A Literary Theorist Predicted Trump's Win in 1939. He's Worth a Read.

He tried to warn us.

Evan El-Amin

Someone understood what was going to happen before Trump was even born. He understood Hitler and fascism as it was unfolding in Germany. He also understood how much danger it posed for America.

He wrote about it in 1939, in The Southern Review of all places.

The essay was titled, "The Rhetoric of Hitler's Battle."

His name was Kenneth Burke.

My first encounter with Burke happened at the beginning of graduate school, in a seminar devoted to his work. If you don’t already know, he’s a notoriously difficult read. Books like A Grammar of Motives and A Rhetoric of Motives almost made me cry on the first read, but a decade later I was teaching him to my own graduate students and talking about the implications of his ideas.

Despite his fame among literature nerds, Burke died in relative obscurity despite honors like Guggenheim fellowships and distinguished lecturer gigs at universities. Unlike his peers, he was self-taught—a true Dewian. One of my professors went out drinking with him once. Apparently, he let him in on a little secret. “It’s all bullshit,” Burke told him. “All of it.”

In the wake of his election, I’m thinking about all the useful concepts Burke tried to give the world, and how much they might’ve helped. Since I’m no longer a professor (they told me to resign for wanting clean air or remote work), I can teach him here, to anyone who’s trying to understand what happened.

Burke would’ve made a great campaign strategist.

He got it.

Throughout his writing, Burke acknowledged that America could easily slip into fascism if its racist, sexist, and elitist groups could manage to form a collective movement and get themselves organized. In short, the only difference between Germany and America was that American fascists were too… sloppy and selfish. They were too egocentric to cooperate.

He was right, until now.

Almost a century later, social media ended up offering these disparate social blobs like white supremacists and incels the exact tools they needed to get on the same page and hammer out something of a coherent philosophy of hate. Burke died in 1993, right around the birth of the internet.

Had he only known…

In 1939, Burke described exactly how fascism works. According to him, fascists were appealing to the masses for a few simple reasons. It had nothing to do with Hitler’s or Mussolini's charisma. They weren't that likable. They were unhinged and aggressive, unpleasant to be around. But they offered something nobody else did: They offered unity. Here's what Burke had to say:

"Hitler provided a worldview for people who had previously seen the world but piecemeal." Fascists gain power when ordinary people lose trust in their institutions and feel throttled by life. "Are they not then psychologically ready for a rationale, any rationale, if it but offers them some specious universal explanation?" Hitler "was not offering people a rival worldview; rather, he was offering a worldview to people who had no other to pit against it."

As Burke goes on, Hitler also showed us "the power of endless repetition." He basically harnessed the power of advertising.

He used it all the time.

Hitler didn't simply give powerful speeches. He deliberately triggered outrage in his opponents in order to cast them as the violent ones. As Burke tells us, Hitler explained in his own writings how he made an effort to "fill his speech[es] with provocative remarks" to trigger his opponents. When they reacted to his insults, his bouncers assaulted them and threw them out.

It made him look like a victim.

Sound familiar?

Hitler managed to accomplish something that nobody else could. Through identification and consubstantiality, he made his followers feel like they were him. As Burke writes, Hitler achieved a "spontaneous identification between leader and people." He integrated himself with the public so strongly that "the politician does not even present himself as [a] candidate. Somehow, the battle is over already, the decision has been made."

Identification has a long history in rhetoric, and Burke was familiar with it. The ancient Greeks understood that if you can make your audience identify with you, to see themselves in you, then you don’t have to offer up so many facts to get them to go along with your plans, no matter what they are.

Burke took the idea of identification and added the religious notion of consubstantiation—spiritual unity.

Longinus offered a similar rhetorical concept called the sublime. You don’t simply try to persuade your audience. You’re not trying to inform or entertain them, either. You can do all of that, but it’s a means to an end, and the end is moving your audience toward a feeling of deep emotional and spiritual connection that borders on ecstasy. Combine all of this, and you get a mode of communication that’s not even trying to be about logic or reasoning.

It’s all about the feels.

This is something all of the talking heads failed to understand a few weeks ago, when Trump apparently “embarrassed” himself by going to a town hall where he barely did anything but listen to some songs and dance. Everyone missed what was really happening. On a certain level, it was a test.

Does Donald Trump even have to answer questions, or can he simply grace his followers with his presence and make them feel good?

Apparently, he can.

That’s identification. That’s consubstantiation. Trump can just show up and talk about Hannibal. He can just show up and dance. He can just show up and be weird. It works. His supporters just want to be near him.

That’s all they care about.

Isabel Wilkerson describes the same process in Caste. When people look at a demagogue, they see themselves. When they listen to a demagogue, they hear themselves. That's the magic trick.

Burke pinpointed the role the economy played in Hitler's rise to power. He managed to trick his audiences into believing they had to achieve dignity before they could build an effective economy. Burke even breaks down the four drivers of Hitler's platform. Here they are:

1. Inborn dignity (through racial superiority).

2. Scapegoating vulnerable groups.

3. Symbolic rebirth.

4. A product or solution.

Time and again, Hitler insisted that Germany's problems weren't economic or political. They were ethical and cultural.

They were spiritual.

Hitler blamed Germany's ethical and spiritual collapse on vulnerable groups. He blamed it on Jews. He blamed it on black and brown people. He blamed it on the physically and mentally ill. He blamed it on gypsies. He blamed it on sexual deviants. Germans were desperate for unity. They were so desperate, they were ready to attack any hint of difference.

Hitler understood that.

Once again, all the supposed experts and talk show hosts missed what was going on. Trump didn’t have to offer an economic plan, because restoring America’s spiritual dignity and racial hierarchy is the plan.

It doesn’t have to make sense.

It resonates.

That’s why Trump constantly talks about cultural issues. For his followers, the cultural and moral issues are the economic issues.

They see them as the same thing.

Throughout his career, Burke returned to Hitler as an example of how a demagogue would twist art, religion, science, literature, and philosophy inside out in order to serve the goals of fascism. He described the conditions that made millions of people so eager to give up their autonomy.

He found America at risk.

Here's what he said: "Our job... is to find all available ways of making the Hitlerite distortions of religion apparent, in order that politicians of his kind in America be unable to perform a similar swindle." Burke also said that "unity, if attained on a deceptive basis, by emotional trickeries that shift our criticism from the accurate locus of our trouble, is no unity at all."

For Burke, the real enemy was predatory capitalism. It was the economic system that devalued humans and elevated machines. It was the resulting culture that drove fear and alienation over community.

If you don’t take on greed, you lose to fascists.

Every time.

People like to claim that fascism could never happen in America. Up until this week, they thought we beat it, but we clearly didn't. Burke never believed that. Throughout his writing, he made it clear as well.

For Burke, America has always had all the pieces of fascism. We have a history of slavery and ethnic cleansing. We have scapegoated, marginalized groups everywhere. We have religious fanaticism. We have a predatory economic system. We have a desperate sense of loneliness that drives a desire for connection and unity. Time and again, we only manage to find the most vapid, commercialized, parasocial forms of it. We find it hard to connect, even when we’re together.

Burke also predicted how Trump would physically relocate his power away from Washington D.C. to his own golf resort, Mar-a-Lago. Burke called this strategy "geographical materialization." When you move your headquarters, it’s a bold gesture that ripples through a power structure.

Symbols matter.

That's why Trump stayed there. That's why he stored classified documents there. It wasn't stupidity or carelessness, as so many tried to claim. It was straight out of fascism's playbook. It was all intentional.

There’s only one way to beat all of this, and it comes from another literary theorist you might know, Michel Foucault.

He called it parrhesia, or fearless speech.

You have to speak the truth loudly and plainly, almost offensively, to power. That has a way of blowing up fascism. He wrote a whole book about it.

Now, how many times did Democrats tell the bold truth to power over the last year? We all know the answer to that question…

Trump and his allies might’ve looked like fools, but they were operating on a different playbook from everyone else. The only mystery here is how so few people could see what was going on. The only way to beat Trump was the only way to beat Hitler, not with insults, not with vibes, but with a bold new deal.

We didn’t get that.

People will gladly sacrifice their freedom for security and stability. They'll sacrifice other people's freedom, too. That's the lesson of fascism.

"Everything's fine," isn't a unifying narrative.

It won't work.

It didn’t.