June, 2020
Lincoln and Berlin – It's hard to fathom the outcome of last month's Nebraska Republican primary election, in which Donald Trump received 242,032 votes, double the 122,327 he received in the 2016 primary. His performance in office – the 2020 primary election was held at the height of the Coronavirus outbreak and at the depth of the farm economy crisis – cannot explain the results.
If anything, one might expect the reverse. In 2016 voters may have cast their Trump votes as a protest, thinking he would not win; or believed that, once elected, he would become "presidential"; or believed in the promises he made to the working-class, to be their champion; or believed he would drain the Washington political swamp.
Why would people vote again for Trump in 2020, after his performance as the most un-presidential, morally-challenged, and divisive president ever? Single-issue voters (guns, abortion) would account for some votes; those who care only about his advocacy of a rapacious business climate would account for more; so would the poorly educated who are addicted to "govertainment." But a doubling of the vote after he was impeached, after his ruination of the farm economy, after weakening our international alliances, after his lack of leadership to confront the Coronavirus?
That's improbable. Something else must be at work.
An explanation that seems plausible to me grows out of what I and many others witnessed in Germany before the country was unified thirty years ago. The East German television network broadcast Communist propaganda continuously, which could also be seen in West Berlin. I remember watching the avuncular Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler interpret Western news over what was called Der Schwarze Kanal. To much of the East German population, it was truth. They had long since become collaborators with the authoritarian regime. As Anne Applebaum explains in an insightful new work, collaborationists feel immensely relieved with their capitulation.
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and people from the West were able to see actual conditions in East Germany, they were appalled. The reaction was summed up in this common analysis: "If East Germany is the world's 11th largest economy, we'd hate to see the 12th." The cities were horribly contaminated, the countryside poisoned, the economy in permanent depression.
Nebraska is not East Germany, to be sure, but there are parallels. Television channels and their hosts popular with Nebraskans are reminiscent of Der Schwarze Kanal; birds and insects are disappearing from Nebraska at an alarming rate; a one-party political system governs in Nebraska, badly but largely unchallenged; the rural economy is not viable and much of the state is de-populating; the urban economy is fragile, susceptible to pandemics and unrest resulting from inequality.
And, as in East Germany, there is a soothing collaborationist sentiment among the majority of the population, as evidenced by the Nebraska primary vote. It is led by the Republican elected leadership, which once said it stood for balanced federal budgets, low tariffs, infrastructure, respect for science, internationalism, checks and balances, and, above all, decency. Where did that go? The relief felt through collaboration with the authoritarian Trump regime, which manifests the opposite position on every such issue, seems stronger than anyone suspected. So much for the party of Abraham Lincoln.
Willa Cather, whose statue now represents Nebraska in the U.S. Capitol, admired and celebrated Nebraska's pioneers. In her novels she was not so sanguine about the generation that followed. That trend has continued, to what is now Nebraska's nadir.
