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In my last article, I said that Trump is the most consequential president since perhaps Lincoln. Some readers may think this is hyperbole—in time, everyone will see that I am right. He broke with the script held to by modern politics, and this was enough to show that the emperor has no clothes. Whatever else he did or didn’t do pales in comparison. The people can’t unsee what he has shown them. He has become something more than a president.
In 2023, when a train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, it spilled hazardous chemicals and prompted a state of emergency declaration. The authorities rushed in and, rather than cleaning up the mess—and in what many saw as a cover-up—decided to burn the chemicals instead. Poisonous gas began billowing throughout the small town, eventually causing widespread health problems which persist to this day. The chair of the US National Transportation Safety Board recently confirmed at a Senate hearing what many knew at the time—that the controlled burn was unjustified.1
Government mishandling of the disaster was bad enough. But something worse happened—the left began gloating at the misfortune of this small, blue-collar town. This was not just a train run off the tracks. To the left, it was it was a sign that nature or nature’s god hated Middle America, and in a feverish display of schadenfreude, it gleefully rubbed salt in the wound, laughing at their misfortune and sputtering that they deserved it, as Joy Behar did on The View.2
Meanwhile, Republican Ohio governor Mike DeWine faced calls to resign over the mishandling, with the Republican party seen as a symbol of elite incompetence and indifference to the folk it is there to serve. When East Palestine residents needed help, they only saw a horde of gloating subhumans to their left, and a cabal of negligent criminals to their right. No one was on their side. Then Trump arrived.
He arrived before even Biden, the sitting president. And people noticed. Watch their response:
Amid the cries of “thank you for not forgetting about us”, Trump projects an almost mythic quality. The woman to the left of the screen looks like she’s about to burst into tears. Whatever you think of Trump’s lack of policy initiative, failure to build the wall, or capitulation to ethnic interests, does not matter. What matters is that Trump is the avatar for white America. When the system persecutes him, they persecute white America. When academics say that the “system of white supremacy” privileges white America, they mean the privilege the people of East Palestine enjoy of being gassed by our rulers. No serious person actually buys the notion of white privilege, and Trump himself simply dismisses the system for the farce that it is. He is a massive problem for the system, just by existing.
We said that Trump is almost mythic. But he is not quite mythic. The term “myth” gets overused to the point where it’s meaningless, much like the term “epic” (bro). Trump is a step toward a mythic persona. He stands for something, but he does not quite meet the qualification of mythic. And it is absolutely critical for us—as dissidents, who wish to change the system—to understand what a myth is, and why Trump is not quite mythic. At least, not yet. He could be, and at the end of this article we will say how.
First, a myth is not a fairy tale or an untrue story. This understanding is an artifact of Christian apologetics, and is misguided—as we shall argue, Christians would do well to regard Jesus as mythic. Second, a myth is not an old story. This is an artifact of Enlightenment progressivism, which has been called into question with the revival of nationalism and yet more reactionary forces today. We have not passed out of the age of myth—the canon is not closed. Mythic persons have walked the earth in living memory. We are not progressives here, and frankly, nor is anyone who is sane, normal, and healthy.
We know what a myth is not. So what is it? The best definition of a myth was given by Georges Sorel in his book Reflections on Violence:
Myths are not descriptions of things, but expressions of a determination to act. [...] A myth cannot be refuted, since it is, at bottom, identical with the convictions of a group, being the expression of these convictions in the language of movement; and it is, in consequence, unanalysable into parts which could be placed on the plane of historical descriptions.3
There is a lot to unpack here. A myth is not merely a description. It may involve description; it may appear to be composed of propositions; it may tell you about a state of affairs in the world—but so does a scientific theory or a court transcript. Those are not myths—a myth is much more than a description.
Sorel tells us that a myth is an “expression of a determination to act”. A myth expresses a determination, which is always aimed at a goal or purpose. And a goal or purpose presupposes a will. When you act wilfully, you are aiming at something. And this aiming, willing, purposive action embodies a command.
Now, a command is a categorically different utterance than a proposition. A command cannot be true or false, only apt or inapt, legitimate or illegitimate. The command is essentially the will of the commander being imposed on the one commanded—the issuer of the command turns the recipient of the command into the instrument of his will.
What Sorel is doing, then, is making a foundational distinction between any old story or account, and a myth. He is distinguishing mythos from logos. A myth is a description, yes. But it is a special kind of description. A myth is a description that hides within it a prescription. A myth does not merely tell you what is—a myth tells you what ought to be. And it charges you with bringing “what ought to be” into being. This is why Sorel then says that a myth is “the expression of these convictions in the language of movement”. A command is not a passive depiction of a state of affairs, but a demand for action, for movement. It is no accident that Trump’s most famous utterance—Make America Great Again—is not a proposition, but a command.
And like a command—which can neither be true nor false—the myth cannot be refuted. As Sorel says, the myth is “unanalysable into parts which could be placed on the plane of historical descriptions”. A myth cannot be evaluated in terms of historical facts. A historical description could be refuted by some fact that contradicts it, but no fact can ever bring a myth into question, because a myth is not strictly true nor false.
As an example, take Marxism. Marxism is not quite a scientific theory, though it pretends to scientific status. But all of its major claims have been refuted by the facts of economic history since Marx’s time, and yet Marxists remain committed. It’s not so much the propositional claims that they remain committed to, but the prescriptions embedded in them. Marx redefines familiar normative terms (such as “value”) to exclude certain actions, and then attaches emotionally charged language (such as “exploitation”) to describe these excluded actions. What he is doing, quite straightforwardly, is giving you a command to refrain from those actions, but dressed up in the neutral and objective language of description. He does something similar with the idea of “class struggle”. By giving you an elaborated just-so story about how class struggle is inevitable given historical forces, he is in essence demanding that you subordinate yourself to those forces, and therefore to the outcome that he would have—which is class struggle.
We could give another, ostensibly less nefarious example of myth, one that Sorel himself gives—the Christian passion of Jesus.