Authoritarianism

It can't happen here. Right?

In 2016 I was sitting in my office at Saint Louis University when a young, shy, student came to visit me. He cut right to the chase. "I've been reading a book about 1930's Germany, and I see concerning parallels with discourse coming out of the Republican Party and what I am reading." Being a good professor, I didn't take his concerns seriously. I assured him that he was overreacting, that we were in no way 1930s Germany, and I sent him on his way. Nine years later I am still thinking about how thoughtful that student was, what an excellent student of "comparative" politics (my supposed specialty) he had become, and how inadequate my own response was to him.

Several years later, during the first Trump Administration, I was tasked with teaching my senior seminar on Authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is the concept that I work with in my scholarship. All of my research connects to it at some level, so I was an ideal person to teach the course. I usually teach the course in a scholarly way (syllabus), asking students to read the social science literature on concepts, and then to apply it to the intellectual genealogy of the concept of authoritarianism. It's a challenging course and students tend to hate it, but learn a lot from it. As our own country seemed to flirt with authoritarianism, that scholarly approach didn't feel right to me, so I changed my course.

Instead, I assigned It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis alongside academic literature. The book was originally published in October 1935. It's a fictional account of the 1936 US Presidential election in which FDR loses in the primary to a fascist candidate named "Buzz" Windrip who goes on to win the election. Windrip promises economic prosperity, but instead plunges the country deeper into the Great Depression. He prohibits dissent, sets up "camps" for those who oppose him, and trains paramilitary groups to police (ie: terrorize) citizens. He sidelines Congress and responds harshly to protests.

The story follows the life of a local newspaper editor named Doremus Jessup, who attempts to resist the regime, and the consequences that he and the country endure as the country moves deeper into an authoritarian regime. Lewis wrote the novel because during the Great Depression many Americans were not following events going on in Europe, and were relatively unaware of the rise of fascism there. Lewis wanted to make American readers aware of how easily the same could happen in our country.

Sadly, most of my students didn't understand the novel. It is not the best written work of American literature, and it is long and meandering. Many of the final papers that I received in that class seemed to think that the title of the work was literal - it really can't happen here! They told me that our institutions are too strong to allow the rise of a dictator, even as we saw concerning events unfolding during that semester.

A few months after the class concluded I received a note from one of the sharper students in the room, "Dear Dr. Wainscott, please end this terrible simulation. We get it now." The student meant that the country was moving more and more in a concerning direction, and he joked that I had arranged it to teach my students.

In the most recent episode of the Ezra Klein show (transcript here), Klein makes a few interesting comments about authoritarianism. He was discussing the events of the past week, the imposition of tariffs and their abrupt 90-day delay. Then he expressed concern about what we learned about the President in this sequence of events. He commented,

"Only there’s no deal. And there was definitely no art. We learned the outer edge of Trump’s pain tolerance, and so did the rest of the world. So there goes some of his leverage. We saw a slapdash policy fall apart within a week or so. But still Trump’s allies are declaring his genius — not because they expect us to believe it, but because they know he needs to hear it — and he needs to see them saying it in public, aloud. It is part of the structure of humiliation that dictators demand of their servants. Authoritarianism is not just a mode of governance — it’s a habit of communication. The king is always right, even when he is contradicting what he said a day before. Future influence in the court relies on being in his good graces, and praise is the currency of that grace. Dictatorships are disastrous in part because they restrict the flow of information around the decision maker."

Watch this week how vociferously members of the Trump administration defend his disastrous economic policy. Watch how instead of citing actual evidence of the claims they are making, the compliment the President. It's just one of the signs that it can happen here. It has happened here.