We are not barreling toward fascism. Fascism requires a program and unity of purpose.
BY NEAL GABLER | MARCH 29, 2017
So many of us were wrong, myself included, about Donald Trump. We saw in the jut-jawed, brow-furrowed Mussolini-like posturing, in the blatant narcissism, in the reckless disregard for truth, the anger and incitement to hatred, the declamations that he would fix everything single-handedly on Day One of his presidency, his disdain for democracy and hints that he would lock up his opponents — we saw in all of these things incipient fascism.
After the inauguration, I began reading Victor Klemperer’s chilling diaries on the rise of Nazism, I Will Bear Witness, and Sebastian Haffner’s memoir of the early days of Hitler, Defying Hitler. The analogies were all too close. Others on these pages have made similar observations. We were on the verge of something unprecedented, something horrifying. We were on the verge of authoritarian government headed by an ignoramus and possible psychopath. We were on the verge of the end of democracy.
And then, last Friday, with the demise of the Republican attempt to repeal Obamacare and replace it with… well, with a massive tax giveaway to the rich, we discovered — I discovered — that I was fearing the wrong thing. It’s not Trump’s ability to marshal the forces of repression that should terrify us. It’s his inability to marshal forces to conduct even the most basic governance. Trump really is a presidential Joker. He knows how to wreak havoc, but he doesn’t seem to know how to do, or seem to want to do, much else.
This isn’t to discount the fascistic dangers inherent in Trump. We all know that he has an authoritarian temperament. He likes the binary and berates the latter in the pairs: winners and losers, majorities and minorities (never mind that he won a minority of the popular vote), rich and poor, powerful men and feckless women, bullying America and every other country. He prefers muscle to negotiation, despite his much vaunted, and now much tarnished, skill at dealmaking. He loves strongmen and considers himself one of them.
His desire, doubtless, was to Putinize this country with the help of his Republican lackeys. Or perhaps the better analogy is that he wanted to turn the country into one giant episode of The Apprentice, in which everyone vied for his favor. With seigniorial hauteur, he, King Donald, would point thumbs-up or thumbs-down.
So here is the good news. Whatever his dreams of dominance and his possible aspirations to one-man rule, he simply does not have the aptitude or the discipline to realize them. We saw that last week. He thought he could bully, charm, finesse, arm-twist and threaten his way to victory, but no one was buying it — in part, I think, because he tried to make it all about his power, not the power of Congress, and he was already on such thin ice before the Obamacare debacle that he didn’t have much suasion with them.
Why abet him, those Republican misanthropes may have thought, when at some point, they knew they might have to distance themselves from him? In any case, some of those legislators realized that Trump and his aides were way out of their depth. Hitler was able to parlay his minority into implacable power because he organized a rigid, disciplined crew of sociopaths on a mission. Trump has the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.
So that’s the good news — sort of. To have an authoritarian state, you have to possess not just the impulse to authoritarianism but the talent for it, which is more than saying, “It’s going to be great,” or “Believe me,” or telling opponents how “sick” and “sad” they are.
Now for the bad news. Two diametrically opposed impulses seem to have been warring in Trump for quite a while — that authoritarian tendency to rule, and a tendency to create misrule. If Trump isn’t a fascist, or at least a successful one, he is something nearly as bad: Donald Trump is a solipsistic anarchist.
Of course he wants to accrue power, which may be what misled us into thinking he was a potential fascist. It’s just that he doesn’t seem to know how to do anything with it other than to promote himself and puff his ego, which means that everything crumbles around him. And of course, like most strongmen, he wants to do harm to the less powerful — to wit, immigrants and the poor — but it may be no accident that even his attempts at strong-arming turn out to have the opposite effect: chaos.
The truth may be that chaos is more his métier than tyranny. As much as he says he hates losing, we may have actually caught a glimpse of the real Trump, the one sitting at his desk, smug and seemingly self-satisfied after his terrible defeat on Friday. This Trump may have thought he won by losing. No, he hadn’t won the congressional vote. But he had sown disarray, certainly within his own party and gradually throughout the health care system, especially once he joins judicial challenges to curb Medicaid expansion, as he undoubtedly will. The anarchistic tendency prevailed over the authoritarian one. Things fell apart. He wasn’t necessarily an unhappy Joker.
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