Sleepwalking in a Snitch State

Like a caper movie with crasser theft, the Donald Trump campaign’s disparate strands converge at the end. Just as the media belatedly bleats the word “fascism,” he takes the stage in Madison Square Garden for a Nazi rally, flanked by his coterie of frauds and flakes who’ll descend on any free buffet. Project 2025 aside, the gold-paint reality of Trump’s Vegas Reich presents mostly the concept of plans. 

The Big Man claims he alone can fix it, but the only problem on offer is that the wrong sorts of people keep getting away with being themselves, and it’s the job of everyone in the audience to become the biggest asshole on their block to put a stop to it.

The most exasperating part of America’s hesitancy to recognize Trumpian fascism is the obstinate ahistoricity of it. Conditioned by decades of film Nazis with clipped British accents and icy-blue-eyed Prussian efficiency, the 24-hour news conversation suspended accepting what it could see with its own eyes in wait of a comprehensively elucidated program of branded fascism. Not even the original Nazis managed that. Fascism is to politics what the guy who will say anything to get laid is to love: The point is getting to “yes.” How doesn’t matter, and good luck to the “you” left in the aftermath.

Despite online commentary from 2016 to the present citing historian Ian Kershaw’s framing of Germany’s road to the Final Solution as a process of “working towards the Fuhrer” — clown-shoe underlings and a compliant citizenry making contingent decisions to comply with the Leader’s plan-like concepts — describing Trumpism as dependent on the same mechanisms never quite took hold in any reliable sense. Perhaps that’s the Good Trump Voter fallacy at work or because “Republicans buy newspapers too.” But just because you don’t formally recognize a process doesn’t mean it isn’t happening to you.

One person who has been clear-eyed about that recognition is the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer. In early October, he published “The Rise of the Right-Wing Tattletale,” about Texas’s abortion bounty law and the ways that it empowers everyday citizens to investigate and punish their neighbors where the state does not. Like the way the homeowners association evolved to be a continuation of Jim Crow by other means, the guy down the street coerces and silences where the government as yet lacks the resources to intrude. The gears of the snitch state are your neighbors and coworkers and uninvited busybodies.

Alongside Texas’ abortion bounty are isolated cranks recently transplanted to Florida, filing complaints on behalf of other people’s children to pull hundreds of books from school libraries. Meanwhile, the nearly exclusive function of conservatism online is surfacing targets of opportunity from social media to be amplified by the right’s failed child-actor vlogger commentariat, whose line-toeing exhortations to put a stop to these people who pose an existential threat to you paints the stochastic-terror crosshairs of the day on those without the resources or the psychological preparation to cope with hundreds or thousands of strangers strongly implying or explicitly promising their death or physical harm.

On Oct. 22, a court ordered Rudy Giuliani to turn over his assets to Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman, two poll workers he accused of rigging the 2020 election in Georgia, a shameless lie that destroyed their lives as they knew it. Giuliani’s court appearance was notable only for the fact that it exemplified the GOP leadership’s turn from savvy establishment operators who manipulated the base with useful lies to shrieking maniacs who wormed their own brains eating the rancid media diet they used to only serve others. The only substantive difference between Giuliani and an Alabama man sentenced to prison that same day for threatening Maricopa County election workers is that, to Giuliani, losing expensive toys probably feels like a fate worse than death.

The next day, a group called the American Accountability Foundation announced on X that, “thanks to generous support from the Heritage Foundation” — formerly one of conservatism’s two most august think tanks — it had published its list of “subversive … leftist bureaucrats” who are “operating in the shadows, shaping government policy according to their extreme agenda.” Their website has a one-word designation for those on the list: “Targets.” In 2010, we could still plausibly argue that Sarah Palin meant something else when she used that word, but that was so long ago in political time that she now seems like one of her party’s intellectuals.

To the extent that the right has a political project other than oligarchic theft and elimination, this is it. A snitch state is an active and passive threat all the way down, outsourced to a street team of people every bit as disempowered as you but making up for it by making your life worse. The understandable compensatory mechanism of looking at Trumpism’s bone-deep fascist ideology and saying “waaaiiiiit, waaaiiiiit, not yetttt …” expecting that a more refined, efficient Hollywood Nazi representative of it will arrive to take over from these militant oafs forgets that the Nazis were like this too.

Von Ribbentrop was a dim-witted wine salesman. Goebbels was every bit the weird creep that Stephen Miller is. Arguably the most talented was Göring, a morphine addict who would have spent the war doing stuff in a jacuzzi that ate through its hull if he had had the chance. The gleaming machine of the Third Reich as experienced on the local level was indistinguishable from being governed by your local Chevy dealer’s dipshit second son and surveilled by your local ass-clown sheriff who does press conferences to announce putting two whole pounds of dope on the table. Your local Gauleiter stood as much chance of being able to turn on a Panzer and put it in gear as Elon Musk does of pressing a button on a SpaceX rocket without it blowing up on the launchpad.

What you get in exchange for Rule by Bozo is fear. Not a fear crafted by an awesome and exquisitely ruthless machine, but punishingly insipid and everyday fear. Fear of going to events where those designated as undesirable congregate. Fear of being taken in for questioning for being associated with them, and fear of your friends who were taken in for questioning and suspiciously returned home without penalty. Fear of the other, and of becoming the other. Fear of speaking or acting with any spontaneity. Fear of randomness and caprice and incompetence raining consequences on everyone but its authors. Fear of the malicious joy in your antagonists’ most squalid triumphs. The crushing, demoralizing fear of being answerable to every cruel idiot you encounter, because you never know if he knows a dumber, crueler idiot.

There’s a part of Tina Rosenberg’s “The Haunted Land” where former East German citizens are allowed to read a copy of their Stasi files. (Different regime, same location, same output.) And beyond the fact that it becomes clear that agents were gathering assets and assigning targets just to have something to fill out, numbers begetting numbers and suppositions telephoning into certainties via repetition, what remains is a thunderingly stupid cruelty: people being woken up at night thanks to prank newspaper ads, faked letters ratfucking personal lives — the sorts of asinine pranks that get ginned up 40 replies deep in a Truth Social thread. An entire regime with a panic disorder coping by radiating it outward for no other reason than to make someone else have to feel this way instead.

The difficulty in dismantling a snitch state is that it runs on everyone. The track for it has been laid for the past eight years by a party and a former president with strong incentives to celebrate and empower his base by letting it report up and kick down at everyone else in hope that the exhilaration of garden-variety tattling and bullying overcomes the sensation of getting increasingly ripped off every day on the way to the grave. The result of a Trump election isn’t so much one where he wins, but where the most resentful ignorant prick in every small town emerges triumphant. They’ve settled in the neighborhood regardless of the outcome. You wouldn’t want to live there, but you already do.