On a cult of personality and its consequences

Genuine never-Trump conservative David French is looking into a cloudy crystal ball, in an attempt to divine what happens to the Republican party and the wider conservative — which at this point means radical reactionary — political movement in America post-Trump. (French assumes that Trump is a lame duck president, which is assuming something of a can opener at this point needless to say):

And now, with the end of Trump’s presidency coming into view, there is an increasing number of conservatives who fear that the movement has been and is being completely redefined — not just in Trump’s image, but in Carlson’s and Fuentes’s as well. And now some of these conservatives are speaking up.

A great deal is riding on their ability to win this fight. Trump will not be president for a third term, and the question of who will represent the Republican Party in the years to come is of immeasurable importance.

I want to believe that a large number of conservatives are in the process of waking up. They’re finally questioning what their movement has become.

But I’m rather afraid that they’re too late. One sign that might be the case is that virtually every person who’s raised a voice against Carlson has a far smaller audience than he does. Since Carlson posted his interview with Fuentes less than two weeks ago on X, it has racked up almost 18 million views. On YouTube it has 5.6 million views.

In fact, the Fuentes interview is already Carlson’s fourth most popular video, despite being online for less than two weeks. (If you’re wondering, his most popular one is his friendly interview with the even more vile Vladimir Putin.) To put those numbers in context, they top the viewership of his prime-time Fox News show, when he was the top-rated cable television host in America.

Compounding the problem, there are many prominent right-wing influencers who won’t explicitly defend Carlson or Fuentes but will scold the people who are confronting them. . . .

The Republican rank and file have also been conditioned to dismiss moral arguments against MAGA as sanctimonious and complaints about Republican racism and antisemitism as inherently leftist. Hearts are hardened, ears shut.

I don’t know if Roberts will survive at Heritage, but I do know that Carlson and Fuentes and their constellation of friends and allies are far too popular to cancel or even to contain.

The fight for the future of the Republican Party is underway, but until the demand for decency reaches toward the very top of the movement, then Trump’s malignant influence will continue to metastasize, and he’ll hand the baton to a woman or a man (including, possibly, Carlson himself) who extends Trump’s legacy of cruelty, bigotry and rage.

This is all part of a fantasy narrative, in which a “basically decent” Republican party, led by people like Mitt Romney and John McCain and George W. Bush [!] got mysteriously hijacked by a malignant figure via a cult of personality.

The cult of personality is of course very real, but what French’s cri de coeur elides or ignores altogether is the extent to which deep structural and cultural factors made the takeover of the Republican party and right wing politics in America by Trump, or someone else like him, if not exactly inevitable, then far from in any way surprising.

A historical parallel worth considering in this context is Khrushchev’s famous so-called “secret speech” in 1956, denouncing Stalin’s cult of personality. (A peculiarity of the secret speech was that it was read verbatim to thousands of CPSU groups in the days immediately following its delivery to the 20th Congress, so even in the totalitarian conditions of the mid-1950s USSR it wasn’t really much of a secret).

Two decades later, Leszek Kolakowski noted how self-serving and basically mendacious Khrushchev’s description of Stalinist Russia actually was:

Stalin had simply been a criminal and a maniac, personally to blame for all the nation’s defeats and misfortunes. As to how, and in what social conditions, a bloodthirsty paranoiac could for twenty-five years exercise unlimited despotic power over a country of two hundred million inhabitants, which throughout that period had been blessed with the [allegedly] most progressive and democratic system of government in human history—to this enigma the speech offered no clue whatever. All that was certain was that the Soviet system and the party itself remained impeccably pure, and bore no responsibility for the tyrant’s atrocities.

I expect that whatever process of de-Trumpification eventually takes place in the Republican party will much more closely mirror the de-Stalinization of the USSR, than the far more thorough, if still far from perfect, de-Nazification of post-war Germany. The latter process, of course, was a bit more elaborate than some speechifying, followed by much vigorous sweeping under many a historical rug.