To explain Trump, try totalitarianism

President Donald Trump is a serious threat to the lives and liberties of Americans. Yet few if any reporters, analysts or commentators can specifically say why he is dangerous in any way that makes sense of his outrageous if not competing claims or erratic behavior. So they attempt to normalize him, using traditional means of criticism: He’s a businessman, he’s a politician, he’s a disrupter, or — he’s just nuts.

Yet such approaches do little to explain Trump’s rise to office or create a meaningful framework for addressing future actions. This is why journalist Carl Bernstein, among others, has called upon the press to generate a new approach, using new tools, to explain what has been, up to now, the inexplicable. But this is not necessary. We already have a tool in our toolbox. It is called the theory of totalitarianism.

People might think this a crazy claim, as they don’t see certain structural frameworks that traditionally have defined totalitarian states — state control of the media, a terroristic police force, concentration camps, etc. Yet the foremost theorist on totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, saw totalitarianism differently. Arendt believed totalitarianism was a new form of government — one she termed a logocracy — that emphasized processes over ideas.

How did she come to that conclusion? Her research suggested totalitarian leaders presented arguments for their policies and actions on logical imaginings that existed beyond reason and thus had to be accepted by others on the basis of trust. This created an environment whereby positions could not be countered because none other than the totalitarian personality had access to the “privileged” information that served as the premise of the “argument.”

More than the double-speak of George Orwell, the goal of this approach was actually to stop people from thinking. How did it/does it work? Being constantly bombarded by unsubstantiated propositions and nonsensical arguments, the mind is forced to spin and spin upon itself trying to make sense of the nonsense.

Getting nowhere, the mind finally shuts down rather than admit the very reason for its existence — navigating a world based upon understanding issues and making choices — was itself meaningless. This it can’t do, so it instead chooses to embrace the reasoning of the unreasonable, in hope the terror will stop and the evil will disappear. This effectively leaves the totalitarian free to actualize whatever policy he or she chooses.

The situation becomes more dangerous when solipsism enters the equation. Solipsism is an “extreme preoccupation with and indulgence of one’s feelings, desires, etc., or egoistic self absorption,” which extends well beyond narcissism to a point where a person attempts to make the external world conform to his or her personal worldview — no matter how perverse or lacking in fact. It was a condition psychologists Erich Fromm and Wilhelm Reich identified and aligned with Nazi leaders, and it certainly resonates with the concept of the logocracy and not thinking.

So, joining the rise of the logocracy with solipsism, we now can make sense of Trump. And if you don’t buy that, let’s revisit the structural arguments: e.g., state control of the media — Trump engages fake news and labels the press an opposition party to control news coverage; a terroristic police force — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents terrorize communities through random arrests outside schools and inside courtrooms; and concentration camps — prior use of internment camps are suggested as precedence for Muslim registries, and radio-frequency identification bracelets are recommended for “tracking” — i.e., “encamping” — illegal immigrants.

But, again, the structures themselves are all about process. So, stop normalizing Trump. Start rebuilding our country by supporting systems that promote human dignity and living a dignified existence.