I was so glad to see President Biden speak clearly and forcefully last night about the true scale of the threat facing our democracy. The history is clear: Biden was right to link Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin with both the Confederacy and the Axis powers of World War 2, and he was right to stand squarely with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.
[Read more…] about Why Biden was right to link MAGA, the Confederacy & the Axis in his SOTU addressauthoritarianism
Will we survive “the desert of organized forgetting?”
As we risk obliviously repeating catastrophic mistakes others have already made, some thoughts about memory and freedom, from people who know the precious value of both…
Most of us in the U.S. have been spared the necessity of knowing history, and instead have been able to live as if the world was created at our birth. But people in Central and Eastern Europe have already been trammeled by the history that has just now caught up with us. They’ve been trying to warn us for decades.
[Read more…] about Will we survive “the desert of organized forgetting?”How You Can Both Love and Hate the Police: Trumpism as Dream Logic
One of the most confounding things about Trump supporters, never more than now, is their comfort with mutually contradictory beliefs.
- They love and hate the police (some will even beat a cop with a Thin Blue Line flag).
- They’re committed to moral values and to an immoral leader.
- They believe the election was rigged, since Trump lost, and that it wasn’t, since other Republicans won.
And so on.
Of course, Trumpists aren’t alone in being inconsistent. Think of the widespread belief in homeopathic medicine among people who also believe in facts and logic.
But in Trumpism, the self-contradictions are so radical that they seem to be of a different order. And I think they are.
We tend to assume that people with irrational beliefs are simply mistaken, or have been tricked.
But what if irrationality is what they want? What if they want to live in a dream?
[Read more…] about How You Can Both Love and Hate the Police: Trumpism as Dream LogicIt’s Not Only the Right That Attracts Authoritarians
There sure are a lot of absolutists in Bernie-world: according to a recent poll conducted by Emerson College, 47 percent of them won’t commit to voting for any other Democratic nominee.
But they’re not alone: a significant percentage (28) of all Democrats are equally obsessed with getting everything they want. To that end they would sacrifice the people they claim to serve to another four years of Trump.
Ideological purism doesn’t fully capture this. Maybe we need to accept that it’s not just the right that attracts the authoritarian personality type.
Because if you truly believe in the greater good, how hard can it be to commit to voting for any of the Democrats over Trump?
(Note that the Emerson poll has an overall margin of error of +/- 2.8%, but it will be larger for subsets of the sample, such as supporters of individual candidates.)
After Trump, Prepare for the Shame: A Warning for Americans From Occupied France
[Also published at Medium.] With the Liberation of France in 1944 came a miraculous discovery: the entire nation had resisted the German occupation.
“Paris liberated! Liberated by itself, liberated by its people with the help of the French armies, with the support and the help of all France, of the France that fights, of the only France, of the real France, of the eternal France!” proclaimed General DeGaulle in his victory speech.
It was an inspiring story of courage and resolve. If only it had been true.
But no. The story of universal resistance was a comforting fiction, hiding a complicated and painful reality: while there certainly had been heroic resisters, most of the French had silently cooperated with their occupiers and the puppet Vichy regime. Many had actively collaborated.
What story will we tell, when our time comes? Because the Trump presidency will end, and for many, that will be a time of shame.
Not, of course, the ones who have no shame. But those who see Trump for what he is, and yet remain silent. They mimic the French attentistes, who privately deplored the occupation, but chose to “wait and see.”
When the wait was over, though, it turned out they couldn‘t bear to see.
So they turned to an alternate reality, in which courage was redefined. In an essay for The Atlantic at the end of 1944, philosopher Jean Paul Sartre hailed the heroes of the “Silent Republic.” Their contribution? They could have informed on actual Resistance members, but didn’t.
Some tried to puncture the nation’s self-delusion. In 1947, novelist Jean-Louis Curtis published “The Forests of the Night,” a portrayal of wartime life in a typical French village. As Curtis wrote, resistance was the “rather blurred background” to a far less noble foreground: acquiescence, collaboration, and betrayal.
Curtis’ book won France’s top literary honor, the Prix Goncourt. But it failed to displace the more less realistic fiction his compatriots preferred.
A full reckoning with the truth didn’t begin until 1969. That was when film-maker Marcel Ophüls released his quietly harrowing documentary “The Sorrow and the Pity” — which was banned from French TV until 1981. The full meaning of that title is revealed through the first-person accounts of a few brave resisters—and many others who struggle to explain their wartime behavior even to themselves.
“There was one value that we all shared, and that was caution,” offers one.
“I’m trying to remember, but I can’t,” says another.
But the archives did remember. Historian Thomas Paxton studied them exhaustively and, two years after “The Sorrow and the Pity,” he published his findings in “Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order” (1971): most people, some of them eagerly, had aligned with whomever was in power.
A crude graph of French public opinion from 1940 to 1944 would show nearly universal acceptance of Marshal Pétain [head of the collaborationist Vichy government] in June 1940 and nearly universal acceptance of General de Gaulle in August 1944, with the two lines, one declining and the other rising, intersecting some time after… November 1942 [after the Allies landed in North Africa and the Germans occupied the former “Free Zone” of southern France].
After Paxton, assessments of the true strength of French resistance would shift this way and that. But the current judgment of history incorporates the pain of that very uncertainty. As Ronald C. Rosbottom writes in “When Paris Went Dark” (2014):
Even today, the French endeavor both to remember and to find ways to forget their country’s trials during World War II; their ambivalence stems from the cunning and original arrangement they devised with the Nazis, which was approved by Hitler and assented to by Philippe Pétain, the recently appointed head of the Third Republic, that had ended the Battle of France in June of 1940. This treaty—known by all as the Armistice—had entangled France and the French in a web of cooperation, resistance, accommodation, and, later, of defensiveness, forgetfulness, and guilt from which they are still trying to escape.
This web waits for us.
It’s popular to scorn and mock the wartime French. A supposed French propensity for surrender has become a stock joke (one that ignores World War I and much other history).
But who are we—especially the silent ones among us—to laugh?
To speak out against the German occupation was to risk torture and death.
To speak out against Trump—so far at least—is to risk only embarrassment, strained relationships, or perhaps the loss of some business.
Before we judge the French of World War II, we must ask ourselves if we can honestly say we would have done better. With that in question, their warning should sound all the louder in our ears.
If they felt such shame, how will it be for those of us who find mere inconvenience an excuse to forsake democracy?
And make no mistake, that is what it means to stay silent now, as Yale historian Timothy Snyder, for one, argues so persuasively and concisely in On Tyranny.
When the institutions and norms of democracy are strong, they protect us. But when they are threatened, as elections, the judiciary, law enforcement, the press—and even the truth itself—are threatened now, we are called to protect them.
For most of us, most of the time, democracy is easy. Maybe too easy. We’ve grown awfully comfortable letting a tiny minority serve as its guardians, out of sight, out of mind.
But ultimately, each of us is democracy’s last line of defense. And silence, unavoidably, becomes betrayal.
It’s that hard knowledge which met the attentistes of post-war France. So too the attentistes of post-Trump America.
Speak out, now.