The work of 245 years & millions of lives dedicated or given to defend the American ideal could vanish

Today is the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and is also the day after 45 Republicans in the Senate voted that Trump's attempt to turn America into a fascist state was just fine with them.

How does this kind of horror happen in otherwise civilized, advanced countries?

Back in the 1980s, my family and I lived in Germany doing international relief work. I knew and worked with several Germans, then in their 60s, who'd been soldiers in Hitler's army.

A close friend and colleague of mine, Armin Lehmann, was the 16-year-old courier who brought Hitler the news that the war was lost, and stood outside his door while Hitler committed suicide; we traveled the world together and I encouraged him to get his autobiography into print.

My mentor Gottfried Mueller, about whom I wrote a book, had been such a true believer that he parachuted into the Kurdish area of Iraq to help the Kurds seize the oil fields for Hitler (and designed the flag still used by the Kurdish resistance); he spent the rest of the war in a British prison cage in the desert waiting to be executed, and when he escaped at the war's end became a vegetarian and committed his life to peace, as had Armin.

People wonder how the Nazis took over that country so rapidly, just like they wonder how Republicans in the US Senate could justify Donald Trump whipping up a crowd to go kill five people and try to overthrow the US government.

Turns out, in both cases, it's the seductive lure of authoritarianism.

All of us have, to a greater or lesser extent, a deep-seated, childhood-rooted need to be taken care of. To have somebody else make sure that we are safe. For some it's a faint whisper; for others, it's the force that drives their lives.

It apparently comes out of the developmental stage of childhood when we're completely dependent upon our parents; some of us didn't feel completely safe through childhood, and when such people grow up they spend their adulthood looking for parent-like figures who promise to protect them and guarantee them safety.

Such people are called "authoritarian followers," and they just want the world to be safe, predictable, and orderly. No ambiguity or complexity; these people want simple answers, a strong leader, the reassurance of weaponry and macho symbology, and swift and harsh "justice" for those who frighten them or they don't understand. Thus, they're open and vulnerable to authoritarian leaders.

And it's not just limited to "average people" or even those suffering poverty or oppression; even billionaires are vulnerable to authoritarianism.

This doesn't just explain why Germans would follow Hitler; it also explains why Americans would follow Charles Manson and Jim Jones. And Donald Trump.

We're all capable of following characters who play the role of parent figures who'll take care of all the crises, solve the problems, and make everything better, whether for good or for ill, whether George Washington ("The Father of Our Country") or Donald Trump.

This is not a novel idea. Entire books have been written about it, like Robert Altmeyer's The Authoritarians, Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, and John Dean's Conservatives Without Conscience.

Authoritarianism, the impulse at the core of fascism, is simple, and that very simplicity is what makes it so seductive.

Democracy, on the other hand, can be frightening. It's messy. It's not always under control. The majority who make the decisions in a functioning democracy may not look or think like us, which adds to our confusion.

For a person frightened by uncertainty, a person whose childhood fears turned them into "authoritarian follower" adults, democracy seems unnecessarily complex and dysfunctional; just putting an authoritarian strongman in charge is such a straightforward solution.

He will protect them, restore order, and make sure that everything in the future is consistent, predictable and safe. He will give them the comfortable, secure world they've craved their entire lives. (Authoritarian leaders in modern society are almost always men.)

Nazism built slowly for a decade, and then swept Germany when enough Germans became convinced that Hitler's simple answers, clear definitions of the villains, and assertion of their victimhood was correct. In just a short year or so, the country flipped from a fully functioning democratic republic into an authoritarian nightmare.

It only took authoritarian-friendly German media (Hitler used rightwing "talk" radio and the "conservative" German press very effectively) to convince enough German people to buy his siren song of authoritarianism. Once that tipping point was reached, Nazism flowed across the country like a tsunami. It was unstoppable.

Today we're watching in real time as that very process plays out within our body politic and among rightwing movements who've adopted Trump as their leader and authoritarianism as their ideal.

Including, apparently, the majority of America's Republicans. Most of today's GOP no longer believes in democracy; the party of Dwight Eisenhower is nearly dead.

If today's Republicans did believe in democracy, they wouldn't go out of their way to sabotage it so effectively year after year, decade after decade, generation after generation.

We see it in Carl Rove's 2010 REDSTATE gerrymandering program; in Mitch McConnell packing the courts with young neofascists; in Republican officials sabotaging the electoral process in neighborhoods filled with minorities, college students or Social Security voters by selectively closing polling places, reducing the number of voting machines in certain neighborhoods, and aggressively purging voting rolls in those same communities.

Joe Lockhart, Bill Clinton's former Press Secretary, yesterday tweeted: @joelockhart "Being a Republican Senator now means nothing matters. Nothing matters. Not the storming of the Capitol, not an attempted coup, not trying to overturn a free and fair election. Nothing matters. The party of Trump. Nothing matters."

Joe's onto something, but to say "nothing matters" about these people is not quite true. The power, control, orderliness, predictability, and safety that Trump's simple lies, convenient scapegoats, and easy solutions offer are what "matters."

We are at the threshold of a fascist authoritarian takeover. America is rapidly turning toward oligarchy. January 6th was America's Kristallnacht.

The cowardice of Senate Republicans voting to not hold Trump responsible for five deaths and the sacking of the US Capitol should shock and chill us all. They are our Neville Chamberlains.

Democracy must reassert its power and moral authority with investigations and prosecutions of the traitors who tried to kill our Vice President and Speaker and take over our country.

Thought and economic leaders in our nation must step forward and unequivocally condemn not only the fascist leaders who've taken over the GOP but also the fascist media supporting and encouraging them.

Our press must explicitly point out the difference between the American invention of a democratic republic and Trump's 21st century neofascism, and tell our citizens in blunt terms what the end point of the direction we're heading could be.

Congress and the Biden administration must make America work again, and protect and restore to safety and prosperity those Americans who are today experiencing fear, uncertainty, unemployment and even hunger in ways we haven't seen in a century.

And Republicans must drop their "voter fraud" big lie and replace their voter suppression campaigns with serious policy considerations, rejecting demagoguery and running on issues again.

If these things don't happen now, we will soon see political violence on a scale resembling Europe's in the 1930s or Chile's in the 1970s. And the work of 245 years, the millions of lives dedicated or given to defend the American ideal, will die.

-Thom

Originally posted on thomhartmann.medium.com .