As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.
–Godwin’s Law
If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s usually a duck. Donald Trump and his supporters may not be a fascists, but they certainly quack like them. As Robert Reich writes:
As did the early 20th-century fascists, Trump is focusing his campaign on the angers of white working people who have been losing economic ground for years, and who are easy prey for demagogues seeking to build their own power by scapegoating others.
Trump’s electoral gains have been largest in counties with lower than average incomes, and among those who report their personal finances have worsened. As the Washington Post’s Jeff Guo has pointed out, Trump performs best in places where middle-aged whites are dying the fastest.
Fear and anger are pre-requisites for the rise of fascism, or in our Trump’s case, authoritarianism. Long understood to encompass a set of personality traits strongly associated with aversion to difference and desire for conformity to prevailing social norms and proper authority, authoritarianism is both a psychological disposition and a political style. Though scholars have linked it to many attitudes and traits, a handful stand out: a general moral, political and social intolerance, an aversion to ambiguity and a related desire for clear and unambiguous authority. And authoritarianism isn’t present but rather responds to external threats with submission, aggression, and conventionalism. People who are not particularly authoritarian behave more like people who are behave more like authoritarians when threatened. Politically, Donald Trump flirts with full-blown authoritarianism. He’s intolerant. He scapegoats Mexicans and Muslims. He presents himself as the solution to all problems, even though he oversimplifies them to the point that they hardly resemble reality.
Statements about authoritarianism here at BMG have ranged from incredulity to accusations of and naive complaints and apologies for liberal prejudice toward Trump supporters. Being accused of authoritarianism certainly isn’t as bad as being accused of racism, but in our democracy, it’s not certainly not a compliment. We netizens are so accustomed to accusations seeing comparisons to Hitler (authoritarianism’s most notorious personage) that we refer to it as Godwin’s Law. To be sure, few of us think Trump supporters will engage in their own Kristallnacht any time soon, but the increasing violence of Trump supporters damages our country, our politics and threatens the safety of the public. When violent rhetoric from a political figure begins to inspire violence, it’s time to be concerned.
Last night was Chicago. Leave it to Trump and his people to arrive in a city beset by police violence–shooting of unarmed black men to a black site where police held suspects to a legacy of torture–on a college campus which foster a tradition of protests. The racism and intolerance of Trump, the implied and explicit incitement of violence, resulted in his canceling of his appearance last night.
Earlier this week, a black protester, “26-year-old Rakeem Jones was being escorted out of a Donald Trump rally by security when John McGraw punched him in the face. He deserved it,” McGraw told Inside Edition. “The next time we see him, we might have to kill him. We don’t know who he is. He might be with a terrorist organization.” Trump, of course, condones the behavior even as he denies doing so:
During one interruption, Trump said, “Get him out. Try not to hurt him. If you do I’ll defend you in court.”
“Are Trump rallies the most fun?” he then asked the crowd. “We’re having a good time.”
He then recalled an incident at a New Hampshire rally where a protester started “swinging and punching.” Trump said some people in the audience “took him out.”
“It was really amazing to watch,” he said.
There are those who will argue that the rough treatment of outsiders at Trump rallies reflects the actions of a few bad apples. Even the enthusiasm of white supremacists for Trump can be explained away as not his fault. But we are missing an important and dangerous phenomenon, at our democratic peril.
There has been no shortage of authoritarian rhetoric among Republican presidential candidates, most notably when it comes to national defense. The GOP has always depended on defining enemies ranging from ISIS to Obama, even if they have to make up reasons to highlight their otherness. (Party rhetoric, however, should not be confused with the party’s embrace of authoritarianism. A substantial percentage of GOP voters are authoritarian, but they aren’t the majority. And the Democratic Party has them too. However,
“Trump voters,” says McWilliams, “exhibit statistically significant and substantive authoritarian attitudes. For example, Trump voters are statistically more likely to agree that other groups should sometimes be kept in their place. They support preventing minority opposition once we decide what is right.”
Supporters of other Republican candidates don’t come close to the extremity of these attitudes.
Trump supporters kick the fundamental tenets of Madisonian democracy to the curb, asserting that the rights of minorities need not be protected from the power of the majority. And they are statistically more likely than Trump opponents to agree the President should curtail the voice and vote of the opposition when it is necessary to protect the country – though a plurality still opposes this exercise of presidential power.
The New York Times asked a number of scholars about Trump’s use of language. Most obvious are those that appeal to authoritarian attitudes: the us vs. them, the intolerance, the rejection of ambiguity.
The most striking hallmark was Mr. Trump’s constant repetition of divisive phrases, harsh words and violent imagery that American presidents rarely use, based on a quantitative comparison of his remarks and the news conferences of recent presidents, Democratic and Republican. He has a particular habit of saying “you” and “we” as he inveighs against a dangerous “them” or unnamed other — usually outsiders like illegal immigrants (“they’re pouring in”), Syrian migrants (“young, strong men”) and Mexicans, but also leaders of both political parties.
“ ‘We vs. them’ creates a threatening dynamic, where ‘they’ are evil or crazy or ignorant and ‘we’ need a candidate who sees the threat and can alleviate it,” said Matt Motyl, a political psychologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago who is studying how the 2016 presidential candidates speak. “He appeals to the masses and makes them feel powerful again: ‘We’ need to build a wall on the Mexican border — not ‘I,’ but ‘we.’ ”
American authoritarianism is not complete without a demagogue. A Huey Long, Joe McCarthy, or George Wallace who promises that things are simple, and it just takes the right person, a strong person, to take the necessary action. The demagogue thrives on the
“language of division, his cult of personality, his manner of categorizing and maligning people with a broad brush,” said Jennifer Mercieca, an expert in American political discourse at Texas A&M University. “If you’re an illegal immigrant, you’re a loser. If you’re captured in war, like John McCain, you’re a loser. If you have a disability, you’re a loser. It’s rhetoric like Wallace’s — it’s not a kind or generous rhetoric.”
Authoritarian rhetoric has been the currency of the GOP for decades now. Republicans have capitalized on the votes of people with an authoritarian bent for years, but ultimately authoritarianism requires a person to embody it. (In this regard, Pat Buchanan was no Donald Trump). Trump talks like an authoritarian. Some of his supporters are beginning to act violently. Rhetorically, he abets them. And these people are afraid. The economy doesn’t work for most of them. The planet is warming. Terrorism has become an everyday concern. The optimism of the 1950s of my parents’ generation is gone. Many parents experience a deep, existential fear for their children’s future in a country and a world that tells them they are on their own. Is it any wonder that some people look for a simple solution in demagogue?
defines the devolution of the Republican party into Trumpism.
Fred Rich LaRiccia
Reuters reports:
N/T
… an O’Brien, which role EB3 is aspiring to, here at BMG
I think an obstacle to the seriousness of this discussion is the implication of Trump as Hitler. It stumbles because in the American imagination, Hitler is a master of rhetoric, staging, and control. Though his inability to conduct a war greatly helped the Allies, he did know how to carefully manipulate citizens. Trump, on the other hand, comes across as a buffoon, turning a victory speech into an infomercial and cycling through about five lines. It’s easy to dismiss Trump-as-fascist because Trump does not present as impressively and intimidatingly as Hitler.
But Hitler wasn’t the original fascist. The original Fascist was a cartoonish bully, who detractors saw as comical, and did little to impede for a while because it was so hard to fear that he’d be in charge. Then he found traction in blaming communists for violence (like Trump has), and reveling in the violence that arose around him (as Trump).
Trump is no Hitler. But he has so many elements of Mussolini.
We’re entering some strange territory when comparisons to Hitler actually have some validity.
Trump is a buffoon. He’s also still learning, I think. Today was remarkable. I watched most of his speech in Dayton. He’s so transparently foolish to me, and he’s exciting a significant number of people. He may remain a buffoon, but what comes next or who comes next is a concern. I’m starting to think we need to worry about assassination attempts, not of Trump, but of some of the crazies he’s feeding.
That’s one of the persistent myths about Hitler’s rise to power; that he had the German Nation in some sort of rhetorical thrall. The variant of this is that he sounds good in German, but the power of his style is lost on an English speaker. This is also false. He sounds ridiculous in German too.
I don’t understand German, but it does seem like footage of Nuremburg rallies show him keeping his audience enthralled.
Insofar as Hitler wasn’t a good speaker, the party studied closely what it took to create a strong feeling at the rallies. Hitler photographed himself while speaking to study his body language. The Nazi Party arranged patterns or light and dark to highlight the podium and activate the audience’s emotions. A mediocre speaker can seem better than that with the right trappings, which Nuremberg certainly created — and Riefenstahl effectively memorialized.
Nuremberg was, for all intents and purposes, a movie set.
Trump’s audiences like the show he puts on too.
One has to remember that Hitler never got more than a third of the vote in any election that was remotely free. Even with his thugs running the election and arresting half the KPD, he still fell well short of a majority. *After* he seized power he became generally supported by the German public, because things calmed down and the economy improved.
dance on the head of a pin?
… and funny, too.
Without disagreeing with previous comments, in this thread and in other threads at BMG, that something bigger than just a thug masturbating in public to his own horror-show fantasies is a foot. I’d like to note that it is a numbers game. Yes, there is a very simple minded Thugee party in this country. They’ve always been here. Whether or no they are big enough –strong enough — to carry the entire country in the direction they wish is entirely unasked. I tend to think not. I tend to think that they are just really really angry that the first black president hasn’t yet been assassinated and, what’s more, the confederate flag no longer flies all that high.
Now, that doesn’t mean it’s not going to get ugly and painful, far from it, but I don’t know that, to paraphrase Sinclair Lewis “It can happen here.” There are, as a matter of simple numerics, too many protesters… and too many of them are white.
What’s not being discussed very much, in the discussion of pro-Trump attitudes toward violence, is the meeting of Trump and anti-Trump at these rallies and that anti-Trump protesters are getting hurt after deliberately walking into the fire and not striking back. Good for them. They are strong, righteous, progressives and they have,deliberately, put themselves in the lions den. And many of them are white. When asked to leave, they have, uniformly, done so without violence on their part. When confronted, as I’ve seen at various places, they have locked arms and stood tall.
It was long the practice of the Bush Administration, for example, to screen people at the door and to let a ‘secret service veto’ keep the discussion from getting out of hand. The lack of violence at a George Dubya rally or a Cheney event was for lack of protestors to be violent towards…. not for lack of rhetoric. The same has long been true for McCain and Palin and Romney and anybody else you can think of on the right. The anger on the right has been stoked and stroked on one hand, but continually confined on the other. Well, that confinement is done with but the stroking continues. And what we are seeing as a result of that lift of confinement is white on one side and black and white (and hispanic) on the other. I think our side has a majority, overall.
The death throes of white hegemony find unbidden strength in the fear that newly swelling minorities will turn and do to the former majority what the majority once did to them. But this doesn’t have to be the case, and — I contend — can’t possibly be the case if non-violence and peaceful confrontation remain on the Left. Or, once again, if we win… so do they. We all win. If we on the left abandon our principles and fight back with ferocity and rage, then we lose. And so do they…. nobody wins.
the discussion of whether Trump more closely represented Mussolini or Hitler. We should be looking at what Trump means and what the future holds. If the past provides a clue, fine, otherwise, it’s how many fascists can dance on the head of a pin.
The danger is not being condemned to repeat history, it’s being condemned to misread it.
“The lack of violence at a George Dubya rally or a Cheney event was for lack of protestors to be violent towards…. not for lack of rhetoric.”
I know they screened attendees, but they also didn’t dial up the rhetoric. W. especially actually tried to be more embracing and I’m sure I don’t recall him ever suggesting that people be violent toward the opposition.