-->
Totalitarianism in the Age of Trump: lessons from Hannah Arendt
The political
theorist who wrote about the Nazis and “the banality of evil” in the 60 has
become a surprise bestseller. Should we heed her warning that protesting just
feed the chaos?
THE GUARDIAN
by ZOE WILLIAMS
Wednesday, 1 february 2017
In the scramble to make
sense of the post-inauguration world, Amazon has been forced to restock a few
key titles: Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four hit No 1 at the end of last week,
after Trump’s adviser Kellyanne Conway used the phrase “alternative facts” in place
of “some bullshit I just made up”. But the surprise hit – being long, complex
and demanding or, as the online magazine Jezebel described it,
“extremely metal” – is Hannah
Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, first
published in 1951. Commentators have been referencing the work since Donald Trump’s
election in November but rarely has this spurred so many people to
actually buy a copy.
In it, the political
theorist (she always explicitly rejected the term “philosopher”) details the
trajectory: “antisemitism (not merely hatred of Jews), imperialism (not merely
conquest), totalitarianism (not merely dictatorship)” are considered in their interrelation.
Against the necessary background of imperialism, “antisemitism became the
catalytic agent first for the rise of the Nazi movement … then for a world
war of unparalleled ferocity and, finally, for the emergence of the
unprecedented crime of genocide”. That much is well established; the chill is
in the detail.
When she describes the rise
of the dictator, which requires a mass not a mob, you could be reading a
sociologist’s thesis about Trump supporters. “The term masses applies only
where we deal with people who either because of sheer numbers, or indifference,
or a combination of both, cannot be integrated into any organisation based
on common interest, into political parties or municipal governments or
professional organisations or trade unions. Potentially, they exist in every
country and form the majority of those large numbers of neutral, politically
indifferent people who never join a party and hardly ever go to the polls.”
She describes, quite
brusquely, antisemitism at its incipience: “Whereas anti-Jewish sentiments were
widespread among the educated classes of Europe throughout the 19th century,
antisemitism as an ideology remained, with very few exceptions, the prerogative
of crackpots in general and the lunatic fringes in particular.” Yet however you
dismissed their mental capacity, this hardcore created the ideological
infrastructure on which a mass movement could be built. It is strikingly
reminiscent of John Naughton’s description on David Runciman’s interesting Talking Politics podcast about the
“alt-right”: “People who belonged loosely to this side of the political system
were essentially excluded from public discourse. But it just so happened, they
didn’t go quiet. They went to the net. So, for the best part of 20 years,
a network of rightwing echo chambers has been established, upon which was built
the infrastructure of Trump’s campaign.”
Two points come out of
that. First, that we can see from the comparison that the net isn’t responsible
for everything. Antisemites found ways to keep their ideas alive and generative
without any such advantage, and with all the same forces of conservatism and
common sense ranged against them. Second, as Runciman asks, what happened to
the leftwing networks? Why don’t we have effective echo chambers? It is a
question that all of us have been asking, one way or another; there is no
shortage of radicalism on the left.
Here, Arendt brings some
liberating insight, described in precis by Professor Griselda Pollock, an expert
in Arendt. “She talks of the creation of pan movements, these widespread ideas
that overarch national, political and ethnic elements – the two big pan
movements she talks about are bolshevism and nazism. There is a single
explanation for everything, and before the single explanation, everything else
falls away. She gives a portrait of how you produce these isolated people,
who then become susceptible to pan ideologies, which give them a place in
something. But the place they have is ultimately sacrificial; they don’t count
for anything; all that counts is the big idea.” The left, in other words, isn’t
necessarily unequal to the task of creating a pan-ideology; but anyone who
believed in pluralism or complexity would have no currency on this terrain. We
should be glad not to have been effective in this space, even if it feels like
a failure.
Arendt was born in Germany
in 1906 and was an academic until 1933, when she embarked on charity work,
securing passage to Palestine for Jewish children and teenagers. The decision
was not based on any sudden realisation of Hitler’s menace. “For goodness
sake,” she said, laughing, in a television interview in 1964, “we didn’t need
[him] to know that the Nazis were our enemies. We also knew that a large number
of Germans were behind him. That could not shock us in 1933.” Rather, she had
been alienated from the intellectual milieu by their “coordinated” exclusion of
their Jewish colleagues (Arendt came from a family of secular Jewish lefties).
“The personal problem did
not lie in what our enemies did but in what our friends did,” she said. “[They
were] not yet under the pressure of terror, [but] it was as if a vacuum formed
around one.” She conducted the refugee work from Paris. Stripped of her German
citizenship in 1937, she escaped to New York in 1941 with her husband and
mother, via the Gurs internment camp in the Vichy-held south of France.
She was never unclear about
the magnitude of the Holocaust, saying, in the same interview: “The decisive
day was when we heard about Auschwitz. Before that, we said: ‘Well, one has
enemies. That is natural. Why shouldn’t people have enemies?’ But this was
different. It was as if an abyss had opened. Amends can be made for almost
anything, at some point in politics, but not for this.”
However, she was a
controversial figure by the 1960s, following the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem, a
consideration of Adolf Eichmann’s trial and what it revealed about
the nature of the Final Solution and all those who were complicit in it. Opponents accused her of
making the Jews complicit in their fate. She rejected that outright – “Nowhere
in this book did I accuse the Jews of failing to resist” – but said, “that the
tone is predominantly ironic is completely true. [Reading Eichmann’s trial] I
laughed countless times, I laughed out loud. I’d probably still laugh
three minutes before my certain death.”
This is the book that
coined the phrase “banality of evil”, which has ramifications for both
totalitarianism as a project and the pathways of resistance. But it is also a
useful thumbnail of the primacy of language to her understanding of politics;
cliches in the service of control, their mundanity, their mendacity, cannot but
amuse her. There is also the matter of Martin Heidegger, the philosopher with
whom she had a turbulent relationship in the 20s, and some other contact – its
extent unclear – after the war, despite his links with the Nazi party,
even justifying them (it reads like the darkest imaginable romcom – “But I
love him! But he’s a Nazi. But I love him!”).
Pollock guards against
drawing too many of the obvious parallels between The Origins of Totalitarianism
and the US’s situation today: “Islamophobia is not elaborated with the same
complexity of tropes and myths as antisemitism and one shouldn’t equate them.”
The work of Arendt’s that she refers to most often is the one that came
directly after Origins, 1958’s The Human Condition. In the
Holocaust, “we have seen the abolition of the human,” Pollock explains, “and
then she has to write what would actually be an account of the human as a political
creature”. Arendt has two core beliefs about the human condition (not to be
confused with human nature). First, Pollock explains: “Every human life is
the potential beginning of something new. Unlike animals, which are predictable
– each will behave as its parents behaved – something has begun in a human that
could be completely different. This is ‘natality’. As a result of that, the
human condition is plural.” The consequences of this are vast: as we
communicate and use language, we show ourselves to one another in our
difference, and it’s in this disclosure that action is generated: we can do
something to change the world.
Then comes a really
important dichotomy, taking its roots from Greek philosophy: the difference
between this action and labour, which is what we do to survive. Work is the
economic, “which comes from the Greek word oikos, which is
the household. But they imagined this other source, the political, the source
of speech and action.” This is what constituted, for the Greeks, the human, and
through Arendt’s prism, natality and plurality are the spurs of that political
self; that is, the political recognises the infinite potential of each human
life, while the economic recognises only that element of the human that works,
that produces. As Pollock says: “What she was afraid of was the tendency to
devalue action, for the economic to overtake the political.”
Taken to its logical end,
the economic overtaking the political results not in the extermination camp but
in the concentration camp; the difference is crucial, Pollock explains. The
concentration camp exists not to extinguish life but to extinguish the human.
“You are removed from moral action, you become a number and, finally, you are
reduced physiologically to a bundle of reactions, as the body struggles to
survive extreme emaciation.” If politics is only a set of economic decisions,
then the person is no more than the work they do and the infinite preciousness
of every person’s potential cascades into a brutal homogeneity, one person indivisible
from the next.
To put this in a modern
context, “official political reality is now being enacted by the modern
capitalist businessman”. Politics and economics are, in Trump, indivisible.
“And although it looks wonderful that people are demonstrating, it’s actually
rather frightening, because it’s generating a crisis situation in which,
ultimately, the protection of law and order justifies the government in extreme
measures. For some of us, it’s repeating the proto-fascist scenario.” It’s an
old Leninist stunt, the generation of civil unrest in order to attack civic
society. In that sense, we are all playing into Trump’s tiny hands.
Mark Davis, director of the Bauman Institute in Leeds,
points us towards another text, On Violence (1970). “I think that gets
us closer to what’s going on at the moment,” he says. “She said in that book
that violence and power are actually opposites. When institutions, particularly
those of government, start to break down and lose their legitimacy, they lose
their power over the everyday conduct of citizens. So what they do as a
response to the loss of power is incite violence. Violence floods in to the
loss of power rather than being an expression of it.”
Pollock brings us back to
demonstrations and what they do to language, the slogan being a flattening out
of complexity, an echo of exactly the same one-idea pan-ideology of the
oversimplified worldview they protest against. I’m not sure. You can pack quite
a lot into a slogan – I particularly like: “First they came for the Muslims, and we said, not
today, motherfucker.” Yet I see the
sense of these arguments, and wonder, what would Hannah Arendt do? Would she
have marched on Downing Street? Davis is conflicted. “Certainly, I think there
is a lot to be gained from people gathering together to show solidarity. But in
a world where the institutions that we’re protesting in front of are losing
their legitimacy and their power, I’m not sure that this has the impact that it
once did. If we think of evil as this one person, this one big event, then we
tend to want to match that with one big display of resistance. But actually, if
evil is banal – a set of ordinary, mundane decisions day by day – then maybe we
have to start living differently day by day.”
I still see the point in
protesting as a concrete expression of solidarity. I’d take more, if under
attack, from a person who went outside than a person who signed a
petition. Tangentially, I have a sudden new faith in the feminist framing
of recent demonstrations as women’s marches, which does something to allay the
intimation of public violence that is always used as the justification of
suppression. It seems clear, nonetheless, that it isn’t enough: that perhaps
Arendt’s most profound legacy is in establishing that one has to consider
oneself political as part of the human condition. What are your political acts,
and what politics do they serve?
Fuente: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/01/totalitarianism-in-age-donald-trump-lessons-from-hannah-arendt-protests
