Protesting the False Prophet
Trump's Fascist Narrative Must Be Defeated
I posted a quotation yesterday from Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism:
Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.1
The quotation sums up the importance of what we have been seeing on American streets over the last two weeks in response to widespread immigration raids and the empty moralizing of the elite.
Today has been dubbed “No Kings Day,” and despite rain across the Northeast, it appears that hundreds of thousands — likely millions — have taken to the streets It is our show of force in the face of Donald Trump and his fascist efforts.
I write this as I recover from minor surgery, watching the original Star Wars trilogy on TV and reading Timothy Snyder on Russian tyranny and its relation to Donald Trump and others. Snyder’s The Road to Unfreedom2 relies on two related political formulations: a politics of inevitability and a politics of eternity. He defines the politics of inevitability as “the idea that there are no ideas.” Politics is stripped of any democratic pretense, power is the only governing principle, and the masses are led by distraction and mythology.
In the capitalist version — the American version — “the market” is the grand myth, the notion that it can and should operate without control or constraint. It is good and fair and impartial. The lie at the center of this formulation should be obvious, but we have been been fed it for decades by both parties.
The upshot of this “inevitability” is the damaging and deeply ingrained inequality — economic, racial, sexual — that burdens American politics and robs us of political and class mobility. “As social mobility halts, inevitability gives way to eternity,” Snyder writes, “and democracy gives way to oligarchy.”
This creates space for new stories and mythologies, explanations for the lost of status that rely on blame and demonization. “The oligarch,” Snyder says, “governs by invoking myth and manufacturing crisis,” promising to end the crisis and return society to its former glory. In Russia, Snyder writes, “sexual deviants” and the West represented a modernizing force that undermined Russia’s historical piety. In Trump’s America, it is brown immigrants, trans women, and more broadly any group that the white MAGA supporter sees as usurping their place in the American hierarchy.
That is the meaning of “Make American Great Again.” The key word in the slogan is “again,” even though it looks back to an American that has never actually existed. The story we have been asked to swallow has two parts — that the nation was great in a mythic past during which white men reigned, and that Trump is the redeemer, the fixer. That he is, in his own words, their voice and their vengeance.
Much damage was done during the first Trump term — to the courts, to the concept of truth — but those initial four years really laid the ground for the last five months, what M. Gessen described in a podcast as “just an incredible amount of destruction in a very short amount of time.” Gessen argues that “democratic institutions are not designed to respond to things quickly,” which has allowed Trump to elude the systems we usually rely on to protect us.
Just as important, Gessen says, is “the psychological point of view,” his making “a whole bunch of things thinkable in a very short amount of time.”
Summary deportations existed before, but these particular deportations that are just spectacularly, intentionally brutal with people being stuffed into unmarked vans. The attack on the judiciary, the attack on universities, the attacks on the media, all the stuff that's stuffed into his big beautiful bill, the decimation of the federal government.
I know this sounds overly pessimistic. But, to return to Snyder’s language, it does not have to be inevitable or eternal. We have the ability — and must use it — to reassert our individual voices and collective humanity.
That’s where today/s protests come in. They are a reminder that we do not have to accept the Trump narrative, that we can defend ourselves and build a better future for everyone.
Wilde, Oscar. “The Soul of Man Under Socislism,” The Essays and Non-Fiction of Oscar Wilde, Golgotha Press, 2011. E=book.
This is a loose description of Snyder’s ideas from his first chapter, mixed with my own. His focus is on Vladimir Putin’s trajectory and the philosophical underpinnings of Russia’s autocracy, with a nod to what is happening in the United States. Snyder, Timothy. The Road to Unfreedom, Crown, 2023.