The May 27th issue of The Economist has an in-depth briefing entitled, “A bungled coup: Ron DeSantis has little chance of beating Donald Trump to his party’s nomination.”
The Economist is always literate, but it isn’t often literary. This piece persistently conjures up Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar throughout.
That includes the opening line: “Belatedly and nervously, the would-be assassins have been lining up,” an interesting way to characterize Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley in their respective campaigns to wrest the GOP nomination away from Trump.
A little later, we read:
It is as if Brutus had overslept on the Ides of March, giving Julius Caesar a chance to put on his armour, but had tried to proceed with his hit job all the same. The plot to overthrow Mr. Trump, which once seemed plausible, now looks forlorn.
And there are many other allusions to Julius Caesar throughout.
This is far from the first time that people have compared Trump to Julius Caesar. Shortly after Trump won election in 2016, but before his inauguration, there was a New York production of Shakespeare’s play featuring an Trump-wigged Caesar who wore overly long red ties.
(That production was actually less of an innovation than many made of it: a similar production had taken place when Barack Obama was first elected, featuring a black Caesar. Moreover, U.S. Presidential politics and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar have been intertwined since John Wilkes Booth, part of a famous Shakespearean acting family, assassinated President Lincoln.)
What I haven’t figured out is what cognitive work the persistent evocations of Julius Caesar are doing in the minds of the readers of that Economist piece?
If Trump is Caesar, then does that mean his attempt to win a second, non-consecutive term as President is doomed? Or does casting DeSantis as Brutus mean that he is the doomed one? Or is it a prediction that the United States is doomed to another Civil War torn between different factions?
The analogy breaks down the longer you scrutinize it because these are all Republicans vying for their party’s nomination, so who are the Democrats? Augustus and Mark Anthony?
That’s OK because literary analogies aren’t logical: they are metaphorical in the sense that the philosopher Donald Davidson explored in his classic article, “What Metaphors Mean.” Prior to Davidson, many thought that there was a special, almost celestial zone of metaphorical meaning. Davidson showed that was not the case. Instead of containing meaning, metaphors provoke the readers of metaphor to create meaning. “My love is like a red, red rose” prompts readers to take everything they know about love and everything they know about roses and generate a relationship. Analogies work the same way.
Part of me thinks that the Economist piece uses the Julius Caesar allusions to dress up a story that isn’t terribly interesting on its own merits. People who follow U.S. Presidential Politics have watched DeSantis foundering in real time, so the ink devoted to the Economist briefing might not be worthwhile.
Finally, and unsurprisingly for regular Dispatch readers, my real question is “why Shakespeare?” Why is the source of literary allusion that an unnamed journalist working for The Economist grasps for when writing a story about U.S. politics in 2023 a play by a guy who has been dead since 1616?
This is the key issue I’m exploring in The Shakespeare Strategy—the book I’m working on about how Shakespeare’s omnipresence in Western culture is the direct result of innovative business practices he created starting in the late 1590s.
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