The American Abyss

A historian of fascism and political atrocity on Trump, the mob and
what comes next.

The police forced the crowd out of the Capitol building after facing
off in the Rotunda, Jan. 6, 3:40 p.m.Credit...Ashley Gilbertson/VII,
for The New York Times

By Timothy Snyder
* Jan. 9, 2021

When Donald Trump stood before his followers on Jan. 6 and [12]urged
them to march on the United States Capitol, he was doing what he had
always done. He never took electoral democracy seriously nor accepted
the legitimacy of its American version.

Even when he won, in 2016, he [13]insisted that the election was
fraudulent -- that millions of false votes were cast for his opponent.
In 2020, in the knowledge that he was trailing Joseph R. Biden in the
polls, [14]he spent months claiming that the presidential election
would be rigged and signaling that he would not accept the results if
they did not favor him. He wrongly claimed on Election Day that he had
won and then steadily hardened his rhetoric: With time, his victory
became a historic landslide and the various conspiracies that denied it
ever more sophisticated and implausible.

People believed him, which is not at all surprising. It takes a
tremendous amount of work to educate citizens to resist the powerful
pull of believing what they already believe, or what others around them
believe, or what would make sense of their own previous choices. Plato
noted a particular risk for tyrants: that they would be surrounded in
the end by yes-men and enablers. Aristotle worried that, in a
democracy, a wealthy and talented demagogue could all too easily master
the minds of the populace. Aware of these risks and others, the framers
of the Constitution instituted a system of checks and balances. The
point was not simply to ensure that no one branch of government
dominated the others but also to anchor in institutions different
points of view.

In this sense, the responsibility for Trump's push to overturn an
election must be shared by a very large number of Republican members of
Congress. Rather than contradict Trump from the beginning, they allowed
his electoral fiction to flourish. They had different reasons for doing
so. One group of Republicans is concerned above all with gaming the
system to maintain power, taking full advantage of constitutional
obscurities, gerrymandering and dark money to win elections with a
minority of motivated voters. They have no interest in the collapse of
the peculiar form of representation that allows their minority party
disproportionate control of government. The most important among them,
Mitch McConnell, indulged Trump's lie while making no comment on its
consequences.

Yet other Republicans saw the situation differently: They might
actually break the system and have power without democracy. The split
between these two groups, the gamers and the breakers, became sharply
visible on Dec. 30, when [15]Senator Josh Hawley announced that he
would support Trump's challenge by questioning the validity of the
electoral votes on Jan. 6. [16]Ted Cruz then promised his own support,
joined by about 10 other senators. More than a hundred Republican
representatives took the same position. For many, this seemed like
nothing more than a show: challenges to states' electoral votes would
force delays and floor votes but would not affect the outcome.

Image Pro-Trump extremists tried to scale the walls of the Capitol
building in Washington to bypass barriers and get inside, 2:09 p.m.
Pro-Trump extremists tried to scale the walls of the Capitol building
in Washington to bypass barriers and get inside, 2:09
p.m.Credit...Ashley Gilbertson/VII, for The New York Times

Yet for Congress to traduce its basic functions had a price. An elected
institution that opposes elections is inviting its own overthrow.
Members of Congress who sustained the president's lie, despite the
available and unambiguous evidence, betrayed their constitutional
mission. Making his fictions the basis of congressional action gave
them flesh. Now Trump could demand that senators and congressmen bow to
his will. He could place personal responsibility upon Mike Pence, in
charge of the formal proceedings, to pervert them. And on Jan. 6, he
directed his followers to exert pressure on these elected
representatives, which they proceeded to do: [17]storming the Capitol
building, searching for people to punish, ransacking the place.

Of course this did make a kind of sense: If the election really had
been stolen, as senators and congressmen were themselves suggesting,
then how could Congress be allowed to move forward? For some
Republicans, the invasion of the Capitol must have been a shock, or
even a lesson. For the breakers, however, it may have been a taste of
the future. Afterward, eight senators and more than 100 representatives
voted for the lie that had forced them to flee their chambers.

Image
Rioters threatened and chased a police officer inside the Capitol, 2:13
p.m.Credit...Ashley Gilbertson/VII, for The New York Times

Post-truth is pre-fascism, and Trump has been our post-truth president.
When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and
charisma to create spectacle in its place. Without agreement about some
basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow
them to defend themselves. If we lose the institutions that produce
facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive
abstractions and fictions. Truth defends itself particularly poorly
when there is not very much of it around, and the era of Trump -- like
the era of Vladimir Putin in Russia -- is one of the decline of local
news. Social media is no substitute: It supercharges the mental habits
by which we seek emotional stimulation and comfort, which means losing
the distinction between what feels true and what actually is true.

Post-truth wears away the rule of law and invites a regime of myth.
These last four years, scholars have discussed the legitimacy and value
of invoking fascism in reference to Trumpian propaganda. One
comfortable position has been to label any such effort as a direct
comparison and then to treat such comparisons as taboo. More
productively, the philosopher Jason Stanley has treated fascism as a
phenomenon, as a series of patterns that can be observed not only in
interwar Europe but beyond it.

My own view is that greater knowledge of the past, fascist or
otherwise, allows us to notice and conceptualize elements of the
present that we might otherwise disregard and to think more broadly
about future possibilities. It was clear to me in October that Trump's
behavior presaged a coup, and I said so in print; this is not because
the present repeats the past, but because the past enlightens the
present.

Image
An angry mob confronted the police as it tried to gain entry into the
Capitol, 2 p.m.Credit...Ashley Gilbertson/VII, for The New York Times

Like historical fascist leaders, Trump has presented himself as the
single source of truth. His use of the term "fake news" echoed the Nazi
smear Lÿ¿¿¿¿¿esse ("lying press"); like the Nazis, he referred to
reporters as "enemies of the people." Like Adolf Hitler, he came to
power at a moment when the conventional press had taken a beating; the
financial crisis of 2008 did to American newspapers what the Great
Depression did to German ones. The Nazis thought that they could use
radio to replace the old pluralism of the newspaper; Trump tried to do
the same with Twitter.

Thanks to technological capacity and personal talent, Donald Trump lied
at a pace perhaps unmatched by any other leader in history. For the
most part these were small lies, and their main effect was cumulative.
To believe in all of them was to accept the authority of a single man,
because to believe in all of them was to disbelieve everything else.
Once such personal authority was established, the president could treat
everyone else as the liars; he even had the power to turn someone from
a trusted adviser into a dishonest scoundrel with a single tweet. Yet
so long as he was unable to enforce some truly big lie, some fantasy
that created an alternative reality where people could live and die,
his pre-fascism fell short of the thing itself.

Image
A bust of George Washington had a Trump hat placed on it, as intruders
charged through the building, 2:34 p.m.Credit...Ashley Gilbertson for
The New York Times

Some of his lies were, admittedly, medium-size: that he was a
successful businessman; that Russia did not support him in 2016; that
Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Such medium-size lies were the standard
fare of aspiring authoritarians in the 21st century. In Poland the
right-wing party built a martyrdom cult around assigning blame to
political rivals for an airplane crash that killed the nation's
president. Hungary's Viktor Orban blames a vanishingly small number of
Muslim refugees [18]for his country's problems. But such claims were
not quite big lies; they stretched but did not rend what Hannah Arendt
called "the fabric of factuality."

One historical big lie discussed by Arendt is Joseph Stalin's
explanation of starvation in Soviet Ukraine in 1932-33. The state had
collectivized agriculture, then applied a series of punitive measures
to Ukraine that ensured millions would die. Yet the official line was
that the starving were provocateurs, agents of Western powers who hated
socialism so much they were killing themselves. A still grander
fiction, in Arendt's account, is Hitlerian anti-Semitism: the claims
that Jews ran the world, Jews were responsible for ideas that poisoned
German minds, Jews stabbed Germany in the back during the First World
War. Intriguingly, Arendt thought big lies work only in lonely minds;
their coherence substitutes for experience and companionship.

In November 2020, reaching millions of lonely minds through social
media, Trump told a lie that was dangerously ambitious: [19]that he had
won an election that in fact [20]he had lost. This lie was big in every
pertinent respect: not as big as "Jews run the world," but big enough.
The significance of the matter at hand was great: the right to rule the
most powerful country in the world and the efficacy and trustworthiness
of its succession procedures. The level of mendacity was profound. The
claim was not only wrong, but it was also made in bad faith, amid
unreliable sources. It challenged not just evidence but logic: Just how
could (and why would) an election have been rigged against a Republican
president but not against Republican senators and representatives?
Trump had to speak, absurdly, of a "Rigged (for President) Election."

Image
Outside the Capitol, the crowd cheered as rioters stampeded into the
building, 2:10 p.m.Credit...Ashley Gilbertson/VII, for The New York
Times

The force of a big lie resides in its demand that many other things
must be believed or disbelieved. To make sense of a world in which the
2020 presidential election was stolen requires distrust not only of
reporters and of experts but also of local, state and federal
government institutions, from poll workers to elected officials,
Homeland Security and all the way to the Supreme Court. It brings with
it, of necessity, a conspiracy theory: Imagine all the people who must
have been in on such a plot and all the people who would have had to
work on the cover-up.
The Presidential Transition

[21]Latest Updates

Updated
Jan. 10, 2021, 9:17 a.m. ET
* [22]Inaugural donor list includes tech companies.
* [23]Four days after a riot at the Capitol, the likelihood of the
House's impeaching Trump continues to grow.
* [24]Viral Capitol mob figures are arrested and charged with
involvement in the siege.

Trump's electoral fiction floats free of verifiable reality. It is
defended not so much by facts as by claims that someone else has made
some claims. The sensibility is that something must be wrong because I
feel it to be wrong, and I know others feel the same way. When
political leaders such as Ted Cruz or Jim Jordan spoke like this, what
they meant was: You believe my lies, which compels me to repeat them.
Social media provides an infinity of apparent evidence for any
conviction, especially one seemingly held by a president.

On the surface, a conspiracy theory makes its victim look strong: It
sees Trump as resisting the Democrats, the Republicans, the Deep State,
the pedophiles, the Satanists. More profoundly, however, it inverts the
position of the strong and the weak. Trump's focus on alleged
"irregularities" and "contested states" comes down to cities where
Black people live and vote. At bottom, the fantasy of fraud is that of
a crime committed by Black people against white people.

It's not just that electoral fraud by African-Americans against Donald
Trump never happened. It is that it is the very opposite of what
happened, in 2020 and in every American election. As always, Black
people [25]waited longer than others to vote and were more likely to
have their votes challenged. They were more likely to be [26]suffering
or dying from Covid-19, and less likely to be able to take time away
from work. The historical protection of their right to vote has been
removed by the [27]Supreme Court's 2013 ruling in Shelby County v.
Holder, and states have rushed to pass measures of a kind that
historically reduce voting by the poor and communities of color.

The claim that Trump was denied a win by fraud is a big lie not just
because it mauls logic, misdescribes the present and demands belief in
a conspiracy. It is a big lie, fundamentally, because it reverses the
moral field of American politics and the basic structure of American
history.

When Senator Ted Cruz announced his intention to challenge the
Electoral College vote, he invoked the Compromise of 1877, which
resolved the presidential election of 1876. Commentators pointed out
that this was no relevant precedent, since back then there really were
serious voter irregularities and there really was a stalemate in
Congress. For African-Americans, however, the seemingly gratuitous
reference led somewhere else. The Compromise of 1877 -- in which
Rutherford B. Hayes would have the presidency, provided that he
withdrew federal power from the South -- was the very arrangement
whereby African-Americans were driven from voting booths for the better
part of a century. It was effectively the end of Reconstruction, the
beginning of segregation, legal discrimination and Jim Crow. It is the
original sin of American history in the post-slavery era, our closest
brush with fascism so far.

If the reference seemed distant when Ted Cruz and 10 senatorial
colleagues released their statement on Jan. 2, it was brought very
close four days later, when Confederate flags were paraded through the
Capitol.

Image
A rioter during the mayhem at the Capitol. He punched the door after
being pepper-sprayed and forced out of the building, 3:45
p.m.Credit...Ashley Gilbertson/VII, for The New York Times

Some things have changed since 1877, of course. Back then, it was the
Republicans, or many of them, who supported racial equality; it was the
Democrats, the party of the South, who wanted apartheid. It was the
Democrats, back then, who called African-Americans' votes fraudulent,
and the Republicans who wanted them counted. This is now reversed. In
the past half century, since the Civil Rights Act, Republicans have
become a predominantly white party interested -- as Trump openly
declared -- in keeping the number of voters, and particularly the
number of Black voters, as low as possible. Yet the common thread
remains. Watching white supremacists among the people storming the
Capitol, it was easy to yield to the feeling that something pure had
been violated. It might be better to see the episode as part of a long
American argument about who deserves representation.

The Democrats, today, have become a coalition, one that does better
than Republicans with female and nonwhite voters and collects votes
from both labor unions and the college-educated. Yet it's not quite
right to contrast this coalition with a monolithic Republican Party.
Right now, the Republican Party is a coalition of two types of people:
those who would game the system (most of the politicians, some of the
voters) and those who dream of breaking it (a few of the politicians,
many of the voters). In January 2021, this was visible as the
difference between those Republicans who defended the present system on
the grounds that it favored them and those who tried to upend it.

In the four decades since the election of Ronald Reagan, Republicans
have overcome the tension between the gamers and the breakers by
governing in opposition to government, or by calling elections a
revolution (the Tea Party), or by claiming to oppose elites. The
breakers, in this arrangement, provide cover for the gamers, putting
forth an ideology that distracts from the basic reality that government
under Republicans is not made smaller but simply diverted to serve a
handful of interests.

At first, Trump seemed like a threat to this balance. His lack of
experience in politics and his open racism made him a very
uncomfortable figure for the party; his habit of continually telling
lies was initially found by prominent Republicans to be uncouth. Yet
after he won the presidency, his particular skills as a breaker seemed
to create a tremendous opportunity for the gamers. Led by the gamer in
chief, McConnell, they secured hundreds of federal judges and tax cuts
for the rich.

Trump was unlike other breakers in that he seemed to have no ideology.
His objection to institutions was that they might constrain him
personally. He intended to break the system to serve himself -- and
this is partly why he has failed. Trump is a charismatic politician and
inspires devotion not only among voters but among a surprising number
of lawmakers, but he has no vision that is greater than himself or what
his admirers project upon him. In this respect his pre-fascism fell
short of fascism: His vision never went further than a mirror. He
arrived at a truly big lie not from any view of the world but from the
reality that he might lose something.

Yet Trump never prepared a decisive blow. He lacked the support of the
military, some of whose leaders he had alienated. (No true fascist
would have made the mistake he did there, which was to openly love
foreign dictators; supporters convinced that the enemy was at home
might not mind, but those sworn to protect from enemies abroad did.)
Trump's secret police force, [28]the men carrying out snatch operations
in Portland, was violent but also small and ludicrous. Social media
proved to be a blunt weapon: Trump could announce his intentions on
Twitter, and white supremacists could plan their invasion of the
Capitol on Facebook or Gab. But the president, for all his lawsuits and
entreaties and threats to public officials, could not engineer a
situation that ended with the right people doing the wrong thing. Trump
could make some voters believe that he had won the 2020 election, but
he was unable to bring institutions along with his big lie. And he
could bring his supporters to Washington and send them on a rampage in
the Capitol, but none appeared to have any very clear idea of how this
was to work or what their presence would accomplish. It is hard to
think of a comparable insurrectionary moment, when a building of great
significance was seized, that involved so much milling around.

Image
A woman who had been pepper-sprayed leaned on the eastern door to the
Capitol's rotunda, 3:47 p.m.Credit...Ashley Gilbertson/VII, for The New
York Times

The lie outlasts the liar. The idea that Germany lost the First World
War in 1918 because of a Jewish "stab in the back" was 15 years old
when Hitler came to power. How will Trump's myth of victimhood function
in American life 15 years from now? And to whose benefit?

On Jan. 7, Trump called for a peaceful transition of power, implicitly
conceding that his putsch had failed. Even then, though, he repeated
and even amplified his electoral fiction: It was now a sacred cause for
which people had sacrificed. Trump's imagined stab in the back will
live on chiefly thanks to its endorsement by members of Congress. In
November and December 2020, Republicans repeated it, giving it a life
it would not otherwise have had. In retrospect, it now seems as though
the last shaky compromise between the gamers and the breakers was the
idea that Trump should have every chance to prove that wrong had been
done to him. That position implicitly endorsed the big lie for Trump
supporters who were inclined to believe it. It failed to restrain
Trump, whose big lie only grew bigger.

The breakers and the gamers then saw a different world ahead, where the
big lie was either a treasure to be had or a danger to be avoided. The
breakers had no choice but to rush to be first to claim to believe in
it. Because the breakers Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz must compete to claim
the brimstone and bile, the gamers were forced to reveal their own
hand, and the division within the Republican coalition became visible
on Jan. 6. The invasion of the Capitol only reinforced this division.
To be sure, a few senators withdrew their objections, but Cruz and
Hawley moved forward anyway, along with six other senators. More than
100 representatives doubled down on the big lie. Some, like Matt Gaetz,
even added their own flourishes, such as the claim that the mob was led
not by Trump's supporters but by his opponents.

Trump is, for now, the martyr in chief, the high priest of the big lie.
He is the leader of the breakers, at least in the minds of his
supporters. By now, the gamers do not want Trump around. Discredited in
his last weeks, he is useless; shorn of the obligations of the
presidency, he will become embarrassing again, much as he was in 2015.
Unable to provide cover for their gamesmanship, he will be irrelevant
to their daily purposes. But the breakers have an even stronger reason
to see Trump disappear: It is impossible to inherit from someone who is
still around. Seizing Trump's big lie might appear to be a gesture of
support. In fact it expresses a wish for his political death.
Transforming the myth from one about Trump to one about the nation will
be easier when he is out of the way.

As Cruz and Hawley may learn, to tell the big lie is to be owned by it.
Just because you have sold your soul does not mean that you have driven
a hard bargain. Hawley shies from no level of hypocrisy; the son of a
banker, educated at Stanford University and Yale Law School, he
denounces elites. Insofar as Cruz was thought to have a principle, it
was that of states' rights, which Trump's calls to action brazenly
violated. A joint statement Cruz issued about the senators' challenge
to the vote nicely captured the post-truth aspect of the whole: It
never alleged that there was fraud, only that there were allegations of
fraud. Allegations of allegations, allegations all the way down.

Image
A mixture of tear gas discharged by police and fire-extinguisher
residue discharged by pro-Trump extremists hung in the air of the
Rotunda as the crowd milled about, 2:38 p.m.Credit...Ashley
Gilbertson/VII, for The New York Times

The big lie requires commitment. When Republican gamers do not exhibit
enough of that, Republican breakers call them "RINOs": Republicans in
name only. This term once suggested a lack of ideological commitment.
It now means an unwillingness to throw away an election. The gamers, in
response, close ranks around the Constitution and speak of principles
and traditions. The breakers must all know (with the possible exception
of the Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville) that they are participating in
a sham, but they will have an audience of tens of millions who do not.

If Trump remains present in American political life, he will surely
repeat his big lie incessantly. Hawley and Cruz and the other breakers
share responsibility for where this leads. Cruz and Hawley seem to be
running for president. Yet what does it mean to be a candidate for
office and denounce voting? If you claim that the other side has
cheated, and your supporters believe you, they will expect you to cheat
yourself. By defending Trump's big lie on Jan. 6, they set a precedent:
A Republican presidential candidate who loses an election should be
appointed anyway by Congress. Republicans in the future, at least
breaker candidates for president, will presumably have a Plan A, to win
and win, and a Plan B, to lose and win. No fraud is necessary; only
allegations that there are allegations of fraud. Truth is to be
replaced by spectacle, facts by faith.

Trump's coup attempt of 2020-21, like other failed coup attempts, is a
warning for those who care about the rule of law and a lesson for those
who do not. His pre-fascism revealed a possibility for American
politics. For a coup to work in 2024, the breakers will require
something that Trump never quite had: an angry minority, organized for
nationwide violence, ready to add intimidation to an election. Four
years of amplifying a big lie just might get them this. To claim that
the other side stole an election is to promise to steal one yourself.
It is also to claim that the other side deserves to be punished.

Informed observers inside and outside government agree that right-wing
white supremacism is the greatest terrorist threat to the United
States. Gun sales in 2020 hit an astonishing high. History shows that
political violence follows when prominent leaders of major political
parties openly embrace paranoia.

Our big lie is typically American, wrapped in our odd electoral system,
depending upon our particular traditions of racism. Yet our big lie is
also structurally fascist, with its extreme mendacity, its
conspiratorial thinking, its reversal of perpetrators and victims and
its implication that the world is divided into us and them. To keep it
going for four years courts terrorism and assassination.

When that violence comes, the breakers will have to react. If they
embrace it, they become the fascist faction. The Republican Party will
be divided, at least for a time. One can of course imagine a dismal
reunification: A breaker candidate loses a narrow presidential election
in November 2024 and cries fraud, the Republicans win both houses of
Congress and rioters in the street, educated by four years of the big
lie, demand what they see as justice. Would the gamers stand on
principle if those were the circumstances of Jan. 6, 2025?

To be sure, this moment is also a chance. It is possible that a divided
Republican Party might better serve American democracy; that the
gamers, separated from the breakers, might start to think of policy as
a way to win elections. It is very likely that the Biden-Harris
administration will have an easier first few months than expected;
perhaps obstructionism will give way, at least among a few Republicans
and for a short time, to a moment of self-questioning. Politicians who
want Trumpism to end have a simple way forward: Tell the truth about
the election.

America will not survive the big lie just because a liar is separated
from power. It will need a thoughtful repluralization of media and a
commitment to facts as a public good. The racism structured into every
aspect of the coup attempt is a call to heed our own history. Serious
attention to the past helps us to see risks but also suggests future
possibility. We cannot be a democratic republic if we tell lies about
race, big or small. Democracy is not about minimizing the vote nor
ignoring it, neither a matter of gaming nor of breaking a system, but
of accepting the equality of others, heeding their voices and counting
their votes.
__________________________________________________________________

Timothy Snyder is the Levin professor of history at Yale University and
the author of histories of political atrocity including "Bloodlands"
and "Black Earth," as well as the book "On Tyranny," on America's turn
toward authoritarianism. His most recent book is "Our Malady," a memoir
of his own near-fatal illness reflecting on the relationship between
health and freedom. Ashley Gilbertson is an Australian photojournalist
with the VII Photo Agency living in New York. Gilbertson has covered
migration and conflict internationally for over 20 years.