The origin story for a villain

How did get where we are right now, with masked men sweeping people up in raids, and the National Guard and FBI called out to patrol the streets of D.C.? Answering that question is an important step toward figuring out how to get the country out of the hole it’s in.

But trying to understand the mechanisms by which institutions and guardrails meant to protect democracy have largely caved to corruption and demagoguery can be a fraught area. When people talk about Hitler or refer to extremists active in the U.S. today as the “American Taliban,” it can underline a tendency to see authoritarianism as something foreign or even exotic that has somehow infiltrated the country like an invasive species. The truth is that the United States has a long history of doing horrific deeds.

But is what’s happening now simply the extension of prior American history—native genocide, slavery, Jim Crow, racism, and the rest? Or are we caught in a global tide that’s repeating and reinvigorating the fascist and authoritarian movements of the twentieth century?

Today I want to look at domestic and international roots of the downward spiral of the country today and make an argument that we need to see the current crisis through both international and domestic lenses in order to understand it and dismantle the machinery currently in motion.

On writing villains

When I was a freshman, Kurt Vonnegut came to my university to give a lecture on storytelling. One of the things I remember from that talk is him saying that if you have a villain in your story, never explain how he got that way.

What he said later but didn’t mention that day (as far as I remember) is that he himself had never had written a character as a villain. Which is not to say that he didn’t write about evil and the horrific things that humans can do. Those issues were at the core of his novels. But as he noted later in his life, “society can be a villain, just the way a mother can be.”

Waking up most days, it’s a grim moment when I remember that U.S. has become the dominant villain on the global stage—not only the bad guy in ways we’ve already encountered before in history, but now also in somewhat new ones. Maybe it doesn’t make for a good Kurt Vonnegut novel, but I think it’s critical for us to figure out the origin story of the current U.S. corruption, and how it morphed into the supervillain role it’s flaunting, even celebrating, today.

Starting out at home

There are those who say that to point to history like the transatlantic slave trade, the U.S. Civil War, or Jim Crow as a fundamental driver of what’s going on today is a mistake. Focusing on history as the main source of what’s happening today, they suggest, runs the risk of ignoring the day-to-day reality in which we live, which can look very different than the lives lived by enslaved Africans centuries ago. They introduce the question of whether today we’re operating subject to other power dynamics.

But it seems foolish to avoid making those comparisons when we’re resurrecting some very grim moments from our history every day. We see kidnapping of immigrants and U.S. citizens off the streets. We see sitting legislators threatened, or even arrested. We see the removal of people of color from positions of leadership in government, or even academia. Much of what Trump is doing seems aimed at rolling back the historical clock for the express purposes of removing power and agency from political opponents and whole categories of people he sees—and talks about—as less than human.

The Trump example

It’s hard not to think of decades of U.S. history, when the president of the country directly targets Washington, D.C. The District has been majority-minority for more than sixty years. It’s a city long known as Chocolate City, due to the significant presence of Black Americans and the defining role that heritage has played in defining local culture going much further back. D.C. only acquired home rule in my lifetime, and it’s now under threat. Congress has frequently tried to strongarm city leaders into reversing policies that conservative politicians from other areas of the country dislike.

President Trump has escalated this background hostility toward D.C., attacking the city directly and repeatedly, often in ways centered on race, crime, and homelessness. He’s previously expressed racist animus against Black Americans in urban settings for half a century, perhaps most famously lying about the criminality of the Central Park Five—who were wrongfully convicted and imprisoned—and continuing to lie long after they’d been exonerated.

The U.S. Senate currently has legislation pending intended to restrict the .D.C city council’s ability to change key policies on crime in the city. That by itself is an egregious action on their part, but Trump is leapfrogging over that attempt by seizing control of the D.C. police department and bringing in the National Guard—all while violent crime rates are the lowest they’ve been in the city for more than 30 years.

Dozens of other actions Trump has taken just this year show an attempt to roll back the gains of the civil rights movement for everyone who has benefited from its protections. What’s happening in the country is deeply rooted in American history, which remains a key driver of events now.

Fascists and oligarchs

Still, along with the worst of our domestic history, I would argue that what we’re seeing rise in America today also relies on twentieth-century fascism—both the formal models that Italy endured and the Nazis embraced, as well as its monstrous stepchildren around the world that followed in their wake—especially in Latin America.

I also see the long-term deference to corporate power giving way to government pinning business interests under its thumb as a squirming coconspirator. News outlets reported billionaires racing to pay for Trump’s inauguration in January. More recently, we saw Tim Cook in what appeared to be a blunt trade of a gold trinket in exchange for protecting Apple from Trump’s punitive orders.

Traditionally in America during my lifetime, the super-wealthy have had a tremendous hand in shaping the country, and often appeared to be able to buy politicians. But we may now be witnessing the shift to government subjugation more along the lines of contemporary Russian authoritarianism—where the oligarchs are ostensibly partners with the government and profit hugely off favoritism from the party leader, but are kept in line by the threat of punitive policies and actions against them by a demagogue.

Having studied the variety of concentration camp systems that rose under fascism, I think that the history and evolution of European authoritarianism, of fascism, can show us a way to understand what’s happening now, as well as what is likely to happen next.

Global trends today

The international history of twentieth century fascism is relevant today for other reasons, too. We’ve heard Nazi rhetoric repeated by Trump and his allies. We’ve likewise seen Nazi tropes in other Republican campaigns. I’ve mentioned before that a number of apparatchiks in Trump’s machine, as well as fans of what he’s doing, have been engaging in a kind of meta cosplay that admires earlier models and strategies of fascism. Along with the attempt at restoration to a pre-Jim Crow America, there’s a deliberate attempt to resurrect repressive eras from other nations and prior eras.

And I don’t think the domestic model is the only one worth considering for another reason. Overseas, we see jingoistic nationalism and persecution of immigrants and religious or racial minorities in places like Xinjiang, where the Uyghur minority is targeted by the Chinese government for nationalistic purposes and power. We see the state of Assam in India, where Muslims are hounded in other ways, or the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, who have been stripped of rights, isolated, and murdered.

We’ve watched Brexit in the U.K., demonizing immigrants in an attempt to restore national greatness—a deeply self-destructive movement. We’ve seen the rise or expansion of repressive regimes in Turkey, Hungary, and elsewhere. Despite successful pushback in places like Brazil and South Korea, there’s clearly a global ascendancy of right-wing extremism underway, one that is focused on abusing minority populations in order to gain political power.

The concentration camp ecosystem

And having studied the variety of concentration camp systems around the world, I think that camp history itself offers a way to understand what’s happening now.

The first detention sites that had the name “concentration camp” were run by imperial powers in territories or possessions far from their capital cities. Over a decade later, a series of decisions to intern enemy aliens during World War I brought camps from what was seen as the periphery of power into the heart of empire. This is an example of a phenomenon a lot of people have written about: the imperial boomerang.

World War I made internment camps—the mass preemptive detention of civilians without trial on the basis of identity—ubiquitous around the world. From that point forward, camps had been planted in most places around the globe. Local culture and prejudices then took over to influence the form camps took in each country on the ground.

If we imagine these systems as a tree, I think of indigenous forced relocation and genocide as the underground roots of the tree, early colonial camps as the visible roots coming out of the ground toward the trunk, the World War I camps as the trunk of the tree, and all the camp systems that grew out of that legacy as the tree’s various branches going in many directions.

Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell

But the tree metaphor isn’t a perfect model either, because of course while fascism was rising in Europe, it already had its adherents in the U.S., enough to fill Madison Square Garden and them some. Fascist movements had support at the time in the U.S. They never really died, though they did change shape.

And as information and communication could more easily circle the world, both publicly and privately, we saw an increase in the networks of collaboration and repression that developed. So if we belabor the tree metaphor a little more, there were cases where grafts were made from one branch to another or branches crisscrossed.

The Nazis famously embraced existing U.S. eugenics and racism and applied them in new ways, even as they had their own racist history for fuel. As I’ve mentioned before, after the Chinese Revolution, the government of the People’s Republic of China adopted the Soviet Gulag model of mass civilian detention in camps, though their approach was also shaped in important ways by Chinese culture. And China maintained course on its detention system long after the Soviet Union had dismantled much of its Gulag architecture.

After World War II, when the French and the British were fighting to suppress independence movements in their colonies, they consulted directly with each another on interrogation, detention, and camp models. During the same Cold War period, the U.S. promoted democracy via overseas programs, some of which achieved valuable outcomes. Yet our government was often undermining democracies elsewhere, or even in the same countries at the same time, in the name of defeating communism.

The U.S. war on terror after 9/11 provided a model by which to apply discrimination against whole Muslim communities by labeling them terrorists. Our government’s rhetoric and tactics were borrowed or expanded on by countless bad actors overseas who saw them as convenient justification for what they themselves wanted to do to their own enemies.

Choosing not to listen

We have to understand our own history to realize the ways in which and the degree to which our country has been a villain and is becoming a worse one. But there’s often a tendency to see what’s close at hand as normal.

Looking at international history, with its foreign settings, can sometimes provide a distance that can help us or others to see a mirror of the degradation of our own system or ideals more clearly. In some cases, other countries will be farther along the trajectory we’re on, and can provide cautionary tales that might be applied in the U.S. preventatively.

Of course, knowledge isn’t always sufficient to keep from repeating history. Philippe Sands testified during George W. Bush’s second administration that at Guantanamo and elsewhere, the U.S. was repeating the same detainee abuses Britain had used against the IRA. He explained that America was staining its democracy—and not only that, but it was embracing moral blight to achieve nothing. The tactics the country was embracing, Sands reported, did not even work.

In a similar vein, after the October 7 massacre in Israel, in perhaps his only public moment of insight and full honesty in the nightmare that followed, President Biden warned Prime Minister Netanyahu that he was on the brink of repeating the U.S.’s vengeful crusade after 9/11. But Netanyahu, caught up like Trump in legal processes that might destroy him, had become yet another reenactor of twentieth-century authoritarianism on the global stage, and had no interest in heeding the warning.

Just because a national leader doesn’t heed the warnings of lessons from other country’s histories doesn’t mean that we, with our own power, can’t act on the knowledge, too. Being aware of the arc of both domestic and global history gives us twin traditions to tap into in looking for ways to fight what’s happening.

What Trump’s doing right now with the National Guard in D.C. and to immigrants nationwide, he’s doing in part because he’s underwater politically, and because he is desperate. All these domestic and international influences came together to bring him to power—to make him perhaps the most powerful human ever to exist. Yet he’s plagued by increasing disapproval because he’s doing the very things he ran on. He is moving too quickly to seize more and more power, and the public will is shifting to oppose him more quickly than he can effectively unleash force against his opponents.

What falls to us

All of which is to say that despite the threat to democracy, despite the unprecedented power Trump has been allowed to accumulate, he’s desperate because he is learning that though he is still beloved by the most ardent part of his base, most Americans are not as monstrous as he is.

And we still have the ability to take him down. The more we highlight his abuses and cruelty, the worse his ratings will become. He appealed to historical fissures and prejudices, but when we show the reality of the people he has labeled as targets does not match his words, people begin to perceive the material realities that we can use to escape from this trap.

We’re living through grim days, but it’s far from hopeless. We’ll have to actually do something if we want what’s happening to end, but most of us still have tremendous freedom to act. And as Kurt Vonnegut also said, “It seems to me that it’s no more trouble to be virtuous than to be vicious. I’m critical, but not a pessimist.” To that, I would add that I’m a realist, but I’ve seen examples of historical momentum reversed by deliberate organized action.

Understanding what’s happening as the centuries-long unfolding of domestic forces and global movements can help to reframe the task of getting the country on a better track. If we acknowledge the obvious—that we’re not responsible or really capable of tackling the enormity of that job each day, of reversing a global trend or bucking the weight of all of American history—it frees us up to focus on one or two places close to home where we can make a measurable difference.

American history and world history alike are filled with instances in which people have done just that under even worse circumstances. Our lives are part of their legacy, and it’s now up to us to do the same for ourselves and those who will come after us.

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