Loathing those who love Trump
Dennis Glover’s Repeat makes the case that those who support Trump are wrong. Again.
A sure-fire way to win friends on the Melbourne left is to compare Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler. To get them even more excited, do it in a little red book that can be pushed across the cafe table while sipping a soy milk latte. Dennis Glover’s short tract, written at speed, fuelled by righteous anger, will press the buttons of progressives looking for an omni-cause for their distress: it is all the fault of populists. Always was and always will be.
The book is an exercise in the conflation of history to serve a rather humdrum conclusion: let’s defeat populism via “redistribution of income.” Anti-Semitism, climate change, Brexit, Victor Orbán, Russian revanchism, Donald Trump: these can all be extinguished by better social democracy.
Guardian readers will find this reassuring. I left the book unconvinced.
To his credit, Glover complicates what could be progressive clickbait by siding with Jews (when it is trendy on the left not to) and finding both left and right (but mostly right) culpable for a brewing crisis. The book is a sustained, occasionally (possibly forgivably) intemperate, effort to find the 1930s in the 2020s. The populism then, is our best guide to it now. Hitler, Stalin, and Franco find their titular “repeat” in Trump, Putin, and Orbán. Xi Jinping is strangely elided.
Unless European-style social democracy, including its muscular capacities (as in and after World War II), reasserts itself, the 2030s will echo the 1940s, with the shedding of much blood. I have admiration for this analogising. It is informed by some good motives. Attacking the creeping ahistoricism of so much contemporary debate is to be applauded. But is history this mutable?
Glover lands some blows. His retelling of the Spanish Civil War is a model of concision and genuinely compelling and revisionist. He has inherited some of his hero George Orwell’s clarity on this conflict, which presaged and rehearsed World War II but is often forgotten.
But for such a short book, it draws some very long bows. Glover makes populism do more than the concept can bear. He ends up loading into it everything that ails him. The definition is too loose. His idea of populism risks becoming whatever is popular that he doesn’t like.
Were Stalin and Hitler not socialists – a label each claimed – rather than populists? Why not indict them for their socialism, one National, the other Soviet? Leveraging Trump into this socialist lineage is a stretch. The former president’s populism is so unlike Hitler’s for the comparison to be meaningless. Hitler invaded his neighbours. Trump invaded nowhere and plans to repeat this retrenchment if he wins next month.
Nazism was inescapably anti-Semitic. Trump is pro-Israel — when it is not popular to be so. Stalin murdered around 50,000 party and Red Army officials (and millions of other citizens). Trump merely had a high staff turnover. Franco stayed in office for nearly 40 years. Trump left office, reluctantly, but left nonetheless, as per the world’s oldest written constitution, after only four.
Glover wants us to believe that because Trump fetishises strong men like Putin and Xi that he will build a new authoritarian alliance with them. This ignores how far Trump’s populism is built on a distrust of China. Biden and Harris copied his China policy. They are populists too?
Parts of Melbourne’s CBD were closed last month by rioting Greens, anti-Semites and assorted other leftists – protesting the right of liberal democracies to arm themselves. But according to Glover, the threat to civil order comes mostly, if not exclusively, from populists. Is his populist tent so vast, it includes every malcontent? Hamas somehow becomes MAGA in the author’s typology. His sources on the 1930s are good and reliable. They include the most respected studies of the three dictators, by historians like Richard Evans and Ian Kershaw. On Trump, however, Glover has consulted little beyond the predictably censorious editorials in the Guardian and New York Times. He avoids the growing historiography of 2017-21 entirely.
This source imbalance explains why the book is often compelling in constructing the populism of the 1930s but less convincing when projecting it forward. Glover is a great student of George Orwell. His Last Man in Europe: a Novel (2018) is a fascinating reimagining of how Orwell wrote the greatest book of the 20th century.
The problem with Orwell-love (from which I suffer) is the temptation to over apply him, of trying to find Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) in 2024.
I know where Glover is coming from. I have been doing the same since reading the book as a student. It provides a revelation about power that demands proselytization. But in so doing we risk cliche. I once carried a copy into a debate, on how the woke killed literature, and was laughed at by my opponent.
“It’s about us.”
That is a claim often made of Orwell’s masterpiece. Glover embraces it too readily. Just as Orwell’s writing was the product of his remarkable (and tragically short) life, so his era should stand on its own demerits, without the need to relitigate it against a confected Age of Trump. Orwell’s bogeymen are not ours, no matter how insistent Glover is that they are.
Perhaps the real foe is not populism but historical illiteracy, the attempt to reduce the histories of successful liberal democracies, like Australia and the US, to ones of shame and guilt. Every acknowledgment of country deepens that skewed narrative. It is to misremember, to make the past a servant of contemporary agendas. This is a trap Glover falls into when he surveys the low, dishonest 1930s.
Like Orwell, Glover disdains the proles. Easily manipulated, they give populists their power. Glover bemoans MAGA and Brexit as contemporary versions of Orwell’s imagined class. But the strength through joy candidate this season is Kamala Harris not Donald Trump. The left has given us a politics every bit as racialised as Hitler’s race theorists. Intersectionality is the Nuremberg Laws updated for campus elites.
I admire the author for warning us that history repeats itself. But to stop all this awful repetition, wait for it, we need to end economic inequality and redistribute wealth? That’s Glover’s concluding meta-prescription. Only a shopworn, soft-left, social democratic, Lygon St solution can forestall the horror that awaits us. I’d likely remain unconvinced of this had the book been thrice its length. Glover deserves credit for not inflicting that on us.
Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne
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