Half measures

Ian Buruma, who is writing a book about Berlin during WWII, points out that people have a nearly unlimited capacity to normalize what would previously have been considered intolerable:

In a letter to his sister during winter in 1944, when Berlin was being bombed day and night, [Buruma’s father] describes a concert by the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler, with the audience and the musicians huddled in thick coats under a roof filled with holes from British and American bombshells.

Almost until the last stages of the war, when the Soviet Army conquered Berlin in a devastating battle that reduced the city to rubble, the cinemas were full, the dance revues were in full swing, the soccer competition went on, and people visited the zoo and sunbathed on the Wannsee opposite the infamous villa where the logistics of the Holocaust were worked out over glasses of brandy.

One reason for public docility in terrible circumstances is fear. In the last years of the war, a Berliner could be arrested and, often, executed for doubting the final German victory — for defeatism. But there is something more insidious, something not unfamiliar to many of us today: the hope that things will turn out all right soon, that the political outrages are temporary or at least that they can’t get worse. One way of dealing with bad times is to pretend that they are normal.

For ten years now something along these lines has been happening in this country:

The human capacity for hope is an essential quality. Without hope, there can be no improvement. But hope can also turn into delusion. The United States today is not Hitler’s Third Reich. We are nowhere near the disastrous circumstances of Berliners in 1945, 1939, 1935 or even 1934. But as humans, we are prey to similar kinds of self-deception.

When Donald Trump refused to say whether he would accept the outcome of the election in 2016, people should have sensed the danger. And yet at the time, respected intellectuals told me that everything would be fine: All he wanted was to play golf or make money. Anyway, Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush were worse, for they condoned or unleashed unnecessary wars. I was told by a well-known American historian that there was really nothing to worry about, for after all, Roosevelt once had authoritarian tendencies, too. Democracy would never be shattered, a law professor assured me, for “Americans love freedom too much.”

Since then, one red line after another has been crossed: Undocumented immigrants are called animals; civilian boats are blown out of the water; American citizens are gunned down in the streets and then accused of being domestic terrorists; universities, news organizations and law firms are being bullied and blackmailed; and refugees are deported to countries whose languages they probably don’t even speak. And that is aside from the blatant corruption of family and cronies.

All this was incremental, too, but compared with 1934, everything goes much faster. And yet life continues as usual. What was unthinkable only yesterday we now take in stride, and we wait for that moment when things really have gone too far this time, when the fever breaks and things will revert to normal.

The entire Biden administration, and in particular its attitude toward Trump and his henchmen, was based on the assumption that the fever had broken and things were returning to normal. That’s why it decided not to prosecute Trump for trying to overthrow the government: Doing so would only re-inflame the Trump cult, as opposed to merely allowing it to fade away. This assumption was not obviously mistaken, but in retrospect it was a huge mistake. What Merrick Garland’s DOJ did by treating January 6 as if it were some sort of random bit of mob violence, as opposed to, you know, a coup attempt by the sitting president of the United States, was signal to the profoundly inattentive American marginal voter that this coup attempt was really not a big deal.

Yes it’s far from clear what would have happened if the Biden administration had, you know, tried to enforce the law against Trump. Maybe the SCOTUS would have blocked the whole thing early on; maybe there would have been stochastic violence from Trump’s cult. A lot of bad things could have happened. Instead what happened was what happened, which is the total disaster we’re living through now.

The answer to the question of what’s going to happen over the next 35 months is that nobody knows. What we do know is that malignant narcissism and senile dementia are conditions that invariably get worse, not better. We also know that the American political system has never dealt with anything remotely like someone like Trump as president, so historical precedents are pretty much useless for the purposes of prediction. For example, will Trump run again in 2028? The normal primary process would start about a year from now, so the answer to that question is coming right up. I doubt anyone knows the answer to that question either, including Trump himself, who is increasingly impulsive and erratic, even in terms of his previous baseline (narcissism and dementia always get worse, not better).

Remember the whole debate back at the beginning of this whole thing about “the party decides?” That was the political science theory that more or less said something like this couldn’t happen, because a contemporary major American political party was a kind of sprawling institutional guardrail, that among other things was sufficiently rationally bureaucratic to ensure that a demented narcissist couldn’t become president of the United States. I haven’t heard or read that phrase in literally years now.

OK so what now? The answer to that is, things are bad, they’re going to get worse, and getting through the next 35 months to whatever the hell may be waiting on the other side requires taking the sorts of political actions that are impossible to take if you’re still living in the kind of denial that has marked American politics for more than a decade now.

Donald Trump and the political movement he leads don’t need to be opposed in normal political terms. That was Joe Biden’s view and he was wrong. Normal politics, for example, don’t include imprisoning your opponents after you win, for obvious reasons, but something like that is the minimum that needs to be done to wrench this country off its current course toward one-party autocracy. I’m well aware that this sounds a lot like the Vietnam war logic of we had to destroy that village in order to save it, but in fact the North had to destroy the South during the Civil War in order to save the Union, and that operation included measures such as forcing the former Confederacy to accept the post-Civil War amendments at quite literal gunpoint.

The problem is, we took a half measure.