In a 1940 review of Mein Kampf, George Orwell speculated about how Adolf Hitler had managed to build a mass following. He concluded that Hitler had “grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life.” He argued that Hitler knew “human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades.” Orwell also observed that the “same is probably true of Stalin’s militarised version of Socialism.”
Orwell argued that “Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life.” He continued: “Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.” While Orwell acknowledged that people may eventually get sick of danger and death, he captured an essential truth about human nature — we derive meaning from struggle. This is particularly true when the struggle is fueled by a sense of historical grievance and injustice, which is what enabled the rise of the Nazis. Orwell pointed out that the economic crisis in Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s created political conditions that were “obviously favourable for demagogues.” But Hitler’s political success wouldn’t have been possible without widespread bitterness at the war reparations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles and the pervasive stab-in-the-back myth that blamed the German defeat in World War I on Jews at home (who actually served in the German military at a disproportionately high rate).
While hyperinflation and unemployment tilled fertile political ground for Hitler, Orwell’s central point was that the roots of support for a movement like Nazism go deeper than material circumstances. Even when people live in prosperous societies that enjoy historically unprecedented levels of wealth and comfort, this is no guarantee that they will be content or that their politics will be stable. If you want evidence that this is the case, look at the United States. Over the past ten years, American politics has become increasingly deranged — it is more polarized and acrimonious than it was just a couple of decades ago, which has led to an explosion of conspiracism and demagoguery. No great economic shock or war launched this process of civic dissolution (which was already well underway pre-COVID). Nor have Americans suffered some grave humiliation like the Germans did after World War I. Yet the country has been riven with savage partisan conflict, which culminated in a violent effort to prevent the peaceful transition of power in January 2021.
For nearly a decade, former President Donald Trump has run on a single message: the United States is a “failed,” “third world” country (except when he was in office, of course), and he’s the only one who can stop its slide deeper into the abyss. After President Barack Obama won Americans’ support with a message of hope and unity, Trump was elected by inverting this message. During his inauguration speech, he lamented what he described as “American carnage,” from the “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation” to the “crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.”
Trump didn’t just attempt to convince Americans that they were trapped in a bleak and smoldering landscape of American carnage. He told them nefarious forces within the country were to blame: “A small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government,” he said at his inauguration, “while the people have borne the cost.” These sinister forces “enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry”; “subsidized the armies of other countries while allowing for the very sad depletion of our military”; and “spent trillions of dollars overseas while America’s infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay.” It wasn’t exactly a stab-in-the-back myth, but the message was clear: Americans must wage war on the enemies within, from a traitorous globalist elite to the immigrants stealing their jobs.
Trump’s rhetoric about American carnage has only become more apocalyptic. “We’re a failing nation,” he declared during his closing remarks at the end of a recent presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris. “We’re a nation that’s in serious decline. We’re being laughed at all over the world. … We’re going to end up in a third world war.” Harris, on the other hand, celebrates the United States instead of endlessly denigrating it. “We are the heirs to the greatest democracy in the history of the world,” she said when she accepted the Democratic nomination in Chicago last month. “It is now our turn to do what generations before us have done, guided by optimism and faith, to fight for this country we love.”
Harris and Trump have both wagered on the state of the American psyche. Harris’s campaign is forward-looking — one of her frequent refrains is “we are not going back,” and she calls upon Americans to “move past the bitterness, cynicism and divisive battles of the past.” Trump’s campaign is almost entirely focused on his grievances over the 2020 election, what he regards as a years-long campaign by the “deep state” to thwart him, and his legal troubles — which he presents as partisan “lawfare” waged by the Biden administration. Decades of conventional political wisdom in the United States would suggest that Harris’s approach will succeed. The idea that a candidate for president can relentlessly attack the United States as a corrupt, failing banana republic would have seemed absurd just a decade ago. After Trump delivered his American carnage speech, Former President George W. Bush was overheard muttering “That was some weird shit.” But to millions of Americans, Trump’s rhetoric isn’t weird — it’s a projection of how they feel about the state of the country, as well as how they want to feel.
Voters don’t just care about the cost of groceries, job security, public safety, and other “kitchen table issues.” They also have political identities which have become increasingly fixed and tribal in recent decades — a period that has seen growing polarization, the intensification of the “culture wars” (bitter disagreements over combustible issues such as race, gender, and American history), and an explosion of hyper-partisan media. Politics in the United States is increasingly viewed as a high-stakes, zero-sum conflict over the identity and direction of the country.
Trump is no Hitler and the United States is no Weimar Republic. But Orwell’s insight is as true today as it was back then — people don’t always want optimism and uplift. While they want comfort and security, they also have desires that go beyond the mere satisfaction of their material needs. Political conflict can be intoxicating because it doesn’t just encompass debates over tax policy or social spending — it encompasses fundamental disagreements over basic moral principles and how society should be organized. It concerns human dignity and recognition. And it offers people a struggle that gives their lives meaning. When politicians like Trump (and to some extent, his opponents) make this struggle sound existential — avoiding a third world war, preventing the “destruction” of the country, etc. — it’s all the more meaningful, and all the more hostile.
The first question of the presidential debate on September 10 was directed at Harris: “When it comes to the economy, do you believe Americans are better off than they were four years ago?” Harris delivered a rehearsed answer about how she would build an “opportunity economy” and argued that Trump’s tax plan would hurt the middle class. Instead of making the case that Americans are better off than they were when she took office as Joe Biden’s vice president, she admitted that housing is too expensive and American families need support.
The worst answer Harris could have given would have been to declare that Americans are, in fact, doing very well — though this wouldn’t have been a difficult case to make. Despite a recent uptick in the unemployment rate, the rate remained under 4 percent for more than two years under Biden — after falling from around 6.5 percent when he took office (due to the spike in joblessness during the COVID-19 pandemic). Meanwhile, the inflation rate has collapsed from around 9 percent at its peak to 2.5 percent in August. Household wealth is soaring and wage growth has been outpacing inflation for the past year and a half. The stock market is setting new records. However, none of this is registering for American voters. A recent Pew survey found that just 25 percent of Americans rate the economy as good or excellent, while Trump leads Harris by 10 points when registered voters are asked which candidate can be trusted to “make good decisions about economic policy.”
American voters don’t want to hear rosy assessments about the state of the economy, and this plays to Trump’s strengths. In his first response to Harris during the debate, Trump decried the “terrible economy” and said “we have inflation like very few people have ever seen before, probably the worst in our nation’s history” (this is false). He described the economy as a “disaster for people, for the middle class, but for every class.” As part of his rant about the economy, Trump declared that migrants are stealing jobs and “destroying our country.” This is a typical battery of Trumpian claims: everything is terrible and somebody else is to blame. Trump frequently fuses the top issue for voters (the economy) with the top non-economic issue: immigration. This makes sense, as he doesn’t just lead Harris on the economy — he’s also 7 points ahead on immigration. Trump knows he has a sympathetic audience when he says the country is being wrecked by immigrants, the economy is collapsing, etc., which gives him the latitude to make egregiously false claims about all the above.
There are times when Trump’s catastrophizing becomes farcical — such as when he claimed that immigrants are eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio. But voters have already priced that sort of behavior in. One undecided voter the New York Times interviewed after the debate “allowed that Mr. Trump ‘came off as crazy,’ but he was no different from his appearances at rallies and in interviews.” A Times survey conducted before the debate found that 90 percent of likely voters say they know all they need to know about him. The same survey found that 19 percent strongly approve of Biden’s performance as president, while 47 percent strongly disapprove. Just 30 percent believe the country is on the right track and 60 percent say it’s moving in the wrong direction. Trump is a pressure release valve for voters’ frustrations, so they don’t care if he goes over the top from time to time. Many voters welcome it.
Trump doesn’t just peddle despair — he also incites hatred. It’s one thing to declare that the United States is a “failed country” on an endless loop, but it’s something quite different to say the country is being “destroyed” by immigrants and ruled from behind the scenes by the “deep state.” During a rally in New Hampshire, Trump told the crowd: “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” He also said immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Orwell always urged readers to carefully scrutinize political language, but it doesn’t take much analysis to detect the reverberations of twentieth century fanaticism in Trump’s speeches. He has even adopted twentieth century ideological attacks — during the debate, he called Harris a “Marxist” and his chosen nickname for her is “Comrade Kamala.”
While there aren’t many voters who believe Harris is a secret communist, millions of Americans have come to believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump; the federal government has weaponized the court system against him; and there’s a sprawling deep state running the country from the shadows. During the debate, Trump attempted to blame the Biden administration for the attempt on his life, which is even more absurd and dangerous than his claim that he “took a bullet for democracy.” An August AP-NORC survey found that three-quarters of Americans believe the 2024 election will determine the fate of democracy in the United States, but nearly as many Republicans believe this is the case as Democrats. For example, a Republican voter interviewed by PBS claimed that the Biden administration has “weaponized the FBI” to pursue Trump — a claim he makes constantly at his rallies.
When politics becomes more divisive and hateful, opposing parties and candidates become more threatening. Politics morphs from disagreements over policy and competing visions for the country into a battle in which one side is bent on “destroying” the country and the other side must “save” it. Trump’s anti-democratic behavior has caused a predictable reaction among many Americans, who describe themselves as part of a “resistance” against MAGA “fascism.” In a January speech, Biden accused Trump of placing a “dagger at the throat of American democracy.” Biden made the defense of democracy a central theme of his campaign — during his State of the Union address, he described Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election as the “gravest threat to U.S. democracy since the Civil War.” This is unprecedented rhetoric from an American president, but we live in unprecedented times.
While the idea that Trump is a fascist is historically illiterate and opportunistic, his political opponents are right to remind their fellow citizens that he tried to overturn an American election. They’re also right to emphasize his plan for “retribution” if he retakes the White House in 2025, which he has explicitly outlined in recent weeks. As he put it in a post on Truth Social:
Those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again. We cannot let our Country further devolve into a Third World Nation, AND WE WON’T! Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.
Unlike Biden, Harris hasn’t placed the threat Trump poses to American democracy at the core of her campaign. While she discussed January 6 and challenged Trump for “attacking the foundations of our democracy” during the debate, she clearly wants the primary focus of her campaign to be on kitchen table issues like the economy.
The Harris campaign has determined that Americans want a return to normalcy, which is what Biden offered them four years ago. But despite Trump’s effort to overthrow the 2020 election and his increasingly deranged rhetoric about waging war on the deep state, mass deportations and camps for undocumented immigrants, the imprisonment of his political rivals, and so on, millions of voters still support him. Is this because they think Trump is the candidate who will do the most to improve their lives? Or is there something deeper that accounts for his popularity?
Trump has been the axis around which American politics has revolved for nearly a decade. Americans have had several opportunities to bring the Trump era to an end — while it seemed like they had done so after his defeat in the 2020 election, the Senate’s failure to convict him after he was impeached for fomenting the January 6 insurrection ensured that he would remain a major political force in the United States. Some Republicans like Sen. Mitch McConnell assumed that Trump’s defeat — combined with his refusal to accept the peaceful transfer of power and the images of January 6 — would neutralize him. This was a historic mistake.
During this period, other Republicans still regarded Trumpism as the future of the GOP, and one of them was Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance. During a meeting with Trump in February 2021 — just a month after a MAGA mob stormed the Capitol — Vance apologized for his earlier attacks on the disgraced former president, which included describing him as “cultural heroin” for the white working class and comparing him to Hitler. Trump accepted Vance’s apology and later endorsed him during his Senate race. A few months later, Vance returned the favor — as a recent New York Times article put it: “When Mr. Trump announced his third campaign for president, in November 2022, at a time when most Republicans wanted nothing to do with him, Mr. Vance distinguished himself by immediately signaling to Mr. Trump’s staff that Mr. Vance was all in.” Vance has spent the past few years positioning himself as the future of MAGA, and that effort paid off when Trump chose him to be his running mate earlier this year.
What did Vance see that many other Republicans missed? Trump’s political future was by no means secure when Vance showed up at Mar-a-Lago seeking a rapprochement or when he ran as the next generation of MAGA. It looked like Republican voters were finally ready for someone new — maybe Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis or former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. But Vance decided to bet on Trump. In 2016, Vance thought Trump was the “needle in America’s collective vein” — a populist demagogue who could only offer voters the “quick high” of rage and division instead of long-term solutions to their problems. Now he believes Trumpism is the future, and he wants to be at the vanguard of that movement.
Vance wants Americans to believe that mass deportation, protectionism, and isolationism will solve their problems — the delusions he condemned in 2016. He repeats bogus claims about a manufacturing renaissance under Trump. He once attacked Trump for promising to “bring jobs back simply by punishing offshoring companies into submission,” but he’s now forced to defend an even more radical zero-sum economic plan which calls for massive tariffs that will be devastating for American consumers. There was some truth to Vance’s belief that Trump was “cultural heroin” in 2016, and he’s become a pusher of the same political drug now. However, what Vance missed in 2016 is that Trump didn’t just offer Americans the political equivalent of a drug-induced stupor — a set of simple and emotionally satisfying solutions to the crises the country faces. He offered them a struggle.
Trump promised to “drain the swamp,” which meant expelling the Washington elites who had allegedly subjected communities to a wave of migrant crime and economic dislocation. He made the culture war a central element of his presidency. In a 2020 speech, he declared that “Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children.” He attacked DEI initiatives and eliminated them in the federal government. He barred transgender Americans from serving in the military. He said “cancel culture” was the “very definition of totalitarianism” and a manifestation of “far-left fascism.” His 1776 Commission called for “patriotic education” in public schools. He attempted to ban Muslims from the United States. A Trump executive order issued in June 2020 declared that “revered American monuments” were under assault from “rioters, arsonists, and left-wing extremists.” It called for defunding police departments and local governments that had “failed to protect” these monuments.
Trump is even more fixated on the culture wars today. He promises to cut federal funding to schools that teach “critical race theory” and “gender ideology.” He declares that the country is in danger of being overrun by “Marxists who would have us become a godless nation worshiping at the altar of race and gender and environment.” During the debate, he said Harris “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison” — a blend of divisive culture war rhetoric with anti-immigration rhetoric.
Whether Trump is talking about some culture war flashpoint or more substantive issues like crime and immigration, his goal is always to frighten and enrage Americans. His speeches and Truth Social posts are littered with dire warnings about a violent crime wave across the country. Even though homicide rates have declined precipitously since peaking during the pandemic, Trump says the data can’t be trusted. Beyond “poisoning the blood of our country,” he accuses immigrants of rampant criminality. He says his political opponents have overseen the “abolition of our national borders” because they want immigrant voters to help them win elections — an element of what’s known as the “great replacement theory.” His claim that immigrants are eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio is part of a larger campaign to present an influx of Haitian migrants in the city as an example of how Democratic immigration policies “destroy” communities. As Vance recently explained:
If you were to ask what caused me to change my tune about President Trump from 2016 to 2020, I could give you a few reasons. But what we’re seeing in Springfield really drives it home. Housing costs skyrocketing. Communicable diseases on the rise. Car accidents, crime, and insurance premiums moving up. Citizens complaining for months (or longer) and mostly ignored.
Vance observed that “Donald Trump was shot in the head, and yet they still call him a ‘threat to democracy,’” but claimed that “it is Kamala Harris who is a threat to democracy” because she “would rather import new voters than persuade the ones who are already here.” Beyond Vance’s regurgitation of the great replacement theory, he often recklessly invokes the assassination attempt against Trump to score political points. It’s a sign of how vicious American politics has become that Vance explicitly accuses Democrats of attempting to kill Trump: “They couldn’t beat him politically, so they tried to bankrupt him. They failed at that, so they tried to impeach him. They failed at that, so they tried to put him in prison. They even tried to kill him.”
Moments after the attempt on Trump’s life at a Pennsylvania rally in July, he rose to his feet and started yelling “fight!” to the shell-shocked crowd. The crowd cheered. People rose to their feet. Photographers captured this moment of defiance — Trump’s clinched fist in the air, blood splattered across his face, and the American flag flying in the background. It’s an iconic image that didn’t just record a dark day in American history — it’s an image that captured an entire era of American politics. This era has been marred by extreme partisanship, paranoia, and even political violence. It has called the most fundamental norms, principles, and institutions of American democracy into question. It has convinced 81 percent of voters that American democracy is under threat.
When Trump arrived at the RNC this year, the hall erupted with chants of “Fight!” More than a year earlier, before Trump secured the nomination, he appeared at CPAC with a massive lead over the other candidates in attendance. He delivered an infamous speech in which he declared “I am your warrior, I am your justice, and for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.” He vowed to “obliterate the deep state.” And he told the crowd “This is the final battle … If we don’t do this, our country will be lost forever.”
Trump has always been combative and divisive, but his entire campaign is now built around waging war on his political enemies. He says the greatest threats to the United States aren’t aggressive dictatorships like Russia and China — they’re threats from within. He wants to gut the federal government and replace career civil servants with his political allies. Despite his incessant complaints about how the justice system has been “weaponized” against him, he wants to use the DOJ to go after political rivals (while there’s no evidence that the Biden administration had anything to do with his indictments). Now that the Supreme Court has ruled that presidents have broad immunity for “official acts,” Trump has been empowered to pursue this campaign of retribution like never before — as well as authoritarian policies like the “largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”
Trump has been the dominant force in American politics for nearly a decade, and he’s promising four more years of partisan hatred, culture war, fevered conspiracism about the machinations of the “deep state,” and most importantly, attacks on the democratic guardrails that restrained him during his first term. He has told Americans to prepare for the “final battle,” and millions are willing to fight alongside him. Orwell explained this phenomenon over 80 years ago — people embrace struggle for its own sake, even when that struggle is exhausting, dangerous, and destructive. It isn’t until after the battle is over that many of its participants realize how much damage was done.
Wow! Very thorough and VERY frightening. I sincerely hope that our country does not have to go through the hell that Trump seems to have planned for it to get his own way. :(