It’s happening here
by David Benjamin
PARIS
— While visiting from Brussels, my 14-year-old godson, Benjamin, grew
exasperated with the alarmism at the dinner table. He said, “All
grownups do now is sit around, eating, drinking and talking about
Trump.”
Hey, music to Donald Trump’s ears. And Benjamin is right.
No political figure in my lifetime, in any country, has similarly
dominated civic discourse, everywhere around the world. The prevailing
mood of this endless, circular discussion of the president-elect is
doleful pessimism until, inevitably, it spirals down into outright fear
and loathing.
I’ve tried to compare all this attention,
speculation and paranoia to the surprise of Barack Obama eight years
ago. For a fraction of the American electorate, Obama caused as much
“collective trauma” as does Trump today, because that minority saw the
White House falling into the hands of a foreign usurper from a
degenerate race. However, aside from the sour-grapes hysteria of bigots
and denialists, the nation treated Obama’s ascension as a normal
presidential transition. There were concerns about his inexperience in
public office, but he was hardly much greener than such forebears as
John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.
In every
respect, Obama took charge as a conventional politician, widely regarded
as qualified for the job and gifted with the intellect and temperament
to do it conscientiously. No such confidence applies to Donald Trump.
There’s no comparison.
It’s not unusual to see political upstarts
who are as transgressive, incompetent, vulgar and mentally disturbed as
Donald Trump climb suddenly to the pinnacle of power in one nation or
another. But the countries in question are typically Third World
backwaters where the demagogue’s route to dominion tends to be a coup d’etat, after which all his political foes are machine-gunned ceremonially in the plaza of the national cathedral.
This
sort of “political revolution” — to borrow Bernie Sanders’ locution— is
almost unheard of in Western democracies. We need to scroll back more
than 80 years to find a genuine parallel, to a weird time warp when a
diminutive, delusional corporal who had failed as a landscape artist
muscled his unlikely way into the chancellorship of the Weimar republic
and established a “thousand-year reich” that was gonna be really, really
great, believe me!
After the initial shock of that bizarre putsch,
conversations around the world were fraught with dark portents.
Nonetheless, in the midst of this angst, there was a trend among elder
statesmen to counsel cautious optimism. Yes. they said, crazy Adolf
seems to be our worst nightmare. But he can’t be all that bad. The
gravity of his great office and the advice of other world leaders will
calm his ferocity and forestall his fanatic plans.
A few figures closer to the action, notably Munich journalist Fritz Gerlich,
saw no reason for such hope. Gerlich had been ruthlessly mocking Herr
Schickelgruber for more than five years before the fateful “election” of
1932. Gerlich intensified his attacks thereafter, placing himself
directly in Hitler’s crosshairs. He became the poster boy for a free
press that, as the Feuhrer suggested, had to be either gelded or gagged.
Hitler’s preferred pejorative for the media was lugenpresse,
“the lying press.” This Nazi slur, thankfully dormant for generations,
has been revived by the rabid fans of our president-elect.
Early
in the Thirties, author Sinclair Lewis perceived the dire possibilities
posed by the Reich. In 1935, he dashed off an extraordinary novel, It Can’t Happen Here,
about a Hitlerlike archetype named Berzelius Windrip who blends cynical
religiosity, corporatism and jingoist patriotism into a populist
formula that turns the U.S. into the Fascist States of America.
In another instructive book, Explaining Hitler,
historian Ron Rosenbaum examines why Hitler’s “strange outlandishness”
appealed viscerally to vast swathes of a restive and frightened public. A
Fritz Gerlich contemporary, Will Schaber, told Rosenbaum that “the very
things that led conventional politicians and statesmen to underestimate
and dismiss Hitler as outlandish and unsuitable, a hopeless outsider —
that nicht natürlich strangeness, that alienness — were the very things that constituted the subterranean power of his appeal.”
Sound familiar?
Despite
a few brave exceptions — notably Gerlich and Schaber — German
journalists treated Hitler the way the American media have kid-gloved
Donald Trump. In response to Trump’s direct threats to the autonomy of
the press, reporters have striven to humor the bully. They’ve operated
with the expectation — the hope, really — that by gently chiding Trump
about his tantrums, vulgarities, slanders and lies, they might
eventually bring him around to behaving like an adult.
It’s not
working. What we, the actual adults, the press, the Democratic Party and
the few Republicans who’ve retained a shred of integrity, must confront
is what Europe’s leaders were loath to acknowledge in ’32.
The issue is not whether Trump, in a political context, is — like Hitler — a raving madman. He is.
Nor
is the issue whether Trump’s intemperate, inflammatory style of
“leadership” will pose a clear and present danger to American democracy
and to the security of the international community. It will.
The
real issue is whether the American people, like Germans in the Third
Reich — jealous of their petty privileges and fearful of the caprices of
an unhinged commander-in-chief — will hunker down and acquiesce to his
serial assaults on decency, truth and the Constitution. Or, unlike the
supine Germans of the Thirties, will we open our eyes, stand our ground,
put aside the selfish grievances that carried Trump forth on his wave
of hatred and — yes — take our country back from the brink on which it
teeters? And how soon?
As Rosenbaum recalls in his book, among
Adolf Hitler’s first executive orders was to build a concentration camp,
in the lovely Munich suburb of Dachau. One of the charter occupants in
that gulag —from which he never emerged — was Fritz Gerlich.
Donald Trump has a head start on the concentration camp. We built one for him, at Guantánamo Bay.
When he sends his first reporter there, it will be, already, too late.
Wednesday, December 21, 2016
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