Opinion, John Stoehr* – Newsweek
All of a sudden, there are numerous comparisons of President Donald Trump to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. This isn’t new, but the frequency and intensity are. I wonder if we are approaching an inflection point beyond which we won’t be arguing, when it will be plain to everyone, not just the president’s detractors, that Trumpism is totalitarianism’s cousin.
The most important instance of this comparison came from Jeff Flake. The outgoing Arizona Republican senator said Trump’s phrase “enemy of the people,” to describe the press, recalls Stalin.
On Sunday, he said, “I’m saying he borrowed that phrase. It was popularized by Josef Stalin, used by Mao as well—‘enemy of the people.’ It should be noted that Nikita Khrushchev who followed Stalin, forbade its use, saying that was too loaded and that it maligned a whole group or class of people, and it shouldn’t be done.”
On Wednesday, Flake delivered his address on the Senate floor in which he took this critique a step further. He not only compared Trump to Stalin; he compared Stalin’s apparatchiks to Trumpists in the Republican Party. “It is a testament to the condition of our democracy that our own president uses words infamously spoken by Joseph Stalin to describe his enemies,” Flake said. “This alone,” he added, “should be a source of great shame for us in this body, especially for those of us in the president’s party. For they are shameful, repulsive statements.”
If this is not an inflection point, it is this: a clearly defined benchmark in the history of the Republican Party. The GOP’s raison d’etre for at least seven decades was anti-communism. Indeed, some scholars believe anti-communism was the glue that held together the grab-bag of interest groups that is known as movement conservatism, a coalition that led to the rise of Ronald Reagan and the fall of the Berlin Wall. And now we have a sitting senator confirming what may already believed: That without anti-communism, the Republican Party would fall apart. Moreover, one of its own is likening the GOP to its former enemy.
This all by itself is breathtaking. But it may be more. It may be a fringe idea that’s going mainstream. (Or it may be already mainstream, but it’s hard to tell if so.)
Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist, was reminded of George Orwell’s thoughts on totalitarianism after Senators Tom Cotton and David Perdue beggared what’s left of their reputations in order to shield Trump from his own “shithole countries” remark. Orwell was a novelist and journalist. Along with 1984 and Animal Farm, he wrote about the rise of fascism and communism in Europe and Russia. Krugman wrote, on Twitter, “I’ve been trying to put my finger on what’s so disturbing about the spectacle of Cotton and Perdue lying so obviously and blatantly to protect Trump. And I think I have it: here you have U.S. senators–US senators!–acting like apparatchiks.”
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*Freelance Writer and Editor —Metro D.C., The Guardian, CNN, Salon, HuffPost, The Independent, USA Today, Newsweek, Columbia Journalism Review, The Daily Beast, Al Jazeera.
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