Arendt: The authoritarian influence of an American strongman

Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, has been widely discussed since Trump rose to power, writes Robert J. Shapiro in the Washington Monthly.

Unquestionably one of the most important Western political thinkers of the 20th century, Arendt was shaped by Adolph Hitler’s rise. She had been a student of Germany’s three leading philosophers of her time—Edward Husserl, Karl Jaspers, and Martin Heidegger. As a Jew, she fled Germany for Paris in 1933. She emigrated to the United States in 1939, where she taught at Princeton University, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and the New School for Social Research.

Her 1951 analysis of the movements that propelled the rise of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes begins with the insight that their followers were not a typical interest group seeking benefits or rights. Instead, they’re individuals who feel that recent disruptive societal changes cost them their status and are brought together by a charismatic leader who exploits their shared sense of injury.

The leader of these movements offers lies to explain why his followers lost their place, claims he can restore it given enough power, and, equally important, manipulates his followers’ anger to support violence committed at his behest.

With violence and threats now part of our politics, the question becomes, is the MAGA movement a populist version of a normal interest group or an extremist faction of the type that modern dictators have used to help establish and support their rule?

That MAGA is a mass movement is not in question. 

As a matter of history, the role of Trump’s mass movement in advancing his ambitions to become an American strongman has some parallels with Hitler’s devoted followers in the Sturmabteilung, the Brownshirts of the SA. The SA began as an outside movement affiliated with the Nazi Party that intimidated and harassed Hitler’s opponents and Jewish Germans. It was always distinct from the Schutzstaffel or SS, the brutally violent agency of the Nazi government that broke off from the SA following the Night of the Long Knives purge in 1934. But members of the original SA mass movement became loyal, public supporters of Hitler’s steps to suspend Germany’s constitution, much like many MAGA followers today.

We don’t have brownshirts brawling across American cities.  But threats of government-sanctioned violence are palpably present, as they were in Germany in the early 1930s, and the president and his administration have repeatedly defended the bloodshed in Minnesota and elsewhere by some elements of ICE.

Based on the facts, MAGA is not an interest group, even an atypical one, but a mass movement following an aspiring strongman of the kind Hannah Arendt saw in Germany. Its political significance rests on its followers’ extreme views about violence and democracy, their faith in Trump’s big lies, their defense of the political use of intimidation and threats, and their support for Trump’s attacks on democratic institutions. In these ways, MAGA shares features of the popular movements that supported the rise and consolidation of dictatorial power in the past century and the early years of this one.

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