President Trump: Nothing will ever be the same again.
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Easter 1916 – W. B. Yeats
HAD YOU BEEN LIVING in Germany on 27 January 1933 the
chances are good that you would have considered Adolf Hitler a busted flush.
Two months earlier, in the last nationwide elections, his Nazi Party had
suffered a small but highly significant loss of support. The newspapers were
filled with confident predictions that the National Socialists had peaked. The
trade unions even dared to entertain a small measure of optimism about the
future. It was known that the present Chancellor, General Kurt von Schleicher,
was drawing up a comprehensive plan to put Germany back to work. Things were
looking up.
The following day, however, General Schleicher was forced to
tender his resignation. Unending backstairs intrigue had finally succeeded in
persuading the German President, Paul von Hindenburg, to get rid of the
inveterate military schemer once and for all and replace him with Adolf Hitler.
The right-wing aristocrats, soldiers, politicians and businessmen advising
Hindenburg were firmly convinced that Hitler could be “controlled”. The Nazi
Party and its charismatic leader would be the pawns of German reaction – not
its master.
Negotiations between Hitler and the President’s advisers
continued for a further 24 hours. The following day, 30 January 1933, Hindenburg
announced that he was appointing Adolf Hitler Chancellor of Germany.
Nothing would ever be the same again.
In Washington today, 20 January 2017, Donald Trump was sworn
in as the 45th President of the United States. The route by which he
has arrived at the White House is very different from that which led Hitler to
the Chancellery, but with the investiture of executive power in Trump’s person,
the American Republic, like the hapless Weimar Republic before it, will be changed,
changed utterly.
As his angry inaugural address makes clear, Trump intends to
remake America in ways no other president has dared to contemplate. He feels
empowered to do this because his election represents not a vote of collective
confidence in the American system, but an act of collective repudiation. Not by
all Americans. Not even by a majority of Americans. But by enough of those who consider
themselves to be “real” Americans, and who possess the means to determine
the course of events. These Americans, like the “true” Germans of 1933, have
become convinced that they can no longer rely upon the American political
system to protect their interests – and so, that system must be changed,
changed utterly.
The forms of American democracy will remain – at least for a
while – but its substance will be steadily emptied out. With all three branches
of the US government: the Executive, the Legislature, and (very soon) the
Judiciary under Republican Party control, the “checks and balances” in which
America’s founding fathers placed so much faith will be rendered inoperative.
Exactly what is meant by “We the People of the United States” will become the
subject of drastic revision.
The progressive expansion of American citizenship: the historical journey that began in the depths of the
American Civil War with the Emancipation Proclamation, and which ended with
President Barack Obama bathing the White House in all the colours of the
rainbow, will be halted. Worse – it will be thrown into reverse.
In Nazi Germany the process began with The Law for the
Protection of German Blood and Honour and The Reich Citizenship Law – both
passed at a special session of the Reichstag convened during the 1935 Nazi
Party Rally in the city of Nuremburg. It was through these so-called “Nuremburg
Laws” that German Jews found themselves definitively excluded from what it
meant to be German.
That is how it begins: with exclusions; deportations;
preventive detentions; the construction of walls.
But that is not how it ends.
This essay was posted
on The Daily Blog and Bowalley
Road on Saturday, 21 January 2017.
