“Whoever can conquer the street will one day conquer the state, for every form of power politics and any dictatorship-run state has its roots in the street.”
Joseph Goebbels, Third Reich Minister of Propaganda
“I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump. I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough—until they go to a certain point and then it would be very bad, very bad.”
US President Donald J. Trump
In 2016, during a rally in Las Vegas, Donald Trump told the cheering crowd he’d like to punch a protester in the face. “I love the old days, you know what they used to do to guys like that when they’re in a place like this, they’d be carried out on a stretcher,” he said promisingly, before adding “I’d like to punch him in the face.”
As a sitting president, Donald Trump’s more recent statements about latent violence and American politics have often had a distressingly similar resonance. Most plainly, these statements are reminiscent of Third Reich propagandist Joseph Goebbels and his ritualistically-revealed faith in “the street.” The most tangible difference between Goebbels and Trump, and perhaps at least a temporary source of reassurance for us, is the current absence of any Sturmabteilung (SA) elements or street fighting cadres.
Fortunately, regarding armed conflict in the streets, we’re not there yet, and presumptively will never be. Still, though such flagrantly intolerable developments remain highly improbable, they are also not inconceivable.
In any event, if Trump is re-elected, far-right ultra-nationalist groups will expand and potentially even thrive with this second-term president’s (tacit or overt) blessings. Resorting at times to certain openly virulent forms of domestic terrorism, these groups could incrementally undermine assorted basic institutions of American democracy. But at least in the best case scenario, they would still not coalesce into any menacing paramilitary force.
Shall we express gratitude for such substantial differences and best case hopes? In essence, historical similarities in this case don’t really add up to being the “same.” This time around there is probably nothing to fear from drunk and brawling “brown shirts” or their present-day equivalents.
Nonetheless, the steadily whispered white nationalist threat of mob violence is both palpable and worrisome.
To suitably understand such complex and multi-layered political developments will require a determined conceptual approach. In this connection, the mass – virtually any human mass – abhors even the tiniest hints of complexity. This literally stupefying abhorrence is as easily recognizable in Donald Trump’s corrosive presidency as it was back in 1933. “Intellect rots the mind,” observed Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s faithful Minister of Propaganda. “I love the poorly educated,” chanted President Trump in 2016, not with any conspicuous irony, but rather with absolute candor and unmistakable sincerity.
There is much more. Above all, the simplification-loving American mass yearns to chant in chorus. Surrounded by like-minded followers who have similarly forfeited any once-remaining obligations of independent thought, each grateful member of the Trumpian mass can “safely” abandon any disturbing tugs of individual responsibility. More than anything else, this hideous “liberation” is precisely what the Trump rallies are all about.
Why else would they sleep in the rain in order to get seats and listen?
Because of the rare intellectual insights of a president who (with evident pride) reads nothing at all?
Hurling undimmed howls of execration against all of the usual suspects – typically Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton or some other conveniently out-of-favor television star/athlete/movie actor – this president will never trouble himself with any annoying difficulties of serious thought. Instead, by noisily favoring a fully national ethos of fitful emotion and eruptive anti-reason, Trump continuously forces American political and social life toward an uncompromising celebration of anti-reason.
It is finally time for candor. A president who so patently abhors intellect and learning is ipso facto a champion of unreason. Now, in effect, this degrading quality has become the approved mantra of a dissembling presidency, a watchword that can only lead the United States toward ever-more painful trajectories of personal tragedy and cumulative decline.
In essence, it’s not a reassuring mantra.
Credo quia absurdum. “I believe because it is absurd.” Left to his own limited intellectual capacities, President Trump will further prod blind public obedience to his disjointed ideologies of pure gibberish, to compulsively vague banalities and to empty witticisms that somehow masquerade as profundities. “Trade wars and tariffs are good for us,” intones this president, without any reasoned explanation. “We can win any trade wars with China,” he likes to add gratuitously. Earlier, the same sentiments were attached to any upcoming military conflicts with North Korea (already nuclear) and Iran (almost nuclear).
Credo quia absurdum.
A 1936 novel by Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here, details the story of a populist American politician who rises to the presidency upon a hazy platform of crudely simplistic and fraudulent promises. Following his election, “Buzz” Windrip proceeds to impose authoritarian rule upon the dazed country, complete with even a new Praetorian Guard. While no one in Donald Trump’s America wants to imagine that any such infringements are possible here, it remains worth noting that the German masses of the 1930s were not in any pertinent way markedly deviant, different, criminal or unique.
Not at all.
Presently, watching largely homogeneous Trump minions (his “base”) continue to chant mindlessly about winning trade wars, military wars and “respect,” it would have become quickly evident to Sinclair Lewis that what earlier transpired among normal people in Europe could also emerge among similarly normal Americans. Again, though such replicating emergence is unlikely, it is hardly unimaginable. Moreover, while reactionary and white supremacist elements in this country are not apt to become crudely transformational – even with a president tacitly complicit on their side – the corrosive social and political effects could still become far-reaching and malignant.
Karl Jaspers, the 20th-century philosopher who most rigorously examined questions of German guilt after World War II, also studied the deeper and more generic issues involved. In his modern classic, Reason and Anti-Reason in our Time (1952), Jaspers had already understood that authoritarian leaderships must depend upon a suitably docile citizenry. This means, inter alia, a citizenry that loathes all challenging thought and always seeks the simplest possible answers. These are superficial and skeletal answers that conveniently blame one or more of the usual and readily available scapegoats.
The critical function of all such orchestrated scapegoating is to best organize the “faithful,” to stifle any inconvenient truths and to provide needed “protections” from insidious alien forces “at the border.” Always, for President Trump and his chanting minions, there must be terrifying “caravans” of “barbarians.”
“At the border.” For Mr. Trump, the “barbarian” is almost always at the border. Unquestionably, it makes for good politics among those vast minions who chant obediently but strive energetically not to think.
In its more generalized form, this longstanding authoritarian tactic was perhaps best understood by the Greek poet C.P. Cavafy: “What’s going to happen to us without barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.”
Today, the foreseeable goal of steadily expanding anti-reason in Washington is to prevent any still-reasoning Americans from substituting residually clear thought for demanded loyalty to “a very stable genius.” For this ironically self-praising president, there can never be any good reason to doubt the primal “wisdom” of Josef Goebbels: “Intellect rots the mind.”
For Donald Trump, it should now go without saying, visceral spasms of loyalty are vastly more important than any calculable science or truth. And why not? “What the mass once learned to believe without reasons,” inquires Friedrich Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, “who could ever overthrow with reasons?”
Although not widely understood, the Founding Fathers of the United States did not generally believe in democracy. In fact, most unhesitatingly agreed with Alexander Hamilton (now an improbable Broadway hero) that “the people are a great beast.” Thomas Jefferson, arguably the most democratic of the Founders, actually regarded “the people” as “refuse” from which a small number of prospectively gifted individuals could somehow be culled once each year. More precisely, wrote Jefferson in his Notes on Virginia opposing mass rule, there should be instituted a plan of elementary schooling by which “twenty of the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually.”
These were the recorded words of our third president. It would be a very great irony of American history if the election of a quintessential “mass man” in 2016 should now lead us inexorably toward the literal fulfillment of Thomas Jefferson’s worst fears about democracy. For this to happen, all that would be required is an American president who continues to hurl belligerent howls of execration toward an obligingly adoring mass, a president who just as stubbornly rejects learning and analytic reasoning as President Thomas Jefferson once embraced a higher life of science, culture, and authentic erudition.
Plausibly, even in these United States, hope is still on the side of sanity. Accordingly, there exists more-or-less ample opportunity for the American People to strenuously oppose multiplying presidential propositions of sheer nonsense. But before “We the People” can suitably reject any insidious replacements of science with populist wizardry, something more conspicuously primary and primal will be needed.
This “something more” is courage. Courage is the most critically missing element from the American body politic today, not the traditionally recognizable physical heroism offering to risk one’s own life for tribe, nation or cause, but instead an integrity-centered personal willingness to stand firm for the timeless ideals of meaning, science and truth. Without such a desperately required courage,[1] even the most amply gifted scientists and thinkers could sometimes willingly surrender their souls. It has happened before.
In the past, such fateful capitulations were animated by blatantly hollow policies of flagrant absurdity and dedicated anti-reason.
In the future, unless we can be substantially more courageous, analytic and wary, these surrenders could become irreversible and irremediable.
[1] For incomparably useful lessons concerning this sort of courage in the (usually neglected) American intellectual tradition, we may reconsider basic writings of the American Transcendentalists, most notably Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.