28/52 - Meditations on the Fourth of July

A year ago, I sat on the law at Monticello in the blazing heat. I was there for the Naturalization service and swearing in of a brand spanking new group of American citizens. As the grandchild of four immigrants, it made me cry.

It felt at that moment that there was a light at the end of the tunnel; that perhaps my country had managed a reprieve from the dark forces of autocracy. I thought that perhaps we had dodged the chilling path outlined in historian Timothy Snyder’s 2017 ON TYRANNY (https://timothysnyder.org/on-tyranny).

Oh, were that the case.

A year later, I find myself on the Fourth more worried than ever about the future of my country. As an amateur historian with an admittedly over-obsession on the 1930s, I can’t escape the feeling that we are living in 1932 on the edge of the abyss, an abyss into which many of my fellow citizens are willingly -- and the more wacky of them cheerfully -- leading us. 

Here is the passage in ON TYRANNY (written in 2017) that particularly caught my eye and the progression that last year I naively thought we had dodged.

As observers of totalitarianism such as Victor Klemperer noticed, truth dies in four modes…

The first mode is the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts. The president does this at a high rate and at a fast pace. One attempt during the 2016 campaign to track his utterances found that 78 percent of his factual claims were false. This proportion is so high that it makes the correct assertions seem like unintended oversights on the path toward total fiction. Demeaning the world as it is begins the creation of a fictional counterworld.

The second mode is shamanistic incantation. As Klemperer noted, the fascist style depends upon “endless repetition,” designed to make the fictional plausible and the criminal desirable. The systematic use of nicknames such as “Lyin’ Ted” and “Crooked Hillary” displaced certain character traits that might more appropriately have been affixed to the president himself. Yet through blunt repetition over Twitter, our president managed the transformation of individuals into stereotypes that people then spoke aloud. At rallies, the repeated chants of “Build that wall” and “Lock her up” did not describe anything that the president had specific plans to do, but their very grandiosity established a connection between him and his audience.

The next mode is magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction. The president’s campaign involved the promises of cutting taxes for everyone, eliminating the national debt, and increasing spending on both social policy and national defense. These promises mutually contradict. It is as if a farmer said he were taking an egg from the henhouse, boiling it whole and serving it to his wife, and also poaching it and serving it to his children, and then returning it to the hen unbroken, and then watching as the chick hatches.

Accepting untruth of this radical kind requires a blatant abandonment of reason. Klemperer’s descriptions of losing friends in Germany in 1933 over the issue of magical thinking ring eerily true today. One of his former students implored him to “abandon yourself to your feelings, and you must always focus on the Führer’s greatness, rather than on the discomfort you are feeling at present.” Twelve years later, after all the atrocities, and at the end of a war that Germany had clearly lost, an amputated soldier told Klemperer that Hitler “has never lied yet. I believe in Hitler.”

The final mode is misplaced faith. It involves the sort of self-deifying claims the president made when he said that “I alone can solve it” or “I am your voice.” When faith descends from heaven to earth in this way, no room remains for the small truths of our individual discernment and experience. What terrified Klemperer was the way that this transition seemed permanent. Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant. At the end of the war a worker told Klemperer that “understanding is useless, you have to have faith. I believe in the Führer.”

Sigh. We all — including the media — better get over the idea that this is some sort of surreal reality show we’re watching.

Happy 4th.