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4/8/2025 Mike Pompeo, Teutonic Civilization, and the Crossroads of MAGA and the American Trajectory. By: Carlos L. GarridoRead Now In 1890 the polymath W. E. B. Du Bois, arguably the greatest mind America has given birth to, delivered his Harvard University Commencement address on the subject of “Jefferson Davis as a Representative of Civilization.” With the succession of the South, Davis, who had been a Representative, Senator, and Secretary of War throughout his career, would now ascend as the President of the Confederacy. For decades after his death and the fall of the “rebels,” Davis would be celebrated as a hero, a great man of history. Till this day, various states of the U.S. South continue to celebrate June 3rd, his birthday, as an official holiday. Speaking in the last decade of the 19th century, the allure of Davis was still alive and well, and in this context Du Bois would reflect on what Davis’s persona, his figure, means for civilization. Du Bois tells us that “there is something noble in the figure of Jefferson Davis: and judged by every canon of human justice, there is something fundamentally incomplete about that standard.” Here was a figure that by the dominant standards of the time was a “success.” He rose to the highest halls of power, and inspired millions of faithful believers in the process. But the values that he fought for along the way, the values that earned him the positions he acquired, would be worrisome by anyone committed to a sense of rational and just civilization. Davis was, for Du Bois, a representative of a different type of civilization: Teutonic Civilization, where “individualism is coupled with the rule of might,” and governance is carried out with “the cool logic of the Club.” Teuton here, for Du Bois, is not the anthropological category used for early Germanic tribes. Instead, it is a civilizational paradigm. This paradigm, this civilizational model, writes Du Bois, “has made the logic of modern history.” Teutonic Civilization is premised on “the advance of a part of the world at the expense of the whole; the overweening sense of the I, and the consequent forgetting of the Thou.” Davis was an archetype, at the level of the individual, of the sort of men Teutonic civilization produces and exalts. For a civilization where “people fight to be free in order that another people should not be free,” Du Bois holds, Davis stands as a heroic representative. At the youthful age of 22, Du Bois provided his audience with a dialectical analysis of the different types of individuals various societies and civilizational models produce and uphold as idols. Civilization enriches humanity culturally, intellectually, and materially. Teutonic civilization does the contrary, it takes from humanity, retards development, and makes the goods which have been universally produced for all to enjoy the privileged property of a select few. Since 1890, Teutonic civilization – which can perhaps be more accurately labeled anti-civilization – has dug its claws deeper into the American trajectory. In the minds of many people around the world, today American civilization is par excellence Teutonic civilization. American life doesn’t seem to be able to exist without waging hybrid war on most of humanity. This is a very unfortunate predicament that has befallen my country, considering how it was, in fact, the American revolution which was the first anti-colonial struggle in the hemisphere, a struggle that affirmed the right of every nation to make their own revolution. In doing so, it would inspire all of the subsequent anti-colonial struggles of the period, from the French Revolution of 1789 to the Haitian Revolution of 1804. It is one of the great tragedies of history that the country born out of affirming the right to revolution has been the keenest on preventing others around the world from affirming that right. Just as the values that have predominated have not been those of the American civilizational paradigm – the democratic creed of Jefferson, Paine, etc. – the individuals that are upheld – in most instances – as examples of success are, like Jefferson Davis, archetypes of Teutonic anti-civilization. Mike Pompeo, the bastard child of Deep State institutions and institutionalized Calvinist insanity, is one of today’s many representatives of Teutonic anti-civilization. His career, whether in Congress (2010-17), as CIA Director (2017-18), or Secretary of State (2018-21), is marked by his bellicosity against any country which dares to stand up for itself and affirm its sovereignty from U.S. meddling. While pretending to be a “Christian,” his work is dominated by the most un-Christ-like activities, from lying to wage hybrid war on countries to complicity in crimes against humanity – there has not been one regime change operation in the last decade he has not loved. His life’s project is captured nicely in a statement he made at Texas A&M University, describing his time as CIA director: “I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.” I must have missed those sections of Exodus 20:2-17 and Deuteronomy 5:6-21 in the Bible, where cheating, stealing, and lying for the interests of the financial elite is presented as the Christian way of life. There is something very interesting about the last sentence of his statement, which implies that lying, cheating, and stealing are part and parcel of the “glory of the American experiment.” The question to be asked here is the one that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. posed for us long ago – which America? The America of the poor working majority? Or, the America of the few owners of big capital. Like Jefferson Davis, who was a representative of the Southern Planter (i.e., slave-owning) class, the champions of Teutonic anti-civilization, Pompeo is the champion of the parasitic elite that goes around plundering and debt trapping for its financial interest – something it does to both foreign lands and to the American people and resources. He is a champion of the Teutonic civilization which has occupied America since the counterrevolution of property in 1876, when the northern forces betrayed the promise of radical, abolition democracy given to the enslaved black working class of the U.S. south. Over the last decade, Teutonic Pompeo has been complicit, supportive, and instrumental in the following crimes of U.S. imperialism: spearheading the “maximum pressure” policy against Iran, which included imposing criminal unilateral coercive measures (sanctions), assassinating the heroic terrorist slayer, General Qasem Soleimani, and unilaterally withdrawing from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (the Iran Nuclear Deal), which put humanity on the precipice of WW3; he supported and spearheaded efforts to sanction and overthrow sovereign governments in Latin America, from Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia, which was successfully overthrown in 2019 (the coup government would be defeated within a year); he gave, like most AIPAC-bought American politicians, unwavering support for Israel’s crimes against Palestinians, both in Gaza and the West Bank, where he was the first U.S. Secretary of State to visit an illegal settlement; against China, he has waged a comprehensive effort to intensify the New Cold War under the guise of combatting “communist authoritarianism,” arguing that “if we bend a knee now, our children’s children may be at the mercy of the Chinese Communist Party.” This attitude has been central to his support for provocations in the South China Sea, his criminal promotion of Separatism, and his proliferating of the Sinophobic “China Virus” rhetoric during the Covid Pandemic. This is just the tip of the iceberg of a life committed to being a “swamp monster,” a shill for the parasitic American deep state. How such a figure was able to attach himself to the Make America Great Again movement (MAGA) remains a mystery to some. How could the MAGA base, which is animated by discontented working class people seeking to end the “forever wars,” dismantle the deep state, and reindustrialize the country to usher in a new era of prosperity for American workers, support a shill like Pompeo, who is a representative of everything they hate? Simple, they never did. Even back when Pompeo was a part of the first Trump government, him and other Warhawks like John Bolton and Elliott Abrams were despised by the working class MAGA base. In fact, in these sectors the dominant narrative for why Trump failed to substantially follow through on the promises of dismantling the deep state in the first term is credited to Pompeo and the other cohort of Warhawks, who duped innocent Mr. Trump into supporting policies contrary to the narrative that won his popular base over to him. The simultaneous presence of swamp monsters like Pompeo with a campaign and movement aimed at “draining the swamp” is not to be scoffed at simply as an inconsistency in Trump’s judgment. We should not dismiss this contradiction by simply attributing its source to subjective factors such as these. Instead, this contradiction – that between a movement aiming to “drain the swamp and the swamp monsters within its highest quarters – is objective in character. This contradiction is the basic dynamic that is animating both Trump and the MAGA movement. It is the “principal contradiction,” as Mao would say, which is structuring the internal movement of this political process. The MAGA phenomenon is a microcosm that reflects the larger tensions within the American trajectory. It is a process wherein the two Americas of Dr. King can be found. It is a true unity of opposites, and the struggle of these opposites steers its trajectory. In 2016, this MAGA microcosm of the larger contradiction of the American trajectory was still quite embryonic in character. The contradictions seemed manageable. For any process pervaded by such tensions, the first few moments always give the illusion of a reconcilability on the horizon. It is this youthful mirage which always emerges at the beginning of similar processes which led to the tradition of modern utopian socialists in Europe and America. The utopians, working at the time when the contradictions of industrial capitalism had just started manifesting themselves, held that these could be escaped from and harmonized. Their idea was not – as Marx and Engels would later postulate – to identify the basic contradiction, understand its fundamentally antagonistic character, and side with the principal aspect embodying the potential for a new world (the working class). Instead, they fell for the mirage, and held that the basic contradictions could be undone, not dialectically overcome. It took time for the mirage to be pierced, and for the fundamentally antagonistic character of the contradiction to become evident to serious observers. Only with time, with the development of the object of study itself, was the transition able to be made from this utopian framework to scientific socialism. Today we are in a similar period of transition for the MAGA movement. The mirage of the potential harmonization of its basic contradiction is pierced by the reality of its development. In other words, the contradiction is demonstrating its fundamentally antagonistic character. The objectivity of the tension between the progressive MAGA working class base (which stands against war, the deep state, and for economic prosperity) with the Teutonic elements in its leadership (while Pompeo is no longer in the government, other Pompeos have taken his place – Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, Mike Huckabee, Mike Waltz, et. al.) is showing itself to be untenable. The antagonistic character of the contradiction is heading towards a rupture – toward the eventual divorcing of the progressive MAGA working class elements from the swamp monsters and Warhawks that occupy leading positions in Trump’s government. Plastered across X (Twitter), the most politicized social media platform in the West, are post from working class MAGA people expressing their discontent with Trump’s regime. The phrase, “Trump has betrayed MAGA,” has become popular in some of these spaces, especially after the recent bombings of Yemen. MAGA commentators have noticed how, back in May of 2024, Trump critiqued the Biden administration for bombing the courageous Yemeni resistance, stating the following: “It's crazy. You can solve problems over the telephone. Instead, they start dropping bombs. I see, recently, they're dropping bombs all over Yemen. You don't have to do that. You can talk in such a way where they respect you and they listen to you.” Where did this diplomacy style go? Were Biden’s bombs any less destructive than Trump’s? While he has taken steps to end the proxy war against Russia, the campaign promise of ending the war on day one is still waiting to be materialized after three months. Additionally, figures like Colonel Doug Macgregor have explicitly criticized the performative de-escalation of Trump on this issue, which hasn’t significantly addressed, in concrete material terms, the bellicosity of the Zelensky regime. Other sectors of MAGA have criticized Trump’s willingness to follow Israel’s lead in military affairs, particularly in the Middle East. Many take issue with his readiness to escalate tensions with Iran, including his threats to bomb its nuclear facilities. Such an action, they argue, would not only destabilize the region but could trigger global chaos with unpredictable consequences. Journalists like Tucker Carlson, who are bit more consistent with popular MAGA sentiments than those in the government, have even gone as far as criticizing the sanctions regime the U.S. applies to nations across the world. In a recent interview with the Prime Minister of Qatar, Tucker expressed his confusion at how such a policy, which has never achieved anything but making people suffer, continues to be used. While commentators like Carlson and Macgregor continue to be supportive of Trump, the popular MAGA base is estranging itself more and more from Trump. These discontent workers have not only taken note of Trump’s continued bellicosity (after he promised to be an “anti-war” president) and his failure to dismantle the deep state in any significant and not merely symbolic capacity, but also, how in the country itself no serious policies are being taken or proposed to improve the dire living situation of the working masses, who are growing more impoverished and drowning deeper in debt as time passes. This situation led the prominent working-class X influencer, “Texas Trucker,” to tweet at Trump, Secretary of the Department of Transportation Sean Duffy, and Vice President J.D. Vance the following: “It's sad. Is all truckers in America going to have to join the American Communist Party to get justice in America. They seem to be the only ones standing with us and for us.” The melancholy in this statement demonstrates the awareness of Trump’s betrayal of MAGA, and the realization that the essential demands of the MAGA working class base can only be realized through another political project. America is in a similar turning point as it was at the time of the Civil War (the second American Revolution). At that time, two routes were presented to the American trajectory. One path led deeper toward Teutonic anti-civilization. The other toward the construction of a fully American civilization, premised on a radical, abolition democracy. For a period of time, America affirmed the later path. It ensured, for a small but not insignificant period of time, that the interests of human beings and civilization were primary. It was this period of social upheaval and revolution that led Du Bois to compare the Civil War and Reconstruction to the Bolshevik, Chinese, and French Revolutions. In 1876 this hope collapses. The northern capitalist class (which could’ve very well played a role akin to the one played by the national, patriotic bourgeoisie in China) betrayed black and white workers in the South, who were building their own dictatorship of labor. Du Bois described this poetically when he said that “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.” In the aftermath of this betrayal, those who were betrayed didn’t simply give up on their ideals. On the contrary, as Du Bois writes in The Souls of Black Folk, “there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes.” In the face of the betrayal of the ideal by the ruling class, the popular base, the black workers, affirmed that it was only through their emancipation that the ideals could be realized. Today the working class MAGA base is faced with the same predicament the black proletariat, as Du Bois called it, was in. Its leaders have betrayed its ideals. Neither Trump nor his government of Warhawks will seriously dismantle the deep state, end the “forever wars,” or uplift the lives of the American worker. The MAGA worker is coming to realize this, and with this realization comes another one – only they can save themselves. These ideals, which affirm a rupture from the path of Teutonic anti-civilization, and toward a genuine American civilizational project, will not be enacted by the whims of billionaires like Trump, but through the struggle of the discontented worker affirming his power. If the tendencies we have outlined continue, it is likely that in the coming years we will be seeing the clear divorce of MAGA from Trump. The American worker will, in time, come to realize that only socialism – a society of, by, and for the people, can actually Make America Great Again. Seismic shifts, not just in the country’s trajectory, but in geopolitics as a whole, will occur when this realization emerges and is acted upon. You can now sign up for Professor Garrido's summer Seminar on 20th Century Marxist Philosophy HERE. Author Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy professor. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the Secretary of Education of the American Communist Party. He has authored many books, including The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Why We Need American Marxism (2024), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming On Losurdo's Western Marxism (2025) and Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2025). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube. You can subscribe to his Philosophy in Crisis Substack HERE. Carlos’ just made a public Instagram, which you can follow HERE. Archives April 2025
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