Is Trump a Totalitarian?

 Is Trump a Totalitarian?

 

In his book On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder (thank God for Timothy Snyder!) he says that by totalitarianism Hannah Arendt didn’t mean an all-powerful state. She meant the disappearance of the distinction between public and private life. Is that happening among us? Maybe. I mean, I’m not sure I make much of a distinction between my public life (such as it is) and my private life. There is, of course, always an interplay between one’s private life and one’s pubic life; but there is, or at least must be, always a distinction between the two. The example of the disappearance of such a distinction that I know best isn’t Nazi Germany, it is Communist Russia. When the Communist oppression was at its most extreme, people had to treat their private lives as if they were public. The could not, for example, say things in their private lives that they could not say in public because they could never know that the person they said it to wouldn’t report them to the KGB. People of course held private opinions about public matters that they couldn’t express in public. But one of my learnings about Stalinism is that everyone opposed it, and everyone thought they were the only person who did. They thought that because no one could express their opinion even in private. People thought they were the only one who disagreed because the Communists had obliterated the distinction between public and private. 

I don’t think I conform to some fascistic norms in my public life just as I don’t in my private life. But I’m just one isolated individual. What about society as a whole? I don’t think the distinction between one’s public and one’s private lives has disappeared to any significant extent. Trump is, after all, an authoritarian not a totalitarian either in Arendt’s sense or in the sense of an all-powerful government. As an authoritarian, Trump wants to suppress anyone who opposes him publicly. He doesn’t, however, give a damn about what people think in private. That may be the only distinction between him and a true totalitarian.  

So I’m not sure Trump will try to impose totalitarianism on us. Totalitarianism requires an ideology. The Soviet Communists certainly had an ideology. The Nazis certainly had an ideology. The Chinese government today has an ideology, though it isn’t clear that the North Korean regime has one. Donald Trump does not have an ideology. He isn’t smart enough to have one, and he would never take the time to develop one. He does, however, have a desire for power, indeed, much more than a desire but an ego need to have it. So I will not say Trump is a totalitarian—yet. Whether or not he becomes one in the future remains to be seen.