Does America look like a proto-neo-Nazi state? Does it seem like some foreign power is yanking our chain and messing with the honest dialogue and exchange of views, not to mention our inviolable voting rights, that still makes our Democracy work in the sense of a peaceful transfer of power at the appropriate times? Are we on the precipice of an American kind of totalitarianism? If immigrants are grossly mistreated and beyond the protection of the rule of law and the Constitution, how close are we to having “the rest of us” subject to a lawless ruler with no Constitutional restraints? Is this the start up, or further evolution, of the American version of Singapore’s “authoritarian capitalism”? Many of us are trying out dire metaphors in an effort to make sense of the present chaotic and outrageous state of our national culture.
We’re doing what a Harvard neuroscientist and psychiatrist calls making “conceptual combinations” to get some clarity about what might become a horrible morphing into an American anti-democracy, an Imperial America that keeps the form of its Constitutional structure but is in reality run by a clique, a junta, an oligarchy, or even an emperor, a “first among equals” who makes equality a crime when it opposes him.
The Harvard physician Lisa Feldman Barrett writes, “Whenever your brain encounters sensory inputs, whether familiar or novel, it tries to produce an answer to the question, ‘What is this like?’ In doing so, your brain constructs a concept out of bits and pieces of past experience. The process is called conceptual combination. Without it, you’d be experientially blind to anything you hadn’t encountered before.” We have a natural impulse, she says, to make metaphors and similes, applying approximations of what we know to what we don’t know until we give it an understandable form.
So when we face strange new behaviors in an old but slippery and different context, as we are in Trumpian America today, our brains work overtime to make metaphors to feed their innate need to make predictions and ready ourselves for fast adaptive maneuvers. It doesn’t matter that today’s world mirrors other worlds that did not collapse into fascism. If it’s new to us, it’s baffling to us until we give an inner nod to what it seems like.
I’m reminded of that near-prophetic 1935 novel of Sinclair Lewis’s called “It Can’t Happen Here.” His metaphoric brain was casting around for images perhaps for Louisiana showboat and populist Governor Huey Long, and what might happen to America should he win the presidential election of 1936. Long was assassinated in 1935. Sinclair morphed Long into his character Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, an American pseudo-Hitler, a glad-handing, arrogant, strutting boomer who wins the presidential election, turns American democracy into a down-home kind of fascism, complete with ruling plutocrats and totalitarian sycophants, and a death squad militia called the Minute Men who intimidate everyone into giving up their constitutional protections, assassinate those who refuse, and imprison in gulag concentration camps those who seem troublesome and expendable. He even abolishes the states and turns the country into a conglomeration, a confederacy if you will, of administrative regions. He eventually oversteps, of course, unable to control the consequences of his ambition, and is brought low like a Greek comedy mocking Greek tragedy.
Are we like that? No. Do many of us fear that we’ll become like that? Absolutely. Orphaning, kidnapping and incarcerating Latino children when their parents try to cross the border without papers deeply outraged many Americans, not only because of the terrible sorrow and anger we felt at seeing our government abuse children to send a message — a true totalitarian idea — but also because of what it might mean for our own children and grandchildren to have such heartless monsters holding office in our country.
So can a Buzz Windrip, a Trumpian American with Nazi overtones, take control of our country with the ease portrayed by Sinclair Lewis? Hitler took power with the overwhelming majority of Germans looking for anyway out of the combined miseries of being citizens of a defeated country in the middle of mad inflationary financial depression. Buzz did basically the same thing. A majority of Americans either wanted him or didn’t want to oppose him but rather “to give him a chance.” As to the notion of giving a single person, like Caesar Augustus, imperial power and the status of being “first among equals,” Republican Rome is the model of such a transformation. It had undergone nearly 200 years of civil war and would do anything to see the carnage end, even if it meant giving a man total power while he kept the façade of tradition and accountability.
Not to put too fine a point on it, opponents of the current regime are some two-thirds of the country, their members aren’t being assassinated, and the economy is, for no known reason that I can tell, booming even if the market sputters at a high gear whine. Joblessness is low even if wage stagnation has earning a “living wage” with one job a hopeless dream for many people. There is no existing national gulag, that we know of, being built for political dissidents along with “abnormal people” and an assimilated racial class traditionally marginalized and the object of millennia of vicious racist propaganda. There are no Black Shirts or Brown Shirts, no extra-legal organized militias at the ruler’s beck and call, that we know of.
This doesn’t mean that something like Buzz Windrip’s America couldn’t happen here. It’s just that the situation doesn’t seem quite right at the moment. Would another terrorist attack sink us into unconstitutional anarchy? Would a nation fed up with climate change deniers fall prey to the denier’s armed thugs and takeover artists who would try just about anything to keep Big Carbon king? Would the NRA become a base for military style armed deniers trying to take over the government? Legal scholar Cass Sunstein in his new book of contributed essays “Can It Happen Here: Authoritarianism in America” leaves no doubt that it can. We could fall into a shadow America as fast as the Soviet Union came apart in 1989.
But let’s don’t make the current horrible situation worse than it is. It’s very bad, for sure, but it hasn’t crossed what for me is the point of no return — assassinations, violent intimidation, “rounding people up,” in other words we’re not in a dirty war, as in Argentina from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, nor are we in the territory of Congressional hearings and jailings and black listings like the years McCarthyism infested our country. Not yet.
The president and the Republican party are lobbing the acid bombs of mind f..king when it comes to America’s greatest sins — sexism, racism, and classism. Their hate speech is the realm of the KKK. It does seem to me that on the strength of such speech against Latinos we could see down the road a Jim Crow against Hispanics, though it seems almost impossible against 56 million Hispanic Americans, but not out of the question. Jim Crow still torments 42 million non-Hispanic African Americans.
American history stinks with violent prejudice against Asians and Asian Americans. Imprisoning Japanese Americans in the West during World War II is an eternal black mark on our country. But little is known in popular culture about the Chinese Exclusion Acts of 1882, and other discriminatory legislation up until the 1920s banning more than half a million Chinese, many of whom built the transcontinental railroads, from all participation in American society, driving out thousands from even working here, and subjecting them to horrific massacres around the West in the 1850s, including one in Rock Springs, Wyoming where white miners blamed Chinese miners for their joblessness and attacked the local Chinatown. It got so bad, federal troops were sent in to stop the killing. But the genocide and ethnocide of more than 90 percent of Native Americans after the conquest is an ultimate model of American infamy and what is possible if enough hate plaguesthe nation.
The question that keeps coming to my metaphoric brain has to do with climate change creating such devastating economic repercussions, ruining so many lives, and setting wave upon wave of climate refugees moving across the country, that conditions could get so far out of control that Americans might prefer the promises of an authoritarian and martial law to keeping what freedoms they think they still retain.
What is America like these days? Like it’s always been, I think, except we can hear a factory somewhere making a variety of hair triggers to weapons we can’t quite yet identify.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
(Image derived from photo by russellstreet)
Good morning Barrett. Sobering times indeed. This may be your most important piece yet. I’ve read it twice and am about to undertake my 3rd reading.
America has not changed. We have just created this illusion that we are ‘better’ than other countries / cultures. We have always been xenophobic and our history of human rights might make some dictatorships look good.
Now with that said, we at least have a portion pf the population that want to change and want to be better. We also need to surface and remember our real history so that we don’t forget what this country has been so we can make it better.
We are more like the genocide of Native Americans, the round-up of Japanese Americans during WW2, and the quelling of the Shay’s rebellion than we want to admit.
While our ‘Founding Fathers’ were indeed smart men for their time, they were also terrified of the ‘mob’ and were the elite. Our history books, except for outliers like Howard Zinn’s ‘The Peoples History of the United States’ paint a very different picture than who we really are…
I ,too, think this is a fabulous piece! I am, however, weighing the idea that there are already “round-ups ” of the “other” on local and regional scales—Blacks in Southern ‘Debtors’ prisons , Latino agricultural laborers herded into shadowy ‘migrant worker camps’ , the vastly harsher prison sentences doled out to Blacks and Latinos , and there already are baroque militia movements….the seeds are there , as are pockets of the hatred needed to sustain these small , long-lived and pent up boils on the nation’s fabric. Apply a bit more heat and one or another of these regional boils could erupt once again.
Price is also absolutely on target with his inclusion of the NRA as a possible trouble spot. The recent appointment of Oliver North, a central criminal character in the covert arms trade for profit , Iran-Contra affair , as the NRA’s President is not a calming sign. Keep up the good work!!!
VB, Thanks for your cautionary, but well-balanced, assessment of the current state of the nation and some future possibilities. Your statement “little is known in popular culture about…” can be applied to many aspects of American history and society due, unfortunately, to under-performing educational systems. Moreover, we continue to be hampered by archaic and obsolete constitutional features, such as the Second Amendment and the Electoral College, to name just two of many.