An Historical Warning

 

Let’s be clear about one thing: Donald Trump is not Adolf Hitler. For one thing, he’s quite a bit dumber, much older, can’t give a proper speech to save his life, and has none of the traumatic events in his past that Hitler experienced as a young man that may have helped form him into what he was. 

Let’s be equally clear about another thing: they are both cut from the same cloth. The purposefully incendiary rhetoric, the vague promises of ‘action’ with no specific plan, the plentiful scapegoats on which to blame all the problems of the world. But above all, Hitler and Trump share these traits: the use of copious lies to not only obfuscate the truth, but to degrade listeners’ ability to understand that truth actually exists, and the one crystal clear message, “Only I can fix it.”

It is also the case that the fascistic, or if you dislike that term, authoritarian, takeover of the United States  will not happen the same way it did in 1930’s Germany, the main reason being that we have a different political system. But, to paraphrase something Mark Twain may or may not have said: History doesn’t repeat itself, but it sure as hell rhymes.

In 1932, no fewer than 2 different national elections were held in Germany, and then one last one in 1933, because of the way the parliamentary system was set up in the Weimar Republic. In each one the NSDAP or ‘Nazi’ party engaged in voter suppression by threats of violence and by deriding the system as ‘corrupt.’  They slowly gained a plurality in the Reichstag (parliament). Also, with the country (and the world) in the grip of an economic emergency, and having lived through a very recent world-wide viral pandemic, the Nazis used lies, division, fear of ‘socialism’ or ‘communism,’ the deliberate creation of chaos in the streets, and the idea of a savior to convince people “what have you got to lose?” In 1933, Franz Von Papen (who believed Germany needed a strong dictator), handed the Chancellorship to Adolf Hitler (one year after Hitler had declined a prior offer because Von Papen wouldn’t promise he could rule by fiat). Within a year, emergency powers had been declared, the NSDAP’s largest rival parties had been disbanded, and many of their leaders jailed. Full legislative power was given to the Hitler, and eventually, only the NSDAP remained. The rest, as they say, is history. 

As I said, it won’t happen exactly like that here, because our system and institutions are organized differently, and world circumstances are not the same; but the echoes are strong and getting stronger.

The Trumpist-Republican platform is a mass of seething vague promises of action, lies meant to sow discord, and threats of what will happen if Trump does not triumph. The Republican Party didn’t even create a new formal platform for the 2020 election; they simply said “refer to 2016,” as if nothing has changed in the intervening 4 years. But is has. Through both planning and sheer incompetence, Trump and his lackeys and enablers have weakened and undermined many of those institutions that made us different from Weimar. He has all but destroyed the professional civil service structure that is required for any true government to function; he has derided and degraded the very idea of service to the country as a whole, and equated personal loyalty to himself with patriotic duty.

He and his lickspittles have lied, constantly and egregiously, to everyone, then denied those very lies when they have been presented to them, even in recorded form. He has declared war against the independent and free press, calling them, explicitly, an “enemy of the people,” by which he means his enemy, because in Trump’s world, as in Louis the XIV’s, “L’etat C’est Moi.”

He and his family and friends have used the public coffers to enrich themselves in the most egregious ways, then waved their hands and said “nothing to see here,” while refusing the legitimate requests of all bodies tasked with executive oversight and checking such plutocratic excess. As such, he and his minions have blurred the lines between the personal and the public, making a mockery of federal law.

Like the NSDAP, Trumpists claim to be the party of ‘Law and Order,’ while flouting the laws themselves, with the Whitehouse chief of staff going so far as to declare that no one outside Washington cares about various federal statutes that make illegal the use of public funds and property for political gain, and utilizing the imprimatur of the symbols of government’s power and authority to show naked support for one political party (or, if we’re honest, support for one man.)

The flying of Republican and Trump banners on the White House grounds was akin to the display of the Swastika over the Reichstag in its temerity to place the coercive weight of government behind the effort to crown the man who would be king.

Like the Nazis, Trump has threatened the use of armed enforcers at polling places to intimidate his political opposition, and like all dictatorial personalities, has continually implied and stated that any result other than his own victory is illegitimate.

The Trumpist party has also carried on and expanded upon the recent Republican trend of ‘legal’ voter suppression, with de facto poll taxes just being upheld in Florida, and voter ID laws passed in many states to solve a non-existent problem by disenfranchising as many ‘illegitimate’ voters as possible; by which they mean, generally, urban voters of color.

He has encouraged baseless conspiracy theories in his supporters in an attempt to obfuscate and distract from actual issues and concerns of the public, and has specifically supported the use of violence against those protesting the excesses of his regime.

Hitler’s themes “Germany above all” and “returning Germany to greatness” are exactly the same as Trumpist slogans “America First” and “Making America Great Again,” and have the same goal: to frighten a cowed populace into supporting the only man who can defend them from that ‘other:’ the ‘untermenschen’ who would replace the upstanding (read: white) ‘patriotic’ citizen and destroy what are falsely claimed to be ‘traditional American values.’ Hitler also talked about traditional German values, and how men and women must be placed into their traditional ‘roles’ and not let them be undermined by ‘communist, globalist, and liberal’ threats.

This tweet from Trump:

“The Suburban Housewives of America must read this article. Biden will destroy your neighborhood and your American Dream. I will preserve it, and make it even better!”

Is the modern equivalent of this poster:

(Text tells Wives if they want to rescue their families, they need to vote for Hitler)

And, of course, now we have convicted felon and Trump whisperer Roger Stone, who would be in prison for his crimes except for the unilateral intervention of his ‘Law and Order’ loving Dear Leader, explicitly calling for martial law and an overthrow of the government if Trump should lose the election. This isn’t some nobody from the sticks of Alabama, but a former government official and close advisor to the so-called ‘president.’ Someone with whom Trump still communicates and can be swayed by.

Like the NSDAP, Trumpists love nationalist populism, but hate democracy, because in a true democracy even those whom Trumpists deem unworthy get a voice. In the ‘Dusseldorf speech,’  given to German ‘industrialists (what we would now call CEOs and ‘entrepreneurs’)’ to win them to the Nazi cause, Hitler  said:

“For the greatness of a people is the result not of the sum of all its achievements but in the last resort of the sum of its outstanding achievements. Let no one say that the picture produced as a first impression of human civilization is the impression of its achievement as a whole. This whole edifice of civilization is in its foundations and in all its stones nothing else than the result of the creative capacity, the achievement, the intelligence, the industry, of individuals: in its greatest triumphs it represents the great crowning achievement of individual God-favored geniuses, in its average accomplishment the achievement of men of average capacity, and in its sum doubtless the result of the use of human labor-force in order to turn to account the creations of genius and of talent. So it is only natural that when the capable intelligences of a nation, which are always in a minority, are regarded only as of the same value as all the rest, then genius, capacity, the value of personality are slowly subjected to the majority and this process is then falsely named the rule of the people. For this is not rule of the people, but in reality the rule of stupidity, of mediocrity, of half-heartedness, of cowardice, of weakness, and of inadequacy.... Thus, democracy will in practice lead to the destruction of a people's true values. “ (emphasis added)

(Also note the invocation of “God;” like Trump, Hitler had little use for actual religion, but saw it as a tool to persuade the masses of the rightness of his cause.)

This is the Trumpist attitude. They can not (yet) state it explicitly, but it shows through in every action and political appointment, in every cover-up of political ratfuckery and sham investigation of political enemies, in every priority they set, and every meme they post. Whenever Trump refers to himself in superlatives, this is what he means. ‘The people’ are but the means to prop up the power and aggrandizement of those with the “very good brains,” “the best words,” those who consume only “the most beautiful pieces of chocolate cake.” In a word, they exist only to serve him. This attitude is evident even from his very early practices in the business his daddy handed him, as anyone who grew up in New York in the ‘80s can attest.

So, no, Trump isn’t Adolf Hitler, and the contemporary U.S. isn’t Weimar Germany. But we are not special. There is no ‘American Exceptionalism’ as the Trumpists would have you believe. No magic protects us from the fates that have befallen other nations. While our history and institutions are different, we are not immune to the rise of anti-intellectualist, nationalistic authoritarianism. And, we are at an inflexion point.

We can repudiate the Trumpists, and everything for which they stand, extirpate Trumpism root and branch from the body politic, and salt the ground so that it cannot henceforth grow.

Or, we can prevaricate like the Germans in 1932, and think, “it’s not that bad, he’s a little uncouth, but at least the trains run on time.”

And then, my friends, the Unites States we know will truly be gone. It won’t be Nazi Germany, but it will be an authoritarian hellscape, it will be of our own making, and in that way, it will be truly ‘American.’