“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi . . . but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
—Hannah Arendt
Under the Trump regime, Americans have entered into a dark period that cannot be understood without acknowledging the ways fascism has manifested in the past. Under Trump, justice has become the enemy of democratic leadership. As digital time replaces the time needed for informed judgments, everything takes place in the immediate present.1 Most evident in an age of celebrity and presidential tweets, thinking is reduced to information that is consumed instantly while consciousness becomes the enemy of contemplation. Our collective capacity to remember and to name injustice, and to imagine a reality different from the one that now confronts us, recedes with each new imposition of falsehood, obstruction, and diversion. Historical memory should always serve as a mode of moral witnessing and protection against tyranny. When it no longer does so, it signals a crisis of politics, agency, and civic literacy. This is particularly true today.
What follows is an attempt to assert the significance of historical memory as fundamental to the preservation of democracy in the face of an unprecedented shift toward authoritarianism and fascism. Reviving the memory of real and imagined horrors of a previous generation, strikingly represented in Orwell’s and Huxley’s fiction, is a way to understand the present descent of the United States into an authoritarian nightmare. Doing so offers a form of intellectual self-defense against Trumpism’s violence against truthfulness, accountability, reason, science, and liberal modernity. I begin with Orwell.
Orwell’s Nightmare
Before we credit Donald Trump with using George Orwell’s great novel as his codebook, we must note that Orwell’s terrifying vision of a totalitarian society has actually been a waking dream in the United States for many years—a country that maintains the largest prison system in the world, “with 2.2 million people in jail and more than 4.8 million on parole.”2 Originally published in 1949, 1984 provided a stunningly prophetic image of the totalitarian machinery of the surveillance state that was brought to life in 2013 through Edward Snowden’s exposure of the mass spying conducted by the U.S. National Security Agency. Orwell’s genius was not limited to this prediction alone. In addition, his work explores how modern democratic populations are won over by authoritarian ideologies and rituals, revealing how language specifically functions in the service of, deception, abuse and violence. He warned in exquisite and alarming detail how “totalitarian practice becomes internalized in totalitarian thinking.”3 Hannah Arendt added theoretical weight to Orwell’s fictional nightmare by arguing that totalitarianism begins with contempt for critical thought and that the foundation for authoritarianism lies in a kind of mass thoughtlessness in which a citizenry is “deprived not only of its capacity to act but also its capacity to think and to judge.”4
For Orwell, the mind-manipulating totalitarian state took as its first priority a war against what it called “thought crimes,” nullifying opposition to its authority not simply by controlling access to information but by undermining the very basis on which critical challenges could be waged and communicated. Orwell illustrated his point by providing examples of how language could be used to weaken the critical formative culture necessary for producing thinking citizens central to any healthy democracy. According to Orwell, totalitarian power drained meaning of any substance by turning language against itself, exemplified infamously through the slogans of the Ministry of Truth, such as: “War Is Peace,” “Freedom Is Slavery,” and “Ignorance Is Strength.” In recognizing how language fundamentally structures as much as it expresses thought, Orwell made clear how language could be distorted and circulated to function in the service of violence, deception, and corruption, and serve to utterly collapse any ethical distinction between good and evil, truth and lies.
The intersection, if not merger, of American politics with Orwell’s disquieting vision was evident in the frenzied media circus focused on Trump’s language that took place after Trump assumed the presidency. In a strange but revealing way, Orwell’s novel 1984 surged to Amazon.com’s number-one best seller in the United States and Canada. This followed two significant political events. First, Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s advisor, in a move echoing the linguistic inventions of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, coined the term “alternative facts” to justify why then press secretary Sean Spicer lied in advancing disproved claims about the size of Trump’s inauguration crowd.5 With apologies to his late father who was a pastor, Bill Moyers has called Conway the “Queen of Bullshit.”6 “Alternative facts,” or what should be called more precisely outright lies, is an updated term for what Orwell called “Doublethink,” when people blindly accept contradictory ideas or allow truth to be subverted in the name of an unquestioned common sense. In the second instance, within hours of assuming the presidency, Trump penned a series of executive orders that caused Adam Gopnik, a writer for The New Yorker, to rethink the relevance of 1984. Gopnik was compelled to go back to Orwell’s book, he writes, “Because the single most striking thing about [Trump’s] matchlessly strange first week is how primitive, atavistic, and uncomplicatedly brutal Trump’s brand of authoritarianism is turning out to be.”7
Unfortunately, the machinery of manipulation, intimidation, and distortion now commands the pinnacle of U.S. political and military power. In this Orwellian universe, facts are purged of their legitimacy, and the distinction between right and wrong disappears, promoting what Viktor Frankl once called “the mask of nihilism.”8 In this worldview, there are only winners and losers. Under such circumstances, “greed, vengeance, and gratuitous cruelty aren’t wrong, but are legitimate motivations for political behavior.”9 This is a discourse that dictates a future in which authoritarianism thrives and democracies die. It is the discourse of a dystopian society marked by a deep-seated anti-intellectualism intensified by the incessant undermining and collapse of civic literacy and civic culture. Offering no room for deciphering fact from fiction, the flow of disinformation works to dismantle self-reflection while it serves to infantilize and depoliticize large segments of the polity. This is a hallucinatory discourse that reduces politics to marketing, self-promotion, and a theater of retribution and cruelty. Such systematic efforts on the part of the Trump administration to mislead, fabricate, and falsify undermine the very capacity to think, judge, and exercise informed judgment. This is what David Theo Goldberg has called the landscape of “make-believe,” which functions as a vast disimagination machine.10
As Orwell often remarked, historical memory is dangerous to authoritarian regimes because it has the power to both question the past and reveal it as a site of injustice. Currently, Orwell’s machinery of organized forgetting is reinforced in American popular culture by a burgeoning landscape of mega-malls and theme parks, media-driven spectacles of violence, and a deluge of consumerism, self-interest, and sensationalism for those who can afford participation. In this sink-or-swim society, the ongoing financial starvation and evisceration of public schools and public universities ensures that the lessons of history are neutered or displaced altogether by an instrumentalist curriculum whose hallmark objective is to confer “job-ready skills.” For the citizens in 1984, the Ministry of Truth made it a crime to read any history outside the official narrative. But history was also falsified so as to render it useless as a crucial pedagogical practice both for understanding the conditions that shaped the present and for remembering what should never be forgotten. As Orwell shows, this is precisely why tyrants consider historical memory dangerous: history can readily be put to use in identifying present-day abuses of power and corruption.
The Trump administration offered a pointed example of this Orwellian principle of historical falsification when it recently issued a statement regarding the observance of International Holocaust Remembrance day. In the statement, the White House refused to mention its Jewish victims, thus erasing them from a monstrous act directed against an entire people. Politico reported that the official White House statement “drew widespread criticism for overlooking the Jews’ suffering, and was cheered by neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer.”11 Accounts of these events read like passages out of Orwell’s 1984 and speak to what historian Timothy Snyder calls the Trump administration’s efforts to look to authoritarian regimes of the 1930s as potential models.12
This act of erasure is but another example of the willingness of Trumpism to empty language of any meaning, a practice that constitutes a flight from historical memory, ethics, justice, and social responsibility. Under such circumstances, government takes on the workings of a disimagination machine, one characterized by an utter disregard for the truth and often accompanied, as in Trump’s case, by “primitive schoolyard taunts and threats.”13 In this instance, Orwell’s “Ignorance Is Strength” materializes in the Trump administration’s weaponized attempt not only to rewrite history but also to obliterate it, all of which contributes to what might be called a “drugged complacency.”14 Trump’s claim that he loves the poorly educated and his willingness to act on that assertion by flooding the media and the wider public with an endless proliferation of peddled falsehoods reveal his contempt for intellect, reason, and truth. Trump derides intelligence and revels in ignorance; he does not read books, appears addicted to watching television, and is aligned ideologically with dictators who turned books to cinders, destroyed libraries, shut down the free press, and disparaged and punished artists, intellectuals, writers, and socially responsible scientists.15
As the master of phony stories, Trump is not only at war with historical remembrance, science, civic literacy, and rationality, he also wages a demolition campaign against democratic ideals by unapologetically embracing humiliation, racism, and exclusion for those he labels as illegals, criminals, terrorists, and losers, categories implicitly equated with Muslims, Mexicans, women, the disabled, and the list only grows. As John Wight observes, Trump’s language of hate is “redolent of the demonization suffered by Jewish people in Germany in the 1930s, which echoes a warning from history.”16
Orwell’s point about duplicitous language was that, to some extent, all governments lie. The rhetorical manipulation one associates with Orwellian language is by no means unique to the Trump administration—though Trump and his acolytes have taken on an unapologetic register in redefining it and deploying it with reckless abandon. The draconian use of lies, propaganda, misinformation, and falsification has a long legacy in the United States, with other recent examples evident under the presidencies of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. Nixon’s claim that he was not a crook in the face of his lies over Watergate took place at a time in American history when a politician could still pay a price for lying. Since his impeachment that has become increasingly less true.
Under the Bush-Cheney administration, for example, “doublethink” and “doublespeak” became normalized, as state-sponsored torture was strategically renamed “enhanced interrogation.” Barbaric state practices such as sending prisoners to countries where there are no limits on torture were framed in the innocuous language of “rendition.”17 Such language made a mockery of political discourse and eroded public engagement. It also contributed to the transformation of institutions that were meant to limit human suffering and misfortune, and to protect citizens from the excesses of the market and state violence, into something like their opposite.18
Yet the attack on reason, dissent, and truth itself finds its Orwellian apogee in Trump’s endless proliferation of lies, including claims that China is responsible for climate change; former President Obama was not born in the United States; the murder rate in the United States is at its highest in forty-seven years; former President Obama wiretapped Trump Tower; and voter fraud prevented Trump from winning the popular vote for the presidency. Such lies, big and small, don’t function simply as mystification: they offer justification for aggressive immigration crackdowns, for effectively silencing the Environmental Protection Agency, and for upending Obamacare. Too often the relentless fabrications serve to distract the press, which then focuses its energies on exposing the untrustworthiness of the person and not on the symbolic, legal, and material violence that such pronouncements and harsh policies invariably unleash.
Allow me to underscore one more striking example. In moments that speak to an alarming flight from moral and social responsibility, Trump has adopted terms strongly affiliated with the legacy of anti-Semitism and Nazi ideology. Historian Susan Dunn refers to his use of the phrase “America First” as a “sulfurous expression” connected historically to “the name of the isolationist, defeatist, anti-Semitic national organization that urged the United States to appease Adolf Hitler.”19 It is also associated with its most powerful advocate, Charles Lindbergh, a notorious anti-Semite who once declared that America’s greatest internal threat came from Jews who posed a danger to the United States because of their “large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government.”20 Though Trump denies he has given a platform to neo-Nazi groups, the shocking uptick in bomb threats to dozens of Jewish community centers across the United States speaks for itself.21
Moreover, once he was elected, Trump took ownership of the notion of “fake news,” inverting its original usage as a criticism of his perpetual lying and redeploying it as a pejorative label aimed at journalists who criticized his policies. Even Trump’s inaugural address was filled with lies about rising crime rates and the claim of unchecked carnage in America, though crime rates are at historical lows. His blatant disregard for the truth reached another high point soon afterwards with his nonsensical and false claim that the mainstream media lied about the size of his inaugural crowd, or the subsequent assertion that the leaks involving his national security advisor were “real” but the news about them was “fake.” The Washington Post factchecked Trump’s address to the joint session of Congress and listed thirteen of his most notable “inaccuracies,” or what can rightfully be called lies.22 Trump’s penchant for lies and his irrepressible urge to tell them are beyond what Gopnik calls “Big Brother crude” and the expression of a “pure raging authoritarian id,” they also speak to a more systematic effort to undermine freedom of speech and truthfulness as core democratic values.23 Trump’s lies signal more than a Twitter fetish aimed at invalidating the work of reason and evidence-based assertions. Trump’s endless threats, fabrications, outrages, and “orchestrated chaos” produced with a “dizzying velocity” also point to a strategy for asserting power, while encouraging if not emboldening his followers to think the unthinkable ethically and politically.24 As Charles Sykes, a former conservative radio host, observes, while it may be true that all political administrations lie, what is unique to the Trump administration is “an attack on credibility itself.”25 Trump’s endless lies do more than undermine standards of credibility, they also embolden pro-Trump media, particularly Fox News, Breitbart, and right-wing talk radio, to abandon all standards of proof, verification, and evidence in order to advance Trump’s agenda and pounce upon those who criticize him.
In fact, there is something delusional if not pathological about Trump’s propensity to lie, even when he is constantly outed for doing so. For instance, in a thirty-minute interview with the New York Times on December 28, 2017, the Washington Post reported that Trump made “false, misleading or dubious claims . . . at a rate of one every 75 seconds.”26 Trump’s abuse of truth corresponds directly to his abuse of power. Trump’s aim is to dominate social and political reality with narratives of his own making, irrespective of how ridiculous doing so often appears. As a result, Trump has undermined the relationship between engaged citizenship and the truth, and has relegated matters of debate and critical assessment to a spectacle of bombast, threats, and intimidation. There is more in play here than Trump’s desire to blur the lines between fact and fiction, the truth and falsehoods. Trump’s more serious aim is to derail the architectural foundations of reason in order to construct a false reality and alternative political universe in which there are only competing fictions and the emotional appeal of shock theater. This is the conduct of dictators, one that makes it difficult to name injustices or conduct democratic politics.27
But the language of fascism does more that institutionalize falsehood and ignorance, it normalizes political short-term memory, paralysis, and spectatorship. At the same time, it makes fear and anxiety the everyday currency of exchange and communication. Destabilized perceptions in Trump’s world are coupled with the shallow allure of celebrity culture. In this environment, vulgarity and crassness attempt to steamroll civic courage and measured arguments. Masha Gessen is right in arguing that Trump’s lies are different than ordinary lies and are more like “power lies.” In this case, these are lies designed less “to convince the audience of something than to demonstrate the power of the speaker.”28 Peter Baker and Michael Tackett sum up a number of bizarre and reckless tweets that Trump produced to inaugurate the New Year. They write:
President Trump again raised the prospect of nuclear war with North Korea, boasting in strikingly playground terms on Tuesday night that he commands a “much bigger” and “more powerful” arsenal of devastating weapons than the outlier government in Asia. “Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform [North Korean leader Kim Jong Un] that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!” It came on a day when Mr. Trump, back in Washington from his Florida holiday break, effectively opened his new year with a barrage of provocative tweets on a host of issues. He called for an aide to Hillary Clinton to be thrown in jail, threatened to cut off aid to Pakistan and the Palestinians, assailed Democrats over immigration, claimed credit for the fact that no one died in a jet plane crash last year and announced that he would announce his own award next Monday for the most dishonest and corrupt news media.29
Echoes of earlier fascist societies are not only audible in Trump’s falsehoods, petulance, and crudeness, but are also evident in his embrace of elements of white supremacy. As I previously mentioned, his racism was on full display in the issuance of his executive order banning citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries—Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, and Libya. Trump’s plan for America is constructed around an imagined assault (alleged terrorists from the countries named in the ban were accountable for zero American deaths) that legitimates a form of state-sponsored racial and religious purging.30 Fear is now managed and buttressed by asserting the claims of white supremacists and militant right-wing extremists that racial domination should be accepted as a general condition of society and its securitization.
Under Trump, the cruelty, misery, and massive exploitation associated with neoliberal capitalism merges with a politics of exclusion and disposability. Social cleansing based on generalized notions of identity echoes principles seen in past regimes and which gave birth to unimaginable atrocities and intolerable acts of mass violence and genocide.31 This is not to suggest that Trump’s immigration policies have risen, as yet, to that level of genocidal vitriol, but to propose that they contain elements of a past totalitarianism that “heralds a possible model for the future.”32 What I am arguing is that this form of radical exclusion based on the denigration of Islam as a closed and timeless culture marks a terrifying entry into a political experience that suggests that older elements of fascism are crystallizing into new forms.
The malleability of truth has made it easier for those in power, particularly Trump, to wage an ongoing and ruthless assault on immigrants, the social state, workers, unions, higher education, students, poor minorities, and any vestige of the social contract. Under Trump, the interests of corporate power, a permanent war culture, the militarization of everyday life, the privatization of public wealth, the elimination of social protections, and the elimination of ecological protections will be accelerated. As democratic institutions decay, Trump does not even pretend to defend the fiction of democracy. He only blurts and tweets his own fiction-rich narratives to better attack the enemy of the moment, be it Hillary Clinton, CNN, or the supreme leader of North Korea.
There can be little doubt about the ideological direction of the Trump administration given his appointment of billionaires, generals, white supremacists, representatives of the corporate elite, and general incompetents to the highest levels of government. Public spheres that once offered at least the glimmer of progressive ideas, enlightened social policies, non-commodified values, and critical dialogue and exchange have and will be increasingly commercialized—or replaced by private spaces and corporate settings whose ultimate commitment is to increasing profit margins. What we are witnessing under the Trump administration is more than an aesthetics of vulgarity, as the mainstream media sometimes suggest. Instead, we are observing a politics fueled by a market-driven view of society that has turned its back on the very idea that social values, public trust, and communal relations are fundamental to a democratic society. It is to Orwell’s credit that in his dystopian view of society, he opened a door for all to see a “nightmarish future” in which everyday life becomes harsh, an object of state surveillance and control—a society in which the slogan “Ignorance Is Strength” morphs into a guiding principle of the highest levels of government, mainstream media, education, and popular culture.
Huxley’s World of Manufactured Ignorance
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World offers a very different and no less critical lens with which to survey the landscape of state oppression, one that is especially relevant with the rise of Trumpism. Huxley believed that social control and the propagation of ignorance would be introduced by those in power through a vast machinery of manufactured needs, desires, and identifications. For him, oppression took the form of voluntary slavery produced through a range of technologies, refined forms of propaganda, and mass manipulation and seduction. Accordingly, the real drugs of a control society in late modernity were to be found in a culture that offers up immediate pleasure, sensation, and gratification. This new mode of persuasion seduced people into chasing commodities, and infantilized them through the mass production of easily digestible entertainment, orchestrated rallies, and a politics of distraction that dampened, if not obliterated, the very possibility of thinking itself. For Huxley, the political subject had lost his or her sense of agency and had become the product of a scientifically and systemically manufactured form of idiocy and conformity.
If Orwell’s dark image is the stuff of government oppression—“a boot stamping on a human face—forever,” Huxley’s dystopia is the stuff of entertaining diversions, staged spectacles, and a cauterizing of the social imagination. We can see how such a future becomes possible when core cultural and educational institutions such as public schools are defunded to the point where they serve mostly a warehousing function, no longer providing a bulwark against civic illiteracy. In addition, the educational function of wider cultural apparatuses now offers a new mechanism for social planning and engagement, to be found in the hallucinatory power of a mind-deadening entertainment industry, the culture of extreme sports, and other forms of public pedagogy that extend from Hollywood movies and video games to mainstream television, news, and social media. These cultural platforms commercialize attention and impose spectacles of dehumanizing violence. They also degrade women through representations of hyper-aggressive masculinity, driving both the infantilization produced by consumer culture and the power of a fatuous commercial culture that encourages the adoration of celebrity lifestyles, all of which temporarily confers enormous temporary media power on people like Lady Gaga, Donald Trump, and the Kardashians.
Behind Trump’s inflated strongman persona lies his blatant disregard for the truth, his willingness to taunt and threaten individuals at home and abroad, and his rush to enact a series of regressive executive orders—an authoritarian machinery through which the ghost of fascism reasserts itself with a familiar blend of fear, humiliation, and revenge. Unleashing policies that make good on the promises he made to his angry, die-hard, ultra-nationalist, and white supremacist supporters, the billionaire populist plays on the desires and desperation of his base by targeting a range of groups he believes have no place in American society. Muslims, Syrian refugees, and Salvadoran immigrants are among those he has quickly singled out with a number of harsh discriminatory policies. The underlying ignorance and cruelty behind such policies were amplified when Trump suggested that he intended to pass legislation amounting to a severe reduction of environmental protections, a promise he shamefully acted on by withdrawing the United States from the Paris Climate Accord. Moreover, he signed an executive order to massively expand offshore drilling areas “in the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans, as well as assess whether energy exploration can take place in marine sanctuaries in the Pacific and Atlantic.”33
And little did his cheering crowds suspect that they’d be paying for the wall through massive taxation on imports from Mexico. He also asserted his willingness to resume the practice of state-sponsored torture, despite warnings from military experts of serious blowback for Americans, and to deny federal funding to those cities willing to provide sanctuary to undocumented immigrants.
And this was just the beginning. Trump has since reaffirmed his promise to lift the U.S. ban on torture by appointing Gina Haspel as the CIA’s new deputy director. Haspel not only played a direct role in overseeing the torture of detainees at a black site in Thailand, she also participated in the destruction of videotapes documenting their brutal interrogations.34 Trump’s enthusiasm for committing war crimes has only been matched by his eagerness to roll back many of the regulatory restrictions put in place by the Obama administration in order to prevent the financial industries from repeating the economic crisis of 2008. The wealthiest Americans, banks, and other major financial institutions quietly appreciate Trump as they wait for millions more in tax handouts, and are poised to happily embrace minimal government regulations. Should we be surprised? Shock might be a more appropriate response given that the 2017 Republican tax bill benefits the rich and major corporations and hurts everyone else. As Robert L. Borosage points out in The Nation, “At a time when inequality has reached Gilded Age extremes, the Republicans will give fully one-half of the tax cuts to the top 1 percent. That’s not an economic strategy. That’s a plutocrats’ raid on the Treasury.”35
As Huxley predicted, historical memories of fascist methods used to seduce and exploit the masses—the ready supply of simplistic answers, vulgar spectacles, fear-mongering, and veneration of strong leaders—have faded. Under such circumstances, it is difficult to underestimate the depth and tragedy of the collapse of civic culture and democratic public spheres, especially given the profound influence of a corporate commercialism that offers nothing to counter the top-down culture of authoritarianism advanced under Trump.
A clear indication of how the apparently trivial media games played by Trumpists can quickly mutate into the censoring gag of authoritarianism took place when Steve Bannon stated in an interview that “the media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while. . . . You’re the opposition party. Not the Democratic Party. . . . The media is the opposition party. They don’t understand the country.”36 Unsurprisingly, Bannon also openly admired the power of Dick Cheney, Darth Vader, and Satan.37 Such comments suggest not only a war on the press, but the intention to suppress dissent. It is a blatant refusal to see the essential role of robust and critical media in a democracy. In the Trumpist view, real journalism, which at its best functions as “the enemy of injustice, corruption, oppression and deceit,”38 is another opponent to be ridiculed and silenced.
How else to explain a U.S. president calling journalists “among the most dishonest human beings on earth,”39 going so far as to claim that critical media are “the enemy of the American people”?40 These are ominous and alarming comments that not only imply journalists can be charged with treason, but echo previous totalitarian regimes that waged war on both the press and democracy itself. As Roger Cohen, a columnist for the New York Times, observes:
“Enemy of the people,” is a phrase with a near-perfect totalitarian pedigree deployed with refinements by the Nazis. . . . For Goebbels, writing in 1941, every Jew was “a sworn enemy of the German people.” Here “the people” are an aroused mob imbued with some mythical essence of nationhood or goodness by a charismatic leader. The enemy is everyone else. Citizenship, with its shared rights and responsibilities, has ceased to be.41
A public shaped by manufactured ignorance and indifferent to the task of discerning the truth from lies has largely applauded Trump’s expressions of fascist bravado, especially when he incites hatred and violence. Trump’s call to build a wall between the United States and Mexico and his consideration of using the National Guard to round up undocumented immigrants arouse applause among his followers.42 As does Trump’s penchant for disparaging all his critics as losers, which perpetuates the way failed contestants were treated on his commercial TV show, The Apprentice.43 Dissenting journalists and others are refused access to government officials, derided as purveyors of “fake news,” become objects of retribution while being told to “shut up,” and, in the course of being symbolically fired, are relegated to zones of terminal exclusion.44
What is clear is that elements of twentieth-century fascism that haunt the current age no longer appear as mere residue, but instead as an emerging threat. Trumpists epitomize the danger posed by authoritarians who long to rule a society without resistance, dominate its major political parties so as to dismantle any opposition, and secure uncontested control of its most important political, cultural, and economic institutions. In the United States, the consolidation of power and wealth in the hands of the financial elite, along with the savagery and misery that characterize the merger of neoliberalism and authoritarian politics, is no longer the stuff of movies and books. Those members of Congress who railed against both Obama’s alleged imperial use of executive orders and later, during the Republican primaries, denounced Trump as unfit for office, now exhibit a level of passivity and lack of moral courage that testify to their complicity with the dark shadow of authoritarianism signified by Trump’s political ascent and actions taken during his first year in power.
The Trump Echo Chamber
During the early Trump presidency, we saw increasing numbers of supine media pundits, political opponents, and mainstream journalists tying themselves in “apologetic knots” while they “desperately look for signs that Donald Trump will be a pragmatic, recognizable American president once he takes the mantle of power.”45 Even the high-profile celebrity Oprah Winfrey stated, and without irony, in an interview with Entertainment Tonight, “I just saw President-elect Trump with President Obama in the White House, and it gave me hope.”46 This is quite a stretch given Trump’s history of racist practices, his racist remarks about Blacks, Muslims, and Mexican immigrants during the primaries and the presidential campaign, and his appointment of a number of cabinet members who embrace a white nationalist ideology. New York Times opinion writer Nicholas Kristof sabotaged his self-proclaimed liberal belief system by asserting, in what appears to be acute lapse of judgment, that Americans should “Grit [their] teeth and give Trump a chance.”47 Bill Gates made clear his own often hidden reactionary worldview when speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box. The Microsoft co-founder slipped into a fog of self-delusion by stating that Trump had the potential to emulate JFK by establishing an upbeat and desirable mode of “leadership through innovation.”48 As comedian John Oliver pointed out on his show Last Week Tonight, Trump is not ordinary. Oliver brought his point home by shouting repeatedly, “THIS IS NOT NORMAL,” and, of course, he is right. What does it mean to call it “ordinary” when the leader of a contemporary Western nation and global superpower proclaims a politics rooted in racist exclusion, white supremacy, and reactionary populism?
The initial complacency of much of the mainstream media further signaled that the storm clouds of authoritarianism were gathering unchecked and pointed to a retreat from responsible reporting and discourse if not a flight from any vestige of social responsibility.49 But as the Trump administration assumed power, producing a litany of reactionary policies, embarrassing lies, insults aimed at America’s allies, and attacks on the mainstream media, outlets such as MSNBC, CNN, the Washington Post, and the New York Times engaged in a series of relentless critiques of Trump, his systemic derangement of any viable notion of governance, and his authoritarian policies. As a result, watchdog journalists came under heavy criticism from Trump and his allies, who labeled their work “fake news” and “enemies of the American People.” In fact, the Trump administration has repeated this view of the media so often that “almost a third of Americans believe it and “favor government restrictions on the press.”50
Yet, in spite of the growing criticism of the Trump administration, especially around the publication of Michael Wolff’s scathing book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, the ongoing legitimation and normalization of the Trump regime continued mostly through the efforts of conservative media apparatuses such as Fox News, Breitbart News Network, and Rupert Murdoch’s media empire coupled with the almost unmitigated and sycophantic support of many prominent Republican politicians in the Senate and House of Representatives. Michelle Goldberg writing in the New York Times argues that Wolff’s book makes clear “that Trump is entirely unfit for the presidency [and] everyone around him knows it. [Yet,] most members of Trump’s campaign and administration are simply traitors. They are willing, out of some complex mix of ambition, resentment, cynicism and rationalization, to endanger all of our lives—all of our children’s lives—by refusing to tell the country what they know about the senescent fool who boasts of the size of his ‘nuclear button’ on Twitter.”51
Normalizing Trump’s influence does more than sabotage democracy, political integrity, moral responsibility, and justice; it also diminishes the public-interest institutions necessary for a future of collective well-being and economic and political justice. New York Times columnist Charles Blow observes insightfully that under Trump,
[The fact that] the nation is soon to be under the aegis of an unstable, unqualified, undignified demagogue [who surrounds] himself with a rogue’s gallery of white supremacy sympathizers, anti-Muslim extremists, devout conspiracy theorists, anti-science doctrinaires and climate change deniers is not normal, [and] I happen to believe that history will judge kindly those who continued to shout, from the rooftops, through their own weariness and against the corrosive drift of conformity.52
Blow is right. Any talk of working with a president who has surrounded himself with militarists, racists, anti-intellectuals, political sycophants, and neoliberal fundamentalists should be resisted at all costs. Trump and his companion ideologues fantasize about destroying all vestiges of the welfare state and the institutions that produce the public values that support the social contract. It is well worth remembering that neo-Nazis applauded when Trump welcomed into his inner-circle White House staff Steve Bannon, a notorious and combative bigot.53 They were also the most vocal group bemoaning his dismissal in August 2017.
Normalization is both a code for a retreat from any sense of moral and political responsibility, and an act of political complicity with authoritarianism, and should be condemned outright. Holding on to any sense of what might be considered just and ethical suggests a responsibility to recognize when a government is put in the hands of a demagogue. When the inconceivable becomes conceivable, the call for normalization of what attempts to pass for the ordinary amounts to surrender to the forces of authoritarianism. What is being propagated by Trump’s apologists is not only a reactionary and demagogic populism that will underpin the fundamental tenets of an emerging American-style authoritarianism, but also a shameless whitewashing of the racism and repression of dissent at the center of Trump’s politics. In addition, little has been said about how Trump and his coterie of semi-delusional, if not heartless, advisors embrace a version of Ayn Rand’s view that selfishness, a war against all competition, and unchecked self-interest are the highest human ideals. Arguments holding up Trump as a moderate, if not openly defending his normality, appear to overlook with facile indifference how fascist rhetoric has reared its ugly head again in many parts of the world, to grave effect, and that the Trump administration has clearly demonstrated an affinity with that sort of hateful vocabulary. How else to explain the support that Trump has received from a number of ruthless dictators who lead reactionary governments in countries such as the Philippines, Turkey, and Egypt, among others? The danger this complacency suggests is all the more ominous given the current breakdown of civic literacy and the general public’s increasing inability to deal with complex issues, on the one hand, and the attempt by those who hold power to ruthlessly promote a depoliticizing discourse of lies, simplicity, and manufactured distortions on the other.
Hannah Arendt, Sheldon Wolin, Timothy Snyder, and Robert O. Paxton, the great theorists of totalitarianism, believed that the fluctuating elements of fascism are still with us and that as long as they are, they will crystallize in different forms. Far from being fixed in a frozen moment of historical terror, these theorists believed not only in the persistence of totalitarianism’s “protean origins,” but that its endurance “heralds [totalitarianism] as a possible model for the future.”54 Arendt, in particular, was keenly aware that a culture of fear, the dismantling of civil and political rights, the ongoing militarization of society, the attack on labor, an obsession with national security, human rights abuses, the emergence of a police state, a deeply rooted racism, and the attempts by demagogues to undermine education as a foundation for producing a critical citizenry were all at work in American society.
Historical conjunctures might produce different forms of authoritarianism, but they all share a hatred for democracy, dissent, and human rights. More recently, Robert O. Paxton, in his seminal work The Anatomy of Fascism, provides a working definition of fascism that points to both its anti-democratic moments and those elements that link it to both the past and the present. Paxton’s purpose is not to provide a precise definition of fascism, but to understand the conditions that enabled fascism to work and make possible its development in the future.55 Accordingly, he argues that fascism may be defined as follows:
A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.56
Under Trump, there are ominous echoes of the fascism that developed in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. Paxton is particularly useful in describing what he calls nine “mobilizing passions” of fascism that provide a common ground for most fascist movements. These include, in abbreviated form, (1) a sense of overwhelming crisis; (2) the primacy of the group and subordination of individuals to it; (3) the belief that one group is a victim, justifying action beyond moral and legal limits; (4) dread of the group’s decline; (5) call for purer community by consent of violence if necessary; (6) need for the authority of a natural leader (7) supremacy of leader’s instincts over reason; (8) beauty of violence and efficacy of the will devoted to group’s success; (9) right of chosen people to dominate others without restraint.57
All of these “mobilizing passions” bear a resemblance to the fascist script that Trump has made in his repeated claims that the United States is in a period of decline; his nationalist slogan to “make America great again”; his official displays of coded bigotry and intolerance, as in his symbolic association with Andrew Jackson; his portrayal of himself as a strongman who alone can save the country; his appeal to aggression and violence aimed at those who disagree with him; his contempt for dissent; his deep-rooted anti-intellectualism, or what Arendt called “thoughtlessness” (e.g., denial that climate change is produced by humans), coupled with his Twitter-driven elevation of impulsiveness over reason; his appeal to xenophobia and national greatness; his courting of anti-Semites and white supremacists; his flirtation with the discourse of racial purity; his support for a white Christian public sphere; his denigration of Muslims, Blacks, undocumented immigrants, Native Americans, women, and transgender people; his contempt for weakness; and his adolescent, size-matters enthusiasm for locker-room masculinity.
But fascism did not come to the United States with the emergence of Donald Trump. In fact much of what pass for American history has a close relationship to what might be called the neo-fascist age of Trump. As David Neiwert observes:
Fascism is not just a historical relic. It remains a living and breathing phenomenon that, for generations since World War II, had only maintained a kind of half-life on the fringes of the American right. Its constant enterprise, during all those years, was to return white supremacism to the mainstream, restore its previous legitimacy, and restore its own power within the nation’s political system. . . . [The] long-term creep of radicalization of the right [has] come home to roost. . . . With Trump as its champion, it has finally succeeded. 58
In his book On Tyranny, the renowned historian Timothy Snyder also acknowledges that fascism is not static and expresses its most fundamental attacks on democracy in different forms, which is all the more reason for people to develop what he calls an active relationship to history to prevent a normalizing relationship to authoritarian regimes such as the United States under Trump’s rule.59 Surely, a critical understanding of history would have gone a long way in recognizing the elements of a fascist discourse in Trump’s inaugural speech.
Trump’s authoritarian mindset was on full display during his inaugural speech and in the actions he undertook during his first few days in office. In the first instance, he presented a dystopian view of American society laced with racist stereotyping, xenophobia, and the discourse of ultra-nationalism. Frank Rich called the language of the speech “violent and angry—‘This American carnage stops right here’—reeking of animosity, if not outright hatred . . . the tone was one of retribution and revenge.”60 As soon as the speech ended, however, the normalizing process within the mainstream media began with the expected tortured clichés from various Fox News commentators calling it “muscular,” “unifying,” “very forceful,” and “just masterful,” and Charles Krauthammer stating that it was “completely nonpartisan.”61 The fog of self-delusion and denial was in full swing at CNN when historian Douglas Brinkley called Trump’s inaugural address not only “presidential” but “solid and well-written” and the “best speech” Trump has made “in his life.”
Just before Trump’s election, the CEO of the CBS television network, Les Moonves, stated that his network’s inordinate and disastrous coverage of Trump “may not be good for America but it’s damn good for CBS.” Moonves openly gloated because the network was not only pumping up its ratings but was also getting rich by covering Trump. As he put it, “the money’s rolling in. . . . this is going to be a very good year for us. . . . It’s a terrible thing to say, but bring it on, Donald. Go ahead. Keep going.”62 Moonves made it clear that the objectives of mainstream media in general have little to do with the public interest, pursuing the truth, or holding power accountable. On the contrary, their real goal is to leverage corruption, lies, and misrepresentation to garner attention, even to the point of transforming the press into an adjunct of authoritarian ideologies, policies, interests, and commodified values—if that is what it takes to increase their profit margins. But more dangers lie ahead for the country than the transformation of critical and independent media into an echo chamber for an entertainment industry that serves up Trump as its main spectacle, or for that matter the media’s growing refusal to recognize the fascist ideology driving the Trump administration. A growing criticism of Trump by the critical mainstream media is to be welcomed, but it does not go far enough and runs the risk of normalizing a president that has turned governance into leverage for his family to rake in profitable business deals. For instance, the press has said too little about Jared Kushner’s real estate company receiving a $30 million investment from Menora Mivtachim, which according to the New York Times is “an insurer and “one of Israel’s largest financial institutions.”63 In blatant disregard for conflict of interest, the investment came at a time when Kushner was acting as the point person in mediating peace talks between the Palestinians and the Israeli government. Such shameless and irresponsible acts of misconduct began as soon as Trump took office.
Once in command of the U.S. military and the White House, Trump not only enacted measures to facilitate building a wall on the Mexican border and to prevent people from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States, putting his xenophobia in action, but he also cleared the way for resurrecting the construction of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines. Trump’s broad assault on U.S. environmental protections is indicative of his equal disregard for domestic issues and certain populations, when the accumulation of capital is at stake. Pushing through the pipelines suggests a barefaced disdain for the rights of Native Americans who protested the building of a pipeline that both crossed their sacred burial lands and posed a risk to contaminating the Missouri River, the primary water source for the Standing Rock Sioux. In response to Trump’s inaugural address and early policy measures, Roger Cohen wrote a forceful commentary suggesting that Trump’s fascist tendencies reverberate with the familiar tactics of former dictators and that his presence in American politics augurs ill for democracy. He stated:
But the first days of the Trump presidency . . . pushed me over the top. The president is playing with fire. To say, as he did, that the elected representatives of American democracy are worthless and that the people are everything is to lay the foundations of totalitarianism. It is to say that democratic institutions are irrelevant and all that counts is the great leader and the masses he arouses. To speak of “American carnage” is to deploy the dangerous lexicon of blood, soil and nation. To boast of “a historic movement, the likes of which the world has never seen before” is to demonstrate consuming megalomania. To declaim “America first” and again, “America first,” is to recall the darkest clarion calls of nationalist dictators. To exalt protectionism is to risk a return to a world of barriers and confrontation. To utter falsehood after falsehood, directly or through a spokesman, is to foster the disorientation that makes crowds susceptible to the delusions of strongmen.64
As language is hacked by propaganda, the American public is inundated with empty slogans such as “post-truth,” “fake news,” and “alternative facts.” This culture is part of what Todd Gitlin calls “an interlocking ecology of falsification that has driven the country around the bend.”65 Under such circumstances, Trump uses language for humiliation and ridicule, not truth-telling or governing.
Given these conditions, the celebration of the principle of an alleged free press hides more than it promises. Noam Chomsky, Bill Moyers, and Robert McChesney, among others, have previously observed that corporate media work in conjunction with the financial elite and the military-industrial-academic complex. The normalization of Trump is about more than dominant media outlets being complicit with corrupt power or willfully retreating from any sense of social responsibility; it is also about aiding and abetting power in order to increase the bottom line and attract other cowardly forms of influence and recognition. This is evident in the fact that some dominant elements of the mainstream press not only refused to take Trump seriously, they also concocted embarrassing rationales for why they would not hold him accountable for what he says. For instance, Gerard Baker, the editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal, publicly announced that in the future he would not allow his reporters to use the word “lie” in their coverage. National Public Radio (NPR) also issued a statement arguing that it would not use the word “lie,” on the grounds that “the minute you start branding things with a word like ‘lie,’ you push people away from you.”66 In this truly Orwellian comment, NPR is suggesting that reporting lies on the part of governments and politicians should be avoided by the media on the grounds that people might be annoyed by having to face the contradiction between the truth and misinformation. This is more than a refusal of journalism’s democratic purpose to uphold people, institutions, and power to some measure of justice; it also legitimizes the kind of political and moral cowardice that undermines informed resistance, the First Amendment, and the truth. While such actions may not rise to the level of book burning that was characteristic of various totalitarian regimes in the past, they do mark a form of self-censorship and misinformation seen in pre-fascist societies.
Although in much of the mainstream media, especially its more reactionary elements, Trump appears to have more friends than foes, this has not prevented him from demonstrating several times over that he is capable of using bullying repression and censorship to undermine the press. Hence, it was no surprise when Trump, at his first president-elect press conference, not only refused to take questions from a CNN reporter because his network had published material critical of Trump, but also justified his refusal by labeling CNN “fake news”—a slogan he appropriated not to challenge the veracity of the media, but to disparage his critics. Yet the general response of the mainstream media was to adopt Trump’s stance, and likewise to rage against the rise of “fake news,” suggesting that, by doing so, their own integrity could not be questioned. Of course, the term “fake news” is slippery and can be deployed to political ends—a maneuver which is on full display particularly when used by Trumpists to dismiss anyone or any organization that might hold them accountable for their fabrications. A particularly egregious and telling example of Trump’s refusal to deal with anyone who questions his authority was his firing of James Comey, the director of the FBI, followed by Comey’s appearance soon afterwards before a congressional committee.
Testifying before a Senate Intelligence Committee, Comey claimed that in meetings with the president, Trump had not only asked him if he wanted to keep his job, but also demanded what amounted to a loyalty pledge from him. Comey saw these interventions as an attempt to develop a patronage relationship with him and viewed them as part of a larger attempt to neutralize an FBI investigation into former national security advisor Michael Flynn’s links to Russia. What Comey implies, but does not state directly, is that Trump attempted to turn the FBI into a complicit and subservient agent of corrupt political power. Comey also stated that he did not want to be alone with the president, going so far as to ask Attorney General Jeff Sessions to make sure that such meetings would not take place in the future, because he did not trust Trump. Comey also accused Trump of lying about the FBI being in disarray, slandering him, and misrepresenting the reasons for his firing. And most important, Trump had possibly engaged in an obstruction of justice. In fact, Comey was so distrustful of Trump that he took notes of his exchanges with him and leaked some of the memos to a friend at Columbia University, who passed on the contents to a reporter at the New York Times. Comey stated outright he leaked the information because he thought Trump would lie about their conversations, and he wanted to prompt the appointment of a special counsel.
Suffering from what appears to be malignant narcissism and a pathological contempt for the truth, Trump has tweeted that Comey’s testimony had vindicated him and that Comey was a liar and a leaker. Of course, Trump made no mention of the fact that Comey leaked non-classified information because he did not trust anyone at the Department of Justice, especially since it was led by Trump crony Jeff Sessions. Since it goes without saying that Trump is a serial liar, there is a certain irony in Trump accusing Comey, a lifelong Republican and highly respected director of the FBI, of lying. As Mehdi Hasan, appearing on Democracy Now!, observes:
From a political point of view, we know that one of the biggest flaws in Donald Trump’s presidency, his candidacy, his ability to be president, is that he’s a serial fabricator. Now you have the former top law enforcement officer of this country going in front of the Senate, under oath, saying he—that, you know, “Those are lies, plain and simple,” he said, referring to Trump’s description of his firing. He said, “I was worried he would lie.” He says, “I was worried about the nature of the man.” . . . And there was a quite funny tweet that went viral last night, which said, you know, “Trump is saying he’s a liar. Comey is saying Trump’s a liar. Well, who do you believe? Do you believe an FBI director who served under two—who served under three presidents from two parties? Or do you believe the guy who said Obama was born in Kenya?” And, you know, that’s what faces us today.67
Trump’s presidency normalizes official intolerance, bigotry, and falsehood. Under Trump, lying and fake news are used for dominating rivals, journalists, and the American public. A scammer and a bully, Trump assumes the inflated swagger of an insufferably pompous game show host. Like a boy in middle school, he is obsessed with size, popularity, and winning. In addition to democracy itself, his biggest fears seem to be openness, honesty, and criticism of his performance. We will likely see more of this, as traditional democratic public spheres such as higher education also feel the brunt of Trump’s politics of retribution. Writing about the “creeping rot” of the Trump administration and how it emulates and accentuates a society lost in a neoliberal abyss of self-interest, unchecked individualism, and mass contempt, James Traub rightly argues that “Perhaps in a democracy the distinctive feature of decadence is not debauchery but terminal self-absorption.”68 We live at a time when notions of shared responsibility, share citizenry, and an embrace of the public good become objects of disdain, especially in the conservative media and other right-wing cultural pathways.
Any analysis of the forces behind the election and normalization of Trump’s fraudulence must, once again, include the powerful role of the reactionary media in the United States. A remarkable article by former conservative radio talk show host Charles Sykes argues that over the last few decades, right-wing media have played a major role in discrediting and delegitimizing the fact-based media. In doing so, the conservative media have destroyed “much of the right’s immunity to false information.” According to Sykes, conservatives, including himself, created a “new post-factual political culture” that has become so powerful that even when the Trumps are caught lying, they believe they can do so with impunity because “the alternative-reality media will provide air cover” for their lies, allowing these fabrications effectively to pollute “political discourse” and discredit other “independent sources of information.”69
Evidence of this major assault on truth can be measured in part by the Orwellian magnitude of the lies the Trump family and their employees produce.70 For instance, Kellyanne Conway attempted recently to justify Trump’s executive order banning people from seven Muslim-majority countries by referring to what she called the “Bowling Green massacre,” an alleged terrorist attack by Iraqi refugees that was to have taken place in 2011. According to Conway, Obama instituted a six-month ban on Iraqi resettlements. The attack never happened, no Iraqis engaged in any such activity, and the Obama administration never instituted such a ban. It got even more absurd, as when former White House press secretary Sean Spicer claimed that Iran had committed an act of war by attacking a U.S. naval vessel. In reality, Houthi rebels had attacked a Saudi vessel off the coast of Yemen. Trump’s lying appears to have no limits and exceeds the boundaries of sanity, as was evident in his statement to a senator and an advisor, according to the New York Times, that the notorious 2005 Access Hollywood (“grab ’em by the pussy”) tape was not authentic, though he acknowledged in October 2016 that it was his voice on the tape, and later apologized for his egregious sexist comments.71
Normalization has many registers, and how media broadcast Trump’s statements serves, in many ways, to further normalize his constant fraudulence. For instance, the Wall Street Journal’s refusal to address critically Trump’s endless lies and insults is matched by the highbrow New Yorker’s publication of a piece on Trump that largely celebrates how he is viewed by conservative intellectuals such as Hillsdale College president Larry Arnn.72 Arnn supports Trump because they share the view that “the government has become dangerous.” If Arnn were referring to the rise of the surveillance and permanent war state, it would be hard to disagree with him. Instead, he was referring to the government’s enforcement of “runaway regulations.” What Arnn and Kelefa Sanneh, the author of the New Yorker article, ignore or conveniently forget is the fact that the real danger the government poses is the direct result of its being in the hands of demagogues such as Trump who are truly dangerous and threaten other countries, American society, and the rest of the world. When Sanneh mentions Trump’s connection to the “alt-right,” he underplays the group’s fascist ideology and refuses to use the term “white supremacist” in talking about such groups, reverting instead to the innocuous-sounding term “white identity politics.”73 Trump’s misogyny, racism, anti-intellectualism, Islamophobia, and hatred of democracy are barely mentioned. Sanneh even goes so far as to suggest that since Trump has disavowed the “alt-right,” his connection to neo-fascist groups is tenuous. This is more than an apology dressed up in the bland discourse of ambiguity. Such reporting is a shameful retreat from journalistic integrity—an assault on the truth that constitutes an egregious act of normalization.74
Under Trump’s regime, compassion and respect for the other will almost certainly be viewed with contempt, while society will increasingly become more militarized and corporations further deregulated in order to engage in behaviors that put the American public and the entire planet in danger. A form of social and historical amnesia appears set to descend over American society. A culture of civic illiteracy will likely become more widespread and legitimated, along with a culture of fear that will enable an increasingly harsh law-and-order regime. Indeed, Neal Gabler argues that the normalization of Trump’s “alt-right” political network presents a greater threat than Trump himself.75 Frank Rich goes further by insisting that things might get worse after Trump because of the “permanent mass movement” he and Bannon fomented. According to Rich,
Trump’s unexpected triumph in 2016, claiming the Oval Office for unabashedly nationalist right-wing populism, changed history’s trajectory. His capture of the presidency and a major political party makes it highly unlikely that his adherents will now follow the pattern of their dejected forebears, who retreated to lick their wounds and regroup in the shadows after their electoral defeats. These radicals are not some aberrational fringe. The swath of America that has now been reinvigorated and empowered by landing a tribune in the White House for the first time is a permanent mass movement that has remained stable in size and fixed in its beliefs for more than half a century. How large a mass? At the high end, Trumpists amount to the third or so of the country that has never wavered in support of the Trump presidency.76
A society driven along by reactionary zeal will mean support for policies to be enacted in which public goods— such as schools—will be privatized. There will likely be a further retreat from political engagement, civic courage, and social responsibility, one matched by a growing abandonment by the state of any allegiance to the common good. The free-market mentality that gained prominence under the presidency of Ronald Reagan will likely accelerate under Trump and continue to drive politics, destroy many social protections, celebrate a hyper-competitiveness, and deregulate economic activity. Under Donald Trump’s reign, almost all human activities, practices, and institutions are at risk of becoming subject to market principles and militarized. The only relations that will matter will likely be those defined in commercial, not civic, terms.
Under Trump, it is likely that the full power of the surveillance state will be deployed to target protesters, people of color, Muslims, and undocumented immigrants. Surely, all the signs are in place, given the coterie of warmongers, Islamophobes, white supremacists, and anti-public demagogues Trump has placed in high-ranking government positions. Americans may be on the verge of witnessing how democracy unravels, and this is precisely why Trump’s authoritarian presidency must not be normalized. Trump’s repressive policies will not change as his presidency unfolds. His impulsive narcissism, indifference to the truth, and intensive use of the spectacle will further increase his view of himself and his policies as unaccountable, especially as he institutes a mode of governance that bullies his opponents and deals with his audience directly through social media.
With the new authoritarian state, perhaps the gravest threat we might encounter is widespread indifference to Trump’s undemocratic use of power. It is precisely the pervasive spread of political indifference that puts at risk the fundamental principles of justice and freedom that lie at the heart of a robust democracy. The Trump family’s rise to power signals the unimaginable. Dynastic politics, official lying, and militant nationalism all occur openly under Donald Trump’s rule. Democracy is under attack. Americans are expected not to behave as empowered citizens, but as obedient subjects and grateful consumers who should repeat slogans and cheer for the supreme leader no matter what. This is the brave new surveillance/punishing state that merges Orwell’s Big Brother with Huxley’s mind-altering modes of entertainment, education, and propaganda.
Fortunately, a number of diverse groups, including unions, immigrant rights groups, constitutional law organizations, anti-fascist networks, Black liberation groups, congregations and faith-based organizations, legal coalitions and reproductive rights groups, along with teachers, actors, and artists openly oppose Trump’s authoritarian ideas and policies. As George Yancy has pointed out, such opposition is unique in that it makes the political more pedagogical by elevating protests, modes of resistance, and criticism to the level of the cultural rather than allowing such critiques to reside in the voice and presence of isolated outspoken people of conscience.77 Moreover, numerous publications, activists, and public intellectuals such as Cornel West, Angela Davis, Anthony DiMaggio, and Robin D.G. Kelley, and groups such as Action Together, Swing Left, Dream Defenders, Black Youth Project 100, and the Black Lives Matter movement are producing instructive articles on both the nature of resistance and what forms it might take.78
The nightmare is upon us. Donald Trump is driving the United States toward neo-fascist rule. The new authoritarianism is glaringly visible and deeply brutal, and points to a bleak future in the most immediate sense. Certainly, we are in the midst of what Hannah Arendt called “dark times.” Individual and collective resistance is the only hope we have to move beyond this ominous moment in our history. The question that we once confronted us was, what will U.S. society look like under Trump? Now we must ask, what will U.S. society look like in the aftermath of a Trump regime that goes unchallenged? For most Americans, it may well mimic Huxley’s lurid world in which corruption is rampant, ignorance is a political weapon, and pleasure is utilized as a form of control, offering nothing more than the swindle of commercialized fulfillment, if not something more self-deluding and defeating.
Both Huxley and Orwell presented their visions of closed dystopian societies as warnings. They did so in the hope of motivating us to preserve and advance openness in government and society. Orwell believed in the power of people to resist the seduction of authoritarian propaganda with spirited forms of broad-based resistance willing to grasp the reins of political emancipation. For Huxley, there was only hope to be found in a pessimism that had exhausted itself, leaving people to reflect on the implications of a totalitarian power that controls pleasure as well as pain, and the utterly disintegrated social fabric that would be its consequence. Orwell’s optimism, tempered by a sense of educated hope, was one that granted people the capacity to reclaim their agency, expand a narrow conception of self-interest, place themselves in the bigger picture, connect their individual well-being to the well-being of others, and make a commitment to struggle for an alternative future. History is open, and only time will tell who was more accurate.