chairman trump's great leap backwards

The Trumpian war on science, culture, and checks and balances on executive power is eagerly, and rapidly, repeating the worst mistakes of past autocracies.

Quick, what did Nazi Germany, the USSR, the Khmer Rouge and Mao’s China have in common outside of their militarism and stifling totalitarianism? They utterly despised scientists and artists in every possible respect. Hell, in the former Soviet Union being called an intellectual was a threat, a way to say that the person in question asked too many questions and was thinking too hard about the hows and whys to be compliant with the regime’s edicts.

But then again, authoritarian strongmen are paradoxically weak. They cannot stand to be told they’re wrong, which is why they tend to fill their orbit with sycophants, weak-willed and incompetent minions whose only qualification to run critical aspects of the government is their unquestioned loyalty. Being able to say no is reserved only for the most loyal and closest of allies, but even then, if they say no too much, their days may be numbered when we consider the ample historical precedent.

Since weak leaders surround themselves with craven yes men to hear only praise in private, the last thing they want is anyone questioning them in public. Their image is being the one person in the entire country that knows everything, and without whom the nation and its people would be lost. This is why they do things like tell journalists how to report on them, and plant reporters to ask questions like “why do you look so healthy?” instead of having an honest exchange.

But scientists all too often find things which don’t fit with the regime’s ideology. They contradict bold declarations with pesky facts that either embarrass those in charge, or just rub the rulers and their minions the wrong way, and because scientists carry a certain cultural and social weight, it makes the public at least pause to consider what they have to say instead of Dear, Glorious, or Benevolent Leader.

Meanwhile artists like to ask questions. Inconvenient questions. Questions that make people think and doubt and ask more challenging questions of their own. And in any authoritarian regime, a great amount of power is simply given up by the people under promise of boring, mindless prosperity, with a threat of force should they try to resist said mandatory prosperity, so once the people stop silently conceding, trouble starts.

When those people start getting ideas and either quietly — or far worse for the leader trying to present a portrait of nationwide harmony — loudly, disagree with the regime and test the limits of speech, the illusion of consensus and conformity cracks. If they crack down too hard, there could be more unrest and an underground resistance like in Nazi Germany and Maoist China. If they use too light of a hand, they risk failure and eventual dissolution, like USSR during Glasnost.

america’s second war on wrongthink

So far, the Trump administration is very much following the authoritarian playbook as far as its treatment of scientists and demonization of artists is concerned. They have effectively dismissed every celebrity critical of them as haters, traitors, anti-American, and not so subtly implied that some were on payroll of sinister forces conspiring in the shadows against “real patriots.”

Of course, the great irony in this is that Leonard Leo, who is responsible for effectively gutting the Supreme Court and turning it into a right wing populist bludgeon is trying to drown out any education or art it deems too liberal for its tastes, asserting that the only reason anyone wouldn’t be a pro-MAGA zealot is “liberal indoctrination” in media and schools. Which, yes, is the same excuse for any aspiring totalitarian regime trying to justify why its actual policies are extremely unpopular. Every accusation, is indeed a confession when it comes to authoritarians.

As far as scientists go, Trump and our Secretary of Plagues RFK Jr. unleashed an all-out assault on American science and research. From cutting funding with a buzzsaw, to censoring research based on conspiracy theories, to demanding scientists aren’t guilty of wrongthink in using certain far right trigger words, regardless of context or meaning, or of not giving the regime’s favorite cranks a place in prestigious journals, to undermining public health with science denialism deeply steeped in eugenics and reminiscent of literal Nazi ideology and tactics.

Even more alarmingly, this crusade against “woke science” is very eerily reminiscent of how Nazis sought to demonize any scientific field with too many Jews spouting all sorts of ideas about the common good and progress as “Jewish science” and tried to dismantle their labs, slash their funding, censor their research, and eventually chase them out of the country. And this was, believe it or not, why the Nazi nuclear weapons program never achieved viable results. The SS had exiled or killed anyone capable of helping Heisenberg, in stark contrast to the Manhattan Project.

It’s also a tangental outgrowth of the Trump administration’s disdain for scientists who didn’t try to pretend reality adhered to his forced optimism about COVID in 2020 in a similarly unsettling parallel to Soviet Union’s embrace of Lysenkoism. As collectivized farming wasn’t working out as well as the Communist Party hoped, they chose to turn to the arrogant delusions of Trofim Lysenko, who borrowed heavily from Lamarckism, an idea about how traits were passed on to offspring before the discovery of genetics.

Tens of millions starved as harvests failed and any scientists who understood why this was happening how to fix it were silenced, jailed, or even executed. In similar fashion, Trump is trying to rewrite the history of the pandemic to advance his favorite — but in no way proven or properly substantiated — theory of COVID’s origin, and declared Dr. Anthony Fauci as his followers’ number one target for retribution over the lockdowns, masks, and vaccines which they hated because something something Q and 5G.

repeating history, one brain drain at a time

Of course, the real reason for this behavior is simple. Fauci and the pandemic experts made him look bad, uninformed, and pathologically stubborn by contrast, which more than likely cost him the election. COVID was not an opponent he could bullshit or just bluster and browbeat into submission. And since he couldn’t do that, like any furious authoritarian, he’s going to take his frustrations out on the scientists.

He’s making the same mistake made by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and Castro, which is deciding that he doesn’t need any of that “Jewish,” or “capitalist,” or “traditional,” or “imperialist,” or “woke” science. He’ll make his own. With big, beautiful charts, figures, and tables showing that everything is terrific in Trumplandia now that he’s back. As far as he’s concerned, if the scientists and engineers don’t like it, they can go somewhere else to get their woke grants.

The big problem for the United States is that this is exactly what they’re doing. For the first time in 80 years, the world’s top researchers are flocking away from America and looking for labs, universities, and contracts in Europe and Canada. Grad students who would be discovering the next treatments for cancer, or new antibiotics, crack fusion or quantum computing, and inventing new materials are having their visas revoked out of the blue, or being jailed and deported for bureaucratic offenses usually punishable by a $200 fine and a stern wag of the finger.

With their trust in American institutions evaporating faster than water on a Hot Jupiter, they’re going to do this groundbreaking work in nations which are happy to make our self-inflicted pain their gain. France, Canada, the UK, and China are rolling out the red carpet and encouraging disaffected scientists to come. Engineers will follow to build all the tools those scientists need, or machines they help invent. Then lawyers, artists, and scholars who irritate the regime. Then, refugees and asylum cases.

Or, at least, this is how the brain drain I witnessed across Eastern Europe in the wake of the USSR’s implosion unfolded. The only reason those scientists didn’t leave much, much sooner? They weren’t allowed, kept working for the regime through coercion as minders followed their every important move. Right now, this is not a problem for the scientific community, so they’re heading for the exits while they can because they do actually listen to those who know history and don’t want to see it repeated.

Meanwhile, Trump and his Cult of MAGA is openly embracing many of the worst, most regressive ideas of the past century, hellbent on refusing to learn from their failures. It seems almost laughable that GOP politicians want to make classes about the horrors of communism mandatory so they can teach kids how communist leaders starved and jailed or killed tens of millions of people through starvation or purges, while feverishly trying to enact so many of the same ideas and policies which resulted in said deaths. But then again, self-awareness was never a strong suit of autocrats.

[ mid-article illustration by Dongyan Xu ]