Steven’s post this morning on “The politics of humiliation and gaslighting” is ties well into an exchange on the latest episode of The Ezra Klein Show, “Trump Kicks Down the Guardrails.” His guest is the journalist Anne Applebaum, who has made quite a career of reporting on authoritarianism.
As regular readers know, I find the Trump=Hitler meme more annoying than helpful, it’s simply undeniable that there are troubling parallels between the 45th and soon-to-be 47th’s President’s style and that of many prominent authoritarian leaders. And Klein and Applebaum do an especially good job of separating out the helpful and unhelpful in the comparisons.
Klein’s setup gets at the heart of the dilemma:
One of the challenging things about covering Donald Trump is that it is hard to talk about him without sounding unhinged — and that is because he acts in ways that are by any reasonable standard unhinged.
It is this remarkable transference Trump is able to effectuate. He makes his opponents look like rabid antagonists by making them respond to a reality that leaves no room for neutrality, no room for a wait-and-see open-mindedness. He creates a wild reality — and then you sound wild simply describing it.
This, in particular, resonated with me. Referencing the most absurd and alarming of Trump’s nominees for important posts, including the now-withdrawn nomination of Matt Gaetz for the Attorney General post, Klein observes:
What we’re seeing here is that in the areas of government where Trump cares most about full control — the military, the intelligence services, the Department of Justice — he is trying to do what he could not do last time: He is trying to put true lackeys and loyalists in charge. People who have no loyalty aside from their loyalty to him. No patron aside from him. No viable path in politics or public service aside from him. And these are the parts of the government that can be weaponized most dangerously. And even if Matt Gaetz is rejected or withdrawn, as he very well may be, the intention is there.
Trump’s other lackeys and loyalists can certainly find him a hatchet man who isn’t known around Washington for allegedly having sex with a 17-year-old and for burning every bridge he had in the traditional Republican Party.
I’ve heard some people say that the saving grace of these appointments is that these people, at least in the agencies they are trying to run, they’re inexperienced. They’re ridiculous. They’re incompetent. They won’t get anything done. They might even fail to win confirmation.
That is not a saving grace. That is a signal. In other countries, and at other times, when would-be authoritarians try to consolidate power, they do so by placing fools and jesters into positions of extraordinary power.
The absurdity is a cloak. The fact that they are underestimated is a feature. The loyalty they have to the strongman is the thing. And no one is more loyal than someone that the rest of society looks down on. No one is more loyal than someone who would never get this kind of chance, this opportunity, this power under any other person.
When I listened to that on my commute Tuesday, I was in the middle of teaching our lesson on Russian strategic culture. One of the readings was an April Foreign Affairs essay by Maksim Samorukov titled “Putin’s Brittle Regime.” The parallels are hard to ignore:
Putin’s Russia is vulnerable, and its vulnerabilities are hidden in plain sight. Now more than ever, the Kremlin makes decisions in a personalized and arbitrary way that lacks even basic quality controls. Since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Russian political elite have grown more pliant in implementing Putin’s orders and more obsequious in pandering to his paranoid worldview. The costs of these structural deficiencies are mounting.
[…]
Although the comparison may at first seem unlikely, Putin’s situation today resembles in some ways that faced by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the final years of the Soviet Union. In the late 1980s, Gorbachev instructed conservative apparatchiks to press ahead with political and economic liberalization. Accustomed to blindly executing orders from above, the officials offered little resistance. Putin has none of Gorbachev’s idealistic humanism, but he does resemble Gorbachev in one critical respect: his ability to impose his personal vision on the Russian state.
Although the comparison may at first seem unlikely, Putin’s situation today resembles in some ways that faced by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the final years of the Soviet Union. In the late 1980s, Gorbachev instructed conservative apparatchiks to press ahead with political and economic liberalization. Accustomed to blindly executing orders from above, the officials offered little resistance. Putin has none of Gorbachev’s idealistic humanism, but he does resemble Gorbachev in one critical respect: his ability to impose his personal vision on the Russian state.
[…]
Putin’s inflexibility and obduracy have been strengthened by his many years spent surrounded by toadies and yes men. Shielded from negative feedback and objective counsel, he is susceptible to tunnel vision, muddled priorities, and emotional outbursts, all of which are channeled into his decisions. Russia’s foreign policy, domestic security, and economic prospects all suffer as a result.
Trump has not consolidated power to the extent Putin has and I continue to believe the nature of our system and our political culture make doing so next to impossible. But he does seem to have largely neutered Congressional Republicans, removing a huge check on his power.
After Applebaum briefly discusses the controversial nominees in terms of their likelihood to break institutional norms and help Trump get revenge for perceived wrongdoings, Klein gets to an aspect of this alluded to in Steven’s post in a way I haven’t really given much thought to before:
This reminded me of when Trump forced Sean Spicer to go out in 2017 and say Trump had the largest inaugural crowd ever — which we could see was not true from photos.
A point people made was that this kind of thing is a loyalty test — making people do something that they know is going to humiliate them, that they know is going to go against both their values and the way they have traditionally seen themselves and acted in the world.
The Gaetz pick, in particular, felt like that on a larger scale, felt like Trump forcing this on Senate Republicans who do not like Matt Gaetz, who view him with complete contempt, and forcing him on the Republican Party more broadly. Trump could have picked a hatchet man whose name nobody knew. He picked the one who would outrage not just Democrats but actually Republicans — and in doing that force them to really choose a side.
Applebaum concurs enthusiastically:
Yeah, I think that’s right. Very often this is what — if you look at other autocratic regimes in other places — very often it’s the forcing of people to adhere to a conspiracy theory or say things, as you say, that are patently untrue. That’s the loyalty test. And hitherto in the Republican Party, the loyalty test was: Are you willing to say that the 2020 election was stolen?
That has functioned as the loyalty test up until now. But you’re right: I think that the appointment of Matt Gaetz is another, maybe more severe one, because Gaetz is somebody who can break all boundaries. He breaks the definition of what an attorney general is supposed to be, what kind of person it is, and also that he would be — because he has no other allies, he has no friends in the Republican Party — he would be loyal only to Trump.
He would not have any other loyalties: not to the party, not to the Congress, not to the Constitution. He would be loyal to Trump. And so I think that’s another piece of the story, too.
Trump clearly enjoys humiliating people in order to establish his dominance. That “Little Marco” Rubio has gone from a fierce anti-Trump attack dog to a lap dog being rewarded with the State Department post—from, which, incidentally, Trump can fire him at any time—is a clear example. But forcing Republican Senators to defend the likes of Tulsi Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence and Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense is the ultimate troll. Gaetz was the icing on the cake but, even for Trump, it was going to be hard to pretend that was a serious nomination.
Another aspect of the farcical nominations—and this is why Klein is such an elite interviewer—is this:
I’ve been thinking about something Hannah Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism” — another one of these books that when you begin quoting it, you know things are not going great — which is: “Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”
Klein is not only incredibly widely read but manages to retain considerable detail. (I’m assuming he also has a crack staff. But, with the possible exception of Reason’s Nick Gillespie, I can’t offhand think of another show host who so routinely pulls together such a wide swath of references.)
Regardless, Applebaum responds:
So, of course, the quote comes from a book in which she talks about history. She talks about the history of both of the Nazi regime and also of the Soviet regime. And those were both one-party states where there were loyalty tests and where people were given jobs and promoted into power, not for being good at something — for being an excellent manager or a superb policymaker. But were given jobs because of their level of their loyalty to the leader. And that is one of the things that characterizes an authoritarian regime.
If you look around the world now and you look at both authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes, you see that’s how it works. I lived in Poland between 2015 and last year, when we had an autocratic populist government that didn’t develop into full-blown authoritarianism, but it did replace people according to whether or not they were loyal. And they succeeded in degrading the quality of the civil service and of the state.
And I think this gets to a deeper problem, which I think will also begin to play itself out, which is: What is the purpose of government? Why do we have a civil service? What do all these people in Washington do? Are they there to solve problems? To improve the lives of Americans? That’s why we send them there. That’s what we’re paying them to do.
Or could they be used in a different way? Could they be used to do the bidding of the president? In some countries, it’s to make the president rich, or in other countries, it’s to make the president popular. Or it’s to carry out policies that are one way or another in the interest of the president.
So one could talk about using the Food and Drug Administration to approve and disapprove drugs in a way that benefited friends of the president or which benefited the president’s policy interests. If the point of the Department of Justice is not justice and is something completely different, then Matt Gaetz is the perfect person for it.
If the point of the Federal Communications Commission is not to regulate communications but to punish the president’s enemies in the media, then it, too, begins to have a different purpose. And that’s why all of these questions about personnel — and again: What’s the purpose of all these institutions that we have, all these three-letter agencies in Washington?
What are they for? Are they for Trump? Are they for Americans?
Regardless of whether one views Trump as merely a tantrum-throwing toddler or truly evil, it is hard to deny that he’s possessed of a deep solipsistic worldview. He truly doesn’t understand that the apparatus of government doesn’t exist to cater to his every whim.
I want to skip ahead quite a bit in the conversation to this bit, which really gets at something I’ve been wrestling with for quite some time.
Klein:
I really struggle with how to talk about this and how to even integrate this history into the way I think about the present. Because I do think there’s this reality that when you use the word “fascism,” people’s thinking shuts down. “Nazis,” even more so. “Communists,” certainly to some degree. That some of these leaders, some of these movements, they really just exist in the American lexicon now, not as complex things that actually happened that people liked when they were happening in many cases, but as slurs.
And so these sort of nationalist authoritarian movements that I think have symmetries or echoes or shades of what’s going on with Trump — to talk about them is almost to commit a kind of etiquette violation. And at the very least to get sidetracked onto these other arguments.
Applebaum:
So I’ve had a lot of arguments with people about the word “fascist.” I’ve tried to not use it. Just because it makes people think of the Nazis, and it makes people think of movies they’ve seen about the Nazis, and that’s the image that they have in their heads. And as I said already, most modern autocratic or illiberal governments don’t look like that at all. There are no storm troopers; there aren’t mass arrests. Instead what you have is the slow takeover of institutions, the elimination of alternative or independent media.
The takeover of courts is usually a big part of it. And that doesn’t mean, in our case, having conservative courts — but having judges who do what the president wants. Which is something very different from being a conservative judge or an originalist or anything like that. And so I try not to use the word. It’s hard to escape it precisely, because as I wrote, he’s using that language.
He, himself, does it, and former chief of staff John Kelly was using it about him because John Kelly had this conversation with him about Hitler’s general. So it’s Trump himself who brings up those analogies and that makes us fall into them.
But I agree that it can be unhelpful, because it creates the wrong expectation. It makes us think they’re going to be Brownshirts and storm troopers, whereas I don’t think it’s going to look like that at all.
Klein:
But I also think we flatten them in our own minds when you hear “fascism,” certainly when you hear about Nazis. But let’s stay on the fascists for a minute. What you hear is “totalitarian,” “evil,” “disaster,” “World War II.”
After a bit more back-and-forth, Applebaum chimes in with:
I always tried to understand not just the people who were oppressed by the regime but also the people who supported it. What did they think they were doing? Why were they there? And after the Second World War, in Eastern Europe, there was this sense of — somewhere like Poland, for example, or Hungary, there was a sense that the prewar system had collapsed and failed.
So the world of the 1930s was gone. And the war had erased whole institutions, had erased the aristocracy and had erased the whole political and economic system, and therefore we need to start from scratch. And therefore, Communism, to a lot of people, seemed like a brand-new ideology, — that we could build something from scratch at the moment.
And a lot of people adhered to it for that reason, and not merely because they were evil or because they were cowardly. Eventually, many of them were evil and cowardly, and those regimes did a huge amount of damage. So I’m not making an excuse for them.
I’m just saying that, yes, you’re right. They were attractive to people in those countries at that time for reasons that are now hard to understand because we know how it ended. But at that time they didn’t know how it was going to end.
Which is the dilemma. We don’t know the future. Trump has repeatedly uttered some violent, if not eliminationist, words. That’s a huge red flag. While I don’t think we’re going to round up six million people and put them into death camps or set off pogroms against opposition party members, Trump’s actions show a deep disregard for our most basic institutions. Congressional Republicans—who will have a majority in both Houses for the next two years—have already demonstrated that they will mostly go along with him. While the Supreme Court checked him time and time again the first term, they’ve abandoned the fundamental principle of stare decisis, overturning at least two landmark cases, to get to a preferred outcome.
And I think Applebaum’s vision of what this looks like is spot on:
So I would watch government agencies and institutions and, as we’ve been discussing, who runs them and with what purpose.
Are they still being run to benefit the American people? Or are they being run in order to perform some political narrative or in order to achieve revenge or retribution for the president? I would look at judicial appointments, looking not for whether somebody is a liberal or a conservative — that actually in our system is a normal debate.
A liberal judge, a conservative judge — how they interpret the Constitution can be very different. And we are all deeply divided about that. But that’s not the kind of judge that would worry me. The kind of judge that would worry me is someone like Aileen Cannon — someone who seems to be there in order to do favors for the president or for his friends.
[…]
One of the things that happens when you lower guardrails or you remove these rules about conflicts of interest or you remove the rules about security clearances or you get rid of the inspectors general or you muzzle the media or you threaten people and make them afraid to speak out — obviously, one of the effects of that is to make repression possible. If they decide to go that route. And that would be a more obvious thing to do.
But another effect of it is it makes it easier for people to steal things — or to use the government as a way of making money. There’s a lot of issues about how transparent the American government’s relationship is with American business already. And the role of lobbyists is already very huge.
This is an element of American democracy that’s already declined pretty far. But you could push it a step further. And most of the modern authoritarian regimes — and this is one of the other ways in which they’re very different from the regimes of the 1930s — are what we would call kleptocracies.
So those are systems where the leaders are not only very politically powerful, they are also billionaires. So Putin is a billionaire. Xi Jinping is a billionaire. We don’t necessarily know how they’re billionaires or why or how they got there, but they are. That’s part of their power, and that’s part of what keeps them in power. Because they have the money to be able to bribe people or to influence people or to run influence campaigns or to buy people off — in a way that Hitler or Stalin or Mussolini didn’t have.
None of this is what springs to mind when one talks of fascism, much less Hitler. But it’s what modern authoritarianism looks like.
Sadly, I think Trump will not only get away with this but that many of his supporters won’t even see it is wrong. One of our few regulars who supports Trump commented the other day that President Biden, the Cheneys, and others who opposed his guy were raking in huge sums from kickbacks from the defense industry in exchange for their support of Ukraine. There’s zero evidence for that, of course. But there are huge numbers of Americans who think the system is already corrupt—most of our successful politicians wind up getting rich, after all—and so it might as well be their guy who benefits.
