How Much Should We Worry?

            Yes, I’m afraid of Donald Trump and his administration.  The damage he is likely to do, particularly domestically, to education, civil rights, labor, the environment, and consumer protections are immense.

            What worries me far more, though, is the synergy of Trump and his followers.  I don’t believe that anyone can have voted for Trump without one of two motives: 1. He’ll be good for me, and who cares about anyone else? (e.g. those who see a major tax break and a rising stock market), 2. And those who believe that he’ll be good for them by being very bad for someone else (e.g. racists, anti-immigrant groups, anti-globalists, abortion opponents, and on and on).  Put the former together with the latter and I see a witches’ brew of trouble: The greedy will back him for their own benefit, while the needy (both lacking in material things and lacking in character), will be further tempted to take matters into their own hands; to push Trump to acting on his worst instincts, and to seek ever more irrational explanations and more radical “heroes.”

            We’ve been hearing the Hitler analogy for quite a while, mostly aimed at Trump.  The analogy has some massive weaknesses:  Hitler was an abject failure until he found his medium in rabble-rousing speech.  Trump is a seeming success, who parlayed that apparent success into national attention.  Hitler was an open racist whose theories, however externally incoherent, made sense on their own terms.  Trump, whose incoherent reasoning isn’t even consistent from week to week.  (Case in point: Hitler carried out all his threats to lock people up or worse, while Trump only used that meme as a tool.)

            The similarity, I believe, is more between the cult of Hitler as it played out in Germany and the cult of Trump as it may play out here.  Like almost every president before Trump, I look to history for some understanding of the present, realizing that conditions vary.  

            Parts of Ian Kershaw’s 1000-page biography of Hitler, published in 1998, with a new preface in 2007, could have been written about Trump:

            “How is that someone with so few intellectual gifts…without the background that bred high office, without even any experience of government before becoming Reich Chancellor, could nevertheless have such an immense historical impact, could make the entire world hold its breath?”

            His explanation focuses on the image of Hitler held by his followers:

            “’Charismatic authority’…did not rest primarily on the demonstrable outstanding characteristics of an individual.  Rather it derived from the perception of such qualities among a ‘following’ which, amid crisis conditions, projected onto a chosen leader unique ‘heroic’ attributes and saw in him personal greatness, the embodiment of a ‘mission’ of salvation.” 

            “The crowds that began to flock in 1919 and 1920 to Hitler’s speeches were not motivated by refined theories.  For them, simple slogans, kindling the fires of anger and resentment, were what worked.” 

            The  remarkable difference is how much worse off Germany was in 1933 when Hitler took power than the U.S. is in 2016.  The German unemployment rate in 1933 was 33%, ten times what it had been only five years earlier.  The U.S. unemployment rate in October 2016 was 4.9%, 37% lower than when Obama took office, and 14.4 million jobs have been added.  Germany had suffered defeat in World War I, four years of catastrophic hyperinflation, and Communist and Fascist paramilitaries.  The U.S. has had minimal inflation, slow but real GDP, and a housing recovery.  As CNN put it, last summer, “Americans are vastly better off than they were 8 years ago. But most are worried. They feel they should be a lot better off than they are.”

         In other words, by any historic standards, the American people as a whole have little to complain about.  But as the Manchester Guardian’s American reporter, Henry Fairlie titled one of his books, we are The Spoiled Child of the Western World.  Or as Lucy Van Pelt once said, Why do there need to be ups and downs?  I only want ups and ups.” 

            Therefore my biggest fear is not what Trump does, but what his followers will do when he fails to deliver on his impossible promises, and when economic reality continues to disfavor the poorly educated rural voters who were key to his success.  More violence against those they hold responsible – immigrants, Muslims, Black Lives Matter, Jews?  A quest for an even more extreme savior?  Attacks on government institutions far worse than the Malheur Wildlife Refuge or even Oklahoma City?   To paraphrase Frost’s “Once by the Pacific”

            It looks as if a night of dark intent

            Has come, and not only a night, an age.

            We all had better be prepared for rage.