NYT’s David Brooks Botched His ‘Tyrants’ Analogy

I’m trying to scale back my coverage of national and international politics recently because I get apoplectic, but I’m making an exception for a small opinion piece in last Thursday’s New York Times. I’m also presenting you with a gift article containing it. It’s called Trump’s “Single Stroke of Brilliance.” It’s by mostly anti-MAGA conservative and longtime columnist David Brooks. It starts like this:

I’ve detested at least three-quarters of what the Trump administration has done so far, but it possesses one quality I can’t help admiring: energy. I don’t know which cliché to throw at you, but it is flooding the zone, firing on all cylinders, moving rapidly on all fronts at once. It is operating at a tremendous tempo, taking the initiative in one sphere after another.

A vitality gap has opened up. The Trump administration is like a supercar with 1,000 horsepower, and its opponents have been coasting around on mopeds. You’d have to go back to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration in 1933 to find a presidency that has operated with such verve during its first 100 days.

Some of this is inherent in President Trump’s nature. He is not a learned man, but he is a spirited man, an assertive man. The ancient Greeks would say he possesses a torrential thumos, a burning core of anger, a lust for recognition. All his life, he has moved forward with new projects and attempted new conquests, despite repeated failures and bankruptcies that would have humbled a nonnarcissist.

Initiative depends on motivation. The Trump administration is driven by some of the most atavistic and powerful of all human desires: resentment, the desire for power, the desire for retribution.

OK, I’m not thrilled with that analysis, but I get it — and it strikes me as true. It makes a virtue out of vice — and please spare me any sort of analogy to FDR in this or any other respect — but it does help explain why a substantial (though receding) portion of the public has been so taken with him. Putting on my old social psychologist hat (the one that reads “Make External Causal Factors Great Again!”), it reminds me of the work of Charles E. Osgood (the social scientist, not the broadcaster) who developed the “Semantic Differential Scale,” which in cross-cultural research found that the greatest share of meaning that people employ in evaluating a physical or abstract object on “Likert scales” (such as ratings between “1 to 5” or “0 to 10”), are, in declining order, (1) Evaluation (good or bad), Potency (strong or weak), and Activity (active or passive). I’ve written about how in liberals Evaluation is the most important contributor to meaning, while in conservatives Potency plays a relatively more predominant role. But I — like from what I can tell, pretty much everyone else — could never figure out what to do with the “Activity” evaluation. And, what do you know, it looks like Brooks may have figured it out. (I’m not sure how to parse “Activity” out of “Potency,” but again I had plenty of company in that.)

Brooks eventually leads to the paragraph that inspired this short essay:

I have come to think of the Trump team less as a presidential administration or even as representative of a political party and more as a revolutionary vanguard. History is filled with examples of passionate minorities seizing power over disorganized and passive majorities: the Jacobins during the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution, Mao’s Communist Party in China, Castro’s 26th of July Movement in Cuba. These movements did not always possess superior resources; they possessed superior boldness, decisiveness and clarity of purpose.

Bravo, Mr. Brooks! You’ve identified some of the closest precursors of the MAGA … hey, wait a minute!

Where’s Hitler?

How could Brooks leave out Hitler?

Hitler is, after all, the standard by which the Trump Administration is being measured! Yesterday we reached the “arresting judges” milestone — and many commenters ticked off that square on their fascism bingo card, noting what the history of late 1930s and early 1940s Germany suggests might come next. The public probably knows more about the actual seizure of power by Hitler than the specifics of the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks, Mao, and Castro combined! (I’ll throw in Pol Pot, but not Juan Peron, because so many people have seen Evita.) People know that these other examples exist, but much less about the actual process by, and order in which, power was seized.

So, why did Brooks miss the most stunning example of the phenomenon he’s talking about. Was Hitler, umm, too passive? Too bereft of grievances? I’d argue otherwise.

I can think of a few possible reasons why:

(1) He actually did include Hitler, but someone edited it out. If so, we should know who, when, and why.

(2) He’s just not a rude person and calling someone Hitler is rude — and also a cliche.

(3) He wants to maintain plausible deniability against any charge that he’s here aiming at Trump.

(4) He’s worried that it would be a turn-off to some readers.

(5) He’s worried that using the “H-word” could endanger his employer, or his job.

(6) He’s worried that — like is apparently true of Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski — it might affect the personal safety of himself, his friends, or his loved ones.

(7) It’s a cry for help: Hitler so clearly belongs in this list — hell, at the front and the back of it! — that his failure to name him as an antecedent of Trump is absolutely stunning. And maybe he is cleverly using a clever rhetorical advice, based in paradiastole, a flavor of euphemism, by leaving out the most striking example of the topic at hand. We’re supposed to notice it, wonder about it, and let it sink in that Brooks both is and isn’t avoiding mention of Trump. (Apophasis — invoking an idea by denying its invocation — may be a better fit.) But so far, I haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere but here, by me.

I hope that it is apophasis. If so, I wish that it were working.