How Will the Professors Act When Fascism Comes to America?
Increasingly, one hears the view that not only is Donald Trump a fascist but that he will be elected president. I don’t know what I think about these claims, but it seems to me that if we truly believe them, we’re obligated to ask the question: What will we do once Donald Trump is elected president?
Woody Allen offered one answer in Manhattan.
Whatever one thinks, I’m struck by the mismatch between the easy avowal, which you see around various precincts of the internet left, that the future looks bleak and the failure to consider the logical next question: What is to be done?
It may be that I’m over-reading the discussion because I’m going through one of my periodic late-night reading binges about Nazism and fascism. Right now, it’s Enzo Traverso’s Fire and Blood, which inspired yesterday’s blog post, and Victor Klemperer’s diaries.
Klemperer’s voice speaks to me at a very personal level. Born Jewish, Klemperer was a professor in Nazi Germany who, despite the world crumbling around him, remained fixated on a few familiar (to me, at any rate) obsessions: his real estate woes, his publication woes, and his wife’s love of cats.
Tetchy and depressive, Klemperer had a keen eye for the weakness and cowardice of his fellow academics. He could be positively scathing about his friends and colleagues, many of whom wound up supporting the Nazis. One entry from March 1933 seems representative:
But unfortunately on Tuesday evening we had the Thiemes here. That was dreadful and the end of that. Thieme—of all people—declared himself for the new regime with such fervent conviction and praise. He devoutly repeated all the phrases about unity, upwards etc. Trude was harmless by comparison. Everything had gone wrong, now we had to try this. “Now we just have to join in this song!” He corrected her vigorously. “We do not have to,” the right thing was truly and freely voted for. I shall not forgive him that. He is a poor swine and afraid for his post. So he runs with the pack?….We have been mistaken in Thieme’s intellect. He has a partial mathematical gift. Otherwise he is absolutely at the mercy of every influence, every advertisement, everything successful. Eva [Klemperer’s wife] already realised that years ago. She says, “He lacks any sense of judgement.” But that he would go so far…I am breaking with him.
So filled with rage and contempt for the professoriat was Klemperer that by August 1936, he would record this in his diary:
If one day the situation were reversed and the fate of the vanquished lay in my hands, then I would let all the ordinary folk go and even some of the leaders, who might perhaps after all have had honourable intentions and not known what they were doing. But I would have all the intellectuals strung up, and the professors three feet higher than the rest; they would be left hanging from the lamp posts for as long as was compatible with hygiene.
I’m not sure what one is supposed to do when fascism comes to America, but of one thing I am fairly certain: don’t look to the professors.
Update (10:30 pm)
I think some of my befuddlement over the state of the current discussion is similar to what Susan Sontag expressed, at a similar moment of democratic crisis, in a symposium on violence that included Arendt, Chomsky, and others.
It’s personally hard for me to understand how in December 1967 in New York the discussion has at no point turned actively to the question of whether we, in this room, and the people we know are going to be engaged in violence. Only Mr. Chomsky in one sentence — breathtakingly short — said: Of course, it goes without saying that we in the peace movement in America should not use violent means. That’s the issue I think we ought to be discussing here.