework helps us make sense of Donald Trump’s appeal. Trump does not represent a coherent political ideology. He offers a shambolic embodiment of excess — and in a negative sense, individual freedom. His persona—deliberately vulgar, chaotic, vindictive, and larger than life—operates outside the norms of rational governance. Trump gives expression to a deep undercurrent in American life: the longing for release, for meaning, for a kind of collective self-abandonment that can also lead to death. The MAGA cultists who follow him take him as their ego ideal.

Trump is a populist despot, but he is also a symbolic figure who channels the unresolved passions of a society that no longer knows how to expel its surplus—of wealth, anger, technological power, knowledge, and libidinal drives. Liberal democracy, in its technocratic form, offered dull management and moderation. Trump offers gleeful, monstrous sacrifice and release from social norms such as morality or restraint. Trump and his minions are actively trying to destroy the elite and professional classes as well as the infrastructure of elite education and scientific research in America. This is obviously not a rational move, but a purely destructive and disruptive effort that will sabotage and weaken America. It might be best understood as a kind of ritualized sacrifice or offering to the dark Archonic forces that Trump and his minions serve.

Bataille wrote, “sovereignty is not power, it is the refusal of utility.” Trump is not popular with the masses because he rules effectively but because he performs a fantastic, excessive, spectacular refusal: of decorum, of deliberation, of utility itself. Think about his arbitrary and even seemingly insane tariffs, which are now crippling economic activity in the U.S. because businesses cannot plan for the future. His attacks on legal immigrants and visitors are destroying our tourist industry. This is, obviously, not a normal situation but an acting out of some deep, unconscious compulsion gripping our society: Almost a collective expression of what Sigmund Freud called Thanatos, the death drive.

Trump is an actor in a larger drama: He shows us the absolutely wrong path to address the crisis of meaning and loss of myth, the abyss afflicting an advanced technological society in rapid decline. Over the next months, his popularity may drop precipitously as he destroys people’s livelihoods on a mass scale, but we will still need to reckon with the deeper source of what this is at its core, if we hope to counteract and defeat it.

The important point — which I hope to return to next time — is that for the “Left” to rise again, we must make intentional contact with the symbolic realm of the irrational and arational, the dark, erotic forces moving through the collective unconscious. We can no longer escape them by suppressing or avoiding them. We must find place for them.

What are the new / ancient myths that can guide us, as a society, back to a state of being that takes us beyond the limited rationalism of the secular Enlightenment / technocratic vision? How can we — as the New Obscurants have done —incorporate myth and mysticism, Eros and archetype, into our politics, without being subsumed by them? I hope we can explore this together. I look forward to your thoughts.