Powers Stronger Than Reason and Virtue

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We are in the midst of a revolution. To be sure, there has been only sporadic violence and chaos in the streets. But there is more sustained violence and chaos in the minds and souls of many Americans, which is where the revolution is taking place. A gradual change, imperceptible at first although still unmistakable, has distorted our perspective and darkened our view of the world.

There are powers stronger than reason and virtue. —Thomas Mann, Mario and the Magician (1929)

I.

Untruth abounds. Lies are relentless and blatant. They fill the world to overflowing. Perhaps it has ever been thus. All the more reason to hold up a mirror to society to reflect its visage back onto itself, to expose it for what it is and to show what it is not. Politics is bringing out our worst and encouraging us to think the worst of each other. Some who incite evil are malevolent. Others know not what they do, unable to recognize the evil in their words and deeds. They believe instead that they act, often in the name of God, to preserve all that is noble and sacred. Most persons in the United States and around the world are, or wish to be, descent. At least I choose to trust that it is so. They value truth. They admire honesty and integrity. They want to treat others with a modicum of respect and to have an opportunity themselves to live dignified lives. Most of us are better than we seem.

Yet, in the collective, the more objectionable and destructive aspects of human nature tend to emerge, such as disdain for, and hatred of, those not like ourselves. Among the lies that we repeat and accept is the conviction that our worth derives from membership in a particular group, whether ethnic or national. Others who are not members of our group are by nature inferior. Nothing could be further from the truth. No people or nation possess special virtues that bestow upon them extraordinary privileges. All assertions of national glory are vapid and sterile, if not absurd. Everyone, of course, should be proud of their identity, their origins, and their nation. But they should take care that such devotion does not awaken in them a sense of arrogance rather than humility or feelings of entitlement instead of responsibility.

Good manners may still on occasion restrain these dangerous impulses to intolerance and hatred. But circumstances may soon require more of us than civility and self-control. Before the Nazis arrested, imprisoned, and executed him, the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote often of the duties that Christians must perform if they wished to live out their faith, to honor God by their actions, and to extract goodness from evil:

Christ…. bore the sufferings of humanity in his own body as if they were his own… accepting them of his own free will. We are certainly not Christ; we are not called on to redeem the world by our own deeds and suffering, and we need not try to assume such an impossible burden…. But if we want to be Christian, we must have some share in Christ’s large-heartedness by acting with responsibility and in freedom when the hour of danger comes, and by showing a real sympathy that springs, not from fear, but from the liberating and redeeming love of Christ for all who suffer.[i]

As “the hour of danger” approaches, Bonhoeffer’s admonition requires that men and women today, especially those who call themselves Christian, have the courage to speak truth to power. In his opposition to Hitler and the Nazi regime, Bonhoeffer set the example for us follow. He remained true to his principles, and convictions, which ultimately became more important than life itself.

A fear that paralyzes, a cynicism that makes society and government seem impervious to meaningful change, subvert Bonhoeffer’s world view by weakening the sense of hope that he tried to instill and by preparing a breeding ground for dishonesty, corruption, pestilence, and hate. Dictators traffic in cynicism and fear; they are the coin of the autocratic realm. Like Lenin and Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler, Mao Zedong and Pol Pot, dictators, or aspiring dictators, share with unreserved certainty the belief that their continuation in power is more important than the welfare of their people or the countries over which they rule. Unlike their predecessors, contemporary autocrats offer no vision of a glittering future utopia, no dictatorship of the proletariat, no Great Leap Forward, but alternately they suggest that the future is bleak. There is no better world to make or even to imagine. They are thus willing to preside over failing states if it means that they can continue to rule. Power is their objective and holding power is all that matters. They are willing to accept economic hardship and diplomatic isolation to do so. Such obvious signs of weakness, of course, may engender a more belligerent foreign policy that encourages desperate action, such as Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, which is tantamount to a Russian Lebensraum but one, ironically, not intended as much to add territory as to add people to offset the declining Russian population.

During an era in which democratic elections, at least in the United States, have devolved into popularity contests that often pander to our hatreds and fears, autocrats care nothing about their public image. Bad publicity does not concern them, for they are indifferent to how they are perceived at home and abroad. Immune to criticism and condemnation, they ignore international opinion because they can. In their own regimes, they revel in cruelty, violence, imprisonment, torture, rape, and murder to punish those who dare oppose them, and to warn others about the consequences of so doing. They abandon due process and defy the rule of law because they think themselves unassailable. They discredited the independent media and undermine the judicial system. They brook no challenge or dissent. They eliminate free speech, for they expect to remain in power for the rest of their lives and thus never to be called to account.

Whether tacitly or explicitly, autocrats follow the advice of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda and Popular Enlightenment, to lie boldly. Should critics expose their lies, instead of denying, retracting, or modifying their statements, they repeat them and even enlarge upon them. The lies become ever more audacious. This approach to politics is not as much the work of cynics as it is of nihilists. It exceeds the level of duplicity long associated with political life and seeks to erase all distinction between fact and fiction, truth and falsehood, good and evil. Attacking the foundations of knowledge and the substance of reality, modern despots attempt to manage ideas, to limit access to information, and to impose a reality of their own devising, which they may alter as circumstance demands. The point is to deny that anyone knows, or can know, the truth about what actually happened. No information is reliable. Since the world is composed of conspiracies and lies, men and women can believe nothing that they see or hear. Prudence requires skepticism, the mistrust of everything and everyone. Neither moral precepts nor political institutions are trustworthy; neither the rule of law nor the outcome of elections are legitimate.

Autocrats routinely fabricate narratives intended to establish and maintain relations of authority and subordination. Using audio and video surveillance, voice and face recognition technology, and DNA collection, they monitor, intimidate, discredit, and silence the opposition. To circulate misinformation, foment conspiracy theories, manipulate elections at home, and interfere with elections in other countries, they rely on radio and television networks, such as China Radio International, China Global Television, Star Times, Telesun (Venezuela), Press TV and Hispan TV (Iran), social media platforms, such as TikTok, Meta, X, and Russia Today, and increasingly on artificial intelligence. Police raids and mass arrests, prison sentences for such dissidents as the late Alexei Navalny and detention in concentration camps for such minorities as the Uyghurs, represent cruder methods of thwarting democracy, eliminating freedom, and imposing totalitarian rule.

Writing in The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum makes a salient observation. However extensive, surveillance and oppression are often insufficient to quell dissent and unrest, and may actually promote them. The resort to coercion and violence, and even efforts to assert untruth, Appelbaum writes, can induce “someone to start thinking about another system, a better way to run society.” [ii] For all their manipulative and tyrannical bravado, authoritarian regimes failed to stop protests in Russia in 2011, in Venezuela in 2014, in Hong Kong in 2019, in Beijing, Shanghai, and Xinjiang in 2022, and in Russia again in response to the invasion of Ukraine. For authoritarian regimes to survive, their leaders must do more than cajole, deceive, threaten, and subjugate. They must not rest content with eradicating dissent but must also eliminate the desire to speak out and rise up.

To accomplish this objective, propaganda campaigns insist that democracy and freedom will make daily life frightening and ultimately unlivable. More than restricting access to information, censoring unwelcome ideas, and punishing defiant behavior, autocrats emphasize order, discipline, and obedience. They encourage their people to fight a protracted war against foreign interference and to assail the ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities in their midst as the embodiment of Western depravity and confusion. The “satanic West,” as Putin has characterized it, is a dying civilization; its “perversions” have brought about its “degradation” and will inevitably result in its “extinction.”[iii] Autocratic propaganda serves to discredit any and every alternative to the regime, suffocating all hope of freedom, and at last bringing the idea of freedom itself into disrepute.

In their efforts to associate freedom with political instability and social chaos, autocrats such as Putin, Xi, Orban, Lukashenko, Maduro, Erdoğan, Assad, and a host of others have acted in concert. These alliances differ from the political and military coalitions of the past. They are transactional rather than ideological or philosophical, enabling autocratic rulers more easily to navigate geographical, historical, national, and political differences. “Autocracy Inc.,” as Applebaum explains, “grants its members not only money and security, but also something less tangible yet just as important: impunity.” [iv] To defend freedom and oppose autocracy, Americans and Europeans must decided that preserving the humanitarian traditions of Western civilization is more important than doing business as usual and making money. In a fierce indictment of the United States and the nations of Western Europe, Applebaum declares that:

For 30 years, Western oil and gas companies piled into Russia, partnering with Russian oligarchs who had openly stolen the assets they controlled. Western financial institutions did lucrative business in Russia too, setting up systems to allow those same Russian kleptocrats to export their stolen money and keep it parked, anonymously, in Western property and banks. We convinced ourselves that there was no harm in enriching dictators and their cronies. Trade, we imagined, would transform our trading partners. Wealth would bring liberalism. Capitalism would bring democracy–and democracy would being peace.[v]

As Applebaum’s rebuke of the West implies, at the very least the rules of the game have changed since 1945.

The procedures that effected the transformation of Germany and Japan after the Second World War have become obsolete and irrelevant in the twenty-first century. It is, in fact, the avowed intent of autocrats such as Putin to subvert and replace the liberal world order that had emerged following the defeat of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan. To combat such a determined and multifarious enemy, the democratic nations of the world must cooperate with one another, just as they did during the 1940s. If they cannot or will not do so, then they should prepare to accommodate Mr. Putin, Mr. Xi, and their many friends. For like nature, international politics abhors a vacuum.

II.

Notwithstanding his avowed intention to rule as a dictator, Donald Trump has distinguished himself from his autocratic counterparts in at least one important respect. His promise to “Make America Great Again” implies, in theory, the return to a better world. Americans will move forward by going backward. Beneath Trump’s frequent denunciations of contemporary American society lingers a promise of restoration. In addition, Trump frequently invokes nationalist rhetoric and, when it suits his purpose, attempts to inculcate nationalist pride. Americans, he says, will be better off if he is re-elected and America again enjoys its rightful place in the sun.

At the same time, like the autocrats whom he so often praises and seeks to emulate, and with the unreserved endorsement of his acolytes in Congress, Trump is calling for vengeance against his critics and opponents in government and the media. Retribution has long been the principal message of his campaign. As tempting as it may be to dismiss such threats, attributing the expression of grievance and the clamor for revenge to the adolescent vindictiveness that defines Trump’s character, his summons reveals a deeper, and largely unrecognized, philosophical crisis. Pundits, of course, have repeatedly noted that Trump’s  assault on established standards, mores, and values is disorienting. He has turned American society and politics inside out and upside down. As a result, nothing is secure, balanced, or enduring.  Everything is unsettled, and life has taken on a vertiginous dissonance. From such volatility Trump derives untold political benefits, and perhaps a measure of personal gratification.

On a deeper level, the French thinker Émile Durkheim identified this condition of perpetual instability and incoherence as “anomie.” In traditional societies, Durkheim argued, divine ordinance imposed social order. God determined status in society and assigned purpose to life. Enthralled by the prospects of individualism, modern men and women rejected such limitations on their freedom. The quest for opportunity, the desire for success, and the expectation of progress, Durkheim feared, would result in anarchy. A society thus constituted would disintegrate into a jumbled mass of isolated, selfish individuals competitive with, and antagonistic to, one another. The disappearance of collective values and common beliefs foretold the approaching disaster. People would become perplexed and life would lose all meaning. Boredom, anxiety, and malaise were the symptoms of the illness that afflicted the modern world. Alienated, unhappy, restless, and desperate, these lost souls were prepared to yield to the seductions of dictatorship.

Trump has the instincts of a tyrant. He does not appeal to reason but senses how to exploit the fears, desires, ambitions, hatreds, and vulnerabilities of others to his advantage. His glorification of violence exalts the will to power. Truth has no objective meaning and law no independent value. They are mere instruments for him to wield against those who stand in his way and dare to restrain his whims. No one, he says, really believes in or acts on any consideration except self-interest. There is no moral order, according to Trump; there are only ambition and appetite. In the ensuring battle for supremacy, there are only winners and losers.

Yet, for all the incomprehensible, often disturbing, bluster and the persistent lies, to say nothing of the felony convictions and the remaining indictments, Trump has fashioned a movement that may return him to the presidency in November. Uninterested in policy initiatives, a coherent political agenda, or even ideological consistency, Trump’s party is an agglomeration of persons who have submerged their individuality into the collective. The Trump movement, in other words, is an archetypical cult of personality—a cult that includes many Republican governors and members of Congress. The increasingly fanatical adherents of the cult have abandoned rational thought, critical discourse, and logical argument, at least in the devotion they show to their lord and savior, whom many are fond of comparing to Jesus Christ. Embracing a collective mindset that gives uniformity to their sentiments and beliefs, they operate wholly at Trump’s direction. They epitomize what the nineteenth-century French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon described as “a servile flock that is incapable of ever doing without a master.” [vi]

Portraying himself as a man of action has only enhanced Trump’s appeal. His followers respond with enthusiasm to his charisma, his intensity, and his frequent calls to arms. But the truth is his flamboyant emotional volatility, which so animates the crowds at his rallies, borders on madness. Trump’s sickness is our sickness. In his deranged and angry tirades, he lashes out at everyone whom he thinks has challenged, failed, or wronged him. Trump is not a conservative. He intends neither to preserve nor to restore anything, and he has already begun to take a wrecking ball to what remains of the Western intellectual, religious, political, and moral traditions. He is neither a statesman nor a gentleman, and no one would ever mistake him for a thinker. Yet, however ironic the exercise, situating Trump in the intellectual history of Western civilization may clarify important assumptions and sensibilities that would otherwise remain inchoate and vague.

Although an eccentric, to state the matter as politely as I can, Trump is not a unique figure in history nor is there anything especially novel about the sort of iconoclasm he represents. Without a hint of understanding, Trump exemplifies a recurrent idea (perhaps desire or longing are better words) that is entrenched in Western culture: primitivism. If only life could be made simple again, unencumbered by the complex regulations and laws that advanced societies require, Trump imagines that he would be free to do whatever he wanted. Paradoxically, Trump is the antithesis of the Noble Savage, living by a simple moral code that breeds a wholesome serenity. He is, rather, the embodiment of the corruption and decadence for which primitivism was the supposed antidote: the man who must engage in deception and intrigue to prosper.

Trump is also likely unaware that he rejects the legacy of the Enlightenment, notably the emphasis on reason. Holding Enlightenment traditions in contempt, he is fascinated by power and entranced by violence. He extols force as a legitimate political weapon, and considers the right of the strong to dominate the weak to be a law of nature. Advocating a vulgar nationalism, Trump entertains martial fantasies designed to assert an irrational virility that transcends all considerations of good and evil. Trump’s vision has produced incoherence and threatens chaos. The center will not hold. Things will fall apart.  Friedrich Nietzsche, who himself celebrated irrationalism, recognized the consequences of promoting such an amoral world view. “Disintegration characterizes this time,” Nietzsche wrote, “and thus uncertainty stands firmly on its feet or on a hard faith in itself…. Everything on our way is slippery and dangerous, and the ice that still supports us has become thin; all of us feel the warm, uncanny breath of the thawing wind; where we still walk, soon no one will be able to walk.”[vii] Trump’s radical assault on moral and intellectual traditions, political and legal institutions, social mores, and personal norms has created a world that is disorderly, capricious, and unintelligible. In the twentieth century, such aggressive and relentless disorientation gave rise to tyrannical governments. There is no reason to think the outcome will be different now.

III.

To be candid, the state of our politics and the condition of our minds fill me with dread and sorrow. Malaise and fear have taken possession of the United States and much of Europe as well, if the recent EU elections offer an accurate portent of things to come. Many admit this reality, but attribute it to incidental causes, passing events that have temporarily unsettled the mind and aroused the passions. To the extent that we accept this explanation, we have confused the symptoms for the cause of the disease. We continue to expect a cure when none is at hand and none forthcoming, and even when the diagnosis is faulty.

Our affliction is deeper and more general than we may commonly suppose. Both public and private life are in disarray. Were it not so, Donald Trump would never have attained the political success he has enjoyed or garnered the reverential devotion that a large segment of the American people bestows upon him. Untrustworthy, deceitful, and treacherous, he would have been exposed as a charlatan long before now. Trump could not have coarsened manners and morals were we not already prepared to contribute to their demise. He could not have discredited civic virtue were we not already inclined to pursue selfish interests and to engage in, or to tolerate, vicious and unethical conduct, were we not already predisposed to think exclusively of our own welfare at the expense of the common good, were we no longer capable of tolerating differences. He could not have provoked our disdain for each other were we not already tempted to regard fellow citizens with contempt. Trump encouraged, and benefitted from, such tendencies, persuading those who were in search of reassurance to champion his cause. To the alleged victims of chicanery and fraud, he vowed punishment for those responsible for cheating them of their birthright. In the process, he has deprived many Americans of their sense of interdependence and their cordial feelings toward fellow citizens. He is determined to complete their isolation and estrangement.

We are, in fact, in the midst of a revolution. To be sure, there has been only sporadic violence and chaos in the streets. But there is more sustained violence and chaos in the minds and souls of many Americans, which is where the revolution is taking place. A gradual change, imperceptible at first although still unmistakable, has distorted our perspective and darkened our view of the world. We have gone a long way toward accepting Trump’s allegation that everyone, from Joe Biden to Volodmyr Zelenskyy, from Judge Juan Merchan to Attorney General Merrick Garland, from Mitt Romney to Mike Pence, from anonymous election officials to well-known journalists, is corrupt–everyone, of course, save Trump himself. Corruption per se is thus irrelevant. It simply defines the way the world operates, inscribed as it is in the nature of things. We are entertaining opinions and beliefs that in time will induce us not to reject a particular law, to remove a specific administration, or even to abandon a distinct form of government. Rather we will undertake to dismantle society itself as the source of the distress, injustice, oppression, and misery that Trump informs us has become our lot.

Trump is not the author of these ills but he bears considerable responsibility for worsening them. He has discouraged noble sentiments. Only fools and losers bother about decency and integrity. He has, on the contrary, unfailingly appealed to the evil in human nature, to weakness, passion, fear, and vice. Whenever it was expedient to do so, he honored with his favor men and women who had no desire or intention of pursuing honest objectives by honest means. Seeking the vulgar satisfaction and benefit of private interests, these degraded persons hastened to congratulate themselves for their cunning and immorality. Trump attracted and cultivated such venality because he need those who were eager to do his bidding and to carry out his schemes. To the extent that we have become inured to such corruption, ours is not an intellectual but a moral failure.

Trump is doubtless a villain. But the evil he has wrought is less dangerous than his folly. In many respects, he is the worst kind of fool. He thinks he knows what he does not. Against such folly we have no defense. Folly is impervious to rational criticism. Trump, and those who aid and abet him, routinely dismiss as trivial or irrelevant facts that contradict their biases. Trump the fool is more confident, more self-satisfied, and thus more dangerous than Trump the scoundrel, who feels at least some pretense to conceal or deny his misdeeds. It is without exaggeration that I say Trump’s rise to power has depended on the folly of others. For ten years his performances have deprived some Americans of the capacity for independent judgment. These men and women, young and old, have ceased to think for themselves and want to be told what to do, a condition that, as Erasmus showed long ago, many prefer. There is a calming reassurance in being told exactly what you want to hear, what you long to believe, and what you ought to do. For that reason, folly is easier but more deadly than freedom and independence, or even than vice. The greater the foolishness, the greater the contentment, until reality intrudes. Then it is too late.

Although intractable in the fervor of their devotion, these unfortunate persons have been overwhelmed and deluded by slogans that provide them with a vocabulary while simultaneously robbing them of ideas and the capacity for thought. They are beguiled by Donald Trump. Under his spell, they make themselves passive instruments and give themselves up to be misused and exploited. Capable then of any evil, they are just as incapable of understanding the evil that their words and actions engender. Therein lies the peril of folly, which can do irreparable harm to a society and can bring destruction to the soul. In the end, the only question that we may have to answer, the only matter that we may have to decide, is whether we wish those who govern to rely more on folly than on wisdom in their exercise of power. The choice we make will determine our fate.

This is “Part II: The Present” of “A Political Travelogue: The Road to Dictatorship.” See the first part here.

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Notes:

[i] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “After Ten Years,” in Letters & Papers from Prison, ed. by Eberhard Bethge (New York, 1972), 14.

[ii] Anne Applebaum, “Democracy is Losing the Propaganda War,” The Atlantic (June 2024), 32.

[iii] Reuters, “Putin attacks West as `satanic,’ hails Russian ‘traditional’ values (September 30, 2022); Katarzyna Chawrylo, “A holy war. The Russian Orthodox Church blesses the War against the West” OSW: Center for Eastern Studies (April 12, 2024).

[iv] Anne Applebaum, “The Autocrats Are Winning,” The Atlantic (December 2021), 48. See also Applebaum, Autocracy Inc: The Dictators Who Run the World (New York, 2024).

[v] Anne Applebaum, “There is No Liberal World Order,” The Atlantic (May 2022), 10.

[vi] Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (New York, 1960; originally published in 1895), 118.

[vii] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. by Walter Kaufmann, ed. by R.J. Hollingdale and Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1968; originally published in 1901), 40.

The featured image is “The Scribe” (1927) by Arthur Szyk. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.