Excerpt: Hitler Biographer Ian Kershaw’s new book on Donald Trump
Triumph of the Will: The Rise of Donald Trump
Historians, journalists and critics, including Andrew Sullivan in New York Magazine — “America Has Never Been So Ripe for Tyranny” — are asking if there are parallels to the rise of Trump and the rise of fascism, Mussolini and Hitler. To better answer that question, I’ve obtained an exclusive excerpt from Ian Kershaw’s forthcoming book on Donald Trump; Kershaw is the noted British historian and author of the magisterial biographies of Adolf Hitler. What’s especially notable are the striking resemblance between Trump’s primary victories and Adolf Hitler’s party’s success in 1930 regional elections that helped pave the way for his eventual selection as Chancellor in 1933. [The chapters on the 1930 regional election are outlined in part III of chapter 8, “Breakthrough,” from the one-volume condensed version, Hitler, of his two-part biography ]. Here’s Kershaw’s short introduction to Trump’s successes in the spring of 2016 as he transitions to the November election, but prior to the chapters on the struggle to unify a divided Republican party. Like other chroniclers of the 2016 campaign, Kershaw is reportedly completing chapters as events occur and then will bring his historical perspective to what many observers believe could well be the first term of the Trump administration in 2017. Take a look:
The crude tirades of the early primaries were missing altogether as Trump got ready to pivot to the general election. “Illegal immigrants” still figured prominently, posed against the alternative international competition for markets and the loss of American jobs. But it was not omnipresent as it had been in earlier in the race.The key theme now was the collapse of the United States under the Obama administration and party government into a divided people with separate and conflicting interests, which only Trump could overcome by creating a new unity of the nation, transcending class, estate, and profession. Where the Democratic and Republican parties represented only specific interest groups, asserted Trump, his movement stood for the nation as a whole. In speech after speech, Trump hammered this message home. Again and again he pilloried the American system, not now crudely and simply as the regime behind the “ economic collapse,” but for its failed promises on tax reductions, financial management, and employment. All parties were blamed.They were all part of the same party system that had ruined America. All had had their part in the policies that had led from Vietnam through 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Great Recession.
Lack of leadership had led to the misery felt by all sections of society. Democracy, pacifism, and internationalism had produced powerlessness and weakness — a great nation brought to its knees. It was time to clear out the rot. But his speeches were not simply negative, not just an attack on the existing system. He presented a vision, a utopia, an ideal: national liberation through strength and unity. He did not propose alternative policies, built into specific election promises. He offered ‘a programme, a gigantic new programme behind which must stand not the new government, but a new American people that has ceased to be a mixture of classes, professions, estates’. It would be, he declared, with his usual stress on stark alternatives (and, as it turned out, prophetically) ‘a community of a people which, beyond all differences, will rescue the common strength of the nation, or will take it to ruin’. Only a ‘high ideal’ could overcome the social divisions, he stated. In place of the decayed, the old, a new America had to be built on racial values, selection of the best on the basis of achievement, strength, will, struggle, freeing the genius of the individual personality, and re-establishing America’s power and strength as a nation. Only Trump could bring this about. It was not a conventional political programme. It was a political crusade. It was not about a change of government. It was a message of national redemption. In a climate of deepening economic gloom and social misery, anxiety, and division, amid perceptions of the failure and ineptitude of seemingly puny parliamentary politicians, the appeal was a powerful one. The message appealed not least to the idealism of a generation, not old enough to have fought in World War II, but not too young to have experienced at first hand little but crisis, conflict, and national decline.
Many from this generation, born between about 1945 and 1970, coming from middle-class and blue-collar families, were no longer rooted in the hierarchical tradition of the pre-Iraq war years, outrightly rejecting liberalism, feminism, civil rights, gay rights, the Democratic welfare state, “political correctness” and GOP free-market ideology. But they were alienated by the political, economic, social, and ideological strife of the post-9/11 era and were on the search for something new. Laden with all the emotive baggage that belonged to the traditional American notions of “nation” and “community,” understood to be the still-dominant majority of white people in the United States, the aim of a ‘national community’ which would overcome class divisions seemed a highly positive one.That the notion of ‘national community’ gained its definition by those it excluded from it, and that social harmony was to be established through racial purity and homogeneity, were taken for granted if not explicitly lauded. The rhetoric of the ‘national community’ and the cult of Trump stood for a rebirth for America in which all the various sectional interests would have a new deal.
As the economic and political situation deteriorated, the rationality of voting for a small and weak interest parties rather than a massive and strong national movement led by Trump — upholding interests but transcending them — was less and less compelling. A vote for Trump could easily seem like common sense. In this way, the Trump-led GOP started to penetrate and destroy the support of interest-driven parties such as the Democrats and their factions and identity interests — from teachers to African-Americans — and seriously to erode the hold of the traditional parties’ leadership, whether they were the GOP’s conservative leaders or the Democratic establishment represented by Hillary Clinton.
This process was only in its early stages in summer of 2015, but it would make rapid advances in 2016, especially following the triumph of Trump and the rout of all opponents after Super Tuesday on April 27, 2016. He had a clean sweep of races in Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Rhode Island, following his victory in New York the week before. By May, the unexpected prize that shocked all the pundits and the party leadership — the GOP nomination — was his.
