Posts Tagged ‘Goebbels’
“The clearest way to show what the rule of law means to us in everyday life is to recall what has happened when there is no rule of law”*…
There’s rule-by-law, and then there’s rule-by-law (AKA, authoritarianism).
Long-time readers will know of your correspondent’s affection and respect for the artist Banksy. He’s “struck” again– and again, he’s hit a nerve…
From the AP…
… Unlike the elusive artist’s other provocative works that are sometimes stolen or carefully removed and displayed in galleries or sold at auction for millions, his latest mural was being erased Wednesday from the record.
The stenciled spray-painting of a protester lying on the ground holding a blood-splattered placard while a judge in a traditional wig and black gown beats him with a gavel was scrubbed from wall of the iconic Royal Courts of Justice…
More of the story: “Banksy mural of a judge beating a protester is scrubbed from London court,” from @apnews.com.
* Dwight D. Eisenhower
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As we protect what’s precious, we might recall that it was on this date in 1935 that Adolf Hitler addressed the eighth Nuremberg Rally, the “Rally of Freedom.” Following Goebbels (who had declared that history would some day pass the verdict on Hitler that by overthrowing Bolshevism he saved Germany from an immediate catastrophe and thereby brought Western civilization back from the brink of complete destruction)…
In a speech to 120,000 political functionaries on the Zeppelinwiese [here] this afternoon, Herr Hitler expressed his appreciation of their loyalty, which had been inspired by faith in him and his ideals, and which had enabled him to achieve for Germany what he had.
In an address to several thousand “Hitler” girls and women Herr Hitler said that the National-Socialist movement was providing “braver and better husbands.”
He added:- We are training real men for the women, decent, brave, and honourable. When the women see the fine Labour Service boys, dressed only in trousers and with breasts all bare, they must say, “It is nice for the women and what fine fellows are here, and conscription, what marvellous training!”, There is no equality in giving women tasks where they were men’s inferiors. Whenever I picture a woman in Parliament, I feel that she is being degraded. She does not raise the general level. She is drawn down to it herself.
– source
“Power always reveals”*…
Apposite to yesterday’s post, a provocative piece by Ben Ansell, who is reacting to a [terrific] piece by Henry Farrell in which Farrell, as he contemplates Trump’s moves, unpacks the “coordination” problems facing– and, Farrell suggests, often limiting– autocratic rulers…
… But you will notice an assumption I and Henry have been making – that Trump is like any other authoritarian leader. I suspect that in lots of ways Trump does wish to behave like one – certainly the treatment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and his current refusal to follow court judgments meets that mark.
But Trump is attempting this in an otherwise democratic system and I think there is a risk that we overstate the degree to which that system has already deteriorated by assuming that the language and logic that we use to describe authoritarianism fits his case. Part of the risk is we give up on democracy while it’s still here. But the other danger is that we think Trump behaves like a rational authoritarian leader, a la Svolik, when it’s all just bluntly a lot dumber than that…
… In an earlier post I referred to Donald Trump as a ‘chaotic authoritarian’. I don’t think it’s implausible that a democracy could have such a figure as a leader, though I do think it’s unlikely that it would remain democratic indefinitely under such leadership.
But in the absence of already having subverted elections, stymied courts, shut down the media, banned opponents and the other types of effective institutional backsliding that are the tell-tale signs of a democracy dying, I think we might do better to think about how such a figure operates in, what for now, is a democracy.
The temptation when talking about dictators is to reach for Thomas Hobbes. We depict them as the Leviathan – imposing order on the body politic to prevent chaos but also any rivals. Hobbes’ vision was after all a painstaking justification for monarchical absolutism.
If you are not familiar with Leviathan, well do read it, it’s a banger. But the very basic gist is a theory of government built from the ground up. Hobbes even starts with a slightly rococo account of how we process sensations. But his core mechanism is to imagine a world without government – his famous state of nature – in which every individual was essentially on their own. A self-help system if you will, but not the kind in the woo-woo psychology section of the bookstore – the kind where if you don’t look after number one, you’ll get an axe in the back of the head.
The Hobbesian state of nature is anarchy and life in it is – say it with me – ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. And so anyone living in this state would seek to escape this ceaseless terror and have some entity that could guarantee security. Hobbes is a social contract theorist, and the contract upon which we could all be presumed to agree is a third party that can ruthlessly crush insecurity. An absolute sovereign power that would protect its subjects…
… The Hobbesian vision of the state is draconian of course and in… err… pretty sharp contrast with the social contract theories of John Locke or Jean Jacques Rousseau. But one way it has come down to us is in how we think about authoritanism. As about order and control, crushing dissent mercilessly, but also preventing anarchy, rebellion, and so forth. It is governing with an iron fist. Rational authoritarianism if you will.
Whatever Trump is trying to achieve, it’s not hitting this mark. Instead of authoritarianism containing chaos, it is chaos personified. Instead of quelling the anarchic state of nature, it is spreading anarchy and confusion. Hobbes’ frontispiece Leviathan is a steady ruler, holding sword and staff, made up out of their ordered subjects [In contrast to the disintegrating beast in the illustation above]…
… Hence, it’s not clear to me that the standard tools we use to think about authoritarianism accordingly make that much sense with Trump. Is he really thinking about how to coordinate among the elites to keep his support base? Because he’s not doing a brilliant job here having already lost the support of the Wall Street journal editorial board, a litany of very conservative judges, and increasingly corporate elites…
… what I find most interesting about Trump’s anti-Leviathan is that his rule is creating anarchy everywhere else too. And that means not only are his promises not credible but nor are his threats…
[Ansell reviews Trumps’ attack on universities, his approach to tariffs, and trade policy, his “crackdown” on immigration, and his foreign policy (or lack thereof)…]
… We will spend a lot of time over the next few years trying to figure out if Trump’s America remains a democracy. Already the main indices we use are starting to downgrade the USA. I struggle as to whether that coding is premature or not – we will of course know much more by the midterms about the stability and freedom of elections, though by then it could be too late.
It is very clear that Trump wishes to act as an authoritarian. But it is not yet obvious to me that analysing him using the logic of dictatorship makes sense. Because he lacks the control, the ruthlessness, and the rationality of normal authoritarian leaders. As Henry says in his post, ‘absolute power can be a terrible weakness.’ True. However, for many – perhaps most – dictators, absolute power is a terrible (in the original sense of that word) strength. Think to the horrors of the twentieth century.
That, however, is not Donald Trump. He may be the master of chaos. But he is not the Leviathan…
What if we abandoned the social contract for the state of nature? “Donald Trump’s Anti-Leviathan,” from @benansell.bsky.social (with @himself.bsky.social).
* “Power doesn’t always corrupt. Power always reveals. When you have enough power to do what you always wanted to do, then you see what the guy always wanted to do.” – Robert Caro (riffing on Lord Acton: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely”) Or as David Brin put it: “it is said that power corrupts, but actually it’s more true that power attracts the corruptible.”
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As we rein in reigns, we might recall that it was on this date in 1945 that Hermann Göring, head of the Luftwaffe and Adolf Hitler’s designated successor as leader of Nazi Germany, wired the Führer asking permission to assume leadership of the crumbling regime. The telegram caused an infuriated Hitler to strip Göring of power and to appoint new successors, Joseph Goebbels and Karl Dönitz, as chancellor and head of state, respectively.
“Authoritarian populism can be seen as a pushback of elements of human nature—tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, zero-sum thinking—against the Enlightenment institutions that were designed to circumvent them”*…
We live in the age of charismatic elected would-be despots. His — it is almost always a “he” — are the politics of fear and rage. It takes a certain sort of personality to be a master of such politics. In the right — that is, the wrong — circumstances, such leaders emerge naturally. That is not surprising after a violent revolution. What is far more so is that such leaders have been emerging in well-established democracies.
We now see elected “strongmen” — actual and would-be — everywhere. Leading examples are Vladimir Putin in Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Narendra Modi in India, Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, Matteo Salvini in Italy and Donald Trump in the US. These leaders differ in degrees of sophistication. The countries in which they operate also differ. Some are economically developed, while others are not. Some are longstanding democracies; others, again, are not.
Yet these men are all characters in a story powerfully told by the independent US watchdog Freedom House. Freedom in the World 2019, published in February, reported a 13th consecutive year of decline in the global health of democracy. This decline occurred in all regions of the world, notably in the democracies that emerged after the cold war. Above all, it occurred in western democracies, with the US — the most influential upholder of democratic values — leading the way…
People want to believe a powerful and charismatic leader is on their side in an unjust world. The estimable Martin Wolf unpacks the mechanism of “strong man” rule: “The age of the elected despot is here.”
For a different angle on the phenomenon the Wolf unpacks, one that speaks directly to Steven’s Pinker’s quote in the title of this post, see “Dialectics of Enlightenment.”
*”A very different threat to human progress is a political movement that seeks to undermine its Enlightenment foundations.
The second decade of the 21st century has seen the rise of a counter-Enlightenment movement called populism, more accurately, authoritarian populism. Populism calls for the direct sovereignty of a country’s “people” (usually an ethnic group, sometimes a class), embodied in a strong leader who directly channels their authentic virtue and experience.
Authoritarian populism can be seen as a pushback of elements of human nature—tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, zero-sum thinking—against the Enlightenment institutions that were designed to circumvent them. By focusing on the tribe rather than the individual, it has no place for the protection of minority rights or the promotion of human welfare worldwide. By failing to acknowledge that hard-won knowledge is the key to societal improvement, it denigrates “elites” and “experts” and downplays the marketplace of ideas, including freedom of speech, diversity of opinion, and the fact-checking of self-serving claims. By valorizing a strong leader, populism overlooks the limitations in human nature, and disdains the rule-governed institutions and constitutional checks that constrain the power of flawed human actors.
Populism comes in left-wing and right-wing varieties, which share a folk theory of economics as zero-sum competition: between economic classes in the case of the left, between nations or ethnic groups in the case of the right. Problems are seen not as challenges that are inevitable in an indifferent universe but as the malevolent designs of insidious elites, minorities, or foreigners. As for progress, forget about it: populism looks backward to an age in which the nation was ethnically homogeneous, orthodox cultural and religious values prevailed, and economies were powered by farming and manufacturing, which produced tangible goods for local consumption and for export.”
― Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
Consider also:
“Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say. In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view—one follows the decisions of the majority. For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction.”
– Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism”, New York Review of Books (June 22, 1995)
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As we think for ourselves, we might recall that it was on this date in 1945 that Joseph Goebbels died. One of Adolf Hitler’s closest and most devoted associates, Goebbels was a student of the shaping of public opinion; he served as Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. He was a gifted public speaker, who was particularly adept at using the relatively new media of radio and film for propaganda purposes, emphasizing antisemitism, attacks on the Christian churches, and (after the start of World War II) the boosting of public morale.
Hitler committed suicide in his bunker on April 30, 1945. In accordance with his will, Goebbels succeeded him as Chancellor of Germany, serving one day in this post. The following day, Goebbels and his wife committed suicide, after poisoning their six children with cyanide.
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