Everyone must read "The American Abyss" in the New York Times

Yale history professor Timothy Snyder on Trump and fascism

This guy knows what he’s talking about.  He has spent his career studying authoritarian countries and how fascism emerged in between-the-wars Germany.  He has been watching as our democracy has devolved into something less than it was, as a new and frightening turn has been taken into what he calls “pre-fascism.”  And he hangs the responsibility for what has happened to this country right where it belongs:  not only around the neck of Donald Trump, but around the neck of the Republican Party – and not just some Republicans, but all of them.  Read his introduction to his theory, in which he begins to describe a split in the Republican Party into what he calls “gamers” and “breakers”: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/magazine/trump-coup.html

“The responsibility for Trump’s push to overturn an election must be shared by a very large number of Republican members of Congress. Rather than contradict Trump from the beginning, they allowed his electoral fiction to flourish. They had different reasons for doing so. One group of Republicans is concerned above all with gaming the system to maintain power, taking full advantage of constitutional obscurities, gerrymandering and dark money to win elections with a minority of motivated voters. They have no interest in the collapse of the peculiar form of representation that allows their minority party disproportionate control of government. The most important among them, Mitch McConnell, indulged Trump’s lie while making no comment on its consequences.”

Snyder then proceeds to introduce the other faction of Republicans, the “breakers,” and gets right into the consequences of this profound change in the American political landscape, begun 40 years ago, when Ronald Reagan began mouthing the Big Lie that has consumed the Republican Party ever since:

“Yet other Republicans saw the situation differently: They might actually break the system and have power without democracy. The split between these two groups, the gamers and the breakers, became sharply visible on Dec. 30, when Senator Josh Hawley announced that he would support Trump’s challenge by questioning the validity of the electoral votes on Jan. 6. Ted Cruz then promised his own support, joined by about 10 other senators. More than a hundred Republican representatives took the same position. For many, this seemed like nothing more than a show: challenges to states’ electoral votes would force delays and floor votes but would not affect the outcome.”

“Yet for Congress to traduce its basic functions had a price. An elected institution that opposes elections is inviting its own overthrow. Members of Congress who sustained the president’s lie, despite the available and unambiguous evidence, betrayed their constitutional mission….on Jan. 6, he (Trump) directed his followers to exert pressure on these elected representatives, which they proceeded to do: storming the Capitol building, searching for people to punish, ransacking the place….afterward, eight senators and more than 100 representatives voted for the lie that had forced them to flee their chambers.”

“Post-truth is pre-fascism,” Snyder goes on to say, “and Trump has been our post-truth president. When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place…post-truth wears away the rule of law and invites a regime of myth.”

See what I mean?  This guy gets it right.

Snyder goes on to describe how Trump used Twitter as a megaphone in the same way Hitler used the relatively new medium of radio to disperse his lies: 

“Like historical fascist leaders, Trump has presented himself as the single source of truth….thanks to technological capacity and personal talent, Donald Trump lied at a pace perhaps unmatched by any other leader in history. For the most part these were small lies, and their main effect was cumulative….yet so long as he was unable to enforce some truly big lie, some fantasy that created an alternative reality where people could live and die, his pre-fascism fell short of the thing itself.”

Snyder then brings us right to the present day and the nub of the matter, so to speak.  What happens when the cumulation of Trump’s little lies, all of which – every single one of them – were endorsed by and re-broadcast by his fellow Republicans? What happens when it all culminate in the Big Lie we have been treated to for the last two months? 

“In November 2020, reaching millions of lonely minds through social media, Trump told a lie that was dangerously ambitious: that he had won an election that in fact he had lost. This lie was big in every pertinent respect: not as big as “Jews run the world,” but big enough….Trump’s electoral fiction floats free of verifiable reality. It is defended not so much by facts as by claims that someone else has made some claims. The sensibility is that something must be wrong because I feel it to be wrong, and I know others feel the same way. When political leaders such as Ted Cruz or Jim Jordan spoke like this, what they meant was: You believe my lies, which compels me to repeat them.”

This is where the rest of the Republican Party comes into play as, in effect, co-conspirators in Trump’s final push of his Big Lie.  They do it for various reasons, but all of them have the same goal:  maintaining power:

“Right now, the Republican Party is a coalition of two types of people: those who would game the system (most of the politicians, some of the voters) and those who dream of breaking it (a few of the politicians, many of the voters). In January 2021, this was visible as the difference between those Republicans who defended the present system on the grounds that it favored them and those who tried to upend it. In the four decades since the election of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have overcome the tension between the gamers and the breakers by governing in opposition to government, or by calling elections a revolution (the Tea Party), or by claiming to oppose elites. The breakers, in this arrangement, provide cover for the gamers, putting forth an ideology that distracts from the basic reality that government under Republicans is not made smaller but simply diverted to serve a handful of interests.”

Snyder goes on to describe the way that Trump failed as what we might call the “breaker-in-chief.”  Because he had no ideology of his own, Trump’s only goal was the break the system to serve his own interests.  That is why Trump’s pre-fascism didn’t work.  “His vision never went further than a mirror,” Snyder writes. “He arrived at a truly big lie not from any view of the world but from the reality that he might lose something.”

Unlike what we might call a “real” fascist dictator, Trump made the mistake of alienating his own military.  “He was unable to bring institutions along with his Big Lie,” Snyder points out.  In the end, he couldn’t even organize a real insurrection.  “It is hard to think of a comparable insurrectionary moment, when a building of great significance was seized, that involved so much milling around,” Snyder points out.  And he’s right.

And yet Trump’s Big Lie lives on.  The Republican Party seems poised to amplify Trump’s fiction that the election of 2020 was “rigged,” and thus Biden’s presidency is illegitimate.  But the “breakers” and the “gamers” among Republicans see the use of Trump’s Big Lie differently.  This has led to the “split” in the Republican Party we’re just beginning to see written about.  But Snyder sees it correctly, as a more profound threat to our democracy than others do. The “breakers” see repeating Trump’s Big Lie about the stolen election as a triumph and a “treasure,” according to Snyder.  Whereas the “gamers” see it as a danger.  That’s why you saw Hawley and Cruz continue to endorse the Big Lie on Wednesday even after their own chamber had been trashed by a mob of its adherents, while Mitch McConnell and most of the Republicans backed away from it and voted to certify Biden’s election. 

“Trump is, for now, the martyr in chief, the high priest of the big lie. He is the leader of the breakers, at least in the minds of his supporters. By now, the gamers do not want Trump around. Discredited in his last weeks, he is useless; shorn of the obligations of the presidency, he will become embarrassing again, much as he was in 2015…but the breakers have an even stronger reason to see Trump disappear: It is impossible to inherit from someone who is still around. Seizing Trump’s big lie might appear to be a gesture of support. In fact it expresses a wish for his political death. Transforming the myth from one about Trump to one about the nation will be easier when he is out of the way.”

Snyder points out that this is where things get truly dangerous.  What Snyder calls “Trump’s coup-attempt” on Wednesday is both a lesson and a warning.  “His pre-fascism revealed a possibility for American politics,” according to Snyder.  The “breakers” will have to spend the next four years amplifying Trump’s Big Lie in order to bring together what we might call their “Coalition of Anger.”  Snyder agrees with experts who say that right-wing white supremacy is the biggest danger to our Republic that we’ve seen since the Civil War.  He points out that the sale of guns and ammunition “hit an astonishing high in 2020.” 

To keep the Big Lie going for the next four years “courts terrorism and assassination,” says Snyder.  He’s right.

And then he poses a frightening, “what if” question that I think all of us must ponder.  What happens “when violence comes,” Snyder asks: 

“The breakers will have to react. If they embrace it, they become the fascist faction. The Republican Party will be divided, at least for a time. One can of course imagine a dismal reunification: A breaker candidate loses a narrow presidential election in November 2024 and cries fraud, the Republicans win both houses of Congress and rioters in the street, educated by four years of the big lie, demand what they see as justice. Would the gamers stand on principle if those were the circumstances of Jan. 6, 2025?”

“America will not survive the big lie just because a liar is separated from power,” Snyder says.  Amen to that.