Gopnik argues that no matter whether he's none of above or all of above, Trump is dangerous.
"If Trump came to power, there is a decent chance that the American experiment would be over," Gopnik says. "This is not a hyperbolic prediction; it is not a hysterical prediction; it is simply a candid reading of what history tells us happens in countries with leaders like Trump."
I've read Gopnik on everything from Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin to Harper Lee, atheism, Shakespeare, the vagaries of translation, Edmund Burke, the 9/11 Memorial Museum, the synoptic gospels and the origin of Christianity. I've always known him to be a thoughtful, considered writer, and I don't think he's just blowing political smoke here.
Some excerpts from today's post, on the New Yorker website:
... One by one, people who had not merely resisted him before but called him by his proper name—who, until a month ago, were determined to oppose a man they rightly described as a con artist and a pathological liar—are suddenly getting on board. Columnists and magazines that a month ago were saying #NeverTrump are now vibrating with the frisson of his audacity, fawning over him or at least thrilling to his rising poll numbers and telling one another, “We can control him.’No, you can’t. One can argue about whether to call him a fascist or an authoritarian populist or a grotesque joke made in a nightmare shared between Philip K. Dick and Tom Wolfe, but under any label Trump is a declared enemy of the liberal constitutional order of the United States—the order that has made it, in fact, the great and plural country that it already is. He announces his enmity to America by word and action every day. It is articulated in his insistence on the rightness of torture and the acceptable murder of noncombatants. It is self-evident in the threats he makes daily to destroy his political enemies, made only worse by the frivolity and transience of the tone of those threats. He makes his enmity to American values clear when he suggests that the Presidency holds absolute power, through which he will be able to end opposition—whether by questioning the ownership of newspapers or talking about changing libel laws or threatening to take away F.C.C. licenses. To say “Well, he would not really have the power to accomplish that” is to misunderstand the nature of thin-skinned authoritarians in power. They do not arrive in office and discover, as constitutionalists do, that their capabilities are more limited than they imagined. They arrive, and then make their power as large as they can.
When Gopnik talks about Trump's "blizzard of lies ... made for Twitter and the quick hit of an impulse culture," it would be easy enough to dismiss it as campaign rhetoric. We always stand at Armageddon around election time, and we do battle for the Lord every four years like clockwork. But Gopnik has something entirely different in mind when he says this:
He’s not Hitler, as his wife recently said? Well, of course he isn’t. But then Hitler wasn’t Hitler—until he was. At each step of the way, the shock was tempered by acceptance. It depended on conservatives pretending he wasn’t so bad, compared with the Communists, while at the same time the militant left decided that their real enemies were the moderate leftists, who were really indistinguishable from the Nazis. The radical progressives decided that there was no difference between the democratic left and the totalitarian right and that an explosion of institutions was exactly the most thrilling thing imaginable.The American Republic stands threatened by the first overtly anti-democratic leader of a large party in its modern history—an authoritarian with no grasp of history, no impulse control, and no apparent barriers on his will to power. The right thing to do, for everyone who believes in liberal democracy, is to gather around and work to defeat him on Election Day. Instead, we seem to be either engaged in parochial feuding or caught by habits of tribal hatred so ingrained that they have become impossible to escape even at moments of maximum danger. Bernie Sanders wouldn’t mind bringing down the Democratic Party to prevent it from surrendering to corporate forces—and yet he may be increasing the possibility of rule-by-billionaire.
And this:
If Trump came to power, there is a decent chance that the American experiment would be over. This is not a hyperbolic prediction; it is not a hysterical prediction; it is simply a candid reading of what history tells us happens in countries with leaders like Trump. Countries don’t really recover from being taken over by unstable authoritarian nationalists of any political bent, left or right—not by Peróns or Castros or Putins or Francos or Lenins or fill in the blanks. The nation may survive, but the wound to hope and order will never fully heal. Ask Argentinians or Chileans or Venezuelans or Russians or Italians—or Germans. The national psyche never gets over learning that its institutions are that fragile and their ability to resist a dictator that weak. If he can rout the Republican Party in a week by having effectively secured the nomination, ask yourself what Trump could do with the American government if he had a mandate. ...
Source: "The Dangerous Acceptance of Donald Trump." Daily Comment, Newyorker.com May 20, 2016. http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-dangerous-acceptance-of-donald-trump.
As a book reviewer for the New Yorker, Gopnik has read widely in the history of World War II and the Holocaust. In one review, of a book titled Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning by Yale history professor Timothy Snyder, he provides a glimpse into his opinion about Hitler's articulation of dark impulses felt by the German people.
And in one passage, Gopnik speaks of atrocities committed on the Eastern Front in terms that call to mind precisely, if ever so distantly, Trump's rhetoric about Mexicans and Muslims even though he nowhere mentions Trump by name.
"In a period of fear and panic," Gopnik says, "it is the easiest thing in the world to talk ourselves into the idea that bad things we do are necessities of human nature."
I think it's important to understand here that Gopnik is not issuing a blanket indictment of all Germans. As a book reviewer, he's careful not to let his own opinion overshadow the content of the book he's reviewing. But he suggests what happened in Germany was not unique to that time and place. It happened in Rwanda in the 1990s, it happened in Vietnam, in isolated instances, and it can happen anywhere:
Surely Snyder is right when he implies that the well-meant “Godwin’s law,” which, beginning as an observation about Internet arguments, has come to be shorthand for the rule that the Nazis should never be introduced into ordinary political arguments, is miscast. In fact, we should keep the image of the Germans and the Nazis in front of us—not to show how close the people on the other side of an argument are to unutterable evil but to remind ourselves that we, too, can become that close in a shorter time than we like to think. In a period of fear and panic, it is the easiest thing in the world to talk ourselves into the idea that bad things we do are necessities of human nature. The Germans listened to Mozart and Beethoven and then murdered children, and this was not a cognitive dislocation from which we couldn’t suffer but the eternal rationale offered by the terrified: we can’t protect what really matters if we don’t do things that we wish we didn’t have to.War makes ordinary people do horrible things. If there is a point that perhaps Snyder does not underline enough—it comes through vividly in Antony Beevor’s books on the Battle of Stalingrad and other campaigns—it is that the Germans who killed were dying, too, in increasingly vast numbers and in cold and fear of their own. Wars make atrocities happen. Americans have still not come to terms with My Lai, a Vietnam atrocity not unlike the acts of the Einsatzgruppen on the Eastern Front, though thankfully more isolated. To engage in political or procedural or even geographic explanations of these histories misses their history. Once panic sets in, for an army or an occupier, then the persecution—indeed, the slaughter—of the population seems a necessity for survival. Frightened soldiers in foreign lands murder the locals without mercy or purpose. One wishes that this happened rarely. In truth, it happens all the time.
Source: "Blood and Soil: A Historian Returns to the Holocaust," New Yorker 21 Sept. 2015 http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/21/blood-and-soil.
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