Arguendo

let's play "mean orange hitler" and see where it takes us

Let’s pretend. I’m going to accept a bunch of arguments that I don’t believe, for the sake of argument, and see where they take us. For the next two minutes, it’s all true: Donald Trump is a vicious racist, an unspeakably cruel man, and the figure whose ascension to power ends American democracy and turns the country into a fascist dictatorship. All of that is perfectly obvious, for the purposes of our exercise, and only a fool or a fellow traveling fascist could pretend not to see it.

Now: If all of that is true, why can’t America stop him? A thoroughly established constitutional republic, nearing its 250th year, with a deep well of legal and political tradition and thoroughly entrenched institutions, can’t stop a vulgar Nazi thug, who keeps winning and advancing. Right? Distinguished statesmen like Joe Biden and Jerrold Nadler can’t hold the line against the death of the republic, despite their decades of accumulated wisdom. This is already making me feel like an idiot, but I’m committed.

The problem is that, if the prevailing “mainstream” argument about Donald Trump is true, it condemns all of the important political norms that Trump’s critics say they’re protecting. Immune systems that can’t stop a virulent infection are failed immune systems. If Trump is what Jamie Raskin and Adam Schiff and Liz Cheney say he is, then they’ve condemned…everything else. Everything else. The emergence of a Hitler figure, the implosion of the rule of law, the collapse of political institutions, and on and on: None of that happens in a healthy country.

So if you want to argue that this is what’s happening, you must argue that America is in a state of ruin. You have no choice. No Weimar republic, no Nazis. Failure comes from failure. Hitler figures don’t arise from healthy societies.

Turning well to my left, Christopher Hedges has been making this argument for years:

The parting gift, I expect, of the bankrupt liberalism of the Democratic Party will be a Christianized fascist state. The liberal class, a creature of corporate power, captive to the war industry and the security state, unable or unwilling to ameliorate the prolonged economic insecurity and misery of the working class, blinded by a self-righteous woke ideology that reeks of hypocrisy and disingenuousness and bereft of any political vision, is the bedrock on which the Christian fascists, who have coalesced in cult-like mobs around Donald Trump, have built their terrifying movement.

Taking off my Daily Kos hat, let’s reformulate. Donald Trump is an unusual political figure, and both his election to the presidency and his continued political importance are signs of an unusual moment. But outsider attacks on the supposed mainstream are not uncommon, and we have a long line of outsider figures who’ve played this role in various forms: William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, George Wallace, Ross Perot. Thomas Jefferson attacked the Federalist mainstream, and the existence of the Republican Party grew from exhaustion with a broken center. A schoolhouse in Ripon was our Trump Tower, the place where people broke with the available choices. And then, you know, the Civil War, but still.

The ridiculousness of the current manufactured crisis is found precisely in the inability of existing institutions to fend off the challenge. To deliver the kind of sophisticated analysis that makes bartenders enjoy our conversations so much, it’s because our existing institutions suck. I roll my eyes at the “Orange Hitler” part, but I see the failed Weimar republic part that Trump’s critics (other than Hedges) often imply without noticing. The common refrain on social media in the face of institutional failure: “You want more Trump? This is how you get more Trump.” A healthy politics would already have seen off the moment, instead of deepening a completely unnecessary societal wildfire with a long series of increasingly insane overreactions: WELL LET’S ARREST HIM AND IMPRISON SOME OF HIS SUPPORTERS AND THROW HIM OFF THE BALLOT THAT SHOULD PRODUCE CALM AND RESTORE ORDER.

Flatly, if you think Trump is horrible, it’s time to think about where he comes from and why he isn’t going away quietly.

One of the signs of where we are is the extraordinary recent arrest of a civilian employee of the US Army, Janet Yamanaka Mello, in Texas. Mello, a finance manager at Fort Sam Houston, allegedly stole $100 million from the federal government before anyone noticed, and used the money to build a ludicrous empire of mansions all over the country. The IRS caught her, because they noticed her buying luxury estates with no noticeable source of nine-figure income. But get this: Mello billed the government for youth services for six years, and did so without ever providing any youth services. She made up a program, and successfully billed ONE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS, yes I’m shouting, for the fake thing. But the military didn’t catch her on the stealing end; the IRS caught her on the spending end. If she’d quietly moved the money offshore without making high-profile purchases, she might have gotten away with it.

More simply: The United States government paid $100 million for services that it never received, and did so without noticing.

How much of that do you think we have, out there, going unnoticed? The Department of Defense acknowledges that it has misplaced, you know, just a…few…trillion. That it can’t account for. So.

Add your own favorite example in the comments, because there are too many to bother naming them all. Congressional stock portfolios are always a fun topic, and public transit systems all over the country pay about six percent of their costs by collecting money from passengers.

The most striking thing in Christopher Rufo’s recent New Right manifesto was his observation that government spending as a percentage of GDP is higher in the United States than in communist China.

So.

Trump, an unusual figure who I’ve voted for and will vote for again, merits a bunch of perfectly reasonable criticism — and he’s still bragging about his brilliant Covid vaccines, which were just amazing, believe me, they saved millions of lives, everybody says so. He’s a challenge that a well-managed and orderly republic could see off with ease. He’s a challenge, really, that an ordered republic would never have faced. Responsible, careful institutions don’t birth firebrands. What we have instead is an orgy of cronyism and greed, a distributed system of Modernas and Pfizers across a range of sectors, frantically milking bloated systems for free money with glazed eyes and a boundless appetite.

We have the half of the story that’s the failing republic, and we should probably bother to notice. If you think Trump is obviously evil, how do you explain the persistence of his appeal?