A Phenomenology of Trumpism

This thought-provoking book spans historical periods, cultures, and continents to prompt reflection on rhetoric, politics and the enduring challenges of democracy. Revisiting Classical thought, it offers a lens through which to examine the early ideals of democratic governance, social and cultural tensions, and the evolving role of the individual. This book traces our escalating geopolitical chaos to the utter failure of Western education. The purging of the Greeks from our schools with the masquerade that was modernity, combined with the prevalence of Teutonic neo-barbarism in Europe and a constitutional anti-intellectualism in America, has bred compiling generations of citizens bereft of a kind of thought that is essentially human. In the absence of human thought, market ideologies from Karl Marx to Adam Smith have enjoyed a long leash to establish as incontestable the idea that any existential proposition other than their own is nothing but an arrogant desire to redesign life itself. Thus Western “democracies” alternatively keep voting in Satan to fend off Beelzebub, in our days having to choose between either a preanthropic Hobbesian, or a metanthropic Sartrean future, with not much in between. From what universal constancy, and from what kind of “education,” can an anthropic measure show beyond doubt that there is an alternative path? This is the riddle of the Age of Trumpism, the book argues; and forces the Statue of Liberty into a syzetetic discussion with the Greek statue, through a critical phenomenological return to the things themselves that bridges Heidegger’s thought with the metaphysics of Greek tragic art. Born and raised in Athens, Greece, Dr Michael Arvanitopoulos is an elementary school teacher in the United States. The book argues that both the Republican and the Democrat political parties are responsible for the decline of democracy in the United States. It premises objective evidence of how the current political crisis in the U.S. in particular, and in the West in general, is a result of the disregard of the Greeks by the U.S. Constitution as well as the gradual withdrawal of the Classics from our educational system. The book concludes that the current state of affairs leads to a new form of totalitarianism. The core argument of this book is that the current political unrest in America and the West is ultimately traceable to the utter failure of Western education. The purging of the Greeks from our schools with the masquerade that was modernity, combined with a constitutional anti-intellectualism in America, has bred generations of Western citizens who cannot think. In the absence of human thought market ideologies have enjoyed a long leash to establish as incontestable the idea that any existential proposition alternative to their own is nothing but an arrogant desire to redesign life itself. In our “Age of Trumpism,” where President Trump is summoned to check uncritical progressivism, and where technoligarchs have availed themselves to either side, stupefied electorates must choose from either a preanthropic or a metanthropic future. In the absence of any anthropic constancy, either one of the alternatives are served by unfettered encroaching technologies that entail forms of totalitarianism as never before. It may be already too late, this book argues, but to bring back human thought towards the possibility of democracy and freedom, is to assess our situation out of Heidegger’s phenomenology and the metaphysical objectivity of Greek tragic art.