We are at a very perilous time in our history. Many of us do not know what to do. We would prefer to not be in the middle of these conflicts. But life does not come with moral insulation. Before I talk about our moral responsibilities as voting citizens, I will share a story.
My maternal grandmother, “Nana”, was her family’s anchor baby, born in the Bronx in 1890. She was at the tail end of her large German Catholic family so when her parents immigrated from Germany, some of her elder siblings remained in Germany. I am the middle of seven myself so by the time I came around in 1946, her parents, my great-grandparents were long gone.
Our Christmas traditions were very German. Our Christmas tree had old family ornaments that came from Germany and the decorations around the house were the style my mother grew up with. We had season traditions like Pot Kuchen, a yeast bread stuffed with candied fruit that Nana would only bake at Christmas. That was a special treat for Christmas breakfast.
I fell in love with and married a Slovak girl so the Pot Kuchen was supplemented (and eventually replaced) by Kolaches so our Christmas traditions expanded to be more Central European. But it is still a big day and season.
Nana also collected Hummels. She had lots of them. They were on shelves, filled the china cabinet and were off-limits to the likes of me, a little boy with grabby fingers.
It was obvious that we were of German heritage in everything in our family life. But there was one thing, as I found out later, we didn’t talk about.
During the ‘90s my wife and I hosted high school age exchange students. We had students from all over. In 1992-3 we hosted some Slovak students, a sister we had for one school year and her younger brother for the next. This gave us a destination for our first European trip now that we had friends to visit near the old “homestead”. The 1992 trip was great and it motivated us to go again in 1995. This time we added Ireland, where my Dad’s family came from, to the itinerary. Since we were to go through Germany on our way to the UK and Ireland from Slovakia, I invited my mother who had never been out of the country at that point to join us. Maybe we could all visit some places in Germany where Nana came from. Mom was a trooper and at age 80, she was all in for the trip. She told me, “Don’t ask unless you mean it because I’m coming.” But I was taken aback by her adamant “No” to traveling in Germany. She wanted to take the trip but she had no interest in Germany. Hence, she met us in London and traveled Ireland and the UK with us. But why not Germany? She would not say and she is gone now so we will never know.
Years later I mentioned this to my older siblings. They told me things that Mom partially talked about with them and what they knew personally from the war and post war years. Mom graduated from college in 1937. Her younger sister graduated two years later. At some point in the ‘30s, both Mom and my aunt got letters from cousins in Germany urging them to emigrate back to Germany and marry a good “Aryan” boys. The economy was booming and… Obviously, neither of them took up the offer from their cousins. And then after the war, 1948 or so?, some relatives made their first visit from Germany since before the war. Apparently they made the (failed) pitch to Gramps (then retired) and Nana to emigrate back and help Germany get back on its feet. I do not know if there was any other correspondence with these relatives after that. This is all I know but it hints on why Mom had zero interest in that part of our trip.
On our 1995 trip we stopped in Munich and visited the Dachau camp memorial which is in the Munich suburbs. It is a horrific place. Our sons also visited camps when they did their third year in Europe while at university. I have thought about this often since I found out some of my unspoken family history. I have been back to Europe on business, including a week in Berlin, a number of times since and I’ve wondered about my relatives that we didn’t talk about. What was their involvement in Nazi Germany? Some have suggested that Catholics were “outsiders” and had a rough time under the regime but that is ambiguous. Did they join up? Did they go-along-to-get-along? Did they resist, at least a little bit? I do not know. But I wonder. Which side of the wire would they have been on at Dachau? I know from the exhibit in the camp that the Americans, when they liberated it, forced the townspeople to go to the camp, to confront the horror, and help bury the dead. It seemed that no one “knew about it” or … Where is that part of my family on the matter?
The picture at the top is from the Holocaust Museum in D.C. It is a quote from Martin Niemöller who was a Lutheran Pastor who started off enthusiastic about the Nazi regime but ended up in the camps by 1937. Unlike Dietrich Bonhoeffer, also a Pastor, who took a stand from the beginning and opposed the Nazis, he went along only until the Nazis started to interfere with Lutheran church business. By that time it was too late. Bonhoeffer, who wrote “The Cost of Discipleship” in 1937, paid for his stand with his life in the last dying days of the Reich. I think about this often. It is so easy to slip off into the abyss. Even the silent fall in.
This brings us to the topic of the “Independent” voter or politician. There have always been “Independents”, voters who want little or nothing to do with political parties. My Mom was a nominal Republican. Dad was a Democrat but voted for Eisenhower and, probably, Nixon and Goldwater. Gramps and Nana were Republicans because he was a small businessman and the GOP was the party of “Business”. Those were simpler times.
My story may be interesting to Progressives and nominally “liberal” Democrats but they are already involved and on-board. The MAGA crowd is already a lost cause and would probably say something snarky anyway. My story is directed to the “Independent”, many of whom could no longer stomach what the GOP has become and made a break. It is also directed to those who sit in silence. My family story is your family story.
These are not normal times. There is nothing Exceptional about our democracy. As one commentator I heard on the radio this week said, “America really is not the oldest democracy. It is actually a fairly young one.” In her view, the Civil Rights movement was really about finally becoming a full democracy, something that was denied everyone who was not “white”, male, and mostly Protestant since the beginning in 1619. And we are about to lose it. Our democracy is at stake.
So what to do? Every Democrat I know, both public and private/personal, is committed to this recent experiment in full democracy. There is a vocal and increasingly violent minority of almost exclusively “white”, authoritarian partisans who, like the Germans who chose Hitler and the Nazis, no longer want democracy because it has evolved out of their control. In the middle are the “Independents” and silent Republicans. You can vote your IRA. You can say to yourself, “It’s not that bad”. You can say, “But my GOP mayor/dog catcher/senator/congressman” is a good guy. You can say, “My vote doesn’t matter anyway.” You can say or vote that way but who will speak up when they come for you?
Like Martin Niemöller, they will come for you.
Let us be very clear and not delude ourselves. Our votes from now on count, especially 2022 and 2024. Depending on how we turn out, how we vote, there may not be an election in 2026. If we do not confront this cancer on our body politic now, we are done.
The choice becomes simple:
Sure, you don’t like Nancy or … Sure, you’ve always voted the “man” not the party, although mostly GOP. Sure. Sure. But this is shaping up to be not about that. If the GOP returns to power, democracy is over — for all of us.
There is only one vote that your congressperson or senator will make that really matters — their first vote to choose the leadership in a new Congress. Everything else follows. If your candidate will vote for a GOP leadership and control, he no longer deserves your (last) vote.
If you need to, hold your nose and vote for the Democrat. Your goal needs to be to vote every GOP office holder at every level out of office. You will get your party back once it has been in the wilderness long enough to purge itself of this cancer. Even Rep Liz Cheney says it out loud. Do your duty to democracy first so we can resume our arguments about your IRA later.