Danger ahead

Just a sampling of recent Proud Boys headlines

Fredrik Logevall’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of the 35th president begins with him observing and sorting through what he was witnessing below his Berlin balcony.

“JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917 - 1956” recounts a 22-year-old Harvard senior processing the relentless propaganda that warned of imminent Polish aggression against the Reich. Logevall paints a vivid picture of John Kennedy looking at a mosaic of Nazi uniforms. They were olive, green, black, brown, blue. The extremist political movement that had propelled the Führer to power was a force for chaos that became so great, the Nazis became the only plausible solution to stop it. The calculus of German voters changed decisively towards the Nazi Party in a volatile era in which voters electorally obliterated it in 1928, before resurrecting it in 1930, following the economic crash and the beginning of the Great Depression. In the end, the political chaos was confronted by giving its alchemist and inspiration responsibility for ending it. When Adolf Hitler took lawful power as German Chancellor in 1932 it took six short months to eradicate democracy from Germany. A man became the law, and the greatest crimes and catastrophe in all of the recorded history of human civilization resulted.

The United States became the preeminent world power in the war that destroyed fascism and the imperial ambitions of the Axis powers.

Today, the story of the Second World War stands at the edge of remembered history, as the participants of humanity’s greatest trial are at the end of long human life spans. The cataclysm built for many years on a rising and toxic tide of venom, lies, hate, scapegoating, dehumanization and fear. Much of that fear was born out of political violence that yielded to state violence when the party became the state and the leader of the party became the nation.

The people were complicit with a mix of actions and accommodations that ranged from the eager to the transactional. People got in line because that was the easiest thing to do. A central lesson of history is that people who submit to tyranny incited by lassitude lack the grit to easily recover it. Most don’t. The submission leads to societal destruction at deep and profound levels. The eradication of love, joy and the pursuit of happiness are the awful byproducts of oppressive extremists who seek control of others. They share a philosophy that is rooted in a self-declaration of superiority against lesser groups of people whose existence isn’t just unequal, but a burden on the superior group.

This always ends up in the same terrible ditch. The people who are blamed are always the same: visible minorities, non-conformists, free thinkers, artists, musicians, authors, activists, disabled, or gay.

This raises the fundamental political question of our time: who has the wherewithal to talk about freedom in a way that can galvanize a clear majority from an apathetic slumber against a growing cancer that is metastasizing in plain sight?

Political violence is that cancer and it is forming in real time, right now. Paramilitary militia groups have become heavily armed appendages of the Republican Party, which has been hijacked by political extremists at the local, county and state levels. Both their numbers and influence are rising.

Perhaps hijacking is an unfair descriptor since they took over the organized institutions of the Republican Party through a democratic process. Though their aim is to end American democracy, and according to them, by the barrel of a gun if necessary, the value of incrementalism and using the rules to their advantage seems intuitive and natural when compared to an opposition that exists in a perpetual state of wonderment about the existence of the malice, hate and incipient threat that is so clearly present.

There has always been an appetite for fascism in America. Charles Lindbergh was a fascist, and his America First movement was a fascist front. He gave aid and comfort to a hostile foreign enemy whom he venerated enough to be officially decorated by the Nazi regime. There were enough Nazis in New York City in 1939 to fill Madison Square Garden to the rafters. A giant banner of George Washington was flanked by the swastika. The American Führer, Fritz Kuhn, spoke. There were many uniformed paramilitary in attendance.

Their heirs are marching today. They marched in Philadelphia, the birthplace of the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. They marched in Boston, and desecrated the Freedom Trail and the birthplace of American liberty. They attacked the US Capitol, and they don’t feel defeated. They feel emboldened. They are preparing to play their part in taking political power, and they don’t believe in a pluralistic society.

The questions at hand in 2024 are as follows:

1. Who wants to live in a country where we are all born equally, and where we have inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

2. Who wants to live in a nation of laws, where no person is above the law and no person is abused by the law on the basis of their skin color?

3. Who wants to live in a society where tolerance, respect for differences, decency, humanity and basic fairness are bedrock values?

4. Who wants to live in a country where we teach our children that respect, honesty, civility and kindness are better than contempt, lying, cruelty and meanness?

5. Who wants to expand freedom and opportunity for everybody, and wants to see all corners of America and all her many people prosper?

6. Who wants to allow every individual to use their natural-born talent to create, rise and build in a country where the only impediment to pursuing a dream is grit, determination and ambition?

7. Who wants to give everybody a shot at happiness and fulfillment, allowing them to make the most out of that divine spark within each human being?

8. Who wants justice for all of the people and not just some of the people?

9. Who wants decent, honest, competent government that seeks to build and unite around the common good, not inflame every division for self-interest and financial gain?

10. Who will stand up against the militias and the paramilitary groups?

What is important to understand about the extremists is that they have found purpose and community in their movement. They have found a place that has immunized them from responsibility by making their grievances righteous and their victimhood holy. Each extremist is a type of martyr with an out-sized sense of entitlement that breeds a culture and philosophy of taking.

They are the antithesis of the 22-year-old on the Berlin balcony, who would issue the American people a challenge worthy of the ages 21 years later:

Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.

The taking of rights and the assertion of control is at the core of the American extremism that is swirling, forming and becoming more dangerous. The costs of confronting it will only rise from here.

It is also important to see the fusion between the cynical religious fanaticism that abounds around Trump and his noxious cartel. They are married and often linked deeply to the armed wing of a movement that seeks confrontation, domination and submission.

They are not content to practice their faith or compromise with opponents. They want to impose their values, beliefs and politics.

The age of political violence looms through the murk immediately ahead. We are caught in the momentum of an awful tide. We are living in the consequences stage of a terrible movement that is not new in our country. It has had many faces, and been called many names.

It has never prevailed, and has always yielded to the forces of better in this country. That will be so until it isn’t anymore. That is the danger of this moment. Are we strong enough to hold the people back with the guns with the power of an idea? Can we stop the extremists with a better idea? Can we unite a majority of Americans around the American idea and ideal against its domestic enemies?

There is terrible momentum-building behind a threat that could end the ability of the American people to author their future.

It is a threat that could imprison our children in a small, vicious world where their agency is non-existent – a world in which their lives can be upended on the whim of powerful people who don’t care about anything other than themselves.

It has happened before, and the lights are flashing red. No one in this country has an excuse born out of a lack of imagination for what is coming down the road.

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