Trump Contrives His Stab-in-the-Back Myth
An
obscene conspiracy theory from the past echoes loudly in the present.
Opinion
Columnist
- Nov. 23, 2020
The word Dolchstosslegende is
hard to pronounce but important to understand. It translates as
“stab-in-the-back myth” and was a key element in the revival of German militarism
in the Weimar years. Even modestly educated Germans know exactly what it
denotes and the evil it entails.
Donald Trump and his legal team are now
contriving their own Dolchstosslegende.
That’s true even as Trump’s effort to
overturn the results of the election seems to descend from fantasy to farce.
The main point of the exercise is no longer (if it ever seriously was) to find
a judge, governor or other pliable instrument to deny Joe Biden the presidency.
It is to deny the legitimacy of the Biden presidency, of the electoral system
that gave him the office and of the federal and judicial systems that turned
Trump’s legal challenges aside.
The point of the farce is farce. It is to
make an obscene joke of the Biden administration and our constitutional system
of government.
This was also the
point of the Dolchstosslegende, which claimed that the German Army, though in
retreat in the fall of 1918, could have kept up the fight had it not been
betrayed by defeatist and scheming politicians who agreed to an armistice that
November.
This was, of course, a self-serving
lie: Germany’s armies were being routed, its strategic situation was hopeless,
its sailors were mutinying, its people were approaching starvation and only the
armistice (which the kaiser’s generals asked for) spared it from a much more
painful defeat.
But the nature of the myth wasn’t that
it should be believable. It’s that it should be believed.
There’s a difference. The success of
the first rests on a plausible interpretation of facts. The success of the
second requires a psychologically astute understanding of the people to whom
the lie is peddled. The Dolchstosslegende may have been a transparent
falsehood, but it had the double advantage of bucking up a humiliated nation’s
pride and playing to its gut prejudices. Translated into the bigoted
vernacular, “defeatist” and “scheming” almost always meant socialists,
communists and Jews.
In this sense, it doesn’t matter that
Rudy Giuliani’s legal case is being laughed out of court. What
matters is that the district judge who did so is an Obama appointee (despite
being a conservative Republican), and therefore can be dismissed as part of the
deep-state conspiracy seeking to bring Trump down.
Nor does it matter that the lawyer
Sidney Powell painted an anti-Trump conspiracy so vast that it seems to have
embarrassed Giuliani and would have made the ghost of Joe McCarthy proud. What
matters is that Powell’s list of enemies — from the director of the C.I.A. to
the former Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez — hit all the right notes for the
president’s die-hards.
And there are a lot
of them: 52 percent of Republicans think the president “rightfully won”
re-election, at least according to a Reuters Ipsos poll from
last week. In other words, a majority of Republicans will believe literally
anything Trump says.
Here again the comparison to Germany
rings loud. In a famous passage of “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Hannah
Arendt noted how “Mass Propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all
times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly
object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.”
The Dolchstosslegende worked because so
many Germans were happy to believe what, at some level, they also knew wasn’t
true. But it also worked because it had a clear aim that a growing number of
Germans shared, which was to overthrow the struggling Weimar Republic by
claiming that it was founded on treason. In other words, it wasn’t just a
conspiracy theory. It was a political weapon with the revolutionary aim of
destroying democracy itself.
What Trump and his minions are now
attempting is of a piece. It is rich that many of the same people who spent
years claiming that Robert Mueller’s lawful and constrained investigation was a
deep-state coup are now happy to entertain a sitting president’s preposterous
claims of electoral fraud.
But the aim is clear: to treat the
Biden presidency as a product of treachery by a political order that is so
comprehensively corrupt that it will require far tougher means than the ones
Trump employed to root out.
In case certain readers think I’m
making a comparison between Trump supporters and Nazis, let me emphasize that I
am not. What I am saying is that this modern-day Dolchstosslegende, like surf
pounding against a bluff, abets future demagogues by eroding public confidence
in democratic institutions, until, unprotected, they collapse.
No comparison with the Weimar years is
complete without noting that the republic wasn’t just done in. It did a lot to
do itself in, too, mostly through economic mismanagement. All the more reason
to wish the Biden administration well as it navigates crises that now include
some of the most disreputable opponents our own republic has ever known.
Bret L. Stephens has been an Opinion columnist
with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The
Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem
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