We Hold This Truth to Be Self-Evident: It's Happening Before Our Very Eyes

By Bill Moyers, Moyers on Democracy

07 June 20

t 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.

Trump's Churchill Role-Play Was a Colossal Flop

By Bill McKibben, The New Yorker

06 June 20

f the battle of Lafayette Park turns—as seems possible—into Donald Trump’s most telling misadventure, part of the credit should go to Winston Churchill.

Churchill seems to have been on the President’s mind since the moment he entered the Oval Office, where he moved a bust of the former British Prime Minister, to replace one that Barack Obama, in what used to pass as a scandale, had returned to the British Embassy, which owns it. Later, Trump, on the eve of passing his tax cut, invited key members of Congress over for a special showing of “Darkest Hour,” the film, from 2017, about Churchill and the Blitz. But it was this week’s trek across the street, past a plaza tear-gassed free of peaceful protesters, that really allowed Trump’s Churchill fantasies full play. As the White House press secretary semi-coherently told reporters the next day, the President had acted “like Churchill—we saw him inspecting the bombing damage and it sent a powerful message of leadership to the British people.”

As it happens, I’d been reading “a stone racist, able to regard the greatest leader of his century, Gandhi, and see a “malignant subversive fanatic” and a “half-naked fakir.” But Churchill’s long career offered a year, from 1940 to 1941, of unparalleled courage and meaning, and Larson’s account of it, constructed from diaries of some of Churchill’s intimates, conveys just how remarkable—and how utterly not Trumpian—that season really was.

There were a few similarities. Churchill had a great desire for quick fixes, and spent countless hours indulging his science adviser’s absurd schemes for laying “aerial mines”—call it his hydroxychloroquine. Also, Churchill was undisciplined in his diet, though his tastes ran more to champagne and oysters than to Diet Cokes and hamburgers.

In the main, however, it’s nearly impossible to imagine two more different leaders. When protesters ventured too near the White House, Trump retreated to the bunker beneath it (in order, he now contends, to “inspect” the premises). Churchill had a bunker, too, as one might hope, since the Nazis were doing their utmost to concentrate their bombing on the Whitehall area of Westminster, where he lived and worked. However, as Larson writes, “no raid was too fierce to stop him from climbing to the nearest roof to watch.” One cold night, “while watching a raid from the roof of the building that capped the Cabinet war rooms, he sat on a chimney to keep warm, until an officer came up to ask him politely to move—smoke was backing up into the rooms below.” When raids occurred, he dispatched his staff to the shelter beneath 10 Downing Street, “but did not himself follow, returning instead to his desk to keep working.” (Another nontrivial difference is that Churchill did a lot of work.) When a large unexploded bomb was discovered right next door, in St. James’s Park, he stayed put, “expressing concern only for ‘those poor little birds’ ”—the pelicans and swans—“in the lake.”

Courage, then, but also language. It’s Trump’s enemy: he’s cursed with a limited vocabulary, and uses the same few words over and over. As Gail Collins pointed out, in the Times on Wednesday, “almost every word out of Trump’s mouth” in recent days “seems to be some variation on ‘dominate.’ ” “If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time,” he said in a call with the nation’s governors, who must have been staring at their phones wondering how that was supposed to work in the streets of their cities. “Domination,” he said, speaking of troops in Minneapolis. “It’s a beautiful thing to watch.” Language, of course, was Churchill’s greatest ally: when half his army was trapped at Dunkirk, when Britain alone was standing up to the Axis, when the Luftwaffe sent the greatest air armada in history against Britain’s capital city, he had mainly words to rally his people. And—although he was no orthodox believer—he spoke in the unmistakable cadences of the King James Bible. Trump looks uncomfortable even holding the Bible; Churchill knew its intonations so well that his every formal sentence sounded like scripture. With the news that the French had signed an armistice with the Nazis, he told the House of Commons, “Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say: ‘This was their finest hour.’ ”

But the greatest difference was the feeling that Churchill inspired in the hearts of his people. Larson’s most moving chapters follow Churchill as he walks through one bombed district after another, often with the fires still raging, and always against the advice of his tiny security detail. When, in April of 1941, the Germans bombed Bristol with staggering effect, Churchill appeared there almost immediately for an unannounced visit, touring “the worst-hit areas on foot. He walked briskly. This was not the halting meander that might have been expected of an overweight sixty-six-year-old man who spent many of his waking hours drinking and smoking.” His single bodyguard “stayed close, one hand in his pistol pocket.” When “engulfed by a crowd of men and women, Churchill took off his bowler and put it on top of his walking stick, then held it aloft so that those outside the immediate crush could see it and know he was there.”

He moved on from there to a commencement ceremony at Bristol University, where “the building next door was still in flames,” and where “people kept on arriving late with grime on their faces half washed off, their ceremonial robes on over their fire-fighting clothes which were still wet.” When Churchill rose to confer an honorary degree to the Australian Prime Minister, he said, “Many of those here today have been all night at their posts and all have been under the fire of the enemy in heavy and protracted bombardment. That you should gather in this way is a mark of fortitude and phlegm, of a courage and detachment from material affairs worthy of all that we have learned to believe of Ancient Rome.” As his car drove back to his waiting train, accompanied the whole way by throngs of men, women, and children, his daughter Mary described the scene in her diary: “These are not mere fairweather friends. Papa has served them with his heart and his mind always through peace and wars, and they have given him in his finest and darkest hour their love and confidence.”

It’s difficult to imagine a greater contrast with our current President, who needed police in riot gear and National Guard troops to clear the way for him simply to walk across the street. But it’s not just Trump—the G.O.P.’s harder-liners also love to cosplay Churchill. Tom Cotton—the junior senator from Arkansas, who supports using U.S. troops against American citizens—accepted the “statesmanship award” at the Claremont Institute’s annual Churchill Dinner, in 2018, using the occasion to rally against the “cosmopolitan élites.” The world, Cotton told the assembled conservative grandees, “is a struggle for mastery and dominance . . . in which you run the show or the show runs you. Dictators organize their domestic order with force and violence and live in constant fear for their own lives and grasp on power, so they understand this all too well.” Indeed.