The Two Minutes Hate was a famous feature of Orwell’s portrayal of Oceania in 1984. The Two Months of Hate is now a notable feature of the 2024 U.S. presidential contest. Donald Trump and his allies are closing this campaign with two months of hate in a way we’ve never seen before. And it could work.
The September 10 presidential debate taught Trump and his campaign that they could not win if the campaign were . . . a debate. So Trump is refusing to participate in a second debate, or for that matter in any interview that might be a simulacrum of a debate. More fundamentally, Trump has abandoned any pretense of having to debate real issues or having to put forth any serious programs. Of course, Trump’s heart has always been in authoritarian demagoguery, not in democratic and civic debate. But in the closing weeks of this campaign, any mask of democratic normalcy and civic decency has been tossed aside.
It’s not just that, as Politico showed in ample detail this weekend, “Trump’s “racist, anti-immigrant messaging is getting darker.”
It’s also, for example, Trump on Thursday calling for CBS to lose its broadcast license—and for Democrats to “be forced to concede the Election”—because he didn’t like the interview with Kamala Harris on 60 Minutes.
Then yesterday Trump told Maria Bartiromo that an even bigger problem than “the people who have come in who are totally destroying our country” is “the enemy from within.” He called them “very bad people, sick people, radical left lunatics.” And he said they could “be easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”
This is, as the New Yorker’s Susan Glasser put it, “Straight up language of dictators and tyrants, who want to use the military on their own people.”
During all this time, JD Vance continues to refuse to say that Trump lost the 2020 election. But here too, the message has gotten worse. Vance no longer bothers to defend this Big Lie as plausibly true. Instead, Vance now says that he wouldn’t have certified the 2020 election results because he didn’t approve of the way the Hunter Biden story was covered in the media.
“Is it OK that big technology companies censored the Hunter Biden laptop story which independent analysis said cost Donald Trump millions of votes?” he said in a recent interview with the New York Times. “I’ve said that I would have voted against certification because of the concern that I just raised.”
But what are the implications of this? That if there’s something that you don’t like in a campaign, you don’t accept its result? Just as, I suppose, if you think there are too many immigrants in America, you’re entitled to lie about the Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio?
Are Trump and Vance being punished at the polls for this intensification of lying and hatred? Not at all. The Trump-Vance ticket seems to have gained a bit in the last two weeks, just as the hatred and darkness have become more central to their message. It turns out that what it means to be an undecided or swing voter is to be undecided about the choice between liberal democracy and authoritarianism. And the swing voters seem to be swinging towards authoritarianism.
It’s shocking and depressing. One could tell oneself in 2016 that Trump won despite the lies and hatred. Now if he wins, it would seem to be because of the lies and hatred.
In his 1942 essay “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” Orwell discussed the “shifting phantasmagoric world in which black may be white tomorrow.” This world had made it possible that “Fascism, or possibly even a combination of several Fascisms, [could] conquer the whole world.”
Orwell remarked:
We in England underrate the danger of this kind of thing, because our traditions and our past security have given us a sentimental belief that it all comes right in the end and the thing you most fear never really happens. Nourished for hundreds of years on a literature in which Right invariably triumphs in the last chapter, we believe half-instinctively that evil always defeats itself in the long run.
We Americans also want to believe instinctively that evil always defeats itself. But it doesn’t. We want to tell ourselves that it can’t happen here. But it can.
And it’s not just that it can happen here. Trump is now promising us that it will happen here.
Now of course, it needn’t happen here. The presidential race is a toss-up. And I think the Harris campaign understands that it needs to close by more effectively emphasizing what’s at stake.
But the burden can’t all be on the campaign or the candidate. Others could step up.
When Trump calls for the use of the military here at home, surely it is time for his former cabinet secretaries and retired general officers, John Kelly and Jim Mattis, to explain, straight to camera, how a Trump second term would be a threat to the Constitution they swore to uphold and to the nation they’ve served, and to urge a vote for Harris.
When Trump spews hatred at immigrants, surely it’s time for George W. Bush, the former Republican president, who was—in the tradition of his father and Ronald Reagan—a fierce critic of demagoguery against immigrants, to come off the sidelines and help in the good fight.
When Trump and Vance refuse to back away from the Big Lie, surely it’s time for other Republicans who care about the truth, like Mitt Romney, to spend time explaining to the country how serious the Big Lie was and is.
And if the Great and Good don’t choose to help as they should?
Well, here the people rule. If we’re to be saved from being governed by four years (or more) of hate, we’ll have to muster the votes to save ourselves.