‘Origins of Totalitarianism’ in Context

Review by Bill Doughty

Seventy-five years ago, in her preface to the first edition of “The Origins of Totalitarianism,”  Hannah Arendt warned of the rise of authoritarianism. She decried the complacency of people in accepting and even supporting antisemitism, imperialism and totalitarianism.

Her preface to her first edition, written in 1950, describes dark clouds of pessimism just five years after World War II and in the heart of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. The dark clouds in these excerpts (from the preface) sound familiar today:

“Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest - forces that look like sheer insanity…”

“Desperate hope and desperate fear often seem closer to the center … than balanced judgment and measured insight.”

“To yield to the mere process of disintegration has become an irresistible temptation…”

“The totalitarian attempt at global conquest and total domination has been the destructive way out of all impasses. Its victory may coincide with the destruction of humanity; wherever it has ruled, it has begun to destroy the essence of man.”

“And if it is true that in the final stages of totalitarianism an absolute evil appears (absolute because it can no longer be deduced from humanly comprehensible motives)…”

We have reviewed Hannah Arendt’s remarkable book several times over the years. In this review, we are focusing on Arendt’s preface to the first edition as well as a compelling introduction by historian Anne Applebaum in the recently reprinted Mariner Classics HarperCollins paperback (2024). 

Applebaum puts Arendt’s warnings against autocracy and authoritarians in context, including those who lie, grift, and threaten to invade neighboring nations as well as promote inequality in society.

The world has experienced an increase in inequality, xenophobia and extremism in recent years. That combination has led to a rise in autocracies, kleptocracies, and oligarchies over free-thinking, people-powered, and liberal democracies. 

According to Applebaum, the rule of power and force wants to overtake public order and rule of law. Even the antisemitism and imperialism Arendt writes about, along with totalitarianism, is on the rise. Unfortunately, complacency, submission, and blind obedience have allowed those anti-freedom (what Arendt calls “evil”) forces to take hold. Applebaum writes:

“And yet the questions Arendt asks remain absolutely relevant today. She was fascinated by the passivity of so many people in the face of dictatorship, by the widespread willingness, even eagerness, to believe lies and propaganda— just consider the majority of Russian people today, unaware that there is even a war going on next door and prevented by law from calling it such. In the totalitarian world, trust has dissolved. The masses ‘believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. To explain this phenomenon, Arendt zeroes in on human psychology, especially the intersection between terror and loneliness. By destroying civic institutions, whether sports clubs or small businesses, totalitarian regimes kept people away from one another and prevented them from sharing creative or productive projects. By blanketing the public sphere with propaganda, they made people afraid to speak with one another. And when each person felt himself isolated from the rest, resistance became impossible. Politics in the broadest sense became impossible too: ‘Terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other.. Isolation may be the beginning of terror; it certainly is its most fertile ground; it always is its result.’ 

Reading that account now, it is impossible not to wonder whether the nature of modern work and information, the shift from ‘real life’ to virtual life and the domination of public debate by algorithms that increase emotion, anger, and division, hasn't created some of the same results. In a world where everyone is supposedly ‘connected,’ loneliness and isolation once again are smothering activism, optimism, and the desire to participate in public life. In a world where ‘globalization' has supposedly made us all similar, a narcissistic dictator can still launch an unprovoked war on his neighbors. The twentieth. century totalitarian model has not been banished; it can be brought back, at any place and at any time.”

Military leaders have long studied the wisdom of Hannah Arendt and other thinkers. Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism” is on the DOD Overdrive Professional Reading List. It was listed on the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings site as a recommended book in 2008. In 2013, retired U.S. Army General, Stanley McChrystal, discussed his book, "My Share of the Task: A Memoir,” at the Hannah Arendt Center.

Beware Government by Fear, Decree

Review by Bill Doughty–

Soldiers of the U.S. Army's 9th Armored Division reach Remagen Bridge in early March 1945.

There is a reason books about fascism, imperialism and authoritarianism refer to historian Hannah Arendt.

Her "The Origins of Totalitarianism" (Schoken Books, Random House, 1948, 1957; renewed 1976) is the motherlode of warnings about the growth and acceptance of such movements and leaders. The book is a call for vigilance and action and a rejection of apathy.

Arendt shows how dictators can rise from catastrophes and destruction. She explains how an "open disregard for law and legal institutions and ideological justification of lawlessness" allow totalitarianism to flourish. And she warns about the autocratic tendency to destroy norms, spread lies, and rule by decree.

Government of, by and for the people is the opposite of government by dictate or bureaucracy under the ultimate control of an all-powerful "Leader" (using Arendt's capital L). The megalomaniacal autocrat ignores controls within the government and creates a "secret society in broad daylight."

Hitler's 1939 Action T4 justified killing disabled children and adults. 

"Legally, government by bureaucracy is government by decree, and this means that power, which in constitutional government only enforces the law, becomes the direct source of all legislation," according to Arendt. 

The bureaucrat, who by merely administering decrees has the illusion of constant action, feels tremendously superior to these 'impractical' people who are forever entangled in 'legal niceties' and therefore stay outside the sphere of power which to him is the source of everything."

"Arbitrary power, unrestricted by law, wielded in the interest of the ruler and hostile to the interests of the governed, on one hand, fear as the principle of action, namely fear of the people by the ruler and fear of the ruler by the people, on the other – these have been the hallmarks of tyranny..."

The dictator/leader through his appointed chief law enforcement officer (a.k.a. attorney general) becomes the ultimate administrator of the law:

"The administrator considers the law to be powerless because it is by definition separated from its application. The decree, on the other hand, does not exist at all except if and when it is applied; it needs no justification except applicability. It is true that decrees are used by all governments in times of emergency, but then the emergency itself is a clear justification and automatic limitation. In governments by bureaucracy decrees appear in their naked purity as though they were no longer issued by powerful men, but were the incarnation of power itself and the administrator only its accidental agent. There are no general principles which simple reason can understand behind the decree, but ever-changing circumstances which only an expert can know in detail. People ruled by decree never know what rules them because of the impossibility of understanding decrees in themselves and the carefully organized ignorance of specific circumstances and their practical significance in which all administrators keep their subjects."

"The Leader's absolute monopoly of power and authority is most conspicuous in the relationship between him and his chief of police (Himmler in Nazi Germany), who in totalitarian country occupies the most powerful public position," Arendt writes. Even if the chief law enforcement officer does not have absolute executive power, "this does not prevent (him) from organizing his enormous apparatus in accordance with totalitarian power principles."

Then the good people in government are forced to choose: either stay and try to be an influence for what is right or leave and escape the fear and terror. But a narcissistic autocrat often does not give them a choice. Paranoid and deranged, he purges those who are opposed to the rule of law. He never accepts blame or responsibility for failure: "If he wants to correct his own errors, he must liquidate those who carried them out," Arendt writes.

"The humiliation implicit in owing a job to the unjust elimination of one's predecessor has the same demoralizing effect that the elimination of the Jews had upon the German professions: it makes every jobholder a conscious accomplice in the crimes of the government, their beneficiary whether he likes it or not, with the result that the more sensitive the humiliated individual happens to be, the more ardently he will defend the regime. In other words, this system is the logical outgrowth of the Leader principle in its full implications and the best possible guarantee for loyalty, in that it makes every new generation depend for its livelihood on the current political line of the Leader which started the job-creating purge."

Nazis – "living corpses" – at Christmas, date unknown.

As members of the leader's inner circle carry out the Leader's decrees their identity and morality are killed off and they become "living corpses," she says. "The first essential step on the road to total domination is to kill the judicial person in man." The autocrat rules with a vulgar and demoralizing destruction of norms.

Vulgarity replaces "generally accepted intellectual, cultural and moral standards" in the republic. "Vulgarity with its cynical dismissal of respected standards and accepted theories carried with it a frank admission of the worst and a disregard for all pretenses which were easily mistaken for courage and a new style of life," Arendt writes.

Corruption becomes the modus operandi. It was a problem in anti-Semitic France  in the late 1800s, when the bureaucracy "gained control of public funds and how the Budget Commission was governed entirely by public interests." And, "Corruption, the curse of the Russian administration from the beginning, was also present during the last years of the Nazi regime..."

Weaponizing their corruption, dictators target media, intellectuals and free-thinking artists and creators.

"Wherever totalitarian movements seized power, this whole group of sympathizers was shaken off even before the regimes proceeded toward their greatest crimes. Intellectual, spiritual, and artistic initiative is as dangerous to totalitarianism as the gangster initiative of the mob, and both are more dangerous than mere political opposition. The consistent persecution of every higher form of intellectual activity by the new mass leaders springs from more than their natural resentment against everything they cannot understand. 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."

After the Leader eliminates nonbelievers, naysayers, whistleblowers and independent voices in his inner circle, he is then surrounded by sycophants who can reinforce his belief in his own lies. The authoritarian autocrat believes in his own omnipotence. Hitler said he was "irreplaceable" and that "the destiny of the Reich depends on me alone."



The goal is to remove all independence of thought, courage of conscience, and creativity of the individual. The same elimination of free thought and action happened purposefully in the camps as well.

In Germany, concentration and extermination camps were "meant not only to exterminate people and degrade human beings, but also serve the ghastly experiment of eliminating, under scientifically controlled conditions, spontaneity itself as an expression of human behavior and of transforming the human personality into a mere thing," according to Arendt. "Terror enforces oblivion."

Cries and resignation in Nazi Germany.

Hitler initiated a campaign of fear and warlike terror in the name of Germany. His initiative was a means to stabilize and feed the economy – "'guns and butter' actually meant 'butter through guns.'" Arendt notes, "One may even surmise that one of Hitler's reasons for provoking this war was that it enabled him to accelerate the development in a manner that would have been unthinkable in peacetime."

Authoritarian leaders collude and corrupt to investigate and denounce political opponents. They get rid of possible successors or anyone who dares question their decrees, directives and lawless orders.

"Deadly danger to any civilization is no longer likely to come from without," Arendt warns. The emergence of totalitarian governments is a phenomenon within, not outside, our civilization. The danger is that a global, universally interrelated civilization may produce barbarians from its own midst by forcing millions of people into conditions which, despite all appearances, are conditions of savages."

This is one of at least two Navy Reads reviews of the Arendt's monumental work on the forensics of totalitarianism, a highly recommended book for anyone involved in defending democracy and the Constitution.

This is also a good selection for Women's History Month in March. Hannah Arendt, who immigrated to the United States and became an American citizen in 1950, is widely considered one of the great philosophers and political thinkers of the 20th century.

One hundred years ago: Arendt in 1920

In this edition of "Origins," Samantha Power provides the book's introduction. "In contemporary debates over ethnic conflict, genocide, international rights, sovereignty and terrorism, (Arendt's) writings have retained a profound pertinence that augurs well for her permanent place among the masters," Power writes. "She understood that barbarous regimes could not come into being overnight."

Power writes of militant Islam including the attacks of 9/11, genocide in in Rwanda, Mao's so-called "Great Leap Forward," Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge terror in Cambodia, and ethnic cleansing for a "Greater Serbia" in the Balkans. She highlights "Arendt's prophetic skepticism about the enforceability of international human rights," and says hope rests with individual activists, organizers and journalists, though that may be a challenge.

"In some countries state control is so fierce that independent voices are muzzled and marginalized, power and wealth are concentrated among elites, and injustice rules. In others, war or occupation have brought such ruin and humiliation that civil society cannot flower and no amount of organizing can restore living standards or human dignity. It is from some of these countries that contemporary terrorist threats hail, and it is here that 'Origins' offers further wisdom for today's dark times – wisdom that we ignore at our peril."

Samantha Power is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, political thinker and diplomat who served as the 28th United States Ambassador to the United Nations from 2013 to 2017. Hers is a call for collaboration, cooperation and action instead of fear and apathy.

Navy Veteran and former Secretary of State John Kerry with then United States Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power, Oct. 2, 2015.

The Lies of Totalitarianism

Review by Bill Doughty–

"To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity."

So writes Hannah Arendt, gifted thinker and historian in "The Origins of Totalitarianism" (Schoken Books, Random House, 1948, 1957; renewed 1976). Her work is vital to anyone interested in understanding the Holocaust or the rise of Fascism.

Leo Hymas speaks about his personal experiences to a group of Soldiers about World War II and the Holocaust at French Theater on Joint Base Lewis-McChord, WA., April 29, 2014 to educate the JBLM community of the history and significance of the Holocaust. (Photo by Sgt. Jasmine Higgins/Released)

Totalitarian leaders use fear, existential threats, and targeting of "the other" – people perceived to have no rights. Most of all, dictators or would-be dictators tell lies.

Hitler and Stalin

Profiling the Nazis under Adolf Hitler and Bolsheviks under Josef Stalin, Arendt examines the characteristics, effects and results of dictatorship. She also helps answer how and why people were willing to believe their supreme leaders' lies.

"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 totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness."

Emaciated prisoners at the Ebensee camp.

Regarding the belief in unbelievable lies and falsehoods, Arendt writes, "Totalitarian propaganda can outrageously insult common sense only where common sense has lost its validity." People had to believe lies and dehumanize in order justify murdering millions of other people during the Holocaust.

Arendt explains how narcissistic autocrats are drawn to rituals and symbols. Marches, military parades and self-adulating shows of idolatry reinforce the propaganda.

She compares Nazi and Bolshevik mass propaganda. Both heavily depended on conspiracy theories, either age-old themes (such as "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" forgery and anti-semitism) or invented fears (countless sinister imperialist or internal conspiracies).

"The effectiveness of this kind of propaganda demonstrates one of the chief characteristics of modern masses. They do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent in itself. What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part. Repetition, somewhat overrated in importance because of the common belief in the masses' inferior capacity to grasp and remember, is important only because it convinces them of consistency in time."

Bergen-Belsen camp, liberated April 15, 1945.

"Repetition ... is important" in propaganda and mind control. Arendt, of course, writes in a time before the internet, social media and smart phones. In 2020, distorted truths and outright lies can be repeated and shared in ways unthinkable in the 1940s and 50s.

The Leader establishes a "spell of infallibility" and thrives in chaos. "The totalitarian ruler must, at any price, prevent normalization from reaching the point where a new way of life could develop," Arendt writes. Followers must have contempt for the nonbelievers and outsiders. 

"The result of this system is that the gullibility of sympathizers makes lies credible to the outside world, while at the same time the graduated cynicism of membership and elite formations eliminates the danger that the Leader will ever be forced by the weight of his own propaganda to make good his own statements and feigned respectability. It has been one of the chief handicaps of the outside world in dealing with totalitarian systems that it ignored this system and therefore trusted that, on one hand, the very enormity of totalitarian lies would be their undoing and that, on the other, it would be possible to take the Leader at his word and force him, regardless of his original intentions, to make it good. The totalitarian system, unfortunately, is foolproof against such normal consequences; its ingeniousness rests precisely on the elimination of that reality which either unmasks the liar or forces him to live up to his pretense."

Arendt in 1924

"Totalitarianism in power," Arendt writes, "uses the state as its outward façade, to represent the country in the nontotalitarian world." Ignoring or appeasing dictators may not work. They often will find ways to manipulate the system to remain in power.

Imperialism and Role of Racism

"Origins" is presented in three parts: Anti-Semitism, Imperialism and Totalitarianism. Part II, Imperialism, is the longest section and examines the "brutality and megalomania" of the ideology that brought about the World Wars. In words that resonate today in light of Putin's revanchism toward Crimea and Ukraine, we read: "The initiative for continental expansion in close geographic continuity no longer comes from Central and Eastern Europe [i.e. Nazi Germany] but is exclusively located in Russia."

Imperialism, Arendt shows, was supported by the right and the left, often encouraged by the workers who saw economic benefits. "In Germany, the liberals (and not the Conservative Party) were the actual promoters of that famous naval policy which contributed so heavily to the outbreak of the first World War." The Socialist Party also "repeatedly voted" to obligate funds to build the German navy after 1906.

The British trawler Rudyard Kipling, launched in 1920, was sunk by a German U-boat in 1939.

She calls author Rudyard Kipling "the author of imperialist legend" for the British Empire, establishing a "foundation legend" based on the sea, quoting him from "The First Sailor" (Humorous Tales, 1871). Arendt writes:

"The foundation legend, as Kipling tells it, starts from the fundamental reality of the people of the British Isles. Surrounded by the sea, they need and win the help of the three elements of Water, Wind, and Sun through the invention of the Ship. The ship made the always dangerous alliance with the elements possible and made the Englishman master of the world. 'You'll win the world without anyone knowing how you did it: and you'll carry the world on your backs without anyone seeing how you did it. But neither you nor your sons will get anything out of that little job except Four gifts – one for the Sea, one for the Wind, one for the Sun and one for the Ship that carries you ... For, winning the world, and keeping the world, and carrying the world on their backs – on land, or on the sea, or in the air – your sons will always have the Four Gifts. Long-headed and slow-spoken and heavy – damned heavy – in the hand, will they be; and always a little bit to windward of every enemy – that they may be a safeguard to all who pass on the seas on their lawful occasions.'"

This passage sums up, as Arendt recognizes, the so-called "white man's burden" – as well as, it could be argued, "manifest destiny" exceptionalism and white supremacist racism.

Early European colonists in Africa captured slaves, often pitting tribes against each other.

Africa was exploited by colonialists and imperialists in the centuries leading up to the 19th century. Seafaring nations, especially Britain, established "maritime and trade stations" to promote commercial exchange. Commerce included African slaves. Arendt presents an eye-opening discussion about South Africa's Boers, who were descended from Dutch settlers, and how they acted out of fear, exterminated tribes and then accepted another banality of evil: apartheid.

What fuels imperialism? "Racism is the main ideological weapon of imperialistic politics," Arendt contends, Russians who consider themselves Slavs, Germans who think they are superior Aryans.

Diversity in a nation is shown as a bulwark and strength. "Racism may indeed carry out the doom of the Western world and, for that matter, of the whole of human civilization."

Power Lessons for 2020

From its 600 pages, packed with history and philosophy, it would be impossible to summarize all of Arendt's points in this blog. But her points seem as fresh and relevant in 2020 as they did 70 years ago, even as she admits, "No matter how much we may be unable of learning from the past, it will not enable us to know the future."

Hobbes's "Leviathan"

Through Arendt we discover lessons from history that can can apply to current events: Corruption in the Soviet Union but supposedly not in Communist China, the Dreyfus Affair, "Secret Judah" and "Secret Rome," and the roles of some Catholics (Pius XII and "The Deputy") and Protestants (Martin Niemöller) in dealing with the Nazis.

Arendt gives an extended interpretation of mid-17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes and his treatise on social contracts in a civil society, "Leviathan." She writes, "Power, according to Hobbes, is the accumulated control that permits the individual to fix prices and regulate supply and demand in such a way that they contribute to his own advantage." A "never-ending accumulation of power necessary for a never-ending accumulation of capital ... foreshadowed the rise of imperialism."

"Origin" lays out how imperialism grew out of colonialism. Arendt explains Soviet goals and seems to predict Russian aggression in Georgia, Crimea and Ukraine, from a perspective more than half a century ago. "The initiative for continental expansion in close geographic continuity no longer comes from Central and Eastern Europe but is exclusively Russian," She writes. "No one justifies expansion any longer by 'the white man's burden ...; instead we hear of 'commitments' to client states, of the responsibilities of power, and of solidarity with revolutionary national liberation movements.'"

A hopeful sign comes in a chapter called "A Classless Society": "Nothing is more characteristic of the totalitarian movements in general and of the quality of fame of their leaders in particular than the startling swiftness with which they are forgotten and the startling ease with which they can be replaced."

Laced throughout this indispensable history of totalitarianism is an unspoken warning, though. Beware the lies, especially the big lies. Demand clear, consistent, trusted messaging and honesty from leaders. Most of all, recognize the insanity.

U.S. Navy Sailors assigned to the guided-missile destroyer USS Jason Dunham (DDG 109) tour the Haifa Holocaust Museum as part of a community relations event during a scheduled port visit to Haifa, Israel, June 22, 2018. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Jonathan Clay/Released)

A Republican View of Autocracy –– Pt. I

Review by Bill Doughty––

Retired Army Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, former commanding general of U.S. forces in Europe, reminds us of this old saying: “If you want a new idea, read an old book.”

A book that is not too old –– and seemingly written yesterday –– shows how the United States is embracing autocracy. Longtime Republican campaign strategist Stuart Stevens captures the country’s current radical slide with the clarity of hindsight in “The Conspiracy to End America: Five Ways My Old Party Is Driving Democracy Away” (Twelve, Hachette Book Group, 2023).

For a new idea, read an good book!

Stevens quotes key authors of other “old books” to investigate the seeds and roots of an anti-democracy and pro-authoritarian movement growing in the government –– including the justice department, legislature and military –– and branching into society. Five building blocks of autocracy include propagandist media, MAGA followers, oligarchic financiers, corrupt legal theories, and shock troops such as J6ers and right-wing militia all supporting the totalitarian movement.

One of the first authors of “old books” Stevens cites is George Orwell, who writes, “Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.” [Instead of a belief in belief. Or skewed news and propaganda.]

In 1984, Orwell warns about Big Brother and in effect Big Lies despite objective facts. “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” It means loyalty to the leader, not the Constitution or even to concrete reality.

Hannah Arendt in “The Origins of Totalitarianism” writes, “Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise.”

Regarding dictators and autocratic movements, Arendt (above) says, “Their most conspicuous external characteristic is their demand for total, unrestricted, unconditional, and unalterable loyalty of the individual member.”

Examples today are obsequious cabinet meetings in the White House and the recent firing of freethinking military officers, including General Todd Donahue, commanding general of United States Army Europe and Africa and commander of Allied Land Command. [Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who calls himself Secretary of War, has removed or pressured removal of more than two dozen senior military leaders, including former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Air Force Gen. CQ Brown Jr.; Navy’s Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Lisa Franchetti; Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Linda Fagan; Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George; and Army Gen. James Mingus, vice chief of staff of the Army. A disproportionate number of people removed from power are women, African-Americans, and/or free-thinkers.]

Attacks on education and science are a hallmark of authoritarians, as Stevens points out through the perspective of philosopher Umberto Eco, who writes, “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity” to the fascist, and “thinking is a form of emasculation … Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism.”

As fascist-friendly forces attempt suppression of free speech, media and voting rights, authors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt write in “How Democracies Die,” “The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy –– gradually, subtly, and even legally –– to kill it.”

Anne Applebaum writes in “Twilight of Democracy” that this “soft dictatorship … relies upon a cadre of elites to run the bureaucracy, the state media, the courts, and, in some places, state companies.”

Legislative and judicial enablers, administration sycophants, propagandist media, and oligarchs –– “elites” –– either endorse or allow the authoritarian to gain power and restrict liberty.

It happened in 1930s Germany.

Another seminal author quoted by Stevens is William Shirer, who penned “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.” Shirer writes about Franz von Papen, an aristocratic conservative politician who served as Chancellor of Germany in 1932. Papen made a deal with Adolf Hitler, thinking he and his fellow conservatives could control him and the Nazis.

Shirer writes, “By means of a shabby political deal with the old-school reactionary he privately detected, the former tramp from Vienna, the derelict of the First World War, the violent revolutionary, became chancellor of the great nation.” Hitler then removed, often violently, anyone not completely loyal to him.

In her book “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present” Ruth Ben-Ghiat (above) describes this as a tradition of the strongman: “…divide-and-rule and bullying tactics to weed out government officials who won’t conspire in his corruption and subversion of the rule of law.”

Their efforts are often funded by misguided oligarchs.

Ghiat writes, 

“Once the ruler is in power, elites strike an ‘authoritarian bargain’ that promises them power and security in return for loyalty to the ruler and toleration of his suspension of rights. Some are true believers, and others fear the consequences of subtracting their support, but those who sign on tend to stick with the leader through gross mismanagement, impeachment, or international humiliation.”

In a chapter titled “The Financiers,” Stevens examines the role of Peter Thiel through Max Chaikin’s book “The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power.” Thiel wrote in an essay for the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Thiel is a big funder of his proteges J.D. Vance, who would become vice president, and Blake Masters, who would win a Republican primary election but lose to Arizona Senator Mark Kelly.

In the same chapter, Stevens uses Jane Mayer’s (above) 2016 book “Dark Money” to springboard onto a discussion about the influential Koch brothers.

The Kochs inherited a fortune from their father who helped both Stalin and Hitler develop oil industries that were indispensable in their respective war efforts. As libertarians, the Kochs were ironically opposed to centralized power and autocracy. They championed and funded Mike Pence, Trump’s first vice president. Pence served Trump faithfully until January 6, 2021 when he resisted an effort to subvert the election in the face of an angry populist mob demanding he be hanged at the Capitol.

A highlight in Stevens’s “The Conspiracy to End America” is a timeline in a chapter titled “The Legal Strategies.” After the formation of the Federalist Society in 1982 and appointments of Federalist judges to the Supreme Court –– Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett –– there is an exponential growth of the influence of money in politics, inequality in society, control by Christian Supremacists, and corruption within the executive branch, including lying to the public.

Moisés Naim cites “3 Ps” of the autocrat in “The Revenge of Power”: Populism, Polarization, and Post-Truth. The 3 Ps are often seen as nationalism, division and outright lying, where the truth no longer seems to matter to those in power.

A “Big Lie” like election denial is an example of the 3 Ps and the root cause of the J6 insurrection coup attempt. Russians and the Soviets before them sowed discord in U.S. elections. Stevens writes, “There is no more fundamental assault on democracy and the rule of law than overturning the results of a free and fair election.”

When Trump announced his last election campaign in Waco, Texas, it was a form of endorsement of White Christian Nationalism. According to Stevens, it was a link to Branch Davidian cult leader David Koresh, Randy Weaver and Ruby Ridge, and Tim McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing that targeted the federal government.

In Kathleen Belew’s masterful “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary in America,” the author writes, “Nowhere was the horror of Ruby Ridge more acutely registered than in the white power movement.”

Trump’s Waco speech starkly presented his election as a “final battle” of good versus evil and of a “final battle,” linked to biblical end times.

Stevens writes, “As Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry (above) wrote in their 2022 book, “The Flag and the Cross,” as absurd as it might seem that a three-time divorced failed casino owner who bragged about grabbing women by the pussy could appeal to conservative Christians, Trump fits a narrative of Christian Nationalism:”

“The first thing to note is that Trump's MAGA narrative can be understood as a semi-secularized version of white Christian nationalism's deep story. Trump's narrative is shorn of the sorts of biblical references and allusions that peppered earlier presidents' speeches.

But the MAGA narrative still has many parallels with the deep story. The most obvious one is between the apocalyptic strand of white Christian nationalism and the catastrophizing aspect of MAGA. Premillennialists believe that there will be a final battle between good and evil, a life-and-death struggle between natural and supernatural forces that is visible to them, but invisible to unbelievers. Trump's worldview is similar. ‘Disaster’ is one of his favorite words. He sees life as an endless battle between us and them. He sees hidden conspiracies everywhere he looks. We should not be surprised that Trump's rhetoric resonated so strongly with many white devotees of Christian nationalism. Their deep stories are quite similar.”

At today’s Faith and Freedom Coalition conference President Trump lied to evangelical supporters that recently elected democratic socialists were “hardcore godless communists” who “will close your churches in this country.”

Trump said. “They will kill your people and that's what they're about. They want to end religion.”

The opposite of “diversity, equity and inclusion” can be considered as religious-based “racism, inequality, and exclusion.” It’s “Us vs. Them” instead of “E Pluribus Unum.”

By using the words of other authors to make his point, Stevens achieves a brilliant strategy of illustrating the five “building blocks” of autocracy: propagandists, support of a major party, finances, legal theories to legitimate actions, and shock troops.

General Hertling’s reminder to read old books for new ideas also applies to “old” ideas: freedom over suppression, ethics over corruption, and democracy over autocracy.

We have Hertling’s book, “If I Don't Return: A Father's Wartime Journal” on our summer reading list.