Trump-Hating toward Totalitarianism
In the climax of the classic Pirates of Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs is shown presenting his iconic 1984 Big Brother commercial before his adoring audience. IBM is the tyrant and Apple is the revolutionary who takes them down. Everyone cheers. But, as Big Brother’s voice thunders over the crowd, Jobs’ associate points to Bill Gates backstage. Big Brother isn’t IBM—it’s Microsoft, the company Apple had just teamed up with to take on IBM. A sinking feeling comes over the idealistic young Jobs. To defeat the enemy, they had become the enemy.
It is a picture of our age. Anyone who reads The New York Times knows that Trump was an Orwellian monster who had to be taken down at all costs. And yet, to do so, anti-Trumpers waged a four-year political war in which every brand of intimidation, censorship, incitement, baseless accusation, and character assassination was employed. As everyone gathered in the socially un-distanced streets to celebrate defeating the great orange tyrant, someone somewhere was pointing at the political Left. To slay the monster, they had become the monster.
At a campaign rally in October, Trump said, “If Democrats are willing to cause such destruction in the pursuit of power, just imagine the destruction they would cause if they ever obtained the power they crave.” Since the election, we don’t have to imagine. We see it unfolding before us.
We need look no further than the eerie list-making of Trump supporters that cropped up in the lead up to and aftermath of the election. It began in early 2020 as commentators pondered what the post-Trump world would be like. In July, Atlantic columnist Anne Applebaum warned in a not-so-subtle overture to independent voters that history would judge Trump collaborators and enablers in the same way that history judged Hitler collaborators and enablers.
In October, economic advisor Robert Reich tweeted, “When this nightmare is over, we need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It would erase Trump’s lies, comfort those who have been harmed by his hatefulness, and name every official, politician, executive, and media mogul whose greed and cowardice enabled this catastrophe.” Up sprang the Trump Accountability Project to do just that.
Emboldened by the historic election, speculation turned into a full campaign. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined the chorus: “Is anyone archiving these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future? I foresee decent probability of many deleted Tweets, writings, photos in the future.” she tweeted Nov. 6. Hollywood types boldly foot-stomped the concept. “Never forget these enablers,” Zach Braff tweeted. “#RememberWhoSaidNothing,” Chris Evans added.
As election results firmed up and Trump’s litigation failed to overturn the outcome, rhetoric creeped toward threats. “A word of warning to those sending money to the Trump legal team at this point. This could later be considered to be a crime making you an accessory, if this stunt is deemed to be a coup attempt under President Biden,” Adam Schiff tweeted. A striking claim coming from a congressman who spent the previous four years trying to unseat the duly elected president of the United States.
Now, these musings can be spun in a number of ways. AOC can make anything seem unthreatening by adding an ‘lol’. But the fascistic undercurrent cannot be denied: These leftists mean to identify and punish political enemies once they are back in power. It doesn’t take a PhD in Political Science to know that this is at the core of fascism.
An unhinged Keith Olbermann gave the game away: “Trump can be and must be expunged. The hate he has triggered, the Pandora’s box he has opened, they will not be so easily destroyed. So, let us brace ourselves. The task is twofold. The terrorist Trump must be defeated, must be destroyed, must be devoured at the ballot box and then he and his enablers and his supporters and his collaborators and the Mike Lees and the William Barrs and the Sean Hannitys and the Mike Pences and the Rudy Giulianis and the Kyle Rittenhouses and the Amy Coney Barretts must be prosecuted and convicted and removed from our society while we try and rebuild it.”
Anyone who watches the Olbermann clip will be struck by his fervor. His rabid, snarling speech isn’t reminiscent of a journalist conveying a story or even an activist hoping to make a practical solution to a shared problem, but of a militant totalitarian with a one-track mind. He fancies himself a modern Edward R. Murrow, but his thrust is more like that of Paul J. Goebbels.
The Totalitarian Mind
The wide-eyed observer will wonder how it came to this. How could anyone who considers himself a lower-case ‘d’ democrat insinuate the most capital ‘T’ Totalitarian things? How could people who decry fascism actually participate in the very ethos that they are supposedly fighting?
An easy explanation is to point to Trump. Leftist firebrands like Olbermann and AOC assume that, since Trump is so terrible, they have license to be just as terrible. Like toddlers, they yell, ”He started it!” and all is justified. If your goal is to take down the monster, it’s okay to become your own monster.
But any reader of history knows that this is exactly how totalitarianism comes about. Totalitarians don’t suddenly appear out of the blue and start tyrannizing the people. The people must ask for it. And what makes them ask for tyranny? It starts with a profound hatred for a group or people. As Hannah Arendt explained in The Origins of Totalitarianism, the Soviet and Nazi regimes were only possible because the average citizens had been primed to the totalitarian mind. Arendt explains that a people must pass through three stages before they arrive at the totalitarianism that we know: The first is what we might call ‘Bugbearism’, where a people derives its self-identity from the hatred of another people or group; the second is ‘Existentialism’, where conflict with the bugbear is seen as a threat to the people’s existence; and the third is ‘Purificationism’, where the people resolves to eradicate the problem by any means. A brief reflection of each reveals just how closely our current path follows the pattern:
Stage I: Bugbearism
Around the time of the 2016 election a meme surfaced comparing the rise of Trump to the rise of Hitler. The argument was that the terror didn’t start with concentration camps and gas chambers; it started with divisive rhetoric and otherism. Totalitarians need to rally their people. And the best way to rally their people is against another people. While despots had always propped up foreign peoples as the foe, the totalitarian innovation was to identify a faction of the domestic people as the hated group.
Every totalitarian regime has its bugbear. For the Nazis it was the Communists and Jews. For the Soviets it was the Kulaks. For Maoists it was intellectuals. In each case, the bugbear was painted in such a terrible light as to elicit fear and loathing in the most innocent of citizens.
Since the hated group is integrated into the society, a campaign must be made to distinguish them. Disagreements are proven to be based on inherent differences and differences are so irreconcilable that ‘they’ seem to be another species. This is why talk turns so swiftly to dehumanizing. These others are not really humans—they are vermin, termites, pestilence. When the enemy is not human, it is much easier to hate them.
Of course, Trump had his bugbears, namely illegal immigrants and Islamic fundamentalists—foreign threats that every U.S. president since Clinton had battled. Trump’s campaign promises of building a border wall and prohibiting travel from Muslim countries drew criticism from modern and classical liberals alike, and cemented his critics’ perception of him as racist and xenophobic.
Today’s leftists have a bugbear too—Trump and his followers. Since this bugbear is domestic, the Left must do a job of distinguishing them. By the reports of Facebook commentators and mainstream media, these people are not only uneducated and bigoted, but outright sociopathic war criminals. Indeed, they are so vile as to be seen as less than human. Olbermann referred to them as “maggots”, a term which has a distinguished history in totalitarian rhetoric. Tune into a leftist social media echo chamber and you’ll see just how pervasive this dehumanizing is.
Real Bugbearism occurs when a people self-identifies with their hatred of the enemy. Arendt said that “Nazi propaganda was ingenious enough to transform antisemitism into a principle of self-definition, and thus to eliminate it from the fluctuations of mere opinion.” It is the difference between community and tribalism as David Brooks puts it: “Community is mutual love of a thing. Tribalism is mutual hate of another.” And who can deny that this is happening throughout America? It might be said that Trump’s rise and popularity have come about, not because of any of his merits but rather because he stands as a fearless counter to the Left. The anti-Trump movement’s label speaks for itself.
Stage II: Existentialism
In a recent study, researchers found that totalitarian tendencies are more likely to arise in societies where there is a high prevalence of deadly diseases. The explanation is simple: People are willing to do away with freedoms in order to protect themselves from an existential threat. The free movement of individuals and assembly of groups is how pathogens spread, and so there is an instinct to put up borders, increase rules, and limit freedom to stop that spread.
Tyrants exploit this phenomenon in a couple of ways. First, they emphasize the risks of any pathogens that might be present. Note that one of Hitler’s first initiatives was to fumigate the factories to clear out tuberculosis. They can also manipulate this tendency simply by making any situation into a life-and-death matter. If people believe their lives are at risk, they will react as if they were. Existentialism leads to fear and fear opens the door for control. As Camus put it, “The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants.”
The Left has embraced this strategy wholesale. Old school liberal Mark Lila explained how today’s leftists are heirs of the 1960s civil rights movement, which was successful primarily because it was made into a moral issue by religious leaders such as Martin Luther King. Based on the success of that movement, leftists learned that they can gain an upper hand in an argument just by moralizing it and turning anyone who disagrees into a moral monster. The way that they do this is by making everything into a matter of life-and-death, even when there is no clear danger.
These days, every matter is of the gravest moral concern: Systemic racism is tantamount to genocide, transphobia is killing people; climate change will bring about the end of the world. Anyone who watched the 2020 DNC will recognize the refrain: ‘Vote like your life depends on it, because it does.’ And how often does one hear the statement ‘People are dying!’ as if to settle the case?
Of course, there is the Coronavirus Pandemic, which started as an actual disease but has since become strictly moral since. The message is unequivocal: If you do not wear a mask or if you gather with other people, then you are responsible for the deaths of more than 300,000 Americans. Indeed, since it is assumed that the science is so clear and the experts have warned us of the dangers, you are not only responsible for the deaths, it is assumed that you actually want all the people to die. Trump was not simply being optimistic when he tried to downplay the risks, he was being a devious tyrant out to kill as many Americans as he could. ‘He has blood on his hands’, as critics will say.
We see this across the board. If one disagrees with the radical Marxist agenda of Black Lives Matter, he is racist supporting the genocide of African Americans. If a man supports traditional gender roles, he is pushing toxic masculinity and rape culture. If a teacher doesn’t think children should be placed on puberty blockers, he is contributing to the bullying and abuse of millions of children. If you disagree, it cannot be because you have a well-founded argument or even a diverse perspective, but rather because you have some sort of phobia or sociopathy.
The goal is to gain an upper hand in debates. But, as Lila warned, the effect is to undermine efforts that are actually moral. If everything’s an existential crisis, nothing is. At the same time, it ultimately removes the possibility for debate. If a person is not allowed to disagree without being labeled a sociopath, there is no civil recourse. They either agree or must be eliminated from society, a condition that cannot end well.
Stage III: Purificationism
Once the bugbear is painted as a moral monster, anything is justified to oust them. Not only are transgressions excused to do so; they are encouraged. As a matter of social justice, they aren’t even necessary evils, they are necessary goods—duties—to rid us of the existential threat.
One of the earliest figures to voice this mentality was a Russian Maximalist named Ivan Pavlov (no relation to the Nobel-winning psychologist of the same name). This earlier Pavlov wrote a tract entitled ‘The Purification of Mankind’, in which he divided the people into two ‘races’: ‘exploiters’ and ‘exploited’. Pavlov concluded that the exploiter race was “morally inferior to our animal predecessors,” and had to be exterminated by the morally superior race of the exploited class. In one prescient essay, Pavlov demonstrated all three stages in the totalitarian mind, from identifying the bugbear to presenting them as an existential threat to the solution of exterminating them.
Wholesale murder is not the only method of purification. Perhaps it is worse what totalitarians do with the truth. Totalitarians also employ social isolation, silencing, censorship, blacklisting, and psychological manipulation such as gaslighting to remove the trouble group from society. Orwell spoke of ‘unpersoning’, the Stalinist way of removing from pictures and history anyone who had become politically inconvenient. Anything to purify our land of the blight that is threatening us.
Any dispassionate participant will recognize that this is exactly what is going on today. Though the political Left has not quite made it to concentration camps and extermination yet, they have made unpersoning into an art. Thanks to an overwhelming coalition of mainstream media, academia, big tech, and governmental bodies, the Left has been able to monopolize political discourse, dispel contradictory perspectives, and ostracize anyone who disagrees. To chronicle a few of the more striking examples from this year:
In June, in response to the BLM protests at the time, conservative commentator Heather McDonald wrote a piece bringing into question the narrative of police racism. She cited a scientific study published in a respected peer-reviewed journal as her central evidence. But as soon as the study’s authors realized their work had been used to undermine the argument for systemic racism, they disavowed their study and the journal retracted it. It was not taken down because it lacked scientific rigor or presented false conclusions, but because the authors believed the information was being used in a dangerous way.
Around the same time, as George Floyd protests erupted across American cities, a group of self-described health professionals, students, and activists published an open letter stating that the protests didn’t pose a COVID risk because they were fighting the public health risk of racism.
And then there was the Stalin-esque ‘disappearing’ of Hunter Biden’s laptop. First, the paper that broke the story The New York Post was muzzled over anti-piracy rules. Then, when it had become clear that it wasn’t piracy, mainstream media called it Russian disinformation and ignored the story. Only after the election did some outlets finally begin to cover the bombshell.
These, coupled with countless other examples, as well as the constant campaign to demonetize, shadow-ban, and cancel anyone who does not conform to the leftist narrative amount to the greatest propaganda campaign since the lead-up to the Second World War. No one dedicated to liberal democracy can justify the brazen censorship and gaslighting that legacy media outlets and social media companies have engaged in during the last year.
Ultimately, concentration camps and extermination are not wholly unthinkable in this climate. With AOC’s list-making and Olbermann’s bombast, and a relentless assault by the media, even normal people have begun to think that violence is acceptable. I recall several seemingly mild-mannered young professional women celebrating the death and destruction inflicted during the George Floyd riots. When questioned, their justification was that the violence was necessary because the message wouldn’t have been heard otherwise.
Meanwhile, more militant factions are not even hiding their motives. The man who attempted to assassinate GOP senators at a baseball practice in 2017 was a member of groups called ‘Terminate the Republicans’ and ‘The Road to Hell Is Paved with Republicans’. The man who killed a Trump supporter during a Portland rally said he was “100% ATIFA” and “ready for war”. Evidently, ideas have consequences.
Trump-Hating toward Totalitarianism
In July, a group of prominent liberals in media and academia including J. K. Rowling, Cornel West, and Noam Chomsky voiced their concerns over the cancel culture storm which has been raging the last five years or so. In the letter, they acknowledged that Trump is a threat to democracy but suggested that resistance could lead to a dogmatic coercion that would be just as bad or worse. It was a levelheaded and well-articulated plea for free thought and free expression. The fact that hardcore leftists then disparaged and tried to cancel the signers of the letter proves how fargone the Left has become.
As former New York Times Editor Bari Weiss said, we need to “stop being shocked” at the totalitarian tendencies of the Left. The forces driving the political Left at this moment are hostile to critical thinking, free expression, and liberal democracy in general, and can only lead to totalitarianism. If you listen to the most honest commentators of the movement, you’ll realize that is their clear end and hating Trump was just the means.
