- Referring to Trump and his followers’ crusade against the masks as a “culture war” he does not understand what it really was: an authoritarian attempt to bend reality.
- Unlike a culture war, the fight for the masks was not a matter of values, but of facts. Nor was it an attempt to gain consensus. An unsurpassed majority of Americans disagreed with Trump on this.
- By avoiding the masks, Trump was trying to use his power to impose his fantasy that the coronavirus is harmless to the American people.
- But he lost that fight. In our society, the coronavirus is too violent a reality for Trump to bend.
- This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.
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The debate over the use of masks was never part of a cultural war, and when we refer to it as such, we miss the depth and danger of its importance. Instead, the debate was yet another flashing red marker on the march toward authoritarianism in Donald Trump’s day.
Fortunately, when Trump reversed his stance and recommended wearing a mask at a press conference last Tuesday, he lost. It was a significant setback for him. But what he lost has nothing to do with culture. It had to do with his power over the reality of the United States.
What is and is not a cultural war.
Words mean things, and in these confusing times it is essential that we use our words accurately. We must be especially careful with the words that have to do with the two most urgent issues in our country: the coronavirus and the presidency of Donald Trump.
Cultural wars are not a simple fight between Donald Trump and his followers and the rest of the country, they are discussions about values. A culture war is won once a critical mass of the population has reached consensus on one side of a debate or the other, so that value is generally accepted. Most Americans move after that, some never do.
This is not what happened in the mask debate. In fact, it is imprecise to even call what happened a debate. It was an attempt to impose reality.
To begin with, public health is not a value judgment, it is scientific. It has nothing to do with what is right or wrong. It has to do with what is dangerous and what is not dangerous for the human body. Unlike most battles in America’s culture wars, it is not about one’s perception based on religious affiliation or political party, but only on objective facts.
It is Trump’s treatment of public health events, his desire to bend them to his will, that makes his stance on masks not another attempt to start a culture war, but rather an attempt at petty despotism.
In a perfect totalitarian regime there is no objective fact, there is only a reality imposed by the leader and the regime. Trump was reluctant to wear masks, even when the consensus among an overwhelming number of Americans was that masks help curb the spread of the coronavirus and that we should wear them in public.
A consensus like the one we see in this case would resolve any culture war, but this was not a culture war. It was a battle between reality and an autocrat, Donald Trump. This has nothing to do with reaching consensus.
An autocratic attempt at reality.
Trump has a host of reasons for wanting to impose a reality in which the coronavirus is not a danger to Americans. For one thing, in his made-up reality, he is not responsible for this disaster. In their reality, children can go back to school, the economy is fine and out of work, Americans can just go out and get a job if they want.
Rather than doing the real work to make the country safe for people to move, Trump and his allies at the highest levels of government, such as Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who is trying to ban mask mandates in their state, they are using their power to enforce a fantasy. This intrusive simulation game comes directly from the dictator’s manual. This is how the Russian Joseph Stalin hid a famine across the empire from 1932 to 1933, for example.
Of course, this is not Russia, it is the United States, a place where we feel very uncomfortable with our long flirtation with facsimile. We collectively shrink when the words associated with totalitarianism are applied to our politics, so we tend to ignore its influence.
Historically, we do not like to accept that the Confederacy was a fascist nation born within our democracy, or that the Ku Klux Klan, a fascist organization, wielded immense political power over large areas of the country in the last century. This autocratic undercurrent is not included in the song of America that we teach our children. We hardly ever call him by his correct name. This denial makes us vulnerable, as noted by Masha Gessen, author of the book “Surviving Autocracy” in an interview with Slate.
“I think one of the weaknesses that Trumpism takes advantage of is American exceptionalism and it is what some scholars have called the American civil religion, this religious belief in the Constitution, in the perfection of structure and this republic,” Gessen said. “And this structure is profoundly imperfect, and I would also say that it has not been very well served in recent decades. It has become more imperfect, richer.”
When we reduce Trump’s stance on masks to a simple “culture war,” it is partly due to our blindness to the imperfection of the American experiment.
While politicians superficially question whether the founders intended us to cover ourselves or not, Trump only thinks about how he can use his power to bend reality to his advantage and how he can impose that on us. That is what the fascists do. But instead of acknowledging that, and what he says about what is happening to us, we ignore it and try to call the reality of Trump something more familiar, more appealing to our democratic society, like a cultural war.
The old names are dead, long live the old names
This mask debate also has nothing to do with identities like Republicans or Democrats. They are irrelevant if we take those words to mean what they have meant in recent decades.
In the past, a disagreement between those two parties would mean a disagreement between two democratic parties (small d). That is not what this is. That old distinction ceased to make sense when Republicans abandoned reality, the rule of law, and consensus. Instead, Republicans must accept reality as transmitted by Donald Trump, and his massacre killing is just another example of that. It has nothing to do with “freedom”.
The United States is immersed in what the Hungarian sociologist Bálint Magyar calls an “autocratic attempt”. It is the first stage on the road to totalitarianism. In his framework, the autocrat tries to break the rules and regulations until they are broken. The attempt is followed by “autocratic advance” and then “autocratic consolidation”. The transition is not a “slide”, which implies that it moves in a stable and predictable clip. It is a tug of war.
In other words, this type of autocratic attempt does not take place without some rejection of the institutions that are breaking down. Sometimes we see the Republican Party struggling with its transition from its old democratic self. And that fight is especially difficult during the coronavirus because it is such a deadly force from reality.
Last week, Trump was pressuring Republicans to subvert the reality in his favor by leaving funds for more evidence of the upcoming coronavirus aid bill. Fortunately, that attempt failed.
That failure was the moment when Trump lost his crusade against the masks. It was for lack of raw political power, not because it respects public health or the consensus of society. If you feel your power return, don’t be surprised if you reverse the direction of the masks again.
Trump firmly believes that he has the right to control reality, to affirm himself and his followers above all else. Their policy is not the policy of seeking an agreement, because fascism is not about an agreement, it is about domination. It is not a debate. It is a demand. But we don’t have to agree.
