It's happening here

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.