I Just Don’t Get It
Yet
I just don’t get it. I don’t get what the hell is going
wrong with my country. We have made a narcissistic megalomaniac the most famous
person in the country. Millions upon millions of us have made a man found
civilly liable for sexual assault who has been indicted on dozens of felony
charges a hero. They care not what sort of man he is. They care not that he is
wildly sexually irresponsible and unfaithful. They care not that he is sexist
and racist. They care not what his political policies are. They care not that
he says he will be a dictator. Yes, he says he’ll be that only for a day, but
how many dictators give up power and become responsible leaders of democratic
countries after they’ve been dictators? They care not that he admires some of
the world’s worst national leaders—Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, Xi Jinping, and
Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban. They care not that he panders to violent
white supremacists. They care not that he despises democracy and thinks it
perfectly legitimate for his followers to use violence to install him back in
power. They care not that nearly everything he says is a lie. They care not
that he will violate this country’s longstanding treaty obligations and make us
a subject of scorn around the world. They care not that his economic policies,
which consist of nothing but tax cuts for the rich and tariffs on imported
goods that would destroy this country’s international economic relations, would
devastate the American economy. They care not that he despises the United
States Constitution that he once swore to uphold and defend and thinks he can
use all of the federal government for his own personal gain. This man, Donald
J. Trump, is a threat to everything decent this country has long claimed to be
and to stand for.
And I don’t get it. How can Donald J. Trump be anything but
an object of scorn? He is nothing but despicable as a human being and as a
politician. Yet millions of Americans want him to be president again and will
vote for him no matter what. To make that fact even more outrageous, many if
not most of them self-identify as Christians. Can they not see that Trump
represents nearly everything Jesus preached and taught against? For that is
surely what he does. He gives not one good God damn for “the least of these.” He’ll
never bless a true peacemaker. He has no reservations about using violence to
achieve his goals. It’s not that he would have paid the workers in the vineyard
different amounts, it’s that he would have stiffed them and not paid them at
all. He has no qualms about committing adultery many times over. I just don’t
get it.
There must be something systemically wrong with this
country. A healthy country would have Donald Trump in jail by now not poised
once again to become president. How have we gone so far astray? Why have we
abandoned every value for which this country has claimed to stand? I have no sure
answers to those questions. The Trump phenomenon is so far outside of this
country’s political experience that I’m sure answers are difficult for
everyone. All I can do is speculate as to the causes using as much factual
information as I can gather.
Since Donald Trump is an American fascist, we can start our
attempt to understand him with the general question of what attracts people to
fascism. There are two prime examples of countries becoming fascist within the
last century. Perhaps looking at those examples will lead to some insight about
what’s going on here at home.
The first country to go fascist was Italy. Benito Mussolini
led a popular movement that gave us the term fascist. He wasn’t elected leader
of the country, but he did take over the government relatively peacefully. Yes,
he had his black-shirted thugs doing violent things to people they didn’t like;
but when he led a mob into Rome in 1922, the government was simply turned over
to him without a fight. He proceeded to create a right-wing dictatorship that
he maintained until he fled Rome as allied forces advanced. He was killed by a
mob in 1945.
Italy had sided with Britain, the United States, and Russia
in World War I. It was on the winning side, but its people thought they had
been treated unfairly when the victors gave the province of South Tyrol to
Austria, which had been on the losing side. That loss became a festering sore
with the Italian people.
Italy, of course, was the home of the Roman Empire for
centuries. It is easy to romanticize that empire, and it did have some
remarkable accomplishments both in culture, in engineering and construction,
and in military conquest. By the 1920s, however, the Roman Empire had been gone
for fourteen hundred years. Italy’s more recent history had been one of
multiple states that divided up the Italian peninsula. There had been multiple
foreign incursions into those states. There was no political entity “Italy” for
many centuries. The country became united in 1871, only fifty years before the
rise of Mussolini.
Mussolini played on the anger of the Italian people over the
loss of South Tyrol. He also claimed that he was going to “make Italy great
again” by reviving the Roman Empire. He claimed he would return the glory of
Rome to the Italian people. Of course, he did no such thing; but his promise to
do it surely rang true to many Italian people.
So, in 1922 Italy was a country that was angry, felt
belittled by its allies, and longed to take a place among the world’s nations
that reflected the long-lost glory of the Roman Empire. Mussolini and his
fascist party promised their people that he would take firm control of the
country, create order, create jobs, and make Italy great again. The Italian
people fell for it, with disastrous consequences.
The next country to go fascist was Germany. Germany had lost
World War I to the allied powers. That was bad enough, but Germany was treated
grossly unfairly by the Treaty of Versailles that the country was forced to
sign at the end of the war. The Germans looked for a distinguishable group on
which they could blame that humiliation. They picked the Jews. A myth developed
called “the stab in the back” that said Germany had lost the war only because
of betrayal primarily by the Jews. The myth made no sense and had no factual
support, but it gave the non-Jewish Germans a way to avoid responsibility for
what had happened to their country. The anger over the Treaty of Versailles
continued at least into the 1930s.
Germany experienced an economic crisis in the 1920s. It was
characterized by inflation of the currency so rampant that, after a time, money
literally was not worth the paper it was printed on. People’s life savings were
wiped out. What should have been enough to support a comfortable retirement
became worthless. That crisis had abated by the time Hitler came to power, but
it was then still a fresh and painful memory.
On top of all of that, most of the Germans feared a takeover
by the German communists. Russia, of course, had become communist starting in
1917. The Russian communists were promoting communist revolutions around the
world. The communist Russia was hardly a shining example of the virtue of
communist rule. Its government was on its way to becoming totalitarian. The
economy was a shambles. And communists both Russian and German are assertive
atheists while Germany was still a predominantly Christian country. By about
1928 or so, the German political situation amounted essentially to a battle
between Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party and the communists for control of the German
government, or at least that’s how it seemed to many people.
In 1933, Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, the government
office with all the power. He was appointed Chancellor peacefully by German president
Hindenburg. Hindenburg’s motives in making Hitler Chancellor may be unclear,
but it seems as he though Hitler was better than the communists and that the
conservative German aristocracy could control him.
By 1933 then, Germany was an angry country with recent
economic problems aggravated by the worldwide depression that began in 1929. The
German people were looking for a scapegoat, and Hitler gave them one, namely,
the Jews. Germany, tragically, had a long history of virulent anti-Judaism that
Hitler could continue and make even more extreme. Martin Luther’s raging
anti-Judaism is just one manifestation of that history. Far too many Germans
bought Hitler’s lies about the Jews and saw Hitler as a force that would
destroy the Jews’ supposed power over Germany. They saw him as the man who
would free them from the limitations imposed on them by the Treaty of
Versailles and “make Germany great again.”
So is there anything that these two situations have in
common that might help us understand the Trump phenomenon in this country?
There may be. In both cases, the people of a nation were angry and felt
threatened. Would-be strongmen played on that anger and fear to generate
support for simplistic, dictatorial solutions to the country’s problems. In
both Italy and Germany, the conditions that led to fascist dictatorship were
the consequences of war, but what matters is how the people of those countries
were thinking and acting in the 1920s and 1930s.
Both of these countries have had one central characteristic
that the United States does not have. None of them had a truly successful
democratic tradition until after World War II. When Mussolini and Hitler came
to power in the 1920s and 1930s, democracy’s roots in both of them were shallow
at best. Lack of a commitment to democracy is essential for the rise of fascism,
and a commitment to democracy is something the United States has had at least
until the rise of the Trump phenomenon.
What do these examples of fascist governments tell us about
the Trump movement in the United States? They tell us that a vital need for any
fascist movement is popular fear and the anger that results from it. Fascism
needs a political situation in which the fascist leader can convince the
country’s people that their country is going to hell in a hand basket, and, at
least in most cases, that there is an identifiable group on which the fascists
can pin the blame for what the fascists make out to be the country’s problems. Fascism
requires at least some instability in the country it seeks to rule.
Those conditions exist, or, at least, Trump can convince
people that they exist, in our country today. There are a couple of elements at
play. One is changing demographics. For all of this country’s history, white
men have been in charge. They have been the ones who made all the important
decisions. They have been the ones who prospered. Not all of them prospered of
course, but there is the myth of the American dream, a myth that says those fat
cats made it, you can make it too. White men’s grasp on power in this country
is weakening. Women occupy prominent positions in every field of human endeavor,
something that has been true only relatively recently. We have, after all, a
woman as vice president who is also a person of color. The non-white percentage
of the population is growing. Although this country is still significantly
racist, Black Americans have made significant progress toward economic equality
with white Americans in recent decades. The number of native-born Americans of
Latin American heritage is growing. It is easy enough to understand why a great
many white men, and the women who follow their lead, feel the ground shifting
under them. They don’t like it at all.
Then there is the immigration issue. This is the primary one
Trump dummies up in his effort to get the American people to abandon democracy
and make him dictator. It certainly is true that very large numbers of people,
mostly from Central and South America and Mexico, have been pouring across the
US-Mexico border in recent years. The increase in the number of undocumented
immigrants is due largely to the violence and poverty in so much of Central and
South America. People come seeking asylum so that they can build better lives
for themselves and their families than they ever could at home.
There is a great human pressure difference between the
United States and its southern neighbors. Pressures on the people are far
stronger in places like Honduras and San Salvador than they are in the United
States. The United States, far more prosperous than any country to the south of
it, acts like a vacuum that seeks to equalize those pressures or at least to
ease them in countries where they are high. That an enormous number of people
would risk everything to leave home and enter the United States through other
than legal means is not surprising.
Donald Trump tells his followers that these undocumented
immigrants are the cause of all of their problems. He says they are “poisoning
the blood” of the American people, a fascist statement if ever there was one. He
says they are all criminals, which only very, very few of them are. Their crime
rate is actually lower than the crime rate of this country as a whole. Trump
says immigrants are taking Americans’ jobs, which they are not. In many
agricultural areas, including the central parts of my home state of Washington,
profitable agriculture would not be possible without immigrants, legal or
otherwise, who do jobs few Americans would be willing to do for wages few
Americans would be willing to accept. Trump says they are straining Social
Security and Medicare, which they are not. Some of them may qualify for some
form of support from a state, but no one draws on Social Security or Medicare
without a Social Security number, which undocumented immigrants do not have
unless they have a forged one. Besides, if they do have one, authentic or not,
they pay into Social Security and Medicare in the same way the rest of us do.
So what explains the Donald Trump phenomenon? Why are so
many Americans abandoning our democratic tradition and following an oft-indicted,
serially lying, megalomaniac who cares about no one but himself? In part
because things are changing in this country in ways that make many Americans
feel insecure. And in part because Donald Trump is a world class salesman of
phony theories and lies that pander to people’s anger and fear. He has been a
genius at making the immigration issue a much bigger issue, and a different
kind of issue, than it really is.
Will American democracy survive the threat that Donald Trump
poses to it? That remains to be seen, and this year’s presidential election
will go a long way toward answering that question. This country has had
would-be fascist dictators before, but Rachel Maddow of MSNBC has pointed out
one difference between Trump and his properly obscure predecessors as American
fascists. It is a difference that makes Trump’s success far more likely than
success for earlier American fascists ever was. Trump has captured one of America’s
two major political parties. The once respectable Republican Party is now the Donald
Trump cult of personality. A great many Americans have voted Republican all
their lives. Some of them may continue to do so just out of habit or out of an
intense dislike of the liberal policies (such as they are) that Democrats
advocate and enact. The Republican Party has a well-established political
apparatus in every US state. Wealthy Americans donate enormous amounts of money
to it. Today, it controls (albeit chaotically) the US House of Representatives.
Many state governors and other state officials are Republicans. Trump has a
political machine behind him that no other American fascist has ever had, something
that makes him a bigger threat to this country than any other American fascist
has ever been.
There is one factor that works against Trump’s success, and
we must pray that it is enough to defeat him. This country has a democratic
tradition well over two hundred years old. The United States Constitution,
which Trump so despises and will ignore as much as he can if he becomes
president again, is the world’s greatest document establishing a democratic
form of government. It isn’t perfect. American democracy isn’t perfect. But
they are our main bulwark against a fascist takeover of our national
government. It gives us more hope than anything else, certainly more hope than
Joe Biden does, that we may yet dodge the bullet and avoid seeing the fascist
Donald Trump back in the White House. Only time will tell if it is enough.
