The Trump Disaster: Why We Can’t (and Shouldn’t) Look Away
When you learn about the Holocaust as a post-World-War-II child, it sounds inconceivable. How can people in an otherwise civilized and cultured country have become such monsters? How could these events have happened so recently — in the middle of the 20th century? How can little Jewish children growing up in the world now understand that they were so despised, so dehumanized? That the leaders in Europe ordered their annihilation and the people followed? You know it’s true, but you relate to it like a nightmarish fairy tale. And as you get older and ask yourself these questions again, you decide it was an anomaly, and you feel secure in the idea that nothing like that could ever happen in America.
Now I feel we’re getting a window into the mystery of Hitler’s power over the German people and also getting an inkling of how, in fact, these things can happen in supposedly civilized nations. I’m not an alarmist; I don’t think America is about to commit a massive genocide on its own shores. But I am chilled by the echoes of Hitler, not to mention several other autocratic leaders, in our current leadership — a comparison that has been made by Louis CK, Bill Maher, and Madeleine Albright, among others. It’s as if Trump has been reading the Idiot’s Guide to Totalitarian Dictatorship and following the steps: Stir up hate at political rallies. Use dehumanizing language to “otherize” whole groups of people and reduce their humanity. (In this case, it is less often Jews and more often Muslims, Mexicans, and black people.) Vilify anyone who doesn’t agree with you. Discredit the media, especially when they criticize you. Shamelessly lie and fabricate information for your own political purposes. Plan pompous military parades. Start wars.
Looking at Hitler and Trump (and Mussolini and Stalin and Pinochet and Trujillo and others) side by side, they shed a kind of mutual light on each other. It seems to me that the very appeal of these leaders lies in the fact that they are the worst of us, proudly on display. There’s a certain relief in it, a kind of catharsis. In our daily lives, maybe we’re afraid that we’ll sound ignorant or uninformed. Or that we harbor prejudices toward others. Or that we’re greedy or selfish or not compassionate enough. Trump embodies all of these qualities, unabashedly and “bigly.” He performs our worst selves, both as individuals and as a country, allowing us to take a good look at ourselves in this horror-house mirror. He is an incarnation of what Hannah Arendt famously called the “banality of evil,” and it is our own banality that we see in him. America used to pretend it was a nation of dignity and high ideals. Now it’s all out there: all the xenophobia, racism, sexism, and stupidity that we always secretly suspected were hidden just beneath the surface. We’ve lifted the rock of our country and revealed the maggots underneath, and they’re even more numerous and lively than we thought they were, but we can’t stop looking.
We (by which I mean human beings — not just Americans) are often drawn to leaders who represent the best in us: decency, intelligence, bravery, nobility of spirit. But at other times and places, we’re drawn to leaders who represent the worst. It’s like two magnetic poles, and the masses can just as easily be tugged in either direction. Appealing to the worst in us — drawing us inexorably toward our own worst selves, like cars lollygagging near an accident on the highway— is a classic totalitarian dictator strategy. These leaders turn us against each other. They convince us that maybe our own hatreds and prejudices were justified after all. They give us permission to hate. And — as George Orwell demonstrated in 1984 — hate can become a kind of drug, something that energizes you and gives you power (or what feels like power). It can feel good in the worst way.
As historians have pointed out, this kind of leader tends to succeed most when countries are weak — when people feel disenfranchised, unheard by the government, economically disadvantaged. The key is that they counter the country’s feeling of weakness with the seductive power of hatred and violence: the Emperor luring Anakin to the Dark Side. In Germany, Jews were already the “other” in that culture before Hitler came to power; there was already anti-Semitism in the air. All Hitler had to do was make it socially acceptable to say it out loud, to point the finger, to smash the glass. His countrymen, feeling downtrodden by World War I and by economic depression, readily took him up on this cheap and easy road to feeling better about themselves: raising themselves up by stepping on someone else.
James Baldwin once said that “every human being is an unprecedented miracle,” and added that “one tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they’ve become.” If we get off somehow on embracing the disasters we’ve become, if we put the worst of those disasters front-and-center in our society and let them make the laws, who ultimately pays the price? We may not be facing a genocide, but there are very real human costs to handing over the reins to our shadow selves, our darker sides. The most disturbing and obvious cost right now, I think, is the deporting of immigrants back to their countries of origin, resulting in the separation of parents and children and the thrusting of people back into dangerous conditions they were trying to escape. There are also the various wars our government seems to be on the brink of starting. Trump may not be coming for me per se, but he’s coming for others near and far, and I don’t see any distinction, either on a moral level or on the level of the terror it induces in me.
It would have been nice to remain in a state of innocence, to continue marveling at the reality of Hitler and believing that post-War Europe and America were immune to such ideologues. But Trump has jolted me out of my innocence, and — as far as Europe goes — the neo-Nazis on the rise there and the support for far-right parties in many countries is just as unsettling. Another James Baldwin quote seems relevant: “People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.” There are enough monsters among us right now; I’ll try to keep my eyes open.
