On Samuel Moyn On Hannah Arendt As Applied To Trump

 The essay: 

 https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/philosophy/hannah-arendt-misunderstood-philosophy-fascism-authoritarianism-trump

Me:

I’ll give this a shot. 

I do believe Moyn argues that while Trump, more “charlatan” than “dictator,” is not comparable to Hitler just as Trump’s America is not remotely comparable to Hitler’s Germany, still Trump and Trump’s America are sufficiently odious that both Americans and non Americans are complicit in his ascendancy. 

Candidly, I’m not sure Moyn means to spread the blame for Trump to non Americans, but that reading seems implicit in his wanting to apply Arendt’s castigation to the age of Trump: 

... Her former aficionados will stop citing Arendt precisely when she is relevant. Not only will they skirt embarrassment at being human; few will even say that they are ashamed of being American...

After all, it’s Arendt’s argument with reference to Hitler that the net of complicity is extremely wide, indeed universally wide.

Moyn writes:

... Those who were not in Germany but condemned it from the outside were going to be tempted to punish the bad Germans. But the truth is that their crimes (while they of course deserved prosecution) spread complicity far and wide. Until such evils were preventable, even those with no relation to them should admit that they earned not pride but shame...

and a bit further down:

... Even in the face of Nazism, Arendt insisted that responsibility allowed no one to say “I am not like that.” Compared to those with vengeful zeal for the punishment of Nazi perpetrators (which she supported), Arendt praised those “who are filled with a genuine fear of the inescapable guilt of the human race.” The trouble was that their shame at their own humanity was still a “non-political” insight...

One thing I take from these two passages is that Arendt held that until the evils giving rise to and manifest in Nazism are erased from the planet, then we as humans are guilty whenever it or anything akin to it occurs, even if our connection to the depredation is beyond remote. What else can it mean to say,... Until such evils were preventable, even those with no relation to them should admit that they earned not pride but shame...?

The implication seems to me to be, we all have the capacity either for evil or the weak moral will that allows it, and we all are,  in a sense, “good Germans.” If I’m misreading the case Moyn makes for what Arendt held, then I’ll be happy to be corrected.

So, having tried to get at what Moyn and what Arendt via Moyn argue, I must say I find it ludicrous, especially, and now being a touch ad hominem, coming from a woman who tried post war to rehabilitate Heidegger, her pre war lover. 

First, I argue Moyn gives the game away conceding to Trump more charlatanry than fascism, or as he says dictatorship. In fact, if Trump is a charlatan, then he is in that assimilable to all politicians, since dissembling on Arendt’s own views is at the heart of politics: 

... In their invocations of Arendt as a theorist for a new age of “post-truth,” her new fans missed that she argued that truth and politics have never mixed. On the contrary: politics is a realm of appearance, not one of correspondence with fact. For Arendt, we have always been post-truth...

So maybe Trump wears his charlatanry more visibly on his sleeve, but if he is as politician assimilable to the “post-truth” of all politics, then from where arises in his case the Arendtian need for all the soul searching and searing self criticism resulting in “embarrassment at being human.” 

So, rounding “first,” there is nothing in Trump’s case that warrants the self abasement that Moyn via Arendt insists we have. And worse, it’s not just Trump that ought to be a reason for this searing self abasement, it’s also what America has been—certainly in the last 60 years, but, too, I must infer, from the time of its founding:

... She acknowledged that fascist lies were unique, but their novelty—and that of later American ones, like the defence of the Vietnam War that the Pentagon Papers revealed to be so deceptive—allowed no “moralising,” since “the background of past history” is “itself not exactly a story of immaculate virtue.” That same belief guided her refusal to moralise once Nazism fell...

Vietnam goes to about the last 60 years. My necessary inference comes from the incomprehensibility of imagining that Moyn thinks that before 1960 America was any more virtuous. Reinforcing this inference is Moyn’s rejection, again via Arendt, of any clean break between Trump’s invidiousness and that of the American past. He writes:

... Arendt did not believe in what the Germans began calling a Stunde Null, a “zero hour,” a caesura before a new era untainted by the old. Far from it: the idea of a clean break with guilt was just another mode of convincing ourselves that we are exempt from universal responsibility...

For me, characterizing what America is and inferentially always has been is absurdly one sided, seeing only darkness and indictable immorality. If he doesn’t see it that way, then why in the first place invoke Arendt to indict Americans as such louses that they must blanch in shame at their impoverished humanity? 

Second, briefly and finally, Arendt’s ground for our continuing necessary self abasement as but mere alive human beings, namely, ... Until such evils were preventable, even those with no relation to them should admit that they earned not pride but shame... is as far fetched as it is inhuman. She and Moyn insist on our utter saintliness, and our self laceration in its absence, until all evil is extirpated from the earth. 

Good luck with that.