Friends,
As we begin planning for the annual Hiroshima-Nagasaki commemoration, we will include the issue of fascism as a main topic of discussion. Thom Hartmann warns us not to be complacent and urges us to be part of the resistance. Kagiso, Max
The Most
Dangerous Thing About Trump's Fascism? Getting Used to It
This is how fascism seduces a
nation: not by storming the gates, but by wearing down our ability to be
outraged.
Jun 06,
2025Common Dreams
It wasn’t all at once (although sometimes the last three months
seem that way). Authoritarianism never is. It happens drip by drip, crisis by
crisis, until people forget what normal even felt like.
This is how fascism seduces a nation: not by storming the gates,
but by wearing down our ability to be outraged. And Donald
Trump, more than any political figure in modern American history,
has weaponized this steady march into moral and civic numbness.
Ten years ago, if you’d told Americans that a U.S. president
would attempt to overturn an election, openly praise dictators, take naked
bribes from both foreign potentates and drug dealers, call the press the “enemy
of the people,” cage children, pardon traitors and war criminals, and promise
to act as a dictator on his first day in office, they’d have laughed. They
would’ve told you, “That can’t happen here.”
But it did. And now the real danger is that we’re getting used
to it.
When we stop being shocked, we stop reacting. And when we stop
reacting, democracy dies.
Let’s not forget:
— When Trump refused to commit to a peaceful
transfer of power in 2020, the political class gasped. Now it’s barely
discussed.
— When he orchestrated an attempted coup on January
6th, 2021, it was the top story in the world. Today, most Republicans call it “a
protest” or a “tour.”
— Had any previous president invited an immigrant
billionaire who promotes fascist memes to rip the guts out of the Social
Security Administration and shut down USAID (handing our soft power to the
Russians and Chinese) there would have been hell to pay. Now Musk’s
extraordinary damage to our government is barely discussed.
— When Trump began calling undocumented immigrants “animals”
and labeling judges and prosecutors as “scum,” it horrified the media. Now it’s
part of the daily churn.
— When a federal judge’s son was murdered by a Trump
campaign volunteer it shocked America; now judges are routinely threatened
and Republicans won’t even give the judiciary control over the US Marshall’s
Service to protect them.
— When Trump praised Putin and Viktor Orbán and
suggested suspending the Constitution, the headlines flared, but then faded
fast.
— When he arrested a Tufts University student for
having written an op-ed in the student paper critical of Netanyahu and threw
her into prison for months, the country was appalled. Now he’s rolling out
loyalty tests for civil servants and investigating the social media posts of
American citizens returning to the country and nobody’s even discussing it any
more.
— When ICE agents showed up in Portland in 2020 in
unmarked vans without uniforms and their ID missing, kidnapping people off the
streets without warrants, Americans and the media were shocked. Now seeing
jackbooted thugs with masks covering their faces and refusing to identify
themselves has become “normal.”
This is the playbook. Fascism doesn’t arrive with jackboots; it
arrives with media and voter fatigue. As the political theorist Hannah Arendt
warned, the very banality and ordinariness of evil is its greatest weapon.
Victor Klemperer, a Jew who converted to Lutheranism and then
chronicled the rise of Nazism in Germany, saw how average people learned to
live with, to adapt to, to bear the unbearable. In his 1942 diary he wrote:
“Today over
breakfast we talked about the extraordinary capacity of human beings to bear
and become accustomed to things. The fantastic hideousness of our existence...
and yet still hours of pleasure... and so we go on eking out a bare existence
and go on hoping.”
Sebastian Haffner, another German observer, noted in Defying Hitler that
even he, a staunch anti-Nazi, found himself one day saluting, wearing a
uniform, and marching (and even secretly enjoying the feeling of authority
associated with it).
“To resist
seemed pointless;” he wrote, “finally, with astonishment, he observed himself
raising his arm, fitted with a swastika armband, in the Nazi salute.”
And Milton Mayer, in They Thought They Were Free,
described how good, decent Germans came to accept fascism. He was a Chicago
reporter who, following World War II, went to Germany to interview “average
Germans” to try to learn how such a terrible thing could have happened and,
hopefully, thus prevent it from ever happening here.
“What happened
here was the gradual habituation of the people,” Mayer wrote, “little by
little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in
secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government
had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so
dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be
released because of national security....”
He wrote about living there and the ten Germans he befriended: I
found his description of a college professor to be the most poignant. As
Mayer’s professor friend noted, and Mayer recorded in his book:
“This separation
of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually
and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a
temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or
with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too)
so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the
whole process of government growing remoter and remoter. ...
“To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it — please try
to believe me — unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness,
acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so
small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that,
unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one
understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little
measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must someday lead to, one no
more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn
growing. One day it is over his head.”
In this conversation, Mayer’s friend suggests that he wasn’t
making an excuse for not resisting the rise of the fascists, but was simply
pointing out what happens when you keep your head down and just “do your job” without
engaging in politics.
“You see,” Mayer’s
friend continued, “one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me,
this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a
little worse. You wait for the next and the next.
“You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such
a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act,
or even to talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’
Why not? Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear,
fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.
“Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time
goes on, it grows. …
“But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will
join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of
the whole regime had come immediately after the first and the smallest,
thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked — if, let us say,
the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers
on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33.
“But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds
of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to
be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you
did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
“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 ‘Jew
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
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.”
Sound familiar?
Stephen Miller’s recent musing about suspending habeas corpus to
lock up immigrants and even protestors without trial? That would’ve sparked
emergency hearings a decade ago. Now it’s barely a blip.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a blueprint
to purge civil servants and replace them with regime loyalists in complete
defiance of the Pendelton Civil Service Act (and
the reasons it came into being), should be setting off alarm bells. Instead,
it’s getting the same treatment Trump gave Covid and his multiple defiances of
the law and the courts: denial, deflection, delay.
It all comes back to normalization, as M. Gessen so brilliantly chronicles in The
New York Times:
“And so just
when we most need to act — while there is indeed room for action and some
momentum to the resistance — we tend to be lulled into complacency by the sense
of relief on the one hand and boredom on the other.
“Think of the trajectory of the so-called travel ban during Trump’s first term.
Its first iteration drew thousands into the streets. The courts blocked it. The
second iteration didn’t attract nearly as much attention, and most people
didn’t notice when the third iteration of the travel ban, which had hardly
changed, went into effect. Now Trump’s administration is drafting a new travel ban that
targets more than five times as many countries.”
When we stop being shocked, we stop reacting. And when we stop
reacting, democracy dies.
But there is a path forward.
The antidote to normalization is resistance. Not just in voting
booths, but in the streets, in courtrooms, in classrooms, in boardrooms, in
pulpits, and at dinner tables.
Thucydides, who had one of the clearest eyes in history about
the dangers faced by democracies, said:
“The bravest are
surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and
danger alike, and yet nonetheless go out to meet it.”
We must regain our vision and resensitize ourselves. We must
reclaim our capacity to be appalled.
That means when Trump calls Democrats “vermin,” we don’t say “that’s
just Trump being Trump”; we say “That’s fascist rhetoric.”
When he promises to use the military against American citizens
and sends out immigration officers dressed up like soldiers at war, we don’t
shrug; we organize.
When Project 2025 tries to turn federal agencies into tools of
vengeance, we don’t wait and see; we fight back now.
If we still believe in this republic, in its ideals, and in the
sacred value of a free and fair society, then our answer to Trump’s authoritarianism
must be more than words. It must be peaceful action.
When armed federal agents hide their identification and their
faces the way terroristic police do in dictatorships as they kidnap people off
our streets, we call them out.
History won’t forgive us for sleepwalking into tyranny. And our
children won’t either.
This is the time to remember that democracy is not
self-sustaining. It requires outrage. It demands vigilance. And sometimes, it
needs us in the streets with our fists in the air and our boots on the
pavement.
If we still believe in this republic, in its ideals, and in the
sacred value of a free and fair society, then our answer to Trump’s
authoritarianism must be more than words. It must be peaceful action.
Don’t get used to fascism.
Get loud. Get active. Get in its way.
Our work is
licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and
share widely.
Donations can be sent
to Max Obuszewski, Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 431 Notre Dame Lane, Apt. 206,
Baltimore, MD 21212. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at]
comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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