Yesterday’s discovery that the Republican National Committee has elected to not draft a 2020 party platform has, as the RNC itself predicted, been misrepresented. For starters, as their one-page resolution announces, it doesn’t mean they don’t have a platform; they’ve simply chosen to continue the 2016 platform, mutatis mutandis, into 2020. This means continuing the wholesale rejection of the Obama Administration, which hasn’t exercised any meaningful power since early 2011.
The part which gains the most attention is the resolution “That the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda.” Op-ed writers, especially those in the left-wing echo chamber, have claimed this “looks like a full-throated embrace of the Führerprinzip,” the inevitable Hitler comparison. This analogy, however, is wrong-headed. They’re currently only giving the party, not the nation, over to their designated secular messiah.
Rather than pearl-clutching comparisons to Anschluss, we’re seeing something altogether more subtle and insidious. The Republican Party isn’t relinquishing control to Trump; rather, they’re relinquishing meaning. The current Republican leadership doesn’t believe words mean anything, and therefore haven’t bothered to create new ones; they coast on promises they made in completely different cultural and economic times. Because why bother saying anything new when saying anything only clouds the issue?
This decision to eschew binding policy principles goes hand-in-glove with Saturday’s announcement that President Trump will speak at all four nights of the Republicans’ online convention. Republicans have chosen to foreground the one personality binding their party together. This feels like a double-dog dare for Americans to compare Republicans to the National Socialists, who similarly had a guiding personality rather than a platform. Everything old is new again.
Yet the comparison feels unsatisfying. I cannot help referring back to French scholar Christian Ingrao, who writes about the brain trust that controlled the Nazi machine. Many leading Nazis had achieved habilitation, a European academic standing that meant they’d essentially completed two doctorates. For all that the Nazis’ success relied upon Hitler’s on-camera demagoguery, the party actually had elaborate administrative machinery to do the actual work of governing.
Current Republican leadership is, if anything, more Nietzschean than any prior political movement. They believe that morals and standards exist to hobble lesser individuals and prevent them rising against their betters. Morals, to the Nietzschean, are created by aristocrats, to yoke the masses into serving their greater mission. This doesn’t mean, as some misrepresent, that the übermensch is an amoral villain. The truly enlightened person, Nietzsche asserted, wouldn’t need morals.
Nazis believed themselves Nietzschean because they saw themselves clearing Germany’s deadwood to permit the promised übermensch to arrive. But they still relied upon party pronouncements, manifestoes, and bureaucracy to achieve that goal. The Republicans, by contrast, reject every aspect of organization, at least as it defines their chosen leadership. Guiding principles of governance, leadership, and morality simply don’t apply to their designated übermensch.
Please don’t misunderstand me. The Democrats, as I’ve written recently, are equally disappointing, making high-minded promises during campaigns, then offering the weakest possible compromise once elected. They’ve been institutionally complicit in America’s recent decline into Gilded Age inequality and moral decrepitude. But at least they still believe words mean something, evidenced by the fact that their digital conference included a wide range of speakers, and even some ceremonial policy debate.
Republicans, by contrast, believe nothing means anything. Their superhero, unencumbered by somebody else’s moral suit, can act, free from verbally learned limitations. Sure, they’ll create false divisions to constrain everybody else, because that’s what words do: yoke the weak and constrain their appetites. But the hero, whether the hero politician, the hero businessman, or the hero general, is free. If the masses can’t distinguish that freedom from nihilism, who cares?
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