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As a historian, what fascinated me most was reading many of the writers who lived through the rise of totalitarian political religions after the First World War. Part of the attraction was to see what initial conceptual frameworks they imposed on the subjects that I viewed through a kind of authorised canon of subsequent academic literature, much of which was parochial and sterile. It did not matter whether they were sometimes wrong; the liquid fluidity was what mattered as they grappled with events which to me were just history.
The most impressive of them were the Great War veteran turned Manchester Guardian foreign correspondent, Frederick Augustus Voigt (Unto Caesar, 1938); the great UCL French Revolution historian, Alfred Cobban (Dictatorship: Its History and Theory, 1939) and the renegade Marxist turned Cold War warrior, Franz Borkenau (The Totalitarian Enemy, 1940). Their astute insights mitigated the fact that they could not know how the story of Hitler and Stalin ended – in this case with hecatombs of dead that made Tamerlane look like an amateur.
Since the election of Donald Trump, in November 2016, and the successes of European populist movements in the polls (70% of which are the existing but cross-dressed far right), similar anxieties are abroad among people whose major intellects deserve respect. There are three in particular.
Timothy Snyder became justifiably famous for his 2010 book Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, not least because it is based on prodigious research in 11 languages and because it highlights Stalin’s mass murder of humble people in Ukraine. Last year, Snyder published On Tyranny, a short manual for how to arm ourselves against its insidious onset in our present.
Its target is clear from the sentence: “The President is a nationalist, which is not a patriot. A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us we are the best.”
A slightly less alarmist, but equally disconcerting, book has recently been published by the Cambridge political scientist, David Runciman. It is called How Democracy Ends. Like Snyder, Runciman views the “disrupters” as akin to destructive children, absorbing our attentions at the expense of the collateral damage they are causing to democratic institutions.
He writes:
While they do, politics atrophies and necessary change is put off by the overriding imperative of avoiding systemic collapse. The understandable desire to keep the tanks off the streets and the cashpoints open gets in the way of tackling the long-term threats we face. Fake disruption followed by institutional paralysis, and all the while the real dangers continue to mount. Ultimately, that is how democracy ends.
My final example comes from the leading literary scholar, Stephen Greenblatt, arguably the world’s greatest authority on William Shakespeare. In some quarters, it is de rigueur to dismiss literary criticism, which admittedly has become a hermetic parlour game in many university English departments. But this would be to ignore the likes of Lionel Trilling, Ian Watt, Joseph Frank or for that matter Stephen Greenblatt, whose capacity to explain authors is remarkable, especially when the use of language is much richer than our own.
Tyrant: Shakespeare on Power is probably not his best book, but to my mind its oblique indirection makes it a very important one. Though the book does not mention Donald Trump once, his domineering presence haunts virtually every sentence.
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