Adam Gopnik - BEING HONEST ABOUT TRUMP
All republics are fragile; the German one, like the Third French Republic it paralleled, did not commit suicide—it was killed, by many murderers, not least by those who thought they could contain an authoritarian thirsting for power...
It is the essence of fascism to have no single fixed form—an attenuated form of nationalism in its basic nature, it naturally takes on the colors and practices of each nation it infects.... What all forms of fascism have in common is the glorification of the nation, and the exaggeration of its humiliations, with violence promised to its enemies, at home and abroad; the worship of power wherever it appears and whoever holds it; contempt for the rule of law and for reason; unashamed employment of repeated lies as a rhetorical strategy; and a promise of vengeance for those who feel themselves disempowered by history. It promises to turn back time and take no prisoners...
The best show in New
York right now may be the Guggenheim’s retrospective of the work of László
Moholy-Nagy (pronounced “nadge,” not “nadgy,” a lesson hard learned). Born to a
Jewish family in Hungary in 1895, he assimilated all the advances and visual
novelties of the early part of the twentieth century, from Russia and Paris
alike, and turned them into an adaptable graphic manner that made him one of
the indispensable teachers at the Bauhaus, in Dessau, Germany, in the
nineteen-twenties, under Walter Gropius. When Hitler came to power, this
citizen of cosmopolitanism then emigrated—heading first to Britain, where he
made wonderful posters for the London Underground, and eventually and happily
to Chicago, where he became one of the key figures in implementing the lessons
of modern design that made Chicago a city of such architectural excitement in
the mid-century. (Though how much pain and anxiety and sheer disrupted existence
are covered over in the words “then emigrated”!)
Two thoughts, not
strictly political but social, come to mind as one exits the museum: First,
that the Weimar Republic gets a very bad rap for how it ended and insufficient
credit for how much creative ferment and intelligent thought it contained. The
notion that it was above all, or unusually, decadent was a creation of its
enemies, who defined the creative energies of cosmopolitanism in that
way. All republics are fragile; the German one, like the Third
French Republic it paralleled, did not commit suicide—it was killed, by many
murderers, not least by those who thought they could contain an authoritarian
thirsting for power. And, second, that the United States has been the ultimate
home of so many cosmopolitan citizens rejected by Europe. People expelled by
hate from Europe wanted desperately to get to the American Midwest, to cities
like Chicago—and, no doubt, to Cleveland, where the Republican Party holds its
Convention next week. Cosmopolitanism is not a tribal trait; it is a virtue, as
much as courage or honesty or compassion. Almost without exception, the periods
of human civilization that we admire as we look back have been cosmopolitan in
practice; even those, like the Bronze
Age, that we imagine as monolithic and traditional turn out to be shaped by
trade and exchange and multiple identity.
We walk out of the
beautiful museum and find ourselves back in a uniquely frightening moment in
American life. A candidate for President who is the announced enemy of the
openness that America has traditionally stood for and that drew persecuted
émigrés like Moholy-Nagy to America as to a golden land, a candidate who
embraces the mottos and rhetoric of the pro-fascist groups of that same
wretched time, has taken over one of our most venerable political parties, and
he seems still in the ascendancy. His language remains not merely sloppy
or incendiary but openly hostile to the simplest standards of truth and decency
that have governed American politics. Most recently, just this week, he has
repeated the lie that there has been a call for “a moment of silence” in honor
of the murderer of five policemen in Dallas.
This ought to be, as
people said quaintly just four or five months ago, “disqualifying.”
Nonetheless, his takeover of the Republican Party is complete, and, in various
postures of spinelessness, its authorities accede to his authority, or else
opportunistically posture for a place in the wake of it. Many of them doubtless
assume that he will lose and are hoping for a better position afterward—still,
the very small show of backbone that would be required to resist his takeover
seems unavailable. Even those who clearly fear and despise him, like the Bush
family, seem able to register their opposition only in veiled language and
cautiously equivocal formulations; Jeb Bush knows what Trump is, but still
feels obliged to say that he would “feel sad” if Trump lost.
What is genuinely
alarming is the urge, however human it may be, to normalize the abnormal
by turning toward emotions and attitudes that are familiar. To their great
credit, the editors of most of the leading conservative publications in America
have recognized Trump for what he is, and have opposed his rise to
power. Yet the habit of hatred is so ingrained in their psyches that even
those who recognize at some level that Trump is a horror, when given the
dangling bait of another chance to hate Hillary still leap at it, insisting on
her “criminality” at the very moment when it’s officially rejected, and
attempting to equate this normal politician with an abnormal threat to
political life itself.
They do this, in part, to placate their readership. In the so-called mainstream (call it liberal) media, meanwhile, the election is treated with blithe inconsequence, as another occasion for strategy-weighing. The Times, to take one example, ran a front-page analysis criticizing Trump for being insufficiently able to exploit a political opening given by the investigation into Clinton’s e-mail, with the complaint seeming to be that Trump just isn’t clever enough to give us a good fight—to be the fun opponent we want. If only he had some more skill at this! While the habits of hatred get the better of the right, the habits of self-approval through the fiction of being above it all contaminate the center.
A
certain number of the disengaged insist that Trump isn’t really as bad as all
that. And there may indeed be another universe in which Donald Trump is one
more blowhard billionaire with mixed-up politics but a basically benevolent
heart, a Ross Perot type, or perhaps more like Arnold Schwarzenegger, preaching
some confused combination of populism and self-help and doomed to flounder when
he comes to power. This would not be the worst thing imaginable. Unfortunately,
that universe is not this one. Trump is unstable, a liar, narcissistic,
contemptuous of the basic norms of political life, and deeply embedded among
the most paranoid and irrational of conspiracy theorists. There may indeed be a
pathos to his followers’ dreams of some populist rescue for their plights. But
he did not come to political attention as a “populist”; he came to politics as
a racist, a proponent of birtherism.
As I
have written before, to call him a fascist of some variety is simply to use
a historical label that fits. The arguments about whether he meets every point
in some static fascism matrix show a misunderstanding of what that ideology
involves. It is the essence of fascism to have no single fixed form - an
attenuated form of nationalism in its basic nature, it naturally takes on the
colors and practices of each nation it infects. In Italy, it is bombastic and
neoclassical in form; in Spain, Catholic and religious; in Germany, violent and
romantic. It took forms still crazier and more feverishly sinister, if one can
imagine, in Romania, whereas under Oswald Mosley, in England, its manner was
predictably paternalistic and aristocratic. It is no surprise that the American
face of fascism would take on the forms of celebrity television and the casino
greeter’s come-on, since that is as much our symbolic scene as nostalgic
re-creations of Roman splendors once were Italy’s.
What all forms of
fascism have in common is the glorification of the nation, and the exaggeration
of its humiliations, with violence promised to its enemies, at home and abroad;
the worship of power wherever it appears and whoever holds it; contempt for the
rule of law and for reason; unashamed employment of repeated lies as a
rhetorical strategy; and a promise of vengeance for those who feel themselves
disempowered by history. It promises to turn back time and take no prisoners.
That it can appeal to those who do not understand its consequences is doubtless
true. But the first job of those who do understand is to state what those consequences
invariably are... read more:
see also
Donald Trump and the Politics of Being an Asshole
Mukul Kesavan - Donald Trump and the global
equalisation of awfulness ...Donald Trump and the Politics of Being an Asshole
Trump represents the end of politics - if
politics is a battle of ideas - and the triumph of shock-jockiness. His campaign
playbook is straight from professional wrestling - a world of braggadocio, fakery, and
insult
What is clear in this case is that a widespread avoidance of the past has become not only a sign of the appalling lack of historical consciousness in contemporary American culture, but a deliberate political weapon used by the powerful to keep people passive and blind to the truth, if not reduced to a discourse drawn from the empty realm of celebrity culture. This is a discourse in which totalitarian images of the hero, fearless leader, and bold politicians get lost in the affective and ideological registers of what Hannah Arendt once called “the ruin of our categories of thought and standards of judgment.” Of course, there are many factors currently contributing to this production of ignorance and the lobotomizing of individual and collective agency. The forces promoting a deep seated culture of authoritarianism run deep in American society.
