Trump, Musk, & Fascism – An Historical Perspective – CleanTechnica

Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!

---

Executive editor Zachary Shahan has published his thoughts about how right wing extremists like Donald Trump and Elon Musk are distorting the notion of free speech to turn it into a weapon to dismantle democracy. Most CleanTechnica readers know I am an avid follower of historian Heather Cox Richardson on Substack. She has a gift for taking events in the past and events happening today and weaving them together in a way that is entertaining and informative. If a little learning takes place at the same time, well, so much the better.

Her post for October 21, 2024 focuses on the parallels between the rise of fascism in Germany after World War One and the parallels with many of the positions and policies espoused by Donald Trump and Elon Musk here in the closing weeks of the 2024 presidential election season. I think it is worthy of being shared with our readers.

Richardson refers to a recent article by political scientist Rachel Bitecofer entitled “What (Really) Happens If Trump Wins?” In it, Bitecofer outlined Adolf Hitler’s January 30, 1933, oath of office, in which he promised Germans he would uphold the constitution, and the three months he took to dismantle that constitution. By March, she notes, the concentration camp Dachau was open. Its first prisoners were not Jews, but rather Hitler’s prominent political opponents. By April, Jews had been purged from the civil service, and opposition political parties were illegal. By May, labor unions were banned and students were burning banned books. Within the year, public criticism of Hitler and the Nazis was illegal, and denouncing violators paid well for those who did it.

Bitecofer writes that Trump will need to dismantle the merit-based civil service and put into office those loyal to him, rather than the Constitution, in order to carry out his plans. In fact, that’s what he meant to do when he said in 2016 he was going to Washington to “drain the swamp.” Then he will purge his political opponents, for once those who would stand against him are purged, Trump can act as he wishes against immigrants, for example, and others.

Dorothy Thompson Meets Adolf Hitler

Ninety years ago, Dorothy Thompson was the first American journalist expelled from Nazi Germany. When she visited Germany, she met Adolf Hitler whom she described as a man of “startling insignificance.” She asked him if he would “abolish the constitution of the German Republic.” He answered: “I will get into power legally” and, once in power, abolish the parliament and the constitution and “found an authority-state, from the lowest cell to the highest instance; everywhere there will be responsibility and authority above, discipline and obedience below.” She did not believe he could succeed: “Imagine a would-be dictator setting out to persuade a sovereign people to vote away their rights,” she wrote in apparent astonishment.

When she returned to America, Thompson lectured against fascism across the country in 1935, then began a radio program that reached tens of millions of listeners. Hired in 1936 to write a regular column three days a week for the New York Herald Tribune, she became a leading voice in print, too, warning that what was happening in Germany could also happen in America.

All Dictators Are Local

She wrote in a 1937 column: “No people ever recognize their dictator in advance… He always represents himself as the instrument for expressing the Incorporated National Will. When Americans think of dictators they always think of some foreign model. If anyone turned up here in a fur hat, boots and a grim look he would be recognized and shunned…. But when our dictator turns up, you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American.”

When 22,000 American Nazis held a rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden in honor of President George Washington’s birthday on February 20, 1939, Thompson sat in the front row of the press box, where she laughed loudly during the speeches and yelled “Bunk!” at the stage. After being escorted out, she returned to her seat, where stormtroopers surrounded her. She later told a reporter: “I was amazed to see a duplicate of what I saw seven years ago in Germany. Tonight I listened to words taken out of the mouth of Adolf Hitler.”

In 1941, Thompson a piece for Harper’s Magazine entitled “Who Goes Nazi?” She said, “It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times — in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.”

Examining a number of types of Americans, she wrote that the line between democracy and fascism was not wealth, or education, or race, or age, or nationality. The frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success — they would all go Nazi in a crisis,” she wrote.

Suggesting her expulsion from Germany was because of her old article disparaging Hitler, she wrote, “My offense was to think that Hitler is just an ordinary man, after all. That is a crime against the reigning cult in Germany, which says Mr. Hitler is a Messiah sent by God to save the German people…. To question this mystic mission is so heinous that, if you are a German, you can be sent to jail. I, fortunately, am an American, so I merely was sent to Paris. Worse things can happen….”

Money & Power

What do Donald Trump and Elon Musk get if their efforts to subvert democracy are successful? Money, for one thing. Trump has always been a grifter who used his name to promote any number of failed businesses — Trump University, Trump Steaks, and Trump Airlines among them. Musk is in it for the power — the power to tell regulators to go pound sand and the power to be the sole authority on Earth on what is truth. Both men are incapable of caring about anyone other than themselves. They are sociopaths who belong in a psycho ward.

And yet, polls suggest half of American voters are just fine with being led by a lunatic. It is hoped that the words of Heather Cox Richardson may sway some to step back from the brink and vote for sanity instead of anarchy. If Trump is elected, the American Experiment will end. It’s astonishing to realize how many people are fine — even gleeful — with that result.

Here is my takeaway from history: Weak leaders push others down; strong leaders lift others up. Trump and Musk both are weak leaders who want to force others to think and act the way they tell them to. What they hate most is being ignored. That is exactly what they both deserve most.