Tony Robalik

Reflections on Camus's 'The Rebel': Sade and the Trump regime

Trump and several members of his administration standing in front of a cage for human beings Newly Flush With Cash, ICE Races to Build Migrant Tent Camps

I'm reading The Rebel, by Camus. In the section on the Marquis de Sade early in the book, he describes Sade's Society of the Friends of Crime,[1] and I, definitely not-a-philosopher,[2] was struck by the resemblance of this Society to the billionaires and pedophiles[3] who control most of the levers of official power in the world.

First, Camus provides a succinct description, or perhaps mission statement, for the Republican Party:

In his Society of the Friends of Crime he [Sade] declares himself ostensibly in favor of the government and its laws, which he meanwhile has every intention of violating. It is the same impulse that makes the lowest form of criminal vote for conservative candidates.

By this I believe he means the kind of uncommon criminal whose crimes are fully premeditated, perhaps even knowing that, for members of their class (the in-group), there are no negative consequences for their crimes. One might even note how frequently and assiduously American conservatives praise the Constitution as if it were some kind of religious text, while also finding in it every justification for evil their vile little hearts can imagine.[4]

Camus goes on:

The advocate of crime really only respects two kinds of power: one, which he finds among his own class, founded on the accident of birth, and the other by which through sheer villainy, an underdog raises himself to the level of the libertines of noble birth whom Sade makes his heroes.

You're either born white or, through sheer villainy, are adopted into whiteness (whiteness is a social construct).

This powerful little group of initiates knows that it has all the rights.

Non-whites have no rights.

Anyone who doubts, even for a second, these formidable privileges is immediately driven from the flock, and once more becomes a victim.

Whiteness is a revocable privilege, not an immutable fact.

Thus a sort of aristocratic morality is created through which a little group of men and women manage to entrench themselves above a caste of slaves because they possess the secret of a strange knowledge.

The elites in power understand the basis of their power and wield it relentlessly. They are moral because they have power; using that power is definitionally moral. Anyone who doesn't have power is a resource to be consumed.

The only problem for them consists in organizing themselves so as to be able to exercise fully their rights which have the terrifying scope of desire.

They also have group chats.

And as if writing directly for us in our time, Camus then says:

But if crime and desire are not the law of the entire universe… it is necessary to create from all these fragments a world that exactly coincides with the new law… [but] the law of power never has the patience to await complete control of the world. It must fix the boundaries, without delay, of the territory where it holds sway, even if it means surrounding it with barbed wire and observation towers.

The wall isn't just for keeping Others out, but the rest of us in.

  1. From Juliette. ↩︎

  2. To my chagrin? ↩︎

  3. But I repeat myself. ↩︎

  4. As befits a religious text for those on the right. ↩︎