How Dostoevsky predicted Trump’s America

theconversation.com/how-dostoevsky-predicted-trumps-america-63799

Ani Kokobobo

As a professor of Russian literature, I’ve come to realize that it’s

never a good sign when real life resembles a Fyodor Dostoevsky
novel.

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, with its riotous rhetoric and

steady stream of scandals, calls to mind Dostoevsky’s most political
novel, “Demons,” written in 1872. In it, the writer wanted to warn
readers about the destructive force of demagoguery and unchecked
rhetoric, and his cautionary messages – largely influenced by 19th-
century Russian political chaos – resonate in our present political
climate.

To show his readers just how bad things could get if they didn’t pay
attention, Dostoevsky linked his political nightmare to unhinged
impulses and the breakdown of civility.

A passion for destruction

Dostoevsky was as addicted to newspapers as some of us are to social

media, and he often plucked crises and violence right from the
headlines, refashioning them for his fiction.

Russia during the 1860s and 1870s – the heyday of the author’s
career – was experiencing massive socioeconomic instability. Tsar
Alexander II’s Emancipation of the Serfs freed Russian peasants
from a form of class bondage, while the subsequent Great Reforms
aimed to restructure the executive and judidical branches, as well as
the military, tax code and education system. The reforms were
supposed to modernize the country by dragging it out of the caste-
like system of estates and legal privilege. But it didn’t do much to
improve the economic lot of the peasant.

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It was a reversal of America’s present political landscape. While
today there’s simmering discontent from the right, in 19th-century
Russia it was leftists who were enraged. They were angered by the
reforms for not going far enough and had lost hope in the
government’s ability to produce meaningful change.

One of the only unifying

ideas among the more
radical left-wing political factions of the period was the belief that the
tsarist regime must be eliminated. Important public figures, like
Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, advocated for destruction of the
status quo as an end greater than all ideologies. As Bakunin famously
exhorted: “The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too.”

Bakunin’s conviction that a new world could rise only from the ashes
of tsarism was actually put into practice by his one-time disciple,
Sergei Nechaev, who was the inspiration for Dostoevsky’s
protagonist in “Demons,” Pyotr Verkhovensky.

A slippery slope from incivility to violence

In 1869, Nechaev orchestrated the murder of a young student, an

event that so shocked and angered Dostoevsky that it became the
basis for “Demons.”

The novel begins in a boring provincial backwater inhabited by

middle-aged people and ineffectual young liberals, all engrossed in
their romantic lives. Pyotr Verkhovensky arrives and persuades
many of these same characters to join his underground revolutionary
society. Passions are stirred and the local order destabilized as the
town enters a downward spiral that concludes with arson and several
murders.

What’s most relevant to our time in “Demons” is not its ideologues

but the anti-intellectual and impulse-driven nature of Pyotr’s
rebellion. In Pyotr, Dostoevsky created a demagogue and pure
nihilist, a political figure who appeals to people’s baser desires.

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Under his influence, the townspeople lose all impulse control and
grow reckless, rebelling against all conventions of decency for a good
laugh. At one point they desecrate a sacred icon; at another, they
gleefully gather around the body of someone who has committed
suicide and eat the food he’s left behind.

If their pranks, insults and disorder seem harmless, the decline in the
level of public discourse act as a precursor to the violent and
destructive acts at the novel’s conclusion. A skilled psychological
writer, Dostoevsky never saw violence as divorced from normal
human behavior. What’s most haunting about his works is just how
close otherwise ordinary people are from doing extraordinarily awful
things.

In “Demons,” narrative tensions escalate in a deliberately gradual

way. What begins as minor impoliteness becomes scandal, arson,
murder and suicide. Dostoevsky is essentially saying that criminal
acts are rooted in social transgression; uncivil behavior facilitates
scapegoating, dehumanization and, eventually, violence.

‘Make America Great Again!’

Donald Trump’s unconventional campaign for president powerfully

evokes Dostoevsky’s novel. Aside from his pro-gun and anti-
immigration positions, Trump doesn’t offer many concrete political
plans. As we evaluate what motivated 14 million Americans to vote
for him in the primaries, we might consider new research showing
that his candidacy has a primarily emotion-based – rather than
ideological or economical – appeal. There are notable anti-
establishment sentiments among his supporters; many are
disaffected, middle-aged white people who believe that American
institutions aren’t working on their behalf.

And while his notorious campaign motto “Make America Great

Again” is framed in a positive way, it actually advances a version of
Bakunin’s creative destruction. It stands for purging the
establishment, for recreating a nostalgia-tinged version of some lost,

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past America. We’ve already seen this destructive drive in its more
Nechaevist, low-brow form at Trump rallies, where several people
have been attacked.

There’s another aspect of

Trump’s popularity that
ties him to Dostoevsky’s “Demons.” Trump, in the way he carries
himself, embodies the complete disavowal of impulse control we see
in the novel. Unlike most political candidates, he speaks off the cuff,
simultaneously reflecting and stoking the anger and pessimism of his
supporters.

For instance, he said he wanted to “hit” some of the speakers who

criticized him at the Democratic National Convention; in his words,
there’s anger, a need to provoke and deep-seated irreverence. His
supporters feel empowered by this. Without weighing his policies,
they’re viscerally drawn to the spectacle of his candidacy, like the
townspeople following Pyotr Verkhovensky in “Demons” who delight
in the gossip and scandals he creates.

To complete the parallel, we might turn to the novel’s ending, which

could have a sobering effect. Basic incivility gives way to an anarchic
vision of creative destruction; many die or lose their minds due to
Pyotr’s machinations. At one point, seemingly without thinking,
crowds crush a female character to death because they falsely believe
she’s responsible for the violence in town.

When audiences at Trump rallies verbalize violence by screaming

“Lock her up” and “Kill her,” or when Donald Trump – either
wittingly or unwittingly – advocates Second Amendment violence, I
wonder whether they aren’t coming dangerously close to the primal
violence of “Demons.”

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