In order to understand what Trumpery is all about, we need to go back to three works by cultural critics of the last century: The Revolt of the Masses by José Ortega y Gasset (1930); The House of Intellect by Jacques Barzun (1958); and The Culture of Narcissism by Christopher Lasch (1979). All three of these writers, as it happens, were liberals of an old-fashioned 19th-century stamp that is now all but extinct, especially among the so-called liberal elite in the US. During the half-century spanned by these three books, American capitalism dominated the world economy. As an academic, editor and politician, one of the last representatives of European culture at its best, Ortega sought to expose what lay behind the threat of Communism and Fascism. In Spain, civil war preceded the global war that brought Western civilisation close to collapse, and Ortega studied the impending catastrophe as if Europe were a laboratory. The magnitude of the threat had yet to emerge when he wrote The Revolt of the Masses, but he accurately diagnosed the danger posed by the collectivist zeitgeist to the bourgeois individualism of the past. “The world today is suffering from a grave demoralisation which, amongst other symptoms, manifests itself by an extraordinary rebellion of the masses, and has its origin in the demoralisation of Europe.” The complexities of civilisation mean nothing to the mass: “It has a deadly hatred of all that is not itself.” Ortega’s mass-man “finds within himself a sensation of power and triumph, which invites him to stand up for himself as he is, to look upon his moral and intellectual endowment as excellent, complete. This contentment with himself leads him to shut himself off from any external court of appeal; not to listen, not to submit his opinions to judgment, not to consider others’ existence. His intimate feeling of power urges him always to exercise predominance. He will act then as if he and his like were the only beings existing in the world; and, consequently, will intervene in all matters, imposing his own vulgar views without respect or regard for others, without limit or reserve, that is to say, in accordance with a system of ‘direct action’.”

What, though, does Ortega mean by “the demoralisation of Europe”? He means not merely the replacement of one moral code by another, but “the aspiration to live without conforming to any moral code”. As a symptom of this demoralisation, Ortega diagnoses the cult of youth, with its suggestion that the old order was in decline and should be swept away by a new one. No: the idea that actual achievement is worth less than mere potential is a way of enabling the inferior “to feel himself exempt from submission to all superiors”. Ortega’s “mass-man” is above all supremely self-satisfied: he makes no demands on himself, but makes infinite demands on society as though they were rights. Hence government expands infinitely to meet these demands, whether they take a left- or right-wing form. “It is indifferent whether it disguises itself as reactionary or revolutionary; actively or passively, after one or two twists, its state of mind will consist, decisively, in ignoring all obligations, and in feeling itself, without the slightest notion why, possessed of unlimited rights.”

Ortega’s mass-man is the prototype of the present-day devotee of Trumpery. As an ideology, it is protean: aggressive, yet also defensive; outrageously chauvinistic, yet seemingly open to everyone, from the Ku Klux Klan to “people of colour”; obsessed with success, yet irresistible to losers; a revolt of the masses inspired by a plutocrat.