Why Donald Trump is Not Hitler

This post is less related to musicology than usual, but does not stray far off from the sociopolitical discussion of history found in the Wagner discussions.

Hitler comparisons have become something of a tired cliche, as this cartoon shows:

"Astonishing...even though the mouse knows it will get an electric shock, it keeps pushing the button over and over again. We will therefore call this the Hitler-comparison paradox."

Within seconds of Googling "Hillary Clinton Nazi" you can find countless images like this:

If you do the same search with any prominent politician, you can find similar images by the dozen.

The point is that Hitler comparisons have come to mean virtually nothing. Part of the problem is that for the most part, the ignorant masses know very little about what National Socialism was, or what it stood for. Most people get their education on the history of era from reruns of Hogan's Heroes or else other novels and films. Most novelistic treatments of this era can be automatically guaranteed to present a simplistic fictive account of the era instrumentalized for belligerent use against their enemies. Professional historians of this period have long noted a fundamental disconnection between the academic literature and the burgeoning pop literature.

Most people get their knowledge of this period of history from films, novels, TV shows, and other fictional depictions of the era

To put it simply most people know nothing about National Socialism or Hitler. They just think of it as a comic book caricature of evil incarnate. The trouble about this moralistic view of history is that it lacks academic neutrality, but also produces simplistic reductivisms without insight. Before anybody goes berserk with accusations that such a statement implies sympathy for NSDAP ideology (and ergo with Richard Wagner, the hysterical accusation will go), I will tell that you simply that nothing more could be further from the truth. Sir Richard J. Evans puts it well:

The process was not a regression into barbarism. To describe it as such is to use barbarism in a moral rather than in a historical sense, and hence to bar the way to an informed, historical understanding of the nature of Nazi exterminism. Instating barbarism as the central conceptual tool for understanding the Third Reich is to mistake moral condemnation for thought. Thinking of Nazi extermination instead as an aspect of the Janus faced phenomenon of modernity involves recognising that there could be a dark side to modernisation, that—as Marx and Engels saw long ago—modernisation could have its victims as well as its beneficiaries. It does not mean rewriting the concept of modernisation until it is emptied of all positive connotations altogether.

Evans: The Third Reich in History and Memory (Chapter 6.–VI Social Outsiders)

Some readers might also point out that I myself have pointed out parallels between Donald Trump and Hitler. That is also true. However, what I would like to clarify is that history never repeats—but it often rhymes. At those points at which Trump seems to rhyme with 1930s fascism, it is not so simple as a literal de capo repetition, and even the points at which things might tantalisingly appear to rhyme or alliterate are more abstract than black-and-white. Yet at the same time when one attempts to point out legitimate structural parallels, the ubiquity of the Hitler-comparison as a universal rhetorical term of abuse means that such analyses are more likely than not to be dismissed as being pointlessly inflammatory. It is definitely a case of calling wolf way too often when every sheep, goat, and mouse gets called a wolf.

I have previously argued that the polarisation to political extremes after the Great Recession show similar patterns to those following the Great Depression. Yet the GFC was no literal recapitulation of the Great Depression. Economists like Ben Bernanke leading the response to the GFC had studied the mistakes made by countries following the 1929 stock market crash and used this knowledge to avert another stock market collapse turning into a new world-wide depression.

Also German fascism was a response to WWI, the Treaty of Versailles, followed by destabilising periods of hyperinflation, plus the ongoing debt burden of the war before the coup de grace of the Great Depression hit, after which the NSDAP vote rose from 3% to 37%.

Money became so worthless due to hyperinflation that children started to play with it as a toy.
A wheelbarrow might be required just to go out to buy a loaf of bread

America is in a very different position to Weimar Germany. Of course America is shouldered with a huge debt burden from waging war in the Middle East, just as WWI and the reparation payments from the Treaty of Versailles left Germany with a crippling debt. Germany lost WWI, but America did not really "lose" the Gulf War, at least not in any conventional military sense. There was never any humiliating treaty imposed upon America for breaching international law in invading Iraq without a UN mandate. There has been nothing like a period of American hyperinflation despite all of the money printing (or "quantitative easing" as it is called today). Unemployment like that seen in the Depression has not been repeated.

There certainly were elements in America too that were also sympathetic towards fascism:

Charles Lindbergh receives a medal from Hermann Goehring

However, the whole socio-political background that engendered fascism in Germany has simply not repeated itself wholesale in post-GFC America. Nor should we forget that Italian fascism and British fascism, just to give a couple of other examples, had their own history and origins, often quite different to German fascism. Simply because the socio-economic and socio-political backgrounds are so different, it is simply not possible to make simplistic statements to the effect that Trump is Hitler and that the Republican Party is the new Nazi Party. That is pure polemic and rhetoric.

Still, there remain tantalizing abstract structural parallels.

For a start whereas the NSDAP were overtly anti-democratic, calling Weimar democracy a "Jewish democracy" of a system rigged by international Jewry, Trump does continue to erode confidence in the American democratic system, and there is the danger that this anti-democratic sentiment may yet snowball. Trump openly resorts to conspiracy theory to claim that the American electoral system is "rigged" and untrustworthy, with electoral fraud allegedly being widespread. The hidden implication is that the inherently corrupt electoral system must be torn down and replaced with something better—which for Trump always means something that favours him.

Likewise, the vilification of an ethnic minority through the creation of a myth of absolute alterity as a redemptive path towards affirming one's own authenticity of national identity, recalls elements of early 20th century fascism's militant ultranationalism. Trump's defenders might point out that he harbours no overt intentionalist Master Plan for systematic genocide. However, there is no evidence that Hitler and his Party had such a premeditated central programme for systematic genocide either. The persecution of the Jews began with a programme of forced emigration, which at the outbreak of war turned into a plan of forced ghettoisation, then a plan to "evacuate" all Jews to the island of Madagascar, before somewhere in the heat of total war the term "evacuation" or "resettlement" turned into a euphemism for genocide. For that to first happen the allegedly alien threat to the cultural authenticity of the glorious homeland had to be first stripped of citizenship before being concentrated in internment camps ready for "evacuation" with a view to "resettlement".

The point is that this slippery slope can be much easier to go down than most people envision, and the absence of any premeditated grand plans for genocide does nothing to inoculate a regime against it. Still, the right set of structural circumstances have to come together for it to become as bad as it did under NSDAP rule. In particular, a vast war of attrition where hundreds of thousands of German soldiers and civilians were already dying was needed, at which point even the most ruthless measure started to seem justifiable in the name of defeating the enemy at all cost in total war. It is simply not looking like this will readily repeat itself in America's war in the Middle East.

As David Cesarani emphasises in his book Final Solution, the NSDAP regime regarded Jews, not as civilians, but as partisans and enemy combatants. Germany had reputedly not suffered defeat in combat during WWI but had rather been stabbed in the back on the homefront by a conspiracy of Jews (and Freemasons). So as to avert the same thing recurring in WWII, it was only natural to attempt to do whatever was necessary to preemptively destroy these enemy partisans before they could conspire to stab Germany in the back yet again, however ruthless that was. While Donald Trump is also quick to resort to evoking conspiracy theory, it has yet to reach the point of driving state policy to the same ruthless extent. Of course, the idea that climate change is a fiction concocted by the left is a conspiracy theory, so once again, there are tantalising parallels, but these too belong to a different set of socio-political circumstances.

In conclusion, it is simply inadmissible to say that Trump is Hitler. That is pure rhetoric. What is true, however, that there are tantalizing parallels between the socio-political climate after the Great Depression and what we see today after the Great Recession. It took ten years from the 1929 stock market crash to the outbreak of war in 1939, and it has been about ten years since the onset of the GFC. From a socio-political point of view, the wider impact of the GFC may have only started to erupt. Yet the Great Recession is not the Great Depression, and under a quite different set of socio-political circumstances, a quite different historical outcome will be engendered. Unmistakable, however, is that the functionality of democratic institutions will be placed under great stress, and if that stress is both sufficient and occurs under the right set of structural circumstances, there is every potential for the collapse of democracy, and its replacement with overt totalitarian rule. Nobody should assume they are safe or that the worst cannot happen. Democracy is far more fragile than we assume, and speaking of the collapse of Weimar democracy Sir Ian Kershaw once spoke of the "thin veneer of civilisation". Most of all it cannot be assumed that such things are so un-American that they are therefore impossible, because Americans are culturally immune to such things out of an innate sense of inner conviction. This is what Himmer once wrote in a document about forced deportation:

I hope completely to erase the concept of Jews through the possibility of a great emigration of all Jews to a colony in Africa or elsewhere. . . . However cruel and tragic each individual case may be, this method is still the mildest and best, if one rejects the Bolshevik method of physical extermination of a people out of inner conviction as unGerman and impossible.  

Quoted from Christopher Browning’s book The Origin of the Final Solution p.70 of eBook edition. 

The moment anyone starts to use the name of their nation as a synonym for quintessential virtue then you know there is trouble afoot. Beside that note by Himmler we find marginalia in Hitler's handwriting with the words "very true and correct".

More likely is that Trump will represent only one stepping stone on the path to the erosion of American democracy, and that he more likely represents not an end in himself, but more like something of an acceleration of an ongoing process of erosion that started a long time before him. Above all else he must not continue to be underestimated again and again in terms of what he is capable of with respect to the worst case scenario amongst possible outcomes.