The Weekly Sift

Trump is scary when he tries to divide Americans against each other. But his vision of unity is even scarier.

The televised speech Donald Trump gave last Monday evening was billed as the introduction of a new military strategy for Afghanistan, but it began with a plea for national unity.

During the previous week, the President had been taking heat for his statements about the white supremacy rally in Charlottesville, which he said was attended by “very fine people” in addition to the obvious Nazis and Klansmen. The rally’s violence, which culminated in a white supremacist ramming his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer and injuring 19 others, was the fault of “both sides”.

Critics (like me) saw Trump siding with racists and bigots, and refusing to hold them to the same standards he applies so enthusiastically to Hispanics and Muslims. Across much of the mainstream liberal-to-conservative spectrum, pundits wondered: Couldn’t he at least try to be a little bit presidential and say something unifying rather than divisive?

In the Afghanistan speech, he tried. I don’t want to take him out of context, so I quote at length:

Since the founding of our republic, our country has produced a special class of heroes whose selflessness, courage, and resolve is unmatched in human history.

American patriots from every generation have given their last breath on the battlefield for our nation and for our freedom. Through their lives — and though their lives were cut short, in their deeds — they achieved total immortality.

By following the heroic example of those who fought to preserve our republic, we can find the inspiration our country needs to unify, to heal, and to remain one nation under God. The men and women of our military operate as one team, with one shared mission, and one shared sense of purpose.

They transcend every line of race, ethnicity, creed, and color to serve together — and sacrifice together — in absolutely perfect cohesion. That is because all servicemembers are brothers and sisters. They’re all part of the same family; it’s called the American family. They take the same oath, fight for the same flag, and live according to the same law. They are bound together by common purpose, mutual trust, and selfless devotion to our nation and to each other.

The soldier understands what we, as a nation, too often forget: that a wound inflicted upon a single member of our community is a wound inflicted upon us all. When one part of America hurts, we all hurt. And when one citizen suffers an injustice, we all suffer together.

Loyalty to our nation demands loyalty to one another. Love for America requires love for all of its people. When we open our hearts to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice, no place for bigotry, and no tolerance for hate.

The young men and women we send to fight our wars abroad deserve to return to a country that is not at war with itself at home. We cannot remain a force for peace in the world if we are not at peace with each other.

As we send our bravest to defeat our enemies overseas — and we will always win — let us find the courage to heal our divisions within. Let us make a simple promise to the men and women we ask to fight in our name that, when they return home from battle, they will find a country that has renewed the sacred bonds of love and loyalty that unite us together as one.

I got chills listening to that, but not in a good way.

Probably most Americans who heard the speech didn’t share my sense of ominous foreboding. If you’re a Trump supporter, you probably heard the kind of bold patriotic sentiments you wish our leaders would express more often. And even those who listen to Trump cynically probably heard only boilerplate rhetoric: Our country is good, our soldiers are brave, so let’s all wave our flags and try to get along.

But there’s something deeper going on in this passage. It expresses a vision deeply at odds with the traditions of the American Republic.

The vision of the Founders, which they embodied in the Constitution, is of a social contract: In order to secure our own rights, we recognize the rights of others. Because we want respect for ourselves, we grant respect to to our neighbors. “As I would not be a slave,” Abraham Lincoln said when he was running for the Senate not quite four-score years later, “so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.”

Lincoln said nothing about “loving” the slaves, because in the American tradition that’s not where rights come from. America has never been about love, neither love for each other nor even love for the Nation as an abstract entity. (On the other side of the Mason-Dixon line, many were denying any emotional connection at all with the Nation. The States, they held, had merely formed a confederation, which had no claim whatsoever on the loyalty of individuals.)

What Trump is describing on the other hand, is a sort of emotional socialism. In economic socialism, the Nation collects money and redistributes it to make sure everybody gets a share. But in Trump’s vision the Nation is the focus of our love, which it then redistributes to all our fellow citizens. “When we open our hearts to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice, no place for bigotry, and no tolerance for hate.”

This is not a new idea for Trump; it was in his Inaugural Address:

At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America, and through our loyalty to our country, we will rediscover our loyalty to each other. When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice.

The basic pattern goes back much further, to a Masonic phrase that was taken up by many 19th-century Christians: “The brotherhood of Man under the fatherhood of God.” You should love other people, because you love God and God loves them.

But Trump’s formulation has one very significant twist: America is playing the role of God. In a nutshell, that’s what nationalism is: an idolatry in which the Nation becomes the central object of worship — God the Fatherland.

Now look at the other concepts Trump is presenting: total allegiance, loyalty, patriotism, heroes sacrificing themselves to become immortal, the obedient military as the ideal to which the rest of society should aspire, and our dead heroes as the symbol of the moral debt we owe to our country.

These are the emotional underpinnings of fascism.

You may not recognize them as such, because all our lives we’ve been told that fascism is ugly. These sentiments, though, don’t seem ugly at all, at least at first glance. On the contrary, they are moving and inspiring, noble and even beautiful in their own way. We all want to be immortal, we want see ourselves as selfless heroes, we want to love and be loved by those around us. Particularly at this cynical moment in history, we want to believe that something is worthy of our total allegiance.

We are like crusaders who have trained all our lives to battle a dark and hideous Devil, and so are completely unprepared when we encounter Lucifer, the Morning Star, the shining Angel of Light.

Fascism in its original form wasn’t all book-burnings and death camps. It was also a good job building the autobahn, wholesome outings with the Hitler Youth, and a feeling that your country was moving again; France and Britain weren’t going to kick it around any more.

I’ve urged you before to watch Triumph of the Will, the classic propaganda film that recorded the pageantry surrounding the Nazi Party Congress of 1934. You will find nothing ugly in it, other than your own knowledge of what comes next. In one rally after another, different groups of Germans focus their love on Hitler, the symbol of the German Fatherland, who reflects it back to them.

It’s beautiful. Hitler talks not about himself, but only of Germany and the greatness of the German people. He calls for them to be unified as never before. A group of infrastructure workers march by, in uniform, each carrying a spade as a soldier would a rifle (because the military is the model all should aspire to). Hitler tells them:

The concept of labor will no longer be a dividing one but a uniting one, and no longer will there be anybody in Germany who will regard manual labor any less highly than any other form of labor.

To a group of children he says:

We want to be a united nation, and you, my youth, are to become this nation. In the future, we do not wish to see classes and castes, and you must not allow them to develop among you. One day, we want to see one nation.

Only in hindsight do we see the flaw in this system: If we focus our love on the Nation (and on the Leader who symbolizes the Nation), and the Nation reflects that love to its citizens, then the Nation can cut off the flow of love to anyone it decides no longer belongs to it. In Germany, the exclusion process started with Jews and Socialists, and then spread until it reached people like Martin Niemöller. The suffering of the excluded wasn’t worthy of compassion, because they were never respected for what was inherent in their humanity. Germans had only loved them because they thought (wrongly, as they were later informed) that such people belonged to their Nation.

You can already see a similar exclusion starting to happen in Trump’s speech. Did you catch that “one nation under God”? Where are America’s atheists and agnostics in that vision? When we love America, do we love them as well? Or have they already been cast out?

And how specific is Trump intending to be when he says “God”? Americans who worship Allah or Brahma or some larger pantheon — are they under God, as Trump and his evangelical base understand the term? What about Jews or Unitarians, who fail to recognize two-thirds of the Trinity? Or liberal Christians, who may have a more deistic, impersonal view of the Creator? When we unify as “one nation under God”, who are we intending to leave out?

Another (largely Catholic) group is so obviously excluded that it need not even be mentioned: immigrants from Hispanic or other not-recognized-as-white cultures. They are being cast out in a literal, physical sense. So when ICE knocks on their doors in the middle of the night, we can avert our eyes and feel nothing. We need not inquire where they are going or what will happen to them. No one should be held accountable for abusing or mistreating them. The Nation and its Leader does not love them, so neither should we.