We’re Not
Experiencing Anything New
January 29, 2025
We live in times that are distressing at best. The American
electorate has made the American fascist Donald Trump president again, as
incomprehensible as their doing so actually is. He and his sycophant followers
have set about destroying the rule of law in this country, the rule of law
being one of the foundational principles of our republic. He and his sycophant
followers have set about destroying our federal government. They have a couple
of reasons for doing so. One is so that everyone the government employs, for it
will always have to employ someone, is loyal to Dear Leader Donald Trump not to
the US Constitution or that hoary old notion the rule of law. The other is that
fascists like Donald Trump always destroy the traditional institutions of the
government they have conquered because those institutions represent potential centers
of opposition to the fascist government’s demonic plans. Trump wants in
particular to put the Department of Justice under his heel, largely because
some career, professional lawyers in that department had the unmitigated gall
to investigate and prosecute him for at least some of the crimes he has already
committed. Some of our traditional governmental institutions will still exist.
There will still be Congress, though it already is stacked with Trumpist toadies
who bend the knee before the Dear Leader every chance they get. We still have
the federal courts, though during his first term as president Trump loaded them
with fascist ideologues who obey him not the law. Even the Supreme Court now
does Trump’s will rather than legitimately rule on and apply the law, so how
much hope we can have in the courts to save us from Trump is, tragically, an
open question.
We have never before experienced anything like Trumpist
fascism in this country. Yes, there were a lot of fascists and Nazis in this
country in the 1930s, but they never took complete control of our government
the way Trump and his minions have today. We are experiencing something unique
in American history. We are, however, not experiencing anything unique in world
history. Fascism has a long history, and Donald Trump is following its playbook
to the letter. He came to power legally just like Adolf Hitler did in 1933. His
agenda is to create a federal government loyal only to him just as Hitler made
most Germans take the Hitler oath. He is trying to submit the entire federal
government, and state governments too, to his will just like Hitler created a
personal dictatorship after he came to power. Trump has a model he is
following, though he may not be smart or educated enough to know that he’s
doing it. Some of his followers, like those who wrote the fascist document Project
2025 that Trump has set about putting into practice, surely do. Yes, Donald
Trump’s fascism is new to the United States, but no, it is not new to the
world.
Neither is opposition to fascism new to the world. It’s new
to the US because we’ve never had to face it before the way we must today, but
fascists have always had opponents. They have understood the evil of fascism
and spoken out against it. They have characterized fascism’s evil in their
speech and in their writing. I recently came across one such statement made in
opposition to Hitler’s Nazism after he came to power. It’s by Eberhard Arnold,
a cofounder of a Christian society called the Bruderhof. In meetings of
his community throughout May, 1933, he said things like this:
One gets the impression that under the tyrannical despotism
of the present government, one can no longer rely on any law….It really is
politics of the dirtiest kind that treads law under foot, a wickedness that
cries to heaven, a revolting, lawless frivolity…. Let us ask Go that we may
hold on to freedom of conscience in these times of bondage….We have to represent…the
politics of the kingdom of Jesus Christ.[1]
Arnold succinctly states the basic premise of fascism,
namely, that the law doesn’t matter, only the directives of the dictator matter.
So while Donald Trump is something new in our country, he and his fascism have
a history in other countries.
We are faced with American fascism, and as Christians we
have to ask: What are we to do? A school Arnold
ran fled Germany for Liechtenstein. Fleeing America, however, isn’t a
viable option for most of us Americans, though Canada is awfully tempting. I
think Arnold gives the best answer there is to the question of what we are to
do: “We have to represent the politics of the kingdom of Jesus Christ.” That
statement, of course, raises two vital questions, namely, what are the politics
of the kingdom of Jesus Christ, and how are we to represent those politics? We
Christians must struggle to reach answers to both of those questions today.
The first question is relatively easy to answer. The
politics of the kingdom of Jesus Christ are the politics of love. That means
several things. It means that these politics are nonviolent. It means that
these are the politics of inclusion not exclusion. Of restorative justice for
the poor and the oppressed. They are the politics of the radical equality of
all people. They are the politics of freedom, all kinds of freedom but most
importantly freedom of conscience. Jesus never made anyone believe anything.
His parables, for example, raise questions for us to answer but don’t usually
give the answers themselves. So the politics of the kingdom of Jesus Christ are
most definitely not the politics of white supremacy and Christian nationalism.
The politics of the kingdom of Jesus Christ are, then, precisely the opposite
of the politics of fascism.
How we are to represent those politics is a much more
difficult question. Few of us have a public voice of any significance. Few of
us lead active opposition movements. There are, however, several things we can
do nonetheless. We still have freedom of the press, at least of sorts. We can
write letters to the editor of our local newspaper proclaiming the politics of
peace and justice. We can work to get the visual media to cover any gatherings
or public events we may hold in which we condemn fascism and proclaim justice. We
still have representatives in Congress. We can call and write them urging them
generally and in more specific ways to oppose the Trump administration’s
fascism. We still have elections. We still can vote, and many (if not all) of
us usually have non-fascist politicians for whom we can vote. We can contribute
time and money to their campaigns. We still encounter people who spout the
fascist line. When we do, we can call them on their lies and proclaim the
divine truth of peace and justice to them. Some of us have family members who
support Trump and his fascism. We can try to change their minds. When we can’t,
we may have to shun them, exclude them from our lives, as a way of making our
disgust with their politics known. We can join any local organizations we have that
work for peace and justice. We can support the ACLU. We can support the
Southern Poverty Law Center. We can support any other national organizations we
know of that stand for truth and justice.
Your humble author and most of the readers of this blog are
Christians. Many of us belong to Christian churches. We can work within our
churches to educate people on the evil of Trumpist fascism. We can, perhaps, lead
our churches in passing and publicizing resolutions condemning the fascist
actions of Trump and his flunkies in government. Publicizing such resolutions
is vitally important. So is acting on them. Churches so often pass resolutions
on issues of the day, then those resolutions and the people who passed them
just sit there doing nothing else to support appropriate causes. We can work to
stir our co-religionists to action not just to words.
We still have freedom of assembly. Trump, of course, would
eliminate that freedom for anyone who opposes him, but he hasn’t managed to do
that yet. We can join groups that work for justice, or, if we can’t find any,
we can create one. We can participate in public demonstrations against Trumpist
fascism. Perhaps you can think of other things we can do. I urge you to
consider other nonviolent ways of opposing Trump and his MAGA movement and then
to act on any you think of.
Perhaps most of all we can pray. Our praying doesn’t
actually change God, but it can change us. Living into God’s unbounded love can
give us courage when we face obstacles or dangers. It can energize us in our
efforts to do what is right. It can unite us in common purpose. It can show the
world that the gospel of Jesus Christ condemns racism, white supremacy, and
Christian nationalism. It can show the world that the gospel of Jesus Christ
condemns Donald Trump and nearly everything he sets out to do.
So no, we are not faced with anything new, at least in terms
of world history we aren’t. We can see that Trump is following a tried and true
handbook of fascist governmental takeover and dictatorship. We can also learn
from the examples of the brave people who have stood up against fascism in
whatever way they have encountered it. Will we be able to stop Donald Trump
from creating a truly fascist US government? I don’t know. Although he has a
great deal of support among the American public, he also has low approval
ratings for an incoming president. We can hope that his extreme, often illegal
actions as president will erode his support, but it remains to be seen whether they
will or not. We can only hope and pray that they will. May it be so.
[1]
Quoted by Marienne Wright in her essay “The School That Escaped to the Alps” in
Plough, Winter 2025, No. 42, p. 30. Plough is a truly excellent
quarterly publication of the Bruderhof. I would never call fascism a “frivolity,”
but never mind.
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