is the title of this New Yorker Magazine Daily Comment piece by award-winning writer Adam Gopnik, who granted is not a political scientist, but is an astute observer of many aspects of society and culture.
To give you a sense, after a long and somewhat erudite introduction, Gopnik notes those in the establishment coming on board to support Trump who think they can control him, to which he responds like this:
No, you can’t. One can argue about whether to call him a fascist or an authoritarian populist or a grotesque joke made in a nightmare shared between Philip K. Dick and Tom Wolfe, but under any label Trump is a declared enemy of the liberal constitutional order of the United States—the order that has made it, in fact, the great and plural country that it already is. He announces his enmity to America by word and action every day. It is articulated in his insistence on the rightness of torture and the acceptable murder of noncombatants. It is self-evident in the threats he makes daily to destroy his political enemies, made only worse by the frivolity and transience of the tone of those threats. He makes his enmity to American values clear when he suggests that the Presidency holds absolute power, through which he will be able to end opposition—whether by questioning the ownership of newspapers or talking about changing libel laws or threatening to take away F.C.C. licenses. To say “Well, he would not really have the power to accomplish that” is to misunderstand the nature of thin-skinned authoritarians in power. They do not arrive in office and discover, as constitutionalists do, that their capabilities are more limited than they imagined. They arrive, and then make their power as large as they can.
Gopnik’s is not an argument that Trump is unqualified to be President of the American democracy, but rather that he is exceedingly dangerous to the very concept of democracy.
He goes where some might not dare:
He’s not Hitler, as his wife recently said? Well, of course he isn’t. But then Hitler wasn’t Hitler—until he was.
Gopnik follows this with reminding us what actually happened. From the same paragraph as the last quote:
At each step of the way, the shock was tempered by acceptance. It depended on conservatives pretending he wasn’t so bad, compared with the Communists, while at the same time the militant left decided that their real enemies were the moderate leftists, who were really indistinguishable from the Nazis. The radical progressives decided that there was no difference between the democratic left and the totalitarian right and that an explosion of institutions was exactly the most thrilling thing imaginable.
It should be obvious from that the Gopnik is not a fan of what he is seeing from Sanders. I am less concerned about that than what Gopnik sees, for a lot of reasons, as the implication of what a Trump victory would mean, beyond specific issues like gun control or abortion.
Here is the first half of the concluding paragraph of this relatively short piece:
If Trump came to power, there is a decent chance that the American experiment would be over. This is not a hyperbolic prediction; it is not a hysterical prediction; it is simply a candid reading of what history tells us happens in countries with leaders like Trump. Countries don’t really recover from being taken over by unstable authoritarian nationalists of any political bent, left or right—not by Peróns or Castros or Putins or Francos or Lenins or fill in the blanks. The nation may survive, but the wound to hope and order will never fully heal. Ask Argentinians or Chileans or Venezuelans or Russians or Italians—or Germans. The national psyche never gets over learning that its institutions are that fragile and their ability to resist a dictator that weak. If he can rout the Republican Party in a week by having effectively secured the nomination, ask yourself what Trump could do with the American government if he had a mandate.
Gopnik begins and ends with reference to Alexander Pope. I will that to you to read.
Our national political system is already quite shaky — we have seen the impact of big money, of the Tea Party movement, of the palpable anger across the political spectrum at the gridlock in Washington deliberately created by those Republicans attempting to prevent any successes for the Obama administration.
We have not REALLY had the experience of an authoritarian nationalist such as those Gopnik describes. We have someone elected on the basis of populist anger possibly approach what we are seeing now, and that was Andy Jackson. But the country was a very different place, the powers of the executive far more limited, and the impact upon the rest of the world by the actions of a President miniscule compared to our time.
We have had demagogues galore, most notably in my lifetime “Tailgunner Joe” McCarthy and his rants in the 1950s, until he was censured by the Senate whose comity he was destroying.
One difference from Germany in the 1930s and what we confront now is that we do not have MAJOR industrial and financial centers of power lining up to support Trump the way those in Germany chose to support Adolph.
Still, the risk to our liberal democracy remains great, even given that most indicators are such that I would expect Trump to lose decisively in the electoral college, and conceivably in the popular vote.
There are things that could change that.
Something that would severely damage Obama’s current positive approval rating is always a danger. That could be economic, that could be terrorist related, it could be something of which we cannot conceive.
Even without Godwin’s Law, I am loath to paint Trump as a potential Hitler, despite the fact that he has already demonstrated a willingness to demonize a group he considers “other” and not worthy of being considered fully human as did Hitler in his rhetoric about the Jews. Extermination camps are not going to happen. And while we have our share of flag officers and below in the military who can demonstrate how batshit crazy they can be, there are far more who are committed to a constitutional democracy, and would NOT follow patently illegal orders from a President Trump.
Trump argues he wants to “make America great again.” In fact, he wants to diminish America in ways that would destroy many of the advances we have over several painful centuries achieved.
He is not honest.
He is quite willing to deal with corruption (eg, the Mob) in order to benefit himself financially.
He is not committed to public service, because he is not disassociating himself from his business interests.
For some it will not matter.
But perhaps a few will read things like this piece from Adam Gopnik and stop and reflect.
Before it is too late?
S