A Literary Theorist Predicted Trump's Win in 1939. He's Worth a Read.
He tried to warn us.
Someone understood what was going to happen before Trump was even born. He understood Hitler and fascism as it was unfolding in Germany. He also understood how much danger it posed for America.
He wrote about it in 1939, in The Southern Review of all places.
The essay was titled, "The Rhetoric of Hitler's Battle."
His name was Kenneth Burke.
My first encounter with Burke happened at the beginning of graduate school, in a seminar devoted to his work. If you don’t already know, he’s a notoriously difficult read. Books like A Grammar of Motives and A Rhetoric of Motives almost made me cry on the first read, but a decade later I was teaching him to my own graduate students and talking about the implications of his ideas.
Despite his fame among literature nerds, Burke died in relative obscurity despite honors like Guggenheim fellowships and distinguished lecturer gigs at universities. Unlike his peers, he was self-taught—a true Dewian. One of my professors went out drinking with him once. Apparently, he let him in on a little secret. “It’s all bullshit,” Burke told him. “All of it.”
In the wake of his election, I’m thinking about all the useful concepts Burke tried to give the world, and how much they might’ve helped. Since I’m no longer a professor (they told me to resign for wanting clean air or remote work), I can teach him here, to anyone who’s trying to understand what happened.
Burke would’ve made a great campaign strategist.
He got it.