Tuesday
In an important article, Washington Post’s Phil Rucker pointed out how the El Paso shooter’s diatribe, in which he talks of a “Hispanic invasion of Texas,” mirrors Donald Trump’s language.
Rucker reminds us of what we’ve been hearing from our president:
President Trump has relentlessly used his bully pulpit to decry Latino migration as “an invasion of our country.” He has demonized undocumented immigrants as “thugs” and “animals.” He has defended the detention of migrant children, hundreds of whom have been held in squalor. And he has warned that without a wall to prevent people from crossing the border from Mexico, America would no longer be America.
“How do you stop these people? You can’t,” Trump lamented at a May rally in Panama City Beach, Fla. Someone in the crowd yelled back one idea: “Shoot them.” The audience of thousands cheered and Trump smiled. Shrugging off the suggestion, he quipped, “Only in the Panhandle can you get away with that statement.”
The shooter claimed that his thinking pre-dated Trump’s presidency, which is probably true because both he and the president are plugging into primal images that have long been prevalent in fascist fantasies. The key study in this regard is Klaus Theweleit’s groundbreaking 1977 study Male Fantasies.
Theweleit uncovered a remarkable trove of novels and memoirs written in the 1920’s by Freikorps officers who believed, like Hitler, that Germany had been betrayed by its leadership and who wanted to overthrow Germany’s democratically elected government. Although the movement would be suppressed (although only after it was used to put down German communists), it would pave the way for the Nazis.
Theweleit focuses on the language and images that surface in the works, which almost always feature a civilization-defining war between good and evil. If you have any familiarity with Nazi culture, you already know what the good guys look like: they are strong, chiseled, manly men while the women are angelic virgins. Their bloodlines are pure—no intermingling of the races—and everything about them is straight and clear-cut. There’s nothing mushy to be found anywhere.
The mush is to be found in the bad guys, who are Bolsheviks and Jews and, as often as not, Bolshevik Jews. Especially villainous are Jewish Bolshevik women, who are sex obsessed and body obsessed. They are dirty, they menstruate, they are fertile, and they threaten to deprive white men of their manhood. When Sen. John Cornyn tweeted out, “Texas gained almost nine Hispanic residents for every additional white resident last year,” he was plugging into a version of this anxiety.
The Freikorps novels range from crude revenge fantasies where the good guys sadistically exterminate vermin to self-pitying grievance dramas where heroic men are overwhelmed, their merit unrealized. (Often they are both.) Here’s Theweleit on the threat of being inundated, first by flood and then by slime and pulp. Theweleit has separated out the images but they’re all part of the same phenomenon:
The threat of the “flood” may be combated with “erections”: towering cities, mountains, troops, stalwart men, weapons. Ideally, the “Red flood” should appear as identical to the Red Army; iplicitly, it is always this. The flood is an armed, rebellious mass containing everything that will dissolve a man. The best deterrent? The weapon. The best way of keeping one’s own camp under control? The ritual of the mass parade.
The threats posed by the morass, the mire, slime, pulp, shit, and showers of excrement are of a different order. The nature of these elements is unclear, more confused and heterogeneous. Since the morass is most slike the flood (in terms, among other things, of its relative liquidity), it can also be combated with weapons…
Think of germophobic Trump’s obsession with walls, weaponry (including nuclear bombs), and military parades, as well as his readiness to tar those unlike himself as rapists and murderers living in rat-infested enclaves and shit-hole countries. The imagery moves easily in his imagination between Hispanics to Muslims to African Americans to Africans, all of whom threaten to invade and overwhelm an idealized whiteness.
Trump is not as explicit as the extremists, but they recognize in his framing their own fears and resentments. He, meanwhile, feels affirmed when crowds thrill to his imagery. If you want an unsettling comparison, check out Leni Reifenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and compare Hitler’s smile of smug self-satisfaction as the Nuremberg throngs chant, “Heil, Hitler!” to Trump basking in “Lock her up” and “Send her back.”
Trump is no Hitler but I attribute this more to constitutional safeguards than any internal checks. He knows how to wield fascist images—knows instinctively because they constitute his own worldview—and the potential killers in our midst find aid and comfort when he does.