Moving Beyond Guilt

In the great global debate over whether Elon Musk is a Nazi, I’m of the position that he’s a spaz, not a Sieg-Heil-er. When his right arm shot up at one of Donald Trump’s inauguration events last week, it looked to me more like an awkward wave than Dr. Strangelove reverting to form.

I mean, if Elon believed in a master race, he probably would have been on the other side of that H-1B brouhaha a few weeks ago, no?

Still, intellectual humility requires one to remain vigilant for the possibility of error. So when, on the eve of the 80^th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation, Musk beamed into a meeting of Germany’s right-wing, populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party to urge them to stop feeling guilty about the Holocaust, I wondered if building a “doomsday machine” might not be in his future after all.

“There is too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that. Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great-grandparents,” Musk said, seeming to reference the country’s history when the Nazis rose to power.

“You should be optimistic and excited about a future for Germany,” said Musk, as the crowd applauded.

“There is too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that.” If I had to summarize the ethos of modern right-wing movements in one line, I would struggle to do better than that.

Coincidentally, the U.S. military also spent the weekend moving beyond guilt—temporarily. After Donald Trump ordered a halt to federal diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, the Air Force removed training courses that included videos about the Tuskegee Airmen, America’s first black combat pilots.

And why not? Recruits, especially white recruits, can’t feel “optimistic and excited” about their country if they’re being reminded of the segregationist sins of their great-grandparents, right? Moving beyond guilt means moving beyond the past.

Except it doesn’t in this case, it turns out. Following an uproar, the Air Force quickly publicly stated that material on the Tuskegee trailblazers would still be taught. New Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (yes, really) personally announced on social media that the policy had been “immediately reversed.” Some guilt over historical injustices is fine, it appears, and possibly even necessary.

Cultural politics in the U.S. is essentially a running argument over how guilty Americans should feel about being Americans and how far they should be willing to go to “move beyond” that guilt. The right, under Trump, is winning that argument.

And I think he’s prepared to take full advantage.

Collective responsibility.

Elon Musk is correct, of course, that one generation should not be deemed guilty of the sins of another. No one should want to see German Chancellor Olaf Scholz hauled off to the Hague to answer for the crimes of the S.S.

But no one does want to see that, as far as I know. It’s a red herring. In his address to the German far right, Musk conflated personal responsibility with cultural responsibility. 

Personal responsibility says “you, personally, committed this sin and should pay for it.” Cultural responsibility says “you are capable of committing this sin, as you belong to a culture in which it was once widely and flagrantly committed, and that fact should inform your understanding of your culture and yourself.”

German children should not be made to feel responsible for the Holocaust. But they should be keenly aware of the fact that their culture, within living memory, barfed up a government of degenerates so depraved that it literally industrialized murder.

We all know the Santayana quote about remembering the past and being condemned to repeat it. Musk would do well to think on it a while. If your condition for feeling “optimistic and excited” about Germany’s future is everyone “moving beyond” Auschwitz, you’re not ready to move beyond Auschwitz.

In the United States, cultural disputes are typically a clash between leftist insistence on collective responsibility and right-wing insistence on individual responsibility. The left doesn’t want America “moving beyond guilt” for the injustices of the past. They want Americans moving deeper into guilt, believing that some of those injustices still haven’t been properly reckoned with.

That’s all “wokeness” is at the end of the day, right? Progressives intend to fully awaken the country to the historical sins committed by the straight white male ruling class against minority groups and, to whatever extent possible, to correct for them. Tearing down statues of Confederates (and, er, Abraham Lincoln), casually practicing reverse racial discrimination toward whites, canceling those who resist normalizing transgenderism—they’re all facets of an attack on “privilege,” the comparative advantages accrued from historical injustices by those fortunate enough to have been spared from them.

In hindsight, it was probably inevitable that something like Trumpism would arise in opposition.

That’s because America’s many downscale (and not-so-downscale) whites don’t feel so “privileged.” And arguments about collective responsibility are destined to be more divisive and embittering in the U.S.—where racial prejudice remains a chronically hot topic—than they are in Germany, where Nazism is defunct (for now!). “Wokeness” here at home is a matter of some tribes accusing others of having abused them, placing the latter in a defensive crouch and encouraging a sense of nostalgia for when their supposed villainy wasn’t a recurring political hobby horse. The accused were destined to lose patience eventually, particularly given the sense that no amount of atonement will satisfy progressives.

Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it—but so too, perhaps, are those who dwell on the past too insistently, inciting a backlash that brings to power a revanchist regime.

Leaning into postliberalism.

One way the right has responded to leftist indictments of collective responsibility is by emphasizing individual responsibility.

Think of how, in 2020, conservatives answered progressive claims that “black lives matter” with “all lives matter.” The left was making the point that black lives have traditionally mattered less in America, such that their value needs to be affirmatively stressed. The right countered by insisting that each individual life has value regardless of color—which is true, of course, but in context amounted to rejecting the allegation of wider cultural prejudice.

Over the last few years, though, as the right has leaned harder into postliberalism, their response to progressive cultural indictments has shifted away from arguments about individual responsibility and toward moving beyond guilt altogether, in Elon Musk’s words. If wokeness was a matter of leftists insisting too much on collective responsibility, postliberalism is a matter of the right insisting on too little.

On Monday, for instance, Pete Hegseth appeared before the press for the first time as defense secretary and casually mentioned “Fort Bragg” in his comments. There is no Fort Bragg; as of October 2022, Fort Bragg is Fort Liberty. The name was changed because it was, frankly, a scandal that a U.S. military base was named after a Confederate general, Braxton Bragg. Bad enough that our country would honor a traitor, much worse that it would honor one who fought for a slave regime.

If you want to be charitable, you might assume that Hegseth simply forgot the name change. But I doubt that: Restoring Confederate names to U.S. bases is a priority for Trump, and of course Hegseth’s pet issue is undoing vestiges of “wokeness” inside the military. Turning Fort Liberty back into Fort Bragg is a matter of the postliberal right moving beyond guilt, I suspect, rejecting outright the idea that vestiges of respect for the Confederacy that survived until recently should be scrubbed from the civic landscape out of shame. There is too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that.

Trump’s order restoring the name “Mount McKinley” to Denali in Alaska can be understood the same way. “Denali” is the Native American name, one that “honors and preserves” the local culture. Because persecuting indigenous peoples is one of America’s core cultural sins, gestures of deference to natives by the U.S. government amount to small acts of contrition. Naturally Trump did away with that in week one, to the dismay of local Alaskan officials. There is too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that.

There are some political constraints on the right in moving beyond guilt, obviously. The Air Force training on the Tuskegee Airmen was quickly restored, I expect, because it might have antagonized some of Trump’s new African American voters. (GOP Sen. Katie Britt accused the officers who removed it of “malicious compliance” with Trump’s order.) Restoring Confederate names to bases can be rationalized—“it’s tradition!”—but memory-holing tributes to pioneering black aviators that were already in place would have seemed like a deliberate snub, an ominous start to the White House’s anti-DEI policy. I doubt we’ll see Black History Month eliminated with the stroke of the presidential pen.

But Fort Bragg and Mount McKinley are surely coming back. Why?

Boldness and its costs.

I think Trump’s project writ large is to move beyond all forms of guilt in politics, to convince Americans that shame of any sort amounts to weakness.

There’s probably a sincere “national greatness” component to that in his mind, along the lines of what Musk told his German audience. A country can’t do great things if its people are demoralized, and endlessly revisiting its darkest chapters is destined to demoralize them. Some populists, I’m sure, would say that’s the point of leftist “wokeness.” If you despise America and wish to curtail its ambitions, remind Americans ad nauseam of how much human suffering their ambitious forebears caused.

In a sense, Trumpism is the antidote to that. Instead of having everything to apologize for, it asserts that the United States has nothing to apologize for—except, of course, for having treated Donald Trump so very, very unfairly.

Trump ultimately cares far less about what U.S. military bases are called than he does weakening the constraints on his own power, though, and moving beyond guilt over historical injustices indirectly serves that purpose. Guilt and shame are important constraints on government action; if you want a freer hand as ruler, convincing your subjects that those emotions are vices rather than virtues is a nifty way to condition them to tolerate executive action they might have blanched at before.

This is very obviously why AfD, the far-right German party Musk addressed, was thrilled to hear him criticize lingering guilt over the Holocaust. The AfD brain trust doesn’t give a fig in the abstract about whether German voters still feel shame over Nazi atrocities. What they care about is power, and the German electorate is unlikely to give power to a party like theirs unless and until it moves beyond guilt over Auschwitz.

Germans won’t be comfortable taking another chance on authoritarian ruthlessness until they jettison their shame over World War II. By encouraging them to do so, Elon and the AfD are attempting to boil frogs.

There’s no similarly huge cultural obstacle in Trump’s path, but a country founded on limited government and separation of powers obviously requires some softening up before it’ll be comfortable with an authoritarian executive. One way to soften it up is to turn the left’s argument about collective responsibility on its head: Yes, we all belong to a culture in which certain historical sins were once widely and flagrantly committed, but that period coincided with our rise to national greatness.

Trump won’t tell you that slavery was fine the way some of his groyper admirers might, but he has plenty of nice things to say about Robert E. Lee. He won’t claim that driving Native Americans off their land was just, but he’s practicing his own version of manifest destiny as I write this. He wheezes endlessly about the Gilded Age as a pinnacle of American success despite the notorious corruption and concentration of wealth during the period.

America was better when it was bold, Trump means to say in all of that, before the post-war liberal order forced everyone to conform to a bunch of wimpy rules and norms. Our 19^th-century boldness inflicted real costs on vulnerable groups, and that’s unfortunate, but it was an unavoidable consequence of bold men imposing their will and establishing dominance over others.

It was, quite simply, the price of greatness. The United States was a more dynamic, vibrant, formidable power when it understood that and was less prone to feel ashamed of it.

So Trump is doing what he can to reduce the shame, expecting that by doing so he’ll goose the public’s appreciation of great men behaving boldly in the name of national greatness accordingly. He aims to reach the point where, say, defying an adverse Supreme Court ruling on birthright citizenship will be viewed by the masses not as an egregious usurpation of the constitutional order but as a bold act of sanity to restore order to America’s chaotic immigration rules.

He moved beyond guilt long ago, possibly before he left the delivery room as a baby. Now he wants Americans to move with him.