They Warmed to Hitler Too

Megalomaniacs and narcissists who attain positions of power can be very charming and compelling, even charismatic, before things go south.  Whether their appeal is warranted or simply an illusion due to their aura of power and a human predilection to be awed by celebrity, is an interesting question.  I strongly suspect it is the latter.

Before Hitler came to power, he was generally ridiculed and dismissed as a laughable character by those in power and those unlikely to embrace his ideology, which at the time were the majority of Germans.  Once he was declared Chancellor and began to wield power things started to change.  Serious people took a second look.  His early successes in stabilizing the German economy and establishing order were heralded as great accomplishments.  Yes, he was a bit rough in his speech, and clearly a narcissist, but damned if he didn’t have a big effect on his country!

 

Credible newspapers, radio broadcasters, diplomats and cultural icons all begin to come around to Hitler due to his apparently dramatic impact on Germany.  People who met him in person often came away enchanted by his personality and charisma.  Perhaps he was what Germany really needed, they opined.

 

Donald Trump was a laughable character too, all through the 80’s, 90’s and 2000’s.  His wealth was prodigious, but few people had any respect for him as a person.  He was viewed as a pompous blowhard and self-promoter – the worst example of rogue capitalism writ large.  In the elections of 2016 and 2020, few of the elites and powerful were in any way impressed by him.  

 

He won the nomination in 2016 because there were enough MAGA crazies (there always are) to give him a slight majority over the 10 other more reasonable candidates.  In the general election, large numbers voted for him (though not enough to win the popular vote!) simply because they couldn’t bear to have a democrat (or a woman) in the White House.

 

But time and familiarity do strange things.  Despite the insurrection of January 6^th and his ignominious behavior post-election and throughout the pandemic, or perhaps even because of it, Trump retained the loyalty of 15-20% of the population (again, more or less the crazies), and their activism was enough to doom any republican who didn’t profess allegiance to Trump and his catechism (climate change denial, stolen election, weaponized justice department, deep state radical left, etc.)

 

A weak attempt by less extreme republicans to sideline him in the 2024 primaries amounted to nothing, and the wealthy and powerful began to acknowledge that Trump was likely to be the next president.  Years of exposure to his lying, his thin skin, his preposterous boasting, his vendettas and his messianic complex had made these characteristics seem almost quaint or eccentric rather than dangerous to people whose lives are already filled with vanity and excess.

 

We now have the elites, the tech bros, the financial tycoons all cozying up to Trump, seeking his favor.  And Trump, who more than anything else has always craved the approval and respect of these people, is feeling empowered to go to any extreme to make his mark and create his legacy.  What could go wrong?  Ask the Germans.

The Triumph of Spite

Cue the Nuremberg Rallies!  Gather the MAGA faithful from all across the land and let us worship at the feet of our glorious leader.  Let us revel in our spite, our ill will, our grudges, our self-righteousness, our imagined grievances.  Trump has returned with his colossal mandate of 1% of the popular vote, and his vengeance is ours.

Oh, this time it will be different.  No half measures, no attempts to assuage the full half of the country that is completely opposed to our agenda.  This time the cabinet and all of the government leadership will be inhabited by true believers.  There will be no room for RINOs or half-hearted conservatives.  And certainly, no traitorous America-haters from the left.

 

The purge will start on day one.  The Musk-led oligarchy will use its master-of-the-universe brain power to whittle down the government with dramatic eliminations of services and social net infrastructure.  The first to go will be any suspected ‘deep-state’ elements.  Let’s piss them all off on day one by forbidding remote work and expressing our utter contempt for them.

 

Then let’s pardon all the violent rioters from January 6^th and pretend that it was just a love fest for our glorious leader and a justified outrage at the stolen election that not a single lawsuit or investigation could ever legitimize even under Trump-appointed judges.  Vengeance is mine, sayeth Trump. Sadly, rewriting history is not quite so easy, as Stalin and Hitler and Mao and Pinochet and others have discovered.

 

Then on to America First!  Scrap the Paris Accords; abandon all efforts to fight climate change; exit the World Health Organization; persecute the International Criminal Court members that dared to call out Israel and Netanyahu for crimes against humanity; ignore anything from the UN that doesn’t align with our interests; threaten Panama, Greenland and any other country that is bold enough to question the might and the manifest destiny of the greatest country that ever existed.  International cooperation be damned!

 

Declare emergencies right and left!  An energy emergency, a border emergency, a law-and-order emergency.  Maybe we’ll need to set a Reichstag fire or two to get things moving!  Fortunately, the first steps of a massive manhunt for undocumented people will set the stage for future crackdowns.  Getting rid of the liberal press will require some finesse, but all in due time.

 

Am I being melodramatic?  Perhaps, but given Trump’s increasingly messianic lunacy (‘I was saved by God to make America great again’), his aggrieved desires for vengeance, his absurd narcissism, his dark inclinations toward violence and his absurdly simplistic appraisals of world events, it seems prudent to expect and prepare for the very worst.

 

There may be many aspects of Trump’s agenda that appear to be highly desirable and reasonable to the run-of-the-mill conservative or the Christian fretting over cultural issues.  I want to believe that we can find ways to achieve some of what the Trump voters desire without making a frightening lurch toward autocracy.

But it is an incredibly dangerous Faustian bargain to give so much power to a man with such obvious psychological flaws.  Let us all pray that the remaining legal, bureaucratic, and legislative barriers will be enough to prevent a full authoritarian transformation in our country, or worse yet, a major war.

 

 

The Sadly Predictable Decline

In 1945 the United States was the sole nation to emerge from the devastation of World War Two with its economy and population intact.  Indeed, the USA was master of the world – a booming industrial economy, a dominating military capability and a population eager to take advantage of both.

As the world slowly recovered, it became a captive market for the USA.  America produced everything and no other economy even came close.  No longer allowed to engage in direct colonization, we mastered economic imperialism, manipulating developing nations to use their resources and manpower to benefit our economic domination, all the while rationalizing our role in the spirit of free market capitalism and a rising tide that lifts all boats.

 

We grew comfortable in our exalted position.  Even though we failed to lift up our own bottom 15-20% out of poverty and despair, the 50’s and 60’s were times of heady economic optimism for most of the country.

 

By the time the 70’s and 80’ came along, Europe had begun to compete effectively with us in many markets, and the Japanese industrial juggernaut caught us by surprise.  An economic malaise took hold in the late 70’s due to multiple factors, so we tightened our belts, reduced taxes for the wealthy and began to look for ways to maintain the high earnings that wall street had come to expect.

 

Globalization took hold in the 80’s, as other nations began to cultivate industrial capabilities and provide less expensive labor.  A legion of freshly minted MBAs spread out across industrial America with the gospel of offshore factories and production, and corporate profits began to soar again as American manufacturing fled overseas.

 

American dominance in the technology revolution masked the insidious changes afoot throughout the 90’s. So-called knowledge jobs became the mantra and we convinced ourselves that the disappearing industrial base would be easily transformed into an even more lucrative knowledge economy. 

 

Economics is perhaps not truly a zero-sum game, but as other nations developed and began to claim their share of the world’s riches, it was not hard to predict that average wages and employment opportunities would be affected in previously dominant economies as the global economy became ever more inter-connected.  Even knowledge jobs can be outsourced with the Internet and gigabit networks.

 

Slowing population growth in established economies resulted in increased immigration to augment the labor market.  In good times and at a measured pace, immigration can be tolerated and even embraced by a native population.  But as economies began to stagnate and the middle class to languish, the immigration waves of the 2000’s and 2010’s created a tsunami of resentment that foretold a rise in populism.

 

Sharing the world’s resources was never going to be easy.  When you have a part of the world that was accustomed to being in the catbird seat and is now struggling to find its equilibrium in a changing world, there was bound to be a very difficult transition.

 

But now, with increasingly rampant populism and the rise to power of authoritarian figures like Trump, Putin, Xi, Modi, Orban and Netanyahu, the prospects for global cooperation on the thorny issues facing this world seem increasingly dim.  Unilateralism, clownishly personified in Trump, appears to be the watchword for the superpowers.  

 

There was a period in the 90’s when we all felt optimistic about the future.  Democracy seemed to be flourishing, economies were growing, global conflict was minimal, hundreds of millions across the globe were rising into the middle class.  But the seeds of discontent were already there.  Did we squander the momentum we had at that time?  Could we have changed the arc of history to a more harmonious path by making some adjustments?  Who knows?  Human nature does not easily tolerate decreased expectations, and sharing is not easy.  

 

I see hard times ahead, but I have faith in our basic humanity.  Unfortunately, we may have to endure some very difficult moments before that really kicks in.