The Politics of Authoritarianism in the Trump Era

The post The Politics of Authoritarianism in the Trump Era appeared first on WhoWhatWhy.

While we all seem to be rushing out to buy copies of 1984, It Can’t Happen Here and Hannah Arendt’s classic Origins of Totalitarianism, we should bear in mind that what we have to fear today is very different from what was going on during the interwar period that gave rise to Nazisim. The situation today is not analogous to that period, according to political scientist Jeffrey Isaac in this week’s WhoWhatWhy Podcast.

Isaac tells Jeff Schechtman that while our constitutional system may help protect us, we have to fight back through traditional political institutions, and through resistance and civil disobedience, of which the country has a long history.

What’s different this time, he argues, is the post 9/11 surveillance state which is being exploited and extended by Trump and which could tip the scales. As for the political battles ahead, he feels strongly that while the Republican Party may not be a partner in Trump’s authoritarian agenda, they are his greatest enablers.

Jeffrey Isaac is the James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, and Editor-in-Chief of Perspectives in Politics.

Click HERE to Download Mp3

Full Text Transcript:

(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)

Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to Radio WhoWhatWhy. I’m Jeff Schechtman.

It seems we’re all rushing out to buy copies of 1984, It Can’t Happen Here, and Hannah Arendt’s classic Origins of Totalitarianism.  Last week in fact 1984 topped the sales charts on Amazon. But did these classic mid-century works really give us insight and context into what’s happening in Washington? Are we facing a true existential totalitarian threat or just the blustering incompetence of a would-be tyrant? Perhaps to the extent we truly understand the history and nexus of fascism, populism, and real totalitarian dictatorships, we might have an answer to some of these key questions. To help us in that effort I’m joined by our guest Jeffrey Isaac. Jeffrey Isaac is the James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science at Indiana University and the editor-in-chief of Perspectives on Politics, a journal of the American Political Science Association. Jeffrey Isaac, welcome to the program.

Jeffrey Isaac: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Schechtman: It’s great to have you here. Does it matter the degree to which the threat we’re facing is a true totalitarian threat, or whether it is kind of the blustering incompetence of a would-be totalitarian dictator? Does it matter in terms of the danger and how we respond?

Isaac: Well, everything matters. Everything matters in terms of the danger and how we respond. Getting it right is important. So you distinguished between a true totalitarian threat and a kind of blustering, maybe inept would-be totalitarian dictator. I would say that there are some other possibilities and it’s that spectrum of  possibilities that really is worth talking about. First of all, there’s the possibility of forms of authoritarianism that don’t represent what we might call true totalitarianism, and I think in fact the situation that we confront is not a situation analogous to the inter-war period that gave rise to the idea of totalitarianism and to the totalitarian regimes, in particular Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. But there are still authoritarian dangers. On the other side, I’m not sure that Trump himself or other leaders of the right-wing populist leaders in Europe, who are similar to Trump, that they aspire to be totalitarian dictators, but they certainly do aspire to institute policies that are frightening and dangerous to constitutional democracy. One other thing, just by way of kind of prefatory clarification, and that is among the things that is very frightening about Donald Trump is not only his unique combination of authoritarianism and ineptitude, and I do think there’s a combination. But the fact that he has as among his chief advisors in Steve Bannon, someone who literally takes his bearings from some of the most far right extremist fascist writers of the 1930s and 20s, and the closeness with which this government is linked to so-called alt-right publications that are also very closely linked to much more conventional white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups. So the danger in Trump is the danger of what I would describe as authoritarianism that is accentuated by his closeness to people who actually are very close ideologically to fascists of the 1930s.

Schechtman: The fact that we have that blueprint with respect to fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, to what extent can that be helpful in the way we respond, in the way we anticipate what’s next?

Isaac: You know I do think it’s always important to be mindful of, you know, specificities of the moment, and it’s not the 1920s and 30s. You know, we’re not between two World Wars. There are genuine crises in the world. They don’t rise to the level, the crises of that time.  

Read more http://whowhatwhy.org/2017/02/11/politics-authoritarianism-trump-era/