I am a die-hard fan of Rod Serling’s classic TV series “The Twilight Zone.” From 1959 to 1964, the anthology of science fiction, fantasy, horror and other supernatural stories offered me escape. It did more than that: There is a political philosophy behind “The Twilight Zone” episodes, a decidedly left-wing opposition to racism (1964’s “I Am The Night – Color Me Black”), to greed (1963’s “Of Late I Think Of Cliffordville”), to mob mentalities (1960’s “The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street” and 1961’s “The Shelter”) and to tyranny (1961’s “The Obsolete Man” and 1963’s “On Thursday We Leave For Home”).
Yet none are more unambiguously left-wing, and more explicit in linking “respectable” conservatism” with neo-fascism, than 1963’s “He’s Alive.” It was, dare I say, prophetic.
It’s one serious flaw? It serves as a “how to” guide for aspiring right-wing demagogues. President Donald Trump may not have seen this episode, but tell me this character description for main character Peter Vollmer (Dennis Hopper) doesn’t apply to him:
“Portrait of a bush-league Führer named Peter Vollmer, a sparse little man who feeds off his self-delusions and finds himself perpetually hungry for want of greatness in his diet. And like some goose-stepping predecessors he searches for something to explain his hunger, and to rationalize why a world passes him by without saluting. That something he looks for and finds is in a sewer. In his own twisted and distorted lexicon he calls it faith, strength, truth. But in just a moment Peter Vollmer will ply his trade on another kind of corner, a strange intersection in a shadowland called the Twilight Zone.”
There are many Vollmers out there, and when they get power, innocent people suffer from the evils of reactionary authoritarians. But how does a Vollmer achieve power? What is the secret of convincing the masses that you aren’t a sniveling child lashing out at a world you irrationally hate, but a thoughtful observer of current events?
Spoilers follow!
In “He’s Alive,” Vollmer is visited by the ghost of Adolf Hitler (Curt Conway), who gives him pointers on how to win over a crowd. These lessons are so apropos to the tricks used by Trump and his ilk that I’ve outlined them below:
- Hitler’s first piece of advice to Vollmer contains a valuable tip of political psychology and a rhetorical tool that is as ubiquitous in 2020 as it apparently was in 1963. The tip for winning over the masses: “When you speak to them, speak to them as if you were a member of the mob. Speak to them in their language, on their level. Make their hate, your hate. If they are poor, talk to them of their poverty. If they are afraid, talk to them of their fears. And if they are angry, Mr. Vollmer, if they are angry, give them objects for their anger.”
Hitler emphasizes that the most important thing is to “make this mob an extension of yourself.” To do that, he tells Vollmer that you must convince them that they are an oppressed minority, even though they are peddling hate against actual minorities. Vollmer openly vilifies African Americans, Jews, immigrants, Catholics, leftists… but, he tells the crowd, these are the enemies of the people. They deserve our hate. They are the majority and the hatemongers are the minority. - “You take one of no value and make him into a symbol. You wrap him in a flag and you make his death work for you.”
This is what Hitler tells Vollmer when he advises that he create a martyr — a member of his organization to be killed off and made into a cause celebre. This is the only area in which the strategy outlined by “He’s Alive” does not completely match modern right-wing politics, but only on a surface level. Right-wing movements absolutely search for people “of no value” to make into symbols around which their masses will rally. The key difference is that they don’t need to be killed off, or even harmed. You can simply lie about or exaggerate the wrongs supposedly being done to them — making mountains out of molehills, spin valid criticisms into unjust attacks, that sort of thing — and achieve the same psychological result. - Crush those who oppose you. In the episode’s climax, an old Jewish man who helped raise Vollmer when he was fleeing from domestic abuse publicly humiliates the neo-fascists during a big rally. Hitler tells Vollmer that he has no choice but to kill the man, to make an example of the one he loves more than anyone in the world, because without repression of those who challenge them, no movement of the right can truly survive.
“He’s Alive” has other flaws. Conway looks nothing like Hitler, cops are depicted as being unrealistically sympathetic to the anti-fascists, the ending seems abrupt and offers little closure to the major plot threads.
Yet the proof of this episode’s greatness can be found in the reaction that it received. 1963, for those who don’t know American political history, was an important year in the rise of modern American conservatism. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona — who was weaponizing fear of Communism, civil rights, diversity and the welfare state to move the Republican Party far to the right — was running for president. One year later he would win the Republican nomination, lose in a landslide to the Democrat (President Lyndon Johnson) and seem to be thoroughly defeated. As we know today, however, he paved the way for far rightists who actually were elected president, men like Ronald Reagan in 1980, George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016.
Director Stuart Rosenberg and writer Rod Serling explicitly linked Vollmer’s speeches to the rhetoric pouring out of Goldwater and his supporters, the likes of the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan. Conservatives noticed this and, according to “The Twilight Zone Encyclopedia,” wrote letters by the hundreds to protest being smeared as Nazis or Nazi abettors. One editorial aptly summed up the outrage:
“Nobody can disagree with whatever scorn one wants to heap on Adolf Hitler… Yet we are a little puzzled as to the relevance of this production to contemporary events… the young Nazi… talked a great deal about anti-Communism. He also had a lot to say about ‘freedom,'” the Indianapolis Star contributor wrote. After pointing out that Vollmer sounded an awful lot like Goldwater, who was of Jewish descent, he concluded that “the impression left by the program was that people who warn against Communism and people who talk about getting back our freedom are probably secret Nazis.”
I’ve already written about how Trump is a terrible president, particularly in the first paragraph of this article. He has absolutely discriminated against the Latinx and Muslim communities, against African Americans and the LGBT community, against the poor and political opponents. He rose to power using the techniques of Vollmer and by appealing to Vollmer-esque ideas, and if he isn’t exactly a Nazi, he is disturbingly close to being one.
Serling made that point in his reply to the editorial. After pointing that he had read a wide range of right-wing opinions due to the intense response to his episode, Serling wrote that “their stock-in-trade… is anti-communism… they seem to feel that racism, bigotry and hatred should be of little concern to us in view of the fact that communists are trying to take over our government, invade our schools and subvert our institutions… I submit to him that we have other enemies no less real, no less constant, and no less damaging to the fabric of democracy. It’s when we hear denials that these people exist, and that their poisoning is being disseminated, and that any comment to this effect is irrelevant — I wonder if ‘The Twilight Zone’ isn’t something more than a television idea.”
Unfortunately, Serling was absolutely right. When people feel like the Trump era is some offshoot of ‘The Twilight Zone,’ they are literally correct. This is the episode we happen to inhabit.