I fear our
mistakes far more than the strategy of our enemies. —Thucydides (470–400 b.c.),
Pericles’ Funeral Oration
It wasn’t all
at once (although sometimes the last three months seem that way).
Authoritarianism never is. It happens drip by drip, crisis by crisis, until
people forget what normal even felt like.
This is how
fascism seduces a nation: not by storming the gates, but by wearing down our
ability to be outraged. And Donald Trump, more than any political figure in
modern American history, has weaponized this steady march into moral and civic
numbness.
Ten years ago,
if you’d told Americans that a U.S. president would attempt to overturn an
election, openly praise dictators, take naked bribes from both foreign
potentates and drug dealers, call the press the “enemy of the people,” cage
children, pardon traitors and war criminals, and promise to act as a dictator
on his first day in office, they’d have laughed. They would’ve told you, “That
can’t happen here.”
But it did.
And now the real danger is that we’re getting used to it. Let’s not forget:
— When Trump
refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power in 2020, the political class
gasped. Now it’s barely discussed.
— When he
orchestrated an attempted coup on January 6th, 2021, it was the top story in
the world. Today, most Republicans call it “a protest” or a “tour.”
— Had any
previous president invited an immigrant billionaire who promotes fascist memes
to rip the guts out of the Social Security Administration and shut down USAID
(handing our soft power to the Russians and Chinese) there would have been hell
to pay. Now Musk’s extraordinary damage to our government is barely discussed.
— When Trump
began calling undocumented immigrants “animals” and labeling judges and
prosecutors as “scum,” it horrified the media. Now it’s part of the daily
churn.
— When a
federal judge’s son was murdered by a Trump campaign volunteer it shocked
America; now judges are routinely threatened and Republicans won’t even give
the judiciary control over the US Marshall’s Service to protect them.
— When Trump
praised Putin and Viktor Orbán and suggested suspending the Constitution, the
headlines flared, but then faded fast.
— When he
arrested a Tufts University student for having written an op-ed in the student
paper critical of Netanyahu and threw her into prison for months, the country
was appalled. Now he’s rolling out loyalty tests for civil servants and
investigating the social media posts of American citizens returning to the
country and nobody’s even discussing it any more.
— When ICE
agents showed up in Portland in 2020 in unmarked vans without uniforms
and their ID missing, kidnapping people off the streets without warrants,
Americans and the media were shocked. Now seeing jackbooted thugs with masks
covering their faces and refusing to identify themselves has become “normal.”
This is the
playbook. Fascism doesn’t arrive with jackboots; it arrives with media and
voter fatigue. As the political theorist Hannah Arendt warned, the very
banality and ordinariness of evil is its greatest weapon.
Victor
Klemperer, a Jew who converted to Lutheranism and then chronicled the rise of
Nazism in Germany, saw how average people learned to live with, to adapt to, to
bear the unbearable. In his 1942 diary he wrote:
“Today over
breakfast we talked about the extraordinary capacity of human beings to bear
and become accustomed to things. The fantastic hideousness of our existence...
and yet still hours of pleasure... and so we go on eking out a bare existence
and go on hoping.”
Sebastian
Haffner, another German observer, noted in Defying Hitler that even he, a staunch
anti-Nazi, found himself one day saluting, wearing a uniform, and marching (and
even secretly enjoying the feeling of authority associated with it).
“To resist
seemed pointless;” he wrote, “finally, with astonishment, he observed himself
raising his arm, fitted with a swastika armband, in the Nazi salute.”
And Milton
Mayer, in They Thought They Were Free, described how good,
decent Germans came to accept fascism. He was a Chicago reporter who, following
World War II, went to Germany to interview “average Germans” to try to learn
how such a terrible thing could have happened and, hopefully, thus prevent it
from ever happening here.
“What happened
here was the gradual habituation of the people,” Mayer wrote, “little by
little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in
secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government
had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so
dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be
released because of national security....”
He wrote about
living there and the ten Germans he befriended: I found his description of a
college professor to be the most poignant. As Mayer’s professor friend noted,
and Mayer recorded in his book:
“This
separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so
gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even
intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true
patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and
reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow-motion
underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter. ...
“To live in
this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it — please try to believe
me — unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than
most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so
inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless
one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one
understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little
measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must someday lead to, one no
more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn
growing. One day it is over his head.”
In this
conversation, Mayer’s friend suggests that he wasn’t making an excuse for not
resisting the rise of the fascists, but was simply pointing out what happens
when you keep your head down and just “do your job” without engaging in
politics.
“You see,”
Mayer’s friend continued, “one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move.
Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but
only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next.
“You wait for
the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes,
will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even to
talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?
Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of
standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.
“Uncertainty
is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it
grows. …
“But the one
great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you,
never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole
regime had come immediately after the first and the smallest, thousands, yes,
millions would have been sufficiently shocked — if, let us say, the gassing of
the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the
windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33.
“But of course
this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little
steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked
by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make
a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
“And one day,
too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon
you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident,
in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jew swine,’
collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed
and changed completely under your nose.
“The world you
live in — your nation, your people — is not the world you were in at all. The
forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the
jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays.
“But the
spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of
identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and
fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when
everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which
rules without responsibility even to God.”
Sound
familiar? Stephen
Miller’s recent musing about suspending habeas corpus to lock up immigrants and
even protestors without trial? That would’ve sparked emergency hearings a
decade ago. Now it’s barely a blip.
The Heritage
Foundation’s Project 2025, a blueprint to purge civil servants and replace
them with regime loyalists in complete defiance of the Pendelton Civil Service Act (and the reasons it came
into being), should be setting off alarm bells. Instead, it’s getting the same
treatment Trump gave Covid and his multiple deviances of the law and the
courts: denial, deflection, delay.
It all comes
back to normalization, as M. Gessen so brilliantly chronicles in The New
York Times: “And so just
when we most need to act — while there is indeed room for action and some
momentum to the resistance — we tend to be lulled into complacency by the sense
of relief on the one hand and boredom on the other.
“Think of the
trajectory of the so-called travel ban during Trump’s first term. Its first
iteration drew thousands into the streets. The courts blocked it. The second
iteration didn’t attract nearly as much attention, and most people didn’t
notice when the third iteration of the travel ban, which had hardly changed,
went into effect. Now Trump’s administration is drafting a new travel ban that targets more than
five times as many countries.”
When we
stop being shocked, we stop reacting. And when we stop reacting, democracy
dies. But there is a
path forward. The
antidote to normalization is resistance. Not just in voting booths, but in the
streets, in courtrooms, in classrooms, in boardrooms, in pulpits, and at dinner
tables.
Thucydides,
who had one of the clearest eyes in history about the dangers faced by
democracies, said:
“The bravest
are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and
danger alike, and yet nonetheless go out to meet it.”
We must
regain our vision and resensitize ourselves. We must reclaim our capacity to be
appalled.
That means
when Trump calls Democrats “vermin,” we don’t say “that’s just Trump being
Trump”; we say, “That’s fascist rhetoric.”
When he
promises to use the military against American citizens and sends out
immigration officers dressed up like soldiers at war, we don’t shrug; we
organize.
When Project
2025 tries to turn federal agencies into tools of vengeance, we don’t wait and
see; we fight back now.
When armed
federal agents hide their identification and their faces the way terroristic
police do in dictatorships as they kidnap people off our streets, we call them
out.
History
won’t forgive us for sleepwalking into tyranny. And our children won’t either. This is the
time to remember that democracy is not self-sustaining. It requires outrage. It
demands vigilance. And sometimes, it needs us in the streets with our fists in
the air and our boots on the pavement.
If we still
believe in this republic, in its ideals, and in the sacred value of a free and
fair society, then our answer to Trump’s authoritarianism must be more than
words. It must be peaceful action. Don’t get used
to fascism. Get loud. Get active. Get in its way.
-Thom Hartmann
The Hartmann
Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my
daily work to stop lies and fascism from consuming our form of government,
please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.