Lenin lived,
Lenin lives,
Lenin shall live!
Twentieth-century totalitarianism depended on man-gods. Lenin was worshipped as not only spiritually immortal, as Mayakovsky suggested in his poem, but as materially immortal, zombified and on display in his Red Square mausoleum. Stalin was the Father of Peoples, the great locomotive of history, etc. etc. etc. Mussolini was glorified, Hitler was divinized, Mao was divinized, and every one of the Kim family in North Korea has been divinized. Look for the light even when it is darkest. It will not fail. We dare not fail to serve it.
It makes sense. Totalitarianism, like a black hole, draws everything into its gravitational pull and collapses it all into its uniformity. There is no room for any allegiance to anything else. The most enduring allegiance in history is the human allegiance to the divine. Therefore, a thoroughgoing totalitarianism must make its leader a divinity, and so to leave no power for anything else at all. (READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: Hamas Plot to Attack Jews in Europe Foiled. World’s Response?)
We are being told that this upcoming election is make or break for our democracy. It seems to be established as the main theme of the left that Trump will destroy the Constitution and make himself dictator. Republicans point to the ever-increasing power of the administrative state that has more and more boldly breeched Constitutional safeguards, intending to gather all power into itself and to be free from any accountability to the people.
How do either of these perspectives jibe with the dictator-god model above?
Those on the left try to make Trump fit the model. But it doesn’t work. The enthusiasm among his base is much more the enthusiasm held for football teams, or better, for one’s favorite WWE wrestling hero. Trump’s flaws have never been hidden. He revels in them and uses them to his advantage. His fans love him because he fights for the causes they care about, and he fights to win, no matter how much dirt he might churn up. There is no aura of supreme self-control that was with Washington, or of the tragic crusader for freedom and for a democracy not doomed to self-destruction that grew up around Lincoln after his murder. It is more of the rule-breaker and scrapper in the mold of Andrew Jackson, Truman’s hero. Whatever it is, there is no whiff of church or synagogue about it, no pretensions of omnipotence, just of a salesman supreme, with a whiff of P. T. Barnum, and an uncanny sense of knowing the worries of the Forgotten Man, in this way only reminiscent of FDR.
So, no savior-god model here.
And neither among the Democrats. Obama could have played his cards that way, but preferred to give full play to his clever deviousness, saying words deliberately meant to obscure, blaming others for not parsing them well. He seems rather proud of himself and of the fantastic wealth he has amassed out of his public service, and on his having pioneered the emergence of a dominant sub-government that intends to set policy no matter who might be elected.
What I mean is this. Had Obama cared to trust the people, he would have said this in his 2008 campaign: I mean to push as far as I can to socialize medicine and it will cost most of you more and give you less options than you have now; I intend to develop and sponsor new identities, each of which will be defined as oppressed and entitled, not to a fair shake and equality under the law, but to cultural and legal precedence; I intend to act on the antisemitism that was so central to my twenty formative years under Jeremiah Wright, and let Israel go as quickly as I can without political damage, all the while slowly subscribing the U.S. to delegitimate Israel’s right to exist and defend itself; etc. etc. etc.
The result is that Obama did not fill a heroic role, but the role of a founder of an American nomenklatura, an elite who mean to establish a monopoly of political and cultural power, but all done with no drama. It’s meant to be invisible. It is meant to generate clouds of what our esteemed editor-in-chief dubbed Kultursmog some decades ago, clouding the vision and choking the lungs. (READ MORE: What Does It Take to Be a Statesman?)
For the twentieth-century model of the heroic savior tyranny is passe. The Lenin-Stalin model had already worn out in Russia. The last Soviet years were piloted by a series of unheroic leaders, squalid in every way, running their country like Nurse Ratched ran the psych ward in Cuckoo’s Nest — if you oppose the regime, you are obviously insane.
Obama went one better on the Brezhnev and Andropov model. He pioneered the totally invisible leader. His great insight was that one can consolidate unlimited power now by running against an anti-hero. The nominal leader is irrelevant. He campaigns from a cellar. His mental competence deteriorates. His policies implode. Doesn’t matter. All that is needed is the Not Him — we are against the Very Bad Orange Dictator.
The eye of the new totalitarian hurricane is an absence, the plummeting barometer that whips the surrounding storm to a destructive frenzy. For while democracy builds on the idea that every person is created in the image of God, the new totalitarianism sees an absence, an abyss, a yawning nothingness. There is no Utopia, just the frenzy to avoid the abyss, the irresistible black hole. It is Hobbes’ war of all against everyone as identities evermore aggressively demand satisfaction of non-negotiable claims by any means necessary. Accept the insanity, accept the truth we dictate, and we will spare you the abyss as long as we can. IF you don’t, we will give you a little shove into its depths.
There is a bit of a bump right now in the road to this new kind of totalitarianism. Some old embers of decency and morality are still glowing , strangely enough, in the man meant to be only the cypher in chief. He has resisted the Obama sabotage of Israel in the wake of Hamas’ attempt to update the Final Solution. Some elemental decency seems to be at work. But the White House staff will have none of it, and all the immense pressure of what the American nomenklatura can bring to bear on their corrupt, doddering, front man. The Obamaites are pushing hard to force Israel to stop before it can eliminate Hamas’ ability to do what they have proclaimed they intend to do — keep launching new and more horrific versions of October 7 (which, some of their allies say now, they didn’t do, but Israel did it to themselves, surely in an attempt to win Olympic gold in Kultursmog). (READ MORE: James Carville, Religion Deserves a Place at the Table)
And then there is the plain old-fashioned story of power and greed and narcissism that interrupts in the form of Hunter and the incredibly bold grift empire that won’t stay hidden.
Do not despair. Just keeping your sanity in the face of the hurricane of unreality is an act of fealty to our Constitution and the holy premises on which it is built. The nihilist totalitarianism is cultural terrorism. It fails when we refuse to become terrorized. We will find unexpected friends, people of courage from every political background. Look for the light even when it is darkest. It will not fail. We dare not fail to serve it.
