Philosophers through the ages have remarked on how history moves in circles, not a straight line — that “there is no new thing under the sun,” as Ecclesiastes would have it.
That points us to a warning voiced by Henry A. Wallace, the second of Franklin Roosevelt’s three vice presidents and his first secretary of Agriculture, in 1944.
Wallace’s subject in an essay published in the New York Times on April 9 that year was “the danger of American fascism,” and his warning seems to have come true with uncanny accuracy in the America of Donald Trump.
“Always and everywhere,” Wallace wrote, fascists “can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power. It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the growth of prejudice.”
Wallace examined the fascists’ manipulation of public debate — their method is to “poison the channels of public information. ... With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power,” he wrote.
“The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact,” he added. “Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity. ... They use isolationism as a slogan to conceal their own selfish imperialism. ... They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution.”
Could there be any more accurate description of Donald Trump’s political tactics? From the moment he began campaigning through to his very latest utterances on Twitter, Trump has strived to divide the American public, not bring them together in the longer tradition of American political leadership.
