Waiting for the Worms
The Man in the High Castle is a warning on the dangers of rigid ideology not an analogy for Trumpism
Writers having been at their keyboards furiously churning out articles desperately drawing parallels between a Trump presidency and the dystopian world of the Man in the High Castle; many, it seems, have neither watched the show, nor been paying attention to reality.
The comparisons are tempting. Trump is essentially the anthropomorphic realization of an internet meme, and after long enough everything on the internet becomes Hitler. See Godwin’s law.
Trump is not Hitler, but it is clear from the scrawlings of many journalists, that there is an alternate reality where he intends to dismantle the republic, instigate the Third World War, and orchestrate a muslim genocide.
Since the Left is so inclined to call anyone they disagree with “Hitler,” The Man in the High Castle provides a convenient opportunity to do so. (To be fair the Right is fond of tossing Stalin and Mao around with the same zealous frivolity.)
Bring on the fear. From Newsweek:
“Even though Donald Trump had yet to be elected president when the season was being made, it’s nearly impossible to watch [the Man in the High Castle] now without drawing some dismal connections between the world of the show and what Trump’s America might become.”
Though the author (Stav Ziv) shows tremendous restraint adding the conditional “might” into his phrasing, the conclusion is clear: we’re fucked.
The title of the article “Watching The Man in the High Castle as Trump Takes Power” is suggestive of the supposed terrifying despotic reality we are about to endure. He later concedes, “the parallels between the world of Man in the High Castle and 2016 America — which itself feels unbelievable much of the time — aren’t exact. But that’s not the point.”
I.e., Just because he’s not exactly Hitler doesn’t mean he’s not Hitler…
But who’s Hitler without his loyal followers? Well obviously his homogenous white, far-right conservative base. Wrong!
Trump is no true conservative, and his followers come from many sections of the political, ethnic, geographic, and cultural arena. Yes, they skew white; so does Norway, and what of it? Is he the first Republican to win the white-male vote? Shockingly, no. In fact, he managed to court more minorities than the less hitlerian Mitt Romney.
The Newsweek piece continues — wrestling with a quote from History professor Gavriel Rosenfeld:
For conservatives, the “only way to find meaning” in the next installment of Man in the High Castle might be “identifying with the Nazis, trying to expel resisters,” he adds. “I don’t think most conservatives want to do that.” Though he hopes differing interpretations of the series will keep the topic in the public sphere — which would be “very helpful if one believes that normalizing a Trump presidency is to be resisted” — he predicts conservatives will tune out, while liberals will watch intently.
Parsing out which words are Ziv’s and which are Rosenfeld’s proves an acrobatic task, but the implication is that conservatives couldn’t possibly identify with any groups in the series other than the vile Nazis. Let’s just discard that notion as blatantly idiotic.
The Left’s favorite comparison between Trump and Hitler draws on Trump’s campaign suggestion of a Muslim ban or registry. Those campaign proposals, which have been whittled down to mere rhetoric, were reactionary policies geared towards solving the actual rise of islamic extremism in the West and a migrant crisis stemming from extremist conflicts in the islamic world, not an ethnocentric fantasy blame-game like the one Hitler played in the post-World War I climate. Ignorance of history does not excuse a lack of creativity.
The Meryl Streeps of the world remain convinced Trump is anti-disabled and forge absurdist false equivalencies with Nazi eugenics policies. Those who base their knowledge of the world on 30 second HuffPo clips will not be rewarded, however, with the truth. Context is crucial.
To be clear, the manner in which he imitated Kovaleski is the same way that he imitates everyone — that is a buffoonish, immature, caricature — but the Left perceives this through the ideological lenses of their own devising, just as they perceive every act of Trump or his loosely aligned political coalition. To his opponents, his every word and hand gesture is dripping with micro- and macro-aggressions against disenfranchised minority groups in their alternate reality.
But Trump is no ideologue, and he has made this abundantly clear, but by clinging tightly to the familiar Left/Right dichotomy it remains impossible for the Left to see him as anything but a hard-line, far-right, autocrat.
*Spoiler Warning*
The message in The Man in the High Castle, though it will be misconstrued, is that the true dangers of the world come not from the divisions of Left and Right, In group and Out, but from the unyielding adherence to ideologies.
In the series, we follow several characters who begin their narrative arcs as embodiments of rigid ideologies — Japanese, Nazis, Resistance — but undergo transformations that allow them to follow independent, calculated, moral paths. We witness the struggle between independence and ideology, and in the end, it is both the protagonists and antagonists rejecting ideology for the common good that saves the world from nuclear holocaust.
In the final moments of the series, we witness a physical manifestation of this rejection in Juliana as she tosses the videotape containing evidence of Thomas’s disease into the campfire. In a chilling jump cut, we return to Thomas in a suit with a matching Nazi armband — the very picture of ideology — as he marches off willingly to his own death at the hands of a Nazi euthanasia squad. She rejects the ideology of the Resistance while Thomas embraces the cruel Nazi ideology that will see him murdered.
The series ends with a monologue from the Man himself as Juliana doubts the path that led her to him:
“Well, I got to know a woman who would bet on the best in us; who bet on people no matter what the world said about who they were, who they should be. That woman would do anything to save a sick boy…a Nazi Boy even, because she would believe he deserved the chance, as slim as it might be to live a valuable life, and I knew that was the key, the only way to make sure that your sister’s father wouldn’t prevent that boys father from stopping a war. Dixon died in an alley so that son of a bitch Smith could live, but San Francisco is still here. Millions of people will live because of the choice you made! The goodness in you Juliana. One selfless act of love and hope. That’s what I put my money on.”
Despite the hasty comparisons made with our current political situation, The Man in the High Castle is not an allegory of Trumpian autocracy, but a cautionary tale against ideology, plain and simple. The true heroes are those that buck ideology for what is right not what is correct.
As we near the end of the transition into a Trump presidency, we can only hope that he continues to piss off both Republicans and Democrats alike, seeking not to fulfill a tired partisan ideology, but to build a better United States.
If you enjoyed this article, please recommend, share, follow @Packy_McElroy on twitter and check out past posts:
Rage Against the [Outrage] Machine
Why Delegitimizing Trump is a Bad Idea
