Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, has been widely discussed since Trump rose to power, writes Robert J. Shapiro in the Washington Monthly.
Unquestionably
one of the most important Western political thinkers of the 20th century,
Arendt was shaped by Adolph Hitler’s rise. She had been a student of Germany’s
three leading philosophers of her time—Edward Husserl, Karl Jaspers, and Martin
Heidegger. As a Jew, she fled Germany for Paris in 1933. She emigrated to the
United States in 1939, where she taught at Princeton University, the University
of California, Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and the New School for
Social Research.
Her 1951
analysis of the movements that propelled the rise of the Nazi and Stalinist
regimes begins with the insight that their followers were not a typical
interest group seeking benefits or rights. Instead, they’re individuals who
feel that recent disruptive societal changes cost them their status and are
brought together by a charismatic leader who exploits their shared sense of
injury.
The leader
of these movements offers lies to explain why his followers lost their place,
claims he can restore it given enough power, and, equally important,
manipulates his followers’ anger to support violence committed at his behest.
With
violence and threats now part of our politics, the question becomes, is the
MAGA movement a populist version of a normal interest group or an extremist
faction of the type that modern dictators have used to help establish and
support their rule?
As a
matter of history, the role of Trump’s mass movement in advancing his ambitions
to become an American strongman has some parallels with Hitler’s devoted
followers in the Sturmabteilung, the Brownshirts of the SA. The SA
began as an outside movement affiliated with the Nazi Party that intimidated
and harassed Hitler’s opponents and Jewish Germans. It was always distinct from
the Schutzstaffel or SS, the brutally violent agency of the Nazi
government that broke off from the SA following the Night of the Long Knives
purge in 1934. But members of the original SA mass movement became loyal,
public supporters of Hitler’s steps to suspend Germany’s constitution, much
like many MAGA followers today.
We don’t
have brownshirts brawling across American cities. But threats of
government-sanctioned violence are palpably present, as they were in Germany in
the early 1930s, and the president and his administration have repeatedly
defended the bloodshed in Minnesota and elsewhere by some elements of ICE.
Based on
the facts, MAGA is not an interest group, even an atypical one, but a mass
movement following an aspiring strongman of the kind Hannah Arendt saw in
Germany. Its political significance rests on its followers’ extreme views about
violence and democracy, their faith in Trump’s big lies, their defense of the
political use of intimidation and threats, and their support for Trump’s
attacks on democratic institutions. In these ways, MAGA shares features of the
popular movements that supported the rise and consolidation of dictatorial
power in the past century and the early years of this one.
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