Trump and Hitler: and Pelosi

Trump and Hitler: and Pelosi

In the recent government shutdown Donald Trump revealed himself to be a right-wing populist. Populists believe there’s a “people” out there that they alone cater to. And once in political power they try to govern as if only those they cater to matter. They are willing to side-step or usurp normal governmental practices, laws and the constitution itself to give those “people” what they want. In his lovely little book On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder cautions us to “be calm when the unthinkable arrives.” He talks about how the fire at the German Parliament in 1933 became the cause for Hitler to declare a state of emergency that would last through World War Two, until 1945.

What Snyder means by being calm is to calmly and soberly assess the danger and to stand up and push back immediately and forcefully. In the parliamentary elections that where held less than a week after the fire the Nazis won a majority. Less than a year after those events Germany was effectively, a one-party state. Who set fire to the parliament was never determined. But Hitler declared that it was Germany’s internal enemies. Germany lacked the kind of robust but deliberate civil society in which people might openly say “well let’s investigate who set the fire,” or we don’t really know who set it. So let’s go to the street to oppose martial law.” Instead the German people, reeling from post-World War One malaise, the Great Depression and more than a decade of unstable governments rolled over before “Der Fuhrer.”

Populism is troubling for the political establishment. But populism on the right trends toward fascism. Fascist populist not only purport to despise big government and big capital. They also fear and scapegoat ”foreign” elements in the population: Jews and Gypsies in 1930s Germany; and people of color in contemporary America. They thus, also become white nationalists. Fascist in power are much more troubling than garden variety populists.

Donald Trump is a populist, a fascist and a white nationalist. The people he seeks to scapegoat are people of color; and especially immigrants. Snyder says be calm when the unthinkable occurs. He then describes the creation of a climate of crisis, which induces hysteria in the citizenry, and justifies a state of emergency. This is what Trump has done over the issue of the border wall. Those living along the border, including most Republican congress members would not describe the border situation as a crisis. Fewer undocumented people are coming across now than before 9-11. Many of those arriving at the border today are seeking asylum. They aren’t trying to enter illegally. And, many of those in the country illegally, are people who came legally and overstayed their visas. Incidentally, many of those people, if not most are white people from places like Canada and Ireland. So there is no crisis, except that manufactured in Trump’s head and sold to his base.

The real difference between Germany in the 1930s the United States today is the durability of our political institutions, specifically, our system of checks and balances. Heralded as some of the strongest institutions in the world, they are under supreme challenge from Trumpism and the long-frustrated white Americans who see the country they’ve known historically slipping away. Trump has been continually frustrated by the media, the courts, blue state attorney generals and local officials who won’t do his bidding. And then the American people sent a thunderous rebuke to his manner of governance in the 2018 federal elections. The government shutdown over a border wall that he couldn’t get when Republicans completely controlled Congress was Trump’s latest desperate attempt to side-step the normal processes of government and get his way in the name of his “American people.” The steadfast leadership of Nancy Pelosi and the decline of Trump’s strategy in the polls is the calm in the face of the unthinkable that Snyder talks about, and the determination to use our institutions to push back hard that I’m calling for here.

Round One goes to Pelosi and the Democrats in the House. But Trump may not be finished. He may declare a state of emergency if this three weeks of negotiations fail. He probably won’t shut down the government again, but if he does, average citizens must be prepared to take direct action in myriad ways to send him and his feckless Republican minions in Congress the message that we’re not going down without a fight. In fact, we have no intention of going down period!