CommentsWALLS AND AUTHORITARIANISM-It’s the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. Federal workers are rationing their insulin.
Worse, there’s no sign the government will reopen. All because a rogue authoritarian President is holding a nation hostage over a Great Wall, having conjured up a completely imaginary border crisis, by demonizing little children seeking refuge as supernatural monsters with the mighty powers to…wreck the world’s most powerful country.
Dear reader, any reasonable person could, without hyperbole, say, wow, that looks suspiciously like the beginnings of fascism. All of which raises the question. Is this America’s Reichstag Fire moment?
In case you don’t know the story, it goes something like this. in 1933, just a month after Hitler was sworn into power — after everyone who’d warned he’d do terrible things was ignored, ridiculed, or erased — the Reichstag — Germany’s then Congress — mysteriously burned down. As soon as the fire was called into the police, Hitler had an emergency decree passed, which suspended civil liberties, can curtailed freedom of the press, assembly, privacy, and suspended habeas corpus. Bang! Hitler’s hold on power was now consolidated. The fire is now generally accepted to have been an inside job, precisely to consolidate Hitler’s hold on power. The rest, as they say, is history — it’s darkest and most sordid moments.
Now, if all that — an authoritarian declaring an imaginary emergency to consolidate power and pursue his own mad dreams of domination — sounds eerily like the events of the last couple of weeks in American history to you, then the question, again, is this: is this America’s Reichstag Fire moment? I have some bad news, and I have some good news (for a change). Let’s start with the bad news.
The correct way, in my estimation, to think about all this isn’t really through the lens of a single “Reichstag Fire moment.” It’s to see the Reichstag Fire itself as a single step in the inevitable and predictable sequence of a fascist collapse. That sequence goes something like this. A country plunges into stagnation. A formerly aspirational middle class’s living standards begin to fall — though they were promised a life of comfort and ease, or at least, if they played by the rules, a share of a society’s surplus. They grow frustrated, disillusioned — and then enraged. Along comes a demagogue, who blames all this on whom it’s the easiest to blame it on: those below this formerly aspirational middle and lower middle. Refugees, immigrants, Jews, Mexicans, the disabled, gays — the weak and the vulnerable, those at the bottom of sociocultural hierarchies.
And now the sequence goes into overdrive. Having found a convenient target to redirect the rage of the masses upon, and sublimate it, the demagogue must then find Great Endeavors and tell Big Lies. Demonization becomes repression. Hitler had ghettoes built, and ordered minorities into them, seizing their homes and possessions, and giving them to his most loyal followers. Trump has a wall — and a network of camps. It’s not that these things are morally equivalent — they are not. It is that they feel hauntingly similar for a very good reason: they are similar steps in the very same sequence of ruin.
Demonization, scapegoating, dehumanization, the creation of imaginary monsters, like little children, all of which culminate in imaginary Existential Problems (“the Jews are the problem!” “The Mexicans are raping our women!”). Now, problems need solutions — and Existential Problems need Final Solutions. So then come power seizures, built on imaginary Final Solutions to imaginary Existential Problems, which alter the destiny of a nation, by destroying what government it has left. Then come expropriation, ghettoization, segregation of those imaginary monsters — all inevitable parts of this Final Solution to an Existential Problem which is really people. Finally come enslavement, war, and atrocity.
That is the sequence of ruin, my friends. Where are we in it at this precise moment? Well, an authoritarian president threatens to declare a state of emergency over a Great Wall — which is itself a solution to an imaginary crisis, built on demonizing refugees and immigrants as supernaturally powerful monsters. Remember the rule: Existential Problems need Final Solutions. The wall is therefore the beginning of an American Final Solution. The shutdown is a power grab, designed to alter the basic institutional and legal fabric of a society — just like a Reichstag Fire.
If you understand that all the above is a process — the plunge into fascism — then you should also understand that there will never be just “one” Reichstag Fire moment. There will be many — until the moment has done its job, which is to declare emergency and consolidate power. The next two years will be a Reichstag Fire moment. Every little setback and obstacle to the authoritarian-fascist agenda will spark furious promises to declare emergency — over and over again. The threat of declaring a state of emergency — and disposing of democracy as we know it — will now become a regular feature of our daily lives. And that’s if it doesn’t by next week.
You’d be right to think of it as a form of abuse, incidentally. Authoritarians are abusers — only they are in an abusive relationship with a whole society. What is happening here is withholding a whole government from a society — until it caves in to the authoritarian-fascist agenda. Ah, but one might as well not have a government then. You see what the abuser has done? He has created a dilemma: damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
The abuser doesn’t just withhold validation and love and respect. He withholds basic things, like control, like freedom, like truth. Maybe like food and safety and information. He rubs his power in your face — by withholding things you once took for granted but have now granted him the power to have over you. He creates dilemmas: if you give me what I want, I won’t hurt you, but if you don’t give me what I want, I will. There’s no good option — because to give him what he wants hurts you anyways. Sound familiar, all over again?
The truth is that from the instant that this rogue President was elected (or at least selected by America’s obsolete electoral college), a Reichstag Fire moment became grimly inevitable. The fascist-authoritarian sequence is not something that stops itself. The aspiring authoritarian does not wake up one day and suddenly grow a conscience, a soul, feel remorse. The authoritarian is an abuser, an abuser is a narcissist, and narcissists do not feel remorse. They do not feel anything but the overwhelming need to be feared, because they will never be loved. That is why not once in history has this sequence, once allowed to begin, magically come to a halt — not in Germany, not in Bosnia, not in Rwanda.
The next two years will be an ongoing, perpetual Reichstag Fire moment — a grim game of chicken, between a mafia of authoritarian-fascists who rode stagnation to power, and what’s left of the functioning institutions of democracy (hint: not much). We’ll see this game of chicken played out day after day, week after week. It’ll be frightening, disorienting, exhausting, and enraging. The stakes couldn’t be higher: the authoritarian mafia vying for absolute power are judging when they can seize total control of the world’s most powerful country.
And that brings me to the good news. I think that they are going to fail. Even if they win their games of chicken here and there, which — steel yourself — they will. Why? Because, my friends, Americans have done something genuinely remarkable over the last few months. They have come together to reject authoritarian-fascism, vehemently, loudly, united. Enough of them, anyways. It’s true that this nascent wave has yet to fully transform American politics, institutions, and economics. But it is notable enough to say that the authoritarians will not succeed at breaking America — at least if Americans do not give up on America, either.
You see, when a people themselves reject authoritarianism, the game is up. You cannot control a country that does not really, deep down, want to be controlled, that will not meekly sit idle while their ideals are trampled and their democracy shattered. The authoritarian’s only real power is to seduce people with alternately frightening and tempting illusions, dreams of monsters, and dreams of power — but at this, America’s aspiring fascists have failed. Americans have rejected the vision of Trumpreich as a disgraceful, shameful, and ignoble thing, fundamentally and deeply un-American.
Now, don’t mistake me. That doesn’t mean that you should breathe a sigh of relief and go back to internet shopping your life away. OK, maybe you can a little. But that idea that the authoritarians are losing? That part is still up to you. It’s up to you voting. Speaking out. Being a little angry. Holding pundits and politicians to account. Remembering, above all, I think, that we are better than this — and if we are not, we were never anything much at all. America has a checkered history, it’s true. But that doesn’t mean that we give in to our worst impulses and sign over our futures to our most contemptible con men. It means that we reach for all that is true, noble, and good in us — even if we have fallen short of that task before. We’ve been doing a good job of that, of really reaching for all that is worthy in us — for the first time in a long time. But the truth is that difficult, beautiful, rewarding work has just begun. Let it go on, my friends, let it go on. Because that is the essence of what it means to be American.
(Umair Haque posts at Medium.com.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
