Fascism in Donald Trump's United States
By Henry A. Giroux
December 09, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "Truth-Out"
- Donald Trump's blatant appeal to fascist ideology and policy
considerations took a more barefaced and dangerous turn this week
when he released a statement calling for "a total and complete
shutdown of Muslims entering the United States." Trump qualified
this racist appeal to voters' fears about Muslims by stating that
such a ban is necessary "until our country's representatives can
figure out what is going on."
When Trump proposed the ban at a rally at the USS
Yorktown in South Carolina, his plan drew loud cheers from the
crowd. Many critics have responded by making clear that Trump's
attempts to place a religious test on immigration and travel are
unconstitutional. Others have expressed shock in the face of a
proposal that violates the democratic ideals that have shaped US
history. Fellow Republican Jeb Bush called Trump "unhinged."
Trump's call to do "the unthinkable" is a
fundamental principle of any notion of totalitarianism.
What almost none of the presidential candidates or
mainstream political pundits have admitted, however, is not only
that Trump's comments form a discourse of hate, bigotry and
exclusion, but also that such expressions of racism and fascism are
resonating deeply in a landscape of US culture and politics crafted
by 40 years of conservative counterrevolution. One of the few
politicians to respond to Trump's incendiary comments was former
Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley (D), who stated rightly that Donald
Trump is a "fascist demagogue."
This overtly fascistic turn also revealed itself
in November when Trump
mocked Serge Kovaleski, a New York Times investigative reporter
living with a disability, at a rally in South Carolina. This
contemptuous reference to Kovaleski's physical disability was
morally odious and painful to observe, but not in the least
surprising: Trump is consistently a hatemonger and spreads his
message without apology in almost every public encounter in which he
finds himself. In this loathsome instance, Trump simply expanded his
hate-filled discourse in a new direction, after having already
established the deeply ingrained racism and sexism at the heart of
his candidacy.
To read more articles by Henry A. Giroux and other
authors in the Public Intellectual Project, click here.
Trump's mockery of Kovaleski and his blatantly
discriminatory policy proposals against Muslims are of a piece with
his portrayal of Mexican immigrants as violent rapists and drug
dealers, and with his calls for the United States to put Syrian
refugees in detention centers and create a database to control them.
These comments sound eerily close to SS leader Heinrich Himmler's
call for camps that held prisoners under orders of what the Nazis
euphemistically called "protective custody." This fascist parallel
only gains currency with Trump's latest efforts to ban Muslims from
the United States. To quote the Holocaust Encyclopedia:
In the earliest years of the Third Reich, various
central, regional, and local authorities in Germany established
concentration camps to detain political opponents of the regime,
including German Communists, Socialists, trade unionists, and
others from left and liberal political circles. In the spring of
1933, the SS established Dachau concentration camp, which came
to serve as a model for an expanding and centralized
concentration camp system under SS management.
Moreover, Trump's hateful attitude toward people
with disabilities points to an earlier element of Hitler's program
of genocide in which people with physical and mental disabilities
were viewed as disposable because they allegedly undermined the Nazi
notion of the "master race." The demonization, objectification and
pathologizing of people with disabilities was the first step in
developing the foundation for the Nazis' euthanasia
program aimed at those declared unworthy of life. This lesson
seems to be lost on the mainstream media, who largely viewed Trump's
despicable remarks toward people with disabilities as simply
insulting.
What is truly alarming is how many corporate media
figures and intellectuals are defending Trump, not realizing that
his candidacy is rooted in the brutal seeds of totalitarianism being
cultivated in US society. Trump represents more than the
anti-democratic practices and antics of Joseph McCarthy; he
illustrates how totalitarianism can take different forms in specific
historical moments. Rather than being dismissed as a wild card in US
politics, as "careless and undisciplined," as some of his
conservative supporters claim, or not a true member of the
Republican Party as Ross Douthat has written in The
New York Times, it is crucial to recognize that Trump's
popularity represents what Victor
Wallis has described as a dangerous "political space ... in both
the wider culture and in recent history." This is evident not only
in his race-baiting, his crude comments about women and his call to
round up and deport 11 million immigrants, but also in his increasing
support for violence against protesters at his rallies.
There is a disturbing totalitarian message in his
call to "make American great again" by any means necessary. The
degree to which Trump expresses his support of violence, racism and
the violation of civil liberties, visibly and without apology, is
unprecedented in recent national political races. But the ideas he
espouses have always been present under the surface of US politics,
which is perhaps why the public and media on the whole seem
unperturbed by such comments
as: "We're going to have to do things that we never did before. And
some people are going to be upset about it, but I think that now
everybody is feeling that security is going to rule ... And so we're
going to have to do certain things that were frankly unthinkable a
year ago." Trump's call to do "the unthinkable" is a fundamental
principle of any notion of totalitarianism, regardless of the form
it takes.
We heard this same hatred in the words of Hitler,
Mussolini, Pinochet and other demagogic orators.
The roots of totalitarianism are not frozen in
history. They may find a different expression in the present, but
they are connected in all kinds of ways to the past. For instance,
Trump's demagoguery bears a close resemblance to the discourse
characteristic of other fascist leaders. There are traces of
fascism's past most particularly in what has been called by Patrick
Healy and Maggie Haberman, Trump's "dark power of words." As Healy
and Haberman point out in
a recent New York Times article, Trump's use of fearmongering
and bombastic language is characterized by "divisive phrases, harsh
words and violent imagery" characteristic of demagogues of the past.
Moreover, Trump, like many past demagogues, presents himself as a
prophet incapable of being wrong, disdains any sense of nuance and
uses a militarized discourse populated by words such as "kill,"
"destroy," "attack" and "fight," all of which display his
infatuation with violence and deep disdain for dialogue,
thoughtfulness and democracy itself. Trump is an anti-intellectual
who distorts the truth even when proven wrong, and his appeals are
emotive rather than based on facts, reason and evidence.
Trump and his ilk merge a hypernationalism,
racism, economic fundamentalism and religious bigotry with a
flagrant sense of lawlessness. His hate-filled speech is matched by
an unsettling embrace of violence against immigrants and other
oppositional voices issued by his supporters at many of his rallies.
This type of lawlessness does more than encourage hate and violent
mob mentalities; it also legitimates the kind of inflammatory
rhetoric that gives credibility to acts of violence against others.
There has been an eerie silence from Trump and other Republican
Party presidential candidates in the face of the killing of three
people at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado, the shooting of
Black Lives Matter protesters by white supremacists in Minneapolis,
the increasing attacks on mosques throughout the United States, and
the alarming number of shootings of Black men and youth by white
police officers, not to mention the recent shooting in San
Bernardino, California.
Trump and his fellow right-wing extremists rail
against Mexican immigrants, Syrian refugees and young people
protesting police violence but said nothing about the police officer
who shot Laquan McDonald, a Black 17-year-old, 16 times, or about
the Chicago Police Department's refusal to make public a year-old
squad-car video of the incident. And Trump's camp has remained
silent about the threat of white supremacists groups in the United
States, the US drone strikes that killed members of a wedding party
in Afghanistan and the illegal targeted assassination of alleged
terrorists.
This is not simply the behavior of moral and
political cowards; it is the toxic affirmation of the machineries of
death we associate with fascism. Such acts point to a large climate
of lawlessness in US society that makes it all the easier to ignore
human rights, justice and democracy itself. There are historical
precedents for this type of violence and for the hate-filled racist
speech of the politicians who create the climate that legitimates
it. We heard this same hatred in the words of Hitler, Mussolini,
Pinochet and other demagogic orators who have ranted against Jews,
communists and others alleged "infidels."
Totalitarianism lives on in new forms and it is
just as terrifying and dangerous today as it was in the past.
Trump's recent call to bring back waterboarding
and to support a torture regime far exceeds what might be called an
act of stupidity or ignorance. Torture in this instance becomes a
means of exacting revenge on those whom the right considers to be
"other," un-American and inferior - principally Muslims, immigrants
and activists taking part in the movement for Black lives. We have
heard this discourse before during the totalitarian regimes of the
1930s and later during the dictatorships in Latin America in the
1970s. Heather Digby Parton is right when she writes that Donald
Trump "may be the first openly fascistic frontrunner for the
Republican presidential nomination but the ground was prepared and
the seeds of his success sowed over the course of many years. We've
had fascism flowing through the American political bloodstream for
quite some time."
(1)
This is a discourse that betrays dark and
treacherous secrets not simply about Trump, but also about the state
of US culture and politics. Trump's brutal racism, cruelty and
Nazi-style policy recommendations are more than shocking; they are
emblematic of totalitarianism's hatred of liberalism, its call for
racial purity, its mythic celebration of nationalism, its embrace of
violence, its disdain for weakness and its anti-intellectualism.
This is the discourse of total terror. These elements of
totalitarianism have become the new American normal. The conditions
that produced the torture chambers, intolerable violence,
extermination camps and the squelching of dissent are still with us.
Totalitarianism is not simply a relic of the past. It lives on in
new forms and it is just as terrifying and dangerous today as it was
in the past.
(2)
Trump gives legitimacy to a number of fascist
policies through his appeal to hypernationalism and disdain of human
rights, his portrayal of Muslims and immigrants as a racial and
religious threat, a rampant sexism, his obsession with national
security, his aggressive mobilization of a culture of fear, his
targeting of dissent and individual groups, his endorsement of human
rights abuses such as torture, his support for the ongoing
militarization of public life, his invocation of an external enemy
as a threat to "our way of life," his call for the creation of a
detention system as part of a state of emergency, support for a
blind patriotism, his calls for the suspension of the rule of law,
his affirmation of a belligerent masculinity, and his support for an
aggressive imperial policy.
Mark Summer is right in arguing that the ghost of
fascism runs through US society, indicating that fascist sympathies
never went away and that the threat of fascism has to be taken
seriously. Summer
writes that fascism didn't win on the battlefield, but it won
ideologically:
It won because the same fears, the same greed,
the same hatred that fueled its growth in the first part of the
twentieth century never went away. The symbols of fascism became
anathema, but the causes ... went deep. And gradually, slowly,
one step at a time, all those vices became first tolerated, then
treated as virtues, and then as the only acceptable view....
[For instance,] our long, stumbling lurch to the right; the
building force of corporate power; the relentless need for war;
a police whose power of enforcement is divorced from law; a
preening nationalism that rewards the full rights of citizenship
only to those who fit an ever-narrower mold ... I'm not saying
we're moving toward fascism. I'm saying we started that drift a
long time ago, and now we're well across the line.
Trump is not just an ethically dead aberration.
Rather, he is the successor of a long line of fascists who shut down
public debate, attempt to humiliate their opponents, endorse
violence as a response to dissent and criticize any public display
of democratic principles. The United States has reached its endpoint
with Trump, and his presence should be viewed as a stern warning of
the nightmare to come. Trump is not an isolated figure in US
politics; he is simply the most visible and popular expression of a
number of extremists in the Republican Party who now view democracy
as a liability. Ben Carson, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio all support an
ideology that reduces certain human beings "to anonymous beings."
Think about their prevailing attacks on Mexican immigrants, Black
people and Syrian refugees. Primo Levi, the great writer and
survivor of Auschwitz, called this use of dehumanizing abstractions
one of the core principles of Nazi barbarism. Fast forward to
Trump's endorsement of violence at his rallies, coupled with his
overt racism, his call for mass surveillance, his discourse of mass
hatred and his embrace of politics as an extension of war.
This is not the discourse of Kafka, but of those
extremists who have become cheerleaders for totalitarianism. Trump
is not a straight talker, as some writers have claimed, or merely
entertaining. As David L. Clark pointed out in a personal
correspondence, the frankness of Trump's call for violence coupled
with his unapologetic thirst for injustice position him as the
"latest expression of a fascism that has poisoned political life
throughout modernity. He is unabashedly vicious because he is both
an agent and a symptom of a barren political landscape in which
viciousness goes insolently unhidden."
(3) Trump is a
monster without a conscience, a politician with a toxic set of
policies. He is the product of a form of finance capitalism and a
long legacy of racism and violence in which conscience is put to
sleep, democracy withers and public values are extinguished. This is
truly a time of monsters and Trump is simply the most visible and
certainly one of the most despicable.
What must be acknowledged is that Trump is the
most extreme visible expression of a new form of authoritarianism
identified by the late political theorist, Sheldon Wolin. According
to Wolin, all the elements are in place today for a contemporary
form of authoritarianism, which he calls "inverted totalitarianism."
Wolin writes:
Thus the elements are in place: a weak
legislative body, a legal system that is both compliant and
repressive, a party system in which one part, whether in
opposition or in the majority, is bent upon reconstituting the
existing system so as to permanently favor a ruling class of the
wealthy, the well-connected and the corporate, while leaving the
poorer citizens with a sense of helplessness and political
despair, and, at the same time, keeping the middle classes
dangling between fear of unemployment and expectations of
fantastic rewards once the new economy recovers. That scheme is
abetted by a sycophantic and increasingly concentrated media; by
the integration of universities with their corporate
benefactors; by a propaganda machine institutionalized in
well-funded think tanks and conservative foundations; by the
increasingly closer cooperation between local police and
national law enforcement agencies aimed at identifying
terrorists, suspicious aliens, and domestic dissidents.
(4)
Totalitarianism destroys everything that makes
politics possible. It is both an ideological poison and a brutal
mode of governance and control. It puts reason to sleep and destroys
any viable elements of democracy. Trump reminds us of
totalitarianism's addiction to tyranny, its attachments to the
machineries of death and its moral emptiness. What is crucial to
acknowledge is that the stories, legacies and violence that are part
of totalitarianism's history must be told over and over again so
that it becomes possible to recognize how it appears in new forms,
replicated under the banner of terror and insecurity by design, and
endlessly legitimated by the image-making of the corporate
disimagination machines. The call to safety in authoritarian
societies is code for illicit spying, treating people as criminals,
militarizing the police, constructing a surveillance state, allowing
the killing of Black people as acts of domestic terrorism, and
ultimately making disappear those individuals and groups that we
dehumanize or consider threatening. The extremist fervor that Trump
has stirred up should be a rallying cry for a struggle not simply
against a crude and reactionary populism, but also against the
tyranny of totalitarianism in its new and proto-fascist forms.
Note: This article was adapted from a much
shorter article that appeared previously on CounterPunch.
Footnotes
1. Heather
Digby Parton, "The Unprecedented Nightmare of Donald Trump: He's
Actually a Fascist," AlterNet, [November 25, 2015]. Online:
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/unprecedented-nightmare-donald-trump-hes-actually-fascist.
It is interesting to note that John Kasich released an ad directly
connecting Donald Trump to the Nazis. Hopefully, the corporate media
will wake up and do the same thing. See TrueBlueMontaineer,
"Kasich's new Trump ad goes full on Godwin and it's a doozy,"
Daily Kos (November 24, 2015). Online:
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2015/11/24/1454059/-Kasich-s-new-Trump-ad-goes-full-Godwin-and-it-s-a-doozy?detail=email
2. See,
especially, Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism,
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York: 2001).
3. Personal
correspondence with David L. Clark. November 30, 2015.
4. Ibid.,
14-15.
