TRUMP and HITLER ANTHOLOGY #5
IN PREPARATION
Compiled by Dick Bennett
for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology
https://omnicenter.org/donate/
[This is the Introduction to the forthcoming Trump
and Hitler Anthology. –Dick]
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DESTRUCTION OF LIBERAL DEMOCRACY, FROM HITLER TO
TRUMP/PROJECT 2025, Compiled by Dick Bennett
The
June 2025 Monthly Review, published by Monthly
Review, focuses on the concept of "Gleichschaltung" in the contexts of Nazi Germany
and Donald Trump. The issue explores how
in only a few years institutions and individuals were "brought into
line" under fascism 1930-36, and how the Republicans under Trump and
Project 2025 began their own “synchronization.” Read “Notes from the Editors”: https://monthlyreviewarchives.org/mr/article/view/6407
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June
2025 (Volume 77, Number 2)
by The Editors
(Jun 01, 2025)
Topics: Empire Fascism History Imperialism Marxism Places: Americas Europe Germany Global United States
All regimes within the
fascist genus in monopoly-capitalist society have as their principal object the
destruction of liberal democracy. This is effected by means of a system of
coercive rule centered on a leader or demagogue around whom a mass of “stormtroopers”
drawn from the lower-middle class or petty bourgeoisie is mobilized, relying on
a revanchist, racist, nationalist, and patriarchal ideology. It is
characteristic of fascism that corporate property and the position of the
monopoly-capitalist class remain sacrosanct. Private economic power within the
society becomes more concentrated, even while control of the state becomes more
centralized.
Such regimes, once
they have gained control of the executive branch of the state, whether by
election or coup, do not rule simply through raw power, but cling to some
notion of legal order as the basis of their rule, claiming to conform to a
constitutional order. What would normally be considered extralegal coercion is
justified in terms of various “states of exception” such as the declaration of
a “national emergency” or martial law, along with the introduction of a leadership principle enhancing executive
authority, allowing the usual constitutional barriers to be crossed. This
process, however, requires the support or acquiescence of the larger society.
Hence, consolidation of such regimes is not the work of a day. Full dominance
can only be achieved through a lengthy process that in Nazi Germany was known
as Gleichschaltung, meaning synchronization or falling
into line, whereby the entire state apparatus and the larger cultural apparatus
are brought step by step under the regime’s control.
In the destruction of
the liberal democratic state, a fascist or neofascist movement needs to gain
control of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches; the
administrative state or civil service bureaucracy; the military and national
security apparatus; police; prisons; the political party apparatus; the public
education system; and, below the national or federal level, regional and local
governments. However, Gleichschaltung does
not stop with the conquest of the state apparatus but necessarily extends to
the entire cultural apparatus of society, including the media, the educational
system as a whole (both public and private), the wider legal sphere (lawyers
and law schools), trade unions, the sciences, and the arts—eliminating all
areas of critical thought and potential opposition.
In Nazi Germany, Gleichschaltung began with the introduction of the
Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service in April 1933,
shortly after Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. This law allowed for the firing of
all “non-Aryans” or Jews and all political opponents (principally Communists
and socialists more generally) from the civil service, including judges,
professors, art museum directors, teachers, musicians, and conductors—and
immediately extended to the practice of the professions in general, for
example, lawyers and notaries. The aim was to gain complete control over civil
society—all the way to the creative arts. In the words of Hitler in Mein Kampf, “The purification of our civilization must
include almost every field. Theatre, art, literature, cinema, press, posters,
and displays must be cleansed of exhibitions of a world in a process of
putrefication, and be put in the service of a moral idea, a principle of State
and civilization” (Adolf Hitler quoted in Jean-Michael Palmier, Weimar in Exile: Antifascist Emigration in Europe and America [London:
Verso, 2017], 23). . . .
The dramatic effects
of Gleichschaltung in the cultural realm under Nazi
rule could be seen in the attacks on “degenerate art,” that is, modern art,
particularly Dadaism and expressionism, and all art attributed to Jews and
“Cultural Bolsheviks.” In 1936, Count Klaus von Baudissin, a dedicated Nazi
who, in 1934, had been appointed director of the Museum Folkwang in Essen, sold
Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky’s famous painting Improvisation 28, declaring that it represented an
attempt to “Russianize German art.” This quickly led to a general purge of art
associated with “Cultural Bolshevism.” Much of the banned art, including
hundreds of paintings, was confiscated at the orders of Nazi propaganda
minister Joseph Goebbels in order to mount the infamous Degenerate Art
exhibition in 1937. After visiting the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich,
visitors cleansed themselves by walking over the park to the House of Art, the
“new temple in honour of the goddess of art,” as Hitler praised it, filled with
classical “heroic kitsch” (John-Paul Stonard, “The 1930s All Over Again?: Trump and the ‘Entartete Kunst’ Revisited,” The Art Newspaper, March 28, 2025; Andreas Hüneke, “On
the Trail of Missing Masterpieces: Modern Art from German Galleries,” in “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany [New
York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1991], 122–25).
Today, Donald Trump’s
MAGA regime is introducing a similar process of Gleichschaltung aimed
at both the state apparatus and the cultural apparatus. Immediately upon taking office in his second
term following the 2024 elections, the Trump administration commenced the
destruction of the federal civil service (or “administrative state”), reducing
federal civilian government employment across the board, but specifically
targeting those associated in any way with diversity, equity, and inclusion, or
“Cultural Marxism.” Arguing that whatever the president does is legal, the
administration has fired off a long series of executive orders signed by Trump
aimed at ensuring the courts, media, universities, public schools, museums, and
institutions of art all fall into line.
When threatened with
loss of federal funding and other coercive measures, numerous liberal
institutions have capitulated (including several elite law firms; certain
targeted universities, such as Columbia University; and key media, as in the
Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post, which has declared
that its opinion pages will now only carry views in line with MAGA ideology).
Yet, others have tried to organize and resist. Judges in some cases have
objected to the trampling of the law underfoot. A movement among lawyers is
calling for the legal profession to refuse to negotiate with Trump. Harvard
University has said no to Trump administration attacks on freedom of academic
speech along with its demands with respect to the surveillance and deportation
of visa students. (As a result, Harvard has been threatened with the loss of $9
billion in federal funds and the removal of its nonprofit status by the
Internal Revenue Service.) Over four hundred presidents of universities,
colleges, and scholarly societies published a joint statement on April 22,
2025, protesting “the unprecedented government overreach and political
intervention now endangering American higher education” (Derek Sayer, “Democracy Dies in Daylight: The Great Institutions of Liberal America Are
Falling to Trump Like Dominoes, One by One,” Canadian Dimension, April 7, 2025; Bill McKibben, “At Last, College Presidents Are Standing Up to Trump,” Mother Jones, April 25, 2025; Sheila Heen, “Don’t Negotiate: Negotiation Strategy Notes for Lawyers Under Attack from
the Trump Administration from Harvard Law Professor of Negotiation [April 13,
2025],” MR Online, April 15, 2025).
The struggle is
especially fierce in the arts. Almost twenty years ago, when British artist
Chris Ofili’s remarkable painting, “The Holy Virgin Mary,” generated a public
controversy, Trump, who was then considering a run for president, declared that
“As president, I would ensure that the National Endowment of the Arts stops
funding of this sort…. It’s not art. It’s absolutely gross, degenerate stuff.”
In the name of combating degenerate or “woke” art associated with “Cultural
Marxism,” and eliminating “waste,” the budgets and staff of both the National
Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Endowment for the Arts
(NEA) have been slashed under the new Trump administration. The NEH is
undergoing a staff cut of 65 percent. One-twelfth of the budgets of both the
NEH and the NEA are to be devoted to Trump’s National Garden of American
Heroes, which will consist of hundreds of statues, each costing $100,000 to
$200,000, aimed at promoting American patriotism. In his executive order
“Restoring Truth and Sanity in American History,” Trump targeted the
Smithsonian American Art Museum, highlighting its exhibition “The Shape of
Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture,” declaring that it presented the
false view that “race is not a biological reality” but rather a “human
invention,” and criticizing it for its misdirected attacks on “institutional
racism” and “scientific racism.” On this unreasoning basis, the executive order
placed overall approval of Smithsonian exhibitions under the charge of Vice President
J. D. Vance (Benjamin Sutton, “Chris Ofili Painting, Once Called ‘Degenerate’ by Trump, Gifted to Museum
of Modern Art by Trump Supporter,” Hyperallergic, April 19, 2018;
Donald J. Trump, “Executive Order on Building the National Garden of American
Heroes,” January 18, 2021; Donald J. Trump, “Executive Order on Restoring Truth
and Sanity in American History,” March 27, 2025; Benjamin Sutton, “Trump
Administration Will Use Humanities Grant Money to Build Patriotic Sculpture
Park,” The Art Newspaper, April 11, 2025).
It is clear that
the Gleichschaltung now being imposed on the United
States is aimed at bringing all political and cultural institutions into line
with MAGA ideology. There can only be noncooperation with such efforts.
Moreover, noncooperation under these circumstances cannot be passive. Active
unified resistance by the population is now required—a struggle that goes
beyond resisting fascism/neofascism to confronting the capitalist system that
gives rise to it.
~
Gleichschaltung in Nazi Germany
John
Bellamy Foster 10.14452/MR-077-02-2025-06_5
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The Trump Doctrine and the New MAGA Imperialism
John
Bellamy Foster 10.14452/MR-077-02-2025-06_1
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