There’s an unanswerable question behind all the discourse about the rapidly decaying condition of American democracy: Did we ever have it in the first place?
I don’t want to come off like a world-weary leftist lecturing the sheeple about how AmeriKKKa has always been a fascist nation and there’s nothing special or unusual about 2025. That’s unfair to the evident trauma of lived experience here and now, and it also isn’t true: Our society has been radically destabilized by the all-out assault on civil rights, the rule of law and basic human decency during the first year of the second Trump presidency.
The danger to civil society, to the constitutional order and to millions of people in America (citizens and otherwise) is all too real. If that danger hasn’t yet personally hit home for many of the people reading this, I think most of us now understand that it will. Members of Salon’s editorial team have recently been speaking to mental health professionals across the country, for a project unrelated to this column. Every single one of them has reported dramatically elevated levels of stress and anxiety among their clients. One psychiatrist with decades of clinical experience told me that the immediate aftermath of 9/11 was the only parallel he could recall.
But if our current national emergency feels unprecedented to most Americans — and deeply shocking to the educated coastal classes — that doesn’t mean it came out of nowhere and has no history. If we can push past the collective ideological delusion of American exceptionalism, we can start to see the Trump 2.0 crisis as a kind of bridal costume for American fascism: at once something old, something new and something borrowed. (I’m not sure about “something blue,” other than our 79-year-old president’s fingers in cold weather.) It isn’t an alien invasion or a rerun of the Weimar Republic, and it wasn’t caused by one individual, no matter how much he brags about it. More than anything else, it’s the resurgence of deeply American tendencies that were never far under the surface.
Consider the FBI under the manifestly incompetent leadership of current director Kash Patel, whose perennially startled demeanor gives actual deer caught in actual headlights a bad name. It’s a telling symptom of our preposterous national predicament the co-author of not one but three children’s books that literally depict Donald Trump as a king, was deemed, by a majority of the U.S. Senate, to be qualified for that job. But that doesn’t mean we should lie to ourselves about the FBI’s mission and history, or pretend that Patel has desecrated a noble, principled and independent institution. If anything, he’s returning the FBI to its roots as America’s secret police, bound by no laws, no rules and no ethics. Arguably we should be grateful for the reminder
Don’t get me wrong: J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI’s legendary founding director, would view Patel as a contemptible weakling. But not because the current director is purging suspected disloyal “woke” leftists from the agency — a cause Hoover personally embraced, although using different terminology — or because he is leading a widespread crackdown on dissent, freedom of expression and perceived foreign influence that has frequently been described as a second (or, more accurately, third) Red Scare.
J. Edgar Hoover would view Kash Patel as a contemptible weakling — but not because Patel is purging disloyal “woke” leftists or leading a widespread crackdown on dissent. He’d love that part.
Nope, Hoover would love all that. In nearly 50 years of unequaled power in Washington, Hoover nurtured the FBI — originally the Bureau of Investigation — from its infancy as a glorified World War I-era filing system into an enormous surveillance and intelligence bureaucracy whose explicit purpose was to crush any and all forms of radical dissent and enforce ideological conformity. Mainstream journalists and political figures typically describe the FBI as the federal government’s law enforcement agency, but most of them, perhaps all of them, know better. Even a cursory glance at the FBI’s actual history exposes that as another ideological fiction — a subset of the one about how unique or “indispensable” the United States is.
Over the decades between Hoover’s death in 1972 and Patel’s appointment this year, a propaganda narrative has taken hold about the FBI. It first required forgetting or ignoring the widespread lawlessness and state terror of Hoover’s regime, which was directed almost exclusively at left-wing dissidents with perceived foreign connections — socialists, anarchists and labor organizers in the early years, and then Black (and white) civil rights activists, student radicals, Latino and Indigenous movements and so on — and then required accepting on faith that the agency had been reformed and depoliticized, and was now a professional and essentially neutral federal police force, even though nearly everything about its budget and operations remained a state secret.
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To be fair, there are shards of plausibility in that narrative, as is generally true of effective propaganda. After Hoover’s death and the exposure of the illegal domestic spy program known as COINTELPRO, there were undeniably some internal reforms at the FBI. Agency leaders focused considerable energy on organized crime — which Hoover had mostly ignored or tolerated — from the mid-’70s onward, and were reluctantly compelled to acknowledge the rising threat of white nationalist and anti-government terrorism after Waco, Ruby Ridge and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1994.
Nothing testifies to the success of the FBI’s propaganda narrative more eloquently than the way Robert Mueller, cloaked in Ivy League drag and the deepest secrets of the “war on terror,” became the hashtag-resistance dreamboat who would save America from Donald Trump.
Most living Americans either remember that period, which can best be described as a brief interruption in the FBI’s overall trajectory, or the agency’s reinvigorated sense of mission after 9/11, when it refocused on defending the “homeland” against the numinous but not entirely imaginary threat of Islamic terrorism. Hoover-style service resumed, in other words, with a new target even more universally reviled than Red infiltrators. We may never know how many innocent people were swept up in the systematic persecution of Muslims during the Bush-Obama years, or how many of the alleged terrorist plots thwarted by domestic spycraft were genuinely dangerous.
We do know, however, that new technologies and networks for electronic surveillance were developed and imposed on a previously unimaginable scale, and that despite the protests of whistleblowers and a handful of civil-liberties nerds, most Americans didn’t notice or didn’t care, as long as Muslims didn’t blow up the mall. We also know that the FBI director from 2001 to 2013, exactly the years when the invisible powers and unknowable extent of the surveillance state were most dramatically expanded, was Robert Mueller.
Nothing testifies to the success of the FBI’s propaganda narrative more eloquently than the way that Mueller, cloaked in Ivy League drag and in the deepest secrets of the “war on terror,” was celebrated by right-thinking liberals as the hashtag-resistance dreamboat who would save America from Donald Trump. And given that context, nothing should be less surprising than the artful obscurantism of Mueller’s report on Trump’s presidential campaign, which appeared to conclude that regrettable things had happened but somebody else would have to do something about them.
That brings us almost all the way to Kash Patel, who, as I suggested earlier, is dragging the FBI into an elaborate Hoover cosplay exercise, with worse wardrobe choices, no finesse and aggressively stupid social media posts. If Hoover could get past his racist horror and outrage at seeing a brown-skinned son of Hindu immigrants in his former job — and he definitely couldn’t — he might just about be able to recognize Patel as a kindred spirit, or at least as a failed tribute act.
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As Yale historian Beverly Gage explores in “G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century,” her Pulitzer-winning 2023 biography, Hoover embodied two apparently contradictory strains of right-wing ideology: a mistrust of “big government” — or at least of government social programs — as de facto socialism, and an embrace of coercive state power on a grand scale. If anything, he was ahead of his time. That particular combo, I think we can agree, is exactly what sticks the multilayered burger of the Trump 2.0 regime together. For the so-called national conservatives who see Trump as their “Red Caesar,” that supposed contradiction was always weak-willed RINO thinking and has now been transcended, as in an upside-down version of the Marxist dialectic.
Hoover felt no need to subvert the constitutional order; he simply ignored it. He was the deepest of deep-state creatures, building and hoarding that coercive state power for himself and deploying it for his own purposes. He didn’t trust any of the eight presidents he served, from Calvin Coolidge through Richard Nixon, and certainly didn’t view them as kings. Presidents came and went while Hoover sat in FBI headquarters like an all-seeing toad. To his taste, they were all fatally compromised by politics, overly willing to forge compromises with labor unions, “Negro agitators,” student radicals and other Communistic forces. (At least four presidents considered firing him, but none of them tried it, perhaps because of the exhaustive dossiers he had compiled on their private lives and financial dealings.)
Hoover would see Patel, correctly enough, as a buffoon and a patsy who was bending the FBI’s awesome machinery to the service of a mercurial president’s incoherent personal agenda. He would lament Patel’s lack of vision and ambition; Trump will die or leave office in the not-too-distant future, and Kash’s career ends there. But Hoover would be delighted to see Patel pushing the FBI back to its original mission: relentlessly persecuting people with funny names, foreign connections and undesirable opinions, and intimidating their domestic sympathizers into silence. That’s the FBI’s basic DNA, and the rest of us shouldn’t forget that again.
