Seeking historical parallels

Why is it that, seeing Trump’s victory, I immediately thought of Grigori Rasputin? Rasputin, for those of you with short memories, was the not very holy Russian monk who had enormous influence over the tsarist family in the decade leading up to the Russian Revolution.

Russian royalists, and Russians more generally, thought that Rasputin was more of a problem than a solution, and at the end of 1916 the royalists murdered him, hoping that this would allow Nicholas to become sensible, lead Russia to victory in WWI and prevent revolution. All three hopes were unfulfilled.

It is not at all clear (at least to me) whether Rasputin had a particular political program, aside from keeping himself influential with the tsar. Maybe that’s what makes me connect him with Trump. As a few of the commercial papers occasionally commented after it was too late to have any real impact, the US election campaign was almost totally devoid of discussion of political issues: it all seemed to revolve around which of the two candidates had committed the most, or the most revolting, crimes.

US elections have long been set up so that, whoever wins, most US citizens and the rest of the world lose. A majority of the US ruling class would have preferred a Clinton presidency, but if the class had had serious doubts about Trump, he would not have gotten as far as the Republican nomination.

Can our side learn something from what has happened in the US? Perhaps, in historical terms, there is a parallel between Rasputin’s rise to near the top of the doomed Russian empire and Trump’s rise to the (official) head of the US empire. Empires approaching their collapse tend to do strange and irrational things – because their very existence has become historically irrational.