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Wednesday
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, one of the world’s foremost authorities on fascism and authoritarian leaders, has written an insightful article on why the GOP is always willing to give Donald Trump a pass, even when his crimes are flagrant. While an urge to sheep-like conformity and a fear of Trumpian retribution are key motivators, Ben-Ghiat mentions an even more disturbing reason:
Something else drives [South Carolina Senator Lindsay] Graham and other GOP Trump devotees: the thrill of partnering with an amoral individual for whom there are no limits or restraints. Enablers of authoritarians always imagine the power they can wield when the rule of law has been vanquished.
Freedom from all limits or restraints is the central theme of H.G. Wells’s Invisible Man, and the novel is so applicable to authoritarian personalities in today’s America that I’ve written versions of today’s post on three previous occasions.
Trump showed Republicans what was possible in 2016 with his Access Hollywood pronouncement, “And when you’re a star, they let you [kiss beautiful women]. You can do anything… Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” The fact that he paid no price for that seemed to prove him right: when you have power and have dispensed with normal checks and balances, you can do anything.
On June 9, 2020, I applied Invisible Man to out-of-control cops. When the law routinely buries instances of them shoving, beating, and even killing people, I noted, they will continue to do so.
I reprinted the post again in June, 2021 on the six-month anniversary of Trump’s January 6 coup attempt. At the time I feared that Trump would escape all accountability for what happened. If he can operate in the world with absolute impunity, I warned, like Wells’s invisible man, he will repeat the same behaviors.
Few maxims are truer than “Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” It’s no accident that, upon learning the secret of invisibility, Wells’s protagonist immediately starts violating social norms. It’s an aspect of human nature that Plato explores in the Gyges ring parable that inspired Wells’s story.
The parable appears in Book 2 of The Republic. Arguing with Socrates that people behave justly only because they fear the consequences of not doing so, Glaucon recounts how the shepherd Gyges, after finding a ring that renders him invisible, proceeds to seduce the queen, murder the king, and become king himself. While people might publicly applaud a good man that didn’t take advantage of such a ring, Glaucon says, they would in actuality regard him as a fool.
Socrates counters that, rather than such freedom making Gyges happy, he will always be slave to his appetites. While I believe this to be true, this is of scant consolation to Gyges’s victims, just as George Floyd finds scant consolation in the fact that his killers may never find deep peace. Wells, however, has a different focus, the one mentioned by Ben-Ghiat: it can feel delicious to act out one’s dark impulses.
Griffin describes a “feeling of extraordinary elation” when he realizes that people can’t see him. Confiding his history to his college friend Kemp, he says he immediately burned down the house so that others wouldn’t discover his secrets:
“You fired the house!” exclaimed Kemp.
Fired the house. It was the only way to cover my trail—and no doubt it was insured. I slipped the bolts of the front door quietly and went out into the street. I was invisible, and I was only just beginning to realize the extraordinary advantage my invisibility gave me. My head was already teeming with plans of all the wild and wonderful things I had now impunity to do.
He uses the word “impunity” again further on:
Practically I thought I had impunity to do whatever I chose, everything—save to give away my secret. So I thought. Whatever I did, whatever the consequences might be, was nothing to me. I had merely to fling aside my garments and vanish. No person could hold me.
Griffin proceeds to engage in the same range of behavior that we are seeing from bad cops, from shoving to outright killing. At the beginning, his social infractions are minor:
My mood, I say, was one of exaltation. I felt as a seeing man might do, with padded feet and noiseless clothes, in a city of the blind. I experienced a wild impulse to jest, to startle people, to clap men on the back, fling people’s hats astray, and generally revel in my extraordinary advantage.
When Kent asks about “the common conventions of humanity,” Griffin replies that they are “all very well for common people.”
As Griffin’s madness grows, so do his dark ambitions. Thinking he has successfully enlisted Kemp, he plots ways to wield total power:
“And it is killing we must do, Kemp.”
“It is killing we must do,” repeated Kemp. “I’m listening to your plan, Griffin, but I’m not agreeing, mind. Why killing?”
“Not wanton killing, but a judicious slaying. The point is, they know there is an Invisible Man—as well as we know there is an Invisible Man. And that Invisible Man, Kemp, must now establish a Reign of Terror. Yes; no doubt it’s startling. But I mean it. A Reign of Terror. He must take some town like your Burdock and terrify and dominate it. He must issue his orders. He can do that in a thousand ways—scraps of paper thrust under doors would suffice. And all who disobey his orders he must kill, and kill all who would defend them.”
Note that he uses one of Trump’s favorite words here: “dominate.” He’s prepared to use violence if necessary.
A sadistic thrill comes with asserting your dominance over others, as rapists know well. The satisfaction does not go as deep as serving humankind—this is Socrates’s point—but Griffin, racist cops, and authoritarians like Trump don’t care. They prefer the rush of acting with utter freedom.
Or as Ben-Ghiat says of Congressman Jim Jordan, who is currently seeking to weaponize the House Judiciary Committee against his enemies: “[H]is “beady eyes positively gleam with anticipation.”
