Trumpian Totalitarianism Rhymes With Nazi Era Central Planning
As the Trump pathogen continues to spread like a Wuhan super-virus, it’s time to dust off a long overlooked term from the grim lexicon of totalitarian ideology — Gleichschaltung.
You’ll want a thorough mouthwash after vocalising this particular piece of Nazi-era word-muesli, but once unpacked the term does help us understand what’s happening in Trump’s MAGA-Land and what might lie ahead.
Gleichschaltung essentially refers to the process by which Hitler and his Nazi goons set about subjugating or taking control of the previously autonomous mechanisms of state — the press, the judiciary, the military, the department of energy, the intelligence services, the film industry, the broader cultural industries, and so on, bending them to his will.
Since losing the 2020 Election, Donald Trump has been broadcasting his intention, when re-elected, to seek “revenge” against the very American institutions who he believes have obstructed his return to power. These are institutions whose equivalents in Nazi Germany were menaced into conformity by the brutal fist of totalitarianism.
Already Steve Bannon and other swivel-eyed finger-puppets in the MAGA Politburo are busy selecting cadres of obedient yes-people to populate every level of government ready for Trump’s return to power. Bannon openly revealed these operations on the UK’s ITV News on January 24th.
If Trump’s last term in the Oval Office was egg-shaped, buckle up for the mayhem ahead.
The portmanteau term Gleichschaltung broadly translates to ‘coordination’ or ‘consolidation’ of the public realm. In one mouthful it encapsulates Trump’s own sinister blueprint, the garbled strands of which he vomits out at his rambling Nuremberg rallies. On almost every occasion he delights in threatening vengeance on his tormentors. “I am your retribution!” he promises the bovine MAGA faithful. In essence, it’s a coded intention to take over all the instruments and institutions of state that have tried to stop him regaining power.
The evidence of Trump’s vengeful, Hitlerian spirit is clear from the vast digital smorgasbord of YouTube videos, news reports, interviews, Tweets, Xs, Truth Socials and other mendacious, gaslighting garbage spewed out in support of his messianic bid for full-on Dictatordom. As the historian of totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, observed: “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 the man who can fabricate it.”
The Trump branded version of Gleichschaltung vows to arrest many, if not all, of the judges, federal prosecutors, attorneys general, FBI agents and intelligence chiefs who have sought to hold him to account for his many crimes. If he survives prosecution and sentencing before the election, his ‘retribution’ on return to office will not be difficult since from day one he will have brought federal law enforcement under his control, with the tools and license to do his bidding.
In this foretelling, his persecutors will be brought to book — silenced, emasculated, punished and, in the case of some individuals, executed. (Promised by a man who predicted that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes.) His clairvoyance may yet be more accurate than we like to think.
All of this has sinister echoes of the rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. As Jane Caplan has shown, “the SA’s (the Stormtroopers’) dedication to violence and thirst for revenge against their political adversaries radicalised the state-sanctioned campaign of police terror that bludgeoned the organized left into submission in the spring and summer of 1933 and sent many into exile.”
As in Germany in the 1930s, it now seems clear that in America today, a significant number of the population have been led to believe Trump’s monstrous lies over factual reality. Hannah Arendt reported that in Nazi Germany, “it was made clear to the population at large that the power of the Nazis was greater than that of the authorities and that it was safer to be a member of a Nazi paramilitary organization than a loyal Republican.”
It’s chilling to see many of the MAGA faithful already arming themselves for a paramilitary reprise of January 6 should Biden be re-elected in November. I believe it was Mark Twain who said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
Perhaps a few of those who vocally opposed Trump in recent years are now watching with some trepidation, wondering whether he would ever act on these dark threats if returned to the White House. His already-mentioned targets have included democratically elected members of Congress, former Speakers of the House, former Joint Chiefs of Staff, former White House interns, as well as the countless impartial journalists, liberal news anchors, op-ed writers, and others who’ve stuck their heads above the parapet in defence of democracy.
It’s hard to know who represents the greater threat to humanity, democracy and world peace — Trump? Putin? Or the other Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Marc Andriessen (whose interlocking dark materials are analysed in Jonathan Taplin’s brilliant exposé — The End of Reality: How Four Billionaires Are Selling Out Our Future.
That quartet of techno-tyrants have done their fair share in nurturing and enabling Trump’s totalitarian instincts. Cooperation and consolidation — Gleichschaltung.
How history rhymes.