Here it is, the most beautiful day of spring, with the weeping cherry slowly dropping pink petals and the tulips bursting forth, and I am beset by the specter of tyranny.
I’ve been having an argument with an old friend who feels that we are on the verge of a totalitarian state. I point out all the reasons why this is most unlikely, if still vaguely possible, and he responds by urging me to read Timothy Snyder’s slim book, On Tyranny.
Snyder’s 20 brief, succinct “lessons from the Twentieth Century” amount to a call to action by those who would ward off a fascist dictatorship. His is a sober reflection on the parallels between our current situation and the fact that the great tyrannies of the 20th century (mainly those of Hitler and Stalin) were aided by the lackadaisical and wishful-thinking inactivity of people like us who allowed the fascist and communist travesties of truth to take hold in Europe. Just one of Snyder’s phrases – “post truth is pre-fascism” – is enough to cast a chill over this lovely day.
The same post that brings me his book also has the May 1 issue of the New Yorker, whose editor, David Remnick, presents a long opening essay that paints a picture of a Trump who “appears to strut through the world forever studying his own image. He thinks out loud, and is incapable of reflection. He is unserious, unfocused, and, at times, it seems, unhinged.” Our president is, in Remnick’s view, “an unprincipled, cocky, value-free con who will insult, stiff, or betray anyone to achieve his gaudiest purposes.” This was perhaps laughable when Donald Trump was a swaggering business mogul and reality TV star. “But,” Remnick observes, “what was once a parochial amusement is now a national and global peril.”
A big part of me still wants to push back, to argue, as I did in a letter to my friend, that there are good reasons to avoid thinking in these nightmarish themes:
1. Aside from his angry base, the American people do not seem to be embracing Trump or his policies. His popularity is at historically low levels. He has not won over any who did not vote for him. If there were an election now, pitting Trump against someone like Joe Biden – a liberal Democrat with working-class roots – I believe Trump would lose by a wide margin.
2. There are rising voices against his administration among Republicans who are secretly aligning themselves with Democrats to ward off Trump’s more outrageous inclinations. White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon seems sidelined, along with his alt-right proposals, and there is antipathy against him among powerful Republicans in the Senate. Both he and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have been weakened by their own lies and recklessness.
3. There has been a spontaneous and widespread activism among Progressives, especially women and youths, but also people across the spectrum who are appalled and frightened by the threats to science, women’s rights, voting rights, health care, and environmental sanity. It is the mirror image of the rise of the Tea Party in the early years of Obama (with significant differences, to be sure). There is no more complacency on the Left.
We have yet to see this reflected among suburban “soccer moms,” but I anticipate that as threats to science, health research, and environmental protection, etc. become apparent, educated moderates will get alarmed for the future of their children and grandchildren. Trump and his minions are setting themselves up for a variety of rebukes. Americans have shown little tolerance for arrogance, from the left or the right, and Trump is no Ronald Reagan when it comes to rising above the fray. He offers a vision of “American carnage” in place of “a shining city on a hill,” and in doing so alienates most people, most of the time.
4. I predict that legions of those Washington bureaucrats so reviled by the radical right will effectively sabotage much of what Trump’s appalling Cabinet picks are propounding. In this, they will be aided by Trump’s failure to appoint hundreds of functionaries required to implement his policies. This may change, over time, but so far it seems that the “anti-government” liturgy of the Right may work against the effective carrying out of many of his nefarious schemes.
If you believe that our country is in real danger of evolving into Hitler-like totalitarianism, I would put the chances of that at no more than 10 percent – alarming, to be sure, but hardly imminent.
I’m now somewhat less confident that the threat is as remote as I have considered it to be. Snyder and Remnick poke at the fragile shield of my serenity. If economic conditions in the U.S. were as dire as they were in World War I Germany, or more likely, if a terrorist attack threw our nation into turmoil, would we face a rapid descent into totalitarianism “to keep our nation safe”?
My fellow columnist Jonathan Baird warns that “Americans need to discard the notion that a fascist-type state could never happen here. Authoritarianism is very alive in the world. Many Americans believe we were immune from the awful things that have happened elsewhere. It is an American conceit that somehow we are beyond history.”
The clearest threat may be invisible: the substitution of an uncritical faith in “the leader” for “truth” and “fact.” You hear it again and again from Trump supporters, “I don’t care what anybody in the fake news media says, I believe in him!” This in the face of the flood of lies, the incredible posturing and braggadocio, the abrupt changes – without explanation – from one opinion to its opposite, the large-scale incompetence. These are the hallmarks of a leader who appears to be consciously or unconsciously operating out of a pre-fascist playbook and carrying along with him a significant percentage of Americans who seem to have lost touch with history, democracy, science, and truth itself.
I feel very disturbed by the millions of Americans who appear to be so alienated, so confused by economic and social changes, so frightened by the specter of people who don’t look like them becoming ascendant in our culture, that they are ready to follow a proto-fascist leader like Trump. Until their progressive and pro-democratic fellow citizens find a way to speak to these folks with sensitivity and respect, Trump-supporters will feel that they have nowhere else to go to have their angst taken seriously.
Snyder and Remnick urge us to remember our Founders’ injunction that our fragile democracy can be maintained only by eternal vigilance against our human tendency to place our faith in appealing demagogues when times get tough. We must be on guard lest those freedoms we take for granted be swept aside by a reckless, self-obsessed leader propelled by an as-yet-unforeseen crisis. The question we all must face is, at what point does the threat of tyranny become real? Have we already reached that point? And what can we, as ordinary citizens, do to protect a democratic system that we have never before in our lives felt was under such immanent threat?
(Robert L. Fried of Concord is a retired educator who is now a writer, gardener and tinkerer. He can be reached by email at rob.fried@gmail.com.)