The slide into authoritarianism

Yesterday commenter Ten Bears posted the following quote from Milton Mayer’s They Thought They Free: The Germans 1933-1945:

“You see,” my colleague went on, “one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

… “But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.”

This passage is quoted in a very interesting essay, well worth reading in its entirety, by Dave Neiwert. Published almost a year before Trump was elected, Neiwert’s piece analyzes what seemed to him to be the relationship between Trump and fascism at that time.

Obviously the United States in 2019 is not a fascist country. What is less obvious is how far down the road we have already gone toward becoming one. It’s increasingly clear that Donald Trump is going to use his Attorney General and his Department of Justice not only to provide him with immunity against any legal process, but to persecute his enemies under the color of law.

And anyone who simply assumes that we will have what international watchdog groups have referred to traditionally as “free and fair” elections next year is being far too optimistic. Trump can only be removed by being voted out of office, but we are going to have to fight to retain the right to do so. Authoritarian regimes consider elections to be public exhibitions of their power and purported legitimacy, not contests to be won or lost.

Meanwhile, for the vast majority of people, life goes on pretty much as always. Everything is “normal.” Warnings about the descent into authoritarianism, and finally into full-blown fascist tyranny, sound hysterical, extreme, obviously wrongheaded. After all, we are not Nazis.

But the Nazis weren’t Nazis either, not in the beginning. And, as Mayer points out, these things happen bit by bit, a day at a time, as one line after another is crossed, and the populace becomes numb to a slowly evolving new reality.

ETA: As several commenters note, it’s important not to focus unduly on the most horrific historical examples of authoritarian and fascist regimes. Nazi Germany is obviously the worst case scenario, but a slide into a moderately repressive, intermittently murderous, and otherwise “soft” authoritarianism would also be the end of the United States as we know it — and a far more likely endpoint to current trends than a full-blown totalitarian nightmare.

Read Neiwert’s piece from that long ago time of November 2015 to experience how far we’ve come since then, and how far we may still go.