It is March 2016, and we marvel at things said on television. It is a political year, and an American woman is quoted as saying, “I don’t care what he says, I’m going to vote for him!”
What a consternating remark that is! How can it be that a person is not interested in what her candidate says? Surely we can only know whom to vote for based on what he or she – the candidate – represents, and we can only know that by what proceeds from the mouth! How can the lady’s remark be explained?
It must be acknowledged that, however inane and dangerous, she does have a reason for her voting preference. What is she voting for if she’s not voting for any expressed political agenda? The answer is that she votes for a “personality”; she likes not what the person says necessarily, but the romantic idea of a superman so eminent, so delightfully above timidity that he seems to say what no one else will.
There is a grave danger in any developing cult of personality. (Don’t madmen too say things that no one else will?) Some of us have had the opportunity to study modern Germany in college, and in these highly instructive courses we learn that values cohere less and less to moral scruple when we attach all virtue to the superman himself, the guy who incautiously advocates (for literally anything). The myth is that the polity is evil from the outset and advocates for evil from the outset. People do not advocate for evil initially. They advocate for something that seems virtuous and sensible: growth in the status of the nation; the ultimate remedying of past wrongs; the full utilization of resources; the disabling of groups and agendas bent on destroying society or the “virtue” or the nation, or disabling a minority bent on putatively dominating the majority. And all this is amassed around the cult of personality. Framed as practical remedies, the demagogue expresses maladjusted and uncivilized values. And the reactionary and the dreamer eat it up.
The greatest danger to the United States is not political corruption, but the corruption that abides between the ears of the common American voter. In our childish romanticism we refuse to consider the obvious: that the candidate that is tearing his own political party apart will surely tear the country apart if he should ever attain to the presidency. Wisdom holds that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” Our romanticism unwittingly predicts the destruction of the nation, and in a nuclear world, perhaps also the entire world.
In 1931, the enemy within Germany was identified by the National Socialists (the Nazis) as the Jews in Germany. They were an easy scapegoat for all the sufferings that resulted from ill-advised war, loss of the war, and economic disaster. The Jewish minority constituted perhaps one percent of the population, and it was possible to mobilize the entire non-Jewish nation against that vulnerable minority. But we will know the dangerous sort by the essential values, not by the specific policies; individual policies and agendas can be complicated and confusing. Does the politician advocate separation? Does the man see the primary problems not in terms of beliefs and policies but in people and groups of people? When groups are identified as the problem, watch out! That means that division will follow from that “leadership”, and also potentially complete destruction – as happened in fascist Italy and fascist Germany in the 1940s.
Since common citizens are not very sophisticated philosophically and politically, it is quite difficult to identify the central elements of fascism. Since fascism is based very fundamentally on the stark inequality of political authority (as it is all about autocracy and totalitarianism, not democracy at all) – that is, its elevation above the masses – it can be identified by advocating for oppressive measures that are consistent with gross inequality.
There is no starker inequality than that which is evident between the living and the dead. The fascist can be expected to be an advocate of killing then. What sort of killing are we talking about? Well, there is the death penalty, of course. But the Nazis began in the mid-1930s by pushing forward a program to purge the severely mentally retarded from their nation. And many hundreds of mentally retarded persons were gassed in 1935 and 1936. These programs were not secret. College professors were conscripted (and corrupted) to give the august imprimatur of academia to the agenda, and thousands of college students in Germany were told about this useful cleansing that was to be accomplished to make Germany the great nation it ought to be.
But in such an environment, no one is inclined to ask the noble professor, “Sir, I must ask how this can be accomplished in a distinct and sharply controlled way? My great grandfather, when he was in his final years, was extremely strange in his behavior. Most of us thought he was insane. And he spent the last several months of his life in an asylum. My question is this: How can we know where to stop this? How can we stop short of killing our senior citizens too with this logic?”
Any impudent and imprudent youth who asked such a question was immediately criticized and his concerns were dismissed as nonsense; of course we’ll always cherish our elderly! How could it ever be otherwise?
The Germans started with the mentally retarded. Then they moved to persecute and imprison communists and suspected communists. Then they began persecuting liberals (some of whom identified themselves early by expressing concerns about the gassing of retarded persons). Then came November 1938 and Kristallnacht, the “night of broken glass,” and the widespread persecution of the jews of Germany. And we all know where this ugly, untenable road ended.
This brings us back to March 2016 and a candidate running for president of the United States and echoes of 1938. A Republican candidate sees violence at one of his campaign rallies and excuses it when it is done in defense of his agenda! He said that the person throwing the blow and initiating an assault – which was caught on camera and shown on national television in the second week of March, 2016 – was possibly someone he would assist with any lawsuit connected with the assault. The Republican candidate says that the attacker was “seventy-four years old… he obviously loves his country,” and that the assailant was the target of an obscene hand gesture. But aside from the fact that offense at hand gestures do not relate in any way whatever to love of country, and that by age 74 we are old enough to handle ourselves responsibly, there is the problem of treating assaults done in favor of the program or party as excusable assaults. Recall the Nazi Party comment on the pogrom of November 9-10, and the statement that it was not orchestrated by the Nazi Party itself, and “such demonstrations are not to be prepared or organized by the party, but so far as they originate spontaneously, they are not to be discouraged either.” This utter tolerance of lawlessness and violence that is done in the name of the political cause or candidate is precisely what the Republican demonstrates. Echoes indeed!
The candidate’s proposals are divisive: he proposes a massive wall-building project along the border between the United States and Mexico. (Note the difference: there is not an “immigration” problem, but a problem with them, the Mexican illegals, the people.) And he proposes the prohibition of “all Muslims” from entry into the United States. (Note that the problem is not identified as terrorism, but as people: “Muslims”) When the framing of a political problem is not understood as a set of policies that are based on the premise of widespread goodwill among the great majority of the world’s people, but seeing the problem in entire demographic segments of society (the poor, the unemployed, the old, the “foreign”, the female, the “liberal”, the Moslem, the “illegal”), backward policy agendas will follow. And these sorts of backward agendas are the very same that produced race segregation, sex discrimination, eugenics and various sorts of pogroms throughout the last several centuries.
That a major political party should uphold as its champion someone who is early in the political season identified as a radical and a fascist is worrisome in the extreme.
As for me, I shall raise my voice in unequivocal dissent. But my voice will doubtless be drowned and trumped by an infinitely superior trumpet: the cult of personality.