Vainglory in a Red Hat

By Curtis Craddock

The MAGA movement is many things, all of them awful, but the one thing that it is not is totalitarian.

The weirdest thing about the MAGA movement, when compared with other populist authoritarian movements, is the utter lack of any sort of affirmative goal. 

In the current degenerate age, the words, Nazi, fascist, and communist have been reduced to expletives without any definition more nuanced than, “someone I hate.” This transformation has rendered those words all but unusable in discussions of the philosophies they embody.

Nazism, fascism, and communism are all different organizing philosophies. They have many different traits, but two traits that they have in common is that they are authoritarian  and totalitarian.

An authoritarian philosophy is one that emphasizes hierarchy and a top down power structure. In its perfect state an authoritarian society has a single indisputable leader who is invested with absolute political power. Typically the autocrat lends some of this power and authority to his subordinates, who then lend some of this borrowed power down to their subordinates, but crucially this power is never given, only loaned, and it can be removed at any time and for any reason or known.

Advocates of authoritarianism claim (in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary) that this hierarchical structure is superior to other messier forms of government because it is, in theory, frictionless. The leader gives an order and the order is carried down through the ranks and carried out by subjugated workers without any of the usual wrangling that democratic governments require. It touts simplicity as a panacea for corruption, despises nuance, and portrays the world as a strict binary between good and evil.

In practice autocracy is just about the least efficient and effective form of government there is. Chief amongst many reasons is that the primary goal, and eventually the only goal, of an autocrat is to maintain their power. The whole dynamic of authoritarian consolidation and collapse leads to the rejection of objective reality in favor of a fabricated narrative, contempt for intellectual or scientific pursuits of any kind, and the replacement of every competent professional in government with a drooling sycophant  who owes their position to the autocrat and could not survive in it without that patronage.

But authoritarianism alone is not totalitarianism.

Totalitarianism, as expressed in Europe during the interregnum between The War to End All Wars and its sequel, was a response to and adaptation of the practice of mass economic, military, and social organization that evolved during the Great War.

The men who went on to found  Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Soviet Russia, had all lived through The Great War and had seen how total war absorbed the whole of their national economies and culture and aligned them for the singular purpose of winning the war. These men, each in their own way, concluded that the perfected state of a national government was one in which the whole nation was organized around a singular purpose, and the individual was completely subsumed into the body of the nation, their individuality wiped away in favor of a national identity. The very term totalitarian encapsulates the idea of total state control of all aspects of life.

Donald Trump is very much an autocrat. His only real political concern is to stay in power. Eight months into his interminable second term, and he is riffling through the authoritarian playbook looking for the pages with his picture on them. 

But Donald Trump is not a totalitarian, he’s arguably something much worse.

Totalitarianism requires a philosophy, an identity to impose upon the people. It seeks to organize the populace for a common purpose. It must assert and affirm a vision of the future. 

Donald Trump never once asserts a coherent or consistent vision of the future. He never once espouses an affirmative philosophy or set of beliefs. He uses words that people associate with patriotism and grievance, but leaves them empty so that his audience may fill in the void with their own desires.

Trump’s promises are all in the negative form. He will get rid of crime, he will end  inflation, he will remove all the immigrants, he will get rid of all the liberals, and then America will be great again.

He does make many ad hoc affirmative claims, such as that tariffs will be paid for by foreign countries, that manufacturing will return to the U.S.,   etc. but these are largely disconnected from each other even when they are not mutually contradictory.  But even if they all came true they would not add up to a totalitarian vision of a united people with a united purpose.

So what is Trump’s vision?

Observation suggests that Trump is utterly consumed by  narcissism. So fragile and raw is his ego that he must believe with absolute certainty that he is universally loved, respected, worshipped and feared. He can tolerate not the slightest impingement upon this belief. He spouts nonsense and expects praise in return, the more grandiose the better. When no praise is forthcoming, he invents worshippers  out of whole cloth and expects everyone else to believe they are real. Just exactly how many big strong men have approached Trump with tears in their eyes over the years? Exactly how many times has he recalled been praised by non-existent world leaders.  His dream, his sole unobtainable fantasy is to be acknowledged by all as a supreme and perfect being. 

Trump’s ideology, if it can even be called that, would be something like Vaingloryism, the belief that the only purpose of society is to worship the leader.  As such, he doesn’t seek to organize society so much as to destroy it, to reduce the whole population not to workers but to worshipers without any purpose beyond heaping praise on Trump.