Tyrannophobia
The disgusting events in Charlottesville this weekend have the makings of an inflection point. The “Unite the Right” torch parade on Friday night and the planned but canceled rally in front of the Robert E. Lee statue on Saturday were some of the largest and most public actions of the fascist white power movement in the modern United States. Screaming “white power,” and chanting “You will not replace us” and the Nazi slogan “Blood and Soil,” the many-hundreds strong torch-brandishing marchers on Friday night were at once angry and organized. The next day the rally was canceled before it began, but in the lead up, some of the scheduled speakers spoke on Twitter. David Duke said:
“This represents a turning point for the people of this country, We are determined to take our country back. We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what we believed in, that’s why we voted for Donald Trump. Because he said he’s going to take our country back. That’s what we gotta do.”
The Unite the Right March showed the white power movement in all its fascist and hate-filled disgrace. But it hardly united the right. Senator Orrin Hatch tweeted, “Their tiki torches may be fueled by citronella but their ideas are fueled by hate, & have no place in civil society.” And Hatch added, “We should call evil by its name. My brother didn’t give his life fighting Hitler for Nazi ideas to go unchallenged here at home.” Other Republican Senators including Cory Gardner, John McCain, Rob Portman, Chuck Grassley, and Marco Rubio all called the marchers out as hate-filled white supremacists and domestic terrorists. Even Attorney General Jeff Sessions stated
“The violence and deaths in Charlottesville strike at the heart of American law and justice. When such actions arise from racial bigotry and hatred, they betray our core values and cannot be tolerated.”
If the marchers united the right, it was thankfully only true in the sense that at least some Republican politicians finally showed the courage to step up and condemn white nationalism, fascism, and terrorism that are growing and publicly mobilizing in the United States.
There was one glaring exception, of course, to the willingness of Republican politicians to unite against the rising tide of race-fueled fascism. President Donald Trump, who calls himself the mouthpiece of the movement, was pointedly silent on the question. He condemned violence on all sides in anodyne words. “We ALL must be united & condemn all that hate stands for. There is no place for this kind of violence in America. Lets come together as one!” Later, he added, “The hate and the division must stop and must stop right now. We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides. On many sides.” Unlike other Republicans, Trump would not mention the white nationalists, their fascist tactics, or their racist views. According to an article in the Washington Post, when asked “whether he wanted the support of white nationalists, dozens of whom wore red Make America Great Again hats during the Charlottesville riots, Trump did not respond.” Even after 20-year old James Alex Fields drove his car into a group of anti-protesters killing one and injuring 19, President Trump refused to call the action what it was, an act of homegrown, fascist, and racial terrorism.
There are optimistic and pessimistic reads on the events in Charlottesville. Optimistically, the Unite the Right rally has united the opposition. The number of prominent Republicans who have publicly distanced themselves from the President is noteworthy and important. In spite the President’s silent support for the marchers, there is a small albeit influential core of Republican leaders willing to stand up and confront the dangerous rise of bigotry-fed fascism. Once again, we see that as weak as our civic culture and civil institutions are, they still have some hold in times of crisis.
Pessimistically, President Trump has once again shown himself to be a willing enabler of an undeniably racist, anti-Semitic, and fascist movement, one that provides a meaningful part of his voter base. The leaders of the Unite the Right march specifically tied themselves to President Trump. They shouted ‘Heil Hitler” and “Heil Trump.” I have written before of the danger in the President’s refusal to condemn hateful acts:
While the president has not offered anything like a racial, antisemitic, or islamophobic justification for slavery, expulsion, or genocide, his flirtation with those on the alt-right who do make such justifications is supremely dangerous. The distance between an ideology of superiority and inferiority on the one side and mass expulsions and genocide on the other is morally vast but practically narrow. At one point during the campaign, Trump floated and then rejected the idea of a Muslim registry in the United States on national security grounds. What happens after the next terrorist attack? That President Trump has thus far refused to explicitly condemn ideological and physical attacks against Muslims is perhaps the greatest cause for alarm concerning the totalitarian potential of his movement.
The mobilization of race as an ideological ground for the elevation of one group over another is not simply prejudice. It is a justification for violence and a potential precursor for totalitarian and fascist politics. It is no accident that the march in Charlottesville turned violent.
On this point, however, it is important to admit that the beginnings of the violence was two-sided. Who knows who started it, but according to news accounts, anti-protest groups attacked the protesters with pepper spray and projectiles. This of course allows President Trump to get away with the false equation of condemning violence on all sides. But we must also admit, that these attacks on the marchers were wrong. They tactically played into the marcher’s desire to show the intolerance of liberal culture. And They reject the fundamental value of plurality that democratic culture must uphold. Most importantly, however, the violence on the left and the right threaten to escalate what has so far been largely a war of ideas into a war for the streets.
Street violence was at the very center of the rise of the fascists in Germany. The Nazi’s mobilized “Brownshirts” — the SA — and marched them into communist and social democratic strongholds seeking to provoke the communists and social democrats. These groups then mobilized their own street gangs and civil disputes turned into violent struggles. This is part of the fascist game plan, to break down the foundation of liberal and democratic civility, to turn arguments into battles, and to insist that political questions cannot be trusted to persuasion but must be won with weapons.
It is likely bad timing that this same weekend that saw the violent mobilization of a fascist mob, Samuel Moyn and David Priestland argued in an op-ed in the New York Times that we should all worry less about the threat that Donald Trump’s Presidency poses to our democratic institutions. For Moyn and Priestland, the United States is wrongly suffering from what they call “tyrannophobia”:
“Since Donald Trump’s election, the United States has been gripped by tyrannophobia. Conspiracies against democracy are everywhere; truth is under siege; totalitarianism is making a comeback; “resistance” is the last refuge of citizens.
Tyrannophobia, the belief that the overwhelmingly important political issue is the threat to our liberal freedoms and institutions, has always been a powerful force in the United States. As history has shown, however, its tendency to redirect our attention from underlying social and economic problems has often been the real source of danger. It is easier to believe that democracy is under siege than to acknowledge that democracy put Mr. Trump in power — and only more economic fairness and solidarity can keep populists like him out.”
Moyn and Priestland argue that this “tyrannophobia” is misplaced and counterproductive. It is misplaced because the sky is not falling.
A little more than six months into the Trump presidency, though, it now seems clear that the most frightening threats to ordinary politics in the United States are empty or easily contained. Starting with the Trump administration’s original version of the travel ban, the president’s most outrageous policies have been successfully obstructed, leaving largely those that any Republican president would have implemented through executive order. The menace the commander in chief poses to the world, as his impulsive warning to North Korea suggested, may be another matter. But there is no real evidence that Mr. Trump wants to seize power unconstitutionally, and there is no reason to think he could succeed….
The sky is not falling and no lights are flashing red, but Americans have nonetheless embraced a highly charged, counterproductive way of thinking about politics as a “new Cold War” between democracy and totalitarianism. The works of Hannah Arendt and George Orwell have risen on the best-seller charts. Every news story produces fear and trembling.
Moyn and Priestland are of course right, on one level. The sky has not fallen. We are not living through a totalitarian nightmare. We have not passed race-laws denationalizing citizens based on race or religion. Yes, we are rounding up and deporting illegal immigrants. Yes there is a mass movement with racist and fascist elements. But this does not mean that the United States is either fascist or totalitarian. To the extent people are using Hannah Arendt’s work or her name to suggest that we are living through a totalitarian or even a fascist reign, they are wrong to do so. I recently made this case quite explicitly.
Arendt does not say that all mass movements are totalitarian; to take seriously President Trump’s claim to be the mouthpiece of a movement is not to claim that he is a totalitarian leader or that he is leading a totalitarian movement. He has not mobilized terror, concentration camps, arbitrary arrests, a secret police, and a party apparatus that rises above the state — all of which were essential parts of Arendt’s description of totalitarianism in power. Mass deportation of undocumented immigrants — disgusting as it is — is not the same thing as de-naturalization, imprisonment, and deportation of citizens. Common sense insists that we not abandon reality and imagine that the United States is experiencing totalitarianism.
But the fact that we are not experiencing totalitarianism does not mean that we should not be afraid of the rising tide of movements, racism, and organized lying that can quickly turn into totalitarian and fascist rule. The reason to turn to Arendt at this time is to understand the logic of totalitarianism, that totalitarianism can emerge again because it is so seductive.
It would be irresponsible to ignore the important similarities that President Trump’s self-professed movement shares with totalitarianism. He has repeatedly asserted he leads “a movement like the world has never seen before.” He has shown a willingness to assert his personal control over reality. And he has positioned himself as a Janus-faced figure who can present one version of reality to his followers and another version to the outside world. These are all characteristics Arendt attributes to leaders of totalitarian movements.
Arendt warned against the temptation to rationalize what is happening in politics, to say: this has all happened before. There is a voice in each one of us, wheedling us with common sense, telling us that Trump is simply another instantiation of American populism. That voice is likely correct. But we should be wary of such voices, Arendt warns, for “the road to totalitarian domination leads through many intermediate stages for which we can find numerous analogies and precedents.”
Moyn and Priestland suggest that “tyrannophobia” is dangerous because it will divert us from other, more important worries.
History raises serious doubts about how helpful this tyrannophobic focus on catastrophe, fake news and totalitarianism really is in dealing with the rise of the populist right, of which this bumbling hothead of a president is a symptom. Excessive focus on liberal fundamentals, like basic freedoms or the rule of law, could prove self-defeating. By postponing serious efforts to give greater priority to social justice, tyrannophobia treats warning signs as a death sentence, while allowing the real disease to fester.
What is the real disease we are suffering from if not the potential birthpangs of a return of fascism? Moyn and Priestland argue that the concerns of social justice are more pressing and are being subordinated to false worries about the return of fascism. It is precisely against such arguments that Arendt wrote her book The Origins Of Totalitarianism. Arendt insists that “the politically most important yardstick for judging events in our time” is simply this: “whether they serve totalitarian domination or not.”
As I have argued, “If it is too early to judge, it is not too early to be wary. Arendt warns us against getting caught up in “sophistic-dialectical interpretations of politics which are all based on the superstition that something good might result from evil.” Totalitarianism invalidates “all obsolete political differentiations from right to left.” Efforts to draw lessons from the Holocaust and concentration camps will likely remain ineffective. Human beings have an “inherent tendency to run away from the experience” of the past, so that remembrance of concentration camps seems incredible and thus powerless. Just as the experience of war does not prevent wars, “dwelling on the horrors” of past totalitarianisms, Arendt argues, will not inoculate us from future totalitarianisms.
One potentially reliable way to prevent a return of totalitarianism, Arendt writes, is fear. It is not enough to contemplate the horrors of the past. “Only the fearful imagination,” the constant “thinking about horrors” that may arise can dissolve political differences and remind us all just how much is at stake. It is possible to think that something good may come from a Trump presidency. It is conceivable that in providing a shock to a sclerotic and corrupt political system President Trump would help reinvigorate American democracy. There is a temptation to use the fact of President Trump’s political disruption for one’s own purposes. But Arendt’s inquiry into the elements of totalitarian domination teaches us we must never let go of the fear of totalitarian government.” Tyrannophobia may be distracting. But there are moments, like this one, where fear and constant vigilance are more than justified.
Roger Berkowitz, Academic Director, Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities, Bard College
