From Absurdity to Atrocity
Members of a German Police Battalion kill Jewish prisoners, up close and personal.
I have been traveling in Maryland this week as we visit friends. I have been focusing on visiting places for research on Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. I will write about that when I get home. But tonight I write about a growing concern of mine.
I haven’t watched any news and spent little time online, but I was struck by something today that pretty much sums up the dangerous clown car posse of the modern Trumpified GOP. I came across Voltaire’s quote, “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities”. Never has a quote been so relevant.
I spent 34 years as a Republican, exiting the GOP after the Republican National Convention in 2008 and the nomination of Sarah Palin following my return from Iraq in February of 2008. I was dealing with PTSD and once I returned to listening to my daily diet of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Fox News I was horrified about their lies about the war, as well as the virulent racism of their attacks again Barack Obama. From February to the convention I put my hopes in John McCain to right the ship, but when Palin was the Vice Presidential nominee I gave up. It only took me a few minutes to realize that she wasn’t at all qualified to be a heartbeat away from the presidency, but her radical Christian Nationalist views, insane supposedly Christian beliefs, the fact that she was a complete imbecile and airhead, lost me to the GOP. Their strategy wasn’t about finding a qualified candidate, but trying to capture the Right Wing Christian base, while trying to deceive women that they care about women’s rights. That strategy offended me, it was base, callous, and put the party into the hands of the radicals who became the Tea Party, the Freedom Caucus, and Trump’s MAGA cult.
From Trump down the leaders of the GOP either sell unbelievable conspiracy theories and promote the use of violence against their opponents, while attempting to overturn a legal election under the most perfidious means by attacking Congress on January 6th, 2021. When not doing that GOP legislatures pass and Governors sign legislation designed to disenfranchise predominantly Black voters, roll back the rights of women at LGBTQ people, backed by decisions of the Trump-McConnell Supreme Court majority, and hand picked Trump nominated judges in Federal District Courts.
Sadly, their voters either believe the absurdities, or turn a blind eye to them. Then there are the MAGA voters who kill Trump opponents, or the White and Christian Nationalist paramilitaries who target minorities, women, and LGBTQ people with violence. Likewise, these same people encourage, ignore, or spout the insincere platitude of “offering prayers” anytime very preventable massacres, failures on infrastructure, or other tragedies occur. Of course, there are the legislatures and governors that pass laws that ensure that the truth about history cannot be taught, and that teachers who dare to teach that history will be fired or face criminal charges, as GOP activists like the Mothers for Liberty act in concert to ban books in school and public libraries to make sure that students might not access ideas that they disagree, with librarians being targeted for removal or criminal punishment. That is not what our Founders imagined. They were not perfect by far, but they were mostly men of the enlightenment to whom such actions would be abhorrent.
But there are so few people in the GOP who oppose them that they get away with everything. Those in the GOP who find them problematic are generally too scared of them to take a firm stand against them. Some might vote against legislation, but don’t take their opposition to the level where it might cost them their office or life. These-called GOP moderates are no better than the German conservatives of 1933 who having thought they could control Hitler found themselves completely outmaneuvered, their parties banned, and mostly accepting the Nazi regime, especially conservative Christians. Many of those people, some not even party members, participated in some of the most heinous crimes in human history. They believed the absurdities, and committed the atrocities. Sadly, they were not the first or will not be the last to do so. I fully expect that win or lose in 2024 that some in the GOP will begin committing full-fledged atrocities, and if they win that Trump’s desire to eliminate all opposition by concentrating all executive power in his hands will be used by any other GOP leader who wins the presidency. That is what MAGA and every other part of the GOP machine and all its allied special interest groups want, absolute power with which they as a minority can rule.
I want to believe that they can be held off for a couple of election cycles so that some sort of sanity might return to the GOP, but I am not hopeful. Those in control of the party, especially at the state level and in the House of Representatives are true believers. If Trump or whatever GOP nominee loses in 2024, they will only become more extreme and blame moderates or some imagined enemy for their loss.
I am not a fatalist, but I am not hopeful that our democracy can endure the descent in to madness that we see today. We have seen targeted mass shootings or violence against Synagogues, African American Churches, and LGBTQ+ gatherings, all done by White Nationalist or Trump-MAGA supporters. When those things happen, the GOP is mostly silent. Hannah Arendt, who saw the Nazi takeover of Germany in the beginning wrote:
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
Those standards of thought or the reality of experience does not matter to most of the GOP, including the more than 80% of conservative Christians who voted for Trump in 2020. Milton Mayer wrote the words of a German University Professor and colleague after the war was over. The professor was reflecting on how people ended up going along with the Nazi regime. Mayer wrote his friends words:
“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.
That my friends is the America that the GOP and Trump built. Trump is not currently in power, but the GOP leadership, even his primary opponents (with the exception of Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson) willingly prostrate themselves before him to defend every lie and every absurdity, with the leadership of the GOP House of Representatives being among the most culpable, and damnable.
Historian Timothy Snyder wrote in his book On Tyranny:
“The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why.”
The question today is: will we?
If you would like to learn more about how we got to where we are today, please pick up a copy of my book, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: Religion and the Politics of Race in the Civil War Era and Beyond. (Potomac Books, an Imprint of the University of Nebraska Press, October, 2022).
Powerful call to action.
I’d thought Reagan was a cynical choice and a disaster, but when Sarah Palin was chosen to run with John McCain I thought the GOP was saying “hold my beer.”