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We Want Them Infected |
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| For Trump, those who die from the
coronavirus are “superfluous people”, or in his mob style
vernacular: they are nothing but “losers”. |
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| By
Debby Long |
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 “Totalitarianism strives not toward despotic
rule over men, but toward a system in which men are superfluous”
- Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
I’ve wondered why, of all the political advantages that could
have redounded to the benefit of Donald Trump had he decided to
fight the coronavirus, he chose, instead, to let ‘er rip. Rip
though red states and blue states; rip through his cult of
deadheads at his demented rallies, and through his own
Republican party – to let ‘er rip like there was no tomorrow.
How does that make sense for any politician, and particularly
one who needed those deadheads and those zombie Republicans in
order to win a second term in office? Why, in fact, did he
choose to delay stimulus checks for desperate Americans in red
states and blue states? He could have literally snatched victory
from the jaws of defeat in the November election had he done so.
Instead, he chose what was natural for him; he chose “Homo
homini lupus” - a man is a wolf to another man. It was as if
Donald Trump were the arsonist dictator, setting America on fire
just to watch it burn to the ground.
Maybe he sees the victims of this pandemic as, what political
theorist, Hannah Arendt, described as “superfluous people”. Then
it does, indeed, begin to make sense. In Arendt’s, 1951
publication: “The Origins of Totalitarianism” she writes:
“Totalitarian government always transformed classes into masses,
supplanted the party system, not by one-party dictatorships, but
by a mass movement, shifted the center of power from the army to
the police, and established a foreign policy openly directed
toward world domination”. -chapter 13, page 461.
(https://urpdfs.com/the-origins-of-totalitarianism-pdf/)
For Trump, those who die from the coronavirus are “superfluous
people”, or in his mob style vernacular: they are nothing but
“losers”. But now as he slinks off to Mar-a-Largo after losing
the election, his trademark scowl won’t be because Republican
ideology has been repudiated; it is because his personal
worldview has been demolished. He is a totalitarian loser. His
fictitious family coat-of-arms bears the phrase: “Numquam
Concedere” (Never Concede), but his actions trumpet: “Anus
Protectus”. Instead of world domination, Trump is reduced to
kicking sand in the faces of his club members at Mar-a-Largo and
pardoning his RICO buddies along with his entire nuclear family.
But while Donald Trump will likely be remembered, at best, as a
totalitarian wannabe, what will the Republican Party be
remembered as? It appears that the clammy Tom Cotton has his
hopes linked to Donald Trump’s zero-sum ideology, and certainly
the smarmy Ted Cruz continues to ooze those very same
aspirations. One asks: “Where do these guys come from”?
These men are not anomalies. They are Republicans through and
through. While we observe the environmental consequences of
Republican deregulation of industrialized farming techniques,
(https://kissthegroundmovie.com/), and the natural state of
affairs when government becomes small enough to be “drowned in a
bathtub” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast, what
we are seeing is a garbled, but predictable extension of
Neoliberalism. And Donald Trump is the hood ornament of modern
Republicanism. He is the Ubu Roi (King of Turds) of Alfred
Jarry’s 1896 play. And Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, and Tom Cotton
are the promulgators of Jarry’s “science of imaginary
solutions”.
As Hannah Arendt wrote in 1951:
“The totalitarian attempt to make men superfluous reflects the
experience of modern masses of their superfluity on an
overcrowded earth. The world of the dying, in which men are
taught they are superfluous through a way of life in which
punishment is meted out without connection with crime, in which
exploitation is practiced without profit, and where work is
performed without product, is a place where senselessness is
daily produced anew. Yet, within the framework of the
totalitarian ideology, nothing could be more sensible and
logical; if the inmates are vermin, it is logical that they
should be killed by poison gas; if they are degenerate, they
should not be allowed to contaminate the population; if they
have “slave-like souls” (Himmler), no one should waste his time
trying to re-educate them.” - chapter 12, page 457.
Do American families really like the two and three jobs they
have to work just to barely maintain the middle-class life their
parents enjoyed in the 1960s and 70s with only one job? What if
the Neoliberalism that has guided Republican thought for decades
succeeds in making us a “superfluity on an overcrowded earth”?
What if the Republicans retain the Senate or wipe out Democratic
wins entirely in the 2022 midterms? Will we just have to get
used to the irrelevant government they have sought for decades
to sculpt from American democracy?
We Americans are exhausted as we run as fast as we can in order
to just stay in the same place we were in 1970. But we never
knew how expendable we were until Donald Trump became our
president.
image: Masao Tsuruoka’s “Heavy Hand”, 1949 |
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