Cultures of Resentment Among the Hitlerites & Trumpers

Last edited Tue May 25, 2021, 04:48 PM - Edit history (3)

'Cultures of Resentment Among the Hitlerites & Trumpers,' History News Network-HNN, GW University, May 23, 2021, By Walter G. Moss, professor emeritus of history at Eastern Michigan Univ. & an HNN Contributing Editor. - Ed.

William A. Galston’s recent essay “The Bitter Heartland” begins, “We are living in an age of resentment...[that] shapes today’s politics.” The more I read of it, the more the great resentments of Hitler’s followers came to mind. They resented rich Jews, the victorious Allies who in 1919 had imposed the “unfair” postwar Versailles Treaty upon them, civilian German politicians who had signed the treaty, communists, who had taken over in Russia and were a rising force in Germany, and the “decadent” godless ways of Berlin. The Versailles Treaty forced Germany to give up land to their west and east and also their overseas empire. It also imposed strict limits on its armed forces and weapons. But perhaps most bothersome of all to the average German was the imposition of war reparations, which many Germans believed contributed to their great financial agonies.

During the great inflation of 1923, a loaf of bread could cost billions of Reichsmarks, then the Great Depression when Germany was the 2nd hardest hit of any nation after the US. “Between 1929 and 1932, 1 in 3 Germans lost their livelihoods. At the same time, young people had no prospect of entering the labor force...German farmers suffered terribly as commodity prices slumped.” Fritzsche also relates some of Hitler’s early tactics like boycotts that “relied on entrenched resentments against allegedly wealthy, rapacious, or tricky Jews,” and he writes that “the Nazi leader appealed to popular fears and resentments.

Hitler used a we-versus-they approach, “pitting patriotic Germans against subversive Communists, Aryans against Jews, the healthy against the sick, the Third Reich against the rest of the world.”

Almost a century after Hitler came to power in 1933, some of Trump’s followers remind us of Hitler’s crowds. After Hitler ranted about the “November criminals” (German politicians who negotiated the war-ending armistice of 1918), the audience cried out, “Hang them up! Bust their ass!” In both the 2016 and 2020 campaigns, Trump crowds (in response to words about Hillary Clinton) shouted “lock her up.” Early in the 2016 campaign, writer George Saunders observed some of the resentments of Trump supporters: many believed “they’d been let down by their government... and [were] sensitive to “any infringement whatsoever on their freedom.” Many suffered from what Saunders labeled “usurpation anxiety syndrome,” which he defined as “the feeling that one is, or is about to be, scooped, overrun, or taken advantage of by some Other with questionable intentions.”

In Galston’s essay he cites a 2016 poll that indicated that 65% of whites without college degrees “believed that America’s culture and way of life had changed for the worse since the 1950s.” His essay dissects the continuing Trumpites’ resentments much more thoroughly. Like some before him, he indicates or hints at where the Trump resentful are mostly found: in small towns and rural areas, and among older people, non-college graduates, groups once dependent on manufacturing and mining jobs, and “social conservatives and white Christians.” The resentful are more provincial and traditional and many of them “lack access to high-speed broadband.” “They have a sense of displacement in a country they once dominated. Immigrants, minorities, non-Christians, even atheists have taken center stage, forcing them to the margins of American life.”

They believe that the big-city elites, the professionals, and the government—before Trump came along—all failed to help them achieve their share of the American Dream.

They resent professionals and liberals telling them how to live, calling them racists, or limiting their freedoms—e.g. to buy multiple guns or go about maskless during our present pandemic. “President Trump was at his best, they say, when he ignored the experts and went his own way.”...More, https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/180316
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- HNN commenter: What makes me sad about this article is how easily so many otherwise honest & patriotic Americans have allowed themselves to be used by such a self-serving, greedy fat man.. Before the instantaneous impact of internet communications, most citizens were voracious readers of newspapers, viewers of television news, & intent listeners of radio news programs...
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- Lying press (German: Lügenpresse, lit. 'press of lies') is a pejorative political term used largely by German political movements for the printed press and the mass media at large, as a propaganda tactic to discredit the publications that offered a message counter to their agenda..The Nazis adopted the term for their propaganda against the Jewish, communist, & later the foreign press.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lying_press
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- The "stab-in-the-back" myth (German: Dolchstoßlegende) was an antisemitic conspiracy theory, widely believed & promulgated in right-wing circles in Germany after 1918. The belief was that the German Army did not lose WWI on the battlefield but was instead betrayed by the civilians on the home front, especially Jews, revolutionary socialists who fomented strikes & labor unrest, & the rest of the republican politicians who overthrew the Hohenzollern monarchy in the German Revolution of 1918–1919. Advocates denounced the German govt. leaders who signed the Armistice on 11 November 1918 as the "November criminals"...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stab-in-the-back_myth
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