gracchusdixit

In 1933, Hannah Arendt, who went on to become a renowned journalist, philosopher, and political thinker, fled Germany, where she had embarked upon what would undoubtedly have been a brilliant academic career, had not Adolf Hitler risen to power.  To escape the all-but-certain prospect of extermination at the hands of the Nazis, she left her native land forever.  She was only 27.

For the next eight years, Arendt moved from one precarious refuge to another:  first to Czechoslovakia, then to Switzerland, thereafter to France.  When, in 1940, the German blitzkrieg swept through the Ardennes and the Valley of the Somme like a massive and pitiless scythe mowing down tender wheat, she was forced to flee again, this time to Lisbon, and eventually, to the United States.

Despite Arendt’s academic and intellectual accomplishments—she had been a prized pupil of the famous philosopher, Martin Heidegger, and had won her PhD at the University of Heidelberg, where she studied under the no less famous Karl Jaspers—Arendt was not given the welcome she deserved when she arrived on our shores.  Our country had been slow to recognize what was happening to the Jews of Europe, and even when that awful reality became inescapably obvious, we remained reluctant to do anything about it.  It was the era of “America First,” a time when many Americans chose to avert their eyes, skirt their moral responsibilities, and turn their backs on the world.

Thus it was that the talented and brilliant Hannah Arendt had to begin all over again, reconstructing the personal life and professional career that had been stolen from her by the cruel vagaries of history.  For the better part of a decade, she endured what amounted to a hand-to-mouth existence, sustaining herself and her family with a series of temporary academic jobs and journalistic assignments.  In 1950, she finally became an American citizen, and, one year later, published her first book.  It was called The Origins of Totalitarianism.

This controversial and influential work changed the trajectory of Arendt’s life and career, catapulting her from relative obscurity to a front row seat among the world’s most consequential political thinkers.  Her book quickly became, and remains, the definitive study of totalitarian political and social regimes.

Never have the insights expressed in that book been more relevant than they are today.  Never has Hannah Arendt’s diagnosis of totalitarianism been more acute.  Never have her warnings been so clear, so perceptive, and so frightening.  Here, for example, is her description of the social and psychological conditions that led to the rise of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin:

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world, the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true…Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived, because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.  The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

These words were written nearly three-quarters of a century ago, yet they could have been written yesterday.  Indeed, it is hard to imagine a more convincing description of the psychological and political malady that now afflicts our nation—a nation held hostage by the political pyrotechnics of Donald Trump and his fascinated “base,” millions of our fellow citizens who are not only willing but eager to accept his lies, to believe in the absurd, to reject truth and facts.   Arendt described such people with chilling clarity:

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

Those who accepted the outrageous assertion of Donald Trump’s former press secretary that “this was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period;” those who believed Senator Orrin Hatch’s description of Trump as “one of the best presidents, maybe ever;” those who swallowed Trump’s own self-aggrandizing claim that “we’ve done more than perhaps any president in the first 100 days;” all those are “ideal subjects of totalitarian rule”.

Our institutions may be stronger than most, but they are not invincible.  The longer Donald Trump stays in the White House, the longer the self-serving hypocrites in the Republican Party ignore, excuse, or defend his behavior, the more vulnerable and fragile our institutions become.  There is no escaping the fact that a would-be autocrat now sits in the oval office and that millions of Americans are quite content with that result.  To quote the prescient Hannah Arendt one last time:

The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition. This is the reality in which we live. And this is why all efforts to escape from the grimness of the present into nostalgia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better future, are vain. 

It is tempting to think that the nightmare of totalitarianism that swept over Germany and Russia cannot plant its roots here, that our Constitution and governing institutions will save us, that we will survive the Trump presidency with those institutions intact and someday return to normalcy.  Such thinking is not only wishful but naïve.  We stand at the edge of a precipice.  To imagine otherwise is worse than naïve, it is fatal.