Image: keystone
analysis
In a nihilistic time, structures and people must be analyzed.
Feb 17, 2026, 8:19 p.mFeb 17, 2026, 8:19 p.m
A user named Marc sent me the following letter:
I read your analysis of Kristi Noem. In terms of content, I was less concerned with the political position than with the form of the argument.
They criticize the personalization of politics and the politics of harshness. At the same time, the text works almost exclusively with character drawings, anecdotes and moral judgments about people. The structural level, i.e. why such political figures become successful, remains in the background. That’s exactly what would have interested me. Because it may not be the figure that explains the political reality, but rather the reality that explains the figure.
My impression when reading it was that the article was emotionally convincing, but it explained little. And it is precisely this explanation that would probably reach readers who do not already agree with your political stance. This is not a riposte, but rather a reading experience. Maybe inspiration for a future text.
Marc’s wish is my command. So here is my reasoning as to why character drawings, anecdotes and moral judgments about people have become so important, especially in our time.
I don’t know what exactly is meant by the “structural level”. I assume that the economic fundamentals – the decline of the American middle class under neoliberalism -, the fear of immigration or people’s loneliness will be addressed. The fact that all of this promoted the rise of Donald Trump, but also of right-wing populists in general, is undisputed, but has now been downplayed to the point of stupidity.
We live in a time in which analysis of the structural level hardly provides any new insights. We live in a time of nihilism in which everything is true, and also the opposite. Ideological boundaries are becoming blurred, and dictators like Vladimir Putin are gearing their propaganda to making people lose all sense of direction.
Ian Bremmer, political scientist.Image: www.imago-images.de
This increasingly applies to the USA and Donald Trump. As the renowned political scientist Ian Bremmer recently explained in an interview in the “NZZ am Sonntag”, the American president is not capable of thinking strategically. Even his followers see it that way. Ben Shapiro, an influential Trump blogger, explains in an interview with the New Yorker:
“He (Trump) is certainly a non-ideological figure, which is why so many people are trying to hijack MAGA for their movement. There are the Reagan conservatives who claim that MAGA is Reagan conservatism. There are national populists who say he is a national populist. Trump is neither. (…) When it comes to domestic politics, he has a strange mixture of rejection of the government and at the same time the desire to harness the government for his own purposes. (…) I think Trump is someone who is willing to try different things and immediately turn around if they don’t work.”
In fact, MAGA is not a movement that can be attributed to specific structural elements. The camps represented in it are too contradictory: tech oligarchs who pursue completely different goals than national populists, liberal hardliners and Catholic social romantics. At the same time, Jewish fundamentalists like the aforementioned Shapiro are at loggerheads with anti-Semites like Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly.
Also a topic at Carnival: the Epstein affair.Image: keystone
Who exactly is pulling the strings in this situation is controversial. For some, Trump is a puppet of the tech oligarchs, for others, the oh-so-confident masters of the universe kowtow to Trump. Still others see Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon or Tucker Carlson as the secret power behind the president because he appears to be physically and mentally weak.
Anyway. The Epstein affair shows that even the boundaries of parties, but also of business, science and entertainment, are dissolving. The secret of this pedophile sex criminal is that he managed to captivate people from a wide variety of backgrounds. An Epstein class emerged, which Ezra Klein describes in the New York Times as follows:
«Epstein had money (…), but his connections were his universal currency. And the wide range of these connections has kept his system alive. Many saw through Epstein and stayed away from him. Others, however, saw the fact that he was able to gather so many rich and powerful people around him as the reason why he couldn’t be so bad. (…) This network made Epstein both legitimate and valuable.”
The quote comes from the Italian philosopher and Marxist Antonio Gramsci: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born: in this interregnum the most diverse morbid phenomena appear.”
Gramsci used it to describe the conditions between the two world wars. However, his analysis also applies to our time. The spreading nihilism is the result of a crumbling world order and the uncertainty of what will follow.
Dear Marc: It’s not just about whether the character describes the political reality or whether the reality describes the character. It’s about both. That’s why it’s important to show how morally reprehensible and stupid people like Kristi Noem behave.