There has been an awful lot of noise recently about whether or not Donald Trump can be described as a “fascist”. There have been a couple of relatively detailed and coruscating pieces by Sidney Blumenthal in the Guardian. Trump's former aides John Kelly and General Mark Milley both opine that he meets the definition of a fascist, and he is quoted as wishing he had “the kind of generals Hitler had … totally loyal” and obedient to orders. His first wife claims that he at one time kept Hitler’s tract Mein Kampf by his bedside. Certainly many of his pronouncements sound disturbingly dictatorial, vengeful and narcissistic.
How substantive is this Hitler-ian parallel? I mean,
compared to the German’s savage lick of black hair, mean moustache and bear-trap
mouth, and hysterical but razor-blade public delivery, Trump comes across as an
ageing naartjie left out too long in the sun. He himself rails against
fascists, communists and radical socialists indiscriminately; I am rather of
the view of another renegade aide, John Bolton, that Trump has neither the
intellect nor the coherence to know what he means, or to have any discernible philosophy
at all, fascist or otherwise. Obvious absurdities aside – those that the media
loves to foreground – is there more to it? Does the fascist label throw light
on Trump’s self-evident capacity to generate a cult-like adoration from nearly
half the American populace?
A full year of my A-Level History studies – gosh, that
was a long time ago – was devoted to European totalitarianism. I read
everything available then, including William Shirer’s monumental The Rise
and Fall of the Third Reich and Alan Bullock’s classic biography, Hitler:
A study in tyranny. Another book, the one I’ve hung onto all these years,
was Joachim Fest’s The Face of the Third Reich. Fest was German himself,
a virtual insider, and took an approach as much psychoanalytical as historical.
I know there has been a mountain of scholarship since, but in returning to Fest
now, curious for another view, I find him as brilliant and insightful as I did
back in 1977. His exploration of what he calls “modern man’s susceptibility to
totalitarian rule” – especially given the current widespread lurch to the political
right – feels horribly relevant.
So I find myself marking any number of resonant passages in Fest’s opening chapters. I’ll touch on some of them.
… what smoothed [Hitler’s]
path was not so much the millions that came into his funds (especially from
heavy industry) as the lack of political sense and judgement on the part of
millions of dissatisfied, embittered individuals, terrified of social levelling
… who surrendered themselves ever more feverishly to the redeemer cult that was
systematically developed … (Penguin edn, 13)
Several things here manifest in today’s America. Firstly, heavy industry (today the fossil-fuel and agro-chemical sectors, abetted by Musk the upstart media mogul) continues to fund the Republican right in America. Secondly, millions of citizens seem unable or unwilling to see through Trump’s conman-ship and lies, terrified of racial and gender equality; while Trump claims God himself has “saved” him from assassination in order to redeem the country. Trump cranks up the “terrible state” of the American state, though by any measure it is nowhere near as badly off as the collapsed Weimer Republic was in 1933. Thirdly, large sectors of the society seem similarly to exhibit “an increasing mass flight into irrationality, the mindless readiness to renounce reason, and an ever more uninhibited susceptibility to myth” (Fest, 17). Witness, among other things, increased suspicion of climate and medical science, and susceptibility to completely bonkers “conspiracy theories” such as Marjorie Taylor Greene’s assertion that meteorologists are controlling hurricanes. This is about as credible as blaming telescopes for creating eclipses. Finally, various forms of disillusionment go “hand in hand with a search for objects of blame and hate”, eviscerating any “realistic approach to life” (19). Yet this is no longer a risible fringe kind of belief, and both Hitler and Trump exhibit the gift of exploiting this mass deficit in critical thinking. Indeed, that deficit is both assumed of “the people”, and actively encouraged by the simplifications of propaganda. Hitler, as quoted by Fest, wrote:
Life in this view is pitiless Darwinian struggle; even compassion is wielded as a tool in a putative fight – weaponised, as they say nowadays. And if “the enemy within” does not exist, it must be invented. Amongst the many real, exaggerated or downright manufactured objects of hate and repression are racial Others. For the Nazis of course this was primarily the Jews; for Trump and Co., it’s mostly Latin American would-be immigrants. Both are vilified in the same terms, for their intrinsic criminality, their dirt, and above all for their alleged threat of “contamination of the blood”, that is, the blood of a barely-acknowledged White (Aryan) supremacism. Contradictorily – just as Hitler at first cannily courted certain political and social sectors to whom he was actually ideologically opposed – Trump is obliged in his presidential bid to appeal specifically to Blacks, Latinos, and women.
Most interestingly, Fest argues in psychoanalytic mode, what Others are condemned for is precisely what the would-be dictator fears or senses within himself. In Hitler’s case, “the Jews’ alleged obsession with revenge, their feelings of inferiority, their lust to subjugate and destroy, represent the transference on to his enemy of compulsive character traits which Hitler sensed within himself” (29). The parallels with Trump’s character traits are suggestive: multiple are the examples of Trump accusing others of precisely what he is doing himself. (Unrepentantly. My favourite Trump moment: Anderson Cooper in a CNN interview interjected, “With all due respect, Mr President, that’s the argument of a twelve-year-old.” Responded Trump with an irritated shrug: “Well, he started it!” Cooper’s point exactly.) This may be part deliberate political strategy (Hitler laid this out explicitly in Mein Kampf); part accidental but useful reflection of society in the personality; and part unconscious projection.
A further parallel – frequently deployed in other authoritarian governments, from Putin’s Russia to Mugabe’s Zimbabwe – is the selective use of “the law”. The assault on old institutions – the Reichstag, the Constitution – are opportunistically derided and utilised. So even as Trump attacks the judicial system and the FBI, he packs the former with sympathetic judges likely to do his bidding under a cloak of legality, and sends in the latter when the occasion suits him. The courts, its officials and decisions, can be derided or appealed to opportunistically; hence Trump can amazingly still run for President despite being a criminal convicted on 34 counts of fraud. The contradictoriness helps engender the very state of chaos, uncertainty and distrust which he claims he wants to fix. In Hitler’s case it spawned the Night of the Long Knives, in which the militia he himself had encouraged was brutally eliminated; in Trump’s case the January 6 assault on the Capitol – fortunately rather less murderous in its outcome.
I don’t think the Hitler-Trump parallel can be pushed too far. The background histories are markedly different; the systemic and institutional checks and balances rather different; the two characters share some traits but not others. If anything, he bears a closer resemblance to Mussolini, brutal, but also bumbling. But remember that Hitler, too, was dismissed as a maniacal clown whom others thought they could control. On the other hand, America has survived one term of Trumpery, and would probably survive another. I do fear, though, the potential damage to an already somewhat precarious democracy, to equally precarious global geopolitical stability, and (especially) to environmental health.
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