[Draft: not for quotation or sharing publicly; comments, suggestions, and criticisms welcome][1]
As I wonder about why so many Americans voted for Trump, my mind often goes to the story of my mother’s family. They fled Germany in the late 1930s. My grandfather was Jewish, married to a gentile, trying to assimilate; he tried to keep his Jewish background quiet, even from some of his own children.
One of those who didn’t know was my uncle, who, according to family lore, wanted to join the local Hitlerjugend. He was a teenager. Had my grandfather not had the foresight to move the family to the US before the war, things would not have gone well.
It’s not hard to imagine why a teenager would have been attracted to the Hitler Youth: outdoor activities, friends, a sense of being part of the latest thing, of cheering for one’s team. It likely seemed alluring, thrilling. One can’t expect a thirteen year old to sort through the political implications of such things.
The case of my mother, my uncle’s older sister, is a bit more complicated. She did know about her father’s ethnicity. In the 1970s, when I was a teenager myself on a hitchhiking tour through Germany, I remember visiting one of my mother’s childhood friends. She showed me a black and white photo of very cute teenage German girls marching in uniforms through a quaint rural village with thatch-roofed cottages, on a camping trip. At the front of the group was a girl in pigtails carrying a large banner with a swastika. It was my mother. My mother’s childhood friend looked at the photo over my shoulder, flashed a hint of a smile and said, “Damals war es noch nicht so schlecht.“ (Back then it wasn’t yet so bad.)
Apparently, my mother had been part of what I now understand was a Nazi-adjacent youth group, I think called Volksbund für das Deutschtum im Ausland. It was rare that she talked about it, but when she did it seemed her memories were detailed, that there was more there than she spoke of.
I think I understand why folks on social media express fury at Trump voters or call them stupid, but that response is not available to me. My family’s story makes it impossible to think in binary terms, in terms of bad people vs. good people. For me, the question of why so many people would fall for a Trump or a Putin or an Orban doesn’t start with racism or hatred or ignorance or blind allegiance. It starts with the question of what path people follow to get there, of the allures or fears that allow them to end up thinking, perhaps fleetingly, “it’s not so bad.” It’s not so bad, say, to vote for racists.
Immigrating to the US, and the full reality of the Nazi regime and the unimaginable death and suffering it caused, ensured that my mother and her siblings moved away from whatever teenage enthusiasms they might have had. My uncle as far as I know grew into a New Yorker-reading, fairly liberal American without much taste for politics, and my mother became a Quaker, participating in the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam war movements before either was fashionable. I was raised to believe that the arc of history bent towards justice, and as recently as the Obama administration I still had faith that was the case.
Yet here we are. A new edition of Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism has come out, and The Authoritarian Personality is selling briskly. Whatever you want to call it, it’s back and it’s armed with nuclear weapons.
I don’t have an answer about what to do. But I think whatever solutions we try need to be mindful of how popular and alluring authoritarianism has always been, even to the educated and the comfortable. What makes me despair about people like Elon Musk, JD Vance, and Marco Rubio is not just the evil of their current actions but how easily they drifted, over the course of a few years, from being serious critics of Trump to fully embracing his movement. What’s scary about them is not how unique but how typical they are. They are such ordinarily malleable men.
People’s malleability is a problem for most theories of democracy. If there are ever going to be elections again in the US, winning them will involve figuring out how to appeal to people who voted for Trump. We can’t assume they’ll grow out of it, or that when faced with realities like collapsing stock markets or imprisoned innocents they’ll wake up en masse and see the errors of their ways. Truth, facts, and science are essential but not enough. Whatever democracy is, in any of its actually existing forms, it is not a state that, once achieved, is self-sustaining.
The rapid transformation over the past decade of what is considered legitimate in the U.S. is a stark reminder that people don’t do what they do simply because of pre-existing attitudes or interests: they develop attitudes and interests in interaction with their social worlds, weaving meanings for themselves out of the swirl of narratives around them.
There are teenagers throughout the US right now who are in various ways in positions similar to my mother and her brother in 1930s small town Germany. Young people who want to belong, searching for friends and meaning, uncertain about their place in the world. Young people who don’t fully know who they are and are seeking answers. Whatever else we do, we need to provide them a better way forward.
[1] Most of this is filtered through memories of past conversations with people who are no longer with us. I am trying to do what I can to verify these stories and welcome thoughts from family members who have different or similar memories. But the likelihood is that everything here will always be plausible, but not provable.