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.