This is fascinating and seems quite correct. Some people are somehow pre- programmed to want authoritarian leaders. No coincidence that they love displaying and waving the Confederate Flag. And some also wave the Swastika/Iron Cross or wear pro Nazi T Shirts. A recent article in the Wash Post noted that many of those arrested have had a lifetime of financial issues with creditors, landlords and the IRS. A freak show of deadbeats. Yet remember they also have AR15s with advanced; highly accurate sighting systems and buy ammo in 500 round lots. A propensity to violence seems clear. How does this movie end?
A good comparison. I went to Bavaria as a soldier in 1965, and while most of the cities had been rebuilt by then , there were still "lost cause" believers, particularly in that area of Germany, the birthplace of National Socialism. Sitting in the biergartens and gasthauses we played a game called "Spot the Nazi." Often the telling point was the way they looked at us. Not much of a challenge here to spot the MAGAts, as they like to wear their regalia.
Man, you are 100 percent correct about how white kids growing up in the South were schooled in the myth of the Lost Cause. By the time I was six, in 1962, I could have told you where the Confederate troops were positioned in every major battle of the Civil War (which I was of course trained to call the War Between the States). Coincidentally, ‘62 was the year that 30,000 federal troops had to put down an insurrection in Oxford, MS, mounted by folks who were determined to keep a single black man from enrolling at Ole Miss. They were the same kind of people who stormed the Capitol in January.
I live around the corner from Gadsden Wharf in Charleston SC where the International African American Museum is being built. It, and my building, is across the street from Gadsdenboro Park. I learned the horror of where I live by clicking on Gadsden flag. I didn't know. And you are correct about the Civil War still being litigated here. It's not called the war between the states and the recent unpleasantness for nuthin'!
Let us never forget the power of the big lie, demonstrated so well in Germany. How many of us were taught that the Versailles Treaty set the stage for World War II, and yet were not taught that Adolf Hitler rolled out his Big Lie at the 1924 Beer Hall Putsch? Hitler claimed that Germany didn’t actually lose World War I, but that a premature surrender negotiated by Jews and communists prevented Germany’s final and inevitable victory. For years, he repeated that lie and gained more and more believers. That lie was the foundation of his rise to power. Trump tried to destroy Obama with the big lie that Obama wasn't born in this country and has tried to hold onto power (and succeeded in the minds of too many of his supporters) with the big lie of a fraudulent election. We must work overtime to refute, again and again, his claims. Many of his believers excused the violence with the statement, "Well, wouldn't you fight if (you thought) your vote was stolen and that an imposter was in the White House?"
Amen! I, with maybe others, had the wrong idea that witnesses would appear before the Senate. In reality, depositions would be taken. How could we conclude that McCarthy, "not known for his candor," being a polite way to describe his mendacity, would have done anything but decline and fight a subpoena for months? Then lie. They proved the case. How like Democrats to be castigated by Democrats. Let's save our vitriol for those who deserve it: the hypocritical usual suspects.
This is a sobering and worrisome description of the populous tribal mass that we now face. I wholly agree with you that trump's supporters love him deeply. Obviously he has resonated within them strong feelings, drawn them together by playing on their deep felt individual tribal hates against you-name-it.
And, concurring with you that trumpism is now with us and will not go away, I look forward to any view you might have on how we can live it or work around it.
I read one of your novels back in the 90’s when I was stationed in Germany. It was a great read, and focused on the psychology of why we humans act the way we do.
Genetics vs. Upbringing...
Stay with me here: Defeating Trumpism will rely on social forces besting genetic ones.
1) Darwin’s theory of evolution, “survival of the fittest,” is a genetically true drive. DNA wants to survive and to propagate.
2) Social Darwinism - superiority by race - is a necessary byproduct of our genetic composition, and our sentience. Descartes “I think, therefore I am” translates to “I am alive, because I am better.”
I will wager that Darwin’s theory is only altered by human rationalization during times of prosperity. In times of famine, the “lesser” DNA or race is always blamed and becomes expendable... Don’t forget, as Lucian Truscott pointed out, that Germans underwent a decade and a half of famine under the Versailles Treaty. They were RIPE for Nazism and Aryan superiority notions. The parallels to the US are crystal clear: The largest part of unwavering MAGA support comes from rural and poor (and uneducated) White Americans. And rural America was blasted by the 2008 economic collapse. President Obama became the focus of white rural rage that the American Dream had been taken from them and handed to black and brown people. Donald Trump, for all of his faults, capitalized on these feelings of rage and indignation. - Don’t EVER forget that he got 74 million people to vote for him...
I think it boils down to this: the human race will never eliminate racism as long as race exists. The feelings of White/ Japanese/ Aryan/ Mongol/ Egyptian/ Norse/ Roman superiority will always be there. It’s coded into our DNA. And even if we homogenize as the human race, we will still parse and discriminate...
So, is there any hope??? YES.
I believe that while “nature” is a strong human drive, “nurture” can, and will win.
How?
1) We have to educate our youth on DNA, and on evolution. That we are all human, and that we share DNA. Skin color, eye shape, running ability, etc., ad infinitum are just genetic mutations. Different, not better or worse...
(As an aside - organized religion needs to get on board with DNA and evolution, and discard the tribe myths. (And the rib myth, ffs). It only perpetuates the problem.)
Then we have to focus on criminalizing the actions.
A long trial for 6 JAN, much like the Nuremberg trials after WWII, is NECESSARY, IMHO, to the healing process and to drive the supremacists underground... where the only place “white superiority” is whispered is in the deep bowels of underground meetings... and where the “Illinois Nazis” become the joke they were in the “Blues Brothers.”
Sandwiched among 1,769 horrifying words of the consequences of cult worship is an equally terrifying recitation of how many who identify as the Resistance may feel forced to confront Trumpism. The elimination of the leader and his enablers will not be sufficient to extinguish the mass pathology that we are witnessing again in our collective history.
An amazing reference to what happened in Germany and the South, is happening here. I mean those of us who were raised by Jewish immigrant parents (Holocaust victims) in the South certainly can relate. You are so correct in saying common “ordinary German citizens” were so easily coerced to join the “cause”. I lost the pleasure of ever knowing my maternal grandparents as they were gassed in a van with 6 other people at Chelmno.
So how did Germany change? Because it did change. I also lived in Germany soon after the war and remember those burned out cities. And I remember that Germans were made to feel shame at what had happened -- by the international community and eventually by their own children. If you drove a car with German license plates you had best not ask directions elsewhere in Europe or you would be sent the wrong way. That has never happened in the South. You don't see German teenagers holding dances decorated with Nazi regalia, yet there are plenty of Plantation-themed proms to this day. There needs to be a Truth and Reconciliation commission for the Confederacy and reparations for slavery (being debated in Congress this week). As for the Confederate monuments, a fellow George Pickett connection who is a scuba instructor had the best answer: sink them and turn them into coral reefs.
Wow. I spent my teens in post-war Germany in the 1970s. I was pleasantly surprised to see the similarity in our life experience and to be reading someone else's personal experience of that period.
I lived in Frankfurt. Every major holiday we visited my dad's family home outside Munich, where Hitler came to power. I've been to both Stuttgart and Oberammergau, albeit from 1969 to 1976, a decade later than Lucian. No rubble on the streets.
My parents were born in the 1930s and raised in Germany. Every one of my relatives in my parents' and grandparents' generation lived under Hitler.
Of all the people reading this piece of yours, Lucian, I am probably the most qualified to appreciate it.
Hitler and Trump have a lot in common. Their followers have even more in common, as you present perfectly.
What sets Hitler and Trump apart, however, is as interesting as what they have in common.
Hitler is one of the first leaders in Germany's democracy, and easily the most influential early democratic leader. Germany was under a monarchy until the Great War, WWI, so the democracy was brand new. So unlike the U.S. under Trump, which has been a democracy for nearly a quarter millennium, Germany's democratic institutions were brand spanking new, underdeveloped, and weak.
Hitler is Germany's FDR. He is Germany's FDR gone bad. Eisenhower brought one of Germany's and Hitler's inventions to the U.S. when he commissioned the construction of the interstate highway system, which is basically a copy of Germany's autobahn under Hitler. In the days when bicycles and horses and carriages and carts were primary modes of transportation, Hitler was the promoter of the car for everyone, the car of the people, the Wagon of the Folks, the Volkswagen. Ferdinand Porsche designed the VW Beetle, but Hitler did the conceiving. Hitler insisted that poverty and suffering could be conquered: keiner muß hungern, keiner muß frieren, no one must hunger (no one has to go hungry), no one must freeze (no one has to tolerate being cold). I could go on and on.
Like FDR did for America, Hitler brought Germany out of poverty and economic despair. He took a country with a shattered economy and widespread deprivation and brought them into some level of physical comfort and financial security.
That's why he was revered. That's why he was adored.
Trump arrives in a country which already has prosperity. What makes him an idol is his social values and his willingness to speak them and act on them. That's where he matches up with Hitler.
The adoration level is just as extreme, as Lucian lays out so clearly. Like he says, nothing will change it. The people who are still living in an old social order will not just change their minds. These social laggards still believe whites should get better treatment and more privilege than all non-whites, and males should get priority over females. Lucian is absolutely correct. I work with Trumpsters, one of them is my father. I understand them.
The only place I disagree with Lucian is this:
Calling witnesses drags out the process. The longer the process drags out, the more information comes to light. The most recent example is Herrera Beutler, who last week was an unknown, and whose name is now nationally recognized. Without the trial, her story is still buried.
Would the votes have changed? On the surface of it, I would say definitely not. Any sensible person would assume that the verdict stays the same. But what drives those votes is public opinion. Public opinion changes as more and more information emerges about the attack on Congress. The longer the trial goes on, the more days cable news is fixated on it, the more attention is invested in it, the more journalists go out there to dig up stories, the more skeletons come out of the closet, the more we learn as a country and a people, and the more public opinion changes.
So although it's nearly impossible that public opinion would have changed enough to change the vote, at a minimum the fragmentation of the Republican Party would be accelerating, and so would the opening of criminal investigations.
Excellent piece, it's very close to my heart because of the content. The message, as usual, is also truthful and timely.
This is fascinating and seems quite correct. Some people are somehow pre- programmed to want authoritarian leaders. No coincidence that they love displaying and waving the Confederate Flag. And some also wave the Swastika/Iron Cross or wear pro Nazi T Shirts. A recent article in the Wash Post noted that many of those arrested have had a lifetime of financial issues with creditors, landlords and the IRS. A freak show of deadbeats. Yet remember they also have AR15s with advanced; highly accurate sighting systems and buy ammo in 500 round lots. A propensity to violence seems clear. How does this movie end?
A good comparison. I went to Bavaria as a soldier in 1965, and while most of the cities had been rebuilt by then , there were still "lost cause" believers, particularly in that area of Germany, the birthplace of National Socialism. Sitting in the biergartens and gasthauses we played a game called "Spot the Nazi." Often the telling point was the way they looked at us. Not much of a challenge here to spot the MAGAts, as they like to wear their regalia.
Man, you are 100 percent correct about how white kids growing up in the South were schooled in the myth of the Lost Cause. By the time I was six, in 1962, I could have told you where the Confederate troops were positioned in every major battle of the Civil War (which I was of course trained to call the War Between the States). Coincidentally, ‘62 was the year that 30,000 federal troops had to put down an insurrection in Oxford, MS, mounted by folks who were determined to keep a single black man from enrolling at Ole Miss. They were the same kind of people who stormed the Capitol in January.
I am a vet and a military brat.
I have lived in our Deep South and served in the US Army in West Germany in the 1970's.
Both Trump and Hitler were beatable cretins...the Right Wing will become dangerous when intelligence creeps into their leadership.
Sad, but true. God help us all.
I live around the corner from Gadsden Wharf in Charleston SC where the International African American Museum is being built. It, and my building, is across the street from Gadsdenboro Park. I learned the horror of where I live by clicking on Gadsden flag. I didn't know. And you are correct about the Civil War still being litigated here. It's not called the war between the states and the recent unpleasantness for nuthin'!
Let us never forget the power of the big lie, demonstrated so well in Germany. How many of us were taught that the Versailles Treaty set the stage for World War II, and yet were not taught that Adolf Hitler rolled out his Big Lie at the 1924 Beer Hall Putsch? Hitler claimed that Germany didn’t actually lose World War I, but that a premature surrender negotiated by Jews and communists prevented Germany’s final and inevitable victory. For years, he repeated that lie and gained more and more believers. That lie was the foundation of his rise to power. Trump tried to destroy Obama with the big lie that Obama wasn't born in this country and has tried to hold onto power (and succeeded in the minds of too many of his supporters) with the big lie of a fraudulent election. We must work overtime to refute, again and again, his claims. Many of his believers excused the violence with the statement, "Well, wouldn't you fight if (you thought) your vote was stolen and that an imposter was in the White House?"
Amen! I, with maybe others, had the wrong idea that witnesses would appear before the Senate. In reality, depositions would be taken. How could we conclude that McCarthy, "not known for his candor," being a polite way to describe his mendacity, would have done anything but decline and fight a subpoena for months? Then lie. They proved the case. How like Democrats to be castigated by Democrats. Let's save our vitriol for those who deserve it: the hypocritical usual suspects.
Frightening yet wonderful read. Reinforces my distain of the south. NEVER have I been a fan. Thank you once again for your experienced analysis.
This is a sobering and worrisome description of the populous tribal mass that we now face. I wholly agree with you that trump's supporters love him deeply. Obviously he has resonated within them strong feelings, drawn them together by playing on their deep felt individual tribal hates against you-name-it.
And, concurring with you that trumpism is now with us and will not go away, I look forward to any view you might have on how we can live it or work around it.
Spot on.
I read one of your novels back in the 90’s when I was stationed in Germany. It was a great read, and focused on the psychology of why we humans act the way we do.
Genetics vs. Upbringing...
Stay with me here: Defeating Trumpism will rely on social forces besting genetic ones.
1) Darwin’s theory of evolution, “survival of the fittest,” is a genetically true drive. DNA wants to survive and to propagate.
2) Social Darwinism - superiority by race - is a necessary byproduct of our genetic composition, and our sentience. Descartes “I think, therefore I am” translates to “I am alive, because I am better.”
I will wager that Darwin’s theory is only altered by human rationalization during times of prosperity. In times of famine, the “lesser” DNA or race is always blamed and becomes expendable... Don’t forget, as Lucian Truscott pointed out, that Germans underwent a decade and a half of famine under the Versailles Treaty. They were RIPE for Nazism and Aryan superiority notions. The parallels to the US are crystal clear: The largest part of unwavering MAGA support comes from rural and poor (and uneducated) White Americans. And rural America was blasted by the 2008 economic collapse. President Obama became the focus of white rural rage that the American Dream had been taken from them and handed to black and brown people. Donald Trump, for all of his faults, capitalized on these feelings of rage and indignation. - Don’t EVER forget that he got 74 million people to vote for him...
I think it boils down to this: the human race will never eliminate racism as long as race exists. The feelings of White/ Japanese/ Aryan/ Mongol/ Egyptian/ Norse/ Roman superiority will always be there. It’s coded into our DNA. And even if we homogenize as the human race, we will still parse and discriminate...
So, is there any hope??? YES.
I believe that while “nature” is a strong human drive, “nurture” can, and will win.
How?
1) We have to educate our youth on DNA, and on evolution. That we are all human, and that we share DNA. Skin color, eye shape, running ability, etc., ad infinitum are just genetic mutations. Different, not better or worse...
(As an aside - organized religion needs to get on board with DNA and evolution, and discard the tribe myths. (And the rib myth, ffs). It only perpetuates the problem.)
Then we have to focus on criminalizing the actions.
A long trial for 6 JAN, much like the Nuremberg trials after WWII, is NECESSARY, IMHO, to the healing process and to drive the supremacists underground... where the only place “white superiority” is whispered is in the deep bowels of underground meetings... and where the “Illinois Nazis” become the joke they were in the “Blues Brothers.”
Sandwiched among 1,769 horrifying words of the consequences of cult worship is an equally terrifying recitation of how many who identify as the Resistance may feel forced to confront Trumpism. The elimination of the leader and his enablers will not be sufficient to extinguish the mass pathology that we are witnessing again in our collective history.
Another excellent column. Thank you! By the way, is there a typo in the penultimate paragraph?
An amazing reference to what happened in Germany and the South, is happening here. I mean those of us who were raised by Jewish immigrant parents (Holocaust victims) in the South certainly can relate. You are so correct in saying common “ordinary German citizens” were so easily coerced to join the “cause”. I lost the pleasure of ever knowing my maternal grandparents as they were gassed in a van with 6 other people at Chelmno.
So how did Germany change? Because it did change. I also lived in Germany soon after the war and remember those burned out cities. And I remember that Germans were made to feel shame at what had happened -- by the international community and eventually by their own children. If you drove a car with German license plates you had best not ask directions elsewhere in Europe or you would be sent the wrong way. That has never happened in the South. You don't see German teenagers holding dances decorated with Nazi regalia, yet there are plenty of Plantation-themed proms to this day. There needs to be a Truth and Reconciliation commission for the Confederacy and reparations for slavery (being debated in Congress this week). As for the Confederate monuments, a fellow George Pickett connection who is a scuba instructor had the best answer: sink them and turn them into coral reefs.
Wow. I spent my teens in post-war Germany in the 1970s. I was pleasantly surprised to see the similarity in our life experience and to be reading someone else's personal experience of that period.
I lived in Frankfurt. Every major holiday we visited my dad's family home outside Munich, where Hitler came to power. I've been to both Stuttgart and Oberammergau, albeit from 1969 to 1976, a decade later than Lucian. No rubble on the streets.
My parents were born in the 1930s and raised in Germany. Every one of my relatives in my parents' and grandparents' generation lived under Hitler.
Of all the people reading this piece of yours, Lucian, I am probably the most qualified to appreciate it.
Hitler and Trump have a lot in common. Their followers have even more in common, as you present perfectly.
What sets Hitler and Trump apart, however, is as interesting as what they have in common.
Hitler is one of the first leaders in Germany's democracy, and easily the most influential early democratic leader. Germany was under a monarchy until the Great War, WWI, so the democracy was brand new. So unlike the U.S. under Trump, which has been a democracy for nearly a quarter millennium, Germany's democratic institutions were brand spanking new, underdeveloped, and weak.
Hitler is Germany's FDR. He is Germany's FDR gone bad. Eisenhower brought one of Germany's and Hitler's inventions to the U.S. when he commissioned the construction of the interstate highway system, which is basically a copy of Germany's autobahn under Hitler. In the days when bicycles and horses and carriages and carts were primary modes of transportation, Hitler was the promoter of the car for everyone, the car of the people, the Wagon of the Folks, the Volkswagen. Ferdinand Porsche designed the VW Beetle, but Hitler did the conceiving. Hitler insisted that poverty and suffering could be conquered: keiner muß hungern, keiner muß frieren, no one must hunger (no one has to go hungry), no one must freeze (no one has to tolerate being cold). I could go on and on.
Like FDR did for America, Hitler brought Germany out of poverty and economic despair. He took a country with a shattered economy and widespread deprivation and brought them into some level of physical comfort and financial security.
That's why he was revered. That's why he was adored.
Trump arrives in a country which already has prosperity. What makes him an idol is his social values and his willingness to speak them and act on them. That's where he matches up with Hitler.
The adoration level is just as extreme, as Lucian lays out so clearly. Like he says, nothing will change it. The people who are still living in an old social order will not just change their minds. These social laggards still believe whites should get better treatment and more privilege than all non-whites, and males should get priority over females. Lucian is absolutely correct. I work with Trumpsters, one of them is my father. I understand them.
The only place I disagree with Lucian is this:
Calling witnesses drags out the process. The longer the process drags out, the more information comes to light. The most recent example is Herrera Beutler, who last week was an unknown, and whose name is now nationally recognized. Without the trial, her story is still buried.
Would the votes have changed? On the surface of it, I would say definitely not. Any sensible person would assume that the verdict stays the same. But what drives those votes is public opinion. Public opinion changes as more and more information emerges about the attack on Congress. The longer the trial goes on, the more days cable news is fixated on it, the more attention is invested in it, the more journalists go out there to dig up stories, the more skeletons come out of the closet, the more we learn as a country and a people, and the more public opinion changes.
So although it's nearly impossible that public opinion would have changed enough to change the vote, at a minimum the fragmentation of the Republican Party would be accelerating, and so would the opening of criminal investigations.
Excellent piece, it's very close to my heart because of the content. The message, as usual, is also truthful and timely.