Last Gasps of the ‘White’ Man

He has a complicated history when it comes to slavery – married into a slave-owning family and eventually purchasing a human himself. However, Ulysses S. Grant’s words on the issue resonate today as America reckons with its systemic racism.

Commanding general of the Union Army during the Civil War and afterward President of the United States, the unassuming Grant is an enigmatic figure, largely misunderstood; remembered mostly for being a drunken general and a hapless president with a corrupt administration. He was not perfect in either role, but, to the contrary, neither was he inept or corrupt. 

 

As general, he understood his Confederate opponents, their strengths and weaknesses, and confounded them with risk-taking strategies that often won the battle. He refused the surrender of Confederate officers unless they released their slaves. As president, he advocated for the 15^th Amendment that gave African Americans the right to vote, created the U.S. Department of Justice, which fought the Ku Klux Klan, and the agency that is today’s National Weather Service.    

In September of 1875, President Grant appeared in Iowa for a gathering of about 200 members of the Army of the Tennessee, the former band of Union soldiers named for the Tennessee River who fought under Major-General Grant during the Civil War.

 

Grant said to the veterans, “If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon's but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other.” 

 

The very contest that he predicted began almost immediately after the Confederacy’s surrender in 1865 with cries of “the South will rise again” and rise of the Klan. Fear, ignorance and ambition has bedeviled society and politics since; duly elected officials of all stripes and station have sought to deny African Americas the rights afforded to all Americans under the Constitution.

 

Since the war ended 157 years ago, some “historians” have framed the Confederate’s lost cause as a “states’ rights” issue rather than a slavery issue. The Constitution grants states the power to govern at the local level; not create a confederacy and wage war. According to legal historian Paul Finkelman, Southern states seceded because free states exercised “their states’ rights in opposing slavery.”

 

In its purity and essence, the Confederacy was about slavery, the economic system that provided cheap labor to enrich already wealthy landowners. The men who led the sedition, and the generals who fought for the cause under the Confederacy’s Stars and Bars flag, were traitors to the nation they once swore oaths to defend—against enemies, foreign and domestic. 

 

General Grant at Cold Harbor, Virginia, in 1864.

As an Ohioan from an abolitionist home, Grant understood that President Lincoln’s reason for war was foremost to keep the nation, North and South, whole; Lincoln knew the union of the state could not survive with slavery. 

 

Grant himself was ambivalent about slavery, he stood neither for nor against it. Much to Grant’s abolitionist parents’ dismay, his wife’s family believed, righteously, in owning humans. Some of those slaves helped build their home, during which Grant worked alongside them, treating them as his equal, which his in-laws and neighbors sorely disapproved. A year before the Civil War, Grant’s father-in-law sold him one slave, 35-year-old William Jones, who Grant freed before the outbreak of hostilities. 

 

In 1862, the war’s second year, Lincoln issued a presidential decree, which changed the legal status of slaves to free. Many of them fled north to enlist in the Union Army because of the Emancipation Proclamation’s promise. The decree hardened the Confederate’s resolve to fight for an institution that never benefitted the average Southerner. 

 

In his memoir, penned shortly before his death in 1885, Grant wrote, “The great bulk of the legal voters of the South were men who owned no slaves; their homes were generally in the hills and poor country. Their facilities for educating their children, even up to the point of reading and writing, were very limited; their interest in the contest was very meagre--what there was, if they had been capable of seeing it, was with the North; they too needed emancipation.” 

Confederate dead on the battlefield at Antietam

In September of 1875, President Grant appeared in Iowa for a gathering of about 200 members of the Army of the Tennessee, the former band of Union soldiers named for the Tennessee River who fought under Major-General Grant during the Civil War.

 

Grant said to the veterans, “If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon's but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other.” 

 

The very contest that he predicted began almost immediately after the Confederacy’s surrender in 1865 with cries of “the South will rise again” and rise of the Klan. Fear, ignorance and ambition has bedeviled society and politics since; duly elected officials of all stripes and station have sought to deny African Americas the rights afforded to all Americans under the Constitution.

 

Since the war ended 157 years ago, some “historians” have framed the Confederate’s lost cause as a “states’ rights” issue rather than a slavery issue. The Constitution grants states the power to govern at the local level; not create a confederacy and wage war. According to legal historian Paul Finkelman, Southern states seceded because free states exercised “their states’ rights in opposing slavery.”

 

In its purity and essence, the Confederacy was about slavery, the economic system that provided cheap labor to enrich already wealthy landowners. The men who led the sedition, and the generals who fought for the cause under the Confederacy’s Stars and Bars flag, were traitors to the nation they once swore oaths to defend—against enemies, foreign and domestic. 

 

As an Ohioan from an abolitionist home, Grant understood that President Lincoln’s reason for war was foremost to keep the nation, North and South, whole; Lincoln knew the union of the state could not survive with slavery. 

 

Grant himself was ambivalent about slavery, he stood neither for nor against it. Much to Grant’s abolitionist parents’ dismay, his wife’s family believed, righteously, in owning humans. Some of those slaves helped build their home, during which Grant worked alongside them, treating them as his equal, which his in-laws and neighbors sorely disapproved. A year before the Civil War, Grant’s father-in-law sold him one slave, 35-year-old William Jones, who Grant freed before the outbreak of hostilities. 

 

In 1862, the war’s second year, Lincoln issued a presidential decree, which changed the legal status of slaves to free. Many of them fled north to enlist in the Union Army because of the Emancipation Proclamation’s promise. The decree hardened the Confederate’s resolve to fight for an institution that never benefitted the average Southerner. 

 

In his memoir, penned shortly before his death in 1885, Grant wrote, “The great bulk of the legal voters of the South were men who owned no slaves; their homes were generally in the hills and poor country. Their facilities for educating their children, even up to the point of reading and writing, were very limited; their interest in the contest was very meagre--what there was, if they had been capable of seeing it, was with the North; they too needed emancipation.” 

Interestingly, the socio-economic status of the Southerners that Grant described sounds similar to many of former President Donald Trump’s core white supporters. On election night 2016, the Republican declared, “We won the evangelicals, we won with young, we won with old, we won with highly educated, we won with poorly educated! I love the poorly educated.”

 

Trump exploits the ignorance and fears his poorly educated supporters have of the 21^st century’s whirlwind of social, economic and technologic change that have left them, particularly those who are white, no longer feeling that sense on invulnerability they once could rely on, even if it was always an illusion. Their ignorance leads them to believe in non-existent racial superiorities and unfathomable, but dangerous, conspiracy theories. Remember Pizzagate?

 

Trump’s narrow election win that year was not by popular ballot, where Democrat Hilary Clinton won with 2.8 million more votes, but by the Electoral College, where about 78,000 voters in three white counties in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin handed it to him, according to data scientist Hamdan Azhar and the Cook Political Report. The Electoral College, by the way, was formed in part so slave-holding states could have equal representation because roughly 40 percent of the South’s population was comprised of slaves who, of course, could not vote. 

 

Trump’s four years as president sharpened racial tensions stoked by his social media rants on Twitter and rally speeches: increased killings by police of innocent African Americans and Hispanics, voter suppression in Republican strongholds, a ban on Muslims who seek to enter the country, separating Central and South American immigrant children from their parents, gassing peaceful Black Lives Matter protestors, a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va. during which a white supremacists killed a white woman activist, and on. 

Trump’s divisiveness emboldened some of his gun-toting racist, anti-Semitic supporters to attack non-whites and non-Christian whites. As they did in 2016, the Klan again endorsed him in 2020.

 

Trump’s election in 2016, the subsequent increase in white supremacist organizations and activities, and the insurrection by his (predominantly) white supporters on Jan. 6, 2021 that followed his defeat for a second term in both the popular and Electoral College vote—all dying gasps from a white cohort that believes whites should always dominate American society.

 

This misguided belief that the United States is reserved for white European descendants to rule socially and politically was diminished by Democrat Joe Biden’s defeat of Trump, 51.3% to 46.9%, in 2020. 

 

Nonetheless, it remains a dangerous belief in the minds of a minority of white voters. Since the 2020 election, just nine months ago, predominantly white conservative Republicans in GOP-controlled states such as Georgia, which Biden won narrowly and where Democrats took two U.S. Senate seats (one of them Georgia’s first African American senator), are gulping for air as they take extraordinary steps to pass one bill after another to suppress minority voters. 

 

Like elections, legislation has consequences. Enacting restrictive-voting laws is one thing, but put into practice, these laws could have an unintended consequence such as suppressing the vote for everyone, not just minority voters. Nevertheless, voting reform legislation now under debate in Congress should nullify some of the worst impulses of these state laws to ensure voting his accessible and fair for everyone. 

 

White supremacy was never a general view of the Founding Fathers, although 17 of them owned slaves as did the nation’s first 12 presidents. However, they affirmed unequivocally that “all [people] men are created equal.” Despite this aspiration, racism has eaten away at the American soul for well over 200 years.

Black Lives Matter protestors in Ohio in 2020.

A rude awakening awaits—within 10 years, demographic changes in the nation will cause about a 4% decline in the white majority (this does not include Hispanic or Latino), from about 59.7% to 55.8%. By 2045, the white population is expected to become a minority.

 

The cry of “The South will rise again!” seemed possible not too long ago: Confederate flags flew from the capitol buildings of Southern states, U.S. military bases were named after Confederate generals, and across the South (not to mention parts of the north and west) stone and bronze edifices had been erected to honor slave owners, politicians and generals of the Confederacy. 

 

Despite Trump’s attempts to stop this movement last year, flags and monuments came down; Mississippi’s governor signed legislation to take down their Stars and Bars, and in Richmond, once the capital of the Confederacy, protestors toppled a statue of Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, while the city’s mayor ordered the removal of other Confederate statues.

 

The military promises to change military base names and the once dismissed Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality became a nationwide and international movement of people of all colors in 2020. In his post-presidency, as he toys with supporters about running for president again in 2024, Trump regretted not sending the military out to stop BLM from protesting, no doubt some red meat for his white supremacist supporters. 

 

That Trump decided not to issue the order is telling on two levels. First, the nation’s military leaders, in particular Gen. Mark Milley, told Trump BLM protests against racism were just that, protests, not an insurrection. That made him aware that “his generals” would not follow his order. Second, Americans of all color are standing up to what Time Magazine called the “Overdue Awakening” to systemic racism. 

 

Grant, despite having crushed the slave-holders’ rebellion, is nonetheless called out not only for owning a slave, but for his treatment of Jews during the Civil War and for waging an illegal war against the Plains Indians as president. In San Francisco, protestors toppled his statue. Grant was humble and compassionate. I wonder whether he would have thought.

 

In his memoir, Grant recalled the 1865 meeting at Appomattox, Va. when Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered to him: “I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.” 

 

This present period in our history may well be the final battle of the Civil War, when a South reckons with its slave-holding history instead of wallowing in a mythical past, and we enter the final days of systemic racism in the United States.

 

 

America’s Endless Nightmare

 More than three weeks ago, after a gunman killed 10 people in a Colorado supermarket, Michael Dougherty, the Boulder County district attorney was quoted at a press conference saying, “This is a tragedy and a nightmare for Boulder County.”

Since I started to write this piece, another mass shooting occurred April 16, eight dead at a FedEx facility in Indianapolis. Since the year began, more than 12,000 people have died or have been murdered by guns in the United States. In that time, there have been 151 mass shootings that have left 156 killed – including the horrific incidents in Boulder and Indianapolis – and 485 injured. 

 

It’s not just a nightmare for a single community, it’s a nightmare for the nation, and it has been a nightmare since at least the 1980s when the body count from gun violence began to grow to 2021’s epidemic levels.

 

The Boulder DA repeated the same observation made after every mass shooting: “These were people going about their day, doing their shopping.” He repeated the same pledge made after every mass shooting: “I promise the victims and the people of the state of Colorado that we will secure justice.”

 

Yet he knows, as every other law enforcement officer in this country knows, that it’s an empty promise, one law enforcement is unable to fulfill, despite their strongest desires to do so. The dead cannot return to life, to their loved ones. The trauma will linger with those who were injured, as well as the community as a whole, forever.

 

The promise of justice against gun violence is an impossible promise to keep—prosecutors are blocked by weak laws, police are outgunned. This nation, awash in more guns than people, chose long ago to accept the violence wrought by guns as necessary to their safety and the protection of their constitutional right to own a gun.

 

In truth, no matter the number of guns sold nor the number concealed-carry and open-carry and stand-your-grounds laws enacted, no one has been or is safe from gun violence. No one. As long as guns remain unregulated, available any time, any place to anyone, no one safe. 

 

As long as gun makers and their lobbyists help lawmakers craft legal loop holes in regulations, thus ensuring anyone can have as many guns as they want, no one is safe.

 

In truth, neither in the Second Amendment nor anywhere else in the U.S. Constitution are Americans granted the right to own a gun. In fact, there is no mention of the word “gun” in the document. The Second Amendment only entitles the nation – not individuals – to a well regulated Militia (i.e. state and local police forces, the national guard, the military). 

 

The other part of the amendment, the right of the people keep and bear Arms, also does not refer to individuals. In this context, “the people” again refers to the nation. Former Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that “the people” is an 18^thcentury term of art, used the century the amendment was written, to refer to the military. Scholars believe the founders wanted to ensure diffusion of resources so governors did not have to rely on the federal government to deploy military resources for state emergencies.

 

Yes, scholars also believe the founders wanted individuals to have the right to self-protection, particularly in a new country where most communities did not have a police force.

 

Yet, it’s more than doubtful the founders, including James Madison, the Second Amendment’s author, would agree with today’s status of gun ownership in the 21^st century, where every community has a police force but where the members of some communities have more guns, and more powerful guns, than the police.

 

Nor would they agree with the trade-off—endless violence and random death for the right to “bear arms.” A select group, a minority of individuals, mostly conservative legislators in Congress and state houses across the country who, along with presidents and governors, decided the majority, which poll after poll supports gun control, should live this endless nightmare.

 

Why? For some, their political fortunes are more important; for others, a lack of principle. The common refrain from politicians with the power but not the courage to act is “that’s not a hill I’m willing to die on.”

 

Instead, they have left their county to die on that hill for no other reason than their fear of telling their constituents the truth and fighting for the nation’s welfare. We live in a democracy. The majority should rule. With guns, it’s the gun makers and their political arms, the National Rifle Association and The Gun Owners of America, who rule. Everyone else be damned. 

 

For more than half a century, the NRA and GOA have perpetuated a lie that guns keep people safe. That lie created America’s endless nightmare: routine mass shootings and, after decades of inaction, a body count of 1.5 million that is climbing every week.

 

As I close this piece on Sunday, April 18, two days since the last mass shooting, another has occurred in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Three dead. Three injured. 

 

No one is safe.

It Happened Here

On a bitterly cold February night in 1939, as Adolf Hitler prepared to launch the Second World War in September of that year, an estimated 20,000 Americans filled New York City’s Madison Square Garden for a rally organized by the pro-Hitler German American Bund.

In the 1930s, the Bund was the most influential of the pro-Nazi German groups, which included the Christian Front, a far-right organization inspired by Father Charles Coughlin, a priest with a nationwide radio broadcast to voice anti-Semitic views and fascist sympathies. 

Since 1922, when Italy became the world’s first fascist-run nation, fascism has had appeal in some quarters. A decade later, fascism replaced democracies in Germany, Japan and Spain while fascist organizations emerged in other European and Asian nations. 

 

In the Great Depression era, with tens of millions of Americans struggling to find work and feed their families, many feared fascism would eventually grip the United States. Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 dystopian novel, “It Could Happen Here,” was about a U.S. dictator’s rise to power in much the same way Hitler rose to power in once democratic Germany.

Indeed, many wealthy Republicans suspected the president at the time, Franklin D. Roosevelt, of being a wannabe dictator because his New Deal policies that he designed to help lift the nation out of its economic depression included increasing their taxes. 

 

Despite American fears of fascism, which competed for their fears of communism, the Madison Square Garden rally, billed as a “Mass Demonstration for True Americanism,” did not lead to a massive turnout of fascist supporters ready to storm the nation’s capital. 

 

Nonetheless, New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, a short, fireplug of a man known as “The Little Flower,” dispatched a law-enforcement army to ensure order: 1,700 uniformed police patrolled outside the Garden with 35 firefighters, armed with high-powered hoses; 600 undercover detectives and non-uniformed officers circulated inside.

 

La Guardia, an unorthodox Republican whose mother was Jewish, was an early, outspoken critic of Hitler. However, after a threat to blow up the rally, bomb squads were dispatched beforehand to check for explosives. The Little Flower was as much concerned with those attending the rally as those opposing it.

 

An estimated 100,000 anti-Nazi protestors gathered outside the Garden as the Bund took to a stage with American flags and a giant image of George Washington as a backdrop. None of the Bund speakers called for the overthrow, violent or otherwise, of the U.S. government.

 

Instead, led by their German-born now naturalized U.S. citizen, Bundersfuhrer Fritz Julius Kuhn, they espoused their ideological, anti-Semitic views including suggesting that George Washington, if he were alive, would be pals with Hitler. 

 

“My fellow Christian Americans! It is my privilege to welcome you to this impressive mass demonstration sponsored by the German American Bund,” the Bund’s national secretary, J. Wheeler-Hill said, opening the event. 

 

Wheeler-Hill went on and said, “George Washington, whose birthday we are celebrating today, when bidding farewell to the people, said: “Be united! Be Americans! … I must confess that we are utterly and completely disregarding the admonitions of George Washington today.”

 

One Bund speaker after another extolled the virtues of Nazism in everyday life and finally Kuhn stood to give the keynote address, proclaiming, “We with American ideals demand that our government should be returned to the American people who founded it!”

 

Kuhn said, “If you ask what we are actively fighting for under our charter, first, a socially just, white, Gentile-ruled United States.” 

 

The dramatic moment of the night was when a 26-year-old Jewish man, Isadore Greenbaum, tired of the white supremacist pablum, rushed the stage. He was stopped by Bund members, to a relieved Kuhn, and dragged off by police, somehow losing his pants during the commotion.

 

The violence that did occur, occurred outside the rally between mostly protestors, police and some of the Bund members who were exiting the Garden. About a dozen people were arrested, Greenbaum among them, charged with disorderly conduct.

 

Concern that “It Could Happen Here” dissipated. Within less than two years, the United States would be at war with the world’s fascists powers.

 

Fascism today remains an attractive ideology to some people around the globe. The New York rally in 1939 was neither a social nor historic anomaly for the United States. Kuhn’s idea that America is, and should remain, a white, Christian nation is one that at least half the voters apparently believed then, and apparently believes today. 

 

The violent insurrection in Washington D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021 was orchestrated by an outgoing U.S. president who throughout his four-year-term demonstrated time and again that he valued authoritarian rule over democratic governance. 

 

Like social media algorithms, Donald Trump appealed to the mobs’ fears and values: the other, whiteness, Christianity—all hard-wired. They already possessed the kindling of fascist tendencies as they stormed the Capitol with their Jesus Saves!, Trump 2020 and American flags.

 

Trump just put a match to it. 

 

It finally happened here.

 

The Reign of the Virus King is Nearing its End

The virus king has changed us. In ways that we may not realize or acknowledge, it has changed us; restricted our habits, made us re-evaluate our life’s routines; the way we socialize, the way we approach each other, the way we move, the way we think. It has changed the way we were. 

Whenever we try to “normalize” our existence in this pandemic, to live the way we did, the coronavirus reminds us – sometimes swiftly, other times subversively – that it wears the crown; that it is king, with the power to shut down the world—Corona, from the Latin for crown.

Anyone who fails to heed the king’s power can, and have, died—more than 1.6 million worldwide since its arrival nearly one year ago, moving steadily toward 2 million, and beyond. and growing exponentially. 

 

The coronavirus disease, named Covid-19, dedicated to the year its reign of infection began. In the eleven months since, more than 72 million around the globe have been infected, more than 16 million in this country including more than 300,000 dead. The counter keeps counting.

 

To reign, the virus king needs us. It can’t travel alone; we are its unwitting companions. It is most infectious – and stealthy – coming from the asymptomatic as water droplets expelled from the mouth and nostrils. 

 

Droplets fly like projectiles—the more we talk, the louder we talk (or shout), the more droplets expel and enter a non-infected person’s mouth or nostrils or eyes or hang in the air long enough for someone close by to inhale. 

 

We can curtail the virus’s power – not provide subjects for infection – but we could never defeat the king. Everyone must wear masks, keep socially distant; wash hands. Frequently. Warm humid weather appears to slow infection rates, but the king conquers in cold, dry weather. Particularly indoors. Wear a mask. Keep your distance.

 

Masks and physical distance protects you/me/us from the virus. We know this from reading about outbreaks in bars or clubs or dorms or restaurants or weddings or funerals or political rallies. Wherever the mask-less mass, the virus spreads exponentially, and kills indiscriminately. 

 

This is how we can subdue the virus, how we can save lives, even our own: wear the mask, keep your distance, test and trace, test and trace, test and trace. Get the vaccine.

 

Seven varieties of coronaviruses infect humans, this one has a will that no one can bend, not even the cold-blooded lizard kings who think they alone have the power to control the virus by denying its existence (hoax); the virus overwhelms to shows otherwise.

 

Along political fault lines are mask wearers and mask refusers. Refusers, infected with heavy loads of viral disinformation spread by lizard kings and their minions, are the virus king’s loyal soldiers—ignorant, defiant, they willingly, knowingly perpetuate infection and death. No words of empathy for the weak; no sympathy for those struggling to care for the sick and the dying. 

 

The virus changed everything. Shapes our daily lives in ways that we may have once considered as our future; never our time. People work, teach, learn and generally engage in life remotely. 

 

Friends and families visit and grieve remotely. 

 

We want to laugh, speak loud, hold one another, stand close to one another—to yell, to scream, to greet with a kiss, a hug, a hand grip; to bid adieu in long, warm embrace. The virus changed emotions and expressions and gestures to something missing—our human touch. 

 

Virologists assure us the pandemic’s end is near, effective vaccines are now on the way, but inoculation for all is months away. So, we wait for immunity; we wait for the king’s last day. 

Echoes from the Age of Fascism

In early October, a little less than a month before the 2020 election, President Donald Trump returned to the White House from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where for three days he battled infection from Covid-19.

 

After the Marine One helicopter set down on the South Lawn, Trump emerged wearing a mask, and marched to the White House portico. He occasionally waved or gave thumbs up to news reporters who yelled questions about his health. At the portico, he climbed the stairs to the balcony, posed for the cameras, removed his mask, and jutted his chin. 

 

Supporters viewed this as a sign of strength for a 74-year-old president treated – at one point on oxygen – for a disease that he had been telling Americans was no worse than the flu. However, some historians and journalist were reminded of the old news reels of Benito Mussolini.

Perhaps a more accurate comparison is of Adolf Hitler’s portrayal of himself at the 1934 Nazi Party Congress at Nuremberg that German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl directed for the 1935 film, “Triumph of the Will.” Either case, Trump, like Hitler, uses the image-making medium effectively.

Nineteenth century American writer Mark Twain said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Today, history echoes off the walls once erected by Europe’s fascist dictators, Mussolini and Hitler.

 

From Belarus to Russia to the Philippines to Brazil, the strongman has risen—modern-day versions of the 1930s fascist dictators. Most rose to power in these (ostensibly) democracies partly because of economic instability, but largely because of weak structures within their systems of government that opened the way for anti-democrat minorities to block democratic majorities from maintaining the compromise and consensus necessary to keep democracy viable.

 

Despite how Donald Trump characterizes his position as president, he was elected in a democracy that requires an oath-sworn adherence to the Constitution and to the laws of the land. No one, regardless of their station (or whatever memo a Justice Department official writes), is above law. 

 

In February 2016, as I followed the primary season and watched and listened as candidate Trump dispatch political friend and foe alike with vindictive barbs, character assassinations, and lies; as I listened to his divisive-fueled rhetoric that left no race or religion – except white supremacists – un-scorched at his campaign rallies, I became increasingly concerned by the national political apparatus’s failure or unwillingness to reign in Trump, who was urging incitement.   

 

Around that same time, I traveled to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. as a chaperone for my son’s middle school class. The first part of the museum provides significant details to Hitler and the Nazi Party’s rise to power.

 

Until then, I had not connected Trump’s rhetoric or his campaign rallies, where his supporters cheered every divisive, provocative remark he made, with Hitler’s rise in Germany in the late 1920s and early ‘30s. Hitler analogies for politicians found distasteful was nonsensical and not comparative. 

 

Yet, when I left the Holocaust Museum that day, I was alarmed. I returned home and wrote about my concerns in my blog. Hitler was a monster, and no one, particularly Americans, want to believe they could support and elect someone so horrible, but, in a recent re-read of that blog post, America did just that in 2016. 

 

Trump’s lifetime of behaving monstrously toward his school mates, family, women (Hitler also had issues with his familyand women), employees, vendors, contractors and anyone else who approaches him is recorded in countless lawsuits the last 40 years, and more recently in books whose authors range from his former consigliere Michael Cohen to his niece Mary Trump, a psychologist.

 

However, not many voters apparently were informed or willing to be informed, about the man who presented himself – following eight years of a popular Black, conservative-leaning centrist president – as the savior of white America. They believed he would make the country great again. 

 

Trump has spent his entire life selling himself, and most everyone who bought his sales pitch got burned in one way or another. Nearly 63 million voters bought his pitch four years ago; nearly 10 million more bought it in 2020. Trump lost the presidency, largely for his penchant for fascism, but Trumpism thrives amid 72 million Americans who voted for him. 

 

During his 2016 campaign, and then his presidency, Trump, like Hitler, appealed mostly to the “low-educated” voter, those in the working class who know a hard day’s work, how it wears and tears the body and tires the mind, and for wages that are just enough to keep them living but never enough to get them ahead. They provided the base he needed to control the Republican Party. 

 

Like Trump and his tax issues, Hitler had tax problems. He never paid them. Both men use/used the law and the courts to hide their cheating, particularly from their supporters. 

 

Trump trademarked his name countless times; Hitler also copyrighted his name and image, which made him enormously wealthy. Hitler and Trump gained popular familiarity, or notoriety, with their bombastic media presence, in particular through their books; for Hitler, it was “Mein Kampf”; for Trump, “Art of the Deal.”

 

Trump and Hitler portray themselves not as politicians (though both are/were skilled), but as plain-spoken men who told their supporters they alone could solve the problems that the government so far had not: Hitler: “The Strong Man is Mightiest Alone.” Trump: “I alone can fix it.”

 

In the eyes of their supporters they are almost supermen. A look at the images supporters made of them is telling: Hitler as Teutonic Knight; Trump as Rambo.  

 

What these comparisons illustrate is that both men capably filled a void created by weaknesses in the political and governmental systems. For Hitler, it was Germany’s failing Weimar Republic, where no single party controlled the Reichstag, that essentially allowed him to assume power without a majority of the vote. For Trump, who lost the popular vote to Hilary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes, it was the archaic Electoral College that won him the presidency.

 

For many reasons, in particular the weakly written and poorly followed Weimar Constitution that Hitler managed to subvert by invoking Article 48, which allowed him to assume dictatorial powers, the German government was unable to stabilize the nation economically and socially. As a result, Hitler blamed democracy for the troubles and suggested that the Nazi Party was the only political party Germany needed. Just enough voters agreed.

 

In the United States, Trump’s candidacy arrived as a crisis in the old order of things had reached a crescendo, largely because the Republican Party had come to believe that power, not shared governance, was paramount to an agenda they could not sell to most Americans. 

 

Through most of President Barack Obama’s two terms in office, congressional Republicans refused to work withDemocrats or the president. GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, unlike any of his predecessors, Republican or Democrat, vowed at the start of Obama’s first term to stop Obama’s agenda. When it came to Trump, who vanquished establishment Republicans in the primaries, GOP leaders lead by McConnell chose to support him for political gain—a packed federal judiciary of conservative judges including a U.S. Supreme Court.  

 

Until that moment, our democracy embraced compromise to ensure that government effectively worked to provide needed services and legislation. Instead, from Democratic President Bill Clinton to Obama, America routinely experienced government shut downs because the GOP refused to work toward compromise; the Supreme Court decided the 2000 presidential election because partisanship interfered with vote counting in Florida; and the endless Middle East wars.

 

Trump compares to Hitler only in that both men knew that media, through which they would easily capture the loyalty of a frustrated working class, was the path to power. Both used books and broadcasting to reach that goal in eras when the political structures were failing because voters no longer believed the experienced politicians could do the job.

 

Like Hitler, Trump relies on thuggery and parliamentary maneuvering to hold onto the presidency, which he views through an authoritarian lens as power. His call to the “Proud Boys” at this year’s first Presidential Debate was reminiscent of Hitler’s bullyboys, the violent Brown Shirts.

 

Trump refuses to accept that in a democracy the presidency is a powerful position from which to lead, not a leadership position from which to wield power. Trump does not disrupt democratic principles, he destroys them. His refusal to concede electoral defeat and lying about massive voter fraud that he never proved brought violence to the streets of Washington in a post-election rally. 

 

While Trump expresses a deep and abiding admiration for dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, he is not a dictator—yet. 

 

In a democracy, only the people allow a dictatorship. And then it’s no longer a democracy. 

Our Democracy: The Moment Between the ‘Right Time and Right Place’

Near the end of “Chinatown,” detective Jake Gittes confronts LA powerbroker Noah Cross, having learned he raped his own daughter and murdered his business partner for lust and power. Cross responds with perhaps one of the truest lines in film and literature:

“I don't blame myself. You see, Mr. Gittes, most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and right place, they're capable of anything.”

 

President Donald Trump had met that moment between the “right time and right place” often in his life and from all accounts chose the worst of himself. As the loser of the 2020 election, he has stayed true to form. 

 

Unfortunately, senior congressional Republicans have chosen to follow him in this post-election miasma of claiming, without an iota of evidence, widespread election fraud and criminal behavior by Democratic candidates and Republican officials who, in their moment between the “right time and right place,” chose to carry out their sworn duties without partisan influence. 

 

To avoid Trump’s wrath while he thrashes about trying to burn down the house of democracy and they cling tenuously to power in the Senate, Republicans – led by Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy – are providing the matches.

 

As writer Anne Applebaum so aptly described in a recent piece in The Atlantic, they are collaborating with Trump and Trumpism, much in the way the Vichy French collaborated with their Nazi occupiers. That’s a hard truth for Americans who believe their country is better than this, and it is, but right now, it isn’t, and that is dangerous.

Democracy is a shared experience, difficult as that may be for some to conceive, that requires informed, committed voters, finding ways to give small donations (dollars or time) to preferred cause or candidate, participating in the community, as volunteer or elected official. 

 

Moreover, it requires the maturity to accept an election loss, give the winner a chance, and work to fight another day, not with lies and character assassination, but with ideas that would appeal to enough people to win an election. 

 

It seems rather simple, but that is what our democracy is all about; people governing themselves by choosing elected officials, from president to local tax collector, to provide representation, vision and leadership for an equitable society that provides for everyone, not just the select few. 

 

That may not have been exactly what the founding fathers imagined 244 years ago, but they knowingly left a document with such broad concepts as to allow future American generations to re-imagine the American experience in order to ensure the true meaning of justice for all.

 

For four trying years, that hard fought-for system, imperfect as it seems, was torn apart by forces bent toward fascism. In 2016, the nation heard Trump’s call that “I alone” could address the problems of America. It was his “right time and right place” moment; the political system had been in gridlock for eight years, technology brought the seemingly chaotic world into our smart phones. Change, good and bad, was upturning life as many people, particularly white people, once knew it. Fear and anger in the country was palatable. 

 

Trump chose the strongman rule, and nearly half of America accepted it, but in 2020, a majority of voters realized his was the lure of a siren, that he actually wanted to dismantle our democracy, and rejected him with the most votes cast for a challenger, 78 million, and against an incumbent.

 

Yet, 72 million did vote for Trump, despite showing that he was incapable of leading an effort to control the pandemic, confessing to knowing about the dangers of the coronavirus before Covid-19 exploded and took more than 240,000 lives and infected 10 million Americans, and contracting the disease himself while telling the public it was no worse than the flu. 

 

According to polls, many of those who voted for him did not blame him for these failures. Indeed, he did not blame himself for failing to act on the responsibility that was clearly his alone.

 

In the autumn of 1936, as the popularity of fascism grew in Germany and Italy, a play opened in theatres across the United States, “It Can’t Happen Here,” based on the Sinclair Lewis novel. It warned of fascism occurring in America.

 

Eighty years later, in 2016, fascism, in the guise of Trumpism, arrived at America’s doorstep and has been trying to happen here, battering the pillars of our constitutional democracy: a free press, the rule of law, fair elections. 

 

With less than two months before Biden becomes president, Trump and his allies have stepped up their attacks, making endless false accusations about the voting process and about anyone who supports the undisputed outcome that was arrived at fairly and legally. 

 

Congressional Republicans, like the Vichy, are showing Americans, in particular 71 million, that elections are to be challenged without evidence of wrongdoing; that the presidency isn’t about the nation, but about one man who flouts the rule of law, and about one party that allows him. 

 

They may be doing this with a wink and a nod to give themselves an edge with their constituents, knowing President-elect Joe Biden did legitimately win the election, but that’s political gamesmanship that is lost on many Americans. 

 

We may yet dodge a bullet aimed at the heart of our democracy, but Trump and his Republican enablers already have done much to wound this nation and its democratic institutions.

 

Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris – carried into office by a diverse coalition of voters led by African Americans, Latinos, South Asians and Native Americans – face an immense job, from getting the pandemic under control to re-building the economy. 

 

Their most important job, though, is showing a nation divided by tribalism (Trump won the white vote) how to again live in a democracy together. Biden and Harris are about to face their moment between the “right time and right place.” We hope that they chose the best of themselves. 

 

(Image: Library of Congress)

 

 

Notre-Dame and What We Owe Our Children

The inferno in Paris looked worse than was feared by the thousands of onlookers stationed on either side of the River Seine and by the hundreds of millions watching live-streamed and time-stamped images on their screens.

The April 15 fire ravaged the great Cathedral of Notre-Dame, the heart of the City of Lights, where we romanticize French culture in a blend of love, sex, food, faith and art. Tears were shed and prayers were said as Parisians watched Our Lady burn and mourned the loss.

But as church and government officials assess the extent of the destruction, the 850-year-old church appears to have another 850 years ahead of it, barring any unforeseen damage the intense heat may have done to undermine the massive structure’s stone construction. 

The attic “forest,” which fueled the fire, is, relatively speaking, easily replaceable. With modern technological advances in building materials, the reconstruction debate won’t be about the cost – more than $1 billion raised so far and counting – but what material to use in the rebuilding. 

Purists will want to replace the attic forest with wood, but the oak that burned came from primeval forests that no longer exist. Will they agree to sprinklers, firewalls and electric wiring for smoke detectors, of which the cathedral had none to preserve its historic nature?

The French government owns Notre-Dame, but permits the Catholic Church to preside and worship there in perpetuity. How politically skillful church and state leaders are in negotiating and executing the rebuilding will determine how long the effort takes, hopefully not the nearly two centuries it took to build the cathedral. 

While the world took a moment to lament the French Gothic structure’s loss, it’s interesting to ask what we hold dear in a medieval building that comparably few people in the world will ever visit. It’s the loss of familiarity, perhaps, of the comforting permanence such an iconic structure has in our subconscious. Notre-Dame has withstood wars, plagues as well as social, political and religious upheavals, not to mention degradations other than fire. 

Historically (and why lack of wiring and sprinklers is understandable but no longer practical), the cathedral is a connection to the past. Touching its stone walls and floors, peering up at its soaring stone vaulted ceilings, and marveling at its massive rose windows of stained glass assure us of the past and reassure us of the future.

Yet, in 2019, when scientists have warned the dangers of climate change are closing in unless we address the issue immediately, the future is uncertain. This is especially so for the children of the world who want the same chance to become productive adults as their parents, grandparents and great grandparents.

If a burning church built nine centuries ago can immediately move humanity to collectively help preserve it, then can we also move with the same urgency to address the man-made pollution that is threatening the existence of the cathedral known as earth? 

We owe it to our children.