Straight to the point

Big statues, fanfares, fancy costumes and military parades: we Brits don’t do that stuff. Since 1945, Europeans have considered it all in very poor taste. The kind of leaders who go in for it are tyrants like the late Muammar Gaddafi, who prance about wearing ornate military gear or giant gold chains while grinding the boot on the necks of their immiserated people. Even a coronation in Britain prompts a litany of post-imperial self-loathing.

Instead, we get William Windsor, who carries himself with the quotidian air of a secular, modern Everyman: the sort of amiable public servant you might find working in a countryside charity. Watching his meeting with Donald Trump after the re-opening of Notre-Dame in Paris at the weekend, the royalty seemed to be on backwards. It was the democratically elected leader who came across like a monarch, grandly telling the actual prince he was “doing a great job” while Wills nodded and smiled like a bureaucrat.

It has long been presumed that even those retrograde nations that keep falling for strongman leaders will see the superiority of liberal democracy in the end. And this goes some way to explaining the hysterically overblown progressive panic about Donald Trump’s purported “fascism”. For simply by existing, and being popular, Trump contradicts this supposed arc of the moral universe toward rational, besuited proceduralism.

This must be frustrating for the progressives; the arc has been bending their way for a long time. In a 1923 essay, “Roman Catholicism and Political Form”, the political theorist Carl Schmitt was already cursing their triumph. In his view, the “economic-technical thinking” behind it — which today we’d call “managerialism” — displaced an older, more esoteric mode of representation with its “representative” government through elections and parliaments for a far.

What it replaced was “representation” not as a count of voters but a series of metonyms: parts that represent a whole, as “keel” might be used metonymically in poetry to denote the whole ship. In this mode, hereditary or appointed figures stand as representatives of distinct “estates” — that is, interests within the overall polity — such as the clergy, the landed gentry, the artisans and so on. But as we arrived in modernity, Schmitt argues, this understanding of “the principle of representation” was gradually lost — for it is the “antithesis to the economic-technical thinking dominant today”.

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But if this case seemed hopeless to Schmitt, something has changed. Whatever the official policies on the table, at the vibes level, the 2024 US Presidential election pitted the spirit of “economic-technical thinking” against that of “representation” in the sense Schmitt describes. Consider: Trump’s opponents offered what was by then very plainly a purely self-propelling managerial regime, whose ability to run entirely on autopilot was revealed when its purported leader became so senile in office that his dementia could no longer be hidden.

Against this, two of the most iconic images of his presidential campaign — Trump “working” in McDonalds, and Trump in a bin lorry — show him deploying the vocabulary of representation-as-metonym: in them, he stands as part-representative for whole classes (or, as the medieval world would have had it, “estates”) of the American electorate, especially in lower-paid and menial jobs.

And while there has been discussion of Joe Rogan and the podcast ecosystem, this is one of the less well-understood ways the digital revolution helped to win the election for Trump. That, as contemporary readers of the great 20th-century media theorist Marshall McLuhan are fond of asserting, “digital retrieves the medieval”. According to McLuhan’s theory, shifting to a new technology will often retrieve older social forms or ideas the previous technology seemed to have rendered obsolete. Contemporary McLuhanists argue that shifting from a print to digital-based information environment re-opened space for cultural norms and practices that were common in the Middle Ages, but which “arc of history” enjoyers had since come to view as relics of the past.

For example, digital media reliably produces increasingly neo-feudal concentrations of wealth and power, which in turn enables the rise of a new class of lords and princes. The same revolution has retrieved the medieval experience of signs and symbols as a living language, in the form of memes. And Trump is by no means the only political leader who has grasped the power of digital to retrieve political legitimacy in a register that’s far more like the one Schmitt describes than the “economic-technical thinking” he decried.

If Trump does this instinctively, perhaps the most obviously skilled communicator in this register is El Salvador’s leader Nayib Bukele. Bukele (or his social media team) is online a lot, plugged into the Anglophone meme discourse, and artful in cultivating his presence in this field. His X timeline blends retweets of frog jokes, conventional state announcements, and visuals from Little Dark Age edits of El Salvador’s armed forces to intimate and painterly visuals such as this, seemingly calculated to convey a sense of the king among his people, lit as if by the grace of God.

As for Trump, having secured his election at least partly via his instinct for internet-mediated medieval-style representation, he is now presiding over a de facto court his haters decry as markedly monarchic in character: picking favourites, greeting petitioners and toadies, and playing courtiers off against one another. Henry VIII was reportedly by turns charming, volatile, generous, and mercurial, and always completely confident of his right to power. And when I try to imagine life in his court, it sounds much more like being around Donald Trump than the polished, controlled, and formally powerless William.

And much as a medieval monarch would, Trump is choosing his inner circle from among the realm’s real lords and princes. This has always been a pragmatic consideration, for a monarch: how do you keep your nation’s most powerful close enough to be on your side, but not so close they try and depose you? Accordingly, Trump has already appointed enough billionaires to his cabinet to form a football team. Indeed, if we were in the 13th rather than the 21st century, these notables would likely already have been granted honour and titles. As it is, Americans don’t really roll like that; but perhaps first-name-only fame, plus serious proximity to the empire’s nuclear core, is the 21st-century equivalent. (Elon was also at Notre-Dame.)

But while in some ways most of this is just a different inflection on existing democratic norms, what’s distinctive about “representation” in the digital age is that you gain legitimacy via genuine affection between people and leader — and this is hard to fake. As disdainful politicians from Gordon Brown’s “Bigotgate” to the Boriswave migrant explosion attest, it’s easy enough in the UK to be elected as a parliamentary representative, via “safe seats” and the party machine, without feeling any special affection for or affinity with the people you represent. But for leaders exposed online, that’s almost impossible to disguise. Regular people may be busy, but they’re not stupid: they will swiftly identify a representative that disdains them, and take note, and hate them for it.

Genuine affection, on the other hand, will cover a multitude of flaws: a blessing for Trump, who is not short of them. And yet he has a clear love for America and Americans, evident in the way he can pose in a bin lorry, a McDonald’s apron, or a police mugshot and look iconic, rather than stage-managed. He may thus turn out to be a terrible leader; but he’s nonetheless a potent antithesis to the headless, faceless, “economic-technical thinking” order not in spite of but because of his personality. The same goes for Bukele: it’s clear, in the way he speaks to and about the people of El Salvador, that he views them as continuous with himself.

By contrast, it’s difficult to imagine Starmer feeling warm and fuzzy about ordinary Brits; he usually emanates something more like tightly controlled fear and disgust. As for William Windsor, I have no reason not to believe he feels some fondness for the people of Britain. But it’s an open question whether he’d ever represent us in this sense. After all, his whole dynasty, and mode of royalling, only came into being after Britain’s last absolute monarch was deposed in 1688. The “constitutional monarchy” that replaced it has always known itself to be defanged, a settlement that suited an increasingly mercantilist country and which has served Britain well enough for several centuries.

For the same deeply embedded historical reasons, I think Britain will have to grow considerably more fed up with our managerial overclass than we are even today, before we’re willing to revisit the pre-1688 monarchical register in any more serious a manner than the Faragist pantomine style. But there’s no reason to believe political legitimacy always and forever flows through the same channels. And it’s clear that something much more like the medieval version is now re-emerging, in the internet age, to challenge the managerialism Carl Schmitt so vividly depicted, and viscerally loathed. So perhaps there’s still hope for us; certainly I’d like to believe assisted political death by Starmerism is not Britain’s inevitable terminus.

So in this sense, perhaps the restoration and re-opening of Notre-Dame does indeed serve as sign. Not for moral collapse, but for the recovery of older forms we thought had burned to ashes. Both ancient yet brand-new, a restored medieval cathedral destroyed and then restored stands as a fitting representative for the restoration of medieval representation. I expect none of us will like everything about this development; but the managerialism it opposes is a whited sepulchre. Let it be defeated by its new, ancient antithesis; and in its place, long live the new kings.

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