Mark Twain supposedly once said, “History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes,” and I think he was onto something.
The United States is not Weimar Germany, but there are some non-trivial similarities that ought not to be dismissed.
While Americans are not post-Great War Germans half-starved by years of reparations payments, I suspect a decent fraction of Donald Trump’s followers are working-class whites who are increasingly finding themselves left behind by a “globalization” that is eager to expose their wages to competition from people who will work in the rest of the world for a small fraction of what they are paid. Deprive someone of the ability to improve his economic situation, and rage is the understandable result.
Trump, like the National Socialists in the 1920s and 1930s, has encouraged his followers to aim that rage at scapegoats: for the Nazis, it was the Jews (and some others); for Trump, it is Latinos and Muslims.
There is a long tradition in the United States of the ruling class using race to divide people whose economic and class interests would otherwise tend to unite them. As my friend and Catholic author Mark Shea has said more than once, the tactic can be summarized as, “Let’s you and him fight.”
The Democratic Party in America bears a significant share of the blame for the rise of Trump, as the more bourgeois part of the German political left did for the rise of Adolf Hitler. As Thomas Frank describes in his new book, “Listen, Liberal: Whatever Happened to the Party of the People?” (Note: I’m not linking to Amazon because it is a horrific abuser of its workforce — both white collar and blue collar — so please do not buy the book from them.) It has become too much the party of the “Professional Class”- those with graduate degrees – and has all but abandoned its historical role as the party of labor and the little guy:
(T)oday the Democrats are the party of the professional class. The party has other constituencies, to be sure—minorities, women, and the young, for example, the other pieces of the “coalition of the ascendant”—but professionals are the ones whose technocratic outlook tends to prevail. It is their tastes that are celebrated by liberal newspapers and it is their particular way of regarding the world that is taken for granted by liberals as being objectively true. Professionals dominate liberalism and the Democratic Party in the same way that Ivy Leaguers dominate the Obama cabinet. In fact, it is not going too far to say that the views of the modern-day Democratic Party reflect, in virtually every detail, the ideological idiosyncrasies of the professional-managerial class.
Liberalism itself has changed to accommodate its new constituents’ technocratic views. Today, liberalism is the philosophy not of the sons of toil but of the “knowledge economy” and, specifically, of the knowledge economy’s winners.
Frank describes how, up until about the Carter presidency, organized labor was the largest and most powerful constituency of the Democratic Party, and their interests were reliably reflected in Democratic legislation and rhetoric – and the result was that as the country became more prosperous, workers had the power to negotiate for a fair share of the gains. (You older folks remember how there used to be talk everywhere about Americans’ “rising standard of living, right? Funny how you don’t hear that much anymore.)
I’ve mentioned before in this space that 35 or 40 years ago, it used to be a commonplace occurrence for blue-collar workers and white-collar workers to live in the same neighborhoods (white collars having the nicer houses in the tract, and the blue collars the more basic models.)
When I was a kid in the 1960s and 1970s, the distinction between blue- and white-collar workers had more to do with taste than with economics. White collars golfed; blue collars bowled. White collars drove Cadillacs; blue collars drove Chevys and Pontiacs. White collars hunted quail; blue collars hunted deer. White collars were Andy Williams; blue collars were Ralph Kramden.
As that world recedes further from the living memory of Americans, our politics have taken a decidedly darker turn.
Former New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges recently described the parallels between Donald Trump’s impact and the fascist movements of the 1930s:
Fascist movements build their base not from the politically active but the politically inactive, the ‘losers’ who feel, often correctly, they have no voice or role to play in the political establishment. The sociologist Émile Durkheim warned that the disenfranchisement of a class of people from the structures of society produced a state of ‘anomie’—a ‘condition in which society provides little moral guidance to individuals.’ Those trapped in this ‘anomie,’ he wrote, are easy prey to propaganda and emotionally driven mass movements. Hannah Arendt, echoing Durkheim, noted that ‘the chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships.’
In fascism the politically disempowered and disengaged, ignored and reviled by the establishment, discover a voice and a sense of empowerment.
…Fascism is aided and advanced by the apathy of those who are tired of being conned and lied to by a bankrupt liberal establishment, whose only reason to vote for a politician or support a political party is to elect the least worst
…Fascism expresses itself in familiar and comforting national and religious symbols, which is why it comes in various varieties and forms. Italian fascism, which looked back to the glory of the Roman Empire, for example, never shared the Nazis’ love of Teutonic and Nordic myths. American fascism too will reach back to traditional patriotic symbols, narratives and beliefs.
I have said it before and I will say it here: the rise of Donald Trump is a bright, flashing warning that American politics is broken, and deeply so.