The Nazi logic behind the Shock and Awe of the Trump Administration
Thoughts on the first weeks of the Trump Administration
The goal of the Trump administration and its allies' shock-and-awe phase is to overwhelm the state and create chaos. The goal of creating chaos is to do things that the majority objects to.
Each shock and awe phase creates circumstances that allow the next phase to engage in activities that are more dangerous to those affected.
The logical limit of such an activity is a war on Mexico that will allow the most extreme of actions against those populations within the United States that the majority views as undesirable.
A great example of this process is how Germany became Nazi Germany.
Consider this graph.
Axios wrote an article about the attitudes of Americans toward immigrants. The picture above captures the data.
In short, most Americans oppose doing the worst things that the most extreme elements of his supporters want.
If you were to conduct a similar survey of Germany's attitudes towards the Jews in 1930, the data would not look that different. One of the best books I have ever read on the topic, The Nazi Conscience by Claudia Koontz, observes that Germany went from being the best place to be a Jew to the worst in less than a decade.
Her book explains how a significant portion of the population, let’s say about one million, became convinced that the existence of Jews was a threat to the German state. And that a majority became confident that the co-existence of Jews within the German state with Germans was dangerous to both Jews and Germans.
How did that happen? There was a combination of propaganda, chaos, and desire. The propaganda was far more subtle than I understood and driven by folks who desired the end of the intermixing of Jews and Germans. The chaos was created by those elements of the Nazi regime that wanted to commit acts of violence against Jews. Each spasm of violence created a backlash, and those who wanted to eliminate Jews from German society proposed reasonable laws that would enforce that separation to minimize the disruption of the social order. And the majority went along for the ride, even if they did not want to or perhaps even looked down upon the violence and laws.
And yet that was insufficient for the Final Solution to take effect.
For that to happen, Timothy Snyder, in his book Black Earth: Holocaust as History and Warning, explains that the state had to collapse. The Holocaust began in Poland because that’s where the state ceased to exist, and those most committed to a plan of extermination had the most amount of freedom.
When the Nazi state established itself in 1941, the “problem” of the Jews remained. It was solved again by Heydrich and Eichmann, who took advantage of the crisis of the Nazi state after Stalingrad and proposed a solution that was both efficient and time-boxed.
Donald Trump has in the past spoken about minority groups in ways that are terrifying. He has also, in the present, behaved differently.
That should not comfort us.
What should also not comfort us is the data in the graph I showed to begin with.