[Hitler defined the Big Lie as an untruth so colossal that people
‘would not believe that others could distort the truth so
infamously’. Trump’s claim that he won the election ‘in a
landslide’ and victory was stolen from him is a lie of this sort.]
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THE BIG LIE   [[link removed]]

 

Eli Zaretsky
February 15, 2021
London Review of Books
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_ Hitler defined the Big Lie as an untruth so colossal that people
‘would not believe that others could distort the truth so
infamously’. Trump’s claim that he won the election ‘in a
landslide’ and victory was stolen from him is a lie of this sort. _

,

 

The impeachment hearings that have just finished in the United States
will be remembered as a significant moment in our history, despite the
preordained acquittal with which they ended. Modern journalism, even
before the internet, makes it almost impossible to form a realistic
picture of what is going on in the world. It breaks knowledge up into
unco-ordinated categories and ignores context and connection, which
are the soul of historical understanding. Above all, the news
distracts. A stream of articles or news items clamour for attention,
each forgotten as ‘breaking news’ takes its place. It almost never
happens that society stops long enough to develop a coherent narrative
about its own experience while it is happening.

That, however, is what the ‘impeachment managers’ were able to do.
They laid down a clear, coherent and compelling narrative that
situated the invasion of the US Capitol on 6 January in the context
of Trump’s long history of sanctioning violence, his strategy of
discrediting elections, his connections with racist right-wing
paramilitary groups, his undermining of institutions and norms, the
minute by minute co-ordination between his words and the rioters’
actions, his dereliction of duty in failing to stop the invasion, and
his lack of remorse afterwards. They situated their account in broader
themes of American history, including the nature of the constitution
and the presidency but also lynching and the disfranchisement of
African-Americans. Running through the entire presentation was a
unifying theme, the ‘big lie’, and they suggested the ease with
which a dictatorial personality can intimidate others – largely
implicitly, since some of those intimidated by Trump were among his
jurors.

In the process, the managers produced a masterly description of a
contemporary demagogue. As Congressman Jamie Raskin put it, most
governments throughout history have been run by tyrants, despots,
bullies, autocrats and thugs. Democratic self-government is rare and
fragile. Raskin’s intent was to show how Trump’s behaviour,
culminating on 6 January, violated both the norms and the legal
protections on which democracy rests. Raskin, to be sure, was making a
constitutional argument, but the problem can be restated in historical
terms.

The liberal political order, as we may call it, referring especially
to the English Revolution of 1688 and the US Constitution of 1787,
was meant to apply to a new kind of society, namely market capitalism.
On the one hand, political revolutions laid down principles that have
become precious and irreplaceable to us, such as equality before the
law or even the rule of law itself. On the other hand, the new legal
systems and institutional orders revolved around the protection of
property, and tried hard to contain and even justify fundamental forms
of inequality. After the abolition of slavery, the most important of
these inequalities was capitalism itself, but capitalism did not
produce a revolution, at least in democratic societies. Instead,
struggles over material interests, economics and the regulation of
markets led to the organisation of society into class-based parties
and trade unions. Protest, in other words, was organised around
economic interests and property, as liberalism itself was to a great
degree. Protest movements were not anti-systemic. As a result,
democratic societies such as Britain and the United States have had
relatively stable histories until recently, even given the blatant
facts of class division and exploitation, and continuous struggle over
economic issues.

The story is no doubt complicated and varies from country to country,
but overall, in the second half of the 20th century, changes in the
socio-economic system weakened and eliminated the class-based
identities that had provided this rough stability. This weakening
opened new structural faults for politics, such as gender, race and
sexuality, but it also precipitated the emergence of the modern
masses, the so-called ‘age of the crowd’. While a new politics of
identity emerged, so too did large numbers of individuals whose
identities were not socially given, or explicit. These individuals
served as the social basis for mass psychology. They could be brought
together innocently, as in celebrity culture or sport. But what makes
for a very powerful group or mass or ‘crowd’ is a shared feeling
of grievance, of being wronged. To be sure, trade unions and leftist
movements of the past had similar feelings, but they were not the
basis of their identity or their politics.

In the modern era – generally said to begin with the late
19th-century outburst of populists such as Georges Boulanger in France
and Karl Lueger in Austro-Hungary – demagogues have been able to
bring together a vast number of diverse hurts, which have little or
nothing to do with one another, and weld them into a cohesive force,
whose identity and outlook is essentially psychological. Arguably this
phenomenon has increased since 1989 and especially since the 2007-8
financial crisis. The managers’ description of Trump can serve as a
model for this phenomenon. It involves five elements: violence;
personal dictatorship; mob or crowd regression; racism and
ethnocentrism; and the big lie.

From the beginning of his 2016 candidacy, Trump continuously
sanctioned violence against the liberal order in a variety of ways.
The first was to disregard norms, especially by assailing the
vulnerable: the disabled, Gold Star parents, Mexican immigrants, women
new to politics, Black demonstrators. Like most bullies, Trump favours
hitting people when they are down. Understanding his deployment of
sadism is fundamental to understanding his appeal. He brought together
large numbers of people who would have liked to lash out, but didn’t
have the courage. He made them feel that their anger and contempt –
whatever its source – was legitimate. And, very importantly, he
convinced people viscerally that the norms of civilised society were
part of a rigged system.

His deployment of violence went beyond the verbal. He sanctioned and
encouraged physical violence by the police and his followers. He urged
the police to hit demonstrators’ heads against the roofs of police
trucks when they arrested them. At his rallies he urged his followers
to push, hit, or trample counter-demonstrators. ‘Kick the crap out
of them,’ he shouted. He congratulated Gregory Gianforte – now the
governor of Montana – for assaulting a reporter: ‘Any guy that can
do a body slam is my guy,’ he said, imitating a body slam. When a
Biden-Harris campaign bus was taken over by his supporters in Central
Texas, Trump tweeted a video of the incident with martial music added
and the words ‘I love Texas.’ Perhaps most telling was his chant
of ‘lock her up,’ aimed at a series of women from Hillary Clinton
to Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan. He egged on the
protesters who sought to occupy the state capitol, and refused to
condemn the would-be murderers that tried to kidnap and execute her.
The siege of the Michigan statehouse on 30 April ‘was effectively a
staged dress rehearsal’ for 6 January, Jamie Raskin said. ‘It was
a preview of the coming insurrection.’

By continually toying with the line between civic peace and violence,
Trump was undermining the web of preconscious understandings on which
liberal society depends. He was opening the way for an eruption of
anger and ruthlessness of which 6 January was a foretaste. This
evisceration of the social bond was facilitated by the second
characteristic of Trump’s presidency, namely the personal
dictatorship he exercised over his followers. Hundreds of rioters have
by now been arrested. ‘We did this for Trump,’ they said. ‘Trump
asked us to do this’; ‘I wouldn’t go unless POTUS told us to
go.’ This evidence was buttressed by recordings taken at the event,
and social media posts afterwards.

The demagogue, Freud argues, turning to the second component of our
template, does not command loyalty on the basis of shared ideals or
values. Rather, the demagogue is like a hypnotist who says to his
followers: pay attention only to me; nothing else matters; concentrate
entirely on me. This accomplishes three things. First, it shunts the
ego aside; it replaces reason with loyalty. Second, it resolves
conflicts arising from frustrated and unfulfilled narcissism, by
fostering identification with a leader who has demonstrated his
mastery by a willingness to deploy sadism by bullying and humiliating
others. In this regard, Freud points out, the successful demagogue
need possess only the typical qualities of his followers, but in a
‘clearly marked and pure form’ that gives the impression ‘of
greater force and of more freedom of libido’. Third, because Trump
established the same identification with every one of his millions of
followers, he fostered an experience of shared equality among them. In
Freud’s words, ‘the members of a group stand in need of the
illusion that they are equally and justly loved by their leader; but
the leader himself need love no one else, he must be of a masterful
nature, absolutely narcissistic, self-confident and independent.’

Being in a crowd – the third component – makes individuals feel,
think and act differently. Many of the people shouting ‘Hang Mike
Pence’ or ‘Find Crazy Nancy’ (Trump’s nickname for Nancy
Pelosi) might have been perfectly peaceful in their home lives. Being
in a mob encourages feelings of omnipotence, suggestibility, and a
proclivity for action. Trump’s crowds know no doubt or uncertainty,
go directly to extremes, and are intolerant and blindly obedient to
authority. His followers are loyal to one another as well as to Trump.

Racism, the fourth component, is at the core of the argument linking
Trump to the riot on 6 January. The demonstration was called to
prevent or slow down the ritualistic certification of election results
by Congress. But it is not difficult to see that many of the votes
Trump challenged, in Philadelphia, Detroit and Atlanta, were the votes
of African-Americans. The riot at the Capitol was not only part of the
effort at voter suppression that Trump had been preparing for months;
it also built on the country’s long history of suppressing the Black
vote. Throughout his political career Trump has whipped up racist
feelings as part of his mobilisation of a group identity based on
personal loyalty. He launched his political career with claims that
Barack Obama is a not a US citizen. He kicked off his primary run by
calling Mexican immigrants ‘rapists’. At a 2016 Republican debate
he claimed that most of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims hate
the US. Before he was permanently banned from Twitter, he
persistently retweeted messages from white supremacists and neo-Nazis.

Trump’s racism is linked to his willingness to deploy violence in
order to foster identification. Racism is the reason the Second
Amendment is so important to so many Americans, at least historically.
The ‘right to keep and bear arms’ was aimed not to
protect US freedoms so much as to put down slave revolts. State
militias were slave patrols. Much of our early diplomacy was aimed at
controlling slaves. After the Civil War, a pervasive Confederate
identity survived, at the heart of which was violent voter
suppression, beginning with the Ku Klux Klan and continuing to the
present. Lynching, which went on for nearly a century, can stand for
the whole rotten history, and this was celebrated in the riot on 6
January with the prominent presence of a gallows.

This brings us to the big lie, our fifth component. A big lie is not a
claim subject to contradiction, or a statement of fact that can be
disputed. The concept was first put forth in _Mein Kampf_, where
Hitler defined it as an untruth so colossal that people ‘would not
believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so
infamously’. Trump’s claim that he had won the election ‘in a
landslide’ and victory was stolen from him by a corrupt
establishment is a lie of this sort. The American electoral system is
decentralised, and run by many thousands of officials at the state and
county level. More than half of them are Republicans and both parties
have legal protections allowing them to monitor the other’s actions.
Stealing a national election would also require collaboration from the
media and from the numerous judges who weighed the evidence. It is
simply impossible for any moderately rational person to believe that a
national election can be stolen (except in a situation like the 2000
race
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which came down to a few hundred votes in a single state).

It is the psychological work that the big lie performs that makes it
so important. Its essence is that something terrible has been done to
an innocent individual or group. Hitler claimed that Germany had
actually won the First World War, but the victory had been stolen by
civilian leaders, Marxists and Jews. In Trump’s case, the most
sacred act of the American citizen qua citizen – voting – was
allegedly suppressed by an evil force, the so-called Democrat Party.
The lie protected a core paranoia as well as mobilising Trump’s
personal dictatorship over his followers, who were meant to feel this
as if the harm had been done to them personally. Not only had Trump
been denied his presidency, but 75 million Americans had been
disfranchised. And it mobilised racism through projection. According
to the big lie, it was white America, the real America, that had been
victimised, not Black people who have been systematically denied their
right to vote throughout history, and are systematically targeted by
police violence.

The House managers framed the question of impeachment in the light of
Trump’s overall pattern of behaviour. As they repeatedly explained,
the charge of incitement does not refer to the specific words he spoke
on 6 January but to the fact that he prepared for the riot with months
of false claims; organised the rally and set the date so as to
interfere with the official certification of the ballots; repeatedly
hinted at the possibility for violence; mobilised the demonstrators
around protecting his person; was regularly cited by the rioters as
being in charge; refused to call in the National Guard or issue a
statement condemning the riot for hours after it had unfolded;
assailed his vice president by tweet even when he knew that Pence had
been targeted; praised the rioters when he finally did tell them to
‘be peaceful’; and never showed either remorse or anger.

Trump’s defence team based their case on a technicality, arguing
that since the penalty is removal from office, someone already out of
office cannot be convicted. But Trump was impeached while still in
office and it was Republican delays that stopped him from being tried
before Biden’s inauguration. Most important, the purpose of
impeachment is to defend the Constitution and the managers
overwhelmingly showed what it means for that to be at stake.

I would add to their argument that Trump’s movement can only in part
be understood as a political movement. While it stands for some older
political ideas – such as support for the police, the importance of
markets and the need to affirm American identity – as well as some
newer ones, such as economic nationalism, the Trump movement must also
be understood in mass psychological terms. This does not mean that
either its causes or its remedies are psychological. Its causes are
socioeconomic – for example, globalisation and technological change
– and so too will the remedies be. Still, the movement is not a
direct response to its causes. Social causes left an opening for
psychology, and that is the opening that Trump exploited.

Finally, it is important to remember that democratic change and
progress depend on collective forces, collective feelings, movements
of public opinion and, yes, crowds, like those of the civil rights,
anti-war and feminist movements of the 1960s. We need to defend
demonstrations, to recognize that crowds sometimes take on a life of
their own, and that such values as pragmatism’, ‘compromise’ and
‘bipartisanship’ are often a cloak for maintaining illegitimate
power. Crowds foster regression but not all regressions are the same.
Without the incredible crowd formations of the 1960s we never would
have advanced such understandings of freedom as Black Marxism,
women’s liberation and gay liberation. These movements sought to
formulate what they were doing historically, which links the
impeachment managers to them (something which emerged dramatically
when Raskin spoke about Julian Bond and Bob Moses, the leaders of
the SNCC). Above all, these movements were an expression of the
historic project of the left, ultimately based on rationality,
critique and the strength of the ego, which is to provide, as Steven
Lukes has written, ‘a demanding answer to the question of what
equality means and implies’.

_Eli Zaretsky is a professor of history at the New School for Social
Research in New York. His books include Political Freud and Why
America Needs a Left._

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