When President Donald Trump claimed about his tariffs, “Only the weak will fail,” he revealed a philosophy — or theology — of the most perverse and evil magnitude.
Trump demonstrated he’s not the ringmaster in a circus of clowns. The president is the Alpha Male in a zoo full of predators. This is not Disney World; this is Jurassic Park. Or Planet of the Apes.
“Only the weak will fail” offers a slogan from a philosophical pragmatism that has haunted the world from Plato, Ayn Rand, Newt Gingrich and now Donald Trump.
Across human history, the rebels have resisted the perfect harmony of peace. The philosophy of the rebel goes by many names: “Only the strong survive,” “dog eat dog,” “might is right,” “he who has the gold makes the rules,” and “winning is everything.” The characteristics of this philosophy include ruthless, vicious, brutal, cruel, merciless, pitiless, relentless, remorseless, unpitying, unmerciful.
The most used moniker for this ideology is “social Darwinism.”
Callicles
Plato
The incarnation of “might makes right” makes an early appearance in human history with Plato’s Gorgias and a character named Callicles. He maintains that pleasure is good, and might is right, that law is nothing but the combination of the many weak against the few strong.
Callicles is a man of the world. He is a cynic, a materialist, a lover of power and of pleasure, unscrupulous in his means of attaining both. There is no desire on his part to offer any compromise in the interests of morality; nor is any concession made by him. He consistently maintains that might is right.
Callicles is interested only in fulfilling his personal desires and cares nothing for the people. He is intent on allowing his appetites to grow as large as possible and fulfill them at the expense of the people and the democracy.
More precisely, Callicles embodies “might equals right” because he is wealthy. In our age of devotion to unfettered capitalism, our insistence of making greed a virtue, and our virtual worship of the rich, it becomes necessary to consider the impact of wealth on our democracy. For Callicles there is only one rule: “He who has the gold, makes the rules.”
Then and now, wealthy people expect to be treated differently as if they are “too rich to fail.”
Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand
Trump has gathered a plethora of billionaires who approach the megalomania of Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead characters, Gail Wynand and Howard Roark. Rand’s desire to impose totalitarian collectivism on the nation hangs over Trump’s motives like a dark storm cloud.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt stated it well in 1936: “I believe in individualism …. up to the point where the individualist starts to operate at the expense of society.” And that is where we are: a group of very, very rich individuals operating at the highest levels of national power at the expense of society.
Rand extolled a peculiar brand of free-market totalitarianism. William Buckley provides an example of a Rand disciple. Buckley defined political liberty as identical with the maintenance of his own personal, family, class and religious privileges; all his life, this heir to an oil fortune has been in the enviable position of proclaiming that whatever is good for him is also morally right. This is Rand’s “philosophy” in a nutshell.
Rand’s philosophy goes against our long evolutionary history of social responsibility and social cooperation. There are dynamic relationships between the development of intelligence, language and social organization. Humans were meant to form symbiotic partnerships across all national, racial, and sexual bounds.
In this Sept. 27, 1994, photo, then-House Minority Whip Rep. Newt Gingrich, D-Ga., addresses Republican congressional candidates on Capitol Hill during a rally where they pledged a new “Contract with America.” (AP Photo/John Duricka)
Newt Gingrich
Perhaps no one represents the Darwin part of so-called “social Darwinism” as well as Newt Gingrich.
Gingrich first steered the Republican Ship of State into the massive jungle of animal politics. In the mind of Gingrich, humans are more animal than angel. He’s a walking bundle of appetites and excesses and hubris. He believes humans need to matriculate in the animal world for knowledge of how to live and do politics.
“There is a lot we can learn from the natural world,” Gingrich said in an interview with McKay Coppins, of The Atlantic. For the interview, Gingrich insisted on meeting at the Philadelphia Zoo. This is a telling trope of his worldview.
“Gingrich is the modern poster child of ‘only the strong survive.’”
Gingrich is the modern poster child of “only the strong survive.” His favorite animal is the lion. He pontificates, “The male lion procreates, protects the pride and sleeps. The females hunt, and as soon as they find something, the male knocks them over and takes the best portion. It’s the opposite of every American feminist vision of the world — but it’s a fact!”
Every neo-Calvinist Southern Baptist preacher filled with notions of the secondary role of women cries “Amen” in unison.
When Gingrich surveys the wreckage of the modern political landscape, he is not regretful. He’s gleeful. “The old order is dying,” he told Coppins. “Almost everywhere you have freedom, you have a very deep discontent that the system isn’t working.”
Then President Donald Trump arrives to speak at the Pennsylvania Farm Show Complex and Expo Center in Harrisburg, Pa., Saturday, April 29, 2017, on the 100th day of his presidency. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
Donald Trump
Trump didn’t create the hard-nosed, hard-core, business-oriented turn toward nihilism. He gathered bits and pieces from his predecessors to produce the dangerous monstrosity now threatening us all.
Trump marches proudly under the banner of all these once dead but alive-again beasts. Their flags fly around Trump and the White House in greater numbers than the flags flying at the Capitol on January 6.
Trump is not a person to give up power. He doesn’t play well with others. He sees everything as a win/lose deal. He can’t stand losing. If he loses, he swears the other side cheated. If he wins, he crows like a rooster on the top rail.
With his demand for absolute freedom to do as he chooses, Trump has set about to undermine the rule of law with his constant attacks on the judicial system along with beating into submission some of the largest legal firms in the nation. He has usurped the Constitutional power of Congress and now rules by executive privilege and has replaced truth with lies.
Trump is the present paradigm of “only the strong survive.” There are winners and losers, strong and weak, intelligent and stupid. We should believe Trump when he says, “Only the weak will fail.”
Not the gospel
There’s a basic problem with “only the strong survive.” Trump’s philosophy is a direct contradiction of the gospel. When the Apostle Paul expresses God’s salvation, he says, “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world.”
We, the people, don’t need to be Superman or Spider Man, or even Luke Skywalker. All that is required is for us to resist the spirit of the strong because they can’t put out the light, eliminate love or destroy human cooperation, hospitality, and good neighbor practices. When we the people rediscover our right to restrain the “anti-social Darwinists,” we will live in harmony.
Rodney W. Kennedy is a pastor and writer in New York state. He is the author of 11 books, including his latest, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit.