The philosopher Hannah Arendt once noted that totalitarianism arises in societies disenchanted with democracy and susceptible to the charisma of the “strongman.” Given the rising tide of resentment lately against the democratically elected President Obama and the rising popularity of Donald Trump, I suggest that the United States of America might be on the verge of abandoning democracy in favor of totalitarianism.
I am aware that such a charge, such a warning, sounds absurd and outrageous to most Americans, but consider this: last week Donald Trump titled his presidential campaign “America First.” Now either he is historically illiterate, as Madeleine Albright said, or he is making a deliberate allusion to the pro-fascist movement called America First that arose in the United States in the late 1930s.
This movement was dedicated to saving western civilization from what it saw as its gravest threat, the international Jewish conspiracy, and therefore it advocated non-interference in European conflicts, much as Donald Trump today advocates American withdrawal from the turbulent Middle East.
Directly involved in this movement was Charles Lindbergh, the hero of American aviation; and associated with it were Joseph P. Kennedy, the father of the future president, and Kennedy’s friend, the fiercely anti-Semitic Roman Catholic priest Father Coughlin. Both of these men welcomed Adolf Hitler as a “strongman,” one willing to propose and put into action a bold solution to the Jewish problem. Their admiration of Hitler reminds me of the widespread support for Donald Trump’s bold solution to America’s immigration problem: erecting a wall along our southern border.
During May 1938, as Edward Renehan Jr. noted in his 2002 book, “The Kennedys at War,” Joe Kennedy Sr. engaged in extensive discussions with the German ambassador to the Court of St. James, Herbert von Dirksen. In these discussions, Kennedy noted that President Roosevelt was the victim of “Jewish influence,” and thus poorly informed as to the Nazi regime’s true ideology.
Until the day he retired from government, Joseph Kennedy Sr. remained convinced that the “Jew media” exercised a partisan influence on American culture and politics: “The Democratic [party] policy of the United States,” he once said in 1939, “is a Jewish production.”
And in 2016, Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party frontrunner, has, says Trump, only one thing going for her: she is playing the “woman card.” The fear that women may exercise excessive influence in the upcoming presidential election may have replaced the fear of undue Jewish influence in western civilization, but the demagogic threat is quite similar. Both Trump and Hitler rose to power by targeting a socially problematic group.
William J. Murphy teaches English and history at Belfast Area High School.