gracchusdixit

The stand-off between Donald Trump and Democrats in Congress over the partial shutdown of the federal government is not, as advertised by the White House and generally accepted by the national news media, a fight over the construction of what Trump likes to call a “great, great wall” on the southern border of the United States.  Nor is it a fight over whether Mexico will ever pay for such a wall, as Trump promised, preposterously, to the gullible rubes who attended his rallies.  

The stand-off between Trump and Congress is more consequential than all that.  It is a battle about what constitutes the truth—and, in particular, who gets to define the truth.

Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election in large part by selling his credulous supporters an implausibly grim fairy tale about the state of the country.   According to that tale, the nation is in peril, our security undermined by a flood of dangerous and disease-ridden immigrants, our economic prosperity stolen by devious foreigners, and our national identity corrupted by cultural changes that are positively “un-American”.  The predicate of Trump’s call to “make America great again” is that America is no longer great, and, to restore its greatness, a great leader is required—a leader who will erase the errors of the past and punish those who committed them.

Two toxic strains of thought underpin this dystopian proposition.  One is racism.  The other is religion.

The racist strain asserts that America is fundamentally a “white country,” and that black, brown or Asian immigrants pose a threat, not only to our security, but to our national identity.  Some who make this assertion mask their prejudices with anodyne clichés like “assimilation”—which is little more than code for demanding that immigrants “behave like white people”.  Others, like Congressman Steve King of Iowa, are less circumspect.  King once proclaimed:  “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”  The implication being that the babies of black or brown people shouldn’t be allowed to be born in the first place.  You have to give people like King credit for at least one thing:  they don’t bother to hide their hate.

The second strain in Trump’s dystopian tale of national crisis and decline is religion, specifically evangelical Christianity.  From the day Trump entered the presidential race, the pundit class struggled to explain why evangelicals so enthusiastically embraced a candidate who so extravagantly violated their purported values.  What the pundits failed to realize was that evangelical support for Trump had, and continues to have, nothing whatever to do with “values”.  It has everything to do with power.  

The grim Trump fairy tale—which merely parrots the horror story evangelicals have been telling themselves for years—is that Christians are under attack by a godless federal government and by morally depraved liberals in the media, Hollywood, and popular culture, whose intent is to destroy religion and demean the religious.

The reality is that, far from being under attack, Christians and Christianity occupy a singularly privileged place in American society.  Their beliefs are protected, their churches and schools are tax-exempt, their pastors and priests are given deference they rarely deserve, and their prayers are given pride of place in the public square—all, despite the Constitution’s  separation of church and state.

For evangelical Christians, however, none of that is enough.  They want far more.  They want nothing less than the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the land—even if that means overturning the Constitution and trampling on the religious freedom of everyone else. 

It would be a mistake to imagine that Donald Trump’s exploitation of such fairy tales is a unique phenomenon.  On the contrary, lies are essential to the rise of all demagogues and dictators, just as the ability to define and control the truth is essential to the survival of their regimes.  Every demagogue ascends to power by climbing a ladder of lies.  Every dictator holds onto power by controlling the truth.  All demagogues and dictators thrive on chaos and fear, because only a confused and fearful people will surrender their liberties and turn to a “strongman” for protection and salvation.

Hitler rose to power in Germany by peddling one of the greatest lies in human history, convincing millions of Germans that they were members of an “Aryan master race,” whose humiliating defeat in the First World War was caused, not by their own arrogant and inept militarism, but rather, by the treasonous behavior of corrupt liberal politicians at home and the Jews who financed them.  Hitler promised to make Germany “great again” by purifying it of those influences.  After killing millions of innocent people, he took the coward’s way out, swallowing poison in his Berlin bunker, as the walls of defeat closed in.

Mussolini rose to power in Italy by promising to restore the national pride of his demoralized countrymen, after their own humiliation in the First World War.  Unlike the Germans, Italians harbored no fantasies about being a “master race,” but they did have a glorious past, which Mussolini exploited with shameless abandon.  He convinced his people that the mighty Roman Empire could be restored—and restored only by him.  When this ludicrous fantasy inevitably collapsed, Mussolini and his mistress were executed by Communist partisans, their bodies mutilated and left to hang upside down, suspended from meathooks, at a gas station on the outskirts of Milan.

It remains to be seen whether some such fate may someday await Donald Trump.    

Whatever his ultimate end, Trump’s survival depends utterly upon his ability to invent, distort, and control the truth.  Like every demagogue and dictator, he has cast a spell over his followers—a tense but fragile bargain with the devil, in which Trump lies, and his supporters surrender to his lies, setting aside their own reason and humanity.  This capitulation is the keystone of every tyrant and totalitarian regime.  It is the political equivalent of a self-induced trance, in which morality and human decency are suspended.  The trance will maintain its grip, until the lies are revealed for what they are, until reality and truth reassert themselves, until the spell is broken.