Dear America,
Once when I was in my twenties, my father, who was a young man living with his family in Austria when the Germans marched in to occupy the country, told me that the way in which Richard Nixon was galvanizing his constituency--the silent majority--was just like what Hitler did in the twenties and thirties in Germany. The fear of other nations and ideals--in Nixon's case, primarily communists, the Soviets and the North Vietnam--was directly analogous to Hitler's vilification of the former Allies for the national penury caused by the peace those nations extracted from Germany and the continuing status as European pariah that plagued post-war Germany. But, Nixon did not turn out to be another Hitler, whether he wanted to be or not, and the United States continued in its democratic tradition, electing both liberals and conservatives over the past forty years, right up until the present. But the ascendancy of Donald Trump raises the same specter in my mind that Nixon's rise precipitated in my father's, but I think with an even closer parallel between Trump and Hitler than may or may not have existed between Nixon and Hitler back in the sixties and seventies. The paranoia and fear are roughly the same, and Trump, like Nixon, seems inclined to retaliate against anyone who disagrees with him without any constraint based on scruples, but there is a sharper verisimilitude that I see as striking, and it didn't begin with Trump, though he is playing into it with the adroitness of aspiring dictators and demagogues everywhere.
Trump didn't invent the notion that America is superior to all other nations and that the American ethos is superior to all other national cultures. The first time I heard the phrase "American exceptionalism" was when Newt Gingrich said it during a Republican debate in 2007 or 2008. Gingrich didn't invent the idea, but he used it in a fashion that rendered it a kind of praise when as it turns out, its origins were in writings that were anything but complimentary. The most common attribution of the concepts behind American Exceptionalism is to Alexis de Tocqueville, who said in his work Democracy in America that we Americans were not distracted by higher pursuits of an intellectual nature because our focus was on more practical matters, and because all the deep thinking was already being done in Europe. Nearly a hundred years later, Stalin used the precise term, American Exceptionalism, in criticizing the United States and attributing the depression started by American capitalism to our lofty self-esteem and the limitations of our national character. But regardless of the origins of the term, Trump's claim that he can "make America great again," implying that it is something less because of the frailty of our political leadership, is resonating, and as in the Reagan years, a certain element of American society is being galvanized by its own pridefulness without contemplation of the origins...the negative context in which the idea of American exceptionalism was spawned, but rather out of a kind of national conceit that has become acceptable despite the fact that our purported Judeo-Christian ethos condemns pride as a sin. The lack of a distinction between pride and conceit seems lost on Trump supporters, and for that matter on many Americans who prefer status to virtue. And this appeal to pridefulness that Trump intentionally indulges in runs parallel to Hitler's strategy in another stark way.
You may recall that Hitler justified what we now know to be genocide by claiming that the German Arians were a "master race," and that they should therefore be dominant in the world as a matter if right. And his use of such a rhetorical flourish was a sine qua non for his rise to power because it essentially affirmed the pride of the German people at a time when Europe, and the United States for that matter, had driven Germany to ruin and hopelessness, Hitler making himself the embodiment of a retreat from that national abyss. He created a national automobile industry with the peoples' car, the Volkswagen, and he brought German science to a pinnacle of accomplishment by investing in military research and technology as well as in, it turns out, eugenics, with fascist principles, and another set of ideas as well. I have lately heard that German study of eugenics occurred to Hitler as a function of the American dalliance in the odious practice as exemplified by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes' majority opinion in the 1927 case of Buck v. Bell--a case about the mandatory sterilization of a young woman approved in that U.S. Supreme Court decision--which concluded with the sentence, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." Thus, heretical as it may seem, the parallel between the concept of a master race and American exceptionalism is worth at least mentioning, and thus, Trump's connection to the latter justifies the pause it has given those who oppose him.
We have come a long way in the wrong direction in my opinion, and also in my opinion, it started with saint Ronald Reagan, who wasn't shy about claiming a rightful place at the pinnacle of human governance for the United States. From that came wars of proseletysm for American democracy, both overt and sub rosa, in Chile, Nicaragua, Afghanistan as both a patron on the Mujahadeen and in our own name, and twice in Iraq, all inspired by our unbridled belief in our own virtue. Trump is the current prime exponent of that misguided ethos, and if we are at all unlucky, he'll be our president. What misadventures will then ensue I dread to think about.
Your friend,
Mike
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