A common thread ties the rise of American authoritarianism with the Nazis marching on Melbourne streets, writes Dr Alex Vickery-Howe.
I ONCE PENNED an article entitled President Donald J. Trump is a convicted felon. That was true when I wrote it and it’s still true. It will always be true.
As we watch the ruthless crackdown on immigration in the U.S., where Marines have now been deployed to quell a non-existent uprising, one wonders how innocent migrants feel when they are handcuffed, humiliated, detained and deported by a man who has actually broken the law. It’s a hideous irony.
One wonders, as well, at how all the self-described “patriots” who claim to “oppose tyranny” react when they see rights abandoned, courts ignored and a small fortune spent on an autocrat’s birthday parade. For the span of my entire life, conservatives have been telling me they “need their guns” in case a “dictator threatens America”. Well, the dictator is here now, guys — this is your moment. It’s weird that you’re cheering him on.
In his review of Mein Kampf, George Orwell captured the victim politics of fascism and how history manages to repeat itself:
It is a pathetic, dog-like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs. In a rather more manly way, it reproduces the expression of innumerable pictures of Christ crucified, and there is little doubt that that is how Hitler sees himself. The initial, personal cause of his grievance against the universe can only be guessed at; but at any rate the grievance is here. He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse, he would know how to make it seem like a dragon.
This image of Adolf Hitler’s portrait goes against the American conservative image of what a tyrant looks like and how they behave. Hitler’s great trick was to play-act in this way. He was the one who was “suffering”, who was “wounded”, who was standing up for his country and his people in the face of “oppression” and enemies both from without and within.
Similarly, the image of Donald Trump – harried, wounded, engulfed by suited agents, pumping his fist in the air and urging his followers to “fight!” – was the point at which he won the presidential campaign.
Trump became the martyr, the victim — and the victor. It didn’t matter that he’d been the aggressor up to that very second. It didn’t matter that he’d been shot by a mentally ill young man who had no coherent ideological agenda but did have, thanks to years of Republican policy, easy access to a firearm. It didn’t even matter whether it was Biden or Harris who opposed Trump moving forward.
Personally, I will always argue that Biden was mistreated and devalued by his own party, and that “Hollywood elites” intervening in op-eds played right into Trump and JD Vance’s anti-elitist rhetoric — but history doesn’t care.
History works from big pictures. Not detail. Not nuance. That photograph of Trump clutching his bleeding ear changed everything.
It was over when that shot rang out. Violence doesn’t vanquish political adversaries; it lionises them.
Trump’s power grab over the months since has been built on the “glory” of that moment. Hats off to him for being cunning enough to exploit the publicity opportunity, telling the secret service team to “wait, wait” so that he could mug for the camera. It was the split decision that solidified his hold over the American people and marketed his grift at the expense of democratic norms and values.
Even Cenk Uygur, of The Young Turks fame, expressed some begrudging admiration for how Trump handled the attack. Many once staunch critics had to concede that Trump had weathered an attempt on his life and done so defiantly. It became difficult to position oneself knowing that a man’s life had been threatened, which is never acceptable, while also knowing that the consequence of that day would be the legitimising of a true dictator-in-waiting.
In a superlative piece of writing that we should all retweet obsessively, Umair Haque detailed how this style of politics plays out:
‘I’m not a fascist! They’re the real fascists!! The students, the leftists, the woke mob, the anti-fascists, the teachers, the LGBTQ! They’re putting me in danger! They’re taking away my rights! My rights matter most of all! I’m being persecuted, violently and viciously!! I have a right to be heard — and what I have to say is that I’m superior, and they’re inferior! And if you don’t allow me this view—then you’re the real fascist!!’
Haque is being bone dry, of course, but his ironic take on authoritarian mentality is textbook Trumpkin. I often return to this article because I think, in years to come, Haque’s style of writing will prove prophetic.
It is also why America was so unprepared. The imagined authoritarian – the phantom menace that kept the NRA in business – was someone cast in permanent shadow, someone who favoured “big government”. Someone opaque and interventionist. The idea that he would be the guy who spruiks tacky hotels, who tells broad jokes, who eats cheeseburgers and sleeps with Stormy, didn’t occur to the conservative American psyche. Trump is as American as apple pie. Trump is old school. He’s “a man’s man”: that’s why the Village People play when he spasms on stage.
To right-wing America, Trump is the local hero and it’s Hollywood, the elites, the Dems, the “libtards”, the “queers”, the “illegals” and all the scary “educated” people, who are threatening the USA. Arming those neoconservative citizens against an imaginary takeover was pointless because the real takeover will always be invisible to them.
We shouldn’t consider the Left blameless. Democrats had four years to challenge Trump’s narrative. He played class politics and he exposed their blind spots. Now Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are leading the counter-narrative. Hopefully, there is still an opportunity for strong, sane voices to prevail.
Meanwhile, the people who warned that these dark days were coming and tried to bring fascism into public discourse were dismissed as “alarmists” because comparing Trump to Hitler, despite the many glaring parallels, was seen as too... mean?
Perhaps we’re “nasty people”, as Trump himself would say, as he signs orders to separate families and muses about arresting California Governor Gavin Newsom for holding the “wrong philosophy”.
Perhaps we’ll be painted as (irony of ironies) “anti-American” for believing in democracy and the rule of law.
Perhaps we’ll have our phones searched and our passports held if we step on U.S. soil. This is what happened to Australian writer Alistair Kitchen, who was held for 12 hours for having the “wrong” views on Gaza. The thought police are out in force.
But this is how fascism works. How it has always worked. Cast yourself as a victim and rise against the odds to become a “hero”. Cast those who oppose you as the “enemy”, the “thugs”, the “radicals”...
In Australia this past week, we have seen the same technique play out. Thomas Sewell, the local Nazi and former leader of the homoerotically named Lads Society, tried to frame himself as “victim” when he claimed his right to protest was being denied by Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan — patently ridiculous when Sewell had been holding court in Melbourne’s CBD just the day before.
There are a lot of ironies built into Sewell’s angry and nonsensical worldview: an “anti-immigration” poster boy who immigrated to Australia from New Zealand (“Go back to where you came from, ya Kiwi!”); an “anti-immigration” poster boy who attacks the people who’ve actually been here the longest; an “anti-immigration” poster boy who... looks pretty bad on a poster. Did anyone else think of all the “Bert is Evil” memes? There’s a resemblance.
Even so, we cannot ignore the grim fact that there is a class element to these recent “Australia first” protests. This explosion of misplaced anger has been underpinned by the strident anti-immigration rhetoric of former Leader of the Opposition Peter Dutton and his absurd claim that it was recent settlers – and not wealth inequality between generations compounded by successive governments shying away from changes to negative gearing and other tax reforms – that led to the present housing crisis.
It’s hard to build a rallying cry around economic theory, but very easy to stir up hatred with easy (fake) solutions. To combat this trend, it would be wise to look to Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez in the United States. There is no viable “New Left” in politics without empathy across the class divide. Studies suggest the wealth gap is widening. It is precisely these economic and social conditions that give rise to the Alternative Right.
Or to put it all another way...
Closing the wealth gap kills the “victim” narrative.
In the meantime, we can expect Trump and Sewell to keep playing classic hits from an old German staple. It’s a broken record of self-pity.
But Trump will always be a convicted felon and that’s the most Sewell will ever manage to aspire to.
Dr Alex Vickery-Howe is an award-winning playwright and social commentator. He teaches creative writing, screen and drama at Flinders University.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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