One that says: “mine is mine, and yours is yours” - this is average; and some say this is the character of Sodom. (Avot 5:10)
I want to say just a bit more in the vein of last week’s newsletter, “Stealing From No One Is Stealing From Everyone," and about Trumpism is general.
Here is a selection from a piece I wrote in 2016 (and linked last week):
School Vouchers and Lebensraum: A Warning From History (forward.com)
In his groundbreaking work on the Holocaust, “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning,” Yale’s
describes Hitler’s belief that human civilization, in its purest state, is a perpetual race war. Set in a brutal world unrestrained by politics or laws, this war is eternally waged between different races for Lebensraum, “living space.” That word, so critical in Hitler’s speeches and writings, literally means “habitat” but also retained, Synder argued, its original connotation of “living room” or “parlor.”In other words, Hitler equated an animal’s natural struggle for survival and the bourgeois desire for a more comfortable life. As Goebbels once put it, a war of extermination may legitimately be waged for “a big breakfast, a big lunch, and a big dinner,” or, as Snyder himself observed, “Tens of millions of people would have to starve so that Germans could strive for a standard of living second to none.”
An early Trumpism example of this in action was Obamacare repeal. Then-Vox.com’s Sarah Kliff interviewed many red state Affordable Care Act beneficiaries who voted for Trump despite his oft-stated promise to repeal this policy that directly improved their lives. She wanted to know why they were voting against their clear self-interest:
Many expressed frustration that Obamacare plans cost way too much, that premiums and deductibles had spiraled out of control. And part of their anger was wrapped up in the idea that other people were getting even better, even cheaper benefits — and those other people did not deserve the help.
The people Kliff interviewed were upset that their costs were too high and their benefits too sparse. But rather than voting for the candidate who promised to further expand the ACA and provide more benefits for everyone, including themselves, they chose to vote for the candidate who promised to strip the benefits from the ones who, Trump told them, were taking more than they deserved.
In other words, these Red State voters were voting their sense of scarcity and competition for a limited supply of resources.
However, the real benefits of Obamacare repeal would have accrued not to them, but to the wealthiest Americans in the form of lower taxes. Kliff’s interviewees would be left with everyone else to fight even more desperately for the limited scraps of social services that would be left.
So Obamacare repeal was a double class war.
Working-class Kentucky voters were fighting for needed benefits against the unemployed and other undeserving.
Affluent voters were fighting everyone else to squeeze out even more affluence and comfort.
As I wrote then:
Millions will suffer and many will likely die as the relatively comfortable try to improve their own standard of living. In other words, the policy implications of Trump’s election reflect both sides of “Lebensraum” as Snyder explained them.
This rhymes with what the rabbis meant when they described “Mine is mine, and yours is yours” as “the character of Sodom. (Avot 5:10)” The Maharal of Prague (Rabbi Yehuda Lowe, 16th century) explained this statement, per Rabbi Moshe Taragin:
[Sodom] witnessed a rapid economic boom creating an environment of universal affluence. Able to service their own respective needs and breaking free of dependence upon others, this culture abolished the notion of chesed (kindness). Sacrifice for others presumes the presence of need; people without their own dependencies lose the ability to locate need in others and completely sever themselves from the world of chesed. Once disengaged from that world, the population of Sedom experienced an inevitable descent into the world of selfishness, ruthlessness, and both moral vice and religious breakdown.
In Trumpism, the prideful “I alone can fix it” boasts and the fierce distrust of others are two sides of the same radically individualistic coin. The politics that emerges from this world-view tend to be more autocratic, self-interested, and power-driven. These politics are about Lebensraum.
On the other hand, the cultivation of a vibrant commons, with strong societal institutions, thick social supports, and generous safety nets, is predicated on the understanding of our inter-dependence and vulnerability, and the resulting empathy we develop for others. These are the ingredients for a responsive, cooperative democracy, particularly one that connects different ethnic or economic groups for mutual benefit. This is hard - it is not easy to lean into our own vulnerability. It requires a great deal of trust in others and the ability to live with our own uncertainty.
Margaret Thatcher famously said, “There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first… There is no such thing as society.”
Rabbi Taragin continued, now summarizing the prophets who criticized the injustice and corruption they found in Jerusalem as Sodom redux:
Many readers will recall the political platform of the elder George Bush, who sought to downsize a 'bloated' government which he believed was exclusively bearing the weight of social welfare. Instead of looking to government to deliver benefits and aid, he encouraged '1000 points of light' in the form of religious institutions, communal organizations, family environments and the like, to rebuild a 'decayed' society. Jerusalem wasn't punished for its behavior, but it simply collapsed under the weight of attempting to carry a society solely upon the shoulders of justice. Any society is only as strong as its combined ability to respond to and protect the needs of its weakest members.
I would reorient this paragraph in the other direction. Sodom is what happens when a society relies on individual ‘points of light’ to carry the burden of welfare and justice in lieu of truly collective - read: government - action.
In other words, Sodom is where there is no commons. It is always nice to think of individuals helping individuals, but the truth is that when there is no shared space or sense of collective responsibility, things tend to devolve into ruthless competition. “Mine is mine and yours is yours” quickly becomes the strong devouring the weak. Sodom is about Lebensraum.
If Trumpism is about anything, it is about this dissolution of a sense of a larger, shared society, leaving a vacuum filled with a series of unending us-them struggles. Every aspect of Trumpism - cooption of the judiciary and justice department, actions against public education, retreating from foreign treaties and alliances, targeting of immigrants and minorities, sowing of distrust in independent government technocrats, media, and academia - is all about robbing us of the commons while claiming that it never actually existed, that what we thought was shared space was actually a power play of its own, covering up a hidden leftist agenda.
The ones who get the most hurt in this environment are the most vulnerable, who most needed the strong social safety net and connections to begin with. Rich and powerful men like Trump and his friends thrive in lawless environments; everyone else suffers. Lebensraum.
Of course, this dovetails perfectly with Trump’s personal business practices. Trump’s argument before Judge Engoron was that nobody takes financial statements seriously, and that fraud is a natural course of doing business. As I discussed last week, Trump’s crime was essentially against the marketplace itself, forcing others to fudge their own numbers to keep up - to do what Trump was arguing they were all actually doing the entire time. The result is a collapse of trust in the commons, which costs everyone, but particularly the smaller, more vulnerable players. Lebensraum.
My argument in 2016 is that this is the core aspect of Trumpism, and the chaos that results is actually its main goal - just as Snyder located Hitler’s ultimate vision and objective in the lawlessness and chaos of the Ukranian killing fields.
The social upheaval and tension likely to result is a feature, not a bug, for Steve Bannon, Trump’s senior advisor, who describes himself not as a “populist” or “nationalist,” but as a “Leninist.” “Lenin,” he said, “wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”
But, as Snyder documents, it was the destruction of political and social institutions in lands conquered by the Nazis that, more than anything else, created the vacuum that was filled by the ethnic, tribal violence that followed. It is no coincidence that the increasing unreliability of America’s social contract and instability of its economic safety net correlates with political polarization, ethnic identification, and a significant increase in hate crimes — including incidents of anti-Semitism.
Judge Engoron’s decision reaffirmed and reinforced the idea of a common marketplace, and our shared interest in being able to trust its integrity. We need to keep finding the ways to reaffirm and reinforce the same in our social and political spaces as well. We are not at our best and our safest when we are conquering and defending our own living spaces, but when we strengthen the shared spaces that connect us with others.
Have a great week,
AB
Some links:
Trump’s Washington Is A Modern-Day Sodom (forward.com), by
Pirkei Avot Chapter 5: Mishna 10 - Midat Sedom | Yeshivat Har Etzion, by Rabbi Moshe Taragin
I think this thread of selfishness-“what’s in it for me”- precedes Trump in this country. Remember the Tea Party?
Tyrants and opportunists like Trump ride the wave of this sentiment to achieve power and impunity.
Almost as if Lebensraum were German for "libertarianism". 😏