Is MAGA a Totalitarian Movement?
If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, ….
A year before our last Presidential election, as both campaigns were heating up, I decided it was time to read The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt — a well-known scholarly study (published in 1951) of the rise and fall of totalitarian movements that focused on Hitler’s Third Reich and Stalin’s Soviet Union. I had worked for Trump and Biden as an analyst at the US Department of Labor until my retirement at the end of 2022.
There wasn’t anything remarkable about the first Trump Administration, but everything about him and his supporters seemed to change after his defeat in 2020. It was clear that he sought revenge and if elected again in 2024, he would go much farther in exercising his power. Many were referring to him as a fascist due to his strongman posture and nationalist rhetoric, especially on immigration. I wondered how far this could go.
The book is phenomenal. Dr. Arendt recognized that she was uniquely qualified to help people all over the world understand what had led to the atrocities in her own country (Germany) and in Russia in her lifetime. Only by understanding the conditions and thinking that characterize man’s inhumanity to man do we have any chance of avoiding its recurrence. She said many times that what made these movements so difficult to resist is that they make no sense to outsiders.
I learned that lying was the primary tool of both Hitler and Stalin, not just in their rise to power but throughout their rule. It is not news that our President is a natural liar and that facts (and even laws) have no hold on him. Knowing it is a primary qualification for a totalitarian regime makes this offensive trait deeply disturbing.
After watching the swarm of Executive Orders, DOGE and other dubious political appointments, outrageous treatment of foreign leaders, and especially the behavior of GOP sycophants on Capitol Hill since the inauguration just a couple of months ago, I began to wonder whether this Administration envisions any end to the chaos. Maybe this is really how they intend to govern.
As the title and subtitle of this essay suggest, I think it is reasonable to ask whether this phenomenon is more than just grievances and incompetence. It’s too odd and too dangerous to dismiss. I don’t know the answer, but I invite you to read what an expert says we now know is possible and judge for yourself. In any event, we cannot say we were not warned.
I pulled the book off the shelf and did a deep dive into Part Three: Totalitarianism, looking for lessons from 20th century Europe that might apply to our current experience. Copied below are what I consider interesting and relevant quotes from chapters 10–12. [1] I’ve added page numbers for all quotes.
This shit is dark and deep. Not everyone has the appetite for it, but I think all of us can appreciate this song by Buffalo Springfield from 1966 (“For What It’s Worth”), which poignantly captured the tensions between young
Americans and our government in the Vietnam era. As we all know, things got worse in the years to come. We survived that challenge; time will tell whether it is different this time around.
Ten: A Classless Society
I. The Masses
For the propaganda of totalitarian movements which precede and accompany totalitarian regimes is invariably as frank as it is mendacious, and would-be totalitarian rulers usually start their careers by boasting of their past crimes and carefully outlining their future ones. (p. 307)
The totalitarian movements aim at and succeed in organizing masses — not classes…. Masses are not held together by a consciousness of common interest…. Potentially, they exist in every country and form the majority of those large numbers of neutral, politically indifferent people who never join a party and hardly ever go to the polls…. [T]he majority of their membership consisted of people who never before had appeared on the political scene. This permitted
the introduction of entirely new methods into political propaganda, and indifference to the arguments of political opponents…. They presented disagreements as invariably originating in deep natural, social, or psychological sources beyond the control of the individual and therefore beyond the power of reason. (pp. 308–12)America, the classical land of equality of condition and of general education with all its shortcomings, knows less of the modern psychology of masses than perhaps any other country in the world. (p. 316)
Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals. Compared with all other parties and movements, their most
conspicuous external characteristic is their demand for total, unrestricted,
unconditional, and unalterable loyalty of the individual member. This demand is made by the leaders of totalitarian movements even before they
seize power. (p. 323)
II. The Temporary Alliance Between the Mob and the Elite
The fact that their lives prior to their political careers had been failures, naively held against them by the more respectable leaders of the old parties, was the strongest factor in their mass appeal. (p. 327)
Simply to brand as outbursts of nihilism this violent dissatisfaction with
the prewar age and subsequent attempts at restoring it … is to overlook
how justified disgust can be in a society wholly permeated with the
ideological outlook and moral standards of the bourgeoisie. They were satisfied with blind partisanship in anything that respectable society had banned, regardless of theory or content, and they elevated cruelty to a major virtue because it contradicted society’s humanitarian and liberal hypocrisy. (p. 328–31)What the spokesmen of humanism and liberalism usually overlook, in their bitter disappointment and their unfamiliarity with the more general experiences of the time, is that an atmosphere in which all traditional values and propositions had evaporated… in a sense made it easier to accept patently absurd propositions than the old truths which had become pious banalities, precisely because nobody could be expected to take the absurdities seriously. Vulgarity with its cynical dismissal of respected standards and accepted theories carried with it a frank admission of the worst and a disregard for all pretenses which were easily mistaken for courage and a new style of life. (p. 334)
The philistine is the bourgeois isolated from his own class, the atomized individual who is produced by the breakdown of the bourgeois class itself. The mass man whom Himmler organized for the greatest mass crimes ever committed in history bore the features of the philistine rather than of the mob man, and
was the bourgeois who in the midst of the ruins of his world worried about
nothing so much as his private security, was ready to sacrifice everything
— belief, honor, dignity — on the slightest provocation. Nothing proved easier to destroy than the privacy and private morality of people who thought of nothing but safeguarding their private lives. (p. 338)Intellectual, spiritual, and artistic initiative is as dangerous to totalitarianism as the gangster initiative of the mob, and both are more dangerous than mere political opposition. The consistent persecution of every higher form of intellectual activity by the new mass leaders springs from more than their natural resentment against everything they cannot understand. Total domination does not allow for free initiative in any field of life, for any activity that is not entirely predictable. Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty. (p. 339)
Eleven: The Totalitarian Movement
I. Totalitarian Propaganda
Totalitarianism will not be satisfied to assert, in the face of contrary facts, that unemployment does not exist; it will abolish unemployment benefits as part of its propaganda. (p. 341)
This kind of mass terror, which still operated on a comparatively small scale, increased steadily because neither the police nor the courts seriously prosecuted political offenders on the so-called Right. It was valuable as what a Nazi publicist has aptly called “power propaganda”: it made clear to the population at large that the power of the Nazis was greater than that of the authorities.... This impression was greatly strengthened by the specific use the Nazis made of their political crimes. They always admitted them publicly… and impressed the population as being very different from the “idle talkers” of other parties. (p.344)
[T]he Nazis, without admitting it, learned as much from American gangster organizations as their propaganda, admittedly, learned from American business publicity… [They] dismissed even those scholars who were willing to serve them, and the Bolsheviks use the reputation of their scientists for entirely unscientific purposes and force them into the role of charlatans… [T]here is hardly a better way to avoid discussion than by releasing an argument from the control of the present and by saying that only the future can reveal its merits. (pp. 345)
The fanaticism of members of totalitarian movements, so clearly different in quality from the greatest loyalty of members of ordinary’ parties, is produced by the lack of self-interest of masses who are quite prepared to sacrifice themselves. (p. 348)
The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error… Mass leaders in power have one concern which overrules all utilitarian considerations: to make their predictions come true… Then all debate about the truth or falsity of a totalitarian dictator’s prediction is as weird as arguing with a potential murderer about whether his future victim is dead or alive — since by killing the person in question the murderer can promptly provide proof of the correctness of his statement... Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it. (pp. 349–50)
[S]pokesmen for totalitarian movements possessed an unerring instinct for anything that ordinary party propaganda or public opinion did not care or dare to touch. (p. 351)
Totalitarian propaganda can outrageously insult common sense only where common sense has lost its validity. Before the alternative of facing the anarchic growth and total arbitrariness of decay or bowing down before the most rigid, fantastically fictitious consistency of an ideology, the masses probably will always choose the latter and be ready to pay for it with individual sacrifices — and this not because they are stupid or wicked, but because in the general disaster this escape grants them a minimum of self-respect. (p. 352)
The true goal of totalitarian propaganda is not persuasion but organization… For this purpose, originality in ideological content can only be considered an unnecessary obstacle. It is no accident that the two totalitarian movements of our time, so frightfully “new” in methods of rule and ingenious in forms of organization, have never preached a new doctrine, have never invented an ideology which was not already popular… What distinguishes the totalitarian leaders and dictators is rather the simple-minded, single-minded purposefulness with which they choose those elements from existing ideologies which are best fitted to become the fundaments of another, entirely fictitious world. (pp. 361–2)
The fundamental reason for the superiority of totalitarian propaganda over the propaganda of other parties and movements is that its content, for the members of the movement at any rate, is no longer an objective issue about which people may have opinions, but has become as real and untouchable an element in their lives as the rules of arithmetic… Foolproof against arguments based on a reality which the movements promised to change, against a counterpropaganda disqualified by the mere fact that it belongs to or defends a world which the shiftless masses cannot and will not accept, it can be disproved only by another, a stronger or better, reality. (p. 363)
II. Totalitarian Organization
The forms of totalitarian organization... are designed to translate the propaganda lies of the movement, woven around a central fiction… into a functioning reality, to build up, even under nontotalitarian circumstances, a society whose members act and react according to the rules of a fictitious world. (p. 364)
The reason why the movements in their prepower, revolutionary stage can attract so many ordinary philistines is that their members live in a fool’s paradise of normalcy; the party members are surrounded by the normal world of sympathizers and the elite formations by the normal world of ordinary members. (p. 368)
For the movement, organized violence is the most efficient of the many protective walls which surround its fictitious world, whose “reality” is proved when a member fears leaving the movement more than he fears the consequences of his complicity in illegal actions, and feels more secure as a member than as an opponent…. [The Leader’s] position within this intimate circle depends upon his ability to spin intrigues among its members and upon his skill in constantly changing its personnel. (p. 373)
From the viewpoint of an organization which functions according to the principle that whoever is not included is excluded, whoever is not with me is against me, the world at large loses all the nuances, differentiations, and pluralistic aspects which had in any event become confusing and unbearable to the masses who had lost their place and their orientation in it. (p. 380–1)
The chief value, however, of the secret or conspiratory societies’ organizational structure and moral standards for purposes of mass organization docs not even lie in the inherent guarantees of unconditional belonging and loyalty, and organizational manifestation of unquestioned hostility to the outside world, but in their unsurpassed capacity to establish and safeguard the fictitious world through consistent lying. The whole hierarchical structure of totalitarian movements, from naive fellow-travelers to party members, elite formations, the intimate circle around the Leader, and the Leader himself, could be described in terms of a curiously varying mixture of gullibility and cynicism with which each member, depending upon his rank and standing in the movement, is expected to react to the changing lying statements of the leaders and the central unchanging ideological fiction of the movement. (p. 382)
In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the
point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing,
think that everything was possible and that nothing was true…. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness. (p. 382)The essential conviction shared by all ranks, from fellow-traveler to leader, is that politics is a game of cheating and that the “first commandment” of the movement: “The Fuehrer is always right,” is as necessary for the purposes of world politics, i.e., world-wide cheating, as the rules of military discipline are for the purposes of war. (p. 382)
It has been one of the chief handicaps of the outside world in dealing with totalitarian systems that it ignored this system and therefore trusted that, on one hand, the very enormity of totalitarian lies would be their undoing and that, on the other, it would be possible to take the Leader at his word and force him, regardless of his original intentions, to make it good. (p. 384)
It is in the nature of the movement that once the Leader has assumed his office, the whole organization is so absolutely identified with him that any admission of a mistake or removal from office would break the spell of infallibility which surrounds the office of the Leader and spell doom to all those connected with the movement. (p. 387)
Twelve: Totalitarianism in Power
Hitler and Stalin held out promises of stability in order to hide their intention of creating a state of permanent instability. (p. 391)
I. The So-called Totalitarian State
Contrary to all expectations, important concessions and greatly heightened international prestige did not help to reintegrate the totalitarian countries into the comity of nations or induce them to abandon their lying complaint that the whole world had solidly lined up against them. And far from preventing this, diplomatic victories clearly precipitated their recourse to the instruments of violence and resulted in all instances in increased hostility against the powers that had shown themselves willing to compromise. (p. 393)
Even more disturbing was the handling of the constitutional question by
the totalitarian regimes. In the early years of their power the Nazis let loose
an avalanche of laws and decrees, but they never bothered to abolish officially the Weimar constitution; they even left the civil services more or less intact — a fact which induced many native and foreign observers to hope for restraint of the party and for rapid normalization of the new regime. (pp. 393–4)[T]he relationship between the two sources of authority, between state and party, is one of ostensible and real authority, so that the government machine is usually pictured as the powerless facade which hides and protects the real power of the party. (p. 395)
[A] movement…can have only a direction, and that any form of legal or governmental structure can be only a handicap to a movement which is being propelled with increasing speed in a certain direction…. Therefore, … these movements…must try to destroy all structure…. (p. 398)
[O]rders were “intentionally vague, and given in the expectation that their recipient would recognize the intent of the order giver, and act accordingly”…. [T]he the consistent and ever-changing division between real secret authority and ostensible open representation made the actual seat of power a mystery by definition, and this to such an extent that the members of the ruling clique themselves could never be absolutely sure of their own position in the secret power hierarchy. (pp. 399–400)
The only rule of which everybody in a totalitarian state may be sure is that the more visible government agencies are, the less power they carry, and the less is known of the existence of an institution, the more powerful it will ultimately turn out to be…. Real power begins where secrecy begins. (p. 403)
[A]uthority is not filtered down from the top through all intervening layers to the bottom of the body politic as is the case in authoritarian regimes…. [T]he principle of authority is in all important respects diametrically opposed to that of totalitarian domination. Quite apart from its origin in Roman history, authority, no matter in what form, always is meant to restrict or limit freedom, but never to abolish it. Totalitarian domination, however, aims at abolishing freedom…. The will of the Fuehrer can be embodied everywhere and at all times, and he himself is not tied to any hierarchy, not even the one he might, have established himself. (pp. 404–5)
[T]he monstrous unfaithfulness which is reported in almost identical terms as the outstanding trait in both Hitler’s and Stalin’s characters did not allow them to preside over anything so lasting and durable as a clique. However that may be, the point is that there exists no interrelationship between those holding office; they are not bound together by equal status in a political hierarchy or the relationship between superiors and inferiors, or even the uncertain loyalties of gangsters. (p. 407)
As techniques of government, the totalitarian devices appear simple and ingeniously effective. They assure not only an absolute power monopoly,
but unparalleled certainty that all commands will always be carried out; the multiplicity of the transmission belts, the confusion of the hierarchy, secure the dictator’s complete independence of all his inferiors and make possible the swift and surprising changes in policy for which totalitarianism has become famous. The body politic of the country is shock-proof because of its shapelessness. (pp. 408–9)[T]he totalitarian dictator regards the natural and industrial riches of each country, including his own, as a source of loot and a means of preparing the next step of aggressive expansion…. Distribution of the spoils is calculated not to strengthen the economy of the home country but only as a temporary tactical maneuver. For economic purposes, the totalitarian regimes are as much at home in their countries as the proverbial swarms of locusts. (p. 417)
[1] Parts I and II are AntiSemitism and Imperialism. I’m saving quotes in the last two sections of Chapter Twelve (II. The Secret Police and III. Total Domination), as well as Chapter Thirteen: Ideology and Terror, for another post that I sincerely hope will not be needed.
