Episode 03 of The Last American President
Episode 01 described Donald Trump as the “charismatic leader” of Max Weber’s analysis of political power. Episode 02 explained the important role of a leader’s followers.
WHAT’S EVERYONE SO MAD ABOUT?
"[Mystery Country X] conjures up fears of what can happen when there is simply no societal consensus on how to move forward, and every minor difference becomes a cause of existential political battles, when assassinations and street fights run rampant and minorities become the easy scapegoats of antidemocratic forces… Meanwhile, the political leadership of the republic was notably old and stuck in a political mindset that proved unable to deal with the new problems…" [i]
Sound familiar?
No, it’s not Trumpinista America.
It’s the state of politics in the German democratic republic that was born in 1918 and died in 1933, after Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor.
I am not arguing that the United States today is the same as the Weimar Republic, which had a complicated history. What I am saying is that the conditions that caused the German people to turn to a charismatic leader are analogous to those driving American politics today.
THE MIST OF MAY IS IN THE GLOAMIN’ [ii]
Put aside for the moment the fact that many Americans loved Benito Mussolini and Der Fuhrer back in the day. They thought democracy had run its course.
Many pundits and political experts in the Biden Bubble today are similarly misled by the “Folk Theory of Democracy.” [iii]
An example of the Folk Theory can be found in President Obama’s speech on April 8, 2013, four months after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Polling supposedly showed that most Americans wanted action on gun control. “If our democracy’s working the way it’s supposed to and 90 percent of the American people agree on something, in the wake of a tragedy, you’d think this would not be a heavy lift.”
I commented on that speech in Tragedy in Aurora:
"What if President Obama and his sympathizers were placing misguided faith in … a naively romantic narrative that assumes citizens are informed, rational buyers in a marketplace of policy ideas proposed by competing political parties and chosen by voters on the basis of self-interest? What if voters are in fact typically ill-informed about the substance of policy, are actually driven largely by emotions like fear and anger, and are so polarized that in the name of tribal loyalty they are willing to blithely toss aside their own self-interest and the safety of children?" [iv]
DRIVIN’ THAT TRAIN, HIGH ON DISDAIN
Richard Bessel argued that four themes run through the Nazi rise to power, in the following order: war, racism, violence, and the desire for order. [v] War was Germany’s defeat in World War I and the humiliating terms the Allies imposed on Germany, Racism was the anti-Semitism and disdain for ethnic others that was endemic to German culture long before Adolf appeared. Political violence was everywhere—all the major parties had armed groups that regularly clashed. Order was the desire for stability that governments and elite classes have sought throughout history.
All of these themes existed before the Nazi rise to power. “Adolf Hitler invented nothing in terms of right-wing ideology. His great innovations lay in the organizational and rhetorical realms.” [vi] Which is to say, his powers as a charismatic leader.
Ditto, Trump.
Variants of these themes drive the Trump Express. I would rank them in a different order: racism first, then desire for order, violence, and war. Let’s look at racism today.
BORDERING ON DISASTER
Two swords have divided Americans into angry disagreement about immigration.
One is the rational case that the collapse of American border control has wreaked economic and social havoc. It has certainly pissed off ordinary people of all political allegiances—even the woke mayors of cities now having to deal with tens of thousands of unemployed and largely unemployable “refugees.” I recommend Ruy Teixeira’s surgical dissection of this issue in The Liberal Patriot:
"The border debacle has been unfolding throughout Biden’s term and the political damage has been accumulating. A big part of the problem is that there are a lot of Democrats who didn’t—and don’t—really want to do much about border security… “More is better and less is racist” isn’t much of an immigration policy but it is the default position of many Democrats." [vii]
The other sword is the use of immigration as a proxy for racism. White supremacist Richard B. Spencer explained. “Immigration is a kind of proxy war—and maybe it’s a last stand—for White Americans, who are undergoing a painful recognition that, unless dramatic action is taken, their grandchildren will live in a country that is alien and hostile.” [viii]
Slapping a rhetorical bandage on this suppurating wound has got the Biden Bubble nowhere. The stench is rising.
More on other themes coming up.
“Be there, will be wild!” [ix]
[i] Weitz, Eric D. Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy. Princeton: Princeton University Press (2009), 3, 83.
[ii] Lerner and Lowe, “Heather on the Hill,” from Brigadoon.
[iii] Not to mention that punditry is a business. Its practitioners need to keep within the guard rails of “access” and their fans’ tolerance for depressing news.
[iv] Diaz, Tom. Tragedy in Aurora: The Culture of Mass Shootings in America. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield (2019), 8-9. See, Achen, Christopher H., and Larry M. Bartels. “Democratic Ideals and Realties,” in Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press (2016), 1-20.
[v] Bessel, Richard. "The Nazi Capture of Power." Journal of Contemporary History, Apr., 2004, Vol. 39, No. 2, "Understanding Nazi Germany" (Apr., 2004), pp. 169-188. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3180720
[vi] Weitz, 98.
[vii] Ruy Teixeira, “Could Immigration Hand the 2024 Election to Trump?” The Liberal Patriot, January 16, 2024. https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/could-immigration-hand-the-2024-election?
[viii] Quoted with citation in Diaz, Tom, Broken Scales: Race and the Crisis of Justice in a Divided America. Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield (2021), 35.
[ix] Donald Trump tweet, December 20, 2020.
Comments