There was what I thought a very
good article in yesterday’s Times,
“The West’s Weimar Moment” by Jochen Bittner, one of the editors of the German
weekly Der
Zeit. I agreed with many of his main
points, though that is of little importance.
What I found most impressive in the piece was its sensible use of
analogy, a self-imposed discipline conspicuously lacking in so much of the
political commentary currently written by American political pundits. Bittner wants to point out some general
parallels in the current political psyche of America and Western Europe with
the general mood of the 1930s. The very
general analogies he draws are enlightening and mainly convincing, and all the
more so because he takes pains to show that he knows what an analogy is: a
comparison between things that are in some ways alike and in some ways not
alike. “…[I]t goes without saying,” he
writes in his first paragraph, “that Donald J. Trump and Austria’s Norbert
Hofer are not Adolf Hitler."
That may go without saying to
someone who knows something about Hitler and is well versed in the political
history of the 1930s, but it apparently is big news to a wide spectrum of the
American punditocracy. I will not
compile an anthology from the liberal eminences who have opined that Trump is a
virtual Hitler, as the undertaking would far exceed my word limit. But I note that deployment of the “Hitler
analogy” is usually a kind of intellectual ejaculatio
praecox. That is why half a century
ago, when I was a student at Oxford, there was already a rule among debaters
that the team that first invoked the Hitler analogy automatically lost.
There is an irony in the fact that
Mr. Trump, who is often accused of stoking a fear of “the Other” among unsophisticates, is himself
“otherized” by so many intellectuals.
Within the broad spectrum of American political aspirants and office
holders, past and present, Mr. Trump is chiefly remarkable for his
extraordinary celebrity, most of which is the product of the increasingly
frantic insistence of his adversaries that he is unworthy of the office to
which he aspires. That he is in several
ways an “outlier” I will readily grant. For
example, his genius for publicity, and for manipulating a generally hostile
press to advertise him and amplify his “message”, is indeed awesome.
F. Scott Fitzgerald said “Let
me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me”—said it,
that is, in the same way that Shakespeare said “To be or not to be—that is the
question”. I mean he wrote it in a work
of fiction. Unfortunately, Ernest
Hemingway did not actually offer the riposte, “Yes. They have more money”. I wish he had, for he then would have defined
the principal “otherness” of Mr. Trump. Other
otherness is hard to find. From the
political point of view what I see in Trump is not an alarming otherness but a
depressing familiarity: an air of entitlement sometimes disguised as
unconventionality, a grossly exaggerated rhetoric wed to a childish command of
the English language, an ego-driven affect.
It is apparently hard for our press to see through all this to the fact
that Trump is, in the context of the starting cohort of Republican presidential
candidates, a rather pragmatic fellow, a moderate
figure who advocates a progressive income tax, opposes no-holds-barred free
trade, and, while advocating a large role for the government at odds with
conservative fiscal asceticism does suggest a comparatively modest role for
American military power.
None of my friends or neighbors knows anybody who supports Donald
Trump. Certainly none of their relatives
are enthusiastic Trump advocates. That’s
because I live in Princeton, New Jersey.
But limited cultural horizons are not identical with sophistication, let
alone virtue. I at least have a dim
racial memory of my youth in places west of the Delaware River where people
ride around on motorcycles and in pickup trucks, hunt and kill rabbits, ducks,
and deer with twenty-twos and shotguns and then actually eat the gristly meat
with enthusiasm. Other amusements may
include cattle auctions, stock car races, or tractor-pulls. They shop at Walmarts, and they lamented the
demise of Western Auto. They frequent
chain restaurants on the Interstate. They
drink California red wine that comes in gallon jugs. Most of them have never been in a taxi cab in
their lives, but not a few have attended Bible study on Wednesday nights. They hang out at the VFW. They make a living by doing hard things like
driving trucks and working on oil rigs.
Ours is a vast, continental nation; and it is just possible that our
categories of appreciated “diversity” may be in need of expansion.
I once read a very frank letter of
evaluation from a British academic whom we had asked to make a confidential
comparison of two possible candidates for appointment. He wrote thus in summary: “Of Candidate A it
can at least be said that—as compared with B--he is a dry blanket.” We had to
interpret that as but qualified enthusiasm.
When the best thing you can say about a presidential candidate is that
he is not Adolf Hitler you have perhaps not said very much. But that you feel compelled to say it at all
suggests, perhaps, that Mr. Trump has not been alone in his irresponsible
rhetoric.
