It's starting to feel like 1932 all over again

 We are living in dangerous and disturbing times.  I don't think this needs repeating to most people who have been paying attention to the news over the past decade or two, but it seems as though many of our fellow human denizens of the earth have either not been alert recently, or else have convinced themselves that this is not the case.  The rise of populist leaders around the world (as I wrote about here), the rapidly warming global climate, the rapid destruction of the natural world, our ballooning human population, widening economic inequality, the geopolitical rise of authoritarian states such as China, Russia, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, and the morass of social-media-fuelled disinformation polluting the well of public discourse have each been a negative development, but put together they provided the kindling to ignite the raging fires of social, political and economic upheaval caused by 2020's covid-19 pandemic.  

The current area of greatest concern for those of us concerned with liberal democracy and the idea of human progress is, of course, the United States with its increasingly unhinged President paging through the authoritarian playbook to try to cling on to power after the November election.  A recent article by Barton Gellman in The Atlantic (a publication that has consistently produced some of the best reporting on the pandemic, on US civil rights protests and on the US political process throughout this Calvary of a year that is 2020) has laid out a chilling litany of the lengths to which the Trump campaign is prepared to go to delegitimize the election results and to employ legally dubious manoeuvres at the state level to try to fix the results by bypassing the popular vote in various battleground states and getting state governors and legislators to send their chosen Trump-loyalist Republicans as electors to the execrable Electoral College.  Rosa Brooks and the Transition Integrity Project tried to game out various scenarios involving a contested election result, but tellingly they didn't follow some of them through to completion as it led to a dark and unpredictable place.  What do you do when one of the two main candidates for US President doesn't follow any of the rules or respect any of the norms associated with the democratic process?  The problem is compounded by the fact that Trump has never faced any meaningful consequences for a lifetime of breaking the rules, refusing to obey norms (or the law), stonewalling, blustering, lying and cheating.  (Trump Inc, a brilliant investigative podcast produced by WNYC Studios, is particularly good at detailing a lifetime litany of particular incidents, and is well worth a listen.)

Adding fuel to the fire, yesterday Trump refused to commit to honouring the election results or to leaving office should he lose.  In any other time in American history, this would have been the only story in the news and would likely have resulted in resignation or impeachment, but like frogs being boiled slowly, Americans have become insensitive to the truly outrageous statements and actions that Trump produces on a daily, or even hourly, basis.   In fact, listening to a series of followup interviews with undecided voters carried out by the New York Times, it seems as though a huge swath of the American public is utterly unaware of the sheer unprecedented volume of lies and dishonesty that Trump spews out (over 20,000 lies in the past 4 years, according to a list maintained by the Washington Post).  

While it's dispiriting to see that Trump's relentless assault on truth and honesty is having an effect on those Americans who don't pay a huge amount of attention to politics, it's striking to me how many well-educated sophisticated consumers of the news buy into Trump's dishonesty.  On Facebook I see people who should know better parroting lines of nonsense that a ninth-grader would see through in seconds.  As a teacher, and as someone who studied science in university, it pains me profoundly to see people accepting mendacious and illogical arguments and clinging tenaciously to statements that are objectively false with the fierce, desperate determination of an IS jihadi.  Those of us fortunate enough to have been born into middle-class comfortable existences in the rich countries of the world like to think that reasoned debate and presenting the facts should be enough to change the minds of those espousing hateful or ridiculous views, but increasingly this seems not to be the case, with grown adults disappearing down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories.  The covid-19 pandemic has led to an incredible increase in belief in conspiracy theories, including the truly dangerous lunacy of QAnon, which a majority of Republicans seem to support either partially or wholly, according to a recent Daily Kos/Civiqs poll.  

A Historical Parallel

A few months ago I read the book The Death of Democracy, by Benjamin Carter Hett.  It examined the rise of Hitler to power and the collapse of the Weimar Republic.  I vaguely knew the story in its broad brushstrokes, but reading about the fine details was illuminating and not at all encouraging for those of us worried about Donald Trump's would-be authoritarianism.  The book examines the role that other right-of-centre politial parties played in Hitler's rise to power.  Hett shows that in 1932 figures such as Kurt von Schleicher and Franz von Papen spent enormous amounts of energy on Byzantine political manoeuvres intended to maintain the centre-right in power, keep the Socialists and Communists at bay and prevent Hitler's Nazis, the party with the greatest number of seats, out of government.  When Schleicher's government fell in January of 1933, the ousted Papen prevailed on the doddering President Paul von Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as Chancellor.  Papen was convinced that he and the members of the DNVP party could control Hitler, whom they regarded as an ill-educated lunatic with stirring oratorical skills but no ability to govern.  Four weeks later the Reichstag Fire broke out and the Nazis used the fire as an excuse to impose a state of emergency and seize all power for themselves.  Germany's post-WWI democracy was dead.  Schleicher was murdered by the Nazis in 1934 during the Night of the Long Knives, while Papen was sidelined and sent out of the country as ambassador to Austria and subsequently to Turkey.  

"History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes."  This quote is attributed (probably falsely) to Mark Twain, and it captures the essence of trying to interpret current events in the light of past historical parallels.  In this case, the obvious figure in the Hitler role is Trump, while Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio are the Schleichers and Papens of the modern day, right-wing politicians convinced that they can control the lamentably crude demagogue and turn him to serve their own ends.  Perhaps the 2020 election will serve as the Reichstag Fire, with Trump and his enablers using ginned-up conspiracy theories about voter fraud, law and order, the Deep State and whatever else they can come up with to suspend civil liberties, cling to power and impose Trump's deep-seated authoritarian fantasies in real life.  It's not a comforting thought.  The fate of Schleicher might possibly cause some unease among Lindsay Graham, William Barr, Mike Pompeo and others who have hitched their wagons firmly to the careering runaway horse that is Donald Trump.

It doesn't have to turn out this way, of course, but Trump and his loyalist henchmen are signalling clearly what they would like to do.  I would like to think that American politics and civics are strong and resilient enough to withstand such a scenario, but with the gutting of US civics education over the past few decades, the rise of right-wing rabble-rousing talk radio and the decline in public trust in civic and political institutions, the system of US government may be as hollowed out as that of Weimar Germany in 1932, or the French Third Republic in the late 1930s.  If this is the case, then a vigorous enough push by Trump might be enough to bring the entire structure crashing down, bringing in its wake a nativist white-supremacist authoritarian state.  

I sincerely hope that this is not the case, as it would be disastrous not just for the people of the United States, but for the entire world.  I wish I could be more optimistic about the outcome, but ever since I lived in the US for two years in the early 1990s, I have been worried about the authoritarian bent of many Americans, and the fact that the centre of the political spectrum lies so much further to the right than in any other democratic country.  A recent book by the Boston University history professor Heather Cox Richardson, entitled How the South Won the Civil War, portrays a convincing narrative of how the ideology of the pre-Civil-War white plantation owners and the Democratic party in the Southern States has lived on in various guises to re-emerge recently in mainstream Republican politics.  I hope that the result is different from what happened in 1861, but I fear that something equally horrible may be about to happen.  I hope that my American friends will be able to sway the outcome in the direction of a more positive outcome over the course of the next 40 days.