America slides into totalitarianism — and it won't be easy to reverse

We’ve seen a spike over the last few years in the use of the word “authoritarianism.” This is the predictable result of the recent rise of authoritarian regimes which, to a greater or lesser extent, work to subvert and dismantle the institutions and practices of democracy and the rule of law.

A survey of more than 500 political scientists found that they believe the United States is headed towards authoritarian rule. A majority of Americans, according to a PRRI poll, now believes Donald Trump is “a dangerous dictator.” (It remains an enduring mystery why this majority didn’t stumble onto this conclusion before the November election).

There is, of course, another term for modern dictatorial regimes, one that gained considerable currency during the Cold War after the 1951 publication of “The Origins of Totalitarianism” by Hannah Arendt, but which has somewhat fallen out of favor.

How does authoritarianism differ from totalitarianism? There is no precise description of either; like other political terms, they are subject to questionable definitions that often depend on the viewpoint of whoever is using them. Marxist writers shunned the word “totalitarian”; Nazi Germany was invariably referred to as “fascist,” while the Soviet Union was a “people’s democracy.” But “totalitarian” was a favorite term of anti-Communists throughout the Cold War.

Based on descriptions of dictatorial regimes over the past century, the distinction seems to be this: Totalitarianism is authoritarianism intensified. Whereas authoritarianism may leave society outside the political realm more or less intact, totalitarianism makes a total claim on civil society. In its most extreme form, as in North Korea, there is virtually no private sphere where persons can gather and exchange ideas outside the regime’s surveillance and control.

Another difference is that authoritarian regimes often have no developed ideology beyond hatred of the political opposition. Totalitarian ideology can be elaborate, if syncretic, and can incorporate disparate, even contradictory ideas (including convoluted and childish conspiracy theories) to produce a kind of comprehensive worldview or substitute religion.

Totalitarian leaders tend toward charismatic styles and have a genuine bond of loyalty with their followers, who often express extreme, exaggerated enthusiasm for the leader and his movement. The followers are in fact the key to totalitarian movements, without whom the charismatic leader would simply be a barroom bloviator. Whereas the typical authoritarian dictator often comes to power amid economic or political crisis, frequently by way of a coup, the charismatic leader is swept into power on a populist wave.

The “crisis” he exploits is a deep-seated cultural one, but also a personal one in the life of the follower. As Eric Hoffer’s “The True Believer” (published the same year as Arendt’s book) observes, the disposition to follow a charismatic leader was “seeded in the minds” of his true believers long before he arrived on the scene.

These followers may not constitute the majority of a population; indeed they rarely do. But if they reach 30 to 40 percent, their dogmatic persistence may successfully overcome the majority, many of whom are timid or apathetic, and set the political tone for a society. The famous line of William Butler Yeats, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity” applies to political behavior.

By contrast, many authoritarian leaders are colorless, possessing little or no charisma: Consider Francisco Franco, Antonio Salazar, the Greek colonels, Leopoldo Galtieri, Augusto Pinochet, Park Chung-hee. They often do not have any coherent or developed ideology, other than opposition to the left. They obtain key support from wealthy interests, but rather than a fervent mass following they count on a divided, apathetic or acquiescent population to gain and hold power.

In a sense, these are true reactionaries, whereas totalitarianism tends to have a revolutionary element. Authoritarians will of course use violence to preserve the status quo, and their rule over societies is repressive, but everything is designed to keep a lid on things. Whether from a calculation of how best to maintain the status quo or from simple lack of imagination, authoritarians generally do not want to rock the boat. It is difficult to imagine most of them as objects of a personality cult.

This sort of authoritarianism also characterized the last decade or so of Communist rule in eastern Europe. As a student in Europe, I recall encountering Poles, Hungarians, Yugoslavs and other Eastern bloc nationals living in Western Europe — not as exiles, but as contract workers or students. These were not idealists building Communism; it was difficult to be an idealist under the leadership of grey nonentities like Polish Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski or East Germany’s Erich Honecker. Perhaps the lone exception in Eastern Europe was Romania, where Nicolae Ceaușescu — who had broken with Moscow years earlier — maintained a rigid dictatorship and cult of personality up until he faced a firing squad.

On the other hand, the core of the totalitarian mindset is an alienation from the world, and particularly from one’s own society. This alienation breeds a twisted utopian mentality that not only rejects modernity, but also tradition and the actual past in favor of a cartoonish pastiche that misapprehends both the past and the present.

As that description implies, totalitarianism is a crisis of modernization. In the early 20th century, totalitarianism was best known in countries that had superficially been modernized, but remained regressive in crucial ways. Italy and Russia offer textbook examples: Different as they were and are, both nations had rapidly advanced in some industrial sectors and metropolitan regions, while conditions in rural areas were primitive and there was considerable social discord and festering injustice. The horrendous bloodletting of World War I bloodletting removed all inhibitions against a total, violent resolution of social conflict.

Germany was in many ways the archetypal example: It was a world leader in industry (especially chemicals, metallurgy, and machinery), and by some distance at the forefront of scientific research. (Early in the 20th century, Germans were awarded more Nobel Prizes for science than citizens of any other country.) Its universities were the best in the world.

Yet that impressive modernity was set against a politically powerful but backward agricultural sector, a rigid social structure left behind by petty feudal princedoms of the Holy Roman Empire and, above all, a retrograde political system. The Reichstag, or national parliament, was grossly gerrymandered in favor of the upper classes, and the government was not responsible to its lawmakers, but rather to a capricious monarch.

With one foot at the leading edge of modernity and another in a mythical past, Germany could produce world-class physicists like Werner Heisenberg, but also agrarian-medievalists like the Artaman League, whose backward-looking, völkisch ideas were apparently so congenial to the Nazi party that the league was eventually absorbed it into Adolf Hitler’s movement.

One could fill a library with all that has been written about Hitler as the archetype of the charismatic totalitarian leader, full of violent hatred, reflexive deceit and a taste for destruction that eventually unmasked itself as an annihilating nihilism. But despite the morbid fascination he continues to evoke in our collective historical memory, Hitler is less interesting — and less important in the long run — than the people who voted for him, regarded him as a messianic national savior and fought to defend his rule till their country was in ruins.

Or for that matter, consider Josef Stalin, who was patently less charismatic than the German dictator, yet was worshipped by countless Russians — along with millions of foreigners who should have known better — and whose death occasioned a paroxysm of public weeping that, according to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, even extended to inmates of the Siberian gulag. To this day, an official cult of Stalin endures, deployed today to motivate Russians to serve as cannon fodder in Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine war.

Countries like Germany and Russia suffered a crisis of industrial modernization, with wrenching change, uneven development and the atomization of the individual in a newly created mass society. I submit that the United States is undergoing a similar social process in its transition from an industrial society to a digital society, and is in danger of suffering an extended totalitarian experience rather than a brief bout of Constitution-flouting.

America presents a paradox similar to that of early 20th-century Germany: It leads the world in science and technology (at least until this year), its elite universities are the finest anywhere, and its major cities are hubs of wealth and economic vitality. Yet much of the American interior, as any intelligent foreign visitor would notice, is economically and culturally backward: systematically underdeveloped, with decaying or inadequate infrastructure and limited educational opportunities. Its residents’ lifespans are comparable to people in developing or “Third World” countries.

What’s even more significant is the backward mindset of a significant proportion of the population. No developed country has anything close to America’s population of religious fundamentalists: believers in angels, demons, miracles and prophecies, all wrapped in a determined provincialism. Their perception of reality more closely resembles those of people in Iran or Nigeria than citizens of developed democracies.

This pronounced preference for the mystical and the supernatural, rather than observable fact, among so many Americans — which has enriched generations of televangelists — has rendered an electorally crucial segment of the population receptive to the fantastic promises, nonstop lies and relentless demonization integral to the totalitarian message. As Arendt observed about the supporters of earlier totalitarian systems:

The effectiveness of this kind of propaganda demonstrates one of the chief characteristics of modern masses. They do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent in itself. What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.

The consistency of the system should not be confused with the consistency of the rules of logic; the only “consistency” is that the leader is always right. As I have previously described, millions of potential followers of totalitarianism in America have taken mental refuge in a shallow cynicism that is actually a disguise for extreme gullibility. This allowed Trump to take credit for having developed COVID vaccines, while at the same time encouraging his acolytes to embrace COVID denial and rejection of vaccines. Here is Arendt again:

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

What are the systemic factors that have resulted in so many people in the so-called leading country of the so-called free world being so vulnerable to totalitarianism? The short answer is that its institutions rotted from within. Contemporary America has operated under a Constitution that is well over 200 years old, has been substantially unchanged for over a century and under current circumstances is virtually unamendable.

This Constitution has archaic features like the Electoral College — unheard of anywhere else since the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 — and grotesquely gerrymandered electoral districts (a hangover from the “rotten boroughs” of 18th-century England), as well as a Senate that privileges rural states, much as the rural Prussian junker class politically dominated imperial Germany.

These anachronisms and inequities are further exacerbated by the unaccountable malefactors of the wealthiest classes, who are able to thwart any fundamental reforms that might weaken the popular urge for a radical or totalitarian solution. As has been frequently noted, the rise of social media (often controlled by these same malefactors) has operated as an informational Gresham’s Law, with genuine information systematically driven out of existence by disinformation, myth and mindless diversion. Just as earlier totalitarians dominated the first generation of electronic media, the current crop of dictators rule digital platforms.

Start your day with essential news from Salon. Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.

A fundamental flaw in America’s early development was of course slavery, which functioned as a rigidly totalitarian state within a state. From the beginning, acute foreign observers like Alexis de Tocqueville noticed that beneath all the self-flattery about rugged individualism, Americans had a tendency towards conformity that could lead to a tyranny of the majority (or a sufficiently dogmatic minority). In the 1960s, political scientist Richard Hofstadter wrote that America had periodically been swept by waves of conformist anti-intellectualism:

One can trace ... the emergence of what I would call the one-hundred per cent mentality – a mind fully committed to the full range of dominant popular fatuities and determined that no one shall have the right to challenge them. This type of mentality is a relatively recent synthesis of fundamentalist religion and fundamentalist Americanism, very often with a heavy overlay of severe fundamentalist morality.

Political absolutism has been a chronic temptation throughout American history. But its most recent extreme outbreak is unique in that the intellectual ground had been prepared by religious fundamentalist theocrats and white supremacists for more than four decades. This is reminiscent of the fact that while the German-speaking lands had had an authoritarian basis for centuries, the radical, violent nationalism of the Nazis was preceded by 40 or 50 years of writings by failed intellectuals like Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn and Moeller van den Bruck (who coined the term “Third Reich”). They brought authoritarianism to a new and mystical level, paving the way for Hitler.

An internet search of the most influential American political books of the last half-century will reveal such works as Noam Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent” or Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine.” But however accurate their depictions of politics and society, how influential were they? I submit that Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’ “Left Behind” series (which apparently traumatized a generation of adolescents), and William Luther Pierce’s “The Turner Diaries” (the Popular Mechanics of race-war incitement) were vastly more impactful, both politically and culturally. One could also mention Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” although what Atwood intended as a warning has been embraced by America’s ayatollahs as a blueprint.

With that ideational foundation already in place on the political right, the current descent into national madness began in the period between the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the early years of the military occupation of Iraq.

The Bush administration’s false pretext for so-called preemptive war against Iraq was thoroughly in the tradition of Joseph Goebbels’ Big Lie or George Orwell’s Newspeak. What was notable, however, was not that the general public, which could hardly find Iraq on a map, readily fell for the Bush-Cheney lie campaign. Erstwhile flagships of liberal thought, like The New Yorker and The New Republic, swallowed the falsehoods like hungry barracudas, and self-styled public intellectuals like Christopher Hitchens sullied their reputations forever by writing propaganda questioning the patriotism and good faith of opponents of the war.

The true Rubicon that Americans crossed was on the question of torture, or “enhanced interrogation,” in the Bush administration’s Orwellian terminology. Torture is a barbaric practice condemned since the Enlightenment, proscribed even in our 18th-century Constitution and condemned in international law. But even after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrated no evidence that torture “worked” in eliciting usable information, nearly two-thirds of Americans supported its use. Now that Trump has asked the Supreme Court to declare both the U.N. Convention Against Torture and its federal implementing statute void, we cannot assume that his position on the matter is unpopular.

The U.S. is now distinctly moving toward the principal goal of the totalitarian project: erasing the distinction between civil society and the state. The Trump regime is eagerly working to insert itself into every facet of American life, from effectively taking over private universities and dictating their curricula to banning books from the Naval Academy, dictating prices to retail businesses, attempting to change cartographic nomenclature (like “Gulf of America”) and vetting exhibits at the Smithsonian Institution, which is not formally a part of government and has had an independent policy on exhibits for the last 178 years.

Another feature of totalitarianism is omnipresent surveillance. Since the 1970s, there have been numerous privacy laws enacted to protect ordinary citizens, and government databases are not systematically interlinked. But the Trump regime has contracted with the notorious tech firm Palantir to do just that. Palantir was of course co-founded by Silicon Valley oligarch Peter Thiel, a Trump supporter and co-conspirator with Elon Musk in the DOGE project.

Some nonfederal entities, eager to curry favor with Trump, have gotten into the act. The University of Michigan hired thuggish private contractors to spy on and harass students (before reportedly retreating). How long will it be until a major university bans the teaching of evolutionary biology, acting in the same spirit as German universities under Hitler, which proscribed “Jewish physics”?

Historian Ian Kershaw has written that Hitler had thousands of “little Hitlers,” Gauleiters, district leaders and block wardens throughout the German provinces who were not only happy to do his bidding, but sought to anticipate his will with their own initiatives, a scheme called “working towards the Führer.” Trump has his little Trumps at the state and local level as well; I live in Virginia, a supposed purple state, where 121 books have been banned in the school libraries of various counties. These include such racy and controversial fare as “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and “Romeo and Juliet,” as well as (irony alert) Orwell’s “1984.” At what point will this ban extend to public libraries, or to Barnes & Noble?

The little Trumps are also present as interpreters for the journalists and social scientists who make the trek to Trump Country to understand the locals. Inquiring as to whether the Trump regime’s cuts to Medicaid and social services, along with the higher retail prices caused by tariffs, might lead overwhelmingly pro-Trump inhabitants of impoverished eastern Kentucky to think again, a visiting sociologist was told by a local mayor that their loyalty was unshakable.

"You know how proud and stoic Appalachians are,” the mayor told Arlie Russell Hochschild. “We know how to take a little pain. People may have to suffer now to help make America great later. Trump's tariffs could raise prices, but that will force companies to gradually relocate to the U.S.” In other words, he was saying that his own community was too stupid to understand their own material interests. A demographic notorious for voting according to the price of gasoline or eggs would gladly further impoverish itself for the sake of Trump’s vision, or so the mayor claimed.

Any well-read person is likely to consider the rise of the modern nation-state to be a distinctly mixed bag, as the history of the last two or three centuries has demonstrated. But it arose concurrently with the Enlightenment, and one of its less remarked-upon features was the idea of the state as an entity above the interest of individuals, a kind of neutral arbiter. There were of course nascent political parties in those days (usually called “factions”), and the usual horde of lobbyists, job-seekers and influence peddlers. But the state and its functions, like the post office, weights and measures, or even the nurturance of science and letters (as with the French Academy) were, at least in theory, above politics and venal ambition.

Only in such an atmosphere could anyone get the idea that the law should nominally treat all people equally (even as economics divided them into classes), or that an abstract notion called human rights might exist and apply to everyone. Only under a neutral state, above or beyond partisan conflict, could dreamers theorize about constitutions and parliaments representing the interests of the nation. Even English monarchs were not above the constitution (if it was an unwritten one), as James II and Edward VIII discovered.

What Trump and his gang are perpetrating is a regression from the modern nation-state to personal rule, in which the autocrat effectively owns everything in the territory he controls, clientelism runs rampant, and ordinary people are subjects rather than citizens. But there are significant differences between then and now: Under the feudal system, the lord had, in principle, certain obligations to peasants in addition to his right to command them. The modern totalitarian leader feels no such duty to law, custom or decency. He represents warlordism in a business suit instead of a thawb.

It has become conventional wisdom that America’s elite institutions – the entities with the most at stake in preserving what’s left of an open society, even one as flawed as ours — have surrendered to the Trump regime with breathtaking (and disgusting) alacrity. From law firms to elite universities like Columbia and Michigan to billion-dollar businesses damaged by Trump’s tariffs to major media organizations, they have chosen capitulation even when resistance seemed both more rational and more effective.

As I write this in the aftermath of the “No Kings” protests (the same weekend that Trump tried to stage a North Korea-style military parade to his own glorification), it has become equally conventional wisdom that ordinary people are resisting: in congressional town halls, spontaneous demonstrations and other forms of resistance.

This is of course encouraging. But is it enough? For all the failures of our elites, they were not responsible for the 77 million votes Trump received last November. The battle for democracy will not be staged by the elites or against them, but at the mass level. The lesson of Trump’s first term was soon forgotten in the popular mind, and overcoming his second regime will be an order of magnitude more difficult, especially as his followers are more numerous, more deeply entrenched in the governmental system and radicalized to a far greater degree than they were the first time around.

Not long after I wrote the previous paragraph, I learned that a Minnesota state representative and her husband had been assassinated and a state senator critically wounded in a “targeted political attack.” We have accelerated from Trump’s perceived opponents receiving death threats to political murder. How long will it take our so-called thought leaders to recognize what has been staring them in the face since at least the Charlottesville neo-Nazi rally in 2017: Trump and his Republican followers and enablers are only symptoms of something much deeper?

Our national crisis will not be correctly perceived, let alone solved, until we recognize that the root of the problem lies in that supposed repository of virtue, the American people. The prestige media’s rote expeditions to rural diners in Iowa to discover the Real America are wearing distinctly thin at this juncture, because what lies at the core of Trump’s support is a not-insignificant fraction of would-be totalitarians who possess the same mentality as those who lynched Black people in the Jim Crow South, mobbed Jews during Kristallnacht and beheaded professors during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution.

It will be a long, hard road back to decency and sanity.