At 98, historian Bernard
Weisberger has seen it all. Born in 1922, he grew up watching newsreels of
Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler as they rose to power in Europe. He vividly
remembers Mussolini posturing to crowds from his balcony in Rome, chin
outthrust, right arm extended. Nor has he forgotten Der Fuehrer’s raspy voice
on radio, interrupted by cheers of “Heil Hitler,” full of menace even without
pictures.
Fascist bullies and
threats anger Bernie, and when America went to war to confront them, he
interrupted his study of history to help make history by joining the army. He
yearned to be an aviator but his eyesight was too poor, so he took a special
course in Japanese at Columbia University and was sent as a translator to the
China-Burma-India theater where Japanese warlords were out to conquer Asia.
Bernie remembers them, too.
In time, we became
colleagues on a series of broadcasts about the 20th century. As we compared the
leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler in an episode titled The
President and the Dictator, Bernie kept reminding the team that the
most cunning demagogues “are never more than a few steps from becoming
dictators.”
Not surprisingly, the
subject came up again when Trump was elected. No, we didn’t think he was
Hitler, or the Republicans Nazis, but both of us acknowledged a deep unease
over the vulnerabilities of democracy, which had led to Trump’s election in the
first place. Inspired by Bernie and unnerved by Trump, I decided to take a
deeper look at democracy under stress and began reading what is now more than a
dozen books on Europe in the 1930s. The most recent is a compelling and
chilling account of Hitler’s First Hundred Days, by the historian
Peter Fritzsche – a familiar story revisited by the author with fresh verve and
insight.
Hitler was a master of
manipulation, using propaganda, violence, intimidation, showmanship, and
spectacle — and above all, fear. By demonizing “the other” – Jews, social
democrats and communists – Hitler won the hearts and minds of the masses,
consolidating his power, and turning Germany into a one-party Nazi state.
I had just finished the
book when I received a short email from Bernie, who had been watching on
television the events following the killing of George Floyd by police in
Minneapolis. He wrote, “All this open talk by Trump of dominance is pretty
undisguised fascism. He’s inciting chaos to set the stage for the strong man to
‘rescue’ the nation.”
There was no doubt who
would be Superman riding to America’s rescue. When Trump promised to end what
he called “American carnage” – a crisis of “poverty in our inner cities,
rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our
nation, crime and gangs and drugs” — he did not ask for our help. He did not
ask that we put our faith in each other or in our democratic values or even in
God. Donald J. Trump would be our savior, the new Messiah — because “I alone
can fix it.”
Bernie’s note triggered a
recollection, sending me across the room to retrieve from a file drawer an
essay written two years ago in The New York Review of Books by
the American legal scholar Cass Sunstein. Reviewing three new books about
ordinary Germans and the Nazi regime, he concluded: “With our system of checks
and balances, full-blown authoritarianism is unlikely to happen here.”
I had admired Sunstein’s
work for years and found reassuring his judgment that the rule of law would
check a would-be tyrant. But many found that assurance disquieting. One
dissenter was Norman Ravitch, emeritus professor of history at the University
of California, Riverside. Responding to Sunstein, he wrote: “The normal concern
of people of all sorts with their daily lives, family, work, leisure, and so on
indicates that only those in certain areas of work and life could possibly
notice the slow but relentless advance of authoritarian and totalitarian
policies by the government. The Nazis knew how to appeal to people who did not
have the ideological concerns but only normal human concerns. They knew how to
conceal their real goals and how to make passive individuals active
supporters.”
So does Trump. He
understands that most Americans are concerned with little more than the economy,
health care and jobs. They respond positively to politicians who promise action
on these priorities, whether or not they know if those promises will ever be
fulfilled. Ravitch pointed out that like Hitler and like Mussolini, Trump knows
how to appeal to a variety of concerns with promises that can be both
attractive and contradictory. Because no population is educated enough,
sensitive enough, or ethical enough to see through the deception, “the danger
is very great indeed. It may in fact be one of the chief weaknesses of
democracy that democracy can lead to tyranny just as well or perhaps even more
than other political systems.”
Two years have passed
since that exchange between scholars, and in those two years Trump has doubled
down. This president is no friend of democracy.
He has declared himself
above the law, preached insurrection by encouraging armed supporters to
“liberate” states from the governance of duly elected officials, told police
not to be “too nice” while doing their job, and gloated over the ability of the
Secret Service to turn “vicious dogs” and “ominous weapons” loose on
demonstrators — to “come down on them hard” if they get too “frisky.
He has politicized the
Department of Justice while remaking the judiciary in his image.
He has stifled
investigations into his administration’s corruption, fired officials charged
with holding federal agencies accountable to the public, and rewarded his
donors and cronies with government contracts, subsidies, deregulations, and tax
breaks.
He has maligned and mocked
the disadvantaged, the disabled, and people of color.
He has sought to
politicize the military, including in his entourage the secretary of defense
and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs (dressed in combat fatigues), as his
orderlies unleashed chemical fumes on peaceful protesters – all so that the
president could use them as stage props in a photo op, holding up a Bible in
front of a historic church, just to make a dandy ad for his re-election
campaign.
He has purged his own
party of independent thinkers and turned it into a spineless, mindless cult
while demonizing the opposition.
He has purloined religion
for state and political ends.
He has desecrated the most
revered symbols of Christian faith by converting them to partisan
brands.
He has recruited religious
zealots for jobs in his administration, rewarding with government favors the
electoral loyalty of their followers.
He has relentlessly
attacked mainstream media as purveyors of “fake news” and “enemies of the
people” while collaborating with a sycophantic right- wing media – including
the Murdoch family’s Fox News — to flood the country with lies and propaganda.
He has maneuvered the
morally hollow founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, into compromising the
integrity of the most powerful media giant in the country by infusing it with
partisan bias.
And because truth is the
foe he most fears, he has banned it from his administration and his
lips. Yes, Bernie, you are right: the man in the White House has taken all
the necessary steps toward achieving the despot’s dream of dominance.
Can it happen here? It
is happening here. Democracy in America has been a series of narrow escapes. We
may be running out of luck, and no one is coming to save us. For that, we have
only ourselves. -Bill Moyers, June 5, 2020
Trump is the tip of the iceberg. Look at the right-wing corporate support, even guidance/demand for relaxed regulations, money, and tax relief. Look how little was done to MAKE the tax relief a help for the workers as opposed to a payoff to the CEO's. Trump alone is not smart enough, organized enough, or capable of that sort of patterned thought.
ReplyDeleteConsider Trump's inner circle: Steven Mnuchin, Mike Pompeo, William Barr, Alex Azar, Andrew Wheeler, Robert Mercer, Stephen Miller, Kevin Hassett, Mark Meadows, John Ratcliffe... come to mind.
DeleteOf course, they are not quite like Hitler's inner circle: Joseph Goebbels, Heinlich Himmler, Hermann Goring, Albert Spier, Martin Bormann, Walther Funk, Wilhelm Keitel, Joachim von Ribbentrup, Karl Donitz, Erich Raeder...