What Do We Do Now?

                                                                What Do We Do Now? 

December 14, 2024 

On January 20, 2025, our national nightmare will begin. Many of us have feared it for a long time now, for its contours and content have long been obvious to anyone with an open mind. My country, the United States of America, has elected as its president a man who is an adulterer, a compulsive liar, and a fraud who has thirty-four felony convictions on his record. It has put American fascism in charge of our national government.  Donald Trump and his legion of other American fascists do not believe in democracy. They do not believe in equal civil rights, especially not for women. They do not believe in the equal human dignity and autonomy of all people, especially not of women and anyone with a minority sexual orientation or identity. Trump and his minions are preparing to deport millions of decent, honest people who are only here seeking a better life for themselves and their families. Hitler’s first intention with regard to Europe’s Jews wasn’t to kill them all, it was to deport them all. Only when it turned out that he couldn’t do that did he begin his mass extermination campaign. When deporting all the people Trump wants to deport proves to be logistically impossible, which it surely will, will Trump and his American fascists set out to murder all the people they wanted to deport but couldn’t? I like to think they aren’t that bad, but time will tell. 

Those of us who remain committed to democracy, civil rights, and the equal dignity and autonomy of all people face a challenge no one committed to those supposedly American values has ever faced before. I have struggled long and hard with the question of what to do in response to Trump and his American fascism. I have heard various proposed answers to that question. A colleague of mine says be civil and talk and listen to those who support the fascists. Others say withdraw. Focus on what you can control and forget about what you can’t. Pay attention to your spirituality not your politics. Others say support the ACLU and be prepared to fight fascism in the courts. I suppose there are others who say, in effect, go the mattresses and fight fascism with violence.  

Except for a resort to violence, all of these responses have their virtues, though I don’t think listening and talking to Trump’s rabid supporters will so any good. Withdrawing and ignoring the destruction Trump will wreak on this country has its appeal, and attending to one’s spirituality is always a good and constructive thing to do. I have given a little bit of money to the ACLU. Yet none of those responses strikes me as adequate. I keep asking myself: In 1933, should Germans have been gently talking and listening to Nazis? No! Should they have withdrawn into themselves and their spirituality and ignored the horror Hitler and his murderous supporters were inflicting on their country? No! Was there any real hope of relief from the courts, all which the Nazis effectively controlled? No! Should we do what Dietrich Bonhoeffer did and join a conspiracy to commit murder despite our commitment to Christian nonviolence? No!  

So here’s where I believe we stand today. There isn’t a damned thing we can do to stop Trump and his gang from inflicting immense harm on this country and especially on the environment and the vulnerable people among us. That harm is going to happen. We have two decent responses available to us, though neither of them will prevent the damage the Trump Republicans are hellbent on causing. They are: 

First, care for those Trump hurts as best we can. Provide financial aid for those whom Trump forces into abject poverty, and there may well be millions of them. Help pay for medical care for those who will lose their health insurance as the Republicans do all they can to destroy the Affordable Care Act, and there will be millions of them too. Provide refuge and emotional and spiritual support to transgender people and other sexual minorities as the Trumpists conduct a propaganda campaign promoting hatred and violence against them and as they try to remove the legal protections their rights have today, such as they are. Trump’s American fascism will result in vastly increased demands on our country’s charitable institutions. We can and must support those institutions as best we can both with money and with our presence and activity. 

Second, we can and we must keep speaking out. We can and must refuse to compromise with evil. I’m old. My gifts, such as I have them, have to do with writing not with more physical activities such as engaging in public protests. I will continue to write, not that much of anyone reads what I read. I will continue to preach Jesus’ gospel of justice and peace every chance I get, though those chances are few and far between. I will speak out as forcefully as I can against Trump’s American fascism if I ever get the chance, though it’s unlikely that I ever will have such a chance of any significance. 

It’s not much. It won’t make any difference, but here’s the thing. In Germany today, the Germans who opposed Hitler, indeed, those who tried to kill him, are national heroes. They changed nothing, but they show that there were Germans who didn’t drink the Nazi Kool-Aid. There were Germans who knew better, who knew how evil Hitler and the Nazis were. Germans today cannot undo the immeasurable harm they inflicted on innumerable people between 1933 and 1945, but they can take some solace in knowing that there were Germans who resisted, however ineffectively. 

That may be the best we can do. Leave a record for history that shows that not all Americans drank Trump’s poisoned brew. To leave a record from which history will be able to see that, despite the fact that the country made the American fascist Donald Trump president twice, there were also decent, moral, caring Americans who, as ineffective as they were bound to be in the face of today’s fascist wave, at least did something to resist. So history will be able to see that America’s claimed virtues of freedom, democracy, and civil rights were not completely lost.  

Yes, I know. It’s not much. And maybe it seems to matter to me because I’m a professionally trained historian. The Soviets had Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov. The Germans had Bonhoeffer and von Stauffenberg, as flawed as their opposition was because it was or tried to be violent. Who will we have? The ACLU and other civil rights organizations I suppose. Some Democratic politicians who may continue to resist. Some but, sadly, by no means all religious leaders of various faiths who continue to speak out. Some, perhaps even many, lone voices like mine crying out in the wilderness. Those of us who continue to resist may be able to mitigate the harm the Trump administration will work to inflict on us, but we won’t be able to stop them from inflicting it.  

The most important thing that we can do now is resist. Resist nonviolently, but resist. However we can. As often as we can. We can refuse to accept Trump’s lies as truth though all, or at least many of us, do accept them. We can refuse to have cordial relations with people who support and advocate fascistic evil, and there are a great many Americans doing that today. We can hold onto hope, thin as it may be, that one day this country will wake up to its error in entrusting our fate to Trump and his American fascists and get back on track to making this a better country not a substantially worse one as Trump will do. No. It’s not much. It won’t change much if it changes anything at all. It is, however, what we can do; so let’s do it.