RICHARD K. SHERWIN
In the days since US President Donald Trump unleashed his tariff tsunami on the world, economists, investors, and business leaders have almost universally questioned its rationality. As a policy matter, they are right to be scratching their heads. But Trump’s tariffs are not simply about policy. They are of a piece with the animating features of his MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) movement: contempt for science and the rule of law, persistent lying, and a propensity for irrational theorizing.
We have witnessed this embrace of unreason before, accompanied by similarly grandiose assertions of power. Hitler’s well-known fascination with Theosophy, Gnosticism, and eugenics was not an isolated phenomenon. During the 1930s, psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s idea of self-growth or “individuation” was viewed by many (including Jung) to be the special destiny of the Aryan race. The well-known Eranos gatherings during this period, which included esteemed scholars such as Mircea Eliade (who publicly supported Romania’s fascist Iron Guard), Henry Corbin, and Gershom Scholem, have been shadowed (not entirely fairly) by the taint of anti-Enlightenment politics.
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