‘The Only Thing We Have To Fear Is Fear Itself’
Beware of the Trump Card — Incredulity
For the last few months we Canadians have been observing with wry amusement the spectacle of American politics. This in itself is nothing new, but with the emergence of Donald Trump as the lead contender for the national Republican nomination, our amusement has rapidly soured to disbelief, outrage and concern.
A few weeks ago I was writing that Donald Trump is a buffoon. I now worry that Trump is a clever and cynical demagogue and it is precisely this attitude of disbelief that is allowing Trump to defy all predictions. Like most of what transpires today, there are several historical precedents.
America is a world empire in decline. This is not say that America will collapse like Rome, but with the inevitable rise of China as an economic, political and military superpower, the position of unipolar global hegemony which America has enjoyed since the collapse of the Soviet Union is rapidly slipping away. What this will mean for America and world security in the 21st century is anyone’s guess, but for the present it is evident that Americans are conscious of the erosion in their public image, and that their politicians are reacting accordingly.
Donald Trump is reusing the same time-tried playbook as Senator Joe McCarthy and every other demagogue throughout history. He does not care whether what he says is true or false (as McCarthy openly admitted when not on the podium), but only if it will provoke a flurry of media attention. When he is challenged for making groundless accusations he abandons his original target and refocuses on his new accuser. When McCarthy was challenged with unfounded libel he would merely discredit the accuser as a Communist sympathizer. McCarthy exploited the ‘Red Menace’ for his own selfish political ends. Trump is exploiting a fear of being second-rate to Chinese authority, Russian imperialism and Muslim fundamentalism. Instead of sinister lurking Communism, Trump’s bogeymen are a few thousand scattered desperate ideological maniacs. The more vague and indeterminate the foe, the more political capital there is available for fear tactics.
People do not ask ‘what has Trump said?’, people ask ‘what has Trump said now?’, thereby implicitly forgiving his past ill remarks. So far he has managed to live down insulting about three quarters of the human race (women + Muslims + Latinos + Chinese, not to mention disabled veterans), and yet his popularity continues to rise! Trump knows that our attention span is laughably short and therefore he can live down just about anything so long as he is justified by continued media attention. With every day that passes his mainstream political opponents are increasingly discredited by his convention shattering, and the supporters of his opponents are gradually defecting to his bandwagon. The way things are going Trump needs only to stay in the race to win the Republican nomination. To those who say that he cannot win the Presidency as a virulent right-wing antagonist, what is to stop him from taking a sharp tack to the (American) center after securing the Republican nomination? If he can insult John McCain for being a cowardly prisoner of war and get away with it, he can get away with this too.
There was another famous political leader in the 20th century with very similar rhetoric to Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’. Adolf Hitler rose to power in incredibly similar circumstances. Germany was in disgrace in the aftermath of the humiliating defeat of World War I and still aching from the memory of being a recognized great power. America is still stinging from two decades of rebuff in the Middle East. She has wasted precious blood and trillions of much-needed treasure on a situation which has only deteriorated. The current American political regime is weak and divided. What is Trump’s solution? Target a minority as a scapegoat, and kick them out. Substitute America for Germany and Mexicans for Jews and the election campaigns of 2016 in America and 1932 in Germany start to sound eerily familiar.
Donald Trump is probably not Adolf Hitler. It is likely (hopefully?) that Donald Trump is Joe McCarthy: unscrupulous, rabid and selfish but without the desire to carry through with the grand plan. That being said, it was a mainstream opinion in Germany in the early 1930s (and then in the Western countries in the late 1930s) that Hitler was not serious about the eviction of the Jews and the enslavement of the Slavs, and that he only said those things to gain power. Hitler was not elected to the Chancellorship; he was legally appointed by President Paul von Hindenburg. Hindenburg represented the elite arch-conservatives of German society, just as much enemies of the Nazis as the Communists, and it was only through self-delusion that the political elite held their nose and allowed Hitler to rule. It was a fatal mistake.
Hitler was able to challenge and eventually supplant the governing regime because the regime and electorate did not take him seriously. Too many people formed their opinions of him during the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 and never reformed their views. The German military made the same mistake of underestimating their opponent when they cut a deal with the Nazis thinking that Hitler could be controlled. In the beginning Hitler was mocked as an upstart ‘Bohemian corporal’ way out of his league. The voices of mockery were quickly silenced. We would be wise to adhere to the warning of history and not leave the important question of intentions to chance. Let us not underestimate Trump and fall victim to our own incredulity.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt wisely proclaimed in his 1933 presidential inauguration: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”. At the time FDR was speaking of the Great Depression and his ‘New Deal’ to revitalize American society, but earlier that same year Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of the Weimar Republic, thereby proving FDR right far worse than he could have ever possibly imagined.
Samuel Buckstein
