By Hussain Abdul-Hussain
-The writer is a Washington-based political analyst. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Kuwaiti daily Al Rai, among others.
WASHINGTON (AA) - American supporters of President Donald Trump might favor him over average politicians because they believe that he is an honest man who “tells it like it is”. With a fortune said to make him independent of donors, Trump is supposedly the president who speaks what is on people’s minds, and the president who -- at long last -- can take on “the political establishment” that is formed of both parties, the Republican and the Democratic.
For his part, President Trump seems to bask in his role as the people’s savior. To live up to his reputation, he announced that his presidency marks the return of “power to the people,” where it belongs. Trump’s insistence on communicating with Americans through Twitter also indicates that he perceives of himself as the president who talks directly to the people, without the editorial embellishment of “the media”. In fact, so populist has Trump become that he made attacking “the media” his top priority. Trump went as far as to declare the media “the enemy of the American people”.
But what the extremely rich Trump and his usually poor supporters see as innovative governance is in fact reminiscent of Europe’s fascist regimes of the early and mid-last century.
Hannah Arendt, one of the most remarkable political scientists of the past century, wrote that in some European countries, before the rise of fascism, an “alliance between the much-too-rich and much-too-poor… took effect in the form of pan-movements”. The aim of these “movements,” Arendt argued, “was to combine domestic and foreign policy in such a way as to organize the nation for the looting of foreign territories and permanent degradation of alien peoples”.
Arendt’s theoretical perspective finds its echo in Trump’s rhetoric. The U.S. president has repeatedly mixed domestic and foreign policies. At his speech at the Conservative Public Affairs Committee (CPAC), Trump said that the wars in the Middle East have cost America $6 trillion. He said that using that money for domestic purposes would have done wonders for Americans. Trump has often berated America’s allies, including members of NATO, for not paying their dues. He has openly called for “taking the oil” of Iraq.
Arendt also wrote, in her classic three-volume book The Origins of Totalitarianism, that “the mob,” which usually carried populists like Trump to power, “was composed of the refuse of all classes”. This composition, Arendt said, “made it seem that the mob and its representatives had abolished class differences, that those standing outside the class-divided nation were the people itself, rather than its distortion and caricature”.
Arendt argued that Europe’s historians in the early 20th century “saw the possibility of converting democracy into a despotism whose tyrants would rise from the mob and lean on it for support”. But that was not all. The bourgeoisie believed that it could use the mob to further its financial interests. “High society” showed “growing admiration for the underworld, its continuous step-by-step retreat on all questions of morality, and its growing taste for anarchical cynicism,” she wrote, adding that the bourgeois attempts to use “the state and its instruments of violence for its own economic purposes were always half successful... until the German bourgeoisie staked everything on the Hitler movement and aspired to rule with the help of the mob, but then it turned out to be too late”.
Rich Americans have been in cahoots with “the mob” for a few decades now. Rich Americans often employ populist social and racial rhetoric, and infuse it with economic theories -- such as lowering taxes and deregulation -- that are to the advantage of the rich at the expense of the poor “mob”. Trump’s appointment of a half-dozen billionaires and Wall Street titans to his Cabinet confirms Arendt’s argument that the rich often agitate the poor for the rich’s benefit.
Finally, Arendt believed that “unprincipled politics could not be played” in any democracy “until a mass of people was available who were free of all principles”. This, the Republicans have so far managed to create after decades of berating intellectuals and the elite, a process which Trump reinforced by going after pollsters and the media. By undermining “the rules of democracy” and creating his own world of “alternative facts,” Trump has in fact facilitated his usage of a mob that “could be inspired only by racial doctrines”.
What might sound today as prophecies from a political scientist who died in the 1970s were merely her description of the classic case of the rise of fascism. The elements that Arendt described look like a perfect fit for Republican politics over the past three decades. Trump only boosted these politics and made them more mainstream and acceptable.
Just like anti-Semitism spiked in Europe with the rise of fascism, hate crime surged in the U.S. with the rise of Trump. In October, the Huffington Post reported a 6 percent increase in hate crime across America, with anti-Muslim crime rising by a whopping 89 percent, a post-2001 record. According to the website, Jews were “still by far the most frequent target of religious hate crime” at the time of reporting.
That same month, Hadas Gold, the Jewish-American editor of Politico’s “On the Media” blog, received a Tweet consisting of a photoshopped image of her with bloody bullet hole in her forehead and a yellow star, worn by Jews in Nazi Germany pinned on her chest. “Don’t mess with our boy Trump or you will be the first in line for the camp,” the Tweet read. “Aliyah (emigrate to Israel) or line up by the wall, your choice,” it added.
In mid-January, a mosque was burnt outside Seattle, in the state of Washington, CNN reported. Less than two weeks later, a fire “completely destroyed” a mosque in Victoria, Texas, according to the Time magazine. The same mosque had been the target of a burglary a week before.
Hate crime against America’s Muslims, Jews, and journalists will probably continue, and even intensify, as long as Trump himself spews hate against such groups.
Many Americans, including from the Democratic Party, have called on their fellow Americans to avoid drawing parallels between Trump and one of history’s bloodiest dictators, Germany’s Hitler. They argue that such comparisons only diminish the gravity of Hitler’s bloodiness.
While it is true that Trump is still a long way from becoming Hitler, a political scientist can find in Trump’s rise elements of similar fascism, which if left unchecked, might pave the way for further change in the nature of the American democracy. After all, Germany did not knowingly veer into Nazism, but only after a series of incidents -- both incidental and accidental -- had unfolded and driven it, and the world, into one of its darkest episodes in history.
* Opinions expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Anadolu Agency's editorial policy