Tibor Szamuely: Belinsky Meets MAGA
How the Platypus Society reached its logical conclusion
By Tibor Szamuely, currently being a gadfly to the gadflies of the intellectual “left”
Will Trump succeed? That is anything but clear. But he will try. Like it or not, we are on this ride now. We have never had a say with the drivers — other than to choose them. Ben Shapiro said that nothing is guaranteed but the adventure in capitalism. It’s times like these that test the basic propositions of the open society, in which nothing is safe and the risks are real.
Chris Cutrone: Fear Itself
The practical consequences of this observation for the individual is, despite everything, the necessity to commit oneself to the preparation for war-regardless of whether one sees in it the preparatory stages of ruin or believes he sees on the hills covered with weather-worn crosses and wasted palaces the storm proceeding the establishment of new orders of command,”
Ernst Junger: On Pain
Plekhanov in his assessments of Belinsky noted the conciliatory period of the latter in which confronted by the seeming lack of any social subject capable of transforming Russian reality and mindful of Hegel’s admonition that reality is rational and the rational is real, became an apologist of the Russian autocracy. What for Belinsky was a period of depression appears in the Platypus Society as the organizing principle of a sect. Platypus from its origins has functioned as a kind of way station where people who no longer believe in the revolution and socialism can build a dramatic narrative around this disillusionment out of a strange desperation to “dialectically” reverse the most craven conformism into the most subversive and daring posture of the avant-garde.
This alone is common on today’s left, much of which has resigned itself to celebrating the most dynamic and in fact already dominant imperialist power (China) as a socialist role model, whose structural features somehow share an embarrassing kinship with the “strong state, free economy” dictum that summarizes the neoliberal ideal. What makes Platypus unique is the combination of bourgeois conformism with a chauvinistic Americanism. An impulse so extreme that they are driven to carry out an idiosyncratic genealogy of Marxism, excising Jacobinism from its prehistory, in order to annex it directly to the revolution of 1776. Conjoined to this Americanism is an affinity for Zionism which not only ties the group to a certain wing of the system compatible left in the German speaking world but allows it to gratify itself with the shocked response of the “regressive left” to its “bold” refusal to condemn ethnic nationalist barbarism.
For Platypus what is “rational” are not simply the surface level modes of appearance of social processes in general, but more specifically the solipsistic ideological self image of an American capitalism in relative secular decline. As such it is unsurprising that the figure of Donald Trump the most garish and aggressive branding of this self image in the contemporary period would exert an irresistible appeal. And if, for a certain type of MAGA voter, the figure of Trump served to embody their bitterness and discontent with actually existing American capitalism, Platypus suffers no such nuances and misgivings.
For Platypus Trump simply functions as an object for their passionate desire to worship the accomplished fact. If the average conservative philistine is lukewarm even in his political fanaticism and likely more concerned with simple everyday pleasures than the Conservative Inc slop in which his brain has been pickled, for Platypus, the defense of car dealerships and Greater Israel should be waged with a kind of Bolshevik zeal.
In 2016, Chris Cutrone the distinctly unimpressive intellectual “heavy weight” of this bizarre group fired the opening salvo for the transfer of his acolyte’s devotion from the banal realities of American capitalism in general to their semiotic summation in Trump in particular, with his aptly titled essay Why Not Trump?
Here I must warn the reader that I will carry out an exegesis of this and following pronouncements on the same theme by Cutrone, a task which considering their utter vacuity will be not only painful but almost certainly close to pointless. However, it is the duty of a true communist to engage in polemic even with idiots, when these idiots accumulate a following, and no conscientious man can evade his duty forever. Keeping the above warning in mind lets proceed to examine Cutrone’s “devil’s advocate” argument for Trump in 2016.
Cutrone begins his essay length 4chan post by asserting:
If one blows all the smoke away, one is left with the obvious question: Why not Trump?
We must already object to Cutrone’s premise here. The question is not obvious at all. It is not obvious to the tiny and fragmented vanguard of Marxist intellectuals (here we mean by intellectual someone who thinks, not the bearers of often culturally worthless credentials), who know as a condition of their existence that the only answer to any bourgeois politician in the era of imperialism can only be no. It is equally lacking in obviousness for the significant proportion of working-class people in America who don’t vote because they correctly see the post-modern clown show of a ever more hollow bourgeois public sphere as irrelevant to their lives. The question “why not Trump” has only ever been obvious for those who sell illusions (Chris Cutrone, Sohrab Ahmari, Tucker Carlson…) and those rather more unfortunate folks who buy them.
Now Cutrone after asking his less then obvious (and no doubt completely rhetorical) “question” proceeds to make his case. He begins by observing:
Trump’s claim to the Presidency is two-fold: that he’s a successful billionaire businessman; and that he’s a political outsider.
We can only observe that if Trump had in fact been both of these things (he was not) neither would have been cause either for Marxists or for anyone with an ounce of common sense to qualify their opposition to him in anyway. These “qualifications” are only of appeal to the kind of aspiring middle management morons who think “we need to run the government like a business” and who imagine that imbecilic political campaign ad rhetoric about “beltway elites” communicates some profound truth about the social reality they have not studied for a single minute.
Cutrone then proceeds to “clarify” his position:
His political opponents must dispute both these claims. But Trump is as much a billionaire and as much a successful businessman and as much a political outsider as anyone else.
If the first clause of this paragraph was simply idiotic, the second, the one we now have the misfortune of considering is insane. Essentially, Cutrone asserts that the truth content of any claims by Trump are insignificant when considered in relation to radical skepticism towards any possibility of knowing objective reality in general. Anybody could be anything. If the Gulf War did not take place then Trump can also be a political outsider. The nihilistic post-modern subjectivism is clear enough.
We are then informed that:
Trump says he’s fighting against a “rigged system.” No one can deny that the system is rigged.
Indeed, nobody can. But when a major beneficiary of a “rigged system” begins to rally discontent by spewing vague denunciations of said system while bound to nothing and nobody but his own aggrandizement, even many mentally retarded people would pause before giving such an individual the benefit of the doubt.
Trump is opposed by virtually the entire mainstream political establishment, Republican and Democrat, and by the entire mainstream news media, conservative and liberal alike. And yet he could win. That says something. It says that there is something there.
And he did win. That did say something. It said that discontent existed in American capitalism which found no outlet in the political establishment. A discontent that Cutrone and his acolytes absolutely refused to attempt to help find a productive, rational expression. They, like the Democratic leftists they parasitize off of, preferred and continue to prefer to foster illusions and lies.
It does say something and what it says is an indictment of Cutrone and many others for treason.
After continuing in this vein for a while Cutrone begins to wind down, noting:
This leads to the inescapable conclusion: Anti-Trump-ism is the problem and obstacle, not Trump.
In reality such a conclusion is not only not “inescapable”, it is downright impossible for anyone with the most elementary capacity to analyze the basic dynamics of modern society. Capitalism is characterized by the contradiction between social production and private appropriation embodied in the working and capitalist classes respectively. And both Trumpism and anti-Trumpism expressed and continued to express the interests of feuding factions of capitalists who seek to perpetuate the decadent system of private appropriation. They are both substantially identical manifestations of the same obstacle and their melodramatic combat has no more authentically historical content then battles between drug gangs.
Cutrone could just as well have asked why not Clinton? Why not Assad or why not Duterte? Incapable of grasping the substantial identity of bourgeois politicians, because he prefers to be a depraved sophist rather than to commit to the character building exercise of defending revolution in a time of reaction, Cutrone ignored the economic content of political life it favor of its ideological forms of appearance. This is of course no different from the Democratic Party leftists, Cutrone decries who do everything possible to evade the uphill march of building independent working-class politics in favor of melodramatic fantasies about “fascism” or the “new confederacy”. Cutrone simply took the same failed conceptual structure and inverted it with the aid of the immense circus, all heat and no light, created by Trump’s low brow comedy antics.
Cutrone claims of the anti-Trumpists that their alignment:
...recalls the character in Voltaire’s novel Candide, Professor Pangloss, who said that we live in “The best of all possible worlds.” No one on the avowed “Left” should think such a thing — and yet they evidently do.
In reality both Cutrone and the DSA members he was desperate to scandalize share a common a deeply held agreement with Pangloss. As evidenced by their deep attachment to one or another of the two great parties of American capitalism. They further share a common affinity with the Stalinism, Cutrone obsessively denounces. It was the 7th Congress of the Comintern which finally buried the unqualified opposition to bourgeois politicians of whatever party, which countless Marxists had spent their lives working to build since the latter part of the 19th century. This opposition was buried in the name of defending democracy against fascism, as if democracy is a category above classes. Cutrone and Mamdani alike are symptoms of that defensive involution of the USSR whose consequences still poison our political atmosphere decades after its collapse.
If in 2016, Cutrone’s identification with Trump could be seen as a relatively incidental expression of his particular quirky brand of regime loyal conformism, in 2024 the pathology had grown much deeper. In the 2024 piece Why Not Trump Again? Cutrone begins by stating:
I identify strongly with the wrongly accused. So does America more broadly. And Trump has been wrongly accused. If you are in the right, then there is no need to lie. And they have lied about Trump.
Here Trump is no longer just a provocative rhetorical device. He is straightforwardly and simply a heroic figure waging a battle for justice. What follows is a long and turgid condemnation of Trump’s enemies for using their control of the legal machinery to harass him in trivial ways. Any listener of the War Room will be familiar with such bilge. This of course has absolutely nothing to do with socialism. Perhaps more importantly it has little to do with any kind of relatively sober bourgeois thought either. For Trump to be a sympathetic victim of deep state meddling he has to represent some kind of alternative program that could be seen sympathetically, nowhere in his diatribe that wanders from Greece and Rome to Constant inspired asides on the difference between bourgeois liberalism and ancient democracy does Cutrone make an attempt to do this. On the contrary he observes that:
...he is an unremarkably moderate conservative Centrist in his policies and politics…
That is to say an establishment politician tussling with other establishment politicians over the spoils of power. Formal injustice done to such a dubious individual is no reason to make him into a martyr for anyone whose values extend above the muck of opportunistic participation in political gang warfare. But by 2024 Cutrone is beyond such arguments. He has embraced the MAGA cult of personality. Trump is no longer a phenomena to judge by some external standard however debased. He is the standard.
Finally in 2025, in the essay Fear Itself contrasted with the closing words of Junger’s On Pain at the opening of this piece, Cutrone takes his cult to its logical conclusion. Masochistic death worship. Trump has taken us on an “adventure in capitalism” one in which “nothing is safe but the risks are real”. And we passengers on a “ride” in which we have “no say” are restricted to cheering from the sidelines and passively paying the costs of an imperialist decadence embodied in Trump’s early morning schizo posts. Ours is not to wonder why, ours is but to do and die.
More of Tibor’s writing can be found at Counter-Attack Journal, here:
https://www.counterattackjournal.org/