On Collaboration

06-04-2020

Roger Berkowitz

Anne Applebaum tells the stories of Wolfgang Leonhard and Markus Wolf. Both were sons of  prominent German Communist families who were educated in the Soviet Union and were roommates in the same military camp. They had similar ideological educations and both came to understand that the communist system behind the Iron Curtain was failing to deliver on its utopian promise. But then their paths diverged.  Leonard became a critic of the communist regime. He fled East Germany and ended up as a professor at Yale, where he taught generations of students about the danger of ideological communism. Wolf became East Germany’s top spy and an architect of its police state. 

Applebaum recalls the historical paths of Leonard and Wolf to ask the question of why it is that some people collaborate with ideological governments that perpetuate tyranny and totalitarianism. She offers one answer given by Czelaw Milosz. Miłosz, a Nobel Prize–winning Polish poet, who “wrote about collaboration from personal experience,” had been a resistance fighter during WWII. After the war he came to serve in the Polish Communist bureaucracy until he defected in 1951. In his essay The Captive Mind, Milosz offered portraits of intellectuals and artists who justified their own collaboration with the Commuist Party. Applebaum describes his analysis of why they collaborated:

Many were careerists, but Miłosz understood that careerism could not provide a complete explanation. To be part of a mass movement was for many a chance to end their alienation, to feel close to the “masses,” to be united in a single community with workers and shopkeepers. For tormented intellectuals, collaboration also offered a kind of relief, almost a sense of peace: It meant that they were no longer constantly at war with the state, no longer in turmoil. Once the intellectual has accepted that there is no other way, Miłosz wrote, “he eats with relish, his movements take on vigor, his color returns. He sits down and writes a ‘positive’ article, marveling at the ease with which he writes it.” Miłosz is one of the few writers to acknowledge the pleasure of conformity, the lightness of heart that it grants, the way that it solves so many personal and professional dilemmas.

Applebaum’s reflection on collaboration has its ultimate aim in the question of why so many Republican Senators are collaborating with President Donald Trump. She focuses on two Senators who, much like Leonard and Wolf, had similar backgrounds but have chosen very different paths. Both Lindsey Graham and Mitt Romney had distinguished careers. Graham’s parents died while he was in his 20s and he put himself and his younger sister through college. He served in the military and was a Judge Advocate, a military lawyer. He ran for Senator as a maverick and a centrist setting himself against the Tea Party. When Donald Trump was running for President, Graham called him a “jackass,’ a ‘nutjob,’ and a ‘race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.” Similarly, Romney—after a distinguished career in business, served as governor of Massachusetts and passed  “near-universal health care that became a model for Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act.” He ran for President and lost. He too thought a President Trump would be dangerous, calling Trump a “con man” and a “fraud.” While Graham says he voted for an independent candidate instead of for Trump, Romney says he wrote in his wife. 

And yet after the election, their approaches to President Trump have diverged. Graham “proved willing to betray ideas and ideals that he had once stood for.” Romney refused. Applebaum asks why:

To the American reader, references to Vichy France, East Germany, fascists, and Communists may seem over-the-top, even ludicrous. But dig a little deeper, and the analogy makes sense. The point is not to compare Trump to Hitler or Stalin; the point is to compare the experiences of high-ranking members of the American Republican Party, especially those who work most closely with the White House, to the experiences of Frenchmen in 1940, or of East Germans in 1945, or of Czesław Miłosz in 1947. These are experiences of people who are forced to accept an alien ideology or a set of values that are in sharp conflict with their own.

Not even Trump’s supporters can contest this analogy, because the imposition of an alien ideology is precisely what he was calling for all along. Trump’s first statement as president, his inaugural address, was an unprecedented assault on American democracy and American values....Almost as soon as he stopped speaking, Trump launched his first assault on fact-based reality, a long-undervalued component of the American political system. We are not a theocracy or a monarchy that accepts the word of the leader or the priesthood as law. We are a democracy that debates facts, seeks to understand problems, and then legislates solutions, all in accordance with a set of rules. Trump’s insistence—against the evidence of photographs, television footage, and the lived experience of thousands of people—that the attendance at his inauguration was higher than at Barack Obama’s first inauguration represented a sharp break with that American political tradition. Like the authoritarian leaders of other times and places, Trump effectively ordered not just his supporters but also apolitical members of the government bureaucracy to adhere to a blatantly false, manipulated reality. American politicians, like politicians everywhere, have always covered up mistakes, held back information, and made promises they could not keep. But until Trump was president, none of them induced the National Park Service to produce doctored photographs or compelled the White House press secretary to lie about the size of a crowd—or encouraged him to do so in front of a press corps that knew he knew he was lying.