Goose-steppers in the name of freedom: The nonsensical cult that now rules America

Credo quia absurdum: "I believe because it is absurd." This is the common paraphrase of an argument by Tertullian, an early church father. It has been repeated through the centuries in various forms by religious apologists, and exemplifies a thought-terminating cliché: an idea that is ridiculous on its face, but stated in such a boldly counterintuitive and in-your-face manner that arguing against the proposition is futile. 

It may be an exaggeration, but hardly an extreme one, to say that virtually all religions, ideologies, worldviews and self-help philosophies are by definition absurd, containing every kind of unprovable axiom, self-contradictory tenet, illogicality and appeal to blind faith. They only gain a semblance of self-evident truth through age and familiarity, as the legend of John Frum illustrates.

About a century ago on the Pacific island of Vanuatu, a messiah cult centered on a mythical figure named John Frum, who would bring riches and happiness, rooted itself among the local population. It gained strength in World War II, when Allied air forces established landing fields on the island. The air crews brought desirable goods or “cargo,” much of which was exchanged to the islanders for their labor in building the airfields. In 1945, the seemingly heaven-sent outsiders departed, along with their novel goods.

After the war, the cargo cult became a tradition, with adherents even building mock airstrips to induce John Frum to return from the skies with cargo. According to one anecdote, an anthropologist questioned a local chief on the implausibility of Frum’s return. He replied that he and his people had been waiting only 50 years; you Christians, on the other hand, had been waiting in vain for thousands. 

And why, indeed, is the idea of a miraculous arrival of World War II-era C-47 transport aircraft loaded with military rations, Spam and cartons of Lucky Strike Greens any less believable than virgin births or resurrections from the dead? Or, for that matter, Karl Marx’s utopian communism or Friedrich Hayek’s perfectly self-equilibrating free market?

A belief system that may have the highest proportion of logical inconsistencies, irrational dogma, failed prophecies and broken promises of all major worldviews is one now on the upswing in the Western world. Why it should do so now, in a manner similar to the witch delusions that periodically swept medieval Europe or the Dutch tulip mania, has been much debated. Why it should infect nations that are prosperous, ostensibly well educated, and with civil societies that have supposedly developed beyond tribal superstition is a mystery that has never been explained.

I am referring to extreme right-wing or fascist ideology, which for all its local varieties has a common core of beliefs or, more accurately, attitudes and poses. In the multiparty systems of Europe, it is usually represented by recently created parties to the right of traditional conservative parties. In the U.S. two-party system, it has swallowed one of the two existing parties, usurping the role of conservatism and exploiting traditional party loyalties.

Thus it is, in the United States at least, whether through merger or hostile takeover, that there is now no meaningful distinction between conservative, far-right and fascist; they are also identified with the Republican Party. I shall use all these terms interchangeably, because they have become synonymous. 

Some former followers of the movement (often in organizations like the Lincoln Project) claim that that the current dogmas of the GOP are a betrayal of “true” conservatism. This is a fundamental error: Ideologies are not platonic essences, existing unchanged beyond time and space. Like the biological process of life, they evolve according to need, opportunity and contingency. Conservatism coevolved with the opportunism of its leaders and the character of the American people who voted for its politicians. 

Nevertheless, American conservatism would not have become what it is now (authoritarianism or fascism or Trumpism, or however political scientists choose to describe it) unless it was capable of developing in that direction, unless it already contained the seed of its present form in its ideological DNA. And unless it had a receptive audience.

What are the properties of conservative ideology under Trump, and how is it that their logical inconsistencies and self-contradictions make them not less, but more attractive to American conservatism’s followers? The following are a few of the movement’s more prominent ideological features:

Exaggerated but brittle nationalism

If there is one thing Republicans want you to know, it’s how much they bleed red, white and blue for America. None of their gatherings is complete without dozens if not hundreds of American flags, attendees sporting kitschy flag-themed costumes (some veering close to flag desecration), Uncle Sam suits or Lady Liberty getups. It has been thus since the McCarthy era of the 1950s and even before; the Republican business coalition opposing Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal wrapped itself in the flag. 

Republicans have for some time claimed an exclusive franchise on love of country; those not in their club they consider as not “real” Americans, or as un-American. Constructive critiques of major disasters like Vietnam and Iraq they will excoriate as “aid and comfort to the enemy.” Media exposés of incompetent and dishonest military commanders like Gen. William Westmoreland became, for conservatives, a kind of Dreyfus affair: a patriotic officer persecuted by the liberal establishment intent on glorifying the communists while dragging an honorable soldier’s reputation through the mud.

How does this history of hyper-patriotism coexist with the Republicans’ revered, practically deified leader, Donald Trump, calling America "a garbage can for the world," a global "laughing stock" or a "third world country"? How does it square with a Republican president playing the sycophantic beta-sidekick to Vladimir Putin, whose hostility to the United States requires no underlining? If a Democratic president talked or acted like that, the cries of “treason” and relentless media and congressional scrutiny would sweep him out of office.

The answer is that Republicans’ endless harping on patriotism has been a performative camouflage and effective inoculation against un-American acts. Richard Nixon’s presidency was the first I recall in which wearing an enameled American flag lapel pin became the way to demonstrate you were a real American; yet candidate Nixon, by colluding with foreign interests to torpedo the 1968 Paris peace talks, almost certainly committed treason. 

The America First Movement of 1939-41, largely (though not exclusively) a conservative movement ostensibly designed to keep America out of World War II, was to a considerable extent steered by Nazi interests, using prominent conservative figures like Charles Lindbergh as stalking horses.

The most “national” political elements being the first to scuttle their own country’s interests on behalf of foreign powers has numerous foreign analogs. Once the German Army broke through the French defenses in 1940, much of the officer corps, business elite and conservative political class became more interested in seeking a quick armistice with the Germans, and making common cause to suppress an (imagined) uprising by the left in Paris, than in resisting the Wehrmacht invaders. One sees similar behavior in Trump, JD Vance and congressional Republicans: They perceive themselves as having more in common with Putin and other anti-woke caudillos like Viktor Orbán than with the majority of their own citizens.

This behavior is almost endemic in ultra-nationalist groups. Norwegian right-extremist Vidkun Quisling’s own name became a synonym for traitor during the Nazi occupation of his country; Anton Mussert held the same position in the Netherlands during World War II, as did Léon Degrelle in Belgium. Even today, several of the current far-right parties in Europe receive covert or overt assistance from Moscow. 

The peculiar relationship to their country that right-wing extremists claim to love so fervently is analogous to the “love” an abusive spouse has for his partner: a jealous and insecure sense of exclusive ownership rather than real affection. Should the partner entertain ideas other than what the abusive spouse mandates, the latter will seek to hurt or destroy what he claims to love. 

Surprisingly, the commentariat has seldom acknowledged, let alone analyzed, the neurosis of showy patriotism concealing hidden hostility to one’s country, despite a popular film, “The Manchurian Candidate,” that described its essentials more than 60 years ago.

Populism: Instrument of rule by billionaires

Populism is one of the most misunderstood, misused and question-begging political descriptors in use today. Nominally left-of-center commentators like Thomas Frank see it as a progressive phenomenon of the common people rebelling against elite, oligarchic rule, a grassroots movement that only through the greed and moral blindness of the liberal establishment is hijacked by demagogues like Donald Trump. Ralph Nader has even claimed populism as the vehicle for the right and the left to transcend partisan politics and throw the moneychangers from the temple.

At its beginnings in the 1880s and ‘90s, populism was a movement by farmers, mainly in the Great Plains and the South, to overturn the virtual debt peonage they were kept in by the banks, railroads and grain wholesalers. Progressives have celebrated what they see as the beginnings of an alliance between white and Black farmers and sharecroppers to transcend the barriers of race and work for a common goal.

This did happen on occasion, but most populist organizations in Southern states remained strictly segregated. The case of Tom Watson of Georgia, perhaps the most famous populist of the era, is instructive in foreshadowing the movement’s later course. Originally, his views on forging a biracial political organization were liberal for a Southern politician. But after losing several elections, he changed course, becoming an arch-segregationist and, eventually, anti-Catholic and antisemitic. Even his economic stand became more conservative, jettisoning prime populist issues like government grain storage and currency reform while warning against socialist infiltration of the populist movement.

From its beginnings, populism demonstrated a fatal tendency to degenerate from progressive and inclusive positions to reactionary and exclusionary ones. Even setting aside the bigotry, its worldview embraced a futile, nostalgic Jeffersonian agrarian myth that was long obsolete even by the late 19th century. Industrialism was an established fact; it could potentially be reformed by progressive legislation such as that championed by contemporary figures like Robert La Follette, but it could not be shouted out of existence by populist demagoguery.

Perhaps the last great American populist movement with left-of-center policy content was that of Huey Long and his “share our wealth” crusade in the early 1930s. His positions on education, infrastructure and taxation were clearly progressive and redistributive, but his dictatorial style, contempt for the rule of law and cult of personality were of a piece with the European fascist movements of that decade. 

Possibly because the New Deal and the early post-World War II economic consensus mitigated the worst economic disparities, left-wing populism has ceased to be a political force in the last 75 years. Instead, populism has become a movement driven by the extreme right, whereby social division and scapegoating are camouflaged as something else. 

In the early 1950s, Joseph McCarthy dressed up demagogic witch hunts against literally anyone he chose (even Gen. George C. Marshall) as legitimate national security. Later, George Wallace’s common-man routine was thinly disguised race-baiting. Ross Perot’s and Pat Buchanan’s presidential bids in the 1990s centered on the foreign trade imbalance, but what they offered was more xenophobia than a rational plan to fix the trade deficit. 

By the 2010s, with the rise of the Tea Party (a “grassroots” movement astroturfed by Koch brothers money), populism as a campaign strategy had captured the Republican Party. With or without Trump, the GOP will always showcase populist themes, because it is the perfect vehicle to put a regressive, pro-billionaire agenda over on the chumps. 

Every historical trait of American populism — its anti-intellectualism, xenophobia, distrust of expertise, hatred of so-called elites, rural and small-town mythologizing, suspicion of institutions, paranoid-conspiratorial world view, unfocused anger and faith in panaceas — fits the psychology of the current Republican base like a glove, at least when its characteristics are adapted to the schizophrenic quality of contemporary American culture.

“Elites” remains a snarl word in America, but it no longer means a wealthy oligarch exploiting the common people. It can now represent a librarian, adjunct professor or social worker, all of whom make little more than McDonald’s wages, but are the cultural villains of the great Republican morality play. Conversely, a manager making well into six figures and living in a wealthy suburb can demonstrate his credentials as a real American by growing a JD Vance-style beard and tooling around in a $70,000 pickup.

Whatever the wishful thinking of the Franks and Naders about a left-right people’s coalition, in living memory populism has been a stratagem of the wealthy, using cultural dog whistles to keep large numbers of non-wealthy people from thinking about who makes the big money, and who pays, while distracting them with chimeras like the existential threat of the dozen or so transgender athletes in the country.

It had to be thus, because populism is liberal democracy’s sinister cousin, bearing just enough resemblance to legitimate self-government to be deceptively dangerous. It proclaims that the confused desires of a supposed majority constitute Rousseau’s “general will,” and must not be weakened by intermediary institutions like legislatures or independent courts. But given the logistical difficulty of direct rule by millions of citizens, it is nearly inevitable that some charismatic demagogue will claim to embody the crowd’s general will. 

And so, in places like Turkey, Hungary and the United States, an ambitious demagogue can establish and strengthen dictatorial rule by deceiving the people that he, as their champion, is exercising their will, not his own.

Competence and the reality principle 

In the 1960s, the waning days of America’s liberal reform movement, Republicans presented themselves as the flinty-eyed bearers of realism. Medicare, then a brand-new program, was simply unaffordable. Urban violence was presented as proof that antipoverty programs didn’t work. Erstwhile liberals like Daniel Patrick Moynihan began flirting with conservatism, in his case proclaiming that the best antipoverty project for Black urban residents would be the government’s “benign neglect.”

And on it went. Irving Kristol, the newly-converted conservative, defined a neoconservative as “a liberal who has been mugged by reality.” Republicans duly fashioned themselves as the Daddy Party, in contrast to the Democrats’ unrealistic and emotional sentimentalism. When the Gary Hart and Paul Tsongas presidential campaigns road-tested Democratic Leadership Council thematics, it was said that their supporters believed in “heart left, wallet right,” one of those clever-sounding but nonsensical memes that pollute American discourse.

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Over time, the constant repetition of these themes (embraced even by Democrats like Hart, Tsongas and Bill Clinton) achieved a kind of cultural hegemony affecting popular thinking. For decades, Americans have consistently believed that Republicans are better on the economy than Democrats. 

Republican performance in office is a different matter. Multiple sources make clear that economic growth has been substantially better under Democratic presidents than their Republican counterparts. The New York Times estimated in 2021 that since 1933, average yearly GDP growth was 4.6 percent under Democratic administrations and 2.4 percent under Republicans. Are the American people blind to these facts? Apparently so. 

Far from operating according to the reality principle, Republican economics, like so many of their positions, is based on magical thinking. Their stridently held belief that tax cuts produce more revenue, a notion dating from the late 1970s, should have been a tipoff: By that reasoning, reducing taxes to zero should produce infinite revenue. But teaching math never was the strong suit of the American educational system. Nor, apparently, was elementary logic: How many people voted for Trump believing that foreign companies, rather than they themselves, would pay the tariffs on imports?

Perhaps it’s because the public so readily gives a pass to Republicans that we have endured scandals like Iran/Contra and the invasion of Iraq, affairs in which dishonesty and illegality have been conjoined with epic incompetence. These episodes can cause brief public discomfiture with the GOP, but never lasting damage. Americans will forgive criminal incompetence as long as you virtue-signal your “values.”

With the advent of Donald Trump, the reality principle, along with competent officials capable of apprehending reality, are in such short supply that one could swear appointees are selected for being the worst possible choices. What better person to put in charge of the armed forces and its 4,000 nuclear weapons than a loutish drunk? Who better to supervise public health services than a paranoid, conspiracy-mongering anti-vaxxer who is, by his own admission, brain-damaged by a parasitic worm? Every single Cabinet officer appears fanatically dedicated to crippling the function of the agency he or she oversees.

The tragicomic hallucination that you see unfolding every day, wherein ostensible adults discuss secret war plans in hackable social media texts replete with emojis, exclamation points and lols, is what the American people freely chose. Decades of anti-Washington bombast, denunciations of expertise in favor of “common-sense solutions,” anti-intellectualism and faith in tough-guy bromides, à la “Dirty Harry,” have brought us to a disaster that causes intelligent foreigners to blink with astonishment. 

This sad spectacle is the culmination of inexorable logic: Dictatorship thrives on incompetence. Hannah Arendt outlined this logic 75 years ago:

Total domination does not allow for free initiative in any field of life, for any activity that is not entirely predictable. Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.

Freedom and the Führerprinzip

The other thing Republicans want you to know, besides their überpatriotism, is how much they would crawl over broken glass for freedom. Republican politicians work assiduously to shoehorn the word “freedom” into the titles of their legislative proposals, such as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, means the freedom of employers to impose religious tests on employees.

As a former House of Representatives staff member, I recall with some bemusement the 2003 edict by the chairman of the House Administration Committee, Bob Ney, that in the House cafeterias, French fries would henceforth be labeled “freedom fries” in light of French President Jacques Chirac bailing on George W. Bush’s Middle East crusade. I did feel some sense of cosmic justice after Ney’s resignation in 2006, when he pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy and making false statements in relation to the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal.

For Republicans, freedom does not mean, as Epictetus said, that “No man is free who is not master of himself” — in other words, that true freedom comes from within, through self-control and a sense of limits and propriety. Rather, it denotes licentiousness and lack of control, the actions of a toddler gorging himself on chocolate until he is sick. 

In the Republican world, freedom means going unvaccinated in a pandemic in order to give the finger to the nanny state. Who cares if you infect some physically vulnerable person who might die? It means contesting every conceivable issue, such as energy-efficient lightbulbs, in the name of freedom — freedom to squander energy, apparently.

This frenzied devotion to freedom in its most perverted form, a kind of Promethean exultation in unbridled will and desire, sits in weird juxtaposition with a cultish, masochistic worship of leader figures. What has arisen in the GOP is an uncanny analog to the Führerprinzip in Nazi Germany, the principle that all authority flows from a single leader, and that absolute obedience is owed to him alone rather than to the state itself or a constitution.

The humiliating self-abasement before Donald Trump of everyone in the Republican cosmos, from the souvenir-bedecked MAGA supporter at a Trump rally to Megyn Kelly thanking Trump for insulting her to pathetic sycophants like Lindsey Graham groveling in the Senate chamber — in comparison to whom Caligula’s horse would be a senatorial improvement — is often remarked upon but too little understood.

This strange dichotomy between licentious freedom and slavish obedience is an implicit bargain between Trump and his followers. In surrendering their dignity and self-respect by kowtowing to Trump, he gives them something in return: a permission slip to break the moral code of civilized society. 

Formerly, if one behaved monstrously, one was judged accordingly. Now, one can act as crassly as one likes without feeling shame and social opprobrium, because everything is done in a higher political cause. It is a pantomime of the unpleasant behavior of religious fanatics who believe their boorishness is sanctified by an all-powerful deity, and one more example of the strange combination of psychological opposites roiling within today’s conservative follower. 

They are goose-steppers in the name of their own absolute freedom.

The "culture of life" — and the death instinct

Since the 1970s, obsessive opposition to abortion has been a catechism among conservatives. This, they insist you should know, is integral to the conservative culture of life, and their ideological justification for the claim that everything they do is good for families.

Beneath the surface, all is not as it seems. The Republican Party has fought tooth-and-nail against neonatal care, subsidized child care and guaranteed maternity leave, policies embedded in law in most developed countries. The results are indisputable: The U.S. has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the developed world, and it is worse in states with entrenched Republican majorities.

This applies at the other end of the demographic scale as well: Americans have a pathetically low life expectancy for a developed country. Partly this is a result of atrocious elder care policies (you must divest your assets and become a pauper before receiving Medicaid assistance in a nursing home), but also from “deaths of despair,” the early deaths, mainly of middle-aged white men, from suicide, drug overdose and risky behavior, a phenomenon more prevalent in red states. Some culture of life. 

One cannot demonstrate this like a mathematical proof, but this carelessness, or callousness, about human life seems linked to fatalistic, even nihilistic attitudes. Take as an example the Trump voter in 2016 who told an interviewer he chose that candidate not out of any expectation of improvement; he voted with his middle finger. Pollsters have noted the frequency with which respondents claim they just want to "burn it all down," not troubling themselves with what will happen to the social infrastructure that supports their very existence.

More convincing evidence of this mindset came with the COVID pandemic, which saw countless people endangering their own lives and those of others by engaging in deliberately risky behavior. One pathetic example whom I knew (if only slightly) spent all his energies decrying COVID as a hoax while refusing vaccination; even breathing his last, on a ventilator, he denied the reality of the virus.

This kind of self-destructive lunacy received theological sanction in the pages of First Things, a right-wing religious publication that fancies itself a bearer of the thought of Thomas Aquinas, but comes off more like Torquemada. In 2020, its editor, R.R. Reno, wrote "Say No to Death's Dominion"; contrary to the title, he argues that death should be embraced, and that those who save lives through medical science are in league with Satan. He never quite gets around to addressing the grief that people might feel if a family member dies to prove some asinine theological point; he considers that to be "disastrous sentimentalism." 

Reno is a moral nihilist, as are the millions of religious fundamentalists (a large part of Trump’s base) who believe in the Apocalypse. If the end is at hand, why worry too scrupulously over a life or two, or, for that matter, over the functioning of society?

While the mainstream media coyly continues to describe the Trump regime’s actions in traditionally anodyne terms (a CNN headline misleadingly states that the administration is “overhauling” an agency, not dismantling it), intelligent Americans should take its behavior at face value and apply the simplest explanation, consistent with the nihilism of conservative philosophy.

Thus, gutting the Department of Health and Human Services’ infectious disease research and forcing out the FDA’s chief vaccine expert is exactly what it looks like: an effort to see that more Americans die. A similar result will certainly come from cutting $12 billion from state health service grants. 

Why did the regime eliminate the terrorist database at the Department of Homeland Security? Given that most domestic terrorism cases have a right-wing motivation, they must want to see more terrorism: It is useful in cowing the rest of the population. As for any other terrorist incident, it can serve as an excuse for martial law. We can similarly conclude that wiped-out towns and lives ruined by natural disasters are the intended results of slashing FEMA.

We are barely into the third month of Trump’s gangster regime. Where we will be after four years of this destructive revolution of nihilism I will leave to the reader’s imagination. 

The sleep of reason breeds monsters

Diehard patriots who betray their country; anti-elitists who worship billionaires; cold-eyed realists living in a fantasy world; rugged individualists fawning over their divine emperor; affirmers of life who embrace death. American conservatism is such a muddle of contradictions that one barely knows where to begin. How did it become so popular?

Umberto Eco, in his essay “Ur-Fascism,” said that fascism (now basically synonymous with current American conservatism) was syncretic: It incorporated disparate and even contradictory themes, and that was part of its appeal. It offered something to everyone, and a person attracted to one position would simply ignore the position that he didn’t care for.

There is much truth in that; people are notoriously sloppy and unsystematic thinkers. But there is a deeper reason. Humans are not just inattentive; they are irrational in a profoundly emotional sense. They desire contradictory things at different times — and even simultaneously. Furthermore, seemingly opposed values may not be opposites at all, but merely two sides of the same coin.

Foreign journalists remarked that the German people would greet Hitler’s motorcade with wild, almost hysterical enthusiasm; their beaming faces showed something like real love for their leader. That love, though, was the obverse side of their hatred for Jews; one could not be without the other, because one enabled the other. A conservative’s professed adoration of the unborn is precisely what compensates for and excuses his fetish for automatic weapons and advocacy of vigilante violence.

Very well, people are irrational. But what will happen when Trump’s policies really begin to bite? I have discussed this with several political pundits who say that when Grandma’s Social Security check fails to arrive, or when the Iraq vet finds the VA clinic closed, or when Bubba in Pascagoula is sitting in the wreckage of his house with no FEMA on site, a time of reckoning will arrive.

Possibly, but I wouldn’t bet on it. A Trump voter whose newly-married wife was detained as an undocumented immigrant says he still doesn’t regret his vote. Farmers were hammered by retaliatory tariffs during Trump’s first term as badly as the rest of us will be damaged in his second; farm bankruptcies soared, as did Farm Belt suicides. That did not prevent farmers from voting overwhelmingly for Trump in 2020 and 2024.

Facts are stubborn things, but so are faith and illusion. By the end of World War II, Germany had lost 5 million to 6 million military and civilian dead, 20 percent of its housing stock was destroyed, and many large cities were almost completely wiped out. The population subsisted on an average of 1,200 calories a day. But in 11 surveys between November 1945 and December 1946, an average of 47 percent agreed with the statement that “National Socialism was a good idea badly carried out.” In an August 1946 “German attitude scale” survey, 37 percent agreed that “the extermination of the Jews and Poles and other non-Aryan races was necessary for the security of Germany.”

People, or too many of them, will still believe in the very illusions that caused their world to collapse in ruins about them. They believe because it is absurd.