The United States has had flawed presidents before; in fact, we have never had any other kind, but we have not had a chief executive in the modern era whose statements and actions are so at odds with democratic ideals.
No serious politician has proposed putting America second. The goal is not the issue. What separates Trump from every president since the dismal trio of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover is his conception of how America’s interests are best advanced. He conceives of the world as a battlefield in which every country is intent on dominating every other; where nations compete like real estate developers to ruin rivals and squeeze every penny of profit out of deals.
Both Fascism and Communism had utopian aspirations and both took hold amid the intellectual and social ferment of the late nineteenth century. Each purported to deliver a level of emotional sustenance that liberal political systems lacked.
Why are many people in positions of power seeking to undermine public confidence in elections, the courts, the media, and – on the fundamental question of earth’s future – science? Why have such dangerous splits been allowed to develop between rich and poor, urban and rural, those with a higher education and those without?
Thus was conceived a phenomenon that would split America from right to left and raise ominous questions – of a type we still face – about whether a democratic citizenry can be talked into betraying its own values.
At many levels, contempt has become a defining characteristic of American politics. It makes us unwilling to listen to what others say – unwilling, in some cases, even to allow them to speak. This stops the learning process cold and creates a ready-made audience for demagogues who know how to bring diverse groups of the aggrieved together in righteous opposition to everyone else.
What makes a movement Fascist is not ideology but the willingness to do whatever is necessary – including the use of force and trampling on the rights of others – to achieve victory and command obedience.
Known throughout his career for penetrating insights and a lack of romanticism, he wrote that “one of humanity’s oldest and most recalcitrant human dilemmas” consists of the choice between “a limited collaboration with evil, in the interests of its ultimate mitigation” and “an uncompromising, heroic but suicidal resistance to it.
There is, however, a tipping point where loyalty to one’s own tribe curdles into resentment and hatred, then aggression toward others. That’s when Fascism enters the picture, trailed by an assortment of woes, up to and including the Holocaust and global war.
He is president because he convinced enough voters in the right states that he was a teller of blunt truths, a masterful negotiator, and an effective champion of American interests. That he is none of those things should put us on edge, but there is a larger cause for unease.
In 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights spelled out a framework for holding governments accountable, followed in three years by the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide.
During the Bosnian conflict, an international tribunal was established to prosecute the perpetrators of crimes against humanity. I was a firm advocate of the tribunal because only through a judicial process is it possible to establish individual culpability for crimes that might otherwise be attributed to an entire group – and nothing does more to trigger additional cycles of violence than perceptions of collective guilt.
Wilson’s doctrine of self-determination gave a boost to the idea that wherever there dwelled a people, there should be a state.
If an advertiser can use that information to home in on a consumer because of his or her individual interests, what’s to stop a Fascist government from doing the same?
The EU’s advantage is that disentangling Europe from the single currency and a shared regulatory structure would be extraordinarily disruptive and expensive.
Chamberlain was too timid to take that advice, but he was not entirely blind to the deepening danger. “Is it not positively horrible,” he wrote, “to think that the fate of hundreds of millions depends on one man, and he is half mad? I keep racking my brains to try and devise some means of averting a catastrophe.
Oswald Spengler’s chilling century-old prophecy that “the era of individualism, liberalism and democracy, of humanitarianism and freedom, is nearing its end. The masses will accept with resignation the victory of the Caesars, the strong men, and will obey them.
Two months earlier, speaking at Westminster College in Missouri, Winston Churchill had declared that an Iron Curtain was descending across Europe.
Democrats pleaded with their countrymen to recognize the Communists’ hypocrisy – that the same partisans who bragged about opposing Fascism were now aping its techniques. The Communists were simply replacing pictures of Hitler with portraits of Stalin and, like Mussolini’s Blackshirts, attacking the press, smearing political rivals, demanding total loyalty from party members, and threatening anyone who stood in their way.
Ultimately, illegal immigration is a symptom of failures that extend well beyond Europe and that will not be solved either by welcoming newcomers or by keeping them out.