Trump and American Authoritarianism: Rationalization and the Destruction of Norms

From the beginning of Donald Trump’s ascent to the deafening, crazy-making presence he has now attained in our lives, there have been voices warning that this was the advent of an American version of fascism or, anyway, of authoritarianism. Robert Kagan was on to this early, as was Madeleine Albright, who wrote, “Fascism: A Warning.”
   As I write this, tanks are being parked on the mall adjacent to the Lincoln Monument and Trump is hijacking what has been for years in Washington an almost thoroughly nonpartisan Fourth of July event; fireworks on the Mall here in DC has actually been something like a home-town affair—traffic congested, invariably oppressively hot and or threatening rain, yet thoroughly celebratory. In light of these events, the arguments by Kagan and Albright and others are worth considering.
    Even among those who loathe Trump, there are reasons to roll one’s eyes. For one thing, Trump is just so pathetically…..pathetic. Silly. There is something clownish and childish about him. “A sad embarrassing wreck of a man,” as George Will put it, one who appears to have stumbled into a job he didn’t really want, in the same way that he lucked into his wealth, then lost it by stumbling into multiple bankruptcies, to be propped up (very probably) by unsavory characters, i.e. Russian mafia, which is said to have enfiladed the Manhattan real estate industry. (Collusion? Who needs collusion? They already own him.) Describing Trump’s thinness of character is a challenge to language—Is it possible to be profoundly shallow?
   (Ian Kershaw’s biography of Hitler, “Nemesis,” describes a man who was early in life, also a silly and unlikely dictator. But Hitler possessed also a ferocious single-mindedness that Trump can’t approximate, and was possessed as well, it has to be said, by a certain genius; a negative kind of genius to be sure—a knack for the long game, a willingness to play nice when it suited his purposes, and an unerring eye for people’s weaknesses. (Trump, I would say, has the last two talents but no sense of the first.))
   It’s also possible to argue that “it can’t happen here” (bearing in mind that in response to Sinclair Lewis’ tract of the same title, Saul Bellow wrote a short story entitled, “The Hell It Can’t”). One of the reassuring strengths of this country—so goes this argument—is the resilience and robustness and independence of its civil society, its extra-governmental institutions. Churches, professional associations, civic organizations, and cultural institutions continue to nurture democratic culture, however much our political structures degenerate. Two hundred years of this culture combined with a governmental architecture that is institutionally resistant to radical change make authoritarianism improbable.
   Those are the contrary responses to Kagan—an aimless, silly man who knows not what he is about, and a durable civil democracy.
   But there are reasons to be scared. Everyone—right, left and center—has become entirely too comfortable with executive privilege and power; arguably, Obama was a prime offender in extending this tendency. It is a trend whose roots, I believe, were in the Cold War: the threat of nuclear confrontation made it necessary to give the executive the power to move more quickly and decisively than the 18th century writers of our Constitution could imagine when they gave Congress the power to make war. It was accelerated again after 9/11, so that there are now influential voices—including Attorney General William Barr—who envision an executive with very nearly unchecked, unlimited authority. Add to this that the Republican party is now thoroughly intellectually degenerate and entirely enthralled to the personality cult that is Trump.
   The form that politics takes anywhere, at any time, is culture bound. German fascism took the form it did—goose-stepping soldiers, torchlight parades, and poisonous anti-semitism—because of German history and German culture and the particular circumstances of Germany in the early part of the 20th century, and it thrived on peculiarly German weaknesses. 
    People who expect an American authoritarianism to look like the German National Socialist Party have their head in a bag, even if all the features of reactionary nationalism are the same everywhere, at all times: evocation of a mythical past of national greatness, exaggeration or wholesale fabrication of national defeats or humiliations, and an appeal to racial and class resentment.
    Question: What are the most glaring American weaknesses?
   Answer: Our love of celebrity and our worship of the wealthy—as if wealth itself were proof of virtue, intelligence, valor and strength. 
   In Trump we have elevated an American cultural protype: a wealthy (or putatively wealthy) celebrity. Even his silliness and thinness of character is emblematic of a popular culture that has grown increasingly frivolous, lacking in the character required for self-government. Fifty years ago, the Moral Majority made its mark saying the culture was in decline. In this they were not wrong, but their criticism was so diminutively focused on personal, private, sexual behavior; Ralph Reed and Jerry Falwell Jr. see the fruit of this degradation in abortion and gay men getting married.
    I see it in thousands of Americans braying, like middle school girls at a pep rally, for a wall, to be paid for by Mexico.
    How is it possible with that level of national immaturity to tackle problems like the financing of entitlements when a tsunami of baby boomers retire, or balancing growth and regulation in the face of climate change, or rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure, problems that require some measure of self-sacrifice and deferral of immediate gratification—that is to say, that require self-government. Our national helplessness is ripe for a strongman, a peculiarly American one—silly and frivolous and empty-headed, but rich and very, very famous and perfectly willing to do whatever it takes to satisfy an insatiable ego.
   Kershaw’s biography of Hitler conveys two important lessons about how authoritarianism happens and that are relevant in thinking about the Trump phenomenon in 21st century America—these are, first, political rationalization, and secondly, the destruction of norms, of normative national practices and protocols.
   To the first point, it is not so that everyone in Germany immediately loved Hitler. There were in fact a great many people—especially among the military and the cultured elite—who immediately and very early on saw in Hitler a dangerous crackpot, at once menacing and gauche. Yet too many people found a reason to rationalize him, to make excuses, to let things slide. When this was not simple spinelessness, it very often had to do with a fear—a terror, really—of socialism. It can at least be said for Germans at the time that their fear of socialism was not unfounded—there had been a very messy, very violent, short-lived socialist uprising in November 1918 as the first world war ended (this uprising was the source of the infamous, paranoid “stab in the back” accusation—the claim, widely circulated, that Bolshevik Jews had sabotaged the war effort and caused Germany’s defeat; this claim had no basis in truth—Germany’s war command had been lying for years about winning the war and had in the process beggared the country—but it reverberated all the way to Aushwitz.)
   In contrast, the American right’s fear of socialism is a laughable joke. But the rationalization of Trump by people who know better is not. It is an open secret in Washington that many Republicans regard Trump as a buffoon and/or a mental case, yet they are willing to rationalize—either out of political cowardice or because of certain ideological interests (judges, immigration, abortion, lowering taxes).
   The second lesson that stands out from Kershaw’s narrative about Germany in the years between 1933 and 1945 is the steady, accelerating destruction of norms. One by one by one, policies and protocols and practices that had been considered normal or normative were knocked over; the dizzying, destabilizing effect of this cannot be over-estimated. The once unthinkable becomes thinkable and then it becomes the reality.
    This is the effect that Trump’s behavior on the world stage is having on American culture and politics. And this is why the tanks on the lawn of the Lincoln Memorial matter.

Scratch My Chest, You'll Feel Better

She walked around the room, a little unstable or a little nervous, looking I believe for a way out, for the way back home—back to the predictable life she knew, that’s what she had been waiting for patiently, submissively for more than a month I think—and chanced upon some chimes hanging low to the floor in the far corner. She nudged the chime just a touch and when the small bright room filled with a rich baritone hum like the meditative “Om”, Kristina looked back at us with an expression that told me she knew within the hour she was going to die.
    If I tell you that Kristina was my dog, a nearly constant companion for 11 years since my daughter and I picked her up at the Animal Protection League in Cleveland, a few of you will roll your eyes. I understand the instinct; I grew up with pets, but throughout my early adulthood I was without one for many years and I rolled my eyes a lot at what I considered the flakiness of dog and cat owners who seemed to treat their animals like prescient people.
   Truthfully, of course, I can’t know what my sweet black border collie mix was thinking or feeling when she looked back at us—curiosity about the sound of the chime? fear and confusion at being in a strange place? Or perhaps she was just feeling sick and dizzy and lightheaded because she had a bleeding mass in her stomach that required surgery that night and a catheter injection to keep her hydrated.
   She died three years ago this week, a month before I was to move back to Washington, D.C., where my job was. (I had spent 13 years working for the same outfit but working from home in Cleveland, where I was helping to raise my daughter. When the daughter went off to college, I went off to D.C.) Kristina and I were staying temporarily with a friend in Shaker Heights, after I abandoned my apartment in Cleveland in preparation for the move. She had collapsed on the pavement—just like that, like air going out of a balloon—while on a walk in the neighborhood in the early evening. She had not been well for some time, I believe. For several years, I had noticed her slowing down, becoming more anxiously attached to me. About a month and a half prior to the night when she collapsed on the pavement, a tic had lodged itself in her scalp. I think I managed to get most of it out, but the scar that was left looked to be infected. I took her to a vet, who said she was fine, but in retrospect I am not convinced. After K and I moved into the friend’s house, I came home one night to find her hiding in an upstairs room, apparently delirious with pain from what turned out to be a raging ear infection. I spent a long night at a veterinarian hospital that night before she was treated with an antibiotic and a painkiller. But I don’t believe she was ever the same.
   At the hospital that night she died two or three weeks later, it was after 9 pm. when the nurse came out to talk to me about her condition, informing me that she would need surgery, and that there was no surgeon on call at the time. I would have to drive with her to Akron, 40 minutes away. And there was no real way of knowing what her prognosis might be after surgery, assuming she survived it.
   That’s as far as I’ll go in justifying my decision to euthanize my friend, put her “down.” She was given two shots, a painkiller and one that stopped her heart. She died with her head in my lap.
   What do our dogs and cats think and feel? Does a dog have a “personality” or a soul? Did Kristina know when she rang the chime at the vet’s office that she was dying, that her life with me was over? Or do we simply project onto household pets our own longings?
   The most cursory google search yields a lot research indicating that animals of all kinds display traits of distinct personality, although the science is “bedeviled” by the problem of anthropomorphism, of human bias or projection in the attribution of personality traits, as described by one particularly cogent report from 2013 in Real Clear Science. 
  
All animal personality scientists grapple with how to reduce the human bias embedded in their experiments. “Trying to eliminate research bias is what this field is devoted to,” says biologist and coder Alison Bell from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She says that even with coding, measuring a behavior as simple as two fish biting each other includes some level of judgment. What constitutes biting? Do the fish just need to bump mouths or must the researcher see teeth sinking into flesh?
   Western culture is quick to attribute qualities like “shy” and “brave” to cats and dogs, says animal ethologist Kristina Horback from the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine. Horback says that when the same traits are observed in an experiment looking at dolphins or elephants, for example, researchers steer clear of using adjectives to describe the behaviors. “Shy” and “brave” are risky words in a scientific setting, she says, because they are reputed as subjective and only ever applied to humans.

Who cares? It might be more useful and interesting to wonder why anyone should doubt that to which virtually everyone who cares for an animal can testify: the almost palpable sense that their companion animals are more human than some of the people they have to deal with at their offices or in their families.

Kristina was almost universally described as “sweet.” Border collies generally are. But she had an inner wolf that came out in certain situations, most vividly when another dog sought affection or recognition from me; that other dog was likely get the what-for, particularly as Kristina grew older and crankier. This inner wolf, by the way, was a trait I found extremely endearing, not because I enjoyed watching her beat up other dogs, but because she expressed it instinctively, without pride, and did not seem to revel in it; after she routed a dog, she went back to business as usual, as if she’d been interrupted while reading the newspaper and smoking a cigarette.

I believe animals suffer a lot at our hands—K. spent entirely too much time alone in my care, which is why I cannot tell people who ask me that I will get another dog. (When someone loses a mother, sister or a brother, no one ever asks, “Will you get another?”). I do relish the memories of our many hours walking and exploring in the MetroParks, enjoying the crisp air off Lake Erie in Lakewood Park, walking the path at Stinchcomb Hill, or Edgewood Park in Rocky River.

And we have a lot to learn from them. Sometimes when my daughter was young and still at home and we would argue (sometimes loudly, sometimes toe-to-toe), Kristina would stand between us, wishing us to be nice to each other. She also had a talent for using her paw to prompt you to scratch her chest. Sometimes when Tess was upset, K. would sit up close to her, paw at her hand as if to say, “Scratch my chest, you’ll feel better.”

It always worked.