A Reckoning Is Upon Us

Oct 29, 2024

Sometime next week we will have a pretty good idea about where our country stands in the struggle to continue the American experiment in representative democracy, constitutional governance, and rule of law. The temptation in light of the dispute ignited by John Kelly’s testimony about Trump and fascism is to put it more starkly: we will find out if our country goes fascist. I try to resist that because the charge of fascism has been so devalued by reckless use as an instrument for demonization of political adversaries that it has become a counterproductive distraction.

The problem with the framing of this debate is that once you start to throw out a label like fascism, people’s minds tend to shut down…it’s much more helpful to think about it as a style of governance, a way that people approach power and the use of power, which many of us would call the abuse and misuse of power. (Fiona Hill on Trump)

On the other hand I cannot quarrel with this sentiment from Heather Cox Richardson at Letters from an American:

I stand corrected. I thought this year’s October surprise was the reality that Trump’s mental state had slipped so badly he could not campaign in any coherent way.
It turns out that the 2024 October surprise was the Trump campaign’s fascist rally at Madison Square Garden, a rally so extreme that Republicans running for office have been denouncing it all over social media tonight.

I tend to agree with John Bolton, for the first time in memory, when he said of Trump, “I think his behavior alone is troubling enough. To be a fascist, you have to have a philosophy. Trump’s not capable of that.” Bolton went on to say that Trump “couldn’t even read his way all the way through that book [Hitler’s Mein Kampf], let alone write something like it” (quoted by Timotija, Bolton: Trump).

I am more inclined to think of Trump and MAGA as a movement toward “illiberal, populist authoritarianism,” as it is described in Christopher R. Browning’s timely review of three books about Hitler’s ascent to power and the first months of the Nazi regime in 1932 and 1933 (Hitler’s Enablers). The parallels are striking. Browning writes of a fragmented Germany where there “was no such thing as majority opinion” and the “political system had checkmated itself.” Conservative nationalists made common cause with Hitler, confident they could both use and contain him, in order to exclude the left, “the ardently prodemocratic Social Democrats along with the revolutionary Communists, “smash the Weimar Republic,” and establish authoritarian rule.

Of the three books, Benjamin Carter Hett’s The Death of Democracy is according to Browning “the most openly presentist”:

He notes that “in many ways, our time more closely resembles the 1930s than it does the 1990s,” as the Nazis “were fundamentally a protest reaction against globalization.” The end of World War I represented “an overwhelming triumph of global liberal capitalism” in the form of an “Anglo-American order” based on the gold standard and “doctrines of financial austerity.” This had severe political ramifications, because “political logic pushed opponents of austerity to become opponents of liberal democracy as well.”

What Hett calls “the Hitler paradox” has a familiar ring: “Adolf Hitler lied all the time. Yet he also said clearly what he was doing and what he planned to do.” While many Germans were won over to National Socialism only after the seizure of power,

Hett focuses on the mass of Germans who were already Nazis before January 1933. They formed a “large protest movement” that constituted a “cult of irrationality” engaged in a “revolution against reason.” This “rejection of rationality” and “contempt for truth and reason” was central to the rejection of the Enlightenment tradition, democracy, and the “liberal, capitalist West” by National Socialism as well as other interwar fascist movements. Hett concedes that such Germans could not have foreseen how their rejection of truth, reason, and rationality would lead to Babi Yar and Auschwitz, because those evils were as yet “unthinkable.” He ends with a presentist warning for the future: such an alibi will not hold today, since “we have their example before us.”

The spectacle of the bended knee is a feature of Trumpism. Formerly establishment Republicans abandon all pretense of principle as they throw in with Trump hoping to maintain power and relevance. Plutocrats such as Jeff Bezos keep their heads down, acting in accordance with capitalism’s moral imperative to maximize profit and fear of retribution if Trump is returned to power. Charlie Sykes referred to this as “the craven capitulation of the billionaires” (Pure Undiluted Trumpism). More openly Elon Musk is lead dog in the yapping pack of oligarchs eagerly positioning themselves to enjoy the spoils under a Trump regime. The German president “Hindenburg and his close circle of advisers, big business, the army, the Nationalists” (Browning) are, with the notable exception thus far of prominent current and former military leaders, their counterparts from that era.

The point here is not that Trump’s followers and others who for reasons I do not fathom cannot bring themselves to vote for Kamala Harris are Nazis. Most are not. The relevance of Germany in the 1930s lies in parallels with the social and political dynamic of the present, where Trump has been clear about his intention to return to power regardless of the outcome of the election and about what he plans to do in the next and any subsequent term in office with the presumption of presidential immunity granted him by six members of the Supreme Court.

The rise of Christian nationalism and its place in MAGA is another part of the equation. Phoebe Petrovic at ProPublica traces the Christian right and Christian nationalism back to the 1970s with roots in Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and James Dobson’s Family Research Council. Organized “around the idea that they had a duty to bring Christianity back into public life,” Falwell, Dobson, and their successors shaped Republican policy in the decades that followed.

Evangelical Protestants of different, often nontraditional, denominations were strange bedfellows with conservative Catholics like Heritage Foundation founder Paul Weyrich in the New Christian Right movement that “under the banner of ‘pro-family politics’…fought against abortion access, feminism and gay rights as attacks on traditional family values” (Petrovic, Behind Christian Nationalism).

Christian Reconstructionism, the Coalition on Revival, and the New Apostolic Reformation are kindred groups that fall under the umbrella of the Christian right. I discussed some of these groups and their ideologies in essays about Mike Johnson, who has aligned himself with the New Apostolic Reformation (The Mike Johnson Moment, May 14, 2024), and postliberal Catholics associated with JD Vance (The Specter of Postliberalism, September 29, 2024). Petrovic traces the foundation of much of this to Christian Reconstructionism, a fundamentalist movement which

held that all aspects of society, including government, education, economics and culture, should conform to a strict interpretation of the Old Testament. Though less recognized, Reconstructionism heavily influenced the more mainstream New Christian Right and its aspirations for Christians to infiltrate systems of power.
Up until the 1970s, the way many evangelicals believed the world would end gave them little incentive to get involved in politics. When the rapture came, the faithful would ascend to heaven, leaving the troubled world behind. That sense of remove began to fade due to the influence of Reconstructionists, who, by contrast, believed they had to build God’s kingdom before Christ would return—which required political action.

The views of founder R.J. Rushdoony “included justifying slavery, denying the Holocaust and endorsing the death penalty for homosexuality and adultery.” The program called for the elimination of public education “by slowly dismantling it.” Reconstructionists “led the way in developing Christian schools and promoting homeschooling.”

Along the way the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) became

a driver for pro-Trump, far-right policies that promote a Christian worldview in government. Although not an NAR leader herself, Paula White-Cain, Trump’s personal pastor of over 20 years, has been instrumental in connecting NAR leaders to Trump through her roles in his campaign and administration.

Petrovic relates that on January 5, 2021, while the mob stormed the Capitol in a violent attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election,

on a stage by the southeast corner of the Capitol, a group of people looked on, blowing shofars and speaking in tongues. They raised their hands toward the sky as they prayed. While some of their followers joined the assault on the building, these leaders of the NAR stayed put, battling in the spiritual realm. One man intoned that he saw a massive serpent with its tail over the Senate and asked God to dispatch angels to yank the demon out.

My mood careens wildly from hope to despair and back depending on the latest news report or analysis to come my way. Two days ago I joined Indivisible Oregon comrades for a final letter-writing session at Migration Brewing on Glisan. The experience was heartening. The room was filled with individuals determined to do what they can to make a difference. One of the group’s movers and shakers made the rounds of the tables insisting, “We’re gonna win.” I hope he is right.

Whatever happens in the weeks ahead, we old hotheads and some young ones with us will not be silent. We will continue to raise our voices on behalf of constitutional governance and rule of law under the representative democracy bequeathed us by the country’s founders and to defend the Harris presidency against efforts to overthrow it if the country has the good fortune for her to prevail in the election. We will do what we can.

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