Hannah Arendt and Trump 2.0

Summary

History As It Happens

"Hannah Arendt and Trump 2.0"

Host: Martin Di Caro
Guest: Samuel Moyn, Professor of Law and History at Yale University
Date: October 24, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the resurgence of interest in political philosopher Hannah Arendt—particularly her ideas about truth, totalitarianism, and propaganda—in the context of Donald Trump’s political return (“Trump 2.0”). Host Martin Di Caro talks with Samuel Moyn about the nuances and misreadings of Arendt’s work, the limits of historical analogy, and whether Arendt helps us genuinely understand contemporary American politics or merely lends rhetorical firepower to the #Resistance and pundit class.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The "Arendt Phenomenon" in Contemporary Politics

• Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism became a bestseller after Trump's first election in 2016, as fears of authoritarianism mounted.
  • “Origins of Totalitarianism became a huge bestseller. It became a kind of compendium of the resistance, so called, which is really a liberal phenomenon.” — Samuel Moyn (04:09)
• Arendt is treated by some as a prophetic voice on Trump and "post-truth" politics, though her thinking is more nuanced and often appropriated selectively.
• There is concern that her work is being used opportunistically, similar to how people quote religious texts to validate any position.
  • “You find what you want to find in the same way you can find what you want to find in the Bible or Moby Dick.” — Samuel Moyn (04:09)

2. Arendt's Views on Truth and Politics

• Arendt distinguished between factual truth and the “realms of appearance” in politics, warning that persistent lying by leaders creates cynicism, not belief.
  • “The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth...is that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world...is being destroyed.” — Hannah Arendt, quoted by Martin Di Caro (05:00)
• For Arendt, the problem isn’t simply that leaders tell lies, but that relentless propaganda erodes the line between belief and skepticism, fueling cynicism.
• Arendt did not believe politics should be governed solely by truth, recognizing that “all politicians are deceptive and liars,” and saw a positive role in the “play of appearances."

3. Comparing Trumpism to Totalitarian Regimes

• Trump exhibits some features Arendt associates with mass leaders (e.g., “unending infallibility”) but lacks the ideological depth and systemization of leaders like Hitler or Stalin.
  • “Trump has no ideological system. He’s not pursuing any type of ideological big goal to remake society, as were the Nazis and especially the Soviets.” — Martin Di Caro (21:21)
  • “The essential question…what's fundamentally different is that Trump does not have a mandate...he doesn't have the social foundations of power that Hitler and Stalin could claim.” — Samuel Moyn (21:52)
• Whereas Hitler or Stalin justified brutality through laws of history or nature, Trump’s appeal is more as a “garden variety nationalist” with little coherent doctrine.

4. The Limits of Historical Analogy and Misuse of Arendt

• The zealous invocation of Arendt often reflects more about the anxieties and political culture of her readers than about Trump himself.
  • “The vast majority of those who invoke Arendt have not read her, certainly not read her seriously.” — Samuel Moyn (25:18)
  • “Their citation tells us as much about us as it does about her.” — Samuel Moyn (27:35)
• Particularly in Trump’s first term, much resistance scholarship and punditry invoked her to denounce “fascism,” often without grappling with the complexities or gaps in her work.

5. Arendt's Influence and Controversies

• Arendt led an extraordinary life as a German-Jewish émigré, student of Heidegger, and celebrated (and controversial) public intellectual, especially after her reporting on the Eichmann trial.
• Her works, especially Origins of Totalitarianism, are more ambiguous, imaginative, and sometimes ill-informed than her modern admirers may acknowledge.
• She critiqued attempts to render politics as a domain of scientific certainty (e.g., Pentagon Papers, Vietnam), warning against the “despotic character of truth” intruding upon the inherently pluralistic and argumentative realm of politics.

6. The Structure of Truth in the Current Era

• Today, the challenge goes beyond lying—it’s about deep societal divisions and the breakdown of consensus, leading to multiple parallel realities.
  • "We can have societies that are mainly afflicted by kind of diverging populations and a lack of fundamental consensus... we almost have like, parallel countries at this point." — Samuel Moyn (43:24)
• Tools like fact-checking have limited power in politics now that so much is about affect and shared belief, not factual clarity.
• Arendt’s views on the “virtue of the political realm to be shadowy” and contestable contrast with the fact-driven, technocratic approaches of the Cold War era.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Use and Misuse of Arendt
  “It became a kind of compendium of the resistance, so called, which is really a liberal phenomenon. It's not actually so clear that Arendt wasn't herself a conservative.”
  — Samuel Moyn (04:09)

• Arendt on Fact and Fiction:
  “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exists.”
  — quoted by Pope, cited by Martin De Caro (10:32)

• On Trump as Mass Leader:
  *“The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility. He can never admit an error.” — Arendt, quoted by De Caro (27:52)
  “Sounds like Donald Trump, Martin. I mean, you've nailed it.”
  — Samuel Moyn (28:17)

• On the Limits of Applying Arendt:
  “There's something more intentional...about Trump 2.0... But he doesn't have the consent or the tools to lock down society in the way that Hitler and Stalin both did... That's just not the world in which we're living right now.”
  — Samuel Moyn (21:52)

• On Liberalism’s Failures and the Rise of Trump:
  “We're all on the hook for what happened. This is a much better way to think about Trump. Like, how did we get to him? Why is his trolling something that, you know, 70 to 80 million people have voted for twice? That's a story...about liberalism and centrist government over decades and the betrayal of ordinary people.”
  — Samuel Moyn (35:30)

• On the State of U.S. Politics:
  “It’s more Mafia than management.”
  — Samuel Moyn (45:17)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [02:32] - Introduction and framing: Arendt’s renewed relevance, Trump’s public statements
• [03:14] - “Arendt phenomenon” and the liberal “Resistance”; Moyn’s critique of opportunistic Arendt citations
• [05:00] - Martin DeCaro reads Arendt passages on lying and cynicism; context of Origins of Totalitarianism
• [10:18] - Moyn grades public figures' use of Arendt (the Pope, Michelle Goldberg)
• [13:43] - Arendt’s biography and philosophical evolution
• [16:16] - Misuses and overuses of Arendt post-2016; Arendt and the resistance
• [18:57] - What Arendt meant by “post-truth” and the nature of totalitarian lying
• [21:21] - Trump’s lack of ideological program; differences from historical totalitarians
• [25:18] - Scholarly critiques of Arendt’s work; problems with the “cult” of Arendt
• [27:52] - The “infallibility” of mass leaders; comparison to Trump
• [33:44] - Nationalism, myth, and ideology—how does Trump’s appeal compare?
• [35:30] - Responsibility for Trump: centrist failures and liberalism’s betrayal
• [39:16] - Arendt’s view on facts, narrative, and the “play of appearances” in politics
• [41:09] - Limits and virtues of fact checking; political truth as contested and performative
• [43:24] - The challenge of parallel realities and the breakdown of consensus in the U.S.
• [45:02] - “Global Mafia politics” as a more realistic model for Trump than fascism

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Conclusion

The discussion presents a critical perspective on the trend of weaponizing Hannah Arendt's works in contemporary American debates about Trump and “post-truth” politics. Samuel Moyn emphasizes intellectual rigor and self-awareness, cautioning against facile historical analogies and urging audiences to confront the unique social and institutional failures that birthed Trumpism. As Arendt herself recognized, politics is never simply about “the facts”—and the rituals of citation may tell us as much about our anxieties as they do about our adversaries. For those navigating the tumult of Trump 2.0, Arendt remains a rich but complicated source, not a crystal ball.

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Transcript

[Jeff Bridges]

Morning Zoe.

[Zoe]

Got donuts Jeff Bridges why are you still living above our garage?

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[Martin DeCaro]

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[Samuel Moyn]

You heard them.

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[Martin DeCaro]

B R-I K.com you never have to listen to ads again. Plus you can get bonus content and access to the entire catalog of 500 episodes going back to early 2021. [e-mail] that's historyasithappens.supercast.com AI agents are everywhere.

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[Martin DeCaro]

B r-I k.com history as it happens October 24, 2025 Hannah Arendt and Trump 2.0 I will always tell you the truth.

[Donald Trump]

It's a quote from a lot. It said Trump's been right about everything. A lot of people are saying maybe we like a dictator. I don't Like a dictator. I'm not a dictator. I'm a man with great common sense and I'm a smart person.

[Martin DeCaro]

A half century after her death, Hannah Arendt's work is as quoted as ever. This month marked her birthday in 1906, and even the Pope sided Arendt in a defense of press freedom. She was a towering philosophical figure who is now often treated like a prophet in the the age of Trump, when fascism or totalitarianism is set to be on the march in America. And that's where the problems may begin. That's next, as we report history as it happens. I'm Martin DeCaro.

[Samuel Moyn]

Several no kings protests planned across the country on Saturday as well. What are your thoughts on those? What are they going?

[Donald Trump]

No kings.

[Rubrik Announcer]

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[Donald Trump]

I don't feel like a king. I have to go through hell to get stuff approved.

[Samuel Moyn]

Because there was an Arendt phenomenon. Shortly after Donald Trump's election, first time in 2016, the fears of authoritarianism, fascism spiked. Even though we now see that Trump was tame and obstructed in his first term compared to now, Origins of Totalitarianism became a huge bestseller. It became a kind of compendium of the resistance, so called, which is really a liberal phenomenon. It's not actually so clear that Arendt wasn't herself a conservative. You know, it was just opportunistic. Like you find what you want to find in the same way you can find what you want to find in the Bible or Moby Dick.

[Martin DeCaro]

Take your copy of the Origins of Totalitarianism or any of Hannah Arendt's famous essays open to any page and maybe you'll find some wisdom or something provocative that may speak to our current dilemmas, such as this passage from Truth and Politics, published in 1967 about the effect of Mass L. The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end is being destroyed. The sense by which we take our bearings in the real world is being destroyed by non stop lying. Now, as the Arendt scholar Roger Berkowitz says, the point here is that constant lying by a propaganda machine does not lead to the lie being believed, but leads instead to cynicism, an argument that Arendt made in her first and most famous book, the Origins of totalitarianism, published in 1951. Arendt wrote Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived. And because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow, the totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that under such conditions one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism. Instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along the statement was a lie and and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness. Alright, so this all sounds pretty on point when held up against Donald Trump's hurricane of lies, his administration's incessant dishonesty about matters large and small. And not just lies. It's an assault on the notion of objective reality itself. The media lie. It's all fake news. The only truth is what Trump says it is, no matter how demonstrably false his statements. You want to fact check them? Forget it won't work.

[Donald Trump]

Or Portland, Oregon. I mean, every time I look at that place, the place is burning down. There's fires all over the place. When a store owner there are very few of them left. But when a store owner rebuilds a store, they build it out of plywood and they don't put up storefronts anymore, they just put wood up because they know it's going to be ripped down. And then I hear how wonderful it is. It's not wonderful, it's a disaster. That's almost an insurrection in that place. So we put our people in there and they do the job.

[Martin DeCaro]

So as an example, Portland is not burning down. There is no insurrection there. Anyone can see that. But these fantasies serve a purpose, right? Do we need Hannah Arendt to understand this? In an essay written for prospect in 2020, Yale Law professor and historian Samuel Moyne takes on the uses and abuses of Arendt's work. In their invocations of Arendt as a theorist for a new age of post truth, her new fans missed that, she argued, truth and polit 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, moyn says. She acknowledged that fascist lies were unique, but their novelty and that of later American ones, like the defense of the Vietnam War that the Pentagon Papers revealed to be so deceptive, allowed no moralizing. Since the background of past history is itself not exactly a story of immaculate virtue. That same belief guided her refusal to moralize once Nazism fell. The words of Samuel Moyn in 2020. Now one wonders how many of those who quote Arendt have taken the time to actually read her. Full disclosure, I have read Origins of Totalitarianism and parts of her other works, and I've read a good deal about Arendt, but I am no expert and I don't often quote her. As you know, I do not argue Donald Trump is a fascist or that the United States is becoming a totalitarian society. Pope Leo just quoted Arendt. Her birthday was October 14th, and so did New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, to name two. We'll have Professor Moyn grade these uses in a moment. Samuel Moin Kent professor of Law and History at Yale University. He is the author of Liberalism Against Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times. Our conversation next morning Zoe Got donuts.

[Zoe]

Jeff Bridges why are you still living above our garage?

[Jeff Bridges]

Well, I dig the mattress and I want to be in a T Mobile commercial like you teach me so Dana.

[Zoe]

Oh no, I'm not really prepared. I couldn't possibly AT T Mobile get the new iPhone 17 Pro on them. It's designed to be the most powerful iPhone yet and has the ultimate pro camera system.

[Samuel Moyn]

Wow.

[Jeff Bridges]

Impressive. Let me try. T Mobile is the best place to get iPhone 17 Pro because they've got the best network.

[Zoe]

Nice. Jeffrey, you heard them.

[Jeff Bridges]

T Mobile is the best place to.

[Samuel Moyn]

Get the new iPhone 17 Pro on us with eligible traded in any condition.

[Jeff Bridges]

So what are we having for lunch?

[Zoe]

Dude, my work here is done.

[T-Mobile Announcer]

The 24 month bill credits on Experience beyond for well qualified customers plus tax and $35 device connection charge credit sending balance due if you pay off earlier canceled finance agreement. IPhone 17 Pro 256 gigs $1099.99 A new line minimum $100 plus a month plan with auto pay plus taxes and fees required. Best mobile network in the US based on analysis by Ooklab Speed Test Intelligence data 1H 2025 visit t mobile.com AI.

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[Martin DeCaro]

B R-I K.com Samuel Moin welcome back.

[Samuel Moyn]

Thanks for having me.

[Martin DeCaro]

Martin the Occasion Hannah Arendt's birthday. It was a few days ago, which is why I saw Hannah Arendt quotes all over the place. Here is the Pope. He was giving a speech about press freedom. He said, quoting Hannah Arendt, the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exists.

[Samuel Moyn]

Well, I love the Pope, so I'm going to give him a B plus. You know, we'll get in maybe later to what Arendt actually thought about the relation of truth and politics. Because she didn't have the view that we should just tell the truth in man, politicians tell the truth. But she is useful for a time in which we fear manipulation and in which the line between what is the fact of the matter and what's not has become decreasingly relevant. So, you know, we didn't need her to say that, of course, honestly. And press freedom is. Is something that a lot of folks have defended. So I. I guess I would want to look for something more original if I were going to quote her.

[Martin DeCaro]

The other example was Michelle Goldberg, the liberal columnist for the New York Times. She quoted Hannah Arendt in a column about Maga, its perverse delight in defilement, as she puts it. She was referring to a AI video President Trump posted during the no Kings protests over the weekend, where Trump is flying an airplane dressed as a king and he drops excrement all over American cities. Shitting on Americans is the message there, Goldberg writes, quoting Arendt. It seemed revolutionary to admit cruelty, disregard of human values, and general amorality, because this at least destroyed the duplicity upon which the existing society seemed to rest. Goldberg goes on to say a similar giddy nihilism has long surrounded the President and his devotees, who often treat his unlikely ascension as a world historical feat of trolling.

[Samuel Moyn]

I like that one. You know, it does have roots in what Arendt said, and it captures something about the current regime. There is something important to say about Trump's original relationship to, you know, the truth, which maybe most politicians at least pretend to tell. Whereas in a sense, you know, he wants us all to be in on the joke that he's not even trying and he's trolling our political system. Now, whether that's fascist or whether, you know, how we explain it in our own time is another matter. But, yeah, I give Michelle, whom I like, an A minus.

[Martin DeCaro]

Okay, that's a pretty good grade. You know, it's not like we can't use past philosophers to understand our current dilemmas. Although we always have to be careful, right? Were they writing for their own times? Were they writing for the ages? Who was Hannah Arendt writing for? Well, you know, really. Sam, we should start. You're the professor here. The encyclopedia sized entry of her life. Who was she and why? Why did she become so prominent?

[Samuel Moyn]

Well, she really was, for most of her youth, a pretty apolitical philosopher. She was a German Jew, but she wasn't raised with any serious knowledge of Judaism or observance. And she went to university and became a kind of early existentialist. And in fact, it's well known that she had an affair with probably the most brilliant existentialist of all, who later became a Nazi, Martin Heidegger, whom she visited after World War II. She was racially Jewish, according to, you know, National Socialist law. So after 1933, she spent years as a refugee. She became stateless, meaning she lost her German citizenship. And she fled in harrowing circumstances, eventually to the United States, where she was a journalist for Jewish newspapers mainly. And then, you know, she ended up writing this smash hit called Origins of Totalitarianism. She became one of the leading intellectuals of the Cold War period. She helped popularize the whole idea of totalitarianism and wrote many interesting books. She got a lot of notoriety for traveling to Israel and writing up a New Yorker story that became a book about the Eichmann trial, which put her in the bad books of a lot of American Jews.

[Martin DeCaro]

It's controversial what she had to say about Eichmann.

[Samuel Moyn]

Extremely controversial. She wrote a lot, and it's like many philosophers, she's hit or miss in her comments on current affairs, her attempts to understand her own time. What's striking is how she's been belatedly made into a progressive icon. She wrote enough that you can find stuff that she said that's apropos of various moments.

[Martin DeCaro]

As you say, she was hit or miss, like any philosopher, like any individual trying to understand their own time. So there is a danger. Taking what she wrote and she died in 1975, taking what she wrote 75 years ago and applying it to what's going on today. You wrote an essay in Prospect in 2020, October 2020. The headline was, you have misunderstood the relevance of Hannah Arendt. I'll share a link to this essay in my weekly newsletter. Have you changed your opinion? Are we still getting her wrong or misusing her? And how?

[Samuel Moyn]

I think less so for two reasons. I mean, I should first explain what I was upset about because there was an Arendt phenomenon shortly after Donald Trump's election. The first time in 2016, the fears of authoritarianism fascism spiked. Even though we now see that Trump was tame and obstructed in his first term compared to now. Origins of Totalitarianism became a huge bestseller. It became a kind of compendium of the resistance, so called, which is really a liberal phenomenon. It's not actually so clear that Arend wasn't herself a conservative. You know, it was just opportunistic. Like you find what you want to find in the same way you can find what you want to find in the Bible or Moby Dick or whatever. So that was my complaint and I thought that there was actually some edgy stuff that deserved more airtime from Arendt's writings. And I gave an example and I can later. So in our time, I guess my two reservations are first, I don't think there's the same cult of Arenth this second time around. I'm not denying that you've cited two examples from Screaming from the Headlines, but it's not a bestseller as it became. I don't think it's as central. Above all, I think the resistance is by and large dead as an organized form of politics. And so that was really what the Arendt revival was about. You know, that's the first thing. The second is that Trump is acting a lot more authoritarian than the first time around, in part because, you know, he learned lessons from being blocked by his own lieutenants and so forth. So I'm less upset now that you might want to bowdlerize some philosopher to indict the president, which of course I would like to do as well. I just don't cite Arendt to do it. Don't need her.

[Martin DeCaro]

Donald Trump is not a totalitarian. Although totalitarianism isn't just about the leader. It's a society wide phenomena. And some people would argue that there's never really been a true totalitarian society or regime because it's impossible as long as you have anyone who can think freely. Wasn't that Arendt's point about that? What did she mean by post truth? Because that is one of the attractions I think people find in Arendt. We're living in a time where they see Trump's followers, they will believe anything he says. They are perfect for him. Right. They're not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist. Right. So we're living in a post truth society. What did she mean by that? What context was she writing in?

[Samuel Moyn]

Well, so just to take one little step back.

[Martin DeCaro]

Sure.

[Samuel Moyn]

Because it's not widely known when Arendt decided to write her big book. It was just going to be about Nazism. And she wrote the first two thirds, which are an attempt to understand the long range possibility of Nazism coming onto the horizon, which she, you know, leads her into histories of anti Semitism and imperialism. And then a few years later, she decided to write another piece of the book, and it's the last piece, and it's still mainly about National Socialism, but it's really about totalitarianism as a supposedly novel way of having a government, you know, the ancients. And she really was a philosopher oriented towards Plato and Aristotle. They knew about tyranny. And her claim, a very specific claim, is that modern times make a form of rule that they didn't know about, and it was totalitarian rule. And in the course of that third part, which first leads her and many others to begin analogizing Nazism and Stalinism or communism, which isn't obvious, she makes some claims about leaders and their lies. And of course, that's a really important topic. And that's the stuff that has generally been quoted. Now, what I think most of those who quote her don't know is that Arendt actually celebrated a politics that we would now call post truth. She was very nervous about making politics answer to the criterion of truth. Obviously, all politicians are deceptive and liars, as we said earlier. What's kind of interesting about Trump's audience is that either they're in on the lie, like they know it's a lie, or they're indifferent to the truth. They like the trolling, like what Hitler and Stalin were doing with the so called big lie, which she does analyze, might be different from what Trump is doing, but we'd have to get into the details. I just think, like, we have to know that it's true that she was very worried about certain kinds of totalitarian lying practices, but it's also true that she didn't want a politics based on truth either.

[Martin DeCaro]

Well, Trump has no ideological system. He's not pursuing any type of ideological big goal to remake society, as were the Nazis and especially the Soviets. Right. Based on a system or a set of laws that were driving the direction of history. And this brings up the issue of prophecies in both Nazism and Stalinism. We can get into that. I know that's a rabbit hole. This is all one big rabbit hole waiting for you and I to dive into this.

[Samuel Moyn]

It really is.

[Martin DeCaro]

Yeah, but, but I don't see that here with Donald Trump.

[Samuel Moyn]

Yeah, I think that's the essential question and topic I would have said that you're certainly right about Trump 1.0, that it wasn't just that he was blocked and thwarted, that legal tactics hampered him, though all that's true. And he learned not to be thwarted this time, partly by choosing different folks to work for him. But it also seemed at the time that he didn't really have an agenda to execute. I mean, his biggest goal was tax cuts, and he achieved that in his first term, renewed in the second term. Other than that, he seemed, you know, bored with his power. Now, I guess I would agree with some people who think that Trump 2.0 is different. And there's something more there. There's something more intentional, there's something more programmatic. What's ironic is that a lot of the things that people said about Trump in the first term are actually more true of Trump in the second term. But what's fundamentally different is that Trump does not have a mandate. It doesn't seem as if he has the social foundations of power that Hitler and Stalin could claim, in part through use of authoritarian techniques. Yeah, now Trump is doing some stuff, you know, like sending the military into cities that reek of totalitarianism, but it's not the same, I think, yet, because he doesn't have the consent or the tools available, or at least he hasn't deployed them successfully yet, to kind of lock down society in the way that Hitler and Stalin both did with secret police propaganda outfits in a one party state. That's just not the world in which we're living right now.

[Martin DeCaro]

In the United States, his presidency has been an abomination. However, what we're trying to do here is understand why this is happening, what are the motivations, the aims.

[Samuel Moyn]

Absolutely.

[Martin DeCaro]

And whether going back to someone like Hannah Arendt is helpful because, you know, using bad history, abusing history, just causes more confusion, doesn't help us actually solve what we're trying to solve today. I mean, that's a point you've made over and over when it comes to the resistance. They're not looking at America, they're not looking at the American causes of Trumpism. They're searching and rummaging around the wrong periods of history and in the wrong philosophy books or what have you.

[Samuel Moyn]

I think that's right. So there could be some uses in Arendt, but it wouldn't be a kind of conventional use that she helps us understand, like fascism and totalitarianism, because it is not clear that we're there yet. Which doesn't mean Trump's good. On the contrary, it means that we need to think more deeply about how the bad that he represents has ascended to power not once, but twice.

[Martin DeCaro]

Man, I interrupted you before, or I almost did. I want to just follow up on that point. When it came to the third part of her book, the Origins of Totalitarianism, some historians took exception with her putting both Soviet system and Nazism in the same treatment. Right. There's just too many differences. She had a lot of critics among historians and philosophers who found her work thin. We look at her today as a prophet. But there are people who thought that her work was somewhat flimsy, right?

[Samuel Moyn]

Absolutely. And it's imaginative enough to have stoked a lot of substances, subsequent research. But the first thing to say is that the vast majority of those who invoke Arendt have not read her, certainly not read her seriously. If they did, they would find that the origins of totalitarianism is. Is bizarre and it's not obvious and it doesn't deserve a kind of scriptural attitude.

[Martin DeCaro]

It.

[Samuel Moyn]

It deserves something, you know, more critical, like, of any book, what's valuable, what's off base. I think that in the current reception, you know, it's funny, like the book gets rep published every so often, and you can just tell by who's asked to write the preface what the values not of Arendt, but of her audience are at the time. So Samantha Power wrote the preface when humanitarian intervention against Nazis abroad was all the rage. Anne Applebaum wrote the most recent preface, one of the intellectual leaders of the resistance. What's striking in this round of the Aren't reception is that in a sense, the first 2/3 of the book, like the book she initially set out to write, have been completely left out. No one ever mentions them, no one cites them. Michelle Goldberg hasn't cited those. It's that last part where she makes a feint in the direction of communism and Stalinism, because after all, the third part is still itself mostly about National Socialism. It's got a lot of problems because her understanding of what happened in World War II, at the time she wrote Origins of Totalitarianism was pretty faulty. And she actually writes a lot about concentration camps in Western Europe, as if we can understand what happened to the Jews in Eastern Europe on the model of those camps. And then she does make some comments about Stalinism, but it's not all that well informed. And yet that's the stuff. And it's really the material about the leaders and information that have been singled out and like, you know, freed of all the dry of the whole rest of the book. In our own time. Now, that doesn't mean that those comments are useless. It just means that their citation tells us as much about us as it does about her.

[Martin DeCaro]

Exactly. As you say, put a patina of intellectual heft on an essay that was your critique of people who are using aren't the wrong way. So I have her book open here to page 348, and I'll pull a quote to make myself sound profound.

[Samuel Moyn]

Okay, Sounds good.

[Martin DeCaro]

The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility. He can never admit an error.

[Donald Trump]

Lately, there's a statement that's been out there all over the place. It's a quote from a lot of people. It said, trump's been right about everything. And if you think about it, I really have.

[Martin DeCaro]

I wonder who that sounds like. Current occupants of.

[Samuel Moyn]

Sounds like Donald Trump. Martin. I mean, you've nailed it.

[Martin DeCaro]

Yeah. The assumption of infallibility, moreover, is based not so much on superior intelligence as on the correct interpretation of the essentially reliable forces in history or nature, forces which neither defeat nor ruin can prove wrong because they are bound to assert themselves in the long run. Go ahead.

[Samuel Moyn]

You were about to say no, no. That's really interesting. And you alluded to this before. That one big part of our theory, and this actually isn't just in the last part of the book, but has some roots in the earlier parts, is about the way that in modern times, politics becomes represented as having laws in the way that nature does or people began to think society does. And our point there was that Hitler appealed to, like Darwinism to justify the race war he started. Stalin appealed to the laws of history, which supposedly, you know, meant communism as the last destination of humanity. I don't see Donald Trump doing either thing. So I'm not saying she's right about what makes totalitarianism distinctive in the past, but if she is right, then it seems like we see a big difference today. That Donald Trump, you know, he doesn't have his own theory of society and history. I wouldn't credit him with such a thing. But it's not like he's referring to the laws of nature and history. He's really like a more old fashioned nationalist.

[Martin DeCaro]

He doesn't seem to have, like I said before, an ideological system underpinning his mode of governance. Now, there are ideologues around him, and they come from different factions of the right. They're not all from the same philosophy, if you will. Russell Vogt certainly knows what he's doing. And as one of the few real ideologues who has a vision of where he wants to take the federal government. Maybe you could say that's the Heritage foundation, too, the Project 2025. But totally, yeah. When it comes to prophecy and ideological system or laws, I think most people understand that's what Soviet communism was supposed to be based on. Right. The stage theory of history put out by Marx. He, of course, borrowed from Adam Smith, who had his own stage theory as well. Right. Nazism. Less coherent, if you will. I mean, if you're looking for the great Nazi or fascist philosophers of the 20th century, you're not going to find people like Marx and Engels the equivalent on the socialist side. But there were fascist intellectuals and people who wrote about it. Roger Griffin, the historian in the United Kingdom, has often talked about the palingenetic rebirth myth that is the consistent idea among the fascist writers and intellectuals of the interwar period, trying to remake society. New men almost at an anthropological level. So for the National Socialists, the Nazis. I will get to a question here, Sam. Hang in there.

[Samuel Moyn]

Oh, no, it's very interesting.

[Martin DeCaro]

Their law was, while you said it, based on race and war, different than, say, the laws that the socialists or the communists in the Soviet Union were following. But for the Nazis, it was race and war. Germany had been a great country. It got stabbed in the back into Nazi propaganda. There was an important myth about ancient Germania and the unification of all German people going back centuries, when, of course, modern Germany was. Wasn't unified until 1871. Right? Yep. And so the laws that Hitler was following or his prophecy was about, well, pardon the expression, making Germany great again. It really wasn't more complicated than that. I don't know if you agree with that or not.

[Samuel Moyn]

That all sounds right. I mean, I guess I would say that, you know, Russell Vote et al, are more ideological operatives. Like, it's absolutely true that they want to deconstruct the administrative state and empower the presidency. But if you ask why they're not following, you know, something on the. On par with Darwin or Marx, I don't know how they would defend their beliefs. But it's not like we have big theories in the air thanks to Russell Vogt or the Heritage Foundation. What they do is they refer to the American founding and say, this is the way America was supposed to be. And then the liberals took over. Now Trump says the same thing at a different level. I think it's right to say that there are similarities between Trump and those old, you know, mid 20th century fascist politicians who said Italy was great when we dominated the world. Because we had the Roman Empire and then something bad happened, or Hitler saying, we lost the war and were mistreated and we want to make Germany great again. Those cases also illustrate that, first of all, the crisis that they saw was much worse. Objectively, World War I, the Great Depression, they had bigger systems of thought. Whereas again, like, you're just a garden variety nationalist if you say like, you know, we need to get back up on top as a country, make America great again. It doesn't seem to me that we're dealing with the same kinds of, of experiential or intellectual framework, though. There are similarities, and I'm not sure I totally think those should be explored and explained, but the differences matter, too.

[Martin DeCaro]

Yeah, we're talking about political phenomena here. And why have Americans embraced Trump? I mean, that is a very important question. Whether we can learn something about that question and answer to it from Hannah Arendt or reading Richard Evans trilogy on the Third Reich or Ian Kershaw's biography of Adolf Hitler, maybe. I mean, I've read all those books, and I find that the differences are more important than the similarities. Even under Nazism, which was an ideology, of course, and Hitler was an ideologue, and the most important part of their worldview was the Jews, antisemitism was the defining aspect of Nazism, unlike other fascist movements, which often weren't anti Semitic. But even in Nazism, like the party program of 1923 was just ignored. I'm kind of going all over the place here, Sam, but that's what happens when I talk about these subjects.

[Samuel Moyn]

I'm down with you. So when I wrote the piece you mentioned, Prospect, a few years ago, I said, let's look at another place in Arendt's writings to avoid getting, let's say, caught up in the rhetorical force of origins of totalitarianism, when in a sense, we want to see Trump as the latest, you know, fascist or totalitarian. And I pointed to two places in Arendt's later writings that I thought would be useful. One is just this essay called Truth in Politics, where she says, but wait, every politician is a liar, and that's a good thing. That doesn't mean all lies are the same, or that Hitler and Stalin's lies, or maybe Trump's are, are forgivable. But she was not in favor of politics as truth telling. And then much more important, she wrote a piece called Organized Guilt and Universal Respons Responsibility, in which she said, in the face of the Nazis, of course we need to find the culprits, the criminals and do something about them. But she also said, we're all on the hook for what happened. This is a much better way to think about Trump. Like, how did we get to him? Why is his trolling something that, you know, 70 to 80 million people have voted for twice? That's a story that is not about fascism, but about liberalism and centrist government over decades and the betrayal of ordinary people.

[Martin DeCaro]

Yeah, those institutions destroyed public trust before Trump came on the scene.

[Samuel Moyn]

Correct. So if you're wanting to talk about lying, the question is, who lied about which wars, whether the American dream was being perpetuated or wrecked? Sounds like, you know, maybe we should not talk so much about the lying and ask, well, what were the policy choices made by those in power that paved the way for Trump? Not in order to avoid indicting the man, especially now, but to understand, well, what would be the conditions under which we would get past this politics of trolling.

[Martin DeCaro]

Her essay Lying in Politics, was written after, well, you know, this, of course, the release of the Pentagon Papers where she asserted the lying was done ultimately to protect the US Image. But it was not possible to get away with this lying because we had a free press and an open society, and therefore it didn't work. I mean, they did get away with destroying Vietnam, but you know what I mean.

[Samuel Moyn]

Yes. So that seems like it's very important because it's a situation in which she appeals to truth and doesn't make just the claim that, well, politics is post truth. So her view is nuanced, and she's very happy to indict totalitarian lies and praise those who finally reveal, like, dark truths, even about American policy. I just feel like when she does the second thing, she's just offering a liberal bromide. You know, we all believe that the role of media is to make sure we know what our government's doing in order to hold it accountable. It's not Trump's fault that we've had the death of media in this country. You know, the death of local papers, the transition to a new form of media which allows him to channel power, but it's not his doing. So if you. If you want to take that practice of truth telling which she did defend, first of all, it's not that original to her, and second, it's not Trump's doing that. We're losing that capacity to judge our politicians and make sure that telling us what they're doing.

[Martin DeCaro]

Sorry to step on you there. I was saying her original or the book? The 1951 book wasn't entirely Original either. She, like anyone, borrowed from previous thinkers and scholars.

[Samuel Moyn]

No, no. But in the end, our obligation is to go back to someone and say, well, what's the stuff she said? Which was new and useful because everyone, most of what they say is old and useless.

[Martin DeCaro]

I'm raising my hand as you say that as a, as a podcaster here. Yes, that's mine. Stock in trade, you know, she also said this. Facts have no conclusive reason whatever for being what they are. I'll repeat that. Facts have no conclusive reason whatever for being what they are. She would not be a very good fact checker for the New York Times or Washington Post for that attitude. Well, what does she mean by that? In the context of what we're discussing here?

[Samuel Moyn]

This is where she kind of looks back to the Greeks. In books like, like the Human Condition and On Revolution, which are really her philosophical masterpieces. Arendt defends a view of politics that, you know, says we're at our best as human beings when we're, like, appearing in public and arguing for an outcome, trying to win over followers. And she loved Pericles and thought like, we should have leaders who are gifted leaders who speak in public brilliantly. And so she said, but that's not math or natural science where there is an incontestable truth. Politics at its best is like saying something controversial which can't be established. And it's about making claims about the world that can't always be validated. Yet that doesn't make politics bad for her. It made it great. And so while she was very concerned about big lies in politics, she also was very nervous about letting, let's say, almost what she referred to as the despotic character of truth intrude too far into politics. Because politics has to be a place where we're not always totally sure what the truth is. And that's essential in order to be allowed to make our case about how to live together. Next.

[Martin DeCaro]

Yeah, fact checking Trump, right? I mean, what purpose does this serve anymore?

[Samuel Moyn]

Well, I'm sure she would have said, and I agree with her, that there is a role for fact checking all politicians, but it's not as if that's all of politics, because otherwise we would, you know, just have some council of censors who decide what the truth is. And we wouldn't need to engage in persuasion or have votes.

[Martin DeCaro]

Exactly. It's about feeling right. You can't wave a fact checked. Listen, of all the bullshit Donald Trump has said over the past eight years in front of his supporters and say, look, you Believe in a thousand lies. Right. That's not how this. I guess that's what I'm getting at. As a journalist. I support fact checking, of course, but, you know, that's in journalism, right?

[Samuel Moyn]

Well, in your field, there's this idea that there's neutrality and objectivity. And I think her point was that when it comes to politics, those are scarce commodities because facts are always part of a story and they can be character in one or another way. And there are liberal newspapers and conservative newspapers, and they see the world differently. And it's not like we use a microscope to know what the truth is. Truth is like a practice that could be hostage to the play of appearances and a phrase she liked to use. So that makes people very nervous because they would like to be able to check facts and know the truth and falsehood, like black from white. But Arendt insisted that it's the virtue of the political realm to be shadowy, for it to be hard to say who's telling the truth.

[Martin DeCaro]

So last thing here, Sam, based on that, what it always comes back to for me, anyway. Yeah, we're talking about someone who wrote before the Internet, before social media, before our current post, truth. Of course, the Pentagon Papers exposed all the lies the government was telling us, but when they were exposed, it did a lot of damage to the government. It did help turn public opinion against the Vietnam War and bring them that war to a close. We are living in a different. Yeah, we're living in a different era now where, you know, if the Watergate tapes were released today, you would have some people still believing that Nixon never said it because Nixon would go on his preferred cable network or his favorite social media platform and say, I never actually said those things. It's a hoax, it's a lie. So I guess that's another obstacle to applying aren't and what she said about truth and, you know, the Madison Avenue men and all their bullshit about, you know, the Pentagon Papers and all of that stuff. Stuff. It's like protecting the US image. Not so much a question, but go ahead.

[Samuel Moyn]

I think that's very insightful and I'm very far from denying that she has a lot of uses for us. We have to debate what they are. But there's one thing that she didn't see because it wasn't as clear in her time as it is now, which is that we can have societies that are mainly afflicted by kind of diverging populations and a lack of fundamental consensus. Our debates really reflect that. We almost have like, parallel countries at this point. And so what we can agree about, you know, in history or politics sort of depends on how much consensus we have. As you say, in Nixon's time, for all the division that the Vietnam War stoked in America, there still were limits because people from Nixon's own party could go to him at a certain point and say, you have to resign or we will impeach. Impeach you. Whereas our Republicans exempt Trump twice so far from the impeachment verdict. So I think our fundamental issue is something Arend is not that helpful in assessing, which is almost like a divergence of mentalities and a refusal to be like to live in the world in which the others truths are true. Yeah.

[Martin DeCaro]

You know about the Pentagon papers. It was McNamara and his people who tried to impose mathematical, scientific, certain certainty to war. Yes. Right. And betray charts and graphs and facts and body counts.

[Samuel Moyn]

Absolutely. Body counts. Yeah.

[Martin DeCaro]

And that fell apart under sunlight. Sunlight being the great disinfectant. So that was a different era.

[Samuel Moyn]

Absolutely. They were fans of managerial government. And, you know, Trump and Vote want to, in a sense, get rid of government other than as a, you know, corruption scheme for their friends or Trump's friends.

[Martin DeCaro]

Yeah. It's all about the grift.

[Samuel Moyn]

So it's more Mafia than management.

[Martin DeCaro]

Yes. I mean, there was tough, tons of corruption in Nazism, in the Third Reich, for sure. Yeah. This is what Trump is really all about, as you said, this is global Mafia politics. To borrow the term that the historian and political scientist Alex Duvall used on my show recently, Global Mafia Politics.

[Samuel Moyn]

I am a big fan of an essay to which you can link in your show notes, which is by my own doctoral advisor, Martin James, who said the fundamental way of thinking about Trump is not necessarily as. As fascist or totalitarian, but as racket man. And, you know, that is an old term for the Mafia player. It's a very insightful analysis. Follow up on her question to you.

[Zoe]

Because the New York Times is reporting.

[Samuel Moyn]

That your legal team is seeking $230 million from your own Justice Department.

[Zoe]

Now in response to the investigation into you.

[Samuel Moyn]

Is that something you want your legal team to do?

[Donald Trump]

I don't know what the numbers are. I don't even talk to them about it. All I know is that they would owe me a lot of money. But I don't. I'm not looking for money. I'd give it to charity or something. I would give it to charity, any money. But look what they did. They rigged the election. And as you know, we had in one case, 60 Minutes had to pay us a lot of money. George Sloppadopoulos had to pay us a lot of money. And they already paid, you know, they paid me a lot of money because what they did was wrong. And you know, when somebody does what's wrong now with the country, it's interesting because I'm the one that makes a decision, right? And you know, that decision would have to go across my desk. And it's awfully strange to make a decision where I'm paying myself. In other words, did you ever have one of those cases where you have to decide how much you're paying yourself in damages? But I was damaged very greatly and any money that I would get, I would give to charity.

[Martin DeCaro]

On the next episode of History as it Happens. Did you attend a no Kings protest recently? What did our founding fathers say about monarchy? What were they worried about? We're going to be joined by Joseph Ellis, Pulitzer Prize winning historian and American institution. That is next as we report History as it Happens. Make sure you sign up for my newsletter. You can do so at Substack. It is free. Just search for History As It Happens.

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