Ninety years ago, pioneer CBS radio journalist William L. Shirer arrived in Germany to cover Adolf Hitler and his then year-old Nazi dictatorship.
“There was much that impressed, puzzled, and troubled a foreign observer about the new Germany,” Shirer wrote in his famous post-World War II book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. “The overwhelming majority of Germans did not seem to mind that their personal freedom had been taken away, that so much of their culture had been destroyed and replaced with a mindless barbarism, or that their life and work had become regimented to a degree never before experienced even by people accustomed for generations to a great deal of regimentation.”
Republican President-elect Donald Trump has been called an authoritarian, even a fascist. He admires dictators like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
In a New York Times story published on Oct. 22, former Marine General John Kelly, Trump’s longest serving chief of staff said Trump “commented more than once that, ‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too.’”
Kelly, who had been Homeland Security secretary, also said that working with Trump convinced him that his ex-boss “certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure” and that “he certainly prefers the dictator approach to government.”
Trump denied Kelly’s charges. But the president-elect’s penchant for prevaricating is well-documented.
Anyway, we will soon find out how many Americans who voted for Trump might be untroubled if he opts to become a dictator or strongman, and end, or greatly curtail, our democracy.
“Roughly a third of Trump voters are comfortable with authoritarianism,” said Murray State University historian David Pizzo, whose specialty is German history. “That’s why appeals to their democratic impulses from the left and the center were totally pointless.”
In an international survey released by the U.S. Pew Research Center last February, 32 percent of American respondents said they’d “support a form of governance led by a ‘strong leader’ or the military,” The Independent reported.
A nonpartisan PRRI poll published last September revealed “that 4 in 10 Americans are susceptible to authoritarian appeals, and that number rises to two-thirds of Republicans and white evangelical Protestants,” said Robert P. Jones, PRRI president and founder. “Notably, while the vast majority of Americans reject the use of political violence, those who support authoritarianism are nearly twice as likely as the general public to support it.”
Pizzo, who earned a Ph.D. in history from the University of North Carolina, sees alarming parallels between the U.S. today and Germany in the early 1930s, when Hitler began consolidating his power. He said Trump supporters are “openly professing their affinity for [authoritarianism] and I’m not putting any words in their mouths.”
Pizzo added about Trumpism: “In terms of the economic autarchy, [it] is classic fascist policy.” So, too, is Trumpian “divide and rule-blaming ‘enemy aliens’ to distract from real problems,” according to Pizzo.
Hitler’s rabid anticommunism went hand-in-hand with his homicidal hatred of Jews, which led to the Holocaust.
Pizzo said “virulent anti-Marxism and virulent anti-communism were a huge part of the Trump platform that apparently swayed some Latino men.”
Although Trump never misses a chance to burnish his pro-Israel creds, elements of his grassroots MAGA movement are rife with anti-Semitism, Rita Katz wrote on Oct. 21 in Forward, one of the oldest Jewish American publications. “Tropes once confined to skinhead clubs and white supremacist Internet forums now litter the rhetoric of pro-Donald Trump and MAGA feeds.”
She added, “Antisemites and hate influencers are thriving on X, which is headed by one of Trump’s most prominent advocates, Elon Musk. Users on The Donald, another forum frequented by antisemitic ultranationalists — and the same one that played a major role in mobilizing ahead of the Jan. 6 attack against our democracy — are now mobilizing to become poll workers. The truth is that no one deserves more blame for this tsunami of antisemitism than Donald Trump. It is reasonable to assume that if Trump is re-elected, anti-Jewish hate in America will increase.”
Pizzo also pointed to a close kinship between the authoritarian personality type and arch conservatism.
“Authoritarians don’t care as much about democracy as they do about identity and power and punishing their enemies. A lot of [Trump backers] are relatively comfortable. The people that stormed the capital [on Jan. 6, 2021] were not the ‘unwashed masses.’ They were, like, boat dealers.”
He said that while the first Trump term “was quite bad, this one will be worse. [Trump voters] knew what they were doing this time but did it anyway. His cabinet picks are all you need to know about what to expect.”
Pizzo predicted that Trump and the MAGA Republicans “are going to try to create a dictatorship, and our institutions and our courts won’t do a damn thing to stop it.”
He hopes to see “tremendous pushback. I think the question of how bad it gets is to some degree up to us. How much are we in our own behavior going to allow this? How much will we habituate ourselves to dictatorship?
“They are counting on us to demobilize and get depressed. If we do that, well…”
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