"The great mass of people...will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one."Mein Kampf, volume 1, chapter. 3—1925Adolph Hitler
"The art of leadership...consists in consolidating the attention of the people against a single adversary and taking care that nothing will split up that attention."Mein Kampf, volume 1, ch. 10—1925Adolph Hitler
"I myself was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored press and radio in a totalitarian state... a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one's mind and often misled it."The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, pp. 247-248—1959William L. Shirer
The three previous quotes all have one thing in common. One man. The first two quotes were from the man himself, a blueprint on how he would lead a great nation, and the third was a warning on how insidious and subversive the previous two could be. The first two quotes are 92 years old, but in the scope of history that is the day before yesterday, there is no reason to have forgotten them. The last quote, the warning, is only 58 years old, it came within my lifetime. William L Shirer was a radio correspondent that reported from Germany from the mid 1930’s until early 1942 when he came home. He was also, unknown to the Germans, an agent of the OSS for the United States. He knows of which he spoke.
While he desperately wants to be him, Donald Trump is no Adolf Hitler. Most certainly not in terms of Hitler’s blatant nihilism, and certainly not in his leadership and political skills. Hitler spent most of his adult life in the political process, Trump fell into the box and came up with the Crackerjack prize.
But both shared an innate and almost unconscious skill. They both had the uncanny ability to find the downtrodden, those with no hope, those who felt victimized, ignored, and left behind, and speak directly to them, in language they could understand, and to once activate them with hope for a brighter future. Their future, the time had come. The government was sick and corrupt, but they alone could fix it. Once they got into power, oh how everyone who once held them down would pay. And one more common thread between the two men, although both men ultimately came to power, neither was able to convince the majority of their population that they were the legitimate solution. This ate at Hitler’s insecurity then, just as it eats at Trump now. Hence, Hitlers monumental rallies at Nuremburg, and Trump’s rallies full of slavish supporters, and his pathetic lies about the size of his Inauguration crowd.
Unlike Hitler, thanks to our Constitution, Trump is not a dictator. Alone, Trump has limited power that he can exert, even his powers or Executive Order are limited. Trump alone is little more than a figurehead with a big mouth. Trump and McConnell together have not much more power, and Trump and Ryan as a duo are no better. It takes all three of them to cause massive harm. And hell, Trump is no ideologue, he doesn’t know an agenda from an addendum. Trump has no deeply held beliefs, he simply loosely adopted the beliefs of the Republican party to run for the Presidency. Ryan and McConnell did not miscalculate with Trump, they were right. They finally had their “useful idiot”. He would sign almost anything they put on his desk in the sake of a “win”, all they had to do was to get it there.
Disagree with me if you will, but I believe that the early mass marches, the Women’s March on Washington, and all of their offshoots were a protest of Trump himself, he hadn’t legislatively done anything yet. We protested against the man himself, what he represented, and his ascension against out wishes. Here is where Ryan and McConnell miscalculated. They should have seen and taken this warning to heart. As on the first day of spring, the grizzlies had awoken in their caves, and they were hungry. But what could these ragtag spoilsports do to them? They held the power.
The second warning sign of a deeply aroused populace came with the implementation of the now infamous “Muslim ban”. The protests were massive, and they did not let up. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, 2003 was only 14 years ago, like those protests against the Iraq war, even if Trump himself was ignorant of the fact, Ryan and McConnell should have realized that here there be tygers. This time the protests were against something tangible, and this time the aggrieved found succor.From the one place that neither Trump nor the GOP congress could touch, the judiciary. They sent a stern warning shot across Trump’s bow that there was a limit to what he could do, and it was the protests of ordinary Americans that forced that hand. We were watching.
The chickens came home to roost once and for all during the healthcare debate. Theoretically Ryan and McConnell were right, they held the majorities, they could pass whatever they wanted. But in practical terms they were dead wrong. Their majority is not a number, it is based on individual members, and each and every one of those members is susceptible to constituent pressure. And brother,was there pressure. Angry letters, e-mails, phone calls, standing room only town halls, billboards, missing congressmen faces on milk cartons, you name it. And it worked, self preservation trumped ideology and the party line. Politicians were faced with the ugly fact that for once their constituents were watching what they were doing, and they very much did not like what they saw.
But why was this drastic wake up call necessary at all? That’s easy, we fell asleep. As a nation we became lazy and complacent. Hitler was wrong, it is not easier to sell one large lie than a series of smaller ones, the only difference is size. For decades politicians have been telling little lies about what they were going to do once they got elected, and then either not doing it, or doing exactly the opposite thing. Instead of kicking their asses out and getting in someone who would actually do what he or she said, we became inured to it, it became so pervasive and ever present that it just became “the way that politics is”. We tolerated it for one simple reason, because so little of it touched us personally. It wasn’t so much that what Trump, Ryan and McConnell were doing this time was such a radically different lie than a thousand other political lies that have been told, it was that this time it had the potential to touch us as individuals, and that touch felt like a being grabbed passing a dark alley, we didn’t like it very much.
The heartening part is, that while trying to dismantle the Constitution, Trump has actually made it relevant again in a way that it has not been for years as far as the general population is concerned. The Constitution is not just some set of rules, like for playing Parcheesi, it is the operating instructions for governing 320 million people. The Founding Fathers never set up public service as a lifetime ride on the gravy train, it was supposed to be a sacrifice, and it was supposed to be a pain in the ass. Putting the public good, and the needs of others ahead of your own personal needs required sacrifice. But it was necessary if this whole Rube Goldberg contraption was going to work. It was “we the people” who allowed politics to morph from a noble calling to one so filthy that only narcissistic con men will sign up to do it. We did it, and we can undo it. And we are trying to do just that. For proof of that, all you need to do is to look at the growing number of ordinary citizens that are stepping forward to at least try to take our government back. People without a personal political agenda, the people that you run into every day at the grocery store, people who only wish to do what is good and right. Pray that they succeed.
So, what is the takeaway from this combination history lesson and current civics course? It is the words attributed to one of those very same Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson; “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty”. We fell asleep at the switch folks, but this time it looks like we may have barely avoided the train wreck. We may not be so lucky the next time. Take from it what you will.