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Tuesday
With Donald Trump’s nomination of sycophant Kash Patel to head the FBI—arguably his scariest pick given Patel threats against Trump’s perceived enemies–the incoming president continues with his plans to “destroy the institutions of the democratic American state and replace those institutions with an authoritarian government whose officials are all loyal to Trump” (Heather Cox Richardson). Since Republicans hold the Senate, which is responsible for confirming presidential picks, we will soon get a good sense of whether the GOP caucus is indeed made up entirely of hollow men (and women).
I thought of T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” after reading a blog essay by authoritarianism expert Ruth ben-Ghiat. The New York University history professor points out that authoritarians like Trump hollow out institutions by “voiding them of any values and professionalism beyond loyalty to the leader.” In the process, they also hollow out their followers:
Strongmen need to bring everyone around them down to their level of corruption and depravity. To show their loyalty, elites compete to be the most sycophant and self-abasing, doing anything the leader asks, no matter how criminal, and going along with the inevitable escalations of violence and corruption.
By pledging support to a brutal demagogue, ben-Ghiat continues, “you are sooner or later required to betray not only your compatriots, but also yourself.”
The key event in Trump’s rise, ben-Ghiat believes, is the January 6 attack on the Capitol, which our current day fascists regard as “the foundational moment of the New Era of Trumpism.” By refusing to acknowledge what all the world witnessed on that day, Trump supporters have twisted themselves into elaborate contortions. “If authoritarian history is any guideline,” ben-Ghiat writes, “Jan. 6 could become a holiday one day.”
With that in mind, let’s turn to Eliot’s poem. Its description of the hollow men could apply to those spineless Republicans who, while fully aware of Trump’s depravity, attempt to walk quietly so as not to draw his attention:
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without color,
Paralyzed force, gesture without motion…
Eliot proceeds to draw a contrast between these people and “lost violent souls” such as Guy Fawkes and Heart of Darkness character Kurtz (the two figures mentioned in the poem’s epigraphs). The Catholic insurgent Fawkes attempted to blow up Parliament in a 1605 plot while Kurtz goes rogue in the Congo, sloughing off the restraints of civilization as he engages in various unnamed acts of barbarism. As bad as these two men are, Eliot finds the hollow men even worse. At least Fawkes and Kurtz take bold action.
If we see Trump as one of the lost violent ones—he has certainly shown himself capable of violence, calling for protesters to be shot in the legs and siccing his supporters on the Capitol–then to judge him as less contemptible than spineless GOP legislators raises an interesting ethical question: Who is worse, the tyrant or those who enable the tyrant?
In rationalizing Trump’s actions, GOP legislators behave like Eliot’s scarecrow, donning multiple disguises and “behaving as the wind behaves”:
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
Eliot compares the hollow men to the souls in Dante’s limbo who, having lived lives of neither infamy nor praise, are condemned to spend eternity on the banks of death’s river without ever crossing over. Among them are the angels who, in the celestial battle between Satan and God, chose to sit it out. “This blind life of theirs is so debased,” Virgil tells Dante, “they envious are of every other fate.”
Eliot says that the hollow men cannot meet the eyes of “those who have crossed/ With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom.” I wonder if those who have enabled Trump can meet the eyes of those who courageously stood up to him, principled Republicans such as Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. For their part, those with principles think of the sell-outs—if they think of them at all—as “the hollow men, the stuffed men.”
What eats away at the hollow men is the memory of a time when they believed in constitutional democracy. Now, they catch only glimpses of the great American experiment that was once at the foundation of their political identity:
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.
These reminders of former beliefs are so painful that they want to avoid proximity with the righteous. “Let me be no nearer/In death’s dream kingdom,” Eliot imagines them saying, and then,
No nearer-
Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom.
Presumably these legislators once entered Congress with a vision of making the world a better place. Now, however, they feel as though they are in a sterile desert worshipping stone images (which is not a bad description of Trump worship):
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.
Is it like this in Paradise, the hollow men wonder—which in our framework is like asking, “Is this the high-minded life of service they once dreamed of?” There was a time when they trembled with tenderness at the thought. Now they kiss Trump’s ring:
Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.
The new reality of Trump’s party is stark and grim:
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
There is one last hope for hollow men, Eliot then says: there is still a chance to ascend to the “multifoliate rose” of Dante’s Paradise. I think of those Republicans who, after years of kowtowing to Trump, finally tore themselves away. The eyes that “reappear” in Eliot’s next verse are those who have seen the light:
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.
Unfortunately, Eliot’s hollow men appear unable to respond to that hope, engaging instead in sterile and juvenile activities:
Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.
What then follows in the poem is a series of steps that people could take were it not for “the shadow.” This shadow is not Donald Trump because that would remove agency and responsibility from the hollow men. The shadow is the inner block, the fear or the cynicism, that keeps them from living up to their potential. They are fully capable of doing what is right but choose not to.
The steps they could take, always aborted by the shadow, are
–having an idea and making it happen (“the idea and the reality”);
–having a desire and fulfilling that desire (“the motion and the act”);
–conceiving of an idea and bringing it forth into the world (“the conception and the creation”);
–having a feeling and acting upon it (“the emotion and the response”);
–having sexual desire and proceeding to orgasm (“the desire and the spasm”);
–having power and using that power to create something (“the potency and the existence”);
–having an ideal but abandoning it because they fear disappointment (“the essence and the descent”).
At this point in the poem, Eliot quotes a line from the Lord’s Prayer—”for thine is the kingdom”—which is a longing to bring God’s kingdom of love, peace, justice, and mercy to earth. But the hollow men are so, well, hollow that they can barely get the phrase out, much less the entire prayer. They can also barely speak the line, “For life is long,” an acknowledgement that there’s still plenty of time to get things right. By the end, they can barely articulate fragments:
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the
And the result for America? A transformation of our multicultural, constitutional democracy into a fascist regime. It happens, not in an apocalyptic blaze, but through one small surrender after another. Or as Eliot puts it,
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
The good news is that the world hasn’t ended yet. For all of Eliot’s pessimism, principles that have lain dormant may yet be activated. The Senate chose not to make Trump toady Rick Scott their leader, and it deep-sixed the nomination of pedophile Matt Gaetz for Attorney General. Meanwhile, Trump resistance will still show up as the voices in the wind’s singing. The “perpetual star” of our democracy has not altogether faded.
