If Only The Little Father Knew

 Well, Trump's comments have once again created a crisis of intolerable cognitive dissonance among Senate Republicans. On the one hand, these are mostly people who have spent their political lives as defense hawks. They know, if anyone does, that the United States has a treaty obligation to defend our NATO allies, in the event of an any attack against any member of the alliance. On the other hand, they are members of the current Republican Party. As such, they know that they exist and hold office purely on the sufferance of His Majesty Donald Trump. And yet, here is Trump saying explicitly, just yesterday, that he would not defend our NATO allies. Indeed, he is saying that he would "encourage" Putin to attack them. 

What is a Senate Republican to do? How are they to preserve some shred of what was once for them a core political principle, while at the same time refusing to criticize Trump for anything? Many chose the approach of expressing slight displeasure, while at the same time downplaying the significance of Trump's comment. It was a "stupid thing to say," was Rand Paul's muted response. Others take the path of sheer denial. They insist that Trump somehow (and they never specify how) simply did not mean what he said. "[V]ery clearly, we’re going to defend our NATO allies," said Mike Rounds, according to Politico. But why is that clear? Trump said he wouldn't defend them; and he's running for president. Well, I don't take Trump "literally," replies Cornyn—dusting off an old stand-by. Rubio reportedly opined in a similar vein: "That’s not how I view that statement [...] He doesn’t talk like a traditional politician."

But I think Senator Tillis had the most creative solution of them all: As Politico reports: "Tillis blamed Trump’s team rather than the former president’s long-established beef with NATO, saying 'shame on his briefers' for not explaining the U.S. has made a commitment to assist any NATO country that is attacked." There we go. That's the mot juste for the occasion. The best way to solve this particular brand of cognitive dissonance is also the oldest strategy in any autocracy: blame the evil advisors, rather than the emperor himself. 

Since ancient times, after all, absolutist monarchies and personalistic cults have had to confront the question of what to do when the leader is manifestly in error. Officially, in any autocracy, the king can do no wrong. And yet, daily experience throughout the land confirms time and again that the king does many things wrong. How is one to reconcile experience with theory? All autocracies—even the most absolutist—resolve this the same way. They create a safety valve. They say: the king may have made a mistake this time; but it was only because he was misled by his evil advisors. The king himself would never wish ill. If he knew the consequences of his words, he would never have uttered them. It is only because those evil lesser officials worked against the common good that we are in the present mess. 

In czarist Russia, this approach was known under the handy phrase "if only the little father knew." If the czar were aware of the people's suffering at the hands of the lesser bureaucrats, that is to say, he would surely have intervened to stop it. The apparent corruption and misrule of the regime, therefore, was never his fault. It could all be laid at the feet of the evil advisors. And so, every few years, some lesser officials could be tried on charges of corruption; the public would feel vindicated; and the reputation of the "little father," the czar himself (whose heart of course bleeds for the suffering of his people) would be preserved. (It's essentially the same principle on which the People's Republic of China still operates today—the government can occasionally be criticized, but only so long as it is the lesser officials—the local party bosses—who take the blame). 

This is the Tillis solution. "If only the little father knew." It can't have been Trump himself who pledged to violate our treaty commitments to our democratic allies. It must have been his "briefers" who simply failed to adequately inform him that the United States has made a binding commitment to NATO, and that the whole deterrent purpose of the alliance collapses if its members refuse to honor their obligations. It can't have been Czar Trump. It must have been those evil advisors!

"I thought how odd it was," Doris Lessing once wrote, in The Golden Notebook: "we all have this need for the great man, and create him over and over again in the face of all the evidence." She was referring to Stalinist intellectuals who refused to believe the worst of the Soviet regime, in spite of all the purges and deportations staring them in the face. But the same observation applies to every political cult of personality, including the MAGA one. 

Lessing's narrator makes this observation about the need to recreate the "great man" after a friend and fellow Communist Party member tries to defend Stalin by suggesting that "perhaps he never knew about all the terrible things that were happening." In short, she was floating the "if only the little father knew" theory to excuse Stalin's crimes. And here Tillis is doing the same for Trump. "Perhaps he just didn't know about our binding treaty commitments. Perhaps his 'briefers' just failed to inform him."

The point of Lessing's example, though, is that of course Stalin was not ignorant of the atrocities being perpetrated in his name. Indeed, he was ordering them. As Osip Mandelstam memorably portrays him in the "Stalin Epigram," he positively relished his own atrocities and murders, tasting them like grapes. Everything we know about Trump's character and personality suggests he approaches his misdeeds with the same relish. He is not simply misinformed. He is downright looking forward to the idea of Putin grinding our democratic allies into dust!

One feels Tillis must know this on some level. But he has chosen the elliptical method of communication that people start to adopt whenever they are laboring under repressive regimes, or inside the mental confines of closed intellectual systems—when they are no longer capable of thinking or expressing themselves freely, in short, because the dogmas of a reigning cult or ideology threaten to contradict what they actually know to be true. 

In the MAGA Republican Party as we have it today, it is simply unthinkable to condemn Trump, even for such a blatantly lawless and dangerous statement as the one he gave last night. And so, the politicians trot out the old excuses. The same ones that their ilk gave under the Czar or under Stalin. He must not really have meant it. Or: he must have been given the wrong information. If only the little father knew...