Democracy in Crisis is a syndicated column, a podcast, and a blog.
Iām writing this week from North Carolina, the state that may be the center of our current illiberal, anti-democratic, and yet ostensibly populist politicsāthe place that should be called North Coup-dāetat-arolina after the Republican legislature tried to disempower the democratically elected Democratic governor in a session from which they expelled the press and the public. Itās also the place whose racially gerrymandered congressional districts the Supreme Court just ruled unconstitutional, causingāin what may almost constitute a miracleāClarence Thomas to side with the courtās more liberal justices.
More specifically, I am in the town of Waxhaw, which claimsāalthough it is disputedāto be the birthplace of Andrew Jackson, seemingly the only one of his predecessors that Donald Trump admires.
The town is named after the indigenous people who were wiped out during the Yamasee War, which ended 300 years ago this year, in 1717.
The Museum of the Waxhaws has a particularly noxious sign featuring an image of Jackson, probably the president most responsible for the genocide of Native Americans (and thatās some stiff competition). When, in Worcester v. Georgia, the Supreme Court ruled that native lands were sovereign, Jackson proclaimed āthe decision of the Supreme Court has fell still born, and they find that they cannot coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate.ā
The court-hating Trump may present himself as a Jacksonian in hopes of employing this line at some point, or more likely the apocryphal version in which Jackson said Chief Justice āJohn Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!ā
The case addressed the forcible removal of the Cherokee, a horrendously shameful event in our nationās history, and one that inspired not only Trump but also Adolf Hitler.
I thought of this a couple weeks ago when I talked to Kathleen B. Jones, a scholar who studies the work of the political theorist and Holocaust refugee Hannah Arendt, whose The Origins of Totalitarianism became a surprise bestseller after the election. I called Jones because I wanted to talk about Trumpās claim that he was āa nationalist and a globalist.ā Trumpās nationalist supporters saw this claim as a betrayalāand yet many of these same people praise Vladimir Putin and used their dank memes for Marine Le Pen.
Arendt wrote about the ways that initially nationalist movements like fascism ultimately embrace globalism as they move toward full-blown totalitarianism and seek to politically remake the world. I thought that might help me understand what was going on with this international movement of nationalists interfering in each otherās elections around the world.
āIf you add the adjective ā¦ āwhiteā in front of the word ānationalist,ā a āwhite nationalistā and a āglobalist,ā there isnāt really much of a contradiction between those two tendencies,ā Jones says. āItās interesting because when Hitler was formulating his program of land conquestāhe writes about this in Mein Kampfāhe turned to the United States as an illustration of the strategy to be pursued to advance the interests of a people across the scope of an entire territorial area. He was thinking of Manifest Destiny. And he was thinking of the decimation of the American Indian population.ā
There we were, back at Jacksonāvia Hitler, who wasnāt inspired by our genocide of Native Americans and conquest of the continent alone. James Q. Whitmanās new book, Hitlerās American Model, shows the degree to which Nazi race laws were inspired by Jim Crow laws in the American South from the period MAGA-ists seem to want to return. Many Nazis even thought our race laws were too extreme.
Jones says that Trumpās ārestrictive immigration policiesā and his ādraconian economic policies,ā which will disproportionately affect communities of color, amount to a kind of recolonization of America and have parallels with what happened in Germany and Russia between the two world wars.
āItās the transformation of people from all of the residents, all of the inhabitants of a country, into a racialized, ethnicized concept of the people that, simultaneously, basically deterritorialized the concept of nation,ā she says.
āWhen you look at what Marine Le Pen is doingāFrance should become French againāyou know who the targets are. She isnāt shy at all about naming them,ā Jones continues. āWhen you look at whatās going on in the Netherlands, in Hungary, in Poland, in Greece, these are all places where far-right nationalistsā parties, ethno-nationalist parties, have gained footing in ways we havenāt seen since the between-the-wars period.ā
This is particularly troubling for us, of course, in the context of Trump, who has consistently acted as if he is the leader, not of the whole country, but of his supporters. He sees the press as the āenemy of the peopleā and finds less commonality with Democrats than he does with foreign nationalist authoritarians like Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, or Rodrigo Duterte, whose murderous drug war Trump praised in the same conversation in which he gave the dictator the position of U.S. nuclear subs.
As with Manifest Destiny, white Christians believe Trumpās election was the will of God. āHe offended gays. He offended women. He offended the military. He offended black people. He offended the Hispanic people. He offended everybody! And he became president of the United States. Only God could do that,ā evangelist Franklin Graham recently told The Atlantic.
Iām not saying there are no differences between Jackson and Hitler and Trump. Two of the three are guilty of genocide. But neither Jackson nor Hitler actually had the capacityāin the form of nuclear weaponsāto destroy the entire world. Trump does.
Arendtās Origins is not about finding exact parallels, Jones says, but it is āa warning of what will happen if we donāt pay attention when people who try to sort of create dictatorships or a kind of power without limits.ā