History rhymes, even if the words get stuck in your craw
Don’t compare Germany in the 1930s with what is happening in America today, we are told. I beg to differ.
Here’s a crunchy German mouthful for you — Gleichschaltung.
Like Schadenfreude it has no exact alternative in English. A standard dictionary definition of Gleichschaltung describes it as: “the standardisation of political, economic and social institutions as carried out in authoritarian states.”
Now, we’re often advised by Rory Stewart et al, that what is currently happening in America is not a modern version of Nazi Germany. He’s right. One cannot fruitfully map one set of specific historical circumstances onto a contemporary situation and expect to gain any insight into what may lie ahead. However, that does not mean we cannot learn from those earlier eras, and from the 1930s in particular.
Take, for, example, the new Trump administration’s so-called “firehose” of Executive Orders signed in the President’s first two weeks. While the royal Sharpie has been working overtime on presidential directives we’ve witnessed a caravanserai of manifestly unqualified and morally unsuitable individuals traipsing through the Oval Office after being elevated to critical Cabinet posts. The departments of Defence, National Intelligence, Homeland Security, the FBI, the CIA, Education, Health & Human Services, USAID, etc. — all have been reverse-engineered to serve the MAGA agenda.
The Federal Register of Trump’s Executive Orders lists the countless, zone-flooding decrees that together add up to what one can only describe as an attempt to ‘coordinate’ and standardise “political, economic and social institutions,” i.e. to bring them into alignment with the administration’s agenda. In a word — Gleichschaltung.
Arguably the most explicit illustration of this was the establishment of an unofficial department — DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency) headed by the unelected billionaire Elon Musk. This too is a sinister echo of earlier times.
The historian Hannah Arendt has much to teach us on these tendencies, referencing in The Origins of Totalitarianism how the Nazis set up “fake departments which were modelled after the regular state administration, such as their own department of foreign affairs, education, culture, sport, etc.” (Arendt, 2017 [1951] p.486.)
Trump has commandeered and remodelled every one of those departments: foreign affairs (installing cronies like Marco Rubio and Mike Huckabee into sensitive diplomatic posts); education (seeking to disband the Department of Education altogether); culture (Trump installing himself as chairman of the John F. Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts in Washington); and sport (banning transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports). The list goes on.
As Arendt informs us, “duplication” of departments into versions reprogrammed to align with the Leader’s personal agenda proved, in the case of Nazi Germany, “extremely fruitful in the work of undermining actively existing institutions and in the ‘decomposition of the status quo’.” Moreover, “They could change overnight the whole structure of German society — and not just political life — precisely because they had prepared its exact counterpart within their own ranks.” (Arendt, p486.)
Is a version of that not happening in America today?
One topic currently exercising historians, political commentators, cable news contributors, academics, podcasters and journalists is the willingness of Republican lawmakers to fall in behind Trump and swear undying loyalty to his cause. Once again, Hannah Arendt observed this exact process in play under National Socialism:
“…the Leader is irreplaceable because the whole complicated structure of the movement would lose its raison d’être without his commands. Now, despite eternal cabals in the inner clique and unending shifts of personnel, with their tremendous accumulation of hatred, bitterness and personal resentment, the Leader’s position can remain secure against chaotic palace revolutions not because of his superior gifts, about which the men in his intimate surroundings frequently have no great illusions, but because of these men’s sincere and sensible conviction that without him everything would be immediately lost.” (Arendt, p489.)
Gleichschaltung.
It’s beginning to roll off the tongue.