On June 16, literary elitists like myself pay homage to Leopold Bloom, the hero of James Joyce’s modernist epic Ulysses. Last year, Donald Trump inadvertently commemorated Bloomsday in the most fitting way possible. Declaring his presidential candidacy on June 16, 2015, the Donald infamously proclaimed that immigrants from Mexico were “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” Reflecting upon the tumultuous 12 months since Trump decided to disrupt the political status quo, I am reminded of a contemptible character from Joyce’s masterpiece. Referred to only as “the citizen,” the character spews forth a nonsensical stream of xenophobia, Irish jingoism, and anti-Semitism:
“Those are nice things, says the citizen, coming over here to Ireland filling the country with bugs.”
“Swindling the peasants, says the citizen, and the poor of Ireland. We want no more strangers in our house.”
“The strangers, says the citizen. Our own fault. We let them come in.”
“Saint Patrick would want to land again at Ballykinlar and convert us, says the citizen, after allowing things like that to contaminate our shores.”
“By Jesus, says he, I’ll brain that bloody jewman for using the holy name.”
The citizen’s racist rambling culminates when he throws a biscuit box at Bloom for being Jewish. Quite clearly, the citizen serves as Joyce’s warning against demagoguery and ultra-nationalism. Nonetheless, within a decade of Ulysses’ publication, Benito Mussolini had taken control of Italy and Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party had established a foothold in Weimar Germany.
Undoubtedly, in light of Donald Trump’s rise, the post-Holocaust rallying cry of “Never Again” bears repeating. Even Trump himself has embraced allusions to Mussolini, re-tweeting a quote from the Italian strongman that “it is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.” In spite of his near-daily doses of racism, Trump’s poll numbers have continued to climb, terrifying historians across the globe. Jochen Bittner penned “Is This the West’s Weimar Moment?” in the New York Times; Robert Kagan wrote “This is how fascism comes to America” in the Washington Post; and Adam Gopnik questioned “The Dangerous Acceptance of Donald Trump” in The New Yorker. At the risk of falling prey to reductio ad Hitlerum, Americans need to revisit the Weimar Republic’s slow descent into the hands of the Nazis following World War I and understand its parallels to the current state of America’s democracy.
Hitler’s Rise to Power
World War I signaled the death knell for the German Empire, yet Germany never came to terms with its crushing defeat. Humiliated by the strict reparations imposed by the Allies at Versailles, the Germans internalized an intense resentment for the French and British victors, yearning to regain pre-war territory. At the heart of this nationalist frenzy lay the geopolitical hot potato of Alsace-Lorraine, a particularly contentious enclave on the border between France and Germany. Hitler and the Nazi Party banged this revanchist drum throughout the 1920s, vowing to return to an idealized past of German glory (or, as Trump would put it, to “Make Germany Great Again”). In his writings and speeches, Hitler trumpeted the notion of a German “living space” (lebensraum) and peddled myths of the German race’s exceptionalism.
The Great Depression further catalyzed Hitler’s rise to power. The German economy was on life support for most of the 1920s, and the worldwide economic downturn dealt a critical blow. Ironically, protectionist tariffs, much like the ones Trump is currently promoting, restricted trade and exacerbated the global financial crisis. By 1932, over 6 million Germans—24 percent of the country’s workforce—were out of a job, and real GDP had plummeted. In the face of widespread poverty and unemployment, Weimar’s liberal democracy was doomed to failure.
It was precisely in this socioeconomic climate that Hitler took control. The Nazis played on the economic and racial anxiety of the German people, unifying Germany under a common hatred for the “other”—most notably Jews, but also the mentally and physically disabled, Slavs, Roma, and several other minorities. Hitler explicated his populist, fear-mongering electoral strategy in Mein Kampf, written from prison after he attempted a coup d’etat in 1923. In the book, Hitler argued, “All great movements are popular movements. They are the volcanic eruptions of human passions and emotions, stirred into activity by the ruthless Goddess of Distress or by the torch of the spoken word cast into the midst of the people.” The Nazis channeled these volcanic eruptions, tempting the German people with hyper-nationalism, strong leadership, and easy solutions. As Hitler confessed, “If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.”
Still, even in the Nazis’ victory in the 1933 election, they only won a plurality of the vote. 56 percent of the German electorate cast ballots against Hitler’s party, but this vote was fragmented amongst several other factions. Once Hitler took control, conservatives kowtowed to his regime, more wary of the German Left than the threat that Hitler posed. To quote journalist Jochen Bittner, “The conservative parties and the nobility believed the little hothead could serve as their useful idiot, that as chancellor he would be contained by a squad of reasonable ministers.” When the German Parliament caught on fire, Hitler blamed the Left and his coalition began to solidify. The Leftists and centrists, on the other hand, were riven by internal divisions and failed to unite against Hitler’s authoritarianism. By late 1933, the Third Reich had entrenched itself in power, and Hitler had proven his many critics wrong, proudly noting, “Don’t forget how people laughed at me 15 years ago when I declared that one day I would govern Germany.”
Moreover, despite the best efforts of Woodrow Wilson and other internationalists, the global community failed to create venues for multilateral, peaceful diplomacy that could have prevented Hitler’s rise. The United States refused to join the newly minted League of Nations, stripping the United Nations precursor of any significant authority. Although France, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, and several other countries signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, the international non-aggression treaty went largely unenforced. Subsequently, the international community stood idly by as Hitler gradually expanded the country into the Rhineland, Austria, and the Sudetenland, rallying Germans behind his ethnic nationalist vision. By the time the world intervened, Nazi Germany had metamorphosed into an almost unstoppable juggernaut.
History Repeating Itself
What allows fascism to take hold in a country? Hitler exploited economic discontent, ethnic tensions, populist agitation, political infighting, the widespread longing to return to a romanticized past, and the withering away of international institutions. To be sure, Donald Trump is hardly an ideologue like Hitler or Mussolini; Trump’s campaign seems mostly an exercise in braggadocio and ego padding. Nevertheless, as Bittner aptly put it, “Mr. Trump is no Hitler, but that’s not the point.” Trump’s astonishing success reveals a pervasive desire to overturn the liberal political order. Sadly, many of the conditions that allowed Hitler to take power are present in America today, sowing the seeds for future despotism. In the words of Stephen Dedalus, a main character in Ulysses, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
If World War I marked the end of the German Empire, perhaps the calamitous Iraq War heralded the fall of the American Empire. Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States held court as the world’s most dominant international powerbroker. America’s military and diplomatic preeminence was on full display in the liberation of Kuwait in Operation Desert Storm and in NATO’s intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo in the late 1990s. However, President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq demonstrated the limits of American supremacy. Though the United States succeeded in toppling Saddam Hussein, the Coalition Provisional Authority was unable to mitigate ethnic tensions and establish a durable government, ultimately contributing to the rise of ISIS and broader regional instability. Given the adverse aftermath of the American invasion, it is predictable that Trump’s alleged opposition to the Iraq War has bolstered his popularity. Likewise, in the wake of recent terrorist attacks in Paris, Brussels, San Bernardino, and Orlando, the United States’ national security appears increasingly fragile. Trump’s strongman approach, as seen in his brazen plans to ban Muslim immigration and kill the families of terrorists, has unsurprisingly enticed many Americans who feel that the United States cannot protect its own citizens and is no longer a world superpower.
Trump’s resolute promise to “make America great again” has proven remarkably beguiling. Of course, Trump has never really clarified when America was last great. For his predominantly white male supporters, Trump’s signature slogan hearkens back to the manufacturing boom of the post-WWII era. This glamorized era of U.S. hegemony, however, leaves out large swaths of the American populace. Certainly, women’s rights, gay rights, and civil rights advocates did not think that the America of the 1950s was great. Herein lies the allegorical and somewhat selfish credo at the core of Trump’s rhetoric: despite still being the most privileged demographic in America, white men have embraced Trump’s calls to reclaim an American prosperity that remains by-and-large exclusive to them alone. Just as Weimar Germans saw themselves as the victims of unfair punishments after World War I, so too have Trump supporters lashed out at a rapidly diversifying, multicultural America. Indeed, a YouGov poll in January exposed that 20 percent of Trump’s supporters took issue with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Go on to Trump’s Twitter account, and you will find a noxious hodgepodge of white nationalists and anti-Semites in the replies section.
Much like the Nazi Party, Trump is aided by growing dissatisfaction with the socioeconomic status quo. With globalization, automation, and mechanization devastating previously reliable manufacturing jobs, Trump’s protectionist agenda has struck a nerve with the white working class. Many families still feel the lingering effects of the Great Recession, and voters have flocked to Trump’s crusade against the neoliberal elite. With rates in union membership declining, disenfranchised laborers have almost nowhere to turn. It should come as no shock that the United States was quick to prop up German labor unions after World War II, wary of allowing another Hitler to tap into the socioeconomic concerns of the working class.
Moreover, it is noteworthy that Trump has refrained from promising sweeping cuts to entitlements, clashing with Paul Ryan’s anti-entitlement campaign. Trump astutely realized that the lower-middle class was not enchanted with the strict free market, neoliberal economic dogma that traditional conservatives had offered in the past. In an especially revealing moment in CNBC’s “Your Money, Your Vote” Republican debate this past fall, Senator Marco Rubio was hard pressed to justify why independent analyses showed that his tax plan would give a 27.9 percent after-tax income boost to the top one percent, but only a 15 percent after-tax income benefit to the middle class. Rubio stammered, “Yeah, because the math is, 5 percent of a million is a lot more than 5 percent of a thousand. So, yeah, this is going to make more money—numerically, it’s going to be higher, but the greatest gains percentage-wise for people are going to be at the lower end of our plan.” Either Rubio was lying through his teeth or he had no clue what he was talking about: regardless, the Republican primary elucidated that voters had grown weary of Rubio’s brand of economic conservatism.
Trump has summoned the “ruthless Goddess of Distress” again and again on the campaign trail, telling lies that are just “big enough” to mesmerize the electorate. Trump’s campaign is nothing more than cookie-cutter populism. In the age of Twitter and Facebook, his supporters are literally “followers.” Dubbing themselves “nimble navigators,” Trump’s avid fan base parades around the Internet in support of their iconoclastic hero. “Trump’s “Make America Great Again” hats (now in red, white, blue, black, and camouflage) resemble gaudy, cultish markers of political identity. Trump hasn’t indoctrinated youth groups and militias, but he has encouraged violence to enter the political sphere, pining for the “old days” when protesters “would be carried out on a stretcher” and positing that he might pay the legal fees for a man who punched a protester at one of his rallies.
Furthermore, the conservatives who have coalesced around Trump’s campaign have demonstrated a spineless proclivity to abandon hitherto sacrosanct values in order to defeat Hillary Clinton. Take Marco Rubio for example, who was mercilessly bullied by Trump, yet is now supporting the megalomaniacal billionaire. According to Rubio, “I’ve always said I’m going to support the Republican nominee … and that’s especially true now that it’s apparent that Hillary Clinton is going to be the Democratic [nominee].” Like the Weimar conservatives who thought that Hitler would rubberstamp a conservative agenda and crack down on the far Left, Paul Ryan and company have fallen into a similar trap. Ryan’s efforts to roll out a slate of detailed conservative policy proposals border on delusional, as if the GOP can somehow escape the specter of their loudmouthed candidate. As evidenced by the GOP’s obstructionist blockade on Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court, Republicans have become so ideologically opposed to the Democrats that they are now willing to burn down the House (and the Senate, and the Supreme Court, and the Presidency) to get their way. Just as conservatives in Germany conveniently overlooked Hitler’s failed coup d’etat in 1923, the American Right has turned a blind eye to Trump’s “birther” campaign in 2011. America’s progressive Left is not without its fair share of blame. Although the “Bernie or Bust” phenomenon is somewhat exaggerated, 13 percent of those who say they still support Senator Sanders would stay home in a Clinton vs. Trump showdown, and 7 percent would vote for Trump. The progressives’ utter contempt for Clinton eerily mirrors the disgust that Weimar’s Left had for centrist politicians, a disgust that paved the way for Hitler to take power.
Lastly, nations across the world have gravitated towards the siren song of isolationism, repudiating multilateral, centralized institutions like the European Union, NATO, and the UN. In Britain, this isolationist impulse has pushed many to want to leave the EU, despite the fact that it has been widely credited with unifying the continent and preventing another world war. In the United States, Trump has emerged as isolationism’s standard-bearer, scorning international alliances and norms. Trump’s proposed wall on the southern border is the most striking example of his disdain for internationalism, but Trump’s provincial worldview is also manifest in his trade protectionism and his “America First” foreign policy, both of which were in vogue in the 1920s and 30s as well.
The Legacy of 2016
Obviously, the contemporary United States is not a carbon copy of Weimar Germany. The American economy is much stronger than Weimar’s, and America’s democratic system is much more pluralistic, orderly, and well established than Weimar’s ever was. Nonetheless, Trump can be thought of as a canary in a coalmine: his daily racist, sexist, and xenophobic tweets remind us of the need to reinvigorate our democracy. Disregarding the immediate threat that Trump’s candidacy poses, it is deeply troubling that a candidate can win the GOP nomination by normalizing conspiracy theories, lambasting international institutions, promoting violence, and targeting free press. Trump’s success portends grave danger for the United States; apparently, fascism is not just an international phenomenon.
How did Leopold Bloom respond to the xenophobic race-baiting of “the citizen” in Ulysses? Bloom exclaimed to his acquaintance Alf Bergan:
—Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life.
—What? says Alf.
—Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred.
It seems that Clinton celebrates Bloomsday as well. Her campaign slogan, though somewhat tacky, echoes Bloom’s message: “Love trumps hate.”
Image Credit: Gage Skidmore