Trump Understands Fascism Better Than Stanley Milgram ~~ NOAH BERLATSKY JUL 1

 

https://substack.com/app-link/post?publication_id=874254&post_id=146059122&utm_source=post-email-title&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=rovhk&token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo0NjUxMDE4NCwicG9zdF9pZCI6MTQ2MDU5MTIyLCJpYXQiOjE3MTk4MzU4MTUsImV4cCI6MTcyMjQyNzgxNSwiaXNzIjoicHViLTg3NDI1NCIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.H4_9NY2N94bXfC2xnLqulyP9wzPsQEOcGFh73A_OPy0 ~~ recommended by newestbeginning ~~ Bureaucrats following orders aren’t the danger. Entitled leaders are. Image: Adolf Eichmann, 1941 The GOP’s Project 2025 is launching an attack on government civil servants. The Heritage Foundation is gathering tips (aka “smears”) and information on the social media posts and political positions of government employees. It plans to post them online, so Trump will known who to remove and reassign when he becomes president. Posting the information online also ensures that the people targeted will receive death threats and worse than death threats. Heritage is engaging in a fascist campaign of terror and intimidation. Hold on though. Why is this campaign of terror and intimidation necessary? Popular discussions of fascism often emphasize that Nazism is enabled by bureaucrats who “just follow orders.” But if the default of bureaucrats is to just follow orders, why would fascists bother attacking bureaucrats? If Trump’s in power, he can just say, “do this!”, and bureaucrats will blindly follow them. Stanley Milgram’s experiments proved as much, right? Well, no. In fact, Stanley Milgram’s experiments were pernicious bullshit. The relationship between bureaucrats, authority, and fascism, is more complicated—and often antithetical—to Milgram’s findings. In no small part because Milgram lied about those findings. — Milgram the Researcher of Torture Stanley Milgram is generally remembered as a groundbreaking researcher whose innovative experiments contributed to our understanding of fascism. Milgram was a psychologist at Yale University who was interested in the dynamics of atrocity. How, he wanted to know, had seemingly ordinary people acquiesced in the Nazi program of violence and extermination? Could everyday Americans be conscripted in moral abomination, just as everyday Germans had? Milgram discovered that the answer was “yes”—though not exactly in the way he intended. As you probably know, Milgram’s experiments of the early 60s involved the fake torture of subjects. Volunteers were told that they were part of an experiment studying the effects of electroshock on learning. Lab-coated instructors ordered them to turn a dial to administer shocks to a test subject—actually an actor. The actor would give wrong answers, the instructor would tell the volunteers to administer shocks, and the actors would convulse as if shocked. The instructors pushed the volunteers to administer higher and higher “shocks” and demanded they continue even as the actors registered more and more discomfort and pain. Most of the volunteers continued to administer shocks up to a maximum voltage level, even when the actors screamed and pleaded. Milgram concluded from this that people would carry out orders from authority figures even if those orders were flagrantly immoral and cruel. The experiments became famous; along with Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, Milgram seemed to confirm the idea that many of the people who committed Nazi atrocities were not ideologically committed to antisemitism, but were simply blandly following orders. Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil,” used to describe Nazi official Adolf Eichmann, was understood as conveying this idea that evil can be advanced without ideological commitments. The higher ups in the Nazi hierarchy were perhaps committed bigots and genociders, but the grunts in the office who handled the details (and even higher up non grunts like Eichmann) were simply following orders. The core Nazi evil was bureaucracy, not antisemitism. Milgram the Torturer There are various problems with this conclusion, but one big one is that Milgram’s experiments were unethical, deceptive, and generally worthless garbage. There were so many problems with Milgram’s experiments that it’s difficult to summarize them all. But the two biggest ones are that he lied about his data and that his methods were wildly unethical. Not surprisingly, these issues are interrelated. Milgram wildly understated the amount of resistance his test subjects exhibited to the commands to torture. In some cases, the resistance did involve refusing to shock. But it also came out in mental and even physical symptoms of considerable distress. The volunteers who were told to torture the actors trembled, stuttered, bit their lips, and clenched their hands. Many begged to stop the experiment Milgram noted that one businessman volunteer ended up as a “twitching, stuttering wreck” after being ordered to shock the subjects. Three participants experienced actual seizures. Spoiler: Adolf Eichmann did not experience seizures due to moral qualms while colluding in mass genocide. And in general, if Nazi bureaucrats had been similar to Milgram’s subjects, they would have been in many cases incapacitated from months or years of unendurable stress, and in no shape to pursue the regime’s goals. This is not generally what happened. The analogy between Eichmann and Milgram’s subjects is tenuous to nonexistent. However, there is someone who looks a bit like Eichmann in this experiment: Milgram himself. The volunteers were pretend torturing people and experiencing acute stress. Milgram, though, does not appear to have experienced any stress while actually torturing people. Milgram’s researchers psychologically bullied and abused their volunteers, to the point where they stuttered, panicked, and again, in some cases actually experienced seizures. Terrorizing people into experiencing seizures is reasonably described as torture. Milgram’s experiments can’t be reproduced because psychologists today recognize that it is unethical to torture people, even if you are torturing them in the name of better understanding torture. Milgram tried to cover for himself and claimed that no one experienced long-term ill effects based on follow-up interviews a year later. But later researchers found that Milgram did not in many cases even debrief subjects adequately; many of them were never told in person that the people they’d shocked were actors. Given the general shoddiness of Milgram’s approach, there’s reason to doubt that he adequately reported or evaluated long term psychological harm. And in any case, if you hit someone in the face, you have harmed them. It’s good if they heal completely, but that doesn’t make hitting them in the first place okay. The question then becomes—why was Milgram willing to cheerfully torture people and cover it up? People have a lot of resistance to following immoral orders. But why are people like Milgram willing to issue those orders in the first place? Entitlement and Ideology Milgram’s experiments suggest that the main source of evil is not obedient bureaucrats indifferent to morality, but powerful leaders convinced of the righteousness of their actions. Milgram and (presumably) his research assistants and colleagues believed that they were doing important work in understanding fascism. That trumped concern for their own volunteers—volunteers who the study itself was designed to reveal as weak, unthinking, and morally flawed. Milgram was the important knower, and what he set out to know was that his own volunteers were inferior. Add in Milgram’s own career ambitions and incentives, and you have a formula for violence, abuse, and a cover-up of that violence and abuse. Milgram set up an experiment to prove that the unquestioning immorality of flunkies is the chief danger facilitating fascism. But what he ended up demonstrating instead is that arrogant leaders in the grip of ideology and self-aggrandizement can excuse just about any violence directed at those they consider inferior. The mix of ideological conviction and entitlement is extremely dangerous. It's not hard to see how that insight applies to the Nazis and to MAGA. The Nazis did not just trust that bureaucrats and functionaries would acquiesce in mass violence. On the contrary, they put extraordinary efforts into convincing the public that Jewish people were dangerous and that German people were entitled to protect themselves from (ie, commit genocide against) Jews. Part of that effort was hollowing out institutional opposition by gutting rival sources of power in the state and ensuring that ideological allies were in key positions of power in the bureaucracy. The Nazis purged Jewish people, leftists, and political enemies and rivals from the Civil Service. Not all those who remained were necessarily committed Nazis or rabid antisemites. They were nonetheless conservative nationalists who saw the Nazis as essentially legitimate and who harbored some prejudice against Jewish people and saw laws targeting them as necessary or reasonable. Similarly, MAGA partisans are aware that, contra Milgram, civil servants who take their jobs seriously are likely to resist implementing illegal fascist orders—as, for example, when the Secret Service prevented Trump from physicaly, personally, leading the violent coup on Congress. That’s both because civil servants want to protect themselves from legal repercussions and because they see themselves as having professional responsibilities that supersede, or at least conflict, with top down immoral and illegal demands. So, like the Nazis before them, Trumpists want to install fanatic loyalists who believe they have the mandate of heaven (literally) to torment and torture immigrants, women, LGBT people, labor unions, and political opponents. MAGA understands, unlike Milgram, that people are not drones, and will not just implement evil because their boss said so. But they also know, as Milgram demonstrated, that if you tell people they have a righteous cause, and that they are entitled to advance that cause at any price, you can enable atrocities.