Frankenstein’s Fascism

This tragedy was actually supposed to amuse leftist and liberal Americans. In a mere nine months, the American billionaire and big talker Donald Trump has managed to humiliate the Republican Party like no other politician before him in history. He has eviscerated it, either insulted or flatly ignored its respectable protagonists, and finally forced them to worship him as the party’s standard bearer.

To prevent anything from going wrong, Trump’s people would make his nomination so bombastic and pompous that any serious-minded Republican who attended would wonder where on earth he was.

But anyone who expected decent conservatives to rebel in even the smallest way will have their hopes dashed. The one exception was Mitt Romney, who four years earlier lost a hard but politically rational campaign against Barack Obama and publicly opposed the billionaire. He even tried to find an independent candidate to support.

Then there were the Bushes, the old party nobility. Father George H.W. Bush, 41st president of the United States, son George W., 43rd president, and Jeb, formerly the very successful Florida governor who had just been bested by Trump in the Florida primary, along with their families.* They — who had had such great influence on Republican policies and politics for over 20 years — would not be attending the Republican nomination gala. That was that. Trump needed fear no further opposition from the Republican Party.

Only a few (neo-)conservative thinkers still warn about Trump as a presidential candidate. One example is Robert Kagan, the influential journalist and foreign policy advisor to George Schultz, John McCain and Mitt Romney. As early as February he referred to Trump as “… the party’s creation, its Frankenstein’s monster, brought to life by the party, fed by the party and now made strong enough to destroy its maker.” Kagan blames the party’s years of obstructionism and declared “the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton. The party cannot be saved, but the country still can be.”

In a recent Washington Post commentary, Kagan notes that egomaniac Trump has a following independent of the party that belongs exclusively to him. Simultaneously, he notes the phenomenon is larger than Trump himself and far more dangerous. Alexander Hamilton observed during the French Revolution that “the unleashing of popular passions would lead not to greater democracy but to the arrival of a tyrant, riding to power on the shoulders of the people.”

The phenomenon has been around for the last hundred or so years and is generally called fascism. Robert Kagan again: “Fascist movements, too, had no coherent ideology, no clear set of prescriptions for what ailed society … Successful fascism was not about policies but about the strongman, the leader (Il Duce, Der Führer), in whom could be entrusted the fate of the nation. Whatever the problem, he could fix it.”

Kagan concludes, “This is how fascism comes to America, not with jackboots and salutes (although there have been salutes, and a whiff of violence), but with a television huckster, a phony billionaire, a textbook egomaniac “tapping into” popular resentments and insecurities, and with an entire national political party — out of ambition or blind party loyalty, or simply out of fear — falling into line behind him.”

And that’s certainly not funny.

*Translator’s Note: The original German text mistakenly refers to Bush 41 as George W.H. Bush.