Rhinocéros

It is happening here

White Rhinoceros in South Africa (Working With Wildlife CC BY-SA 4.0)

The US government has taken a dangerous, radical turn since Trump took office. I am sad and scared for my country.

In Eugène Ionesco’s play Rhinocéros, the residents of a French village turn into rhinoceroses. When they first start to turn—crashing across a town square and crushing someone’s cat—the villagers want to ban the animals from the village. Others insist rhinoceroses could never actually appear in France because the French are too smart to be so easily turned into beasts. But the villagers nevertheless begin to defend and to admire the rhinoceroses, until at last everyone in the village but the main character has transformed into a dumb rampaging brute.

Rhinocéros—in case this isn’t clear—is a parable about Nazism. Ionesco studied French literature at the University of Bucharest in the late 1920s and early 1930s when the fascism was growing in Romania. He later described how one after another the people in his circle who initially opposed the Iron Guard would join them:

“From time to time, one of the group would come out and say 'I don't agree at all with them, to be sure, but on certain points, I must admit, for example the Jews...' And that kind of comment was a symptom. Three weeks later, that person would become a Nazi.”¹

When I read Rhinocéros in high school, the idea that mindless brutality lay just underneath the surface of civilized society appealed to my teenage alienation. But I didn’t truly understand the play until seeing apparently normal people begin to rationalize or somehow explain away the vicious absurdities of the new administration. As

Claire Berlinski

says, it is a textbook case of what Erich Fromm called folie à millions. Emperor’s-new-clothes apologists who should know better assure us that ideas they would have previously dismissed as ridiculous—the US should annex Canada and Greenland, Palestinians should be driven from Gaza so we can develop beachfront real estate, Ukraine started the war with Russia, and so on—are perfectly reasonable. The rejection of basic facts and common decency is fundamental; the ideology itself is just a flimsy justification—an “alibi” Ionesco called it—for the totalitarian urge to trample everything.

Tom Scocca, “Elon Musk Gets Awkward” (Indignity)

“There was a game the fascists played back around the start of the first Trump administration, where in the name of pulling a prank they put out the claim that the hand-gesture for ‘OK,’ rotated a certain way, shaped the letters ‘WP,’ for ‘White Power.’ They began flashing the OK sign in public, and outrage-hunting liberals began looking out for it, and the joke was that the liberals could be baited into claiming to see racist signals anywhere, when all they were really seeing was a... hand signal that White Power enthusiasts had chosen to show off their affiliation and to demonstrate their contempt for antiracism. Get it?”

Elon Musk intentionally performed Nazi salutes at a Trump inauguration rally. It’s one thing to be fair-minded, it’s another to be a chump. Being a celebrity billionaire seems to buy you limitless indulgence, but Musk doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt on this score. I find it hard to believe that Musk—who thumped his chest and extended his arm straight out with the palm facing down two times—was simply trying to show that his heart goes out to his supporters. I don’t know what Musk’s real ideological commitments are, but I’m not sure it matters. He has not only used his personal account to post antisemitic comments and amplify openly extremist accounts on social media, but is also a generous and vocal supporter of Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the heir to the Nazi Party in Germany. Steve Bannon followed up with a crisp Sieg Heil of his own at CPAC. Modern extremists like Musk and Bannon like to troll censors and watchdogs by using coded or ambiguous Nazi symbols while professing outrage that anyone would doubt their innocence. AfD supporters, for example, chant “Alice für Deutschland” at AfD candidate for Chancellor Alice Weidel, which not coincidentally sounds almost exactly like the banned Nazi slogan “Alles für Deutschland.” See the pattern here?

Quinn Slobodian, “Speed Up the Breakdown” (The New York Review)

“Young men with smirking profile photos and scandalously thin curriculum vitae have become the shock troops of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). They are strolling through the halls of power, messaging federal staffers en masse to stay home and accessing internal intelligence reports. According to Wired’s reporting, one DOGE staffer who later resigned over his racist social media posts had both read and write access to the Treasury’s payment systems for at least a day. Three years ago, as a sixteen-year old intern, another had been fired by a data-security firm for allegedly leaking information to a competitor.”

With President Trump’s blessing, Elon Musk has set about gutting the federal government by firing federal workers indiscriminately with the help of a crew of what Slobodian calls “radicalized management consultants.” This is essentially the same thing Musk did at Twitter, but suddenly eliminating government functions will cause much greater harm than dissolving Twitter’s trust and safety team. Ostensibly, this is about reducing government spending. But he seems to be focusing on—in his words—“deleting” congressionally-funded agencies like USAID that he personally doesn’t like. But these are not his or even Trump’s decisions to make. Musk is essentially arrogating to himself the power of the purse by cancelling congressional appropriations. More broadly, the Trump administration is following the example of elected autocrats like Hugo Chavez and Viktor Orbán in “deconstructing” the administrative state by replacing long-time civil servants with people who are loyal to Trump personally. Accelerationists allied with Trump are even hoping he will “speed up the breakdown” by killing public government almost entirely. Government is not perfect, of course—and in a democracy no one is happy with every compromise—but it’s fundamental to our constitutional government that the President does not have the unilateral authority of a king to decide what we do or how we spend our money. The President’s power is limited, as Justice Davis wrote in the landmark 1866 decision Ex parte Milligan, because the US may not “always have wise and humane rulers, sincerely attached to the principles of the Constitution. Wicked men, ambitious of power, with hatred of liberty and contempt of law, may fill the place once occupied by Washington and Lincoln.”

The US has taken a sharp turn toward dictatorship and imperialism since rhinoceroses took charge of the White House. American society increasingly reflects the malignant narcissism and rapacity of leaders who recognize no principle beyond the gangster’s will to power. Trump has staffed the White House with people who see The Origins of Totalitarianism as an instruction manual. More than 600 law professors wrote in a statement that the actions of the second Trump administration represented “the gravest threat to the rule of law and its constituent principles… ever presented in our lifetimes.” Trump has at the same precipitated the end of international order that made the US the most powerful and prosperous country in human history. The Financial Times wrote in an editorial that Trump has “all but incinerated 80 years of postwar American leadership” and a European diplomat told Politico that “the transatlantic alliance is over.” Singapore’s Minister of Defense said that the image of the US “has changed from liberator to great disruptor to a landlord seeking rent.” The US is no longer the leader of the free world but is now actually taking the side of authoritarian regimes against democracy. Our longtime allies are now considering increasing their military budgets not so that they can contribute more to NATO but so that they can defend themselves against us. And who can blame them?

This post is for Ben Faircloth, who couldn’t tolerate the abuse of authority. Telling the Future has no paywall, but if you read it and appreciate it—and if you can afford to—I ask that you become a paid subscriber. You can also help support my work by sharing it with others.

1. Quoted in Anne Holloway Quinney, “Excess and Identity: The Franco-Romanian Ionesco Combats Rhinoceritis,” South Central Review 24:3 (Fall 2007).