Weekly Mind Dump: The End of the American Way of Life

Welcome to Fascism, America. For this is what you voted for.

Week of 11/3-11/9, 2024:

The period we are in now, between the November 5 election and inauguration day on January 20 — call it fin de régime, interregnum, götterdämmerung — gives me a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. A sense of impending doom, of a transition from the American Way of Life, as we’ve known it, to a period of darkness, uncertainty, failure and impending violence.

In my last piece, I describe what happens when extremists pursuing a radical ideology assume the reins of power. Always expect the worst. Castro’s Cuba. Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Hitler’s Germany.

The radical MAGA agenda will lead to cataclysm, in my view. Mass arrests and deportations were a feature of the Third Reich. As are lies, arbitrary prosecutions, quashing of dissent, corruption and uncontrolled corporatism, preaching hate, and practicing treachery in foreign policy. “The enemies of the people” and “enemies within,” as repeatedly espoused by Donald Trump, is the language of dictators — Hitler, Stalin, Castro, Mao, Pol Pot. As are his threats to “execute” former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley and shoot former Republican congresswoman and Trump critic Liz Cheney. He’s also threatening to “execute” any undocumented migrants who attempt to return to the U.S.

Trump’s MAGA minions are gleefully promising to prosecute Attorney General Merrick Garland, Special Counsel Jack Smith and journalists like Rachel Maddow. An unhinged MAGA fanatic, Kash Patel, reportedly in line to be named to head the FBI or CIA, calls for a “comprehensive housecleaning” of the Justice Department and an eradication of “government tyranny” within the FBI by firing “the top ranks” and prosecuting “to the fullest extent of the law” anyone who “in any way abused their authority for political ends.” Purging the government ranks of career civil servants and replacing them with sycophants is another tactic of autocrats.

On mass arrests of migrants (call it ethnic cleansing), Trump’s chosen “border czar” Tom Homan warns Democrats: “If you’re not going to help us, get the hell out of the way for we’re going to do it.”

Voters have delivered to Trump and MAGA a clean sweep of government, with both chambers of Congress as well as the White House. Add to this the MAGA-dominated Supreme Court and we have the perfect correlation of forces to bring us autocracy.

What Trump voters will soon find out is that actions have consequences. Cancelation of FAFSA student loans and grants means many kids won’t be able to go to college. Abolishing worker safety and child labor laws will make the workplace more dangerous. High tariffs will make recent inflation seem tepid. Repeal of the CHIPs and Science Act means goodbye to those factories and jobs that would have boosted local and state economies. And forget about those much-needed new bridges and roads after the repeal of the Infrastructure Act. Don’t want the women you love to bleed out in a parking lot after being denied emergency care due to abortion restrictions? Oh, so sorry. And on it goes…

All of this brings me back to one of my favorite authors, William Shirer, and his seminal book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Shirer, an American journalist, reported on the Nazi regime from inside Germany in the 1930s and after its collapse after 1945.

American voters who re-elected Trump parallel their German counterparts in 1932 who gave the Nazis a plurality in parliament, leading to Hitler’s appointment as chancellor. Shirer said of Germans: “They didn’t seem to care about loss of freedom as long as they had some prosperity.” He added: “One underlying fact that stands out on the pages of German history is the almost complete lack of interest, thought or questions on the part of Germans of all classes in the ethical implications of Hitler’s acts.”

German industrialists considered Hitler to be malleable to their interests and chose to support him. Shirer: “The big industrialists and landlords began to pour money into the party coffers, and of course nothing was ever done about them.” Compare this with Jeff Bezos’s and other American billionaires’ pre-emptively caving to Trump recently, not to mention Elon Musk’s pulling out all the stops to get him elected.

“No class or group or party in Germany could escape its share of responsibility for the abandonment of the democratic Republic and the advent of Adolf Hitler. The cardinal error of the Germans who opposed Nazism was their failure to unite against it,” Shirer writes.

The same can be said of those Republican politicians who cowered rather than oppose Trump early on when they had the power to do so.

Finally, Shirer presciently told the New York Times, “Perhaps America will one day go fascist democratically, by popular vote.”

I, for one, don’t buy the arguments that Americans voted for Trump because the price of eggs is too high. The Economist magazine calls the American economy “the envy of the world” with its high growth rate, low unemployment and fast decreasing inflation. I also discount to an extent the assertions that “flyover country” is angry at the elites.

In 1932, the U.S. unemployment rate was 25 percent and the nation was economically prostrate. Scholars were announcing the failure of capitalism. But voters elected Franklin Roosevelt, not a mid-century Donald Trump. In 1976, inflation and interest rates stood at around five percent (as opposed to half that today). Voters elected Democrat Jimmy Carter to be their president. Four years later, as inflation surged to almost 13 percent, interest rates soared to 18 percent and unemployment rose to over seven percent (with youth unemployment at double that), Americans chose Ronald Reagan, not a lying, morally depraved, treasonous convicted felon.

The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols nails what happened on November 5:

A majority of American voters chose Trump because they wanted what he was selling: a nonstop reality show of rage and resentment… Americans have done this to themselves during a time of peace, prosperity, and astonishingly high living standards. An affluent society that thinks it is living in a hellscape is ripe for gulling by dictators who are willing to play along with such delusions.

George Conway likewise captures what went down:

What deserves the lion’s share of our attention are the facts that a major political party could have even considered nominating Trump despite his manifest criminality, moral depravity, psychological derangement, and cognitive deficiencies and deterioration — and that nearly half the country would have voted for him no matter what he did or said and no matter whom he had run against. That was the ultimate problem in this election, and remains so.

Trump’s copycatting Joseph Goebbels paid off. Nearly two-thirds of Americans have a hard time telling truth from lies when elected officials speak, according to Pew Research.

The burgeoning right-wing media-verse acted as a powerful force multiplier, as described by journalist Michael Tomasky:

Today, the right-wing media — Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more — sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.

The upshot is this: welcome to Fascism, America. For this is what you voted for. And take the word of this ex-diplomat who experienced dictatorship up close and personal — you aren’t going to like it, which is why I’m feeling very queasy with what’s to come.

And you can’t say you weren’t warned. “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Thanks Ben Franklin.