The Median Experience Of Tyranny
If the politics of tyranny were self-discrediting, we wouldn't need mantras like "never again."
The arc of Donald Trump’s authoritarian takeover and the rise of fascism in Weimar Germany bear enough resemblance to one another that it has become commonplace to observe certain similarities: January 6 as a modern-day beer-hall putsch; Charlie Kirk as Horst Wessel; Stephen Miller’s desperation to provoke a Reichstag fire; and, here in these pages, the March and September continuing resolutions as analogues to the Enabling Act of 1933.
The point isn’t that we’re headed irreversibly toward totalitarianism, but that we should at this point be on guard against complacency, exploiting all legitimate means to change our course.
You can sense complacency now in the fight over extending Trump’s budget authority, which somehow doesn’t touch on his establishment of a secret police force, his deployment of armed service members into U.S. cities, or his selective prosecutions. The debate barely even touches on his illegal fiscal policy—his arrogation of taxing and spending powers that are the explicit province of Congress.
It isn’t as though opposition lawmakers can’t see that something’s amiss, but in their complacency, they’ve fallen back on standard processes. They survey random Americans and draw on conventional wisdom and conclude that “normal” issues—things like the cost of living—affect people more (and matter to more people) than the politics of democracy, resistance, or anticorruption.
In a narrow sense, this is obvious. A spike in out-of-pocket health care costs will impose financial hardship on tens of millions of American citizens; by contrast the number of American citizens directly under the boot as of now is relatively tiny.
But this is precisely the point. Despotism doesn’t impose itself on everyone all at once. It creeps inward from the margins of society.
This is a term that I came up with on the fly in a recent episode of Politix, but I’m sticking with it: We need to remind ourselves, constantly, that in the median experience of tyranny, life is largely unchanged. Even the median experience of those being tyrannized can be free of intolerable forms of oppression. If we wait until the abuses become severe and widespread enough to register in our standard analytic tools, it will be too late.
Adolf Hitler’s rise and seizure of power spanned years in part because of this very dynamic. The public had to be acclimated to extrajudicial oppression.
Hitler found his way to unpersoning people, interning them en masse, and then murdering them. But when he was consolidating power, as far as most people were concerned, life went on as usual. The Reichstag passed the Enabling Act on March 23, and on March 24, Germans largely went about things the way they had the day before. Stores were open, children went to school, families ate dinner together, the population continued to grow.
My great grandmother was a Jewish physician in interwar Germany.
The machine of state oppression was aimed squarely at her and families like hers. But she did not flee amid a pogrom or have to hide in anyone’s attic. She instead experienced increasing inconvenience and intolerance, breezy slurs and a higher threat environment. The state rescinded her medical license, relegating her to an entirely private practice. Her children reported experiencing casual antisemitism in their classrooms. Members of her family were interrogated by Gestapo.
Sensing menace, she smuggled 10,000 Deutschmarks out of Germany, but didn’t actually flee until 1935, more than two years after Hitler had become dictator. If she’d stayed, she and her family would almost certainly have been murdered within a few years. But they didn’t leave under nearly that level of duress. They probably could have held out for longer, without having to go underground or beg. And she was among the minority of Germans singled out for maximal antagonism. Many of her neighbors and peers weren’t put upon directly; millions of Germans were only dimly aware that society had changed and true freedom had been extinguished.
Now let’s consider the penumbras of Trump’s tyranny.