ARRIVALS: PBS portrayed Red America's voters!

FRIDAY, JULY 4, 2025

Is it also a portrait of us? How did our struggling nation's current arrival gain purchase? 

For better or worse, adherents continue to come over the walls. But how did this latest arrival begin—and why did it gain purchase?

We said we'd show you what PBS said, and so we're going to do that. We refer to the venerable PBS program, American Masters, whose newest episode debuted last Friday night:

S39 Ep 5
Hannah Arendt: Facing Tyranny

Premiere: 6/27/2025 | 01:23:45 | TV-PG 

Discover Hannah Arendt, one of the most fearless political thinkers of the 20th century, who transformed her time as a political prisoner and refugee during World War II into daring insights about totalitarianism which continue to resonate today.

The American Masters program is now in its 39th season. Last Friday, it finally got around to profiling Hannah Arendt. 

Arendt was present in her native Germany to witness a different arrival. As a bit of basic background, her biographer tells us this:

Hannah Arendt 

Hannah Arendt (1906 – 1975) was a German and American historian and philosopher. She was one of the most influential political theorists of the twentieth century.

Her works cover a broad range of topics, but she is best known for those dealing with the nature of wealth, power, fame, and evil, as well as politics, direct democracy, authority, tradition, and totalitarianism. 

[...]

In 1933, Arendt was briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo for performing illegal research into antisemitism. On release, she fled Germany, settling in Paris...When Germany invaded France, she was detained as an alien. She escaped and made her way to the United States in 1941. She became a writer and editor and worked for the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, becoming an American citizen in 1950. With the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, her reputation as a thinker and writer was established, and a series of works followed.

According to that overview, Arendt is best known for her work on an endless array of topics! That said, she was present in her native Germany during the early years of a disastrous arrival—and she literally wrote the book about the way totalitarianism arrives on the scene.

In last Friday's American Masters program, the portrait of that German arrival starts at roughly the 20-minute mark. You can watch the entire program at its official site.

Full disclosure! The program does a remarkably poor job identifying who is providing the background narration at various points along the way as it describes that arrival. That said, we think we can give you an accurate account of that matter.

According to the program's website, "actress Nina Hoss provides the voice of Hannah Arendt as a student in Germany to the 1970s" [sic]. When Hoss provides this part of the narration, she's reading the actual words of Arendt. 

Several scholars also provide the narration as this German arrival is described. 

In our view, also this:

In its account of that German arrival, the program is making a clear comparison to the rise of our own nation's current political movement. 

You can decide if you think that comparison fair. But to our ear, that's plainly the way this program fashions its account of that earlier disastrous arrival.

How did that German arrival gain purchase? As that part of the PBS program begins, Germany is reeling in the aftermath of its defeat in World War I. 

As best we can tell, these are the voices who now seek to explain the early rise of the political movement which would become the insanely murderous Third Reich:

VOICE OF ARENDT: The most efficient fiction of Nazi propaganda was the story of a Jewish world conspiracy. The Nazis acted as though the world were dominated by the Jews and needed a counter-conspiracy to defend itself.

By 1931, I was firmly convinced that the Nazis would take the helm.

So begins the program's account, with Hoss reading Arendt's actual words. Continuing directly, the scholar Roger Berkowitz extends the discussion:

BERKOWITZ: There were federal and regional elections at the time. And if you look at Hitler's speeches during the campaigns, he would say things like, "We are a majority."

He was never a majority! And he would come up with some argument that they won. He was giving them a coherent narrative.

"We are winning. We are going to change Germany. We are going to change the world. And the movement is growing, and it's stronger because of you and your undying loyalty to me."

To our ear, the comparison to our nation's current situation is already emerging. At this point, the voice of Arendt takes over again, and the implied comparison becomes that much more clear:

VOICE OF ARENDT: The Nazis translated the propaganda lies of the movement into a functioning reality. The ideal subject was not the convinced Nazi, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer existed.

A most cherished virtue is loyalty to the leader, who, like a talisman, assures that ultimate victory of lie and fiction over truth and reality.

A basic distinction—the ability to distinguish fact from fiction—was being replaced by total loyalty to the movement's leader. Stating the obvious, that's part and parcel of one current portrait of the rise of the MAGA movement—not, we'd say, without reason. 

As it was then, so it is now? At this point, Berkowitz takes over again:

BERKOWITZ: Arendt saw this. She was there. She was living there. And so many of her friends said, "Oh, well, he's just crazy. He's just making things up. And don't worry about him. He can't win. He's just creating fantasies."

But fantasies are sometimes what we want and especially at times of economic, cultural, social, and political despair.

People—they were lonely. They were needy of meaning and belonging, and that's what Hitler was giving people.

People were saying that Hitler couldn't win—that he was just too crazy? That, of course, is what many people were saying about Candidate Trump as of 2015. 

At this point, the broadcast returns to the voice, and to the words, of Arendt herself. Within the current context, we'd score these remarks as unwise—as highly unattractive:

VOICE OF ARENDT: The Nazi movement recruited their members from this mass of indifferent people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic, or too stupid, for their attention.

The result was that the majority of their membership consisted of people who never before had appeared on the political scene.

Were Hitler's early supporters apathetic, indifferent, stupid? In effect, were they just the deplorables?

We have no idea. But within the context of this emerging presentation, that also seems to function as a portrait of President Trump's ongoing support.

In our view, our own Blue America goes off the rails when our scholars pleasure us—implicitly, when they flatter us—with that unpleasant portrait of Red America's voters. At any rate, the overview by American Masters continues with two scholars commenting in the manner shown:

BARBARA HAHN: I think she came up with these ideas when she was looking at what this mass society would provide people.

It would provide them with the impression that they're not alone any more, and there is a party giving them an idea that they are part of something really big.

MALE COMMENTATOR: All the major German conservative politicians are on record over and over again saying, "We cannot let Adolf Hitler become chancellor."

And, yet, because they wanted to recruit followers of Hitler to their side, they didn't just exclude Hitler when they could, they tried to control him. And he was able to then play them all against each other until they had to make him chancellor.

German conservative politicians thought they could control Hitler! Plainly, that's a very familiar portrait of the way Republican pols perceived Candidate and President Trump in the first years of his arrival.

Today, we know that the German arrival led to a brutal genocide—to one of the most deranged events in all of human history.

In this tenth year of his reign, President Trump has engaged in no such conduct. Beyond that, we know of no reason to believe that he ever will, or that he would. We say that despite his new, explicit statement, made last night in Iowa, about the way he actively hates the others—in this case, the Democrats.

It's our assumption that President Trump is fundamentally disordered—is disordered in way which Blue America's press had agreed not to evaluate or discuss. Still, he hasn't conducted a genocide. 

That said:

In our view, much of what that profile describes is well worth contemplating. As our nation has split into two rival nations, it can be said, and often is, that many voters in Red America have turned into "people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer exists."

For many voters in Red America, it can be said that "loyalty to the leader" has perhaps replaced the traditional attempt to separate fact from fiction—has led to the ultimate "victory of fiction over truth and reality."

For many voters in Red America, it can perhaps be said that loyalty to President Trump has gifted them with a pleasing set of fictions, in which they're battling a world conspiracy led by a pleasing set of villains. In our view, American Masters was plainly sketching that comparison in last Friday's program. 

In April 2024, it seemed to us that PBS did much the same thing in the portrait of Julius Caesar offered by this underwhelming program:

Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator

The dramatic story of how nearly five centuries of ancient Roman democracy was overthrown in just 16 years…by one man. This is the story of a brazen, ambitious power-grab that saw Julius Caesar consolidate the vast power of Rome in his own hands.

Back then, Trump was said to be Julius Caesar. As of last Friday night, he was you-know-who himself.

In our view, there's substantial merit in American Masters' implied portrait of Red America's pro-Trump voters, who no longer separate fact from fiction in their pursuit of a pleasing tale.

In our view, that's a reasonable critique of many of Red America's voters. The question we will continue to ask about our own Blue America is this:

To what extent, if to any extent, can it be said that this pleasing portrait is also a portrait of us? To what extent has our own tribal blindness lead to the situation our flailing nation is in?