The Most Dangerous Moment Is When Authoritarians Seem to Compromise

Trump’s recalibration follows the same step-back, step-forward playbook used by Orbán, Putin, and every modern strongman…

Over on Threads last night, sierracascadia posted:

“CNN BREAKING: Kristin Holmes reports Stephen Miller is saying ‘there may have been a breach of protocol’ and Noem is blabbering about how she was in touch with Trump and Miller for her talking points. Miller is saying that he got his information CBP trying to shove it down to Bovino! This fucking clown show guys. They are all going down.”

Meanwhile, Democrats are celebrating the replacement of Nazi-cosplayer Greg Bovino and eager puppy-killer and adulterer Kristi Noem with Tom Homan, who merely takes $50,000 bribes in burger bags and is therefore presumably more reasonable. Blue collar versus white collar, and all that.

But, wait a minute. Slow down. It’s way too premature to toast the dawn of a new era.

Fascist governments don’t rise in one giant arc, nor do they collapse that way. It’s more of what electrical engineers and ham radio operators would call a “sawtooth pattern.” Climb an inch up toward fascism, get pushback from the public so you back down a half-inch until things quiet down, then move up another inch in another step toward the ultimate goal of total tyranny.

Learn from your own mistakes, while getting the public used to each step, so Trump and his lickspittles can move onto the next falling domino in the process of ending democracy and replacing it with strongman oligarchic autocracy.

Step-by-step, the fascist leadership gets there. As has happened so often in other countries across history.

In other words, ICE is still operating on the assumption of complete immunity, still kicking in doors without Fourth Amendment warrants, still capable of killing you or me without ever answering for it. And they know it.

We are still on the path to dictatorship.

Eventually, people in countries that are in the process of flipping from democracy to fascism figure out that they’re now living in a dictatorship; by then, however, it’s usually too late.

For people in Hungary, it was May, 2020 when Orbán started arresting people for their Facebook posts. For folks in Russia, it was December, 2011 when Alexi Navalny and his supporters were first assaulted in public and then arrested and sent to brutal gulags in Siberia. For Germans, it was July 14, 1933 — six months after he became chancellor — when Hitler outlawed all political parties except his own.

But at first, the steps from democracy to fascism and tyranny always seems like “just another thing the government has to do to deal with a very real problem.” Something that reasonable people would understand and can’t reasonably object to. Something that, even if weird, makes a certain amount of sense.

After all, we do have millions of people in this country without documentation….

Until suddenly the mask is dropped and the twisted face of hateful fascism peers out at the country with laser-red eyes and a bloody mouth filled with threats and lies. Wearing camouflage, anonymous, face masked, carrying handcuffs and pepper spray while brandishing a gun.

Today, Trump appears to be backing away from his senior toadies who’re still blaming Nicole Good and Alex Pretti for their own executions, and both Democrats and the media are proclaiming Bovino’s departure as a “victory for democracy.”

It’s no such thing.

This is a recalibration. Trump, like Orbán and Putin before him, is learning just how far he can go before he or his people encounter resistance they can’t bludgeon their way through.

They’re figuring out which messages will work to get us to accept the changes they’re making to America and our political and economic systems, including how much they can steal for themselves and their families, and which schemes won’t work out for them.

This is an old playbook that dates back to Machiavelli and before. It’s how every dictator ends up fabulously rich while wielding life-or-death power.

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 such 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 of himself, “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 ten “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,” a German college professor told Mayer, “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....”

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. … [O]ne 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 assume that ultimately the good guys will win:

“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. …

“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.”

Everything seems the same, Mayer’s friend told him. You still go to work, cash your paycheck, have friends over, go to the movies, enjoy a meal out. The regime even backs down from time to time, making things seem ever more normal. Little victories, you tell yourself.

Except, as the German professor told Mayer, they’re not. One day, he said, you realize that:

“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?

Consider Stephen Miller’s recent musing about suspending habeas corpus to lock up immigrants and even protestors without trial:

“Well, the Constitution is clear — and that, of course, is the supreme law of the land — that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion.”

That would’ve sparked emergency hearings a decade ago. Can you imagine if Obama had asserted such a power? 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 have set off alarm bells. Instead, it got the same treatment Trump gave Covid and his multiple defiances of the law and the courts: denial, deflection, delay…and eventually acceptance with barely a follow-up peep from the media.

It all comes back to normalization, as M. Gessen so brilliantly chronicled 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.”

Congressional Democrats, thinking they’re winning the PR war (and not realizing this is a battle within that war, not the war itself) are suggesting they’ll only vote to fund DHS/ICE this week to avoid a government shutdown under the following conditions, as Reuters reports:

“Democrats are seeking: a prohibition on ICE detentions or deportations of American citizens; a ban on masks worn by ICE agents; a requirement to wear body cameras; explicit prohibitions on excessive use of force; prohibitions on raids of churches, mosques, synagogues and other places of worship, as well as hospitals and schools; and no absolute immunity from prosecution of agents violating codes of conduct.”

It’s a reasonable list, if ICE were a legitimate institution worth preserving. And, of course, we do need somebody to enforce our immigration laws.

But this agency has become so corrupt, has developed such a toxic culture, and has hired so many outright dangerous former felons and open racists, that it must be shut down and replaced.

And what about arresting and prosecuting the people who committed the murders that we know about? And investigating the ones we’ve only heard rumors of?

And letting that prosecution go right up the chain of command all the way to the top, like it did during Watergate, when the Attorney General of the United States went to prison for years?

Why aren’t Democrats talking like that? You know, if the shoe was on the other foot, Republicans would be.

Even if Republicans were to accept all these reforms — and odds are they won’t — we’d still be on the same path toward fascism. It would just look more orderly and lawful, and we’d breathe a sigh of relief, not realizing we’d just helped the Trump regime with their latest readaptation.

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 outrage and 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” and attacks Somalis like Representative Ilhan Omar 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 and demand an end to the entire rotten undertaking.

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 peacefully 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.

And demand that our Democratic leaders do the same.

Louise’s Daily Song: “When the Devil Learns to Whisper”

The song that was inspired by this article is here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is here.
My newest book, The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink is now available in bookstores nationwide.
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