The great novelists usually possess an uncanny prescience. As history unfolds, we see they were anticipating the future, even if they were writing about the past. The first book in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy was published in 2009, long before Donald Trump rode down a golden escalator in 2015 to stand for the US presidency. The Mirror and the Light, the third book, came out in 2020, the first year of the pandemic and the year of Trump’s electoral defeat.
There was a notion among the intelligentsia that Trump was an aberration – a last gasp of a dying conservative power structure about to be relegated to the dustbin of history.
His triumph this year suggests that he’s something more. His critics invariably compare him to Adolf Hitler, but their temperaments are very dissimilar. The Fuhrer was an obsessive, neurotic aesthete whereas Trump is very like the monster at the heart of the Mantel books, Henry VIII, ruler by divine right, a rich, entitled creature of bloated appetites and sudden whims. An accidental figure of world-historical importance.
Consider the famous Holbein portrait – its painting is described in The Mirror and the Light – of Henry, magnificent, virile, his exaggerated codpiece occupying the centre of the painting, thrusting out at the viewer. It’s the exact painting Trump would commission if he’d ruled during the High Renaissance.
Journalists documenting Trump’s first term described an eerily empty White House, with all the key advisers and rival factions crowded into the Oval Office paying homage to Trump. He didn’t preside over a government, he ruled over a court.
The grand theme of Wolf Hall, Bring up the Bodies (2012) and The Mirror and the Light is the birth of the modern world. How did we transition from feudal societies ruled by the church and landed gentry to early capitalism and the bureaucratic nation state?
Agents for change
Mantel identifies Henry VIII as a key change agent enabled by a series of ruthless and brilliant advisers. The king tears down rival institutions and centres of power, not for ideological reasons but because they defied him and his unbounded desire for adulation, power, wives and male heirs. The new world emerged into the vacuum left behind by the destruction of the monasteries and aristocracy. It was an incidental byproduct of reckless realpolitik.
Mantel also identifies fertility as a central theme in power politics. In her essay Royal Bodies, she wrote that “women, their bodies, their reproductive capacities, their animal nature, are central to the story”. One of the key policy questions in the US election was abortion.
Kamala Harris campaigned hard on it, and one of the emerging in-hindsight critiques of her messaging is that it seemed exclusively aimed at women. Abortion law has long been a divisive topic in US politics, but it’s acquiring an additional weight with the rise of the post-liberals – an influential, anti-modern movement – as an intellectual force, championed by Trump’s vice-presidential pick, JD Vance.
Many post-liberals are Catholic (Vance is a convert) and one of their preoccupations is the declining birth rate across the developed world. They blame the sterility of modern liberal societies on economic factors, but also reproductive rights, LGBTQI+ rights, and the ubiquity of internet pornography. It’s an interest they share with Elon Musk, who campaigned hard for Trump and who has fathered at least 11 children.
They also place fertility at the heart of politics, central to the story. Vance’s comment about the Democrats being the party of “childless cat ladies” – that earned a swipe from Taylor Swift – was mostly about mocking his enemies. But there’s a question behind the sneer that is challenging for liberals on both the left and the right: if your politics is about maximising individual freedom, either via markets or a welfare state, and this leads to individuals freely choosing not to have children, isn’t your political project self-defeating? Isn’t it doomed? And Mantel knows where this question can lead. In Henry’s court, women who could not reproduce were literally disposable. On the day of the US election, Trump’s supporters were urging men to go out and vote.
Exit polls documented a massive shift to the right among young male voters.
One of the reasons Trump failed as a change agent in his first term was a lack of elite human capital. Most of his White House staff were establishment Republicans. They poured their energies into frustrating his policy goals, and not all of Trump’s goals were bad. He wanted to withdraw from Afghanistan, to reshore tech manufacturing from China back to the US, both of which happened under Biden, whose administration often functioned as a successful vehicle for Trump’s policies rather than a continuation of the Obama government.
Henry VIII functioned as a vehicle for the ambitions of the men who advised him: Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas Moore, and Thomas Cromwell. Trump now has the tech-sector right in his corner: Vance, Musk, Peter Thiel and David Sacks. They’re largely brilliant and ruthless individuals who will serve him rather than thwart him – at least as long as it advances their interests.
Like Henry, Trump will resent them and eventually attempt to destroy them. Perhaps the most important question about his second term is the extent to which his government can accomplish any of its goals before the relationships within the regime break down into bitter factional infighting. Can they demolish existing institutions? Create new ones? Both? Neither?
Many people find support for Trump inexplicable. Henry VIII was crowned king, but people voluntarily empowered this impeached, convicted felon and instigator of the January 6 attack on the Capitol building. They’ve voted for him twice now, and this second triumph is decisive.
Pundits and historians will argue about the drivers of Trumpism for decades, but consider the church in Mantel’s novels: corrupt, sanctimonious, hypocritical, self-serving.
The intellectuals of the Maga movement furiously denounce “the Cathedral”: the secular clergy of educated elites who dominate most modern institutions: government, academia, media, NGOs. They are “the enemy within” that Trump has vowed to purge once he re-acquires power. Perhaps many voters simply prefer the crass, pompous king to the polite but duplicitous priests.
Disenfranchised
The other essential novelist of the Trump era is Michel Houellebecq – the ageing enfant terrible of French literature. His grinning visage looms over all of this; his pinched face smirking at the world. I told you this would happen. You can’t say you weren’t warned. He’s the favourite novelist of the post-liberals. His first book, Whatever, published in 1994, warned that the social realignment following the sexual revolution would disenfranchise many young men from society: that their alienation and rage would manifest in dangerous and violent ways.
In Atomised, he depicted modern France as a spiritually dead society in which humans are simply collections of atoms, drowning in loneliness, anxiety and acute depression. There’s a lot of sex in Atomised, but most of it is masturbatory, all of it non-reproductive.
His most important book, Submission, imagines France converting to Islam – not because it is forced to, but because its own culture is exhausted, depleted, sterile. Its intellectuals pretend to believe in liberalism or Marxism, but they’re really only interested in departmental politics. The male lecturers at the Sorbonne gleefully become Muslim converts at the prospect of multiple wives.
The post-liberals are fond of Israel: it’s still religious and it has a high birth rate. The clinically depressed, heavily medicated hero of Submission loses his girlfriend when she migrates to Tel Aviv as a result of rising antisemitism in Europe, and he reflects, “There is no Israel for me.” France is merely a node in the global free-market economy, the bureaucracy of the European Union, a zone of resettlement for migrants from the Middle East and North Africa. It has no coherent identity of its own.
The intellectuals around Vance agree that the solution to the problems of modernity is a spiritual rebirth – not via Islam, obviously, but a re-integration of church and state? A rollback of the Reformation – that grand historic process of which Henry VIII was such an accelerant? These are consumations devoutly to be wished. The leader of the Islamic Party in Submission is described as a modern-day Augustus. Trump is not Augustus. He’s a disruptor; a destroyer.
For this faction of his supporters, that is just fine. They like to say they’re not conservatives “because there is nothing left to conserve”. And they quote Houellebecq: “It may well be impossible for people who have lived and prospered under a given social system to imagine the point of view of those who feel it offers them nothing, and who can contemplate its destruction without any particular dismay.”