Topic: Liberal Fascism
There is irony in the anti-Trump Left’s current craze for Nineteen Eighty-four—once again a best seller, albeit for reasons that would, no doubt, make George Orwell roll his eyes. It seems likely that few of the Trump bashers have read it or, if they have, that its message actually has penetrated their skulls. That their own behavior in many ways mimics the dogmas of Ingsoc as Orwell imagined them is a cosmic joke that they just don’t get.
Today on Twitter I happened across a bit of extraordinary news. It seems that Mitch McConnell, the GOP Senate Majority Leader, and Paul Ryan, the GOP Speaker of the House of Representatives, colluded with V. Putin to funnel Russian cash into the campaign coffers of Donald Trump. Various replies to this tweet were of the “Aha! Now we’ve got them!” variety: expressing absolute confidence that once this story breaks Demon Trump, his minions and his enablers will disappear behind bars. Winston Smith, toiling in his cubicle at the Ministry of Truth, could not have concocted a more audacious political fantasy. So here we are, almost one hundred days into the Trump Dystopia, and the Left has embraced its very own variant of birtherism: the conviction, apparently unshakable despite a total lack of evidence, that Donald Trump & Co. colluded with V. Putin to hack the 2016 presidential election and steal it from the rightful victor, Hillary Clinton.
It’s amusing to recall the scorn and contempt with which the Left treated the original birtherism: the claims by various fringe figures on the Right that Barack Obama was not really a native-born US citizen and was, therefore, ineligible to serve as president. Conservative dislike of Obama was such that many people who ought to have known better gave credence to this fact-free theory. Most notoriously, it was embraced and promoted by one Donald J. Trump—though one wonders whether he really believed it. Anyhow, the Left was right to revile birtherism, a political fable in the tradition of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion that was and remains a blot on conservatism.
But then a funny thing happened: Donald Trump actually managed to get himself elected president, and the Left lost its collective mind.
The essence of the original birtherism was a stubborn belief in a claim that was obviously not true and was soon refuted by clear documentary evidence. Admittedly this sort of thing is nothing new in political history. I already mentioned The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a product of the Tsarist secret police that is still cited nowadays by dedicated anti-Semites. There was, too, the charge that the Great War, whose centenary we’re currently observing, was engineered by those Merchants of Death, munitions and weapons manufacturers, in a quest for ever-higher profits. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy spawned literally dozens of conspiracy claims, many of which live on today despite repeated debunking. Some seemed more plausible than others, but all, if not at blatant variance with the facts, were unsupported by any real evidence.
The current birtherism of the Left—let’s call it trumputinism—has this resemblance to the Merchants of Death charge: some basis in reality. It’s certainly true that the prewar arms race played a role in the coming of the Great War, and it’s also true that Russia was meddling in the 2016 US presidential election. But that is all. Just as there is no evidence that munitions manufacturers actively conspired to start the Great War, there’s no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian agents to corrupt the 2016 election. Indeed, there’s no plausible scenario by which either thing could actually have happened. Where trumputinism is concerned, on a small foundation of fact was raised a vast, ramshackle superstructure of speculation, wishful thinking, distortions and plain falsehoods. And the less credible it appears, the more fanatically it’s embraced and promoted by the faithful.
Supposedly the leaders of the institutional Democratic Party are becoming nervous about trumputinism. It served their purpose for a time, perhaps, but if it doesn’t pay off in terms of gigantic headlines, indictments, perp walks and impeachment, the letdown may be such as to ruin the Democrats’ long-term political prospects. The problem is that many trumputiners are also part of the party base. If nothing happens, these people may turn on the Democrats, accusing them of selling out to Trump. Then too, as journalists pursued the story certain details emerged that look problematical for the late Obama Administration. It just goes to prove that so-true truism: Be careful what you wish for…
The author of Nineteen Eight-four would certainly have relished the irony of all this: The trumputinist Left has become a mirror image of the birther Right they so despise, clinging to a political fable that makes them appear ridiculous to anyone with a scrap of objectivity. It’s condign punishment for the people who are attempting to hijack Mr. Orwell’s intellectual legacy.
