{"id":43853,"date":"2015-07-21T16:18:34","date_gmt":"2015-07-21T16:18:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/?p=43853"},"modified":"2018-04-30T06:13:45","modified_gmt":"2018-04-30T06:13:45","slug":"trump-is-hitler","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/trump-is-hitler\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump is Hitler"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"trump-is-hitler\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I\u2019m sorry but this is exactly<\/i> what nascent, doctrinaire fascism looks like. More timid comparisons (to George Wallace, to Barry Goldwater) are insufficient: Trump is following the Adolf Hitler template exactly. I don\u2019t want to hear about \u201cGodwin\u2019s Law\u201d when Bernie Sanders is called a Nazi<\/a> in the National Review<\/i> and Obama has been compared to (and directly portrayed as<\/a>) Hitler at least as many times as he\u2019s been called a Socialist or a Muslim; the taboo on the comparison should be retired.<\/p>\n

We balk at the idea because Trump is so un-Hitler-like: he can\u2019t be taken seriously; he\u2019s \u201ca clown\u201d (even according to Fox News<\/a>); he has no chances. But it was the same with Hitler. In late 1920s and early 1930s Germany, Hitler was<\/a> \u201cthe ranting clown who bangs the drum outside the National Socialist circus.” As Andrew Nagorski, author of Hitlerland<\/i> (2012), recently explained, \u201cyou had Americans meeting Hitler and saying, \u2018This guy is a clown. He’s like a caricature of himself.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s message, exactly like Hitler\u2019s, is blindingly simple: the public should feel justified in their suspicion that public institutions, despite their stated goals, have betrayed them\u2014that they, the public, are being gulled by rhetoricians who cannot deliver on their promises because they function in a noncompetitive environment without penalties and, therefore, get away with nonperformance. Hitler spoke as a soldier, and Trump speaks as an entrepreneur, but they each frame the discussion in terms of a suspension of fairness<\/i>: they are each saying, I have struggled to compete upon what I once believed to be a level playing field and have been sold out. For Hitler it was the treaty of Versailles; for Trump it\u2019s Obama\u2019s trade and immigration policies. The circumstances are vastly different but the sentiment is identical: if you, listening to me, feel that you\u2019re not getting anywhere, you\u2019re not alone\u2014none of us are, because our leaders have failed us. The military and the business rhetoric are nearly identical, because both spheres operate (ostensibly) in terms of direct competition, of territory and (therefore) goods and wealth, power and influence won and lost directly through sacrifice and effort (as opposed to the empty gestures of politics). And, in both cases, the racial undercurrents of the argument seem to emerge naturally from the observation of the struggle: I can\u2019t win, because somebody else is being given a break, unfairly, and the powers that be are letting it happen. It\u2019s an incredibly powerful message, in either century, because it works to ennoble anyone\u2019s frustration and envy: If things are not going your way, you don\u2019t have to \u201csuck it up;\u201d you can fight back. You\u2019re not alone; you don\u2019t have to be embarrassed by or to hide your racially-based suspicions, because they\u2019re correct. \u201cThose people\u201d are eating your lunch, and if you\u2019re tired of concealing that certainty, you don\u2019t have to conceal it any more.<\/p>\n

This is why Trump always attacks not just politicians but newspapers, websites, and individual journalists by saying they lose money. (He\u2019s been doing this since the early 1990s when Spy<\/i> Magazine, after being described by Trump as \u201ca failure\u201d that \u201cwon\u2019t be in business in a year,\u201d gleefully started running its \u201cChronicle of Our Death Foretold\u201d countdown calendar in each issue.) Today, responding to a blistering attack from the Des Moines Register<\/i> (regarding Trump’s remarks disparaging John McCain), Trump (predictably) said, \u201cThe Des Moines Register<\/i> has lost much circulation, advertising, and power over the last number of years.\u201d In other words, you don\u2019t have to listen to them because they can\u2019t do their jobs<\/i>\u2014just as McCain couldn\u2019t, when he was a soldier. (The fact that Trump dodged the draft doesn\u2019t affect his argument\u2014he\u2019s directly challenging, not McCain\u2019s bravery or ideology, but his competence in combat.<\/i>) Hitler\u2019s early triumphs, from the \u201cBeer-hall putsch\u201d (1923) to the remilitarization of the Rhineland (1936) were demonstrations not just of what could be done<\/i> but of what Germans were being prevented, by their leaders, from doing<\/i>\u2014what their intrinsic competence made possible, as Hitler\u2019s had, personally. Hitler spoke like a modern self-help guru\u2014I did these things, and so can we all\u2014and it\u2019s the same kind of invigorating, \u201cempowering\u201d narrative that Trump is using today.<\/p>\n

And, again, the racial subtext of the message (in either context) is not just clear but inevitable, since any hint of racially-based compensatory social measures (Affirmative Action, \u201cpolitical correctness,\u201d \u201crace-hustling\u201d) can so easily be presented as thumbs on the scale; as an imposition of unfairness onto the lives of ordinary, struggling (non-ethnic) citizens. \u201cThe national community gained its very definition from those who were excluded from it,\u201d Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw explains<\/a>: \u201cRacial discrimination was inevitably, therefore, an inbuilt part of the Nazi interpretation of the concept. Since measures directed at creating ‘racial purity’ […] exploited existing prejudice and were allegedly aimed at strengthening a homogeneous ethnic nation, they buttressed Hitler’s image as the embodiment of the national community.\u201d As in the context of Nixon\u2019s brilliantly toxic post-Southern-Strategy \u201cSilent Majority\u201d rhetoric, the listener need not feel alone or aggrieved; you finally have a champion who will say the things you cannot. As Josh Marshall explained<\/a>, \u201cTrump is running an angry, populist campaign focused on xenophobia and \u2018I don’t care what you think\u2019 aggression against ‘the establishment’ and ‘elites’ of all stripes. To think that trash talk against an establishment favorite [McCain], who is only marginally relevant to the politics of the moment in any case, will upset that apple cart is to thoroughly misunderstand the politics of the moment.”<\/p>\n

To be clear: Trump will not be the nominee or the president. (And I’m sure he doesn’t personally harbor genocidal ideas or plans.) But the reason he won\u2019t take power goes back to the decades-long debate about the roots of Nazism and the culpability of the leader vs.<\/i> the people: our democracy, thank God, is not as weak (or young) as the doomed Weimar Republic, and our legislative and elective apparatus are not as correspondingly vulnerable to partisan tampering\u2014we struggle with gerrymandering and voting-rights issues, but nobody can do the equivalent of dissolving the Reichstag (as Hindenburg and his cabinet did over and over, disastrously, in the 1930s, compelling the public to eventually grow weary of voting and of democracy itself). Our constitutional system protected us from Father Coughlin and Joseph McCarthy, and it will protect us from Donald Trump. But let\u2019s not pretend we can\u2019t see exactly what\u2019s going on and what it means.<\/p>\n

[See “Part II” here<\/a>.<\/i>]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m sorry but this is exactly what nascent, doctrinaire fascism looks like. More timid comparisons (to George Wallace, to Barry Goldwater) are insufficient: Trump is following the Adolf Hitler template exactly. I don\u2019t want to hear about \u201cGodwin\u2019s Law\u201d when Bernie Sanders is called a Nazi in the National Review and Obama has been compared […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":43863,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43853"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43853"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43853\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44456,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43853\/revisions\/44456"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}