The Morning After

On the morning after our catastrophic elections in 2016, I wrote an open letter to a Polish friend:  “We have to acknowledge that an enormous part of the American electorate wanted this fascist. I’ve never been especially patriotic, I’ve always felt more like a rootless cosmopolitan, but these elections have broken my heart.”

At the time, eight years ago, many people felt that the description “fascist” was overly hysterical. Historical comparisons–above all to the 1930s, above all to Nazism, often make various groups of people–Americans, Germans, Jews, for instance–uncomfortable for different reasons. The reaction of many Americans I know was then to say: “This is very bad, but we’ll get through it. American democratic institutions are the strongest in the world; we have checks and balances.” Among liberals, “checks and balances” came to play the role of a yoga mantra: Inhale. Checks and balances. Exhale. Checks and balances. . .

I had the overwhelming feeling that we Americans were like the passengers on the Titanic insisting, “Our ship can’t sink!” As a historian, I never know what will happen. What I know rather–what the past does give us a sense of–is what can happen. And I knew then–as I do now–that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.

After the November 2016 elections, our kitchen in New Haven, Connecticut turned into a Soviet kitchen: friends, dazed, eyes glazed over, coming by, opening bottles of wine, crying. Asking again and again what they call in Russian the “eternal questions”: What is to be done? Who is to blame? In the weeks and months that followed, there in our kitchen, over wine and a lot of New Haven pizza, our philosopher friend Jason Stanley wrote a book called How Fascism Works (Wie Faschismus funktioniert) while our four little kids (two of his, two of ours) ran around having pillow fights and building Lego towers, and sneaking lots of cookies—and learning more about the 1930s than children ought to know.

Jason’s book, intended for the broadest audience, laid out very clearly some classical fascist motifs: Mythologization of the past. The naturalization of hierarchies. Cults of victimhood. Insecurities about masculinity. A fictitious world. Social Darwinism. The rhetoric of Us v. Them.

There was a debate among liberals: were we allowed to invoke the concept “fascism”? Yes or no?  How many boxes had to be checked in order to justify using the word? But of course the Kierkegaardian Either/Or is a trap. Nothing is ever exactly the same as anything else, but these kinds of concepts and historical comparisons are essential to helping us mediate between the singular and the universal. 

In any case, we all–not just Jason and my husband and myself, but many more of us who study things like the history of totalitarianism and the language of propaganda—did a lot of work to try to bring into American consciousness an understanding of what fascism was, how it worked, how it could appear and reappear in different degrees and forms, why we Americans, just like everyone else, were vulnerable.

And in the past weeks I’ve seen that on the one hand, these efforts were successful: Americans have largely accepted fascism as a hermeneutic device to help us understand Trumpism. On the other hand, some half of Americans do not see fascism as a bad thing at all. Eight years ago, I felt like so many Trump supporters just did not understand what was happening. Today I feel much worse: I think they do understand who Trump is and what he stands for, and this is what they want.

Trump’s Chief of Staff John Kelly said publicly that Trump has “nothing but contempt” for the rule of law; his Secretary of Defense Mark Esper called him “unfit for office;” his top general Mark Milley said “no one has ever been as dangerous to this country as Donald Trump. He’s a total fascist.”  In November 2020 Trump made a phone call–recorded and published–to the Secretary of State of Georgia Brad Raffensperger asking him to “find” him 11,780  more votes. Two months later, the country watched as Trump incited a violent insurrection on the capital and approved a mob calling for the hanging of his vice-president, Mike Pence. There is a reason there was an open spot this election on Trump’s ticket. 

There’s a concept that appears in many Slavic languages called obnazhenie–literally “laying bare.” This was a motif, a century ago, of avant-garde poetics (“the laying bare of the device”). Today it is a significant element of postmodern neo-totalitarianism. Nothing is hidden. Vladimir Putin’s spin doctor Vladislav Surkov described Putinism this way: “The most brutal structures of its power scaffolding run straight along the façade, not concealed by whatever kind of architectural excesses.”

Trump makes no attempt to conceal that for him all relationships are transactional. There is not even a pretense of having any first principles or considering other people’s lives to have any value at all. There is also no attempt made to conceal racism, misogyny, homophobia and violence. His Madison Square Garden rally ten days ago was self-consciously modeled after a Nazi rally there in 1939. Speakers at the rally called Kamala Harris’s advisors “pimp handlers,” Hillary Clinton a “sick son of a bitch,” Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage,” and Kamala Harris “the Antichrist.” “America is for Americans and Americans only,” the Trump political advisor Stephen Miller said there, echoing, not by chance, a speaker at the 1939 rally who vowed to “restore America to the true Americans.”

These were no longer “dog whistles.” Now Trumpists were saying the quiet parts aloud, promising white supremacy and violence and lists of those to be purged. Now Trump speaks openly about deploying the American military against “the enemy from within”—and his supporters appear to love this. There is violence to come.

Civilization–Sigmund Freud tells us in Civilization and Its Discontents–is built on repression. It “has to use its utmost efforts in order to set limits to man’s aggressive instincts.” What fascism–what Trump promises—is liberation from repression. This is real liberation, Freud tells us, liberation for which we pay the small price of the destruction of civilization. And we are–and will be–paying that price.

There are, of course, no perfect human beings, no perfect candidates, no messiahs. But this election was different from 2016, too, in the quality of the Democratic Party’s campaign. Eight years ago there was too much complacency in the Democratic Party; it seemed too inconceivable that Trump could ever win. This time Joe Biden made a historic move, and whatever his faults, his resignation clearly came from an authentic sense of responsibility for his country. After he announced he would withdraw from the race, the Democratic Party united in an unprecedented way. Hillary Clinton spoke at the Democratic National Convention with wisdom and generosity, with an absence of resentment and absolute willingness to throw everything into helping Kamala Harris win a historic role that should have been hers eight years ago. Very different men–from Doug Emhoff to Tim Walz to Pete Buttigieg to Jamie Raskin–did a fantastic job of performing strong, caring, non-threatened masculinity, an antidote to the toxic masculinity of Trump and Putin. Michelle Obama, some ten days before the election, gave what was truly one of the greatest feminist speeches of all time. Her deep dive into the price women pay for restrictions on reproductive health care was brilliant and courageous and sui generis on this kind of political stage. Kamala Harris and Mike Walz campaigned with extraordinary energy and warmth–declining to be provoked by Trump’s infantilism, refusing to descend to his level, maintaining reason and dignity and composure throughout.

That Americans have voluntarily handed ourselves and everyone else over to an unhinged fascist cannot be blamed on a weak campaign by Kamala Harris. It was not a weak campaign. And she was not a weak candidate. We are a weak species.

After the war, Hannah Arendt wrote of how “for many years now, we have met Germans who declare that they are ashamed of being Germans. I have often felt tempted to answer that I am ashamed of being human.”

The horrible truth is that some 72 million Americans voted for Trump not in spite of the fact that he’s a sadistic narcissist, but because of that. There was nothing subtle about his campaign. We cannot say we Americans did not and do not understand who he is: he has told us exactly who he is every single day.

Today I feel ashamed of being American and human alike.

Marci Shore is associate professor of history at Yale University. She is the translator of Michał Głowiński’s The Black Seasons and the author of Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968, The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe, and The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution. In 2018 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for her current book project, “Phenomenological Encounters: Scenes from Central Europe.”

This piece was originally published in TAZ on November 9th, 2024.