Diverging populisms

Lecture in Budapest, Hungary, on April 8th, 2025

Below is a full transcription of the talk I gave in Budapest at the beginning of April in the Várkert Bazár, in the context of the Eötvös Conference organized by the 21st Century Institute. As this trip didn’t go unnoticed, I wanted to make it as public as possible so that anyone could form their own opinion about it. Liberal democracy cannot survive without freedom of information.

Emmanuel Todd, May 14th , 2025

 

My debt to Hungary

Thank you for this very kind and flattering introduction. I have to confess that I am rather moved to be here in Budapest to speak about the defeat, the dislocation of the western world, because my career as an author began after a trip to Hungary. I came here in 1975, when I was 25; I met some Hungarian students, and as we chatted I realized that communism was dead in the minds of the people. In Budapest in 1975, I had a glimpse, an intuition of the end of communism. Afterwards, I came back to Paris, and then, partly by chance, I came across some data on the rise of infant mortality in Russia and Ukraine (the central part of the USSR) and I had a sudden understanding that the Soviet system was going to collapse. Before this talk you saw the cover of my first book – published in English as The Final Fall: An Essay on the Decomposition of the Soviet Sphere (Karz: New York, 1979). Everything began on that trip to Budapest and I feel I owe a debt to Hungary. It is moving and awe-inspiring to be here in this beautiful hall, after meeting with your Prime Minister yesterday, and to be giving a lecture myself – compared to half a century ago when I was a poor student, coming by train and sleeping in a youth hostel, with no idea of what I would find in Budapest.

Necessary humility

The experience I had with that first book and the collapse of communism made me cautious. Of course my prediction was correct, and I was very sure of myself: the rise of infant mortality is a very, very reliable indicator. But when about 15 years later the Soviet system did indeed collapse, I have to admit with some humility that I didn’t really understand what was happening. I would never have imagined the consequences of this dislocation for the entire Soviet sphere. I wasn’t so surprised that the former “people’s democracies” within the Soviet sphere adapted fairly easily: in my book I had already noted the enormous differences in energy between Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, for example, and the Soviet Union proper.

But the collapse of Russia in the 1990s is something I would never have anticipated. The fundamental reason why I was unable to understand or anticipate the dislocation of Russia itself is that I had not understood that communism was not simply a means of organising economic activity in Russia, but also a kind of religion. It was belief that allowed the system to exist and the dissolution of that belief represented, of course, something at least as damaging as the dislocation of the economic system.

All of this has a bearing upon what is happening today. I will talk about two things in my lecture. I will talk about the defeat of the West, by which I mean something quite technical and specific, which is not very complex and has not surprised me. I had anticipated it, and to a certain extent it’s already under way in Ukraine. But we are now in the next phase, which is the dislocation of the West, and I have to say that, just as in the dislocation of communism, of the Soviet system, I am unable to understand exactly what is going on. The fundamental attitude that we need to have now is, I would say, an attitude of humility. Everything that’s happening, especially since the election of Donald Trump, surprises me.

I have been surprised by the violence with which Trump has turned against his Ukrainian and Europeans allies – or rather his vassals. The will of the Europeans to continue or restart the war – even though Europe is certainly the region of the world which would be most advantaged by a peace agreement – has also been a great surprise to me. We have to start from these surprises if we want to think properly about what’s going on.

I will start by explaining why the defeat of the West does not in itself surprise me, and why indeed I have anticipated it, and then I’ll try to say something about the areas where I am less certain and to formulate a few hypotheses. But please excuse my lack of certainty at this point. To offer any certainty at this point about what is going to happen would be enormously presumptuous, even a sign of insanity.

In the introduction I was described as a researcher, and I’d like to say something about my intellectual profile: I am not an ideologist. I have political opinions, of course, I am a left-wing liberal, but this is quite irrelevant to the topic at hand. I am here as an historian, as someone who is trying to understand what is happening and who aims to predict what will happen next. I think I am able to – or at least I’m trying to be able to – detect historic trends, even if I don’t personally approve of them. I’m trying to see history “from the outside”; that’s never totally possible, of course, but it’s what I am trying to do.

I will first quickly review my book’s main arguments. This book gave me the satisfaction, I have to admit, of seeing my prediction come true unexpectedly quickly. I had to wait 15 years to see my prediction about the collapse of the soviet system fulfilled, but when it came to the military and economic defeat of the United States, Europe and Ukraine against Russia, I only had to wait a year.

I remember very clearly how I wrote this book in the summer of 2023, at a time when journalists on all the French and probably all Western TV channels were marvelling at the cleverness of the Ukrainian counterattack organized by the Pentagon. At that moment I was absolutely unembarrassed to write, with total conviction, that the West would certainly be defeated. Why did I have this level of confidence? Because I was working with a complete historical model of the situation.

Russian stability

I knew that Russia was a stable power. I had been aware of the enormous hardships and suffering of the Russian people in the 1990s, but throughout the period between 2000 and 2020, while everyone was explaining that Vladimir Putin was a monster and that the Russian people were either submissive or stupid, I had been seeing data that showed the stabilization of Russia. In France, David Teurtrie published an excellent book called Russie: le retour de la puissance (in English, Russia: The Return of Power). In it, Teurtrie demonstrated the stabilization of the Russian economy, the increased capacity of the Russian banking system to function autonomously, and how the Russians had managed to shelter themselves against retaliatory measures in the electronic and IT fields, protecting themselves from any sanctions that the Europeans might impose. His book also includes a description of renewed efficiency in Russian agricultural production, as well as in the production and export of nuclear plants.

I had my own view of Russia as well, also based on rational factors. I had my own indicators. I am still following infant mortality, this indicator that allowed me to predict the collapse of the Soviet system. But infant mortality is now decreasing very quickly in Russia. In 2022, and it’s still true today, Russian infant mortality sank below that of the US. I find it difficult to admit – and I would need to double-check – but I believe that this year infant mortality in Russia is now lower even than in France. There has also been a decrease in the suicide rate and the homicide rate in Russia. So, every indicator I was aware of suggested that Russia was stabilising. In addition, I had my experience as an anthropologist. My true speciality is the analysis of family systems, which were very diverse in the past, and the relationship between those family systems and the social structures and form of nations. The Russian family system is communitarian. The traditional Russian peasant family was structured around the father, his sons, and strong values of authority and equality; this family structure nurtured a collective mindset and very strong national feeling. And even though I hadn’t anticipated the Russian suffering of the 1990s, I could, by this analysis of the specific Russian family system, anticipate that a stable and solid Russia would re-emerge, and that this Russia would not be a western democracy. Its system would accept the rules of the market, but the State would remain strong, as would the desire for national sovereignty. I had no doubt at all about Russia’s essential solidity.

The West: a long-term collapse

I also had an unusual view of the West. I worked for a long time on the United States and I knew in advance that the American and NATO expansion towards Eastern Europe had been produced by the collapse of communism and the temporary collapse of Russia itself, but that it didn’t correspond with any truly American dynamic.

Since 1965 the level of education in the United States has been decreasing and this has only accelerated in more recent decades. From the beginning of the 2000s, the free trade chosen by the United States and the West has resulted in the destruction of a significant proportion of American industry. My starting point was, therefore, a vision of the western system as one that was expanding outwards, but imploding from the centre. I successfully predicted that American industry would not be able to produce enough weapons for the Ukrainians to support their war against the Russians.

But beyond that, I had stumbled across a very important indicator that identified the respective capabilities of Russia and the US to produce and educate engineers. I had noticed that Russia, despite a population two and a half times smaller than that of the US, was able to produce more engineers and probably also more technicians and skilled production workers. This is simply because 7% of students study engineering in the United States, whereas in Russia the proportion must be around 25%. And even beyond this specific indicator, I had reached an understanding of the depth of the American crisis: behind American incapacity to train engineers – or upstream of this incapacity; behind also the fall in educational levels, lay the collapse of what had made US so powerful: the Protestant tradition of education. Max Weber (and not only him) saw in the rise of the West the rise of the Protestant world. The Protestant world was very strong when it came to education. It was necessary for Protestantism that the faithful should have direct access to the Holy Scriptures. The success of Protestant countries in the industrial revolution, the success of England and also of Germany – even though only two-thirds of Germany was Protestant – and of course, the success of the United States, were all versions of this rise of Protestant nations.

In this book and in various others, I have set out an analysis of the evolution of a religion, from the first stage of an active religion, with believing populations who implement the social values of the religion; to a stage I call zombie religion, in which belief itself has disappeared but where the social values and the moral code of the religion remain; and finally to a zero stage, in which not only has the belief disappeared, but so too have the associated social and moral values, and with them the framework and educational systems that supported them. In the case of the US, in order to accept the hypothesis that the country has reached the zero stage, one has to appreciate that the new American religions, especially evangelism, are no longer religion in the sense this term was used in the past – they are no longer restrictive, and have become something else entirely.

So this was the vision I had of the West. I don’t like to use the term decadence, but some American authors have done so. I had this whole sequence mapped out, and so I felt very confident of my diagnosis.

In my book La Défaite de l’Occident (2024; in English, ‘The Defeat of the West’) I referred also to American violence, the American preference for war, indeed the unending American wars. I explained this preference in terms of a religious void which feeds anxiety and leads to a deification of a kind of emptiness. Several times in the book I use the term nihilism. But what is nihilism?

Nihilism is born from a moral vacuum. It is an aspiration to destroy things, to destroy individuals and even to destroy reality. Behind the slightly crazy ideologies that have appeared recently in the United States and some other parts of the West – I’m thinking especially of ideologies such as transgenderism, which insists upon the possibility of changing sex – I see an expression of nihilism. Such ideologies are not necessarily the most serious examples, but they are expressions of nihilism all the same – a kind of impulse towards the destruction of reality.

I had no difficulty in predicting the American defeat. It came if anything slightly more quickly than I had anticipated. And the war is not yet over. I was going to mention at this point the possibility that the war could be seriously relaunched by the Americans, but it is clear that the Trump administration is in fact starkly aware of the fact of defeat.

Military defeat and revolution

Let’s try now to look at things in a kind of reverse order. I can’t prove it, but this is what I believe: that Donald Trump’s electoral victory has to be understood as a consequence of the military defeat in Ukraine.

We are in the middle of what will soon be called, or perhaps is already being called, a Trump revolution, a revolution of Trumpism. But this is really a standard historical phenomenon – it is absolutely classic that a revolution should come after a military defeat. This is not to say that the revolution itself has no internal causes within the society. But the military defeat delegitimizes the ruling classes in a way that creates the opportunity for political upheaval.

There are very many historical examples of this phenomenon. The simplest and most obvious would be the Russian revolutions in the early twentieth century. The 1905 Russian revolution followed the defeat against Japan. The Russian revolution of 1917 followed the defeat against Germany. The German revolution of 1918, in turn, followed Germany’s defeat in the 1914-1918 war. Even a revolution like the French one, which seems to have more purely internal causes, came only a few years after the very significant defeat of the French ancien régime in the Seven Years war, at the end of which France lost the core of its colonial empire.

And in fact, we don’t even need to go back so far. The collapse of communism was admittedly the result of internal changes and a blockage within the Soviet economy, but it happened after Russia suffered defeat in the arms race and a military defeat in Afghanistan.

This is the kind of situation we are in today. This is just a hypothesis, but if we want to understand the violence of Trump’s government, its reversals, the multiplicity of more or less contradictory actions, we need to see Trump’s victory as the result of a defeat. I am convinced that had the war been won by the United States and their Ukrainian army, the Democrats would have won the election and we would be in a different historical period.

We can amuse ourselves by looking for other parallels. The war is not yet over. Trump’s dilemma looks rather like that of the 1917 Russian revolutionary government. You could say that Trump must choose between a Menshevik option and a Bolshevik one. The Menshevik option goes like this: we try to continue the war all the same with the Western European allies. In the Bolshevik option we dedicate ourselves to the internal revolution and abandon war overseas as soon as possible. If I wanted to be ironic, I could say that the fundamental choice of Trump’s administration is: do we prefer to fight a civil war, or a war overseas?

This concept of a military defeat paving the way for a revolution already helps us to understand the discrepancy that exists between the Americans and the Europeans. The Americans have understood that they have been defeated. The reports from the Pentagon understand this defeat. The American Vice-President, J. D. Vance, in his discussions with political leaders, Western or otherwise, admits this defeat. This is normal, because America is at the centre of the war. It is the American intelligence system and American weaponry that fed the war in Ukraine. Europeans have not reached this level of awareness because, even though they played some part in the war via economic sanctions, they were not autonomous agents in it. They weren’t the ones making the decisions, and because they weren’t making the decisions, they did not fully grasp what was happening, and they’re not in a position to understand the extent of the defeat. This is why we are in this absurd situation where European governments – I’m thinking of the British and the French – who were unable to win the war with the Americans, are deluding themselves that they could win it without them.

There is an element of absurdity there. But I think that the European governments are mentally still before the defeat, for them the defeat has not happened, or at least it is not unambiguous. I think that they sense, too, that acknowledging defeat will risk delegitimising the ruling classes in Europe, just as it did in the United States – a delegitimization of what I personally call the Western oligarchies – and that the defeat could pave the way to a certain type of revolutionary process, in Europe as well as in the US. The kind of revolutionary crisis that I mean here would be the result of a contradiction that exists everywhere.

Democracy in crisis: elitism and populism

Hundreds of authors have written about how, in the whole Western world, we are witnessing the weakening of democracy, its disappearance, and a structural opposition between the elites and the people.

I have a simple explanation for this phenomenon. The age of democracy was an era in which the whole population could read and write, everyone had basic literacy, but very few people had received a higher education. In this system of universal suffrage, the elites, who were very small in number, could only survive socially by addressing the whole population. But after the Second World War in the whole industrialized world we saw a development of higher education that provoked a re-stratification of advanced societies. There are now large numbers of highly educated people everywhere; in highly developed countries, in the younger generations, 30%, 40%, sometimes even 50% of people have higher education degrees.

One problem is that this mass of highly educated people really believe in their superiority, even though in practice the level of higher education has tended to deteriorate almost everywhere. But this is not the only problem for society. The real problem is that there are now so many highly educated people that they can realistically live only among themselves; such people are now able to believe that they can cut themselves off from the rest of the population. As a result, educated upper class people throughout the developed world – in the US, in the UK, in France, in Germany, in Hungary too, of course – feel closer to one another than to their fellow-citizens.

What I’m trying to describe is a kind of globalization, not at the economic level, but as a cultural dream. Personally, I have always thought that this dream was absurd. It was mentioned earlier that I did part of my higher education in Cambridge. For this reason, I have always believed that the elites from different countries are not similar to one another at all. This idea that highly educated people from any country are basically the same is a joke. But it is a collective myth. And it is true that when opinion pollsters analyse the fragmentation of advanced societies and concomitant threats to democracy, they always find the same thing: a pronounced split between those who went to university and those who only received a primary or secondary education. If you look at Donald Trump’s electorate, you find the less well educated. If you look at those who vote for the Rassemblement National in France, the most defining feature of this group too is its relatively low level of education. The same thing can be observed for the British people – or rather the English people – who voted for Brexit. We find a similar pattern in those who vote for the AfD in Germany and for the Sweden Democrats in Sweden. There’s something universal in this tension that’s internal to democracies.

Reality Shock

We are living through a very peculiar moment. The defeat to Russia is a major reality check. The previously impregnable global ideology about Russia contained a huge element of fantasy. GDP numbers, for example, were essentially fictional, and did not reveal the real productive capabilities of a given country. That’s how we ended up in this absurd situation in which Russia, whose GDP was supposedly only 3% of the West’s, was able to produce more military gear on its own than the entirety of the western world.

Defeat is a shocking reality check that triggers a collapse, not only in economic terms, but also a general collapse of the western belief in its own superiority. That’s why we’re seeing, at the same time, a collapse of the most advanced sexual ideologies, of the belief in free trade, and all sorts of other characteristically Western beliefs. The most useful concept to understand what’s happening here is the concept of dislocation.

The divergence of populisms

When there’s a revolution, when a unified system is abruptly dislocated, all sorts of things happen and it is very difficult to say which ones will prove the most important. But if there’s one thing I am sure about, it’s that the current appearance of solidarity between different populisms, all challenging the globalized order, is only a temporary phenomenon.

Of course, the people challenging the elites in France, in Germany or in Sweden will all sympathize with the Trump experiment. But this solidarity is a temporary phenomenon linked to the dislocation of the globalized system. The globalized ideology both in its American version, and in its European Union version, told us that distinct peoples no longer existed, that nations no longer existed. What is going to reappear now are precisely nations and peoples. Yet all those peoples are different, and they all have distinct and diverging national interests. What’s taking shape now is not simply Vladimir Putin’s multipolar world, which would imply only a few major strategic centres, but rather a world of multiple nations each with their own history, their own family traditions, their own religious traditions (or what’s left of them) – and these will all be quite different. We are therefore only at the beginning of the dislocation.

The first dislocation, which we could call the transatlantic dislocation, is the one separating the United States from the Europeans. But ahead of us we have the dislocation of the European Union itself and the re-emergence in all the European countries of very different national traditions – a reappearance of the nations.

It would be ridiculous to take all the European nations one after another and to say, “Well, in such-and-such a country, I sense that this or that thing will appear”. At a certain point, I was tempted to suggest an alternative kind of polarity. In geopolitics, you can sense some kind of shared sensibility among the southern European Catholic countries. You can feel that the Italians, the Spaniards and the Portuguese don’t have much interest in the war in Ukraine. In my book La Défaite de l’Occident (in English, ‘The Fall of the West’) I described the emergence of a Protestant or post-Protestant axis from America as far as Estonia and Latvia, the two Protestant Baltic countries, crossing Great Britain and Scandinavia; to this axis I would add also Catholic Poland and Lithuania, for specific reasons I do not have time to go into here.

To summarise: we are in a situation of incessant change. I have to admit that preparing this talk has been rather a nightmare. I’m doing interviews with the Japanese media very regularly at the moment. I’m also giving lectures in France. Each lecture has to be different from the one before because things change every day. Trump, the core of the revolution, is a permanent surprise. I’m afraid he’s a permanent surprise even to himself, by the way. So my speech today is, let’s say, just an outline, a sketch of the basics. To try to get something of a grip on what comes next, I will focus on the three countries, the three nations that seem to me to be the most important for the immediate future. I will talk about Russia, Germany and the United States, and try to see in which directions these countries are heading.

Russia as a fixed point

As for Russia, it’s business as usual. I am French, I don’t speak Russian, I’ve been to Russia just a couple of times in the 1990s, but it’s the only country that strikes me as completely predictable. I have moments when, in an attack of a kind of geopolitical megalomania, I feel I can read the minds of Putin or Lavrov, because Russian politics seems to me so fundamentally rational, consistent and limited.

In Russia, national sovereignty is paramount. Russia felt threatened by NATO’s advance. Russia has a problem, in that it can no longer negotiate with Westerners – neither the Europeans nor the Americans – because it considers them as absolutely unreliable in the negotiation of treaties or agreements.

Trump, however, is rather well inclined towards Russia. He is motivated by so many phobias and resentments – against Europeans, against Black people, etc – that it is clear that Russophobia is not a key motivation for him. But for the Russians his constant changes of attitude make him a caricature of American unreliability.

So for the Russians the only practical option is to reach their military goals on the ground, to take the territory in Ukraine they need to feel safe, and then to stop. It’s not true that they want or that they have the capacity to go further into Europe. Then they will simply let things settle down in order to restore peace without any negotiation as such.

Of course, Vladimir Putin’s policy towards Trump is rather elegant. He doesn’t try to provoke him. He takes part in negotiations. But here is what I think about Russia’s objectives. This is my personal opinion, it’s not in the texts, although it’s beginning to appear in some discussions. I think that the Russians can’t stop at the oblasts they’re currently controlling in Ukraine. Naval drones attacks launched from Odessa have demonstrated that the Russian fleet was not safe in Sebastopol. I think that Odessa is one element of Russia’s security objectives. This isn’t based on any private information – this is purely a product of logical inference – but in my opinion the Russians will only stop the war once they have captured the oblast of Odessa. This is my prediction: maybe I’ll be wrong, maybe I won’t be. We shall see.

What frightens me isn’t having misguided ideological views. What frightens me is the thought of making a mistake as a predictor of future events. So I am taking a risk here, albeit a small one. It’s obvious that all the media noise about Russia attacking Europe is ridiculous. Russia, with its population of 145 million and 17 million square kilometres of land, is not expansionist. It is profoundly happy that it no longer has to manage the Poles. Personally, (and this is my own preference), I hope that Vladimir Putin will have the wisdom to avoid so much as touching the Baltic countries, in order to show the Europeans just how absurd is their idea of Russia as a threatening power.

Germany: good or bad choice?

I come now to Germany, which is the biggest unknown for me in the international system, in the geopolitical system, and in terms of the outcome of the war.

In speaking about Germany, I’m consciously leaving behind the dominant European mythology, since when people speak about European “neo-hawkishness”, the continent’s new appetite for war, they talk about Europe as a whole wanting to rally together and organise itself as a unit to continue the war with the Russians. But the English no longer have an army, the French have a very small army, and neither the French nor the English have significant industry. The military capabilities of the French or British are both quantitatively ridiculous.

Only one nation, only one country really has the ability to do something, because its industry, if mobilised, could introduce a new element in the war. That country is of course Germany. And German industry is not only German, it’s German industry plus that of Austria and German-speaking Switzerland. It also includes the industry in all the ex-people’s democracies which were reorganised by Germany.

I think there’s a real threat here. I don’t believe that Germany is at all hawkish. The Germans got rid of their army. But Germany does still aspire to economic power, an aspiration they maintain by very significant levels of immigration, sometimes to an unreasonable degree. I would say that Germany has found its new post-war identity in economic efficiency, as a sort of machine society whose only purpose is economic efficiency.

Balancing the accounts and being economically efficient ensures a good standard of living for the population, it maintains exports and keeps everything working well. These have been Germany’s guiding principles since the Second World War. But Europe and the German economy are now suffering greatly from the sanctions that were supposed to destroy Russia. I’m seeing now the emergence in Germany of the idea that rearmament, a war economy, could be a technical solution to challenges of the German economy. This is where the threat lies.

I can indeed imagine that Germany might rearm in order to solve an economic problem, rather than out of any real spirit of aggression. But the problem is that, although the American military industry is no longer a threat to the Russians, if the Germans make a serious move towards rearmament, that would present Russia with a serious problem. This German military industrial threat, should it emerge, could lead the Russians to enforce their new military doctrine.

Russia has always been very clear and I hope our leaders are aware of it: the Russians know that they are less powerful than the West, than NATO, because of their relatively small population. That is why they have warned that if the Russian State is threatened, they reserve the right to deploy tactical nuclear weapons to suppress the threat. I point this out, and I keep doing so, because European recklessness on this point is a real risk. In France, journalists often dismiss this Russian message as posturing, or as empty threats. But one of the distinctive features of the Russians is that they do what they say. Let me repeat the point: the emergence of Germany as a major industrial and military player would carry the risk for Europe of a dramatic and total escalation.

This is the biggest element of uncertainty in the current situation. But I’ll add a more personal concern. Germany faces a choice between war and peace, between a bad choice and a good one. As an historian, I cannot recall Germany ever making the good choice. But this is a purely personal remark. I’m going to come now to what still remains for me the most important aspect of all, the Trump experiment.

The United States: the bottomless pit?

The Trump experiment is a fascinating phenomenon, and I would like to be clear that I do not belong to those western elites who despise Trump, and who in 2016 thought that Trump could not possibly be elected. Back then I kept giving lectures to say that Trump had an accurate perception of the suffering at the heart of America, in the devastated industrial regions, with the increase in the suicide rate, in the opioid epidemic, in this version of America that has been destroyed by the imperial dream. (At the end of the Soviet system, Russia too was struggling more in its centre than on its periphery.)

So I have always thought that Trumpism had made the correct diagnosis of the situation and contained many reasonable elements. Let me recap the main ones. Firstly, protectionism: protecting or rebuilding American industry is a good idea. Four years ago I had the opportunity to write a very favourable report about a book by an American intellectual named Oren Cass, The Once and Future Worker (2018), which I described as an elegant and civilized version of Trumpist protectionism. These days you see Cass’s name cropping up more and more often. He’s a very impressive and interesting man, far more so than many French politicians and intellectuals.

I also think that Trump’s desire to control immigration, although he expresses it too violently, is in itself legitimate. And to finish on a positive note, I would say that Trump’s conviction that there are only two sexes in the human species, men and women, seems pretty reasonable to me. Indeed, this has seemed obvious to almost all of humanity since its beginning, with the very limited and recent exception of a few isolated segments of the Western world.

So much for the positive aspects of Trump’s project. I will now try to explain briefly why I don’t think that the Trump experiment can succeed. Trump’s experiment mixes some reasonable elements with some nihilistic elements that I had already perceived in the Biden administration. That’s not to say that exactly the same nihilistic elements appear in both administrations – they will present differently – but nevertheless we see in Trump’s administration too evidence of these aimless, self-destructive impulses that find their origin in a very deep disarray of American society.

I don’t think that Trump’s protectionist policy is thought through. I am not shocked by the idea of brutally raising tariffs by 25%. (Indeed, since this lecture was delivered, some have been raised much higher). One could consider this a kind of shock therapy. To extricate oneself from globalization, violent methods are needed. But the policy has not been thought through, the industries concerned have not been properly considered, and I am left uncertain whether the imposition of much higher tariffs is really a positive project or rather a nihilistic impulse to break everything up, to tear it all down.

I have worked on protectionism. In France, I organised the republication of the classic exposition of protectionist theory, called in English The National System of Political Economy by Friedrich List, a major German author from the first half of the nineteenth century. Any protectionist policy has to allow the state to play a role in helping to develop or redevelop the industries in question. But Trump’s project attacks the federal state and federal investments. This whole aspect works against any possibility of an efficient or intelligent protectionism. So when the Republicans talk about fighting the federal state, when I see Elon Musk wanting to purge the federal state, I don’t see a policy that is fundamentally economic in nature.

When one thinks about the United States and what moves Americans, when one doesn’t understand what’s going on in the US, one should always think about the racial issue, about the obsession with the status of Black people. The opposition to the Federal State is not an economic policy, it’s a fight against DEI policies, intended to promote “Diversity, Equality and Inclusion”. It’s a fight, in fact, against Black people: to fire federal agents, for instance, is to fire a proportionally higher number of Black people. The Federal State has historically protected Black people and provided jobs for them. So Musk’s Trumpism is also an attempt to destroy the Black middle class.

Beyond that, one of the problems faced by Trump’s protectionism and his attempt to create a kind of national recentring, is the absence of a nation in the US in the European sense. This is a very easy topic to discuss in Budapest. The Hungarians certainly know what a nation is. The Hungarian sense of national identity is clearer and more sharply defined than any other that I have been able to observe in Europe, and you can see this now in the policy of the Hungarian government, which is very independent from the EU.

But even the French, with their elites who think of themselves as global and somehow disembodied, detached from their country – even the French are fundamentally an ethnic nation. There is a way of being French that goes back hundreds or even thousands of years. It’s the same for the Germans, and for each of the Scandinavian peoples. There is a depth of history and lifestyle in the European nations that gives them a national identity which can always resurface.

America is different. America was a civic nation. There has in the past been a governing core that gave it its consistency – that is the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) element who continued to rule the country even after they were no longer the majority population. But one of the key developments of the last thirty to forty years is the disappearance of this core and the transformation of America into a very fragmented society.

I would describe myself as a peaceful patriot, not at all aggressive or warmongering. A patriotism which is rooted in history becomes an economic resource for a society when it is going through difficult times. That resource is obviously accessible to Hungarians, and I believe it remains accessible also to the Germans and to the French, but I am not sure that the Americans have this resource to draw upon.

I will conclude this assessment of Trump’s chances on a pessimistic note, by considering a more concrete, less abstract or anthropological aspect, which is American production capacity. To rebuild an industry behind a wall of tariffs, one has to be able to build machine tools. Machine tools are the industry of industry. Today it might be more accurate in fact to talk about industrial robotics rather than machine tools. But for America, it’s already too late. In 2018, 25% of machine tools were made in China, 21% by the Germanic world broadly defined (meaning Germany, German Switzerland and Austria), and 26% by the East Asian block, namely Japan, Korea and Taiwan. The United States were on a par with Italy in the production of machine tools, at only 7%. This is not just an idle piece of US-bashing – the numbers for France are even lower. I cannot say how this will work out for France. But the key point is that I think it is already too late for the US to develop an independent industry, and if I had to place a bet on the Trump experiment, I would say it will fail.

One can therefore envisage a situation in which America, uncertain of its direction after the failure of this policy, might throw itself back into war because Germany seems ready to do its bit in the manufacturing of military goods, and because the Russians appear too inflexible. I think Trump’s desire and intention to get America out of the war is sincere. I think if he had the choice he would prefer civil war to war overseas. But America simply does not have the resources to become a normal industrial power again. America has been an empire and all its significant industrial production is now located on the periphery of its empire, in East Asia, in Germany and in Eastern Europe. The industrial heart of America is hollowed out and given the small numbers of engineers and machine tools that it produces, I don’t think it can bounce back.

I see that I have overrun my time by 25 seconds, but I would like to say just one last thing that is very important to me, to express a personal anxiety. This is a worry that I can’t justify, but which haunts and torments me. I’m very aware that America was for a long time the most advanced part of the world. My mother’s family were refugees in the United States during the war. For my family, America was the country of safety, since this part of my family was of Jewish descent. My father’s father ended up an American citizen: he was a Viennese Jew, whose father was a Jew from Budapest.

America was the pinnacle of civilization, and now I’m seeing this pinnacle of civilization collapsing. I’m seeing it produce things whose brutality and vulgarity I find hard to accept, as a well-educated child of the Parisian upper middle-class. I’m thinking for example about Trump’s disgusting behaviour in front of Zelensky. I see in these aspects a moral collapse.

But this is the second time in history that the western world has experienced a moral collapse of the most advanced of its member countries. In the early twentieth century, Germany was the most advanced country in the Western world. German universities were leaders in research. And yet we saw Germany collapse into Nazism. And one of the things that made us unable to stop Nazism, was that it was simply impossible to imagine that the most advanced country in the West could produce such an abomination.

So my true fear at the moment, which goes beyond any rational argument – and I admit I have no proof of this, as I said we have to be humble in the face of history, and maybe everything I say will be false in two months’ time, or even in a week – my true fear, is that the United States is on the brink of producing things that we cannot now imagine, terrible threats, and that they will be particularly terrible precisely because we cannot imagine them.

Thank you.

Emmanuel Todd, Budapest, Hungary, April 8th, 2025

Pictures

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