How Far We Have Fallen!

 How Far We Have Fallen! 

December 20, 2023 

 

It is very nearly incomprehensible. It’s not that we can’t know what’s happening. Many (though it seems not enough) of us do. This country of ours is about to nominate an American fascist as the presidential candidate of one of our two major political parties. Of the party people used to call the GOP, the Grand Old Party. The party of Abraham Lincoln, the emancipation of enslaved Americans, and Reconstruction after the Civil War. The party of Theodore Roosevelt. The party of Dwight Eisenhower. The party of George H. W. Bush. Decent, honorable men all. Up until recently, the Republican Party has been the party of main street businesspeople who don’t want governmental regulation and hate paying taxes. It was the party that favored small government except when it came to the military, which they always supported and funded lavishly. I have rarely voted for Republican politicians. I have never considered myself to be a Republican. I can, however, look back on what the Republican Party used to be and mourn its passing. Democracy thrives when different views of the world and different political desires compete in open and fair elections. I have frequently not liked the outcome of those elections, but, especially in retrospect, I can see their value for this country and its democratic heritage. 

Now Donald J. Trump, who, tragically, this country made president in 2016, is set to become the Republican nominee for president once again. He is an indicted felon in four different cases that have 91 different felony counts in them. Back in 2016 I wrote that he was an American fascist and gave an analysis of why that was true. Since then, Trump’s fascism has become more and more evident to more and more people. Most recently he has made statements that sound a good deal like Adolf Hitler, the most evil fascist there ever was. He has always hated immigrants to this country unless, perhaps, they are as white as he is. Now he has ramped up his anti-immigrant rhetoric very nearly to the level of Hitler’s anti-Jewish rhetoric. He has called immigrants from Africa, Asia, South America, and elsewhere “vermin.” He has said they are destroying the “fabric” of this country. He has said they are “poisoning the blood” of this country. He has not said that we must kill all of them the way Hitler tried to kill all of Europe’s Jews and damned near succeeded in doing it. He has, however, said that we must expel all immigrants from this country. I assume he means all the immigrants he doesn’t like. After all, he’s married to one, though who knows. He might want to expel her too the way he has expelled two other wives from his life. Expelling all immigrants, even expelling just all undocumented immigrants, is probably logistically impossible. In any event, it could not be done without the use of massive force and violence. Even as president Trump probably couldn’t do it, but what matters today is that he says the country needs to do it. 

Trump is using immigrants in exactly the same way Hitler used the Jews. He is creating a big lie about them, namely, that they are destroying this country. Immigrants are no more destroying the United States today than Jews were destroying Germany in 1933, but truth doesn’t matter to fascists or their gullible followers. What matters to fascist leaders is that they have a whipping boy, some group of people other than their country’s majority people, they can blame for what they say are their country’s ills. Some group of people they can blame for everything they don’t like. Some group of people they can convince millions of followers are at fault for whatever problems those followers have.  

That’s what Hitler did in Germany. In 1958 I heard our German landlady in Berlin say: “Yes, it is too bad what happened to the Jews, but something did have to be done.” I don’t think she was a Nazi, though her late husband had been one. She once tried to put the armband from his Nazi party uniform on me, something that, even at age eleven, I refused to let her do. Just look at how the Nazis had brainwashed her! What happened to the Jews wasn’t “too bad.” It was one of the greatest crimes against humanity in all of human history, which takes some considerable doing. And it didn’t “happen to” the Jews. German people like our landlady and her late husband did it to them. There was nothing passive about it. And no, nothing had to be done about Germany’s Jews. They weren’t responsible for the numerous, serious difficulties Germany faced through the 1920s and into the 1930s. That they were was Hitler’s big lie. Trump’s big lie functions in precisely the same way. Truth doesn’t matter. What matters is that the fascist leader can identify a group of people who are somehow distinct from the majority of a country’s people toward whom he can spew his hatred, spew his venom, spread his big lie. 

Trump says he hasn’t read Mein Kampf. I suppose he hasn’t. He doesn’t read much of anything, and Hitler’s horrific book is hardly recreational reading. But what the hell difference does that make? Trump’s rhetoric has become more and more Hitleresque as time has gone by. Fascism is fascism regardless of what the fascist has or hasn’t read. The big lie is still the big lie whether the fascist propagating it knows he’s following in another fascist’s footsteps or not. A fascist doesn’t have to follow another fascist intentionally or even knowingly for him to be an immense danger to his country and to decent people everywhere. 

It was bad enough that Europeans whose countries did not have long traditions of democracy fell for fascism in the 1920s and 1930s. They have no excuse. But it is even less understandable how the United States of America could fall for fascism the way it seems to be doing. It’s less understandable for at least two reasons. One is that this country isn’t facing problems anything like the problems Germany faced through the 1920s. Yes, we have some inflation; and Americans hate it. But Germans had inflation so bad that money literally wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on. We haven’t lost a war since 1973, and horrific as that war was, it was nothing like the war Germany lost in 1918. Millions upon millions of people, a great many of them Germans, died in that war. Germans thought they couldn’t lose that war. Then, when they did, the victorious allies imposed the Treaty of Versailles on Germany, a treaty with provisions so onerous that they essentially insured the coming of World War II. Nothing like that has ever happened in this country. Compared to Germany at the rise of Hitler, we are in remarkably good shape. There is no reason for Americans to fall for Trump’s fascism, but millions of them are doing just that. 

The other reason the rise of fascism among us is to incomprehensible is our tradition of democracy. The European countries that went fascist (or Communist for that matter) in the years between the world wars, Germany and Italy chief among them, did not have long traditions of democracy and civil rights. The United States does. Our country has been a democracy since its very beginnings. Sure, our democracy hasn’t always worked perfectly. Sometimes it has worked really quite badly, but it has always been a democracy. It has been a democracy that has looked to stirring historical statements when framing its nature and purpose.  

Recall, if you will, these words from the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence:  

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men (sic), deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”  

And these words of the Preamble to the United States Constitution:  

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”  

 

To some extent, these two documents and their lofty statements of principles created an American reality. Perhaps more importantly, they established an American ideal. We have always fallen short of that ideal. We still fall short of it today. Yet we have, at least at times, been committed to equal rights, to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for everyone in this country, to the idea that government derives it power from the consent of the government, and that the purposes of our government include the establishment of justice and the promotion of the general welfare. Every one of these ideals is radically opposed to fascism of any sort. Fascism is undemocratic. It tramples the rights of those without power. It corrupts justice. It works for the welfare of only some of a country’s people not all of them. Donald Trump’s fascism is no different in these ways from the fascism of Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy. 

Yet an enormous portion of the American people today are stampeding themselves toward fascism and away from foundational American values. If we make Donald Trump president in 2024 we will have fallen nearly completely away from those values. We already have fallen to a significant extent. We now take it for granted that a man who may very well become president on January 20, 2025, has to explain that he hasn’t read Mein Kampf. He has to explain that he hasn’t because some of what he says sounds like it came directly from that despicable book. We now have a political culture in which large crowds of people cheer madly when Trump makes his fascistic remarks. We have a political culture in which nearly all Republican politicians follow the fascist Trump in lockstep, supporting everything he says and everything he says he would do as president. Even Republican politicians who once said they despised Trump follow him in that lockstep. That’s how far we’ve fallen, and it’s hard to imagine a future in which we don’t fall even farther. May it not be so.