Post #158: Amusing Ourselves to Death

9 Nov. 2024

     In a neat twist of synchronicity, I just looked up the date to put at the head of a text I had already more or less thought out, and I discovered that it happens to be November 9th today—the day the German monarchy ended in 1918, the occasion for Hitler’s attempt at a putsch in 1923 and of the 1938 pogroms, as well as the day when the wall fell in 1989.

     The idea that Mr. Trump’s behavior might resemble that of an American Mussolini (or even a Hitler) has occurred not only to knee-jerk leftists, but also to Andrew Sullivan (and J.D. Vance), among many others. (That Mussolini was as much at home of the left as the right is an important point, but not one that needs to be taken up here.) The fascist leaders basked, much like Mr. Trump, in the adoration of the crowd and showed a similar disdain for the rules of speech, debate, reasoning, and law. To confuse the picture even more, Mr. Trump has spoken of making himself dictator, and he did incite something of a pseudo-coup on January 6th. One could find other worrisome resemblances, but all of these founder on one central rock: Mussolini and Hitler were nothing if not serious; Trump is not. By which I do not wish to suggest that he does not mean what he says, in the moment, but that there is very little to hold it all together.

     Take the supposed coup of January 6th. One could discuss Mr. Trump’s culpability at great length, and I have taken a hard line on this myself, calling him a “well poisoner” in a text (#122) that I eventually substituted, after much agonized rewriting, for an even harsher indictment in which I called him a traitor. The trouble with this line of reasoning, as I argued in both texts, is that there was never the remotest chance of success, and that it does not look as if Mr. Trump ever seriously intended to do what it would have taken to seize power by force. As anyone who knows anything about coups will tell you (the go-to text is by Curzio Malaparte), they require a combination of strategic genius and ruthlessness that is rare in the world. Mr. Trump does not have it, and even if he did, it would have been a hopeless undertaking in the U.S. context. He did something very foolish and irresponsible, but on some crucial level (like the rest of us but more so) he knew not what he was doing. The result was a tawdry parody, as I have put it, a dabbling with an enormity not properly understood, and something made more for television than for the firing squads and tanks in the street that you need to pull off the real thing, or anything resembling it.

     Not only that, but on the martial front quite generally, Mr. Trump does not have the kind of steel that it would take to don the uniform, go beyond the superficial resemblances with the fascist production, and take steps towards the genuine product. Both Mussolini and Hitler were confirmed soldiers; not remarkable ones, perhaps, but creditable enough, grant them that much. (As a friend of mine likes to quip, they didn’t give away Iron Crosses for free in the wars.) And these men carried the mental scars of the Great War with them into what came after. Mr. Trump never misses a moment to grandstand, and yes, he pumped his fist after he was nearly shot; but let us remember that for real soldiers, being shot at is not an occasion for staging a dramatic moment before running cameras, it is an everyday occurrence. They are not heroes because they have been exposed to live fire; they are heroes because they have learned to brave it as a matter of course, maybe despite their fears—and not out of vainglory either, but out of loyalty to their buddies, first and foremost, and to their country. (“What was in it for them?” Trump asked General Kelly at Arlington.)

     It is very telling that none of the distinguished military men that Mr. Trump introduced with much fanfare into his first administration, men who got to see him up close, came away with a good impression. Their ideas of manly courage and character are those of the battlefield—an exacting standard indeed—and there is nothing very remarkable about not passing their tests. Very few of us would. But let us note, nonetheless, that whenever Mr. Trump has found himself in close proximity to these men, they discovered not affinities, but mutual disdain. Mr. Trump is anything but a soldier; he is a showman with not a soldierly bone in his body, something we can say with some assurance not least because he had his chance to give evidence to the contrary, at his military school and when he avoided service in Vietnam (nothing very unusual for a man of his generation and social position, but nothing very honorable either).

     The historical parallels, if there are any, point somewhere quite different, somewhere rather more surprising: to the luckless Wilhelm II. Like Mr. Trump, the Kaiser was above all a showman who craved attention, who had something to compensate for (in his case a lame arm, what it is in Trump’s case I do not know, though there must be something), and who was exceedingly fond of bellicose rhetoric that was too easily mistaken for warmongering.* In fact, however, Wilhelm did not wage a single war on his own initiative; at times of confrontation, he always backed down at the decisive moment, something his generals took very ill. Just the year before the cataclysm of 1914, Wilhelm celebrated his 25th anniversary on the throne under the mantle of “Peace-Kaiser,” a title in which he took great pride. Not for nothing did his eldest son, the crown prince, think he could position himself as a dashing warrior in contrast to his old man.

     All his life, Wilhelm insisted that the First World War never made sense from the German perspective, because they had so little to gain from it, and everything to lose. Whatever others thought of him and his people, he emphatically disavowed warlike ambitions, recalling how, in his youth, he had been given such terrible descriptions of the battlefields of 1870–71 by his father that he never felt any inclination to bring such misery, on a colossally larger scale, upon his country or any other. When the war came, Wilhelm wanted to back down, just as his generals had feared, and he brought the chief of the general staff, Moltke the Younger, to the verge of a nervous breakdown when he would not authorize the general mobilization. After a few hours he gave way, but with resignation not enthusiasm. (See my article on 1914 for the references.)

     Of course the example of Wilhelm also illustrates that wars can be started inadvertently, or stumbled and bumbled into. This I would not rule out in Mr. Trump’s case either; but my point is not to claim that the world will be more peaceful under Trump, as many are wont to believe these days, only that there is nothing in him of that glorification of war which is so distinctive a feature of fascism. Nor, as I have argued in #156 along lines suggested by Andrew Sullivan, does he seek power in order to control and lord it over others. He seeks the love of the crowd; he wishes to be adored; he is an actor on the stage doing whatever he can to maximize the applause and the adulation. But he is not very interested in running the lives of others, or to impose himself on society in a grand way, let alone in making himself the supreme leader of anything except the feature film. He does not want to hold the reins of power at all times, as fascist leaders do; what he wants is to be at the control board so that he can ensure the most favorable lighting and other stage effects to maximize his own impression on others. In this hunger for the approval of the crowd, he does resemble the fascists superficially; but for them it was merely a means to an end, while for Mr. Trump it is the end itself.

     The danger, then, is not some terrifying take-over, or some assault on the Constitution or other fundamentals of the American way of life. [Written before the Muskian assault on the federal government, whatever good may or may not come of it.] Of course it is true that he is fundamentally oblivious to the constraints of law, because he is not in fact a political creature at all, but a performer and show-master; none of this, however, aims at a systematic remake of the political system. What is truly alarming about the phenomenon Trump is not the political content so much as how much his style aligns with the predictions that Neil Postman made forty years ago in his classic indictment of the image-driven world.

     I have brought Postman up enough times to outline sufficiently, I think, how I see his predictions coming true more generally in our brave new world of the ever-flickering digital image, projected as it were on the walls of the Plato’s Cave (#26, #64, #139). The distinctive threat that we are facing as an age is not, as it always was for mankind before, the familiar Horsemen of the Apocalypse: war, disease, famine, and death. We are so accustomed of thinking of our human condition in those terms that it can be difficult to appreciate just how dramatically things have changed. Of course the old scourges have not disappeared, as the daily news feed demonstrates only too clearly; but even this apparent counter-argument does not go as far as it seems. If we could see the world at large, and not only the flash-points to which our image-culture reduces it, and we compared it to how things looked before, we would be astounded by the almost miraculous extent of the improvements. But of course we cannot reduce the whole world to such a convenient image; what we need to do is to see it with a different kind of eye, far from the news, by looking at the data, for example, though there are many other ways of capturing the change on camera too.

     Neither Mr. Trump nor our age in general is likely to sink us into the bog of pervasive despotism and war, the way the twentieth century really did. What it will do instead, pockets of despotism and war aside, is to drown us in the warm sugar-water of endless entertainment. What it will do is not to maim or kill us physically, but to destroy our capacity for seriousness, for clear thinking, and for rational public discourse—and these dangers Mr. Trump really does embody in the highest degree, alas, even while he does not exemplify the renewed menaces of fascism. I am not saying that there will be no political substance to these next four years, only that it is likely to come more from others in Mr. Trump’s circle than from him. What he will continue to give us, as before, is a continuous noisy display around the leading man—a never-ending orgy of showing off.

     If you enjoy that kind of programming, with various treats thrown in for diversion, as in any good case of bread and games, it will be a treat; if you do not, it will be torture to watch. So don’t. Switch it all off and put your trust in the logic of the production, which is fatal for the life of the mind if you let it, but which, in sharp contrast to the ways of the twentieth century, will let you do your thing freely and unharmed. Keep your eyes down, the way meditators are taught to do on retreat; guard your sense-doors assiduously; do not invest your hopes or fears in politics; and get on with your life. Register your protest by reading a book that is not about making money or maximizing your performance. You cannot get more counter-cultural than that.

     If you think you need to fight a fascist take-over and that this must be taken into the streets, go ahead. Mr. Trump will never get the troops to shoot demonstrators in the legs, even if he meant it before, which is at least open to doubt. He will not round up his political enemies, or build deportation camps for millions of supposed undesirables. There will not be soldiers patrolling the streets, tanks rolling down the highways, or jackbooted thugs in brown shirts beating up or killing their neighbors with impunity. There is a good chance that there will not be a major American war either, though of this one can never be sure, under Trump or anyone else.

     Let’s count our blessings. These may look like the worst of times, but they are not even close, quite the contrary, despite everything. If you are lucky enough to be living in North America, or the European Union, or a remarkable number of other relatively safe, prosperous, and peaceful societies (not always absolutely, but definitely by historical standards), then you have the option of tuning out and living the good life the Platonic way, by seeking cover from the madness of the crowd behind your little wall and leading a private, quiet, contemplative and sane life. If you don’t, that’s your choice, not Mr. Trump’s.

*To corroborate this line of argument, let me share an outtake from the original version of my article on 1914, a section discussing Wilhelm II that did not make the cut. I documented my claims, in the original, with ample footnotes from reliable sources. I shall have to dispense with them here, but they are available upon request:

Barbara Tuchman, with her gift for poignant if somewhat cruel caricature, has given the reading world the unforgettable image of “the possessor of the least inhibited tongue in Europe”—a motley buffoon who covered the nightshirt of his shrinking cowardice with a military overcoat and “wanted the gladiator’s rewards without the battle” (Guns of August, Penguin 2014: pp. 4, 8–12, 28–29, 83–84, 90). A more charitable way to make the same general point would be to recognize that Wilhelm’s upbringing was in fact remarkably unmilitary by the standards of his time and place, and this not even primarily because of his lame arm, but owing to a number of curious, perhaps not ultimately successful, but undeniably original educational compromises between his anglophile, modernizing parents (his mother was Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter) and the more traditional Prussian establishment around his grandfather, the old emperor.

     There is no gainsaying, of course, that the German penchant, starting with the emperor himself, for all manner of swaggering and otherwise “unlovely posturing” on the international parquet was little suited to winning a rising power friends in the world. What sets apart the loudmouth that the Kaiser often was, however, from the bully that he generally was not, is that Wilhelm wished above all to be admired and prove himself worthy—not bend others to his will because he enjoyed watching them squirm, though his often dubious and occasionally cruel sense of humor produced its share of squirming, perhaps at home even more than abroad. As for the sometimes bizarre verbal displays that made the emperor look so tactless and tone-deaf on many occasions, it is all too easy, from a century’s distance, to scoff at the almost comical theatricality of his reign; it was done even at the time, by Friedrich von Holstein, for example, the “gray eminence” of the German Foreign Office, who sighed that the Kaiser was heading an “operetta régime.”

     But that was a senior civil servant talking, and a diplomat to boot, while the sovereign in question, a born anti-diplomat, had a very different conception of his role, making it a point of pride not to be satisfied with reading off a cautiously worded, anodyne script of the sort that the tribe of politic scribes would have prepared for him, and feeling that he owed his people a grand, individualized performance every time—a larger-than-life Emperor in shining armor, or rather, in a different glittering uniform every time, carefully selected to match specific occasions (he owned several hundred). In the sincere service of this ideal, strange as it may sound to us, he and his entourage traveled more restlessly than any mediaeval troupe of actors, to upward of a hundred cities in many a year of his reign, probably giving thousands of impromptu speeches that we never hear about because they were well-received on the occasion and therefore passed over without much notice. What was recorded for posterity, naturally, were those instances when he “overshot the mark,” numerous enough in absolute terms if we were to catalogue them all, but perhaps not as representative of his usual showing as we take them to be.

     When he came off worst, as in the notorious “Hun speech” that provided such endless ammunition to Allied propaganda in later years, what was he doing? Was he threatening to overrun Europe in the manner of a latter-day Attila? Not at all. He was engaging in one of his usual dramatization before a live audience, playing to the gallery in a manner that was meant to be heard not read—as opposed to dispensing golden words to be carefully sifted and weighed, one by one, only to be found wanting. Nor was he addressing Germany’s neighbors; he was exhorting his own soldiers on the eve of their deployment to China, in what was then expected to be a particularly bloody and fearful mission. He was deliberately adopting “the tone of the barracks” in order to breathe fire into these troops, on the spot, not issuing a martial manifesto to be endlessly quoted thereafter as if it were unholy writ—and one might note with surprise that the speech was very positively received in France.

     Such strange, starkly displayed, and unrestrained individuality might be a problematic trait in an emperor, of course. But even if we admit that the Kaiser’s loose tongue was at times a dangerous liability for Germany, and for Europe, his failing should be seen for what it was, and what not: namely a weakness for the all-too forthright voicing of sometimes misplaced boyish enthusiasms, for “unbosoming himself” impulsively, habitually speaking before thinking—as opposed to forming and declaring settled, serious, menacing designs, for which the Kaiser’s words were so often willfully mistaken from abroad.

     In reality more nervous strutting peacock than cold-eyed swooping hawk or eagle, Wilhelm’s sensitive, well-intentioned, and peaceable side often got overlooked beside his more obvious bluster; yet on those who saw him up close, he often made a decidedly capable and talented, at times even charming and endearing impression—“touching, captivating, adorable,” as Bernhard von Bülow, one of his confidants and his prime minister for a decade, put it in a letter. If that be dismissed as fawning from within a circle of friends, it might be noted that Churchill, whose portrait can hardly be called flattering, acknowledged Wilhelm’s “undeniable cleverness and versatility, his personal grace and vivacity.” Even John Röhl, one of the most damning critics of Wilhelm on the whole, still admits, as “not in doubt,” that the Kaiser, like his age, had a “brilliant” side and that he really did possess “some of the impressive qualities invoked by Bülow.”