Trumpism and power worship

Here’s a passage from a characteristically fascinating Orwell essay, comparing E.W. Hornung’s once-famous Raffles books (these involve an upper class English gent who robs his social peers; I don’t think it’s been noted that Your Friends & Neighbors, the amusing new TV series starring John Hamm, is a fairly straightforward updating of this same plot device), and James Hadley Chase’s No Orchids For Miss Blandish, a fantastically commercially successful exercise in lurid gangster detective fiction, which was one of the most popular books among British soldiers during the second world war:

[Chase] is a popular writer — there are many such in America, but they are still rarities in England — who has caught up with what is now fashionable to call ‘realism’, meaning the doctrine that might is right. The growth of ‘realism’ has been the great feature of the intellectual history of our own age. Why this should be so is a complicated question. The interconnexion between sadism, masochism, success-worship, power-worship, nationalism, and totalitarianism is a huge subject whose edges have barely been scratched, and even to mention it is considered somewhat indelicate. . . Fascism is often loosely equated with sadism, but nearly always by people who see nothing wrong in the most slavish worship of Stalin. The truth is, of course, that the countless English intellectuals who kiss the arse of Stalin are not different from the minority who give their allegiance to Hitler or Mussolini, nor from the efficiency experts who preached ‘punch’, ‘drive’, ‘personality’ and ‘learn to be a Tiger man’ in the nineteen-twenties, nor from that older generation of intellectuals, Carlyle, Creasey and the rest of them, who bowed down before German militarism. All of them are worshipping power and successful cruelty. It is important to notice that the cult of power tends to be mixed up with a love of cruelty and wickedness for their own sakes. A tyrant is all the more admired if he happens to be a bloodstained crook as well, and ‘the end justifies the means’ often becomes, in effect, ‘the means justify themselves provided they are dirty enough’. This idea colours the outlook of all sympathizers with totalitarianism, and accounts, for instance, for the positive delight with which many English intellectuals greeted the Nazi-Soviet pact. It was a step only doubtfully useful to the U.S.S.R., but it was entirely unmoral, and for that reason to be admired; the explanations of it, which were numerous and self-contradictory, could come afterwards.

There is definitely something to the idea that much of Trump’s base admires him not despite his grotesque immorality but precisely because of it. Not just the cruelty, but the sadism, and bullying, and corruption, and sexual violence, and complete shamelessness of every sort, is very much the point.

And all this is in some way fundamentally connected to the basic psychology of fascism, which at this point you would have to be blind to fail to see that Trump and Trumpism represent in every important particular.